A vision is measurable as soon as it is split into four layers that each become more concrete: vision, vision state, target and target state. Only at the level of the target state do the numbers, timeframes and dimensions emerge that you can actually steer and test against.
The problem usually does not lie in the vision itself, but in the leap that management teams make from "what we stand for" to "what we are doing this year". That leap is too big to make in one step. Four layers make the distance bridgeable.
A sentence like "becoming market leader in customer focus" is a direction, not a goal. It contains no time horizon, no dimension on which you score, no level that you reach or fail to reach. That is not a flaw in the wording: a vision is abstract by definition, that is its function. The problem arises when an organisation tries to translate this sentence directly into KPIs, without taking the intermediate step. At a service provider with around 150 employees, this led to five departments each giving a different interpretation to "customer focus" — and five different dashboards that had nothing to do with each other. Anyone who runs into this pattern more often will recognise it as described at our vision is too vague, how do I make it concrete.
Between vision and execution lie two intermediate steps. The vision state describes what the organisation looks like in the long term once the vision is reality — still qualitative, but already more specific than the vision itself. The target describes which part of that is pursued within a defined period. The target state makes that concrete: who does what, with what capacity, at what level, measured on which dimensions. At a manufacturing company with around 220 employees, the vision state turned out to be "an organisation that learns from customer signals itself". The target for the coming two years became "structurally linking complaint handling and product improvement". Only in the target state did it become clear that this required a fixed link between two departments that had previously reported separately.
A target state filled in by management alone usually lacks information that is already known on the work floor: where an objective is technically not feasible, where two objectives work against each other, where an assumption about capacity is incorrect. An ambition round in which multiple layers of the organisation provide input surfaces that information before the objectives are set, not after. At the manufacturing company mentioned above, this round revealed that the desired link between complaint handling and product improvement had already been attempted twice before and had failed because of a system that could not link the data. That information did not come from management, but from two employees who worked with it daily.
An objective that looks complete on paper may still not be steerable. The double check assesses every objective in the target state on eight dimensions — think of measurability, ownership, time horizon and dependency on other objectives — and then passes through five confidence gates that determine whether confidence in feasibility is high enough to steer by. An objective that passes the first check but gets stuck at a gate is not discarded but flagged: something is needed here — an assumption that must be tested, a dependency that must first be resolved — before the objective becomes steerable. This prevents departments from working on goals that undermine each other, a situation elaborated further at what do you do when departmental goals work against each other.
The four layers and the double check only work if management agrees among themselves on what each layer means. In practice, this picture often differs per management team member: one sees the vision state as a year ahead, another as five years ahead. That difference remains unnoticed until the target state is set and everyone had expected a different target. How to surface that difference earlier is described at how do I get my management team aligned. Anyone wanting to know how a target operating model relates to these four layers can find that explained at what is a target operating model in plain words.
To see whether your vision is already in a steerable form, or is still stuck at the level of intention, there is the free test "is your vision steerable": six questions about the four layers that show within a few minutes where the translation is still missing.
Once the target state has been established, the next question is inevitable: who needs to do this, and do those people already have time for it now? The capability back-translation places the roles and tasks required by the target state alongside what is actually being filled today. The difference in hours that emerges from this is elaborated in the workload scan at ftetoai.com.
Vertel wat u wilt bereiken, dan kijken we samen wat daarvoor moet staan.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.