Is It Time to Revisit Your Vision, Mission, and Values?
By Janice Molloy
For the past several months, we at Pegasus have been engaged in revisiting our organizational vision, mission, and core values. While we're all up to our eyeballs in tasks, making it challenging to carve out time for reflection, we agreed that going through this process now, together, would actually improve our effectiveness over the long run. By becoming clearer as a group about why we do what we do, what needs Pegasus could serve in the world, and how we're going to get there as a team, we will move forward with a stronger sense of direction and alignment.
We've gotten off to a good start--with a little help from our friends. A few weeks ago, systems change facilitator Tuesday Ryan-Hart led us through a day of visioning (capped off by dinner at our local Spanish restaurant, where we continued the conversation over many plates of tapas and some tasty sangria).
In addition to sparking lots of meaty conversation, both with the group as a whole and in smaller subsets, Tuesday engaged us in a physical modeling activity. In two teams, we used items from our offices--including a stuffed Kermit the frog, a plastic Hoberman 
sphere, a bottle of wine, a small globe, various plants, and assorted electronics--to create representations of Pegasus when it's working at its highest future potential. The two models, while very different visually, ended up with much overlap in themes. Some important "ahas" emerged from each that we're weaving into our vision statement.
One unexpected outcome of the session with Tuesday is that we realized our core values, as written, hold little meaning for those currently with the company. It's been stimulating to evaluate and refresh them, to bring them to life for today's workforce and today's challenges. We also continue to noodle with how we express our company's vision and mission. With changing technologies and major industry shifts for our core businesses, we want to craft something that reflects both immediate and timeless relevance, and that resonates with each member of our team and our other stakeholders.
As part of this process, we'll each articulate our personal purpose statements to feed into the organizational mission. Daniel Pink has an exercise in Drive for creating one sentence that summarizes your life's purpose; for example, "He raised four kids who became happy and healthy adults." Or "She invented a device that made people's lives easier." We're also using as inspiration the "six-word memoir" meme initiated by the online storytelling magazine SMITH.
At the end of the journey, we'll share our outcomes and reflections. In the meantime, here's a video that our president Mark Alpert showed to inspire our efforts. I hope it'll spark new ideas for you, too.
Janice Molloy is content director of Pegasus Communications, managing editor of The Systems Thinker newsletter, and program director of the annual Systems Thinking in Action conference