People mean different things by the same words because a word like 'growth' or 'customer-focused' has no layer: one person hears a vision in it, another reads a concrete target into it. Without distinguishing between those layers, everyone talks past each other while everyone thinks they are right.
When a management team of a company with 150 employees uses the word 'international', it sounds like a single agreement. In reality it contains a stack of four different kinds of statements. There is the vision: why the organization looks across national borders at all. There is the vision state: the image of what the organization looks like in five years if this has succeeded. There is the target: the concrete, measurable point that is being worked toward this year or next year. And there is the target state: the operational situation that goes with it, with the roles, systems and ways of working that make that possible. Whoever says 'international' without saying which layer they mean, leaves it up to the rest of the table to fill in which layer they hear.
At a manufacturing company of around 200 employees, management used the word 'agility' in almost every meeting. The COO meant it as a vision: the organization must be able to move with the market. The head of operations heard a target: being able to switch faster between production lines, this quarter already. The HR manager heard a target state: different job profiles, different meeting structures. All three were right about what agility meant to them. No one was wrong. The problem was that no one had named which layer the conversation was taking place in, so that decisions that were logical in one layer were experienced in another layer as half-hearted or as too rushed.
As long as people only talk about it, the difference remains invisible. It becomes noticeable at the moment a decision has to be made: an investment, a reorganization, a choice between two clients. It then turns out that one manager makes a decision from the vision state — what fits the image five years out — and the other from the target — what has to be achieved this year. Both decisions can be correct within their own layer and yet turn out to be opposites. This is also the moment when it is wise to lay down what you record about decision rights during a change, so that it is clear who may fill in which layer and who may correct a statement in another layer.
The reflex is to explain the word better: a presentation, an internal memo, an extra clarification at the town hall. That only shifts the problem to the next sentence, because the explanation again uses new words that can themselves also be read in four layers. What does work is not making the word better but naming the layer: is this a vision statement, an image of the vision state, a target, or a description of the target state. Asking those four questions separately forces a group to say out loud which layer they are in, instead of assuming that the other person hears the same layer.
With ambitions that do not fit into one year, an extra layer of confusion arises: the word stays the same while the time horizon shifts. Someone who used the word in year one for a target, uses it in year three for the target state that comes after it, without mentioning that shift. That is why it is useful to look at how you phase an ambition that is too big for one year, so that the word gets a fixed layer and a fixed meaning per phase instead of shifting again every year.
A quick way to see whether this is playing out in one's own organization is the free test 'is your vision steerable': six questions about the four layers, which show in a few minutes where vision, vision state, target and target state overlap in one's own use of language. That provides an initial picture, not a judgment.
The follow-up to that is the step where the chosen target state is translated back into what that concretely requires: which roles, which tasks, which capacity are needed to actually put that layer in place. That translation back is the bridge between the word on paper and the shop floor, and the difference between what is available today in hours and roles and what the target state requires is worked out in the work scan on 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.