This post is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of Flock Not Clock.
In a fictitious example, let’s say our organization’s vision is to “Eradicate Fleas Worldwide.” To do this, our mission is to Evangelize, Educate, and Empower people to eradicate fleas. As part of the education element of our mission, we begin our efforts by offering training to disseminate these fundamental ideas to relevant audiences. The question we now face is, “What are the systems we have in place (or need to develop) to accomplish this task?” These individual systems, as seen in Figure 4.3, can begin with individual employees. In this image we see how an employee’s daily tasks (like creating a brochure) can lead to increased capacity systems (by way of an existing training development resource) to do one part of the mission (educate people) to bring about the vision (to eradicate fleas worldwide).
This simple example shows how the things that employees do everyday should exist on a path through the organization’s VMCL (blue line). The red lines indicates the global-level path that is created when there is throughput at the local-level from capacity to mission to vision. It also shows that something as mundane as designing and printing a brochure can be a capacity-building act (as long as it is aligned with the mission!) By planning ahead to build these mission-critical systems you can ensure that the moment when a customer needs a brochure, your salesperson will have one to hand them. That’s an example (albeit a simple one) of organizational capacity playing out during a mission moment.