I have always loved the Cheshire Cat’s quote from Alice in Wonderland, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will do.” And I find that too many people are really not clear about where they’re going.
If you set out on a cross-country drive but don’t know where your destination is, you’ve created an immediate disadvantage. If your destination is West, but you begin driving Northeast, you’re not likely to get there anytime soon, if at all. If you ask a passenger to help you navigate, but you haven’t told them or your GPS where your destination is, they are useless.
Yet, every day business owners and leaders set out to accomplish tasks, goals, visions, strategies, and missions without any clarity on what “done” looks like and how it gets achieved in the way they want.
People cannot meet expectations they don’t know exist. If no one has clarified the vision, communicated it clearly where others can see, absorb, and digest it, and continuously reiterated it at every possible fork in the road, that vision is very likely to go unachieved.
The alternative is to spend the time necessary to define the desired outcome with crystal clarity. From there, articulate to everyone on the team multiple times and in multiple ways to give them a chance to really ingrain it. After that, define the acceptable and unacceptable ways to go about working on it. Define your actions, and help others define their next actions that move the vision closer to reality. Define the checkpoints, the stops for gasoline, the rest stops, the meal stops, and the other criteria for ensuring you’re on track and how to course correct if you’re not.
Only then can you get behind the wheel with some confidence that the destination can be reached.
If you have the time and freedom, by all means, take any road you want to the destination. But if the demands are high and the timelines tight, as is the case in our busy, demanding world today, you better know exactly where you’re going and exactly how best to get there so your competition is not there and already encamped long before you arrive.
The price of not knowing where you’re going is never getting there. For most of us, that’s a really high price to pay.
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