Confusion of Terms

Suppose a person tells you that she is taking a new job in a distant city, and she plans to move there. She immediately realizes that she must find a place to live. So she says, “I have a problem. I have to find a place to live.”

You ask her what her mission is. “To find a place to live,” she says.

And how about her vision? “To have a place to live,” she answers, a little confused.

No wonder she is confused. All three statements sound alike! She needs to understand the difference between them if she is to solve this problem.

Remember, a problem is a gap. Suppose we were to ask her to tell us where she wants to be when her problem is solved. She would say, “I would have a place to live in the new city.”

“And where are you now?” you ask.

“I have no place to live,” she says.

Then the gap is between having a place and not having one. This can be stated simply as “I have no place to live.” And, indeed, this is the problem she is trying to solve.

But—would just any place be okay? Of course not. She doesn’t want to live under a bridge, although homeless people sometimes do. So if you ask her, “What kind of place are you looking for?” she can tell you.

“It needs to have three bedrooms, the house must be of a certain size, and I prefer a certain style,” she says. This is her vision for the kind of place she wants to live in. That vision literally paints a picture in her mind, and, when she finds a place that comes close to that picture, she will have “arrived” at her destination. This is the function of vision—it defines “done.”

Her mission, then, is to find a place that conforms to her vision. Another way to say this is that the mission of a project is always to achieve the vision. In doing so, it solves the stated problem. So you may want to diagram it as shown in Figure 4-1. Note that the vision has been spelled out as a list of things she must have, along with some that she wants to have and a few that would be nice to have if she could get them.