Hey Changemakers,
Last month, we talked about mission and values and how to close the gap between the big ideas on your wall and the decisions your org makes daily. A clear mission and solid, honest values are the foundation for all of the strategies in the Strategy Stack.
This month, we’re going one level higher, to vision—in the form of what Jim Collins calls a Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal, or a “BHAG.” A BHAG is the sharp, target-shaped half of your vision; the other half is a vivid picture of what hitting that target actually looks and feels like. We’ll get to both.
Navigating by Your North Star to Your Distant Shore
Your mission and values are your North Star: fixed, with a Collins-style time horizon of a century. These are things you should almost never change.
Your vision, the BHAG and the vivid picture that goes with it, is your distant shore. It’s where you’re sailing to.
I know that “mission, vision, values” is a familiar melody, but I gotta say, it’s a classic for a reason. In 30 years of this work, I’ve seen that organizations with a compelling picture of where they’re aiming can make better decisions and sustain their momentum through hard seasons.
Escaping the Doom Loop of Suckitude
Big goals generate velocity. When boards treat “minimizing risk” as the paramount goal, they rack up a much bigger risk of underperformance and irrelevance, drifting without a named destination to be moving toward.
Without a compelling envisioned future, it’s easy for organizations to default to crisis mode. Every decision becomes about surviving this week, this quarter. That’s what I call the doom loop of suckitude: grinding down at the bottom instead of building momentum with that longer time horizon in mind.
A named 10-year goal works as a decision filter. “Does this get us closer to the goal?” is a far better question than “What’s urgent right now?” It’s all too easy to be yanked around by the loudest short-term problem of the week. A big-picture goal can pull you out of that loop.
What a Good BHAG Looks Like
A strong BHAG has a few things going for it:
- It’s specific enough that a newcomer could read it and understand what you’re aiming for.
- It uses propulsive language, a verb that pushes or acts rather than just describes.
- It’s time-bound. I like a 10-year horizon—close enough to feel real, but lays down enough runway to matter.
- It comes out of genuine collective engagement, not management handing down a poster.
- It isn’t just about being bigger. Collins is explicit that greatness in the social sector has three tests: superior results, distinctive impact, lasting endurance. (Budget size isn’t on the list.)
Think back to the construction trailer: The electricians and the landscapers have different agendas and to-do lists, but they’re reviewing the same blueprint. A BHAG is your blueprint, one that every team can tackle according to their own expertise.
A Word on Time-Travel
Setting the goal is only half the job. The other half is making it feel real enough to sail toward.
Goal setting requires you to step outside the daily pressure and pay a visit to the future. Your vision should be so vivid that it feels like a memory. Think: sensory rich, descriptive, compelling.
Here are two exercises I like:
Backcasting. Instead of starting from today and forecasting forward, the team starts at the envisioned future state, ten years out, fully achieved, and works backward, naming what had to be true the year before that, and the year before that, all the way back to now. It’s a strategic foresight technique built for breakthrough thinking rather than incremental planning, and it forces teams to name the actual pathway, not just the destination.
The Future Press Release. Teams write the press release announcing that the goal has been hit: Add your headline, pull quotes from a beneficiary or funder, the works! It’s the exercise Amazon popularized internally for product launches. Facilitators adapted it for org-level visioning because writing in an “announcement” voice forces the same specificity your BHAG criteria demands (a reader who’s never heard of you should understand exactly what happened).
Here’s the uncanny part: Once a team names where it’s going with enough specificity and conviction, the destination has a way of pulling the organization toward it like a magnet. A well-crafted BHAG, paired with a vivid enough picture of what reaching it looks like, closes the distance to that far-off shore.
This work isn’t easy, and a skilled facilitator can help you get into ten-year-view mode and hold space for the kind of dreaming that gets squeezed out by normal organizational life.
If you’re curious about what that process can look like, let’s chat!
Waving at you from the future,
Kimberley
