Fundamentally every organization's vision and mission statements are the foundational statements that guide your work, but how often should you look at these critically?
Times are a changing and in our rapid-fire, 24-hour media crisis world, it can seem like your organizational tenets may need to be revised often to keep up. If you are finding yourself in mission drift, having a specific conversation about the status of mission and vision can certainly be helpful in getting out of the weeds and redirecting your energy and action.
What does mission/vision drift look like? It can be helpful to know the signs that things may be going off course, but what are some clear demarcations that it is time to send up flares? Here are few scenarios:
- Your new boss comes up with a project that requires all-hands and redirects resources from strategic goals and objectives. This could look like a brand new event, appeal scheme or even marketing channel.
- A board member wants to copy something they heard about from another organization through a friend of theirs who said it was a great success. This could look like a program, service or offering.
- You have a transformational experience which inspires you to give time, talent or money to an organization that you don't typically support and you want to replicate that experience.
Now all of these scenarios could lead to untapped new potential success for your organization, and they could also steer you wildly off-track. They all provide great opportunities to ask fundamental questions to discover how they support your organization's key belief proposition AND how they are aligned with strategic SMART goals and objectives. If they hold up, consider proceeding to determine scope and impact potentials. If not, put them in a parking lot to reexamine during your next planning cycle when things will (probably) have changed.
But getting back to actually changing your mission and vision. If vision is the why and mission is the how of your identity, then it makes complete sense that over time the mission needs to be revised, but a true, guiding vision would be so aspiriational and motivational that it would unlikely ever be altered unless something climatic occurs. Plus, mission statements are tricky enough to craft alone. Revising a mission statement every 5-7 years should be enough to keep it current with audiences, programs and activities.