Sacrificing Sacred Strategies
Mission. Vision. Strategy. As someone who regularly helps individuals and organizations move forward with new initiatives, I often start by bringing them back to the “true north” of what they were called to do in the first place: Mission. This exercise often brings needed perspective and clarity around the heart of the initiative and helps ensure it doesn’t stray from their missional purpose to other “good”, but often distracting aims. One surprising result in this process of missional refinement is that most people use terms like mission, vision, and strategy interchangeably and often suppose them to be just different ways of describing roughly the same concept: Your purpose. Not only is this inaccurate, but I have witnessed this misnomer have deleterious effects on churches and non-profits alike. This article is an attempt to frame these concepts properly, with the hope that you can be effective in fulfilling your personal and/or organizational mission.
A brief definition.
Mission – Your purpose, aim, or objective. Your reason for existing. What you are trying to accomplish.
Vision – The better future that will be realized if you are wildly successful at your mission.
Strategy – The varied and evolving set of approaches for executing the mission, leading to achievement of the vision.
To help bring a little more clarity, lets look at a concrete example: A non-profit working to alleviate poverty in Africa.
Mission statements typically highlight or are a response to a problem that is trying to be solved. Often times this problem is not stated explicitly, but is implicit in the Mission Statement itself. Using our example, the mission statement might be something like: “We exist to eradicate poverty in Africa”. (A very lofty and laudable mission, I might add.) This is the organization’s purpose, their reason for existing. Additionally, there is an implicit problem statement within this mission, namely that “poverty is a significant problem in Africa that needs to be addressed”. This is the essence of Mission.
Moving on to Vision, one must simply ask the question: What would a future world look like if we were wildly successful at our mission? The answer to this question is pretty clear in our example. The Vision Statement for this organization might simply be: “An Africa without poverty.” This is the essence of Vision.
Finally, we will look at the most interesting of the three terms: Strategy. Returning again to our example, the strategies for this organization could be one or some complex combination of the following: economy stimulating micro-loans, foreign business investments, anti-corruption measures, advanced farming technology and practices, annual foreign aid, government welfare programs, etc. If we spent a few more minutes, I think we could come up with another dozen or more potential strategies, each with their own effectiveness and cost to implement. As you can see, strategies can be numerous, complex, and ever-evolving. This is the essence of Strategy.
Hopefully this has brought clarity to the idea that mission, vision, and strategy are terms that represent unique and important concepts for any organization or endeavor. If you have a new or existing organization or initiative, I encourage you to either develop or revisit your work on mission, vision, and strategy to see if you have all of your conceptual bases clearly covered.
Mission is Sacred, Strategy is Not!
For those that paid attention to the title of this article, you are probably wondering, much like Isaac was with Abraham, “Where is the sacrifice?” I can tell you definitively that the time has arrived! This idea of “Sacrificing Sacred Strategies” had its genesis in the many years or working with both corporations and faith-based organizations like churches and other non-profits. After many years of observation, I started to see a pattern arising that was causing all sorts of problems. The common thread in all of these instances was simply: Equating Mission with Strategy.
As we stated earlier, Mission is your purpose or why you exist and in this sense it can be considered “sacred”. For most organizations your Mission never changes nor should it. In reality, it is the one thing that lets you know your decisions are moving in the right direction, again your “True North”. What happens though, when you view Strategy the same way as Mission? Said another way, “What happens when you view the “How” you achieve the Mission with the same sacred sentiments as the very Mission or “Why” you exist?” The answer is quite simple: Your strategies also become sacred. At this point you might be wondering why that is such a problem, but let me remind you that strategies, unlike mission, NEED to be dynamic. The way you fulfill your mission should be ever ready to change and evolve, because the world around us is changing and evolving. If you never update your strategy, it is almost inevitable, given enough time, that it will become ineffective.
Do you smell that, the pleasant aroma wafting from an acceptable offering to the Lord? Almost every organization has ways of trying to fulfill their mission that have become old and tired. This does not mean that at one point they were not vibrant and effective, often quite the contrary. That said, these strategies need to be retired, ultimately for the sake of the “sacred”: Your Mission. Although it can be difficult and painful, it is may sincere prayer that you will be able to sacrifice of your sacred strategies that you might ultimately see you Vision come to pass. Remember too that these are often your sacred strategies, as they are not sacred to God, even though sometimes we might assume that they are.
In conclusion, I encourage you to take time to prune the strategies and programs in your church or organization. Please, for everyone’s sake, put an end to that dying program or activity, it is an act of true mercy. Additionally, I encourage you to develop a culture of regularly reviewing your strategies in light of their effectiveness and missional alignment, as culture and technology are changing more rapidly than at any time in human history. Finally, don’t forget that there is one core strategy that in essence will never change (no matter what I said earlier…) and that is God’s Strategy for His Mission of saving the world! Although there is a lot of room for creativity and sub-strategies within, we must never forget God’s Strategy of Redemption though the power and sacrifice of Jesus, made know to the world by His Church, as we become and make Spirit-empowered Disciples of Jesus across all nations, tribes, and tongues!