Writing a mission statement? Here’s what you can learn from Labour
The BBC has reported that the UK Labour party has rephrased its missions for government.
Political correspondent Iain Watson says the new wording is designed to make the party more appealing to voters at the next general election.
Apparently, the original missions were falling flat on the doorstep.
Let’s take a look at what’s changed:
Improve the NHS has become Getting the NHS Back on its Feet
Reforming the Justice System has become Taking Back Our Streets
Raising Education Standards has become Breaking Down the Barriers to Opportunity
It remains to be seen whether these changes will have the desired effect.
But comparing these before-and-after versions side by side is illuminating if you’re thinking about vision, mission or purpose.
Watson says the missions have been “recast in more active terms”. But that’s not quite what’s going on here.
Improving, reforming and raising things don’t imply less activity than getting them, taking them and breaking them down.
It’s that they speak more immediately and directly to the voter.
Reforming the justice system speaks to the legal elite. Taking Back Our Streets aims to speak to “Stevenage Woman” — the swing voter Labour is apparently targeting.
Sinister as Taking Back Our Streets may sound, the new language illustrates a piece of advice we’ve made before: paint a picture.
Notice just how much more concrete and visual the new mission statements are.
Feet. Streets. Barriers. Try not picturing each of those in your mind.
Now, compare those with the Justice System and Education Standards.
Hard to picture, right? Because systems and standards are abstractions. And abstractions, by their nature, are hard to visualise.
Try this yourself
An exercise we sometimes do in training sessions is to get participants to draw a pizza.
Everyone very quickly and easily draws roughly the same thing: a circle, divided into eight or so, perhaps with some blobs for toppings.
(This drawing exercise, by the way, is inspired by the must-see video we featured in How to stop good mission statements from going bad).
Then, we ask people to draw integrity. At this point, many participants literally draw a blank.
Those who do attempt the task do so by drawing a symbol of integrity, such as a wall or a pillar. In other words, they have to find a concrete, visual representation of the abstraction.
Interestingly, as well, rarely are any two drawings the same. Unlike a pizza, integrity means different things to different people.
Despite its ubiquity as a corporate value, integrity doesn’t offer people the same unifying, shared experience as a pizza.
And aren’t great missions all about unifying people around a vision?
So if you’re drafting your mission statement, ask people to draw it. If they can’t, try to make the language more visual.
And if you need any help with that, get in touch.
Read the original BBC article, Labour Party 'campaign bible' gives hints of general election strategy
