where are we going?
what do i need to do?
The importance of a vision has come into sharp relief for me this week. I’m still quite new in my current organisation and have been tasked to create a large body of work. My manager has been on a training course for most of the week. The information available about the work I’m trying to create is preliminary and shifting multiple times daily. As a result, I’ve felt lost and found it difficult to do anything more than collate a collection of ideas.
Thankfully, this was a temporary state. My manager returned from her training and gave me direction so I could consolidate these ideas into something more tangible. The new information I’ve been given is enough for me to understand my work's requirements. I now understand the purpose and expected outcomes.
A few days of discomfort is one thing, but I have met plenty of teams working blind indefinitely. Development teams working on products that have no vision other than to be profitable. Attempting to solve user and customer problems when the only motivation is to make the organisation money means that the solutions generated lack creativity and may not even fulfil the needs and desires of those who own the problem.
Perhaps this lack of vision is the same reason many organisations fail to write user stories as problem statements to be solved but instead as features to be built. To give a dictated instruction means that the developer doesn’t need to have to be concerned about the broader context in order to be able to build the product.
I remember that, as a developer, I never had a vision or mission for the work we were delivering. Sometimes I felt I had a creative outlet because I was given a problem to solve. However, most of the time, I was told about the features that needed to be built and given a design to implement. The latter didn’t give me a creative outlet and left me frustrated and feeling underutilised. I’ve seen the same in so many of the development teams I’ve worked with as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach.
These days, as a coach and leader, I’m mostly left alone to create a direction for other people. This works well enough when I understand the direction the organisation wants to take, but it continues to be the above problem. Every leader at every level needs to understand the vision from above and communicate it to those below. The first requirement is to know that this is the case, and the second is to be able to do so.