Designers who work in organizational identity and brand development often find themselves involved the strategic planning initiatives of their clients. After many years working with organizations in this manner, here is a “heads up” on how to approach the task.

Composing the mission, vision and values for an organization is a critical element in its strategic planning. Even established companies need to examine and affirm or amend their mission and vision and values at the outset of strategy work. Concretely articulating these items renders the remainder of strategic development meaningful. Yet for many, this work is strategic planning’s most strenuous activity. In cases of smaller organizations, it might be skipped entirely. 

The reason for this difficulty is inherent in how most people approach the task. They begin by articulating the mission, then the vision, then the values by which those will be realized. The problem with this method is that both the mission and particularly the vision are speculative, future focused. Trying to state what will be true at some later day is quite difficult, and people are generally poor prognosticators. 

Furthermore, this aim-for-a-target approach can generate confusion between what is a mission statement, and what is one’s vision. Another pitfall of working this direction is that the values can seem as add-ons meant to further explicate the mission. Values should not be understood this way, but rather should be at the heart of who one is and what one does. 

So, In order to preserve the proper role of one’s values and generally ease the process of creating one’s mission, vision, and values, one must invert the approach. Start with the values. Articulating one’s values begins with what is true now. What does the organization care about? What characterizes the way they do things? People will know an organization by how it engages its constituents. How does it engage its constituents? There are more questions from which to forge values. But that is the subject of another post. The important thing here is to see that starting from the more concrete present fuels a more productive strategic planning exercise. 

From one’s values, then, one can articulate the organization’s vision. The vision for who and where the company will be in say five years (the period of most strategic plans) grows from the value statements which begin to articulate not only what is true at present, but also what will be true over the period for which the strategy is built. The vision might describe what an organization seeks to become that it has yet to realize. However, in this inverted approach, a reasonable vision most remain congruent with those penned values. As the organization works to describe its horizon it does so with clear agreement on who that organization is and how it goes about being it.

Lastly, then, should come the mission statement. Of course, a good mission statement is one that constituents (in this case mostly employees) can memorize. Because if the organization’s people can’t recite the mission statement, they don’t have a mission statement. (Yet again, that’s a topic for another post.) What is critical in this scheme for strategic planning is that the mission statement grows from the values and vision. Instead of starting with what can often be a heady abstraction, this approach grounds the mission in the concrete and agreed upon values and vision. 

It is far easier to move from concrete toward abstract than it is from abstract to concrete. Of the elements of MVV, values are the most concrete followed by vision, then mission. While the strategic planning trinity is usually referred to as “Mission, Vision, Values,” for the process to construct them to be more productive and efficient perhaps we should consider it to be, “Values, Vision, Mission” instead.