Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations, 5th Edition

CHAPTER EIGHTEstablishing an Effective Organizational Vision for the Future

You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, poet

The purpose of Step 8 in the strategic planning process is to develop a clear and succinct description of what the organization (program, collaboration, or community) should look like as it successfully implements its strategies, achieves its full potential, and creates significant and lasting public value. This description is the organization's vision of success. Typically, this vision of success is more important as a guide to implementing strategy than it is to formulating it. For that reason, the step is listed as optional in Figure 2.1, and it comes after strategy and plan review and adoption. However, Figure 2.1 also indicates that under the right circumstances, visioning might occur at many places throughout a strategic planning and management process (see also Figure 2.3).

Although many—perhaps most—public and nonprofit organizations have developed clear and useful mission statements in recent years, fewer have clear, succinct, and useful visions of success. Part of the reason is that a fully developed vision, though it includes it, goes well beyond mission. A mission outlines the organizational purpose; a vision goes on to describe how the organization should look when it is working extremely well in relation to its environment and key stakeholders. Developing this description is more time-consuming ...