part one · vision & mission
Vision & Mission
Declaring the change the organisation exists to make.
A vision is a description of a world that does not yet exist, written by people who intend to make it exist. It is not a slogan. It is not a tagline. It is the answer to what is different in someone's life because we built this.
The shape of a vision that holds
Three properties.
- It names a person. Not a market, not a segment. A named person — Dina, Miri, Avi — whose life the organisation intends to change.
- It names the change. Specific. Dina's first hour of work is no longer spent on tasks she has already done four times this week is a vision. Best-in-class productivity tools is a slogan.
- It makes a falsifiable claim. A vision that cannot be wrong cannot guide. We will be the leader in our space cannot guide a Tuesday decision. Dina will spend her first hour on the thing she came in to do can.
Mission vs vision
The vision is the world to come. The mission is what the organisation does to bring it about. Mission is verbs, vision is nouns.
- Vision — Field service technicians arrive at jobs already knowing what they need.
- Mission — We build the system that puts the right information in the technician's pocket before they knock on the door.
A team can hold either without the other for a while. Holding both, written down, named, gives the chain something to converge to.
How to know it's working
The vision is working when:
- Two people on different teams, asked the same question independently, would answer the same way.
- A new hire, in their first week, can say what the organisation is for in one sentence and the sentence is the same as the founder's.
- A scope decision in Volume III references the vision and the reference is not contrived.
- A kill decision in Volume V references the vision and the reference is not contrived.
The vision is not working when:
- It appears only in the deck.
- Different teams have different working understandings of who the person is.
- Strategy decisions are explained without reference to it.
- Wins and losses are interpreted without it.
Where the vision lives
Two places. The mission and vision live at the top of the corpus — visible to anyone who reads the chain. They also live in the founder's onboarding conversation, where every new person is asked to repeat them and is corrected if they get it wrong. The artifact and the conversation reinforce each other.
A vision that lives only in a deck is a vision that does not survive the deck.
What this produces for the rest of the chain
| Volume | What it inherits from the vision |
|---|---|
| II | The person whose life the chain is for. Discovery starts from this person, not from a segment. |
| III | The constraint that scope decisions are checked against — does this slice move the person closer to the change? |
| IV | The domain language. The named person and the named change are reflected in the code, the API, the analytics events. |
| V | The check question. Did the cycle move the world closer to the vision? — answered, not implied. |