A gymnast at the Olympics, just before their performance, visualizes themselves landing every move—they walk through the routine in their mind and see the moment they’ve won the gold medal and step up to the podium. An artist sees in their mind what their next work ultimately looks like as they’re creating it. It may change and take shape as they put paint to canvas or hand to clay, but they have a picture in their imagination of what they’re working toward.

This is Vision—with a capital V. And it’s not just for Olympic athletes and the artists of the world. It’s for everyone, and it’s especially important for organizations and their teams.

Does your organization have a Vision already? Think about it: If you were to ask your team, “What is the most major ambition of the company?” how many divergent answers would you get?

When our organizations are small and the teams are tight, if we ask that question, we’re likely to hear similar answers. But when we expand our teams and bring in more and more new people, answers to the same question may begin to vary wildly, with every person having a different impression of what the overarching goal of the company actually is. It gets muddled.

As we scale our companies, we need to think about scaling clarity. Everyone in the organization needs to understand the overall point so that, when they’re making decisions in their roles, those decisions are in pursuit of the goal. However, it’s not clear on the individual decisions that you need to scale exactly. It’s clarity of Vision.

What does Vision look like?

To define it, Vision is a clear, specific, and compelling picture of what the organization will look like at a particular time in the future, including a few key metrics that define success. It is an image of how we want the business to look, what impact we want it to have on the world, what type of culture it has, and even its revenue and profit. It is a destination.

A clear vision sets limits to potential strategy and helps define what's inside or outside the organization's bounds. But those bounds aren’t static: Vision can be revisited annually to assess new market opportunities, continuously ensure the organization is on the right track, and build motivation and realignment across the enterprise.

Vision answers questions like: "Where do we want to be? What do we look like in the future? What is our goal? What do we want to achieve or have achieved by then? What have we accomplished?"

Vision is about setting a goal. This is not about sloganeering or wordsmithing or using marketing jargon. It’s about picking a goal that stimulates change and progress. It’s about making a resolute commitment.

This is not about writing a “mission statement.” This is about going on a mission!

An example, by SpaceX:

"Humans will walk on Mars within twenty years. We will lay the groundwork so Mars can be resourced and colonized. If successful, humans will have a new home." It clearly defines an end state for the future. From this Vision, Tesla creates the products (cost-effective rockets) and strategy (partner with NASA; build and launch our own rockets) to get to the Vision.

Why is having a Vision important?

Vision is an effective tool in that it creates a focal point and a common sense of direction company-wide. When everyone is clear on what the Vision is, true north is easy to find no matter whether you’re in the C-suite, managing thousands of employees, or an individual contributor on the ground floor. But Vision is greater than simply a sense of direction and focus; it gets at the heart of “something bigger.” And that something bigger is what can engage people—employees, executives, and sometimes customers—on an emotional level. If people relate to and engage with the Vision, they develop a sense of ownership for their part in accomplishing that Vision along with the motivation to see it through. In that sense, it also puts into relief the people who are right for the job. If someone can’t get behind the Vision, they’re not going to effectively bring it to the finish line.

On a more practical level, as mentioned above, Vision streamlines decision-making. Everyday micro-decisions have an easy check-and-balance when placed against the greater Vision. Similarly, day-to-day thinking automatically gets elevated to a higher level. It also helps make decisions about new opportunities: Does this bring us closer to our vision? Do we still have the right vision? Ultimately, you can build a more transparent enterprise, with a well-defined rubric for choices and decisions, because everyone is clear about what’s most crucial and consequential.

In brief, Vision: