Mission and Vision 151
resonates with the authentic best possibilities of a place to create educational
value, it has created a powerful source of motivation.
The envisioning process is also a way to locate the most important disparities
between what we want to become and our current situation. The limitations
may come in many forms, but strategically they have to do with the underlying
capacities of the organization. Most visions cannot be realized in the span of
a normal strategic plan, for they may require several decades, but they are able to
focus our attention on the structural issues and causal characteristics that are the
primary barriers to the fulfillment of our best possibilities (LeVan 2005). What
are the most important gaps that have to be closed? As we consider organizational
strengths and weaknesses, this deeper orientation will change the character of our
strategic self-assessment.
Whose Vision?
One of the perennial questions about a vision revealed in our earlier analysis
of leadership in higher education is whether it is created by leaders and imposed
on the organization, or whether the leader serves primarily as the storyteller
for the vision that the organization creates for itself. These two ends of the
spectrum are better understood as polarities that need each other to be com-
plete, rather than as opposites (Cope 1989; H. Gardner 1995; Ramsden 1998;
Sevier 2000).
Since leadership is actively reciprocal, vision is a relational concept. Without
opportunities for open exchange and dialogue, absent active and continuing collab-
oration to learn his or her constituents’ needs and aspirations, it seems impossible
to imagine how a leader’s vision could inspire an organization, especially a profes-
sional one like a college or university. The conclusion that as to leader and organi-
zation, a collegiate vision is always both/and, never either/or, seems inescapable.
Yet it is also clear that listening is an active process in which the leader is
contributing ideas, synthesizing information, integrating recommendations,
testing boundaries, and drawing on privileged knowledge and experience from
outside the campus. Finally, it falls to the designated leaders of organizations to
articulate a clear and compelling sense of direction. To communicate the story
and the vision is, then, always far more than neutral discourse that repeats an
inchoate set of wants and needs. It is a central act of leadership as both sense
making and sense giving.
Narratives of aspiration are not only integrated and changed in the telling;
they also have to be sustained and enacted by the leader’s commitment. Depend-
ing on circumstances, the articulation and implementation of a vision may rise
to the level of transforming leadership that involves systematic and pervasive
change or decisive moral leadership. The assertion of a bold vision could mean
that the president or other high officials have to take a stand in the name of the
defining values of the organization itself. At such times, the balance shifts to the