Six questions that build a mission statement and a vision paragraph at individual, team or company scale, with the recognition test that tells you whether either one is finished. Explained in full below, and free to download, keep and teach from.
The reason most mission statements are interchangeable is that they were written to be agreed with rather than to be acted on. A sentence assembled from empower, enable and elevate cannot be disagreed with by anyone, which means it also cannot rule anything out, and a statement that rules nothing out is decoration.
This framework builds the statement from underneath instead. Six questions come first, answered roughly on purpose, because polish at the answer stage hides the gaps the exercise is designed to find. The mission is then compressed out of the first three answers and the vision expanded out of the last one, so both are consequences of thinking rather than substitutes for it.
The same six questions work whether the subject is one person, a team of nine, or a company. Only the person answering changes. That is what makes it portable between a personal branding classroom and a corporate offsite without any translation.
Polish hides gaps. Answer the six questions in rough sentences and the holes will show themselves.
Who you serve. What problem they face. What you do about it. What proof exists. What changes because of your work. Where this leads in five years. Rough sentences only. If an answer arrives already polished, it is probably borrowed.
The working frame is I help [who] do [outcome] through [method]. The frame is scaffolding rather than final prose, and most people rewrite out of it once the content is settled. What matters is that all three slots are filled with something specific enough to be wrong.
Write the five year answer as a present tense paragraph describing a day that is already happening. Present tense is not a stylistic preference, it is a forcing function. It is very hard to describe an abstraction as a lived Tuesday, so the abstraction has to become concrete or the paragraph will not write.
An individual tests the statement on somebody who knows their work. A team tests it on the team next door. A company tests it on an actual customer. If the person hearing it does not recognise you in it, the thinking is unfinished. Resist the urge to treat this as a wording problem, because it almost never is.
Interchangeable verbs. A vision about the organisation succeeding rather than the audience changing. A sentence built by committee, carrying three clauses and one qualifier. Strategy dressed as mission. And the most common of all, a statement written once and never used to decide anything.
We empower organisations to unlock their full communication potential through innovative, human centred solutions.
Ask it to generate a noWhich project would this sentence refuse? None. Every possible project is a communication potential being unlocked. The sentence cannot say no, so it is a caption.
The same claim, made specificKorean professionals who have to work in English are trained to be understood on structure rather than vocabulary.
Now ask againIt refuses monolingual English teams. It refuses vocabulary building work. It refuses beginners. Three noes in one sentence, which is what makes it usable on a Monday morning.
This follows the Values and Principles work and precedes anything you write publicly. The mission sentence produced here is what the Online Readiness Roadmap is planned against, so a vague one at this stage costs you in Week 14. The recognition test is best run on a classmate who has watched you present.
Most useful when something has changed and the old sentence no longer fits, which is more often than people rewrite. Start with the six questions rather than editing the statement you already have, because editing preserves the original errors. Pairs naturally with the Values and Principles Framework, which supplies the constraints this one turns outward.
The worksheet above is yours with no conditions attached. If an annotated edition would help, the one with a completed example in every field and the notes on where people get stuck, that is what this is for.
One message per instrument, nothing else. Students in the class do not need this, the annotated version is handed out in the session.
Everything here is original teaching material developed for university courses and corporate training in Seoul. Use it, adapt it, teach from it. When quoting or summarising, cite Matthew Clement, CareerComms, and link this page.
If it is useful in your classroom, it has done its job.