How To Craft Your Organization's Destination Statement - Forbes

Destination statements are better than traditional mission and vision statements.

How’s that for a lead sentence? I understand if your first reaction is to push back. Many believe that an organization's mission and vision statements are essential and give our work lives some sort of meaning. But in my experience, they are more likely to be simple taglines or milquetoast statements.

I concede that vision and mission statements are good when onboarding new hires into your team because they are simple and easy to understand. They can also be helpful as brand-positioning copy for press releases and as part of a warm-up exercise for senior leaders embarking on a strategic planning effort (if handled correctly and for the right reasons).

A good destination statement, on the other hand, takes things a step further. These statements encapsulate vision and mission with greater introspection, higher accountability and better alignment. Importantly, they communicate to the entire organization that employees' work is based on both a rational and inspirational foundation and that it’s all going to be worth their effort.

What makes for a good destination statement?

A good destination statement describes a clear and confirmable market and the position the organization will reach by a future date, as identified by specific measures. Typically, destination statements are four or five sentences and touch on the expected key drivers of success, such as certain advantages you enjoy, opportunities you expect and capabilities you will leverage or develop along the way. Depending on your industry, market position, organizational design, management routines and culture, each sentence could focus on a different functional area, piece of the value chain, geography or key customer segment.

Most critically, each element needs to be anchored in one (or maybe two) metrics. Agreeing on those will be some of the most challenging work in crafting your destination statement. It will require buy-in from the entire leadership team. Presumably, each of them will have a stake in what gets measured and recognize the implications both to them and to their respective areas. Expect negotiation. Expect to confront current limitations on data quality and availability. And expect that the process itself will uncover previously unsurfaced or unvoiced issues and challenges. Accordingly, these ultimately will be healthy and productive efforts.

Where do we start?

If your organization has a mission and vision, fold those into the first sentence of your destination statement while also articulating the overarching target for the organization. You want to build on the thoughts and efforts that went into drafting those statements to inspire the specific actions required to activate your strategy.

Next, imagine the organization at that future destination. Ask your leadership team to describe how they would arrive there, what specific choices they'd make, what they'd start or stop doing and how they'd manage the journey along the way. Demand specificity in their answers to these questions in isolation from one another. Allow space for each leader to work through their responses through their particular lens. This leverages their unique expertise and frame of reference while also building for future buy-in.

Armed with this list of discrete actions, challenge the team to then look to how each can be integrated into a cogent whole. Reconciling them, choosing as a team between attractive alternatives and working through the next level details is perhaps the most important activity of all. They will have an internal logic, and they will become guides to future decisions both seen and unseen.

The surviving actions from this exercise become the key drivers for success that make up the balance of your destination statement. The final step will be to agree on how progress should be measured for each. Obviously, this will take effort and expert facilitation as well but, once agreed, will allow the organization to have a focus on the right metrics for the right results.

With each of these solved, the destination statement can be finalized. From there, it should be used as the touchstone for detailed strategic planning, as a reference for your corporate development and change management teams, and as motivation for individual contributors to understand how their daily work impacts the success of the entire organization.

Putting It All Together

To illustrate the strategic impact of a destination statement, let's take a hypothetical pass at Tesla Motors. The mission of the company is "to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy," according to the company's website. And the vision, according to the International Institute for Management Development, is "to create the most compelling car company of the 21st century by driving the world’s transition to electric vehicles."

With these, the first sentence of the destination statement might be: "By 2024, Tesla Motors is accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy by offering a portfolio of electric vehicles capable of meeting the needs of at least 90% of consumer and commercial drivers."

Because of the measure included in this first sentence, the rest of the destination statement could focus on the organization meeting drivers’ needs by broadening the scope of vehicles offered, as well as declare financial and nonfinancial metrics to be met. Future strategic and tactical decisions would be evaluated with this focus in mind, and short- and long-term goals would center on this "destination."

Alternatively, the first sentence could be: "By 2023, Tesla Motors is accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy by offering electric vehicles that are the most sought after in their class." Rather than build the company into an expansive vehicle manufacturer, this wording leads to driving demand in certain markets.

Both versions of the first sentence include the essence of the same mission and vision statements. The fact that they can describe such different directions means that they have limited reach. Without articulating a good destination statement, there is a license to shift at will while seemingly staying true to the mission and vision.

And trying to reach two destinations at the same time? That's just something no organization can do.

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November 08, 2019 at 08:00PM
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How To Craft Your Organization's Destination Statement - Forbes
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