Episode 005: Strategy Map — Vision, Mission, Values, Themes and Results

Key Takeaways:

• A vision statement defines what the organization is working towards and why.

• A mission statement defines how the organization is going to get there and is made up of three components:

  • The impact the organization will have.

  • The audience the organization wishes to impact.

  • The one to three actions the organization will take to have an impact on its audience.

• Values represent who you are as an organization and are used to make organizational decisions.

• Strategic themes and results are medium-term goals and the outcomes the organization wants to see when those goals are accomplished.

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Transcript

Hi, church leaders! Welcome to the CEO Pastor podcast. My name is Cindy and I am your host for today's episode. My goal is to provide the management expertise every church leader needs to produce the ministry experience every church leader wants. We'll skip the jargon and cliches and focus on ideas that will help you accomplish the church's mission in your unique ministry context. Ready? Let's go!

In today's episode, which is part two in our strategy map series, we're going to be discussing your vision, mission, values, themes and results that you would like to get through your organization. First, I'm going to discuss why these things are important and then I'm going to define what they are and give you some examples.

Why the Foundational Strategy Map Statements are Important

So why are these five components of a strategy map important, other than the fact that they're the foundation of your strategy map? Well, the first reason why they're so important is that knowing these five things allows you to know who you are and what you represent as an organization. It's a lot easier to explain to people inside your organization and outside your organization what your organization does if you have it very clearly defined in your vision, mission, and values especially.

The second thing is that the definition of these five things will allow your organization to leverage the unique skills that you find within the people of your organization to fill the needs that you are seeking to fill. Let's say that you're a trucking company. You don't want to start talking about flying airplanes. Like, you're a trucking company. That's the whole point of what you're trying to do. So you shouldn't be talking about other modes of transportation. It allows you to to leverage your unique skills. You don't have unique skills in flying airplanes and... and manufacturing airplanes or... or repairing airplanes. Your unique skill is in trucking.

The third reason to define these very clearly is to inspire your stakeholders. So that's not just people inside the organization, although that is very important. You want to be able to use these five things in your strategy map to inspire them to action and to inspire them to fulfill the ultimate goals of your organization, why the organization exists in the first place. But you also want to inspire other people who may want to join in on what the organization is doing. People who are looking at the organization from the outside and saying, "I really like what they're doing over there. I wonder how I can help." If you have your vision, mission and values very well defined, then people can say, "Yeah, I'm a good fit for that organization," or "It's not really a good fit for me here, but I would fit really well over with that organization." So it helps you narrow that kind of thing down for people who are looking to be inspired to join in on a mission of some sort.

The fourth thing is that these five things will help you increase your focus and guide decision trade offs. So, like with our trucking example, we know that we are in the trucking business if you're running that type of an organization. So that means if somebody says, "Hey, we have a really good deal over here on fish. Maybe we should buy some fish and start farming fish," that's very much outside what you're trying to do. You are trying to transport things from one place to another by truck. It may be a wonderful opportunity and a really great deal to go buy the fish and start selling fish but it's very much outside the scope of what you're trying to do as an organization. If you have your vision, mission, and values clearly defined, there's always going to be great opportunities that come up and more than one opportunity at the same time. But, unfortunately, we often find ourselves with limited resources so we can't do everything all at once for sure and maybe not everything... like, certain things may always have to fall by the wayside. So if we have our vision, mission, values, themes, and results very well defined, it allows us to say, "Okay, this is a really great opportunity, but it doesn't fit in with what we're trying to do right now with the limited resources that we have. Which are the best things that we can be involved in? Which of... which of these opportunities will best help us fulfill our mission and vision and will help us remain within the values and strategic themes that we have chosen for ourselves, who we want to be and what we want to pursue?"

And, finally, defining these things in the correct way, in a good way, helps you to anticipate change. You don't want to define your mission and vision so narrowly that if an opportunity does come up... so let's say you're in the trucking industry and you have trucks that are on the road right now, but all of a sudden there's driverless vehicles. Well, you don't want to define your vision and mission so narrowly that you exclude the possibility of using driverless trucking should it come about in the future. You want to be able to define your vision and mission and values so... widely enough that you can encompass technological advances, other opportunities that may come up that are very close to what you're doing but something you may not have anticipated because it may be something new that has come up. As social events come up, as circumstances change, you should be able to anticipate those changes by not defining what you do so narrowly that you can't use those things when they come up as opportunities. And the other important thing to understand, too, is when those things do come up, you're not changing your mission and your vision. You're just incorporating something new into it. You're just incorporating a change into it. It's not that you're throwing the whole thing out and starting over. It's just that you're bringing something that's a little bit different than what you had originally anticipated into your organization.

Those are the five reasons why it's good to very well define these five things. You get to know who you are and what you represent, you leverage your unique skills, you inspire your stakeholders both in your organization and outside your organization, you increase your focus and guide your decision trade offs, and they allow you to anticipate and take advantage of change.

Definitions and Examples of the Foundational Statements

So now we're going to get into the five things we're looking to define in this particular aspect of the strategy map. So first, we're going to talk about the vision. The vision is what you're working towards. You need to clearly define what your organization is working towards and it's sometimes helpful to define why you want to work towards those things. The idea of the vision statement is that you can say what you are working towards and people can have a picture of that in their mind's eye so they're not directionless when they're going about doing their jobs. They know that they're working towards this final end goal.

And adding in why you want to work to that end goal gives... also gives people the motivation behind why we want to get to this end goal. If you want to run a marathon, it's sometimes a lot better to have a reason why you want to run a marathon other than just for the sake of running marathon. Maybe you want to challenge yourself to see if you can do it. Maybe the reason you want to run a marathon is to get healthier and that's one way that you're going to go about doing that. Maybe you're running a marathon because you want to raise money for a cause you care about very greatly. So there's lots of reasons why you want to run a marathon. So let's say... so let's use that as an example. Your vision is to be a marathon runner. Why? "Because I want to run this marathon to raise money to support this cause that I care about." So you know that when you're practicing, you're running every day, when you're watching what you eat and when you're sacrificing all this time and energy in order to practice your running and to... to strengthen your body and to strengthen your endurance that you know, "Okay, this is why I'm doing this."

So I'm going to give you an example from the Bible about the vision that Jesus gave to the Church. I would say that the vision that Jesus gave to us, he told us in the Lord's Prayer. One of the first things that he mentions in the Lord's Prayer, he asks his father to have the kingdom come and for the Father's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. So I would propose that the vision that Jesus gave us is a world where God's Kingdom is present and God's will is done. So we can envision that in our mind. What does it look like when God's kingdom was present? Well, we just have to watch and see what Jesus did in order to see, "Okay, this is what Jesus was doing. This is how Jesus lived. This is how we should be living. This is how God wants us to live." We can also get a vision of what God's Kingdom is going to be like when we read Revelation, for example. We can see that there will be no tears, no pain, no sorrow. Now we may not be able to accomplish that vision in its fullness now. It's not going to be in its complete form until the Lord returns. But we can work towards that and work alongside the Lord, with the help of the Holy Spirit, in order to bring that vision into increasing reality wherever we find ourselves.

The second part, the mission. The mission is how we're going to get there. Jesus cast this vision for us of a world where God's Kingdom is present and God's will is done. But he also gave us the mission, the Great Commission found in Matthew 28:19-20. So our mission is to go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey all of the commands that Jesus gave us.

So there's three components of any mission statement and we can find all three components in this mission statement that the Lord gave to us before he left to be with his Father. The first is what the organization is going to do, the impact that that organization wants to have. So, in this case, in this mission statement that Jesus has given us, the what, the impact that we're supposed to have as the church is to go and make disciples. So usually you have one or two verbs or actions in there. So you can say, "Okay, this is what we are doing, the impact that we're going to have."

The second component of a good mission statement is a mention of who the organization is going to serve, the audience for the organization. So in this case, the Lord has told us to go and make disciples of who? All the nations. So we know that this mission covers everyone.

And the third component of a good mission statement is how, or the actions that we're going to take in order to accomplish the mission. Now, usually, it's best to limit it to the most impactful one to three actions that you're going to be doing as you're fulfilling that mission. So in this case, Jesus has told us how we're going to go and make disciples, some of the actions that we're going to take. So the first one that Jesus mentioned is baptizing the new disciples in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And the second thing that Jesus mentions is that we need to teach those new disciples to obey all of the commands that Jesus gave us. It's very clear the major actions that we are taking when we are going about the mission of the church: baptizing the new believers and teaching the new believers.

And, thirdly, an organization should define the values, the core values that they base their work upon. The core values are very helpful to define who you are, who you aspire to be, and help you make decisions. For example, in my town where I live, one of the core values of the town is sustainability. So when they're trying to decide what they're going to do, what initiatives they're going to do for the town, that's the main filter through which they make decisions. Is this sustainable? Is it sustainable economically? Is it sustainable for the environment? Is it sustainable for business? Is it sustainable in that there's not going to be a conflict between residents and businesses? That's one of the values of the town that I live in.

For Jesus, I would say that the ultimate value that Jesus put forth for us to follow as the Church are the two greatest commandments, which both hinge on the value of love: to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind and all your strength and to love your neighbor as yourself. So that should be the filter through which we make all of our decisions as we follow Jesus. Is this action or this decision that I'm making showing that I love the Lord and that I love my neighbor? If it doesn't fit in with that value, that's probably not the way we should be going if we're trying to follow the mission of Jesus.

I would also say that as a few sub-values of that core value of love that Jesus talked about, some sub-values that we find in John 14-16, those three chapters in there, are to know the Lord, to believe the Lord, to obey the Lord, and to remain in the Lord. So that kind of fleshes out how exactly we are to love the Lord and to love our neighbor as ourselves. If we know the Lord, we will have a good idea of how to best please him by following his character, by following His commandments, by following the heart of God. God's heart is not to harm people. God's heart is to make them be whole and complete and live in peace. We believe in the Lord. If we don't believe in the Lord, we're not going to love him. There's no point in loving somebody that you think is not going to steer you in the right direction or that you don't think is real. Also, obeying the Lord is another subset of loving the Lord. Jesus says in the passages in John, "If you love me, you will obey my commandments." And then the fourth thing, the fourth sub value is remaining in the Lord. And that's... this is where Jesus talks about, "I'm the vine, you are the branches. Remain in me and I in you." If we don't remain in the Lord, we are going to have some problems because if we think that we can go and do things apart from Jesus and apart from the help of the Holy Spirit, we're not going to get very far. Jesus says, "Apart from me, you can do nothing." So it's through the power of the Spirit, the power of Jesus, that we are able to accomplish the mission as the church.

And finally, for themes and results, these are things that are more like medium-term ideas for your strategy. They can be changed as... let's say that you you do a great job on one and you say, "Okay, we're good on that. We're going to work on something else." So you should only have three to five of those as well so you don't overwhelm people with the themes of what you're doing. In the example of the early Church, we see some themes, some strategic themes of how they go about creating the Church and running the Church and ministering to people outside the Church so they want to also join in the mission of the Church that Jesus laid out for us.

So one of the strategic themes (and we can find this in Acts 2:42-47), one of the strategic themes is worship and that falls under loving the Lord your God. It also falls under knowing and believing in the Lord, the sub values that we discussed. We worship we praise the Lord. That's how we honor him, how we love him.

The second thing is prayer. We talk to the Lord in order to get to know his heart, to gain direction from him so that we know what we're supposed to be doing and to... to ask Him for wisdom so that he can provide us the things that we need in order to accomplish the mission that he sent us out for, to get direction from the one who has sent us on the mission. The Lord didn't leave us here on our own. He gave us the Holy Spirit. He gave us the ability to talk to him through prayer and discern his will through having discussions with him. So, just as you as a leader in your organization aren't going to say, "Here's the mission. Good luck!", the Lord gave us the Holy Spirit so that we can discuss our own particular needs, our own particular circumstances and gain direction for our own particular circumstances that we found ourselves in.

The third strategic theme that I see in Acts is teaching. It says in Acts, the early Church devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles. Why was that so important? Jesus said in John, "If you love me, you'll obey my commandments." If you don't know what the commandments are because you haven't been taught them, you can't obey them and, therefore, you can't love the Lord. So that's why it was so important for the early Church to devote themselves to the teaching. They got to know the heart of the Lord, know what the Lord wanted them to do, and then to obey the commands.

Fourthly, a big theme in the early church was fellowship. The early church, the new believers, they ate together. They worshiped at the temple together. They prayed together. And fellowship also falls under the ultimate command of loving your neighbor as yourself. It's a lot easier to love your neighbor if you know your neighbor. And, in order to know your neighbor, you have to have fellowship with your neighbor.

The fifth strategic theme was sharing. The early Church shared meals together, they sold their possessions so that no one would be in need. And, by doing that, they also were showing love for their neighbor.

So once you have your strategic themes, you can kind of define what your results are. So, for example, one of the strategic themes of the early Church was worship. Their results will be going to the Temple in their case (because they were still in Jerusalem at that time)... going to the Temple and worshiping the Lord in the Temple. When they have their strategic theme of teaching, the goal was to learn from the apostles, to learn the commands that Jesus had taught to them so that you can also go out and obey those commands and teach them to others as well. And also fellowship and sharing, those two strategic themes. You know each other, you know each other's struggles, and then if you know one another's struggles, you can share your possessions with people who are in need. You can share meals together so that no one is hungry. So some of the results are making sure that there's no one in the community that has needs. Everyone is provided for, no one is struggling in order to survive.

So when you're defining your vision, mission, values and the themes, the strategic themes of your organization, ideally, it is best to make each -- especially the vision, mission, and values statements -- short and memorable and something that's like a word picture that you can see happening in your mind, something that is not just a bunch of words but it's something that you can see the outcome even before you see the outcome. You can see it, you can envision it, you have an idea of where you're going and how you're going to get there.

Vision and Mission Statement Example: TED Talks

So, just as an example, I found an excellent vision and mission statement by TED. TED Talks are pretty popular. You can watch them on YouTube. And the TED talks are... people... they get up and usually speak for about 18 minutes and just talk about a particular idea. At TED, their vision is as follows: "We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives, and, ultimately, the world." The vision is what you're working towards and why. In the TED vision, why they're doing what they're doing is that they believe passionately in the power of ideas. So that's why they're doing what they're doing. And what they're working towards is change of attitudes, lives, and, ultimately, the world.

And how are they going to do that? What is the mission? How are they going to get there? Very simple: "Spread ideas." That is their entire mission statement, which is amazing because it is so short that you can remember it, it's something that you can get excited about, it inspires people: "We're spreading ideas!" Even though it is short, it is allowing you to narrow down what you're doing and eliminate opportunities that don't quite fit in with the direction, the mission of the organization. "Will this help us spread ideas?" If the answer is yes, great! If the answer is no, then obviously it falls outside of what we're doing here and it can be eliminated. But you can also see in your mind, the ideas getting spread. Like, it is such a simple mission statement and the vision statement... it discusses the passion with which they believe in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives, and, ultimately, the world. You can see that happening in your mind. If you get good ideas and spread them, then you can see how lives can be changed, how the world can be changed, if people understand and apply those ideas that are good and helpful.

Summary

So, in summary, the first statement to include in your strategy map is the vision. What are we working towards as an organization and why? At least one, if not both of those things, should be part of a short, memorable vision statement. The second thing is the mission. How are we going to get there? A good mission statement needs to include the impact, the actions, the results of what you're trying to do as an organization and for whom the impact will make a difference. And the third thing is just a brief list, up to three main actions, that your organization is going to take in order to fulfill your mission. Then you need to define your core values. Your core values are the essence of who you are and how you make decisions. Once you have your core values defined, it makes it a lot easier to say, "Okay, that doesn't fit in with who we are so we're not going to do that." If one of your core values is protecting the environment, if you have an opportunity that's a polluting opportunity, that's automatically off the table. You're not going to pollute the environment. That's against one of your core values. So that makes that decision a lot easier. And finally, your themes and results. These are the things that are more medium-term goals that you want to see happen because of the work of your organization. And once you have your themes, you can say, "Okay, here are the projects and initiatives that we're doing. Do they fit in our themes?" It helps you to narrow down what you're doing so you don't start running around doing all the great things. You focus on doing the best of the great things and then you can also outline the results that you want to see from those things.

“Cascading” Strategy

Now, something that I forgot to mention in my last episode that I'll mention here is --n and it's especially fitting because we've discussed the vision, mission, values, and strategic themes and results that Jesus gave to us -- the great thing about the strategic map is that once you have the vision, mission, values and strategic themes, then you can cascade that down to the different parts of your organization. Not everyone in your organization is going to do all of the strategic themes. They're not going to be able to do everything all at once.

For example, your finance team isn't necessarily going to be the one out doing work, but they're going to be managing the finances so that the people who are doing the work have the financial resources to be able to go do that work. So you can cascade down your vision, mission, and values so that that finance team can create their own vision, mission, values, and strategic themes that are built upon the organization's strategic themes and values and mission overall, so that they can see what their part is in fulfilling the strategy of the organization. So even though you're not able to do everything, you can say, "Okay, this is how we fit into the organization's strategy." And then you can define your own vision, mission, and values.

So the finance team's vision may be: "Our vision is an organization that has a solid financial footing, where resources are available as needed to support the projects and initiatives of the organization." That could be the vision of the finance team. The mission is: "To steward the resources and make them readily available to the frontline workers of the organization by managing cash flow, by predicting the future needs of the organization, and by ensuring that new projects are filtered through the core values of the organization and are responsibly managed." That could be an example of the finance team's vision and mission.

So there's all kinds of ways that, even though you may not be the "top dog" of your organization, you may be a little lower in the organization, you can also create your own vision, mission, values, strategic themes and results within your section of the organization. Perhaps if you're listening to this and you're not the lead person in your organization, if you have these things and are working them out in your own corner of the organization, people may ask you, like, "What are you doing? Like, everybody seems to be going in the same direction. We've seen some really great results from your side of the organization. What are you doing? Maybe we can apply that to the entire organization." You may end up teaching those people about a strategy map. You never know!

Next Steps

So I would encourage you to think about and write out your vision, mission, values, themes and results over the next little while. The great thing is you can tweak these. They should be pretty solid but you can tweak them as time goes on and improve them and make them shorter, more memorable, more easy to envision. And once you have that down, it should be very easy to communicate those and have other people understand where you're going and so they can align themselves with that same direction that the organization or your part of the organization is going in overall.

And I would also encourage you as you are thinking about and writing out these things for your strategy map to include input from your team if you have one. Sometimes our team can see things that we haven't been able to see or they have ideas that, frankly, are better than our own. I know I don't always have the best ideas. Sometimes it's good to have that input from your team. And it also helps them get on board when the vision statement and the mission statements are finalized.

Another thing that I would suggest is, if you're getting your team involved, it might be a great idea to have them come up with their own vision, mission values, themes and results for your organization on their own and then for your entire team to come together and discuss the different statements that you've come up with separately, and then you can combine the best of everyone's input and... to get a fuller picture of the direction and vision for your organization. We always want to be careful not to get into the trap of following the leader's ideas just because they're the leader's. Sometimes people are intimidated by, "Oh, the leader says this so it must be correct." Sometimes people don't speak up because they think that you have all the great ideas, but maybe they have a better idea. So if you do all of your thinking and writing separately, sometimes you can come up with ideas that you didn't think of yourself and that can help you better define what you're doing in your organization.

Our Next Episode

So on our next episode, we're going to discuss the SWOT and PESTLE analysis frameworks. These two frameworks should help you if you get stuck on trying to figure out your vision, mission, values, themes and results. The SWOT is just a short form for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. So it's always good to understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to your organization in order to know the direction that your organization can take based on the circumstances in which you find yourself. Also, the PESTLE analysis is specific to the opportunities and threats of the organization. It just helps you refine what factors are leading into the opportunities and threats that your organization is experiencing. So PESTLE is just the letters... they stand for Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental. So we'll talk about that on our next episode and I look forward to having you with me again then.

Thank-you for joining me for today's episode of CEO Pastor podcast. I hope you discovered an idea that you can apply in your unique ministry context. Head over to ceopastor.com for more resources and meet up with me and other church leaders on social media for further discussion. Any questions or suggestions? Email me at podcast (at) ceopastor.com. And don't forget to share, rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast to help spread the word that managing ministry better makes ministry better.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai