Mission, Vision, Etc
There is always a space for articulating visions and great hopes and dreams. But visions, great hopes and dreams seldom include the articulation of the next step, the adjacent possible. So it’s great to spend time talking about where one hopes to end up in a year or five years, or how we’re going to be No. 1 in market share, or how we’re going to do this, or how we’re going to do that. If one cannot tell a narrative that allows people who are part of the organization to know what to do next, that gives them a better understanding of the adjacent possible, then all one has done is to leave them floundering. They have no idea what they’re supposed to do. They may eventually stumble on a possibility and then there will be some distribution, which may even be Gaussian, about how lucky or unlucky they are about finding the right thing to do. Vision alone is not enough. Plans alone are not enough. One has got to situate those things in the present context and then give the people of the organization some understanding of which adjacent possibles create what affordances — so that they have some idea of what they should be doing. One might be able to summarize a vision into a tagline, into some convenient phrase that can serve as a guide. Southwest Airlines empowers its employees to take whatever action they think is necessary, as if the employee was the customer trying to travel on the journey. In effect the little tagline they give everybody is: “Do what one thinks is necessary as if one were the traveler, and we’ll worry about the rest of it later.” That tagline tells employees what their adjacent possible is, and it fits in with the airline’s vision that they will get to have significant market share and significant profits by providing superior service. (That service does not include food or assigned seats, but in the long run, what their customers wanted was the planes to be flown, loaded, and dispatched more quickly. It was a distinction of situating adjacent possibles to allow for action.)
