Mission and Vision - do you see the purpose?

I have observed that in some organizations, what is commonly understood as mission is denoted as vision and vice versa.  So, let me clarify what mission and vision are:

Mission

What is a mission?

Mission is the purpose of existence – of an individual, a family or an organization.

It is generally understood that the purpose of existence is to serve or make meaningful contributions to our stakeholders, i.e., those who are impacted by us.

Why do we need a mission?

Mission gives us focus – we may be capable of contributing in multiple ways to multiple stakeholders but our contribution may produce the greatest positive impact when we focus and channelize our energy to those few activities that we enjoy doing and are really good at, are highly valued by our stakeholders and do not require us to compromise with the principles.

Mission gives us a sense of direction – in our journey to make meaningful contribution, we are likely to come across obstacles and distractions.  A strongly internalized mission enables us to face the obstacles and distractions in a calm manner and discover creative ways to overcome them and get back on track.  Mission is like a compass for a lost traveler, a lighthouse for a lost sailor or the constitution for a country.

The exercise of preparing the mission statement, by itself, is an enriching experience.  We can prepare mission statements for ourselves, for our family, for our function or department, for our social or commercial organization.

Vision

What is a vision?

Vision is the desired perception of a future state of existence – of an individual, a family or an organization.

To put this in simpler terms, vision is the set of measurable objectives that we desire to accomplish in the medium term, say 5 years, to long term, say 10 years.

While preparing the vision statement, care to be taken to benchmark the measurable objectives against the perceived potential at the end of the timeline instead of extrapolating our past accomplishments into the future.

Why do we need a vision?

Vision provides us the reality check – the moment we are develop our vision, our ability to honestly perceive our present state of affairs improves significantly.  This understanding enables us to identify the gap in our capabilities and take creative actions to bridge the gap and realize our vision.

Vision provides the acceleration – before preparing our vision, we may have chosen to travel at a slow and steady pace in our mission journey taking comfort from the fact that we are heading in the right direction.  This may have resulted in our contributions being much less than what we are capable of making.  Also, the slow and steady pace may have diminished our capabilities to overcome obstacles and distractions.  An inspiring vision may challenge us to discard our complacency, enhance our capabilities and increase the speed at which we cross various milestones to realize our vision.

Vision enhances accountability – vision enables us to breakdown our objectives into measurable milestones in our mission journey.  This further enables us to develop a scoreboard to measure our actual contribution vis-à-vis the milestones and take corrective actions on a timely basis to get back on track.

Apart from the above, there is one other important reason:

In many organizations, people are generally aligned to their supervisor, manager or leader.  If the person that they are aligned to leaves the organization, there is disruption.  When we replace this person with a new one, some of the people, who were strongly aligned with the earlier person, struggle to align with the new person.  In the process, they become frustrated and leave the organization and, in many occasions, join the person whom they were in alignment with.  Such attrition has adverse impact on the organization.

Instead, if we consciously enable every person, be it an individual contributor, supervisor, manager or leader, to align themselves with the mission and vision of the organization, they are indirectly aligned to each other.  If any of them leave the organization and are replaced with a new one, the adverse impact may be reduced significantly by enabling the new person to align with the mission and vision of the organization at the earliest.