The Art of Project Management

4.7. A catalog of lame vision statements (which should be avoided)

I've read dozens of vision documents in my career, and there are certain patterns the bad ones share. Lame visions have no integrity; they don't offer a plan, and they don't express an opinion. Instead, they speculate, and avoid the possibility of being wrong. If the vision doesn't take a clear stance on what should happen, the team leaders will never fully invest emotionally behind the effort, setting up the project for failure. In the film Fight Club, Tyler Durden says, "Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken." Writing a document with the word vision in the title doesn't mean you have a vision. You can have all the right meetings and use the right document templates and still miss the entire point of what vision documents should do. In the same sense that having the job title project leader doesn't magically make everything you do an act of leadership, calling something a vision document doesn't mean it will have the effects I've described previously.

Table 4-1 shows some of the common things I've seen in impressive-looking vision documents that disqualify them from having project leadership value.

Table 4-1. Common lame vision statements

Lame vision statement	Example	Why it happens/fails
The kitchen sink	Maximize our customer's ability to get their work done.	Too broad to be useful. This is a mission statement for an organization, not a vision for a project.
The mumbo jumbo	Develop, deploy, and manage ...