More on Rough Draft Vision – Leading in Change Part 2

After reflecting on my last post I realized that I left a lot open to interpretation.  So today I’m going to break down a little more what “vision as a rough draft” looks like for me.  To do that we need to first talk about what an organization is.

Side Note: None of this is mine by the way.  I’ve put it together in my head by piecing together different authors and thinkers.  If I had to point you in one place, a great discussion of organizational structure can be found in the first section of the the book On the Verge by Alan Hirsch and Dave Ferguson.  It’s an interesting read.  There is lots of valuable stuff in it.  If you like church strategy you should go check it out.

Every organization (whether its a school, a business, a house church, or a big honking mega church) is comprised of three things: values, statements, and practices.

Values – These are DNA level beliefs that live inside the organization’s culture.  Often, especially in undisciplined organizations, they go unspoken; but even if a leader can’t define them, he/she still has them.  From these everything else springs.  These beliefs are what makes actions feel inherently right or wrong.

Statements – These are how Values are vocalized.  They take the form of repeated sayings, or slogans, or stories that explain the why the organization is like it is.  Statements flow from the Values.  They are the expression of what we value.

Practices – This is where the Values get legs.  Practices are the physical and behavioral manifestation of the beliefs.  Practices reinforce and justify our statements (and in turn our beliefs).  Practices also speak back to our statements and values.  As things work or don’t work our values and statements evolve.

Let’s look at a simple example of how all this plays out in an organization.

When I lived in the heart of downtown there was a hardware store down the street from me that was unique.  It was run by an elderly man who lived above the shop.  The store was a huge mess.  The aisle were packed to the rafters and littered will all kinds of things.  They looked impossible to navigate.  That didn’t matter though, because immediately upon entering the front door you ran into a counter.  Customers were not welcome to browse the shelves.  To buy something from the store you had to tell the elderly, often grumpy, owner what you wanted and he would go and fetch it for you.

There was no cash register, no calculator, and no computer.  On the rare occasion that  merchandise had a price tag, it was a hand written tag.  There was a simple credit card scanner; but it was only used under protest.  The owner figured out your bill by hand with a pencil on a piece of scratch paper.  There was no negotiation on price or the total.

The shop had no consistent hours.  When the owner felt like perching himself behind the counter, the shop was open.  When he didn’t, the shop was closed.  I was told by contractor friends that if you called ahead the owner would open the shop for you and have your order ready when you walked in the door.

The owner treated everyone under the age of 30 with frustration and disdain.  Customers over 30 were acceptable.  Customers over 45 who had lived in the neighborhood most of their lives were welcomed with smiles, hand shakes, laughter, and warmth.

Everything I’ve just described above falls in the category of practices.

If you hung around the shop long enough to listen to conversations (which was no easy task by the way because there was no where to stand accept at the front counter) you would hear lots of stories about the good old days when everyone in the neighborhood knew everyone.  There was lots of complaining about the “yuppies taking over.”  Specifically Yuppies were criticized for only sticking around for a few years and then trying to sell their homes for a profit.  Venom was also spewed at all forms of technology.  Praise was lavishly dished out onto older residents who chose to fix up their houses instead of sell them to developers.  Surprisingly, the counter was littered with pictures of young kids and if you were to bring a child into the store the atmosphere radically changed.

All of this falls into the statements category.

There wasn’t a list of core values hanging anywhere in the shop.  If you had asked the owner to define his DNA you would have received a string of profanity.  But values clearly existed.  Here are four that I saw:

• Business is built on personal relationships.
• Neighborhoods should be built on family relationships.
• People doing construction should have a knowledge of construction (the work is for insiders, not dabblers).
• Families and trust, not progress and technology, were the keys to a healthy future.

I’m sure there are more, but you get the idea.

So you are a leader working an organization through change.  You have to understand the values.  You have to know the beliefs that reside within the organization.

To keep your vision a rough draft, your vision should be about values.

The mistake many leaders I’ve seen make is to make their vision about statements or practices.  If you try to enlist people by using statements and practices you block them from ownership.  They become workers just playing out your plan.

Rough draft visions give people values and then empower them to build statements and practices.  That is the work that excites people and keeps them engaged.

Next we will look at the cycle of organizational life and how we can use it to lead change.

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