A Best Practice for Holding Vision Together
Who Holds the Vision?
A Best Practice for Holding Vision Together
Vision, in the simplest sense, is an honest answer to one question: what are we actually trying to make possible, together? It is not the mission statement on the website. Not the mandate written into a strategic plan. It is the real, current, shared picture of what success looks like.
Many organizations assume they have one. Few actually know what it is. .
More often than not, this isn't about bad intent; it's about bias. Board members and staff naturally gravitate toward the work they enjoy most, or the way things have always been done. Some people are genuinely open to change, others less so, and that's not a character flaw; it's human nature, especially for volunteers whose strengths or motivation lie elsewhere. Priorities also get shaped by relationships, a friendship, a family connection, a local business someone cares about. None of this is a judgment on anyone involved. It's simply what happens when good people are doing their best inside a system nobody's holding together.
When the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, a shared vision becomes hard to follow, and focus splits across competing priorities. I see it in cultural sites welcoming a wave of new visitors, in national projects chasing their next funding grant, in small towns facing major development while trying to merge with a bigger region. The pattern is always the same. Everyone is working hard. Almost nobody is working from the same picture.
Why This Matters
A vision gap rarely shows up as a crisis on day one. It shows up slowly, as a quiet drift, and by the time anyone names it, momentum has already leaked out of the system. The real cost isn't failure. It's years of hard work producing far less than it should have.
What Happens When Vision Isn't Held
When nobody holds the whole picture, a few things reliably happen. Capacity gets misallocated, because nobody agrees on what matters most. Decisions get made inconsistently, because there's no shared reference point to weigh them against. Accountability gets fuzzy, because it's hard to hold someone to a target nobody agreed on in the first place. And trust erodes, quietly, as people notice the organization saying one thing and doing another, even when nobody intended the gap. None of this is dramatic on its own. That's what makes it dangerous. It adds up.
The Best Practice: Hold Five Things Together
That's usually why I get called in, not because anyone did anything wrong, but because someone needs to see the whole picture and help everyone move toward it. My Strategic Systems Alignment™ (SSA) framework is built on five key themes:
Shared Vision, Strategic Priorities, Organizational Capacity, Day-to-Day Decisions, and Accountability
And one simple practice: hold these five things together, on purpose, rather than letting them drift into separate conversations. When any one of these five pulls away from the others, everything downstream starts to feel harder than it should. When all five themes are held together, on purpose, the organization stops moving in parallel and starts moving as one system, even through growth, turnover, and real complexity.
This matters most in places facing real growth and real complexity: rural communities anticipating new development, partner organizations trying to coordinate a shared destination, mission-driven teams stretched across funders, members, and community expectations. These are exactly the situations where a plan without a shared vision underneath it turns into fluff. It reads well. It changes nothing.
Who's holding the vision in your organization right now? If the honest answer is nobody, or “this is the way we've always done it,” that's the real starting point, and that’s the best practice for naming it - start building from there.
