Often referred to as a preferred future, a compelling vision is a short descriptive picture of what your organization is aiming for. Some books will tell you that you need to have a mission statement and a vision statement. Don’t believe it. While there can be a difference between the two (mission describes your reason for existence whilevision describes your future) and there is nothing wrong with having both of these statements, there are plenty of successful organizations that work off of one unifying description of why they exist and where they are going.

There are estimated to be about 1.5 million non-profit organizations in the United States and over 330,000 churches with a combined annual budget of over $800 billion dollars. Each of these has, or should have, a board of directors. If each board only had nine members, that would mean there are almost 16,500,000 board members of non-profit organizations in the United States!  That is a lot of people, a lot of responsibility and a lot of time being invested.