Corporate visioning: a survey of UK practice
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Corporate visioning: a survey of UK practice F O'Brien* and M Meadows Warwick Business School A survey of strategic planning managers was considered to identify the current practice of developing corporate visions, with a particular focus on how the vision was developed. The paper begins with a brief review of the literature concerning organisational visions and their development. The issues addressed by the survey and the research methodology are then described, and the results of the research presented. The paper ends with a discussion of the ®ndings of the survey, and suggests ways of progressing research in this area. Keywords: strategic planning; visioning; survey
Introduction The importance of a clear corporate vision and strategy for organisations faced with conditions of increasing change and uncertainty has been demonstrated by empirical research.1 The archetypal portrayal of practice is that vision development, objective setting and strategy formulation are the remit of the Board. Lower management and the `workers' are in addition typically portrayed as remote from this process and sceptical of the meaning of its output to their own responsibilities. Prescriptive methodologies and guidelines for vision development can be found in the literature on corporate visioning. Interestingly, some of these works prescribe participative methodologies for vision development that appear to contrast with the traditional image of vision development. But it is a statement of the obvious to say that what people are encouraged to do is often very different from what they actually do. Little empirical, descriptive, research exists documenting the processes followed and the tools used by organisations who develop visions. The research reported in this paper presents a window on the current practice of visioning from a number of angles. Firstly, it seeks to explore whether the archetypal characteristics of the realm of vision development are still current or whether organisations have adopted some of the more participative approaches described in the literature. Secondly, it seeks to address the gap in empirical research focusing on how organisations develop visions. This paper begins with a review of the literature on `vision' and visioning. An outline of the research process follows, and the issues explored are introduced. The results of the survey are then presented in the order of the issues *Correspondence: Ms F O'Brien, Warwick Business School, Coventry CV4 7AC, UK
explored. The paper ends with a discussion of the results, from which some conclusions will be drawn, along with suggestions for further research. Vision or mission When learning about visioning as a method to support strategic development for the ®rst time, students invariably ask what is the difference between a vision and a mission. To some students, there is a clear difference between the terms, while to others the words mean the same th
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