Vision, Mission, Purpose: What's The Difference?

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Purpose statements, mission statements, vision statements.

It can get really cluttered really fast. It seems like every organization has a different offering when it comes to declaring their purpose. Some just have a mission statement. Some have a mission and vision, some have a purpose. Some use some other term to describe a little bit of prose that they put on a plaque in the office or in the front of a 10-K report.

And if you go from organization to organization, you can get really confused because the definitions change.

There's a lot of clutter out there and we're gonna cut through that clutter today.

Today, we're gonna talk about about the difference between purpose, mission and vision. How they interrelate to each other. How they affect each other. Whether or not you even need all three or whether or not you can cut through that clutter with one simple statement that accomplishes all three.

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"Calling" by Ukiyoau.   / calling  

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Purpose statements, mission statements, vision statements.

It can get really cluttered really fast. It seems like every organization has a different offering when it comes to declaring their purpose. Some just have a mission statement. Some have a mission and vision, some have a purpose. Some use some other term to describe a little bit of prose that they put on a plaque in the office or in the front of a 10-K report.

And if you go from organization to organization, you can get really confused because the definitions change.

There's a lot of clutter out there and we're gonna cut through that clutter today.

Today, we're gonna talk about about the difference between purpose, mission and vision. How they interrelate to each other. How they affect each other. Whether or not you even need all three or whether or not you can cut through that clutter with one simple statement that accomplishes all three.

So let's start with the big one. Let's start with vision. What is a vision? And a vision statement, is really a statement of what the future looks like. It's a statement of where you are headed. A vision statement describes what if you achieve your mission if you serve your purpose, and we'll get to those in a little bit. What that is going to look like.

And the thing about vision is that by nature it is aspirational. It can be five years out, 10 years out, 20 years out, 100 years out, but it's about what you aspire to make the world look like.

All leadership involves change to some extent and your vision is a picture of what the world looks like when you have finished that change.

Now by definition, vision can't stand alone, because vision is about what you want to change the world to look like. All leadership is about change. And so vision is what happens after you achieve that change. But there has to be what you're doing inside of that in order to make the vision a reality. That's where mission comes into play.

Your mission on the other hand answers the question, how?

How are we gonna make that vision a reality? What are we going to be about? What activities are we engaged in on a day to day basis? And also what are the long term objectives that will help us make that vision happen?

Now mission can be where you talk about how lives are changed. Mission can be how you talk about how objectives are won. Mission can even be products or service that you sell. A lot of great mission statements put a specific number. We're gonna change this many lives or whatever it is.

The point is that mission answers that question, how? How are we gonna make that vision into reality?

So if your vision is what the world's gonna look like, when you've achieved your mission. Your mission obviously sets inside of it. It is the how do the visions what, but we still haven't answered all of the questions that we need to answer in order to have an intrinsically motivating set: mission, vision, purpose.

But, there's one more element we have to talk about.

We have to talk about purpose.

Purpose goes inside all of these. Purpose is the why your organization began. Why it's on that journey. It answers why you choose to exist. What was the whole reason for starting this organization? Why's as can be answered with that sort of founding story some of the time, but other times you need a declarative statement of that and we would call that declarative statement, your purpose.

So now we can take all three together.

We have the vision, this is the what.
We have the mission, this is the how.
We have the purpose, this is the why.