If a team is building a car, not everyone does the same thing. Some work on the drive train, others install the air conditioning and radio, and yet others add the upholstery. The overall intent of assembling the car has many parts. The vision has to be extensive enough to support everything the team needs to do. The thing to do is start at the top and work down. At each step, use your questioning skills when considering your answers. You want to encourage yourself to think in an open-ended way.

The Organization's Vision

The team is trying to support what the organization wants to do, which is why you need to start at the top with where the organization is going. That means first looking at the organization's principles. Any vision will have to begin with that as the foundation or your efforts will be wasted.

Identify the principle or principles with which your group's efforts should most closely align. This will help you refine what your group should be doing because it lets you focus your efforts to best advance the interests of the organization. This step sets the destination on the map when you are taking a trip. You can further extend this by considering the structure of the organization. It may be that your group is contained within another, which is part of yet a third, and so on.

Use Active Imagination

When you have a strong sense of what the organization stands for and what it is trying to accomplish at every level, you have the groundwork to understand how your group fits in to the whole. The group's objective is to support the organization's principles and intents.

One of the most important responsibilities of a leader is to see practical ways that he and the team can further the principles and intents. At times, it will be clear what your team should be doing. For example, if you are in charge of the marketing department at a corporation preparing to release a new product, you know you need to develop an appropriate campaign. If a community group is planning an outdoor cookout, you need to make arrangements for food, grills, volunteer cooks, and so on.

But there will be many times when what you ought to do isn't so obvious. These situations require active imagination. We all know how to daydream. What you want to do is have a directed daydream and consider what supportive things your group might do. Don't censor what comes to mind; note all your ideas for later consideration. Those ideas will spark goals that bring you closer to supporting your organization's principles.

Examine the Specific Goal

Now it's time to take apart the group's goal. Understand its parts, intents, requirements, expectations, assumptions — in short, anything and everything that explains where the group is supposed to go, how it can get there, what the barriers might be, and what resources and techniques you have for overcoming those barriers.

Goal Supports Principles

You've built a principle ladder from your group upward to the top of the organization and have examined your group goal. At every stage, you should see the ways in which your planned actions fit in with some aspect of that goal. If there is a divergence at any point, your group's efforts will fail because they won't connect all the way back to the top.

At each stage, you should also be able to directly relate your group's goal to a bigger goal of the organization. Your efforts are to reinforce, as completely as possibly, what the organization is trying to achieve and to create harmony between your group's efforts and those of the rest of the organization. That makes synergy on a grand scale possible.

Break the Goal Down

A group goal can still be too general. Often one will split into multiple parts handled by different people. Each of those parts needs an explicitly understood connection to the group goal's aims and to all the principles up the line. Once that is accomplished, you've established criteria by which group members can examine their efforts and determine whether the group's goals remain on track.