Staking Out Our Missions and Visions

A few years back, I had the opportunity to help launch a recycling and re-use project here in Colorado.  We recycled asphalt roofing shingles and found a great new use for this recycled material, re-using those waste shingles in asphalt pavements for roads and highways and driveways and parking lots.

As a tree-hugger, I was surprised to find myself immersed in the multiple technical details of highway construction and asphalt use.  It's a vast system of people, money, materials.

But I really want to talk about mission and vision.

In Systems Thinking Made Simple: New Hope for Solving Wicked Problems, Laura and Derek Cabrera cover a lot of ground.  I stumbled and staggered through some of their territory, strolled through ripening fields of flowers in other chapters, and scratched my head through several sections.  And I relished their discussion of mission and vision.

In the Roofs to Roads project, we integrated short, clear mission vision statements, just as the Cabreras¹ affirm.  We created these for each stakeholder.  Why?  Because we had widely disparate stakeholders, with a variety of visions and systems and motivations!

(This was my secret vision: oh yeah. solar paved.)

Highway engineers wanted SAFETY and PERFORMANCE and LOW RISK, but they also wanted to follow the RULES created by then-Governor Bill Ritter, who wanted each state department (in our case, the Department of Transportation) to recycle more.  A lot more.  25% more. 

We environmentalists wanted GREEN roads and more RECYCLING, more people involved in and loving recycling.

Roofers pulling asphalt shingles off roofs wanted EASE OF OPERATIONS and LOW COST.

Road construction companies wanted CHEAPER ASPHALT so they could win more construction bids.  

Creating a shared mission/vision for the Roofs to Roads project never really occurred.  Rather, we had a multi-faceted central cohesion, where each stakeholder saw the elements they valued.  A kind of geodesic dome where each stakeholder saw mainly their own triangle, but all the triangles connected, and they understood there was a connection to other stakeholder's priorities...but really, they only cared about their own.  Our job was to create the cement between triangles. 

As the project progress, advanced, moved, we regularly reviewed the goals, motivations, mission and vision of our stakeholders, viewing the project and the system we were created from each perspective, tracking relationships, looking for feedback loops and leverage points.

Question for you:  

Is your mission and vision flexible, or even multiple?  

Do you have several stakeholders in your life (perhaps within your own mind and heart)?  

If you had a pleasing plethora of missions and visions, short powerful ones, what might they be?

 

Footnote:

1. 10 TESTS FOR EFFECTIVE MISSION→VISIONS, Cabrera, Derek; Cabrera, Laura . Systems Thinking Made Simple: New Hope for Solving Wicked Problems (Page 212). . Kindle Edition.

Comments

[Mallika]

It’s interesting that you have real life experience with the mission -> vision thinking framework. I’m curious, did you feel that having these simple mission statements for each stakeholder lead to a better functioning project than if you had one complicated mission -> vision statement for the whole thing?
I was trying to apply this thinking to my capstone project. It’s fairly easy to articulate a simple outcome for my project: convince 100 homeowners in Boulder to install a heat pump system in their homes. However, it’s more difficult to come up with the simple steps to get us there. Is it as simple as motivate, educate, convert? Or does there need to be a mechanism in place to remove financial burdens for the homeowner? How much time do we need to spend developing our market? Maybe I just need to spend more time thinking about my mission. Anyway, I would love to hear more about your road project and if you thought developing simple vision statements helped it run better.

[John Bratton]

Jen- you guys were like "grout," helping to hold the thing together. I know it isn't a glamorous image, but grout is good! It is interesting, as well, that you look at a collaborational mission... not just one that is for a given organization, but one that encompasses more than one organization.

Really, in part, our MENV program mission might be "more grout!" In other words, the interdisciplinary nature of what we're doing sort of calls out for us to attempt bind disparate endeavors together in service of a larger goal.