10 Rules for 10-Year Visions
Why Most Vision Statements Are Terrible and How to Make a Better One
Hello friend.
Thank you for being here today. There is a bigger conversation taking place on how Soulful Leaders can change the world. Join us here.
As the founder of Arable, I have the privilege and challenge of leading a highly self-motivated team across 2 continents. Every member of this team is a strong, brilliant leader in their own right.
They are True, Brave, Kind, and Curious.
Their curiosity leads them to seek out opportunity, take initiative, and build in courageous new directions.
When you lead a team of Curious builders and visionaries, one thing you must do consistently is trim the fat.
We aren’t short on ideas or initiative, but time is a finite resource and must be invested wisely into the few things that will take us closer to our ultimate YES—the purpose and mission of Arable’s existence.
Enter the 10-Year Vision, The 5-Year Plan, the 90-Day Goals tracker, etc. You might think that I’m about to advocate for defining these things and then aligning everyone’s personal goals around that—standard, practical business advice.
Yes…and no.
My team is tasked with identifying and pursuing the goals that individually contribute to our collective purpose. And with eliminating overgrown experiments and reining in speculative activity as we scale operations.
But we are not killing our Curious.
No matter how big or successful you get, you shouldn’t either.
Side Note: As I set out to write this article, I noticed that the vision conversation and the strategy conversation are so closely linked that I decided to give you both conversations for the price of one free newsletter. Enjoy.
The Problem with 10-Year Visions (and 5-year plans…and 90-Day goals)
Vision statements are problematic because they are usually too vague or too specific.
The vague ones are little more than unrealistic wishes or indefinable hopes.
The hyper-specific ones are usually confusing themselves with strategies.
Visions should definitely be clear, but they aren’t roadmaps. Roadmaps are the domain of strategy. But the challenge of strategy is that we’re trying to map roads that are, themselves, in motion.
You may have a clear vision and a defensible strategy for getting there, but what happens when the map you created completely reorganizes itself in front of your eyes?
That’s why, in pursuit of your ten-year vision (and beyond), you mustn’t fall into the Strategy Trap. Which usually looks something like:
Leaders treat their vision like it’s a strategy.
Then they get addicted to their strategy and treat it like it’s sacred.
Then they treat their sacred strategy like it’s the law for everyone else.
If vision is the change you want to make, strategy is how you’re going to make that change. If the context in which these plans play out were static or even a vacuum, your organization’s plan would be simple. It’s just not the case.
The world is constantly changing the field of play in front of you, so you can’t afford to be too precious with or tied to your stated strategy. The playing field, the protagonists, the rules, the challenges, and the opportunities are all going to change as you go along. If the problem changed, the threat morphed, or the opportunity shifted, then the gameplan and the routemap must evolve similarly.
By all means, change the plan!
You won’t always know where counterforces to the change you seek to make are going to come from:
Broader shifts in culture suddenly making your target market disinterested
Technological breakthroughs no one anticipated rendering your idea obsolete
Antagonistic individuals with a personal distaste or outright hatred for you (and the power to hurt your progress)
Or (more often than you think) your own unchecked unconscious sabotage: AKA your inability to get out of your own way.
What you can bank on is that those counterforces are coming, which means you will need, not an unbreakable strategy, or a sacred strategy, but an anti-fragile strategy.
How to Create a 10-Year Vision and a Strategy That Actually Works
In the Arable Blueprint, a strategic tool I created with my team, the WHO is the plan:
your character, the character of the team you choose, and the culture that flows from this.
The reason I’m such an advocate for character formation as the beating heart of leadership is that it can shift entire cultures and drive the whole strategic play.
You have more power to shape your character than you do to shape anything else in this world.
It’s the most direct and leveraged pathway to achieve the change you want to make in the world.
When leaders get intentional about their character formation, their character ends up shaping cultures that change outcomes.
What I have discovered is that adding an anti-fragile strategy to a True, Brave, Kind, Curious character exponentially elevates the impact of both.
So, I want to give you some tools for designing a vision worth pursuing and the kind of strategy that will help you get there:
Start with YOU: you are the project. Your character development will have the most prolific and direct impact on whether or not you accomplish what you set out to do. If you can’t become True, Brave, Kind and Curious, you can not expect anyone else to be. But if you are and if you do, you set the standard. You have the opportunity to Model, Message, Manage and Measure the stuff that really matters. It will also almost certainly impact what you decide to do in the first place. If you instead neglect these qualities, at best you leave to chance whether your team and organization ever becomes the kind of place that exudes health and engenders trust.
Make your vision more about WHO than WHAT: what you do means nothing if you don’t have a clear and honest desire to serve the people you’re doing it for. You are the Project but you are not the Object. They should be your focus when it comes to designing your product or service or system. They will be your motivation when things get hard. Please make as much money as you can…so that you can reinvest it in helping the people you’re here to serve. If you can curate an atmosphere of safety and stretch for those who are part of your team, it will drive the vision. If you can offer purpose, connection and formation, you will grow an ownership mindset, which makes any audacious vision possible.
Make your vision compelling enough to inspire a cynic and simple enough to explain to a child: If it’s not simple and sticky it will never be scalable.
Create anti-fragile strategies: This means that they are flexible and improving under pressure, not rigid (breaking under pressure) or resilient (surviving pressure but failing to take you further than you’ve already gone). If your strategy cannot adapt constantly, it’s too rigid. If it’s too domineering to allow for innovation, it’s too resilient. Foster an environment that honours innovation and even celebrates the right kind of front-foot failure, and learn, learn, learn from every mistake or misstep. Every experience that remains unprocessed stays unlearnt.
Burn the sacred relics: This sounds irreverent, but how often have you seen a team or organization or community die the slow death of turgid dogma? It doesn’t matter how old it is or how well it once worked, if the strategy is not up to the task, revise it or kill it. If the system is breaking down, update it or destroy and redesign it to meet the current challenges. Don’t force bright minds and willing hearts into outdated plans or broken systems. The strategy that began as a way to achieve your vision will choke the life out of your dream if you have more allegiance to the strategy or the history than the vision.
Be dogmatic about principles and open-minded about operations: your values, your mission, and your character should be unshakeable; your methods should be adaptable. Don’t be the leader who shuts down the best ideas simply because your ego can’t handle that you didn’t come up with them. The most brilliant thing about any leader will always be their ability to choose and develop a brilliant team. Which leads me to…
Keep scouts in the trenches: In almost every case, your team knows a heck of a lot more about what’s really going on in the nitty gritty of a given project or process than you. Train at least a few of them to report back to you about what’s working, what isn’t, what’s broken, missing, or confused. Take your cues from your team, and they will give you invaluable insight on how to fix what’s broken and build something better.
Limit experiments, but never stop running them: you can’t let everyone chase every whim, but you should absolutely be sifting through their ideas for innovative gold—no matter how big your organization gets. Try giving each team member an allowance of one or two experiments per quarter. They have to frame it for you first: What do they want to do? What are the costs? What are the risks? What are the possible upsides and payoffs? Decide if it’s worth it, and then let them have a go. Give them the freedom to innovate or make an aggressive mistake in the pursuit of innovation. With an experiment allowance, a failed experiment doesn’t equal a failed team member. Remember to make aggressive mistakes, not passive ones!
Develop a rhythm of strategic review: your strategy should be making your team, organization, or value-add to the world better. Constantly. And your leadership should be refining your strategy constantly. It’s the principle of Kaizen: 1% better every day. Your strategy may not be failing, but it can always be better. Don’t stop working on the strategy just because things are going well. Always ask, how can we make it better?
Default to NO so you can say your truest YES: for all my talk of experiments, having a go, and making aggressive mistakes, you should still be saying no to most experiments, proposals, or new initiatives. This only gets more true as you are scaling your YES. The key is not to shut down the innovative spirit, but channel and refine it in the direction of your truest YES. Have your team bring you only the experiments and ideas that they are willing to defend. Make sure they bring you a compelling case for why those experiments have the best chance to serve your highest purpose. Invite smart speculation, not wild speculation. And even then, say no or not yet most of the time. Not for the sake of saying no, but for the sake of saying your biggest, truest, most audacious, most compelling YES.
10-Year Vision Statements are great, but only when done well.
Make them clear; make them big enough to require multiple anti-fragile strategies and strategic adjustments to reach them. Make them compelling enough to inspire a great team and impactful enough to mean something truly good and decent for the world around you.
I know this is a lot. In fact, it’s one of the longest articles I’ve written in a long time. I hope you find it helpful. If you do, I would love to hear what stuck out to you in the comments on Substack.
Sincerely,
Karl
P.S. If you know a leader who would benefit from this, do consider sharing it with them.