📝 ESSAY
Three wires, one filament. A vision lights only when every connection is made.
📍 IN BRIEF
A vision drives transformation through its connections, not its wording. Wire it into the measures that score it, the sponsor who repeats it, and the queue that prioritises by it, or it will drive nothing at all.
Most ServiceNow programmes have a vision statement, and most of those statements are interchangeable. Swap the company name and the sentence would survive the move to any other organisation in the sector without anyone noticing the difference. The platforms drift anyway, which tells you the sentence was never doing the work.
Interestingly, in ServiceNow’s own delivery method which most implementations follow, there are between 5,000 and 6,000 delivery tasks, and the business sponsor is accountable for exactly four of them, which is 0.1% of the total while the platform owner carries 31.3%. The executive who owns the vision holds almost no formal grip on delivery, so the vision is not a decoration for them, it is their primary instrument to set strategic direction for the platform. Most organisations then treat that one instrument as a communications exercise, and wonder why the transformation steers itself.
The vision is a decision instrument, not an announcement
Judge a vision by how many decisions it makes when its authors are not in the room.
A live platform generates thousands of decisions a year across intake, architecture, funding and sequencing, and the whole point of governance is to streamline those decisions so teams deliver the right work at the right time. Every board doing that work needs a reference point that sits above it, something the steering committee, the architects and the intake team can all consult and independently reach the same answer. That reference point is the vision, and when it cannot supply an answer, the decision reverts to whoever in the room carries the most seniority or makes the most noise. This is why crafting the vision is not a writing exercise. We an think of it as the three-wire test. A vision drives transformation only when it is wired to the measures that score it, the sponsor who repeats it, and the queue that prioritises by it, the rest of this essay walks each wire in turn.
Wire one: write a destination someone could check
If nobody can tell whether you have arrived, you have written a direction, not a destination.
The clearest illustration comes from outside our field. In 1961 Kennedy did not ask America to embrace the limitless potential of space. He committed the country to landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth before the decade was out, which is an outcome, a test and a deadline in a single sentence, and it let thousands of people check their own work against it for eight years. Early Microsoft ran on ‘a computer on every desk and in every home’, a destination you could literally count your way towards. A platform vision earns the same property when it names two or three business outcomes, attaches a measure to each, and states a horizon. That means starting from a baseline, because movement you cannot measure from a known starting point is movement you cannot demonstrate, and also picking measures the organisation can actually influence rather than ones that merely sound strategic. A vision that cannot register progress cannot hold a three-year transformation together, because somewhere in year two the funding conversation arrives and the vision has nothing to show.
Wire two: give it one voice that outranks the loudest request
A vision nobody senior says aloud is retired the first time it is tested.
Prosci's benchmarking research has ranked active and visible sponsorship as the top contributor to change success in every study they have run since 1998, and their research points to people resisting change most when nobody has explained why it is happening. Both findings converge on one job, and it belongs to the sponsor. The sponsor is the person who describes the destination in their own words, in funding rounds, in escalations and in the meetings where the platform team are not present, and that repetition is what turns a sentence into a ruling that other people can lean on. Remember the anomaly from the top, the one where the sponsor's formal footprint in delivery is four tasks out of just under 6,000. Repeating the vision, and arbitrating from it when two priorities collide, is not a courtesy they extend to the programme, it is the mechanism through which they steer it. A vision that lives only in a slide deck has no voice in the rooms where it is contested, and a contested vision without a voice loses to whoever turned up.
Wire three: connect it to the queue where demand arrives
The demand queue is where a vision either governs or gets overwritten.
Once a platform shows what it can do, requests arrive faster than any team can deliver them, and each prioritisation call steers the transformation a few degrees one way or the other. The queue, not the strategy deck, is where direction is actually set. The wiring here is concrete, because you can derive your intake and prioritisation criteria directly from the outcomes the vision names, so the first question any request faces is whether it moves a named outcome, and delegate the low-risk approvals so the board spend their time on the contested calls. When the intake criteria do not mention the outcomes the vision names, the vision and the queue are quietly running two different transformations, and the queue wins every time, because the queue ships and the vision does not.
The three-wire test. A vision drives transformation only when it is connected to the measures that score it, the sponsor who repeats it, and the queue that prioritises by it.
Where this doesn't apply
A platform younger than its first delivered outcome should not attempt the full wiring. In the first year of a single-department rollout you have no baseline worth measuring from, no queue worth governing and no evidence to write a destination with, so write plain objectives for the phase, deliver them, and draft the vision afterwards from what you learned. The three wires earn their cost at the point where demand outstrips capacity, which for most platforms arrives sooner than anyone plans for.
The bottom line
Stop redrafting the sentence, and spend the quarter on the wiring instead. Attach a measure and a baseline to each outcome the vision names, put the destination in your sponsor's mouth at the next funding decision, and rewrite your intake scoring so the first question a request faces is whether it moves a named outcome. Polishing the wording is the tactical move, and it is the one most teams reach for because it is pleasant and finishes in an afternoon. The structural move is the three wires, and it is the only version of this work that shows up in how the platform behaves.
A platform vision does not fail in the writing, it fails in the wiring. Connect it to your measures, your sponsor and your queue, or it is decoration.
P.S. One test this fortnight. Pull the last ten decisions your demand board made and count how many were argued from an outcome your vision names. That number, out of ten, is how much transformation your vision is currently driving.