The Vision Framework is designed to help organizations define and leverage their organizational identity to achieve exceptional outcomes.

For ambitious organizations, strategy is table stakes. Aligning it with coherent and powerful Vision and Doctrine is what distinguishes great businesses from the rest. I suspect this combination—which is intertwined with culture—is the most important determinant of success.

And yet it's surprising to me how few ambitious organizations have a coherent vision, strategy, and the doctrinal beliefs that underpin and connect them. Many of the vision statements I’ve heard are either tepid, or aren’t even a vision.¹ And most leaders don't really know what doctrine means, and those who do rarely can describe a cogent one. 

This article explains how and why a cohesive vision, strategy, and doctrine are so important. I also present a framework for establishing and leveraging your own. 

The framework has five levels, which are described in further detail below:

• Vision: High level desired end state
• Strategy: How you make your vision real
• Doctrine: Shared beliefs and understandings
• Plans: How to execute strategy
• Tactics: Specific steps to execute plans

Vision

Vision—a high level desired end state.

Your vision describes an improvement to the world that you are striving to achieve. It is a manifestation of your values, and what an ideal world should look like. 

To train a world model to operate humanoid robots at the billion-unit level
— Figure

To enable humans to become a multiplanetary species
— SpaceX

We’re in business to save our home planet
— Patagonia

The best visions are powerfully compelling. They inspire stakeholders—both current and potential—and strike fear in the hearts of the enemy (e.g., the status quo, and those who support it). 

The power of vision

Vision—along with culture, which is inextricably intertwined—is a deeply unfair advantage for ambitious organizations. The greatest founders are visionaries. The most successful companies are driven by their mission to accomplish a grand vision. 

How does vision drive success? A compelling vision attracts the best people (talent, customers, and more), focuses them in the right direction (with the right doctrine and strategy), and motivates them to exceed. It is core to building a team of missionaries, not mercenaries.

Attraction

A compelling vision enables you to attract the people—talent, customers, investors, and more—who ultimately define the success of your organization. It serves as a clarion call to the best talent, attracting them with the opportunity to be part of something big, exciting, and meaningful. The best talent wants more than money; they want to be part of something meaningful.²

Customers, investors, and other partners want the same. Interweave a powerful vision with their personal interests, and the result can be magical. It can become part of their identity—the microstory they tell others about themselves and their relationship to your company: “I’m part of the effort to make humans a multiplanetary species.” This is the magic that allows brands to become so powerful. 

Direction

Vision unifies and orchestrates your stakeholders; it establishes a mission.³ It answers at the most fundamental level why and what you’re doing. It serves as a constant reminder of your direction, a testable theory of action. “Does this strategy align with our vision? Does this decision get us closer?” The result is clarity of focus and less conflict. It also makes it much easier to make the tough decisions—for example terminating poor performers—without conflict.⁴

Shared vision strengthens trust, which is a critical part of a successful culture, and superpowers your relationship with your customers. Trust arises when you understand and share values with another.⁵ When your stakeholders share your goals and understand why they matter to you, they know how you’re going to act when nobody is watching. They can trust you. 

In the darkest of hours, shared vision serves as a beacon of light. When you question your strategy, find fundamental flaws in your doctrine, or face radical industry disruption, vision can serve as the unwavering North Star that leads your team through the abyss.

Motivation

In addition to attracting the best people and pointing them in a cohesive direction, shared vision motivates them to exceed. And unlike greed,⁶ which encourages individualistic behavior, shared vision creates the multidisciplinary cohesion required for success in the modern economy.⁷ The best talent cares much more about autonomy, mastery, and purpose than money.⁸ In fact, research proves that financial incentives backfire for knowledge workers.⁹ 

To be clear, making a lot of money is almost always part of a successful ambitious organization. But I believe value creation is a byproduct of a team that’s fundamentally motivated to build something meaningful. If you focus too much on the money, it’s much harder to avoid selfish and rent seeking behavior. When you see others around you optimizing for their personal returns, it’s hard not to do the same. That inhibits psychological safety and group cohesion.

Vision also works to motivate customer engagement. The complexity,  speed, and interconnectedness of modern society makes it increasingly hard for human beings to understand and influence their environment. That’s why consumers increasingly seek to align themselves with brands that reflect their values and that they perceive as making our world a better place. It’s about self-expression and self-actualization in an ever frenzied world. 

So customers want to know who you are as a company: they seek to understand your organizational identity. Yes, organizations have an identity, complete with values, aspirations, and other human traits. It’s formed by the collection of people involved—and also exists at a combinatorial level that transcends the sum of the parts. 

An organization’s identity might not be clear or consistent. And it might not be appealing. But it’s there. And organizational vision serves to encapsulate and spread your organizational identity more adroitly than any other factor. A powerful vision enables you to take control of your organizational identity.

What makes a vision powerful?

A compelling shared vision is one of the most powerful tools you can use to achieve your organizational goals. But how can I tell whether my organization has an effective vision? What makes great visions work? Great visions are ambitious, clear, and inspirational. 

Don’t forget this applies to ambitious organizations—if you’re running Northern Trust, you probably need a very different positioning.  

Ambitious

The best visions are grand and seem almost impossible—until you hear more. They appeal to the heroic talent that aspires to leave a dent in the world—the kind of talent required for ambitious companies. Compelling visions accentuate the difference between what is, and what could be. They stand out like a beacon of light in a jaded world. 

If your vision feels achievable without any further explanation, you’ve probably aimed too low. If it sounds like most of your competition, you’ve definitely got it wrong. The ambition of your vision should create tension. If it doesn’t beg the question “how the heck will we do that,” you should probably go back to the drawing board.

Make your vision so ambitious that at first it seems unattainable.

Clear

Great visions offer unambiguous focus. They describe what should be, and by extension what should not be. The best visions stand for something—and against others. If you’re not implicitly (or explicitly) creating enemies by putting your stake in the ground, you’re probably not being sufficiently clear.

They also inspire focus by disambiguating what we should and should not be striving for. Focus is—more than anything else—choosing what not to do. Clear visions establish what matters, and by implication, what doesn’t. 

These are why it’s too easy, particularly for established companies, to prevaricate and obfuscate a bit in expressing vision. If you avoid offending anyone, you’ll water down your vision to the point of inutility. Keeping your options open means a lack of focus on what really matters. 

Make your vision clear and boldly unambiguous about what you should, and should not, be and do. 

Inspirational

Effective vision statements inspire people to act. They resonate with their audience, inspiring a sense of purpose, belonging, and direction. They present compact narratives that can’t be ignored, drawing you into the story, making you a part of it. And once it draws you in, the story begs the questions, how can you not act?

Make your vision inspirational to the point where it seems to vibrate with energy.

Crafting a powerful vision

Wow, that’s a tall order. Ambitious, clear, and inspirational. And you’re saying it needs to be super short and compact? And it should uniquely match my organization? Sure, gotcha.

Yes, it’s extremely difficult. It usually requires a lot of iteration and soul seeking. But it’s worth it. It’s hard to imagine how ambitious organizations succeed without a compelling vision. And once you have one, it will simplify so many other hard things.

And I’ll share a trick with you, something that so few people seem to understand: great vision is always underpinned by a set of doctrinal beliefs. So, as you go through this framework, you’re likely to naturally clarify or discover your vision. 

Ask yourself why

Start by asking yourself why you’re doing this. Why do you care so much? You say it’s all about the money? There are easier ways to make money. Why are you doing this? One possibility is that this isn’t actually that ambitious. That’s fine. Then why are you reading about this vision framework? Do you want to be ambitious? Do you want an extraordinary outcome? Then there’s probably something tickling the back of your brain that’s far more ambitious than what you’re currently doing. 

When you start to identify what really drives you to do this—the things that you care about, the things you dislike—you’re probably getting warmer. That’s why we’re going to jump ahead to Doctrine, skipping over Strategy for now. 

Doctrine

Shared beliefs and understanding

Wait, doesn’t strategy come next? Yes, it does in the hierarchy, but usually not temporally. I find that what typically comes first—or at least early on—is frustration about how an existing business system works. 

The founders of Uber, Match, and Zillow asked themselves why. Why was it so hard to hail a taxi? Why was it so hard to meet dates? Why was it so hard to learn about homes for sale? In many cases that “why” is implicit in a stroke of inspiration—an idea that arises seemingly out of nowhere. But that idea is rooted in a system, and an inspiration for changing it. 

What does that have to do with doctrine? Because doctrine is the understanding of that system, and what needs to change about it.

What is doctrine?

What makes some organizations so consistently better at what they do than others? Why do some organizations continue to stumble undertaking what seem to be simple initiatives? How do organizations often retain their key characteristics through decades and many changes in personnel?

The reasons are more complex than we can fully explore here. But it starts with culture, of which a key component is a concept called “doctrine,” which means shared beliefs and understanding.

Culture derives from the human need for order and stability. It forms as social groups face challenges and learn what works. Over time groups settle upon a set of beliefs and behavioral norms designed to promote order and stability in the group. In the case of a startup, culture starts with the founding team and evolves as the organization adapts to its circumstances.

Doctrine, a key element of organizational culture, is the aggregate of shared views and beliefs that form in an organization as it evolves. The word is more commonly used in academia and the military than in business, but is a very useful concept for commercial (and non-profit) organizations.

“Doctrine provides a military organization with a common philosophy, a common language, a common purpose, and a unity of effort."
— General George H. Decker, US Army Chief of Staff, 1960-1962

Doctrine is knowledge assembled into system design models, best practices, and organizational norms. Doctrine provides tools to connect strategy to planning, to organize complex multi-party activities, and to unify activities in pursuit of a common strategic goal.

How powerful are culture and doctrine? The story of Boeing’s decline after merging with McDonnell Douglas in 1997 can provide some clues. Boeing was a proudly engineer-centric culture which believed that engineers should be making product decisions. McDonnell Douglas was a cutthroat culture focused on “good enough” engineering and success measured solely in dollars. “The culture became … that corporate executives ultimately make the best decisions about allocating resources, and ultimately about safety.”¹⁰ The ultimate result of this doctrinal change appears to have been a series of accidents and crashes that contributed to $20 billion in direct damages and $60 billion in lost sales (and more importantly, perhaps many lost lives). 

Doctrine is a critical enabler as well. If a team lacks a cohesive view about how a system works (e.g., a market, industry, or customer use case), it’s very hard to conceive and execute on plans to impact that system. How can you craft an effective strategy to optimize or improve a system without understanding how it works? 

And once you understand how a system works, it becomes so much easier to see what’s broken and needs to be fixed. And that’s the stuff that vision is made of. An insight into not just what a better world should look like, but what it could look like. 

When you combine doctrine and vision, you are bringing together a combination of values and beliefs that without each other might not make sense. 

Let’s make this more concrete. Here are some high level doctrinal beliefs from SpaceX:

• Sustainable human habitation on other planets is necessary to ensure the long-term survival of humanity
• The current space industrial complex is uncompetitive and deeply inefficient, which leads to unacceptably slow progress
• Yet cooperation is required between government and non-governmental entities to succeed
• Technology drives the future (techno optimism) 
• Multidisciplinary technology advances are required to accelerate innovation timelines
• Democratization of space is required to drive scale and reduce costs
• Sustainable and reusable components are required to make space accessible (e.g., multiple reuse of heavy rockets and spacecraft)

These are very high level, of course, and the truth of doctrine involves extraordinary complexity and detail, often spread amongst your team. Doctrine exists and evolves in any organization whether or not the team is consciously aware of it. And despite its critical role in organizational success, few organizations seem aware of the concept. 

I believe that powerful vision and coherent strategy can’t exist without doctrine. Those shared understandings may be implicit and disorganized, but they exist. 

How do I “find” my doctrine?

So, one of the very first steps in establishing your vision should be to describe your organizational doctrine. Vision describes a better system. How does the current system work? What’s wrong with it? What are you changing?  What’s unfair, inefficient, or just plain awful about it? 

Establishing your doctrine involves writing a narrative¹¹ describing the system you’re focused on: how it evolved, how it works, and its flaws. My 2013 piece on the venture capital industry is an example of a doctrinal exploration, for example. 

If you read critically, many interesting articles expose doctrinal beliefs. Once you start thinking about it that way, you’ll see it. For example, this WSJ article on Mistral AI describes a vision and doctrine for Mistral:¹² 

• Vision: this small European company—not big tech, and not the US—is going to win the generative AI crown
• A lot of the money being poured into training models is being wasted
• There are much more efficient ways to build and deploy generative AI
• Big tech doesn’t have the unfair advantage many think it does
• Knowledge generation works better using an open (source), academic model permitting more multidisciplinary and multi-team collaboration

That’s a simplification, and yet I suspect it’s helpful to see it. Another way to think about it is to ask yourself how you’d explain your industry, company, and business model to an outsider. What are the most important mechanisms? How do they work together? What are the surprising consequences or insights about the system you’re describing?

Best practices for doctrine

Doctrine exists in your organization, whether you’re aware of it or not. So first surface the various doctrinal beliefs that exist from various people and groups in your organization. Ask them how the system works, and what might be wrong with it, or useful to know.

Write it down in narrative form. Narratives require reflection, which creates positive feedback loops leading to greater clarity and faster improvement. As Jeff Bezos said, "[t]here is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking." Bullet points and decks might be much easier, but they don’t require the same level of thinking. And that thinking is where real knowledge and insights arise.

Normalize your doctrine across your organization. People and teams always have different viewpoints and beliefs, but the more your doctrine is shared, the more powerful it is. Identifying areas of disagreement is also a great way to dig into how the system really works, and can lead to fantastic insight generation. 

Share your doctrine internally, and put it in front of your team constantly. This reinforces shared insights and perspective, and simplifies many decisions. It also reinforces your culture (which is tied to doctrine), and makes it easier to onboard new team members and integrate partners.

Constantly update your doctrine. Adaptability is key in the modern economy, and static doctrine can be very dangerous. For one thing, your doctrine is probably at least partly incorrect, and definitely incomplete. And changing market dynamics can quickly change how the system works, and thus what your doctrine should be. So encourage your team to challenge your doctrinal beliefs, and update them as new information and logic surfaces. 

Strategy

How you make your vision real

A powerful vision is ambitious enough that it begs the question, how? Strategy is the answer to that question. Effective strategy is logical, clear, and differentiated, and effectively explains how you are actually going to make your vision real.

Logical and plausible

Great strategy explains how you’re going to achieve your vision in a series of grand steps that each seem plausible. Taken together, these steps should make your otherwise incredible vision seem achievable. There is a logical flow to an effective strategy that suggests that each step flows from the prior, and is rooted in your doctrinal understanding of the system you’re disrupting.

Clear and focused

Great strategies are also clear and focused, establishing for your team what you are—and are not—doing. Who is your customer, and what problem are you solving for them? How are you solving it? 

As mentioned before, focus is mostly about choosing what not to do. Good strategy makes that clear. What customers are you not going after? What problems are you not trying to solve? Your strategy should be simple to understand, and serve as a testable theory for decision making: does this conform to our strategy? Is this the best use of our resources given our strategy?

Differentiated

Effective strategy incorporates your organization's strengths and weaknesses, your culture, and your doctrine. The result should be the roots of sustainable competitive advantage. What is durably special about your organization? What makes your organization the best bet to make this vision come true? 

Doctrine should be true for everyone. Strategy should be fitted to your organization. 

Evolving your strategy

Strategy is a high-level approach to achieving your vision. It should be clear enough to inspire action and direction without getting too bogged down into the details. The details—particularly for startups—will be mostly wrong, and strategy shouldn’t change too frequently. Achieving your vision is already going to feel like a carnival ride, and switching around your strategy too often is an easy way to give your team whiplash.

At the same time, your strategy—even as it evolves—should remain consistent with your vision. And as you face new facts, challenges, and opportunities, your strategy is likely to change over time. In the Lean Startup methodology, changes to your strategy might be referred to as a “pivot.” But if you’re changing your vision, you’re probably making more than a pivot, whether you like to admit it or not.

I care so much about being right that I change my mind.
— Joe Dwyer

There’s infinitely more to be written about strategy, but this should be enough for our purposes today.

Plans

How you execute strategy

So you have a strategy to achieve your vision, and a working view of how things work. How are you going to actually execute on your strategy?

Plans are in effect a collection of actions and goals designed and organized to effect change to achieve your organizational strategy. They are fundamentally guided by your vision, defined by your strategy, and informed by your doctrine.

Thus, when conceiving or evaluating your plans, you should ask the questions:

• Does this plan align with my vision? If I share it with anyone who has a similar vision, would they be likely to be supportive of it? If they might reject it, why?
• Will this plan further our strategic goals? If the connection is tenuous, you might reconsider enacting the plan in favor of something more likely to further your strategy.
• Does this plan conform to our doctrinal beliefs? If not, is it because the plan doesn’t make sense or because we need to reassess our doctrine?

Best practices for plans:

• Be explicit: put them in writing
• Explicitly connect them to your vision and strategy
• Indicate which doctrinal beliefs underpin your plan
• If you can’t identify any, you might want to consider whether you have some implicit beliefs that should be put to paper
• Describe what success and failure looks like (again in writing)
• Consider what you’re trying to learn during the course of executing your plan for potential inclusion in your body of doctrine

Tactics

Specific steps to execute plans

Great, so you have plans lined out. What are the activities required to translate your plans into action?

Tactics exist in both an abstract and a concrete sense. Abstractly, tactics are a set of tools you can re-use in the context of plans. Concretely, tactics are the implementation of steps or activities in the context of a plan.

Tactics end up playing an important role in the establishment of doctrine. As your team explores what works, you’re likely to end up with a set of preferred tactics. Those preferences are in effect part of your doctrine, whether you realize it or not. That’s why we advocate written plans, which makes it easier to see what sorts of tactics seem to work for your team. Once you recognize what works, it’s probably worth putting it in writing.

A risk, however, is that plans and tactics can become prescriptive instead of descriptive. By that we mean that just because you find something that works doesn’t mean it will always be the right choice. Saying, “that’s how we do it” is fine, as long as you add, “but we’re willing to try something different to see if it works better.”

Putting all of this to use

Together, these elements form a hierarchy that connects everyday activities to an inspiring vision:

• Vision: High level desired end state
• Strategy: How you make your vision real
• Doctrine: Shared beliefs and understanding
• Plans: How to execute strategy
• Tactics: Specific steps to execute plans

Craft a narrative

In the end, all of this is about crafting a narrative. Tell a story about a better world. A picture is worth a thousand words, but a story is priceless. Stories humanize ideas, making them far more accessible and persuasive. So leverage human storytelling when crafting your vision and strategy. What is the hero’s journey you’re undertaking, and what is the path to get there? 

Bring your organization (the hero) to life by identifying the values that drive it. What are you fighting for? Why do you believe your vision is so important? What are the values that attach to it unavoidably? These should resonate powerfully with your target audience (the people who share your vision). 

Make your decisions based on your vision and values. The stories you tell about your organization should reinforce this. Bake it into every aspect of running your company. When your stakeholders understand (and agree with) what drives you, they can trust you. And when you do it right, it means you can trust your team, too. Can you trust a plane maker that prioritizes money over safety?

Call out your enemies. Who stands opposed to your vision? Who is impeding it through inaction? Who stands to lose when you achieve it? Who are you terrifying? Every vision has an enemy, even if it’s simply the status quo. Google’s vision is to organize the world’s information.¹³ How can that be terrifying? How about the millions of companies that benefited from information asymmetry and friction? Many, many companies were threatened by—and many succumbed to—Google’s vision. 

I also love Nancy Duarte's sawtooth pattern for persuasion. She exhorts us to emphasize the difference between "what is" and "what could be" over and over again to engage and energize our audience (customers, team, and partners). If you craft the right vision and the right story, you'll be able to wield immense power to achieve your goals

Conclusion

The most successful organizations have powerful visions with credible strategies underpinned by clear doctrine. It’s increasingly hard to survive in the modern economy without that clarity and purpose. The Vision Framework is designed to assist organizations intentionally establish and grow an effective organizational identity.

1.  These often manifest as mere value statements or laundry lists of cultural inspirations
2. I'm working on an article focused on motivation the best talent. More coming soon.
3. A mission resembles a vision, but it’s subtly different: mission is the drive to effectuate your vision
4. I'm working on an article describing organizational culture and how it works. More coming soon.
5. I'm working on an article describing the importance of organizational trust and how to build it. More coming soon.
6. Greed to me refers to a selfish pursuit of money without consideration for others
7. I'm working on an article focused on the destructive force greed can be on organizational culture. More coming soon.
8. Pink, Dan, "The puzzle of motivation", TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009
9. This is not to say you shouldn’t pay talent well, but rather that certain types of performance incentives often backfire
10. Haupt, Jennifer, “Lessons of Boeing’s Cultural Decline–and How It Can Recover”, From Day One, 1 May 2022
11. I'm working on an article describing why narratives work much better for complex systems. More coming soon.
12. Shechner, Sam, “The 9-Month-Old AI Startup Challenging Silicon Valley’s Giants”, WSJ, 26 Feb. 2024
13. At least it was at one point. Now it looks like it’s more about domination of online advertising.