Week 20 Day 7: Assignment: State Your Team's Mission -- Then Ask Three People to State It Back

Write down your team's current mission or strategic direction in one to two sentences. Do not look at any documents -- write from memory, because that is how you communicate it day to day. Then ask three people on your team to do the same thing independently. Compare the four versions. The degree of alignment tells you how effectively you have communicated the vision.

Here is the full protocol. Step one: write your version of the team's mission or strategic direction in one to two sentences. Write it from memory. Do not refine it. The raw version is more honest than the polished version because it reflects what you actually say, not what you wish you said. Step two: ask three team members -- ideally at different levels or functions -- to write the same thing independently. Give them the same instruction: 'In one to two sentences, write what you think our team's mission or top strategic priority is right now. Do not look at any documents. Write from memory.' Step three: collect the four versions and compare. Score alignment on three dimensions. Direction alignment: are all four versions pointing at the same outcome? Priority alignment: do the versions agree on what matters most? Motivation alignment: do the versions agree on why it matters? Step four: identify the gaps. If direction is misaligned, your 'what' communication has failed. If priority is misaligned, your 'which matters most' communication has failed. If motivation is misaligned, your 'why' communication has failed. Each gap has a different fix. Step five: share the results with the three participants and discuss what you learned. This conversation itself is a communication event that reinforces the vision. Add the results to your Leadership Operating Manual under 'Vision Communication Audit.' Plan to repeat this exercise quarterly. Over time, alignment should improve. If it does not, the problem is not repetition -- it is clarity. Go back to the two-sentence test from Week 18 and rewrite your Commander's Intent.

The comparison methodology is adapted from what organizational researchers call 'cognitive mapping' (Walsh, 1995) -- the technique of eliciting and comparing mental models across team members to identify alignment and divergence. Research by Marks, Zaccaro, and Mathieu (2000) on 'shared mental models' found that teams with higher mental model convergence outperformed teams with lower convergence by 22% on task execution, and that the primary driver of convergence was leader communication consistency. The three-dimension scoring (direction, priority, motivation) maps to what Shamir, House, and Arthur (1993) identify as the three components of effective vision communication: painting a picture of the future (direction), connecting the vision to collective identity (priority), and articulating the value basis for the vision (motivation). The instruction to write from memory rather than from documents follows the 'availability heuristic' principle (Tversky and Kahneman, 1973) -- what people can readily recall reflects what has been most effectively communicated, making recall-based measurement more valid than recognition-based measurement for assessing communication penetration. The quarterly repetition creates what Senge (1990) calls a 'learning discipline' -- a structured practice that becomes part of the organization's operating rhythm. The cross-reference back to Week 18 reinforces the course's design principle of building interconnected frameworks rather than standalone tools.