Strategy To Achieve Vision

Once the vision and mission statements were finalised, we wasted no time to brainstorm on how to plug the gaps between the vision and the current reality. This was done again in early 2000 by way of a task force of the key staff members whose views had proven to be useful in the visioning exercise. The work of the task force would pave the way for the 2000 Work Plan Seminar. At this point, we started to run into some methodological difficulties. The literature on learning organisation typified (but not limited to) by Peter Senge’s book “The Fifth Discipline”, which we had been using to guide us in our visioning hitherto, was not specific enough to shed light on how we should proceed from where we were. The problem of steering the organisation in a new direction was enormous and the literature did not give us sufficient guidance on how to break down the problem. One day, while doing some mental callisthenic to try and find a solution, it dawned upon me that we could map the six vision markers against the functional areas identified in the mission statement. Each box of the two-dimensional matrix would be a component of the larger problem but it would become more manageable to grasp intellectually. I suggested this newly invented method to the task force. The task force was then broken down into groups to consider each box of the matrix in turn. A sub-set of the results is given in Annex A as an illustration.