When Goals Are All You Have, You Eventually Lose the Thread

“We achieved what we set out to do. But right now, I do not know what will genuinely move us forward next.”

Many business owners would probably not say this in an executive meeting. It sounds too vague—too little like strategy, too little like a decision, and too difficult to translate directly into an action plan.

Yet it describes a familiar situation: the numbers are right. Important projects have been completed. The company has grown. The calendar remains full. But the shared sense of direction no longer feels as clear as it once did.

This is not automatically a motivation problem, nor does it mean that the goals were wrong. Often, it points to something else: the company has goals, but no sufficiently concrete shared picture of the future those goals are meant to make possible.

Goals steer the next step forward. A vivid picture of the future creates direction. Companies need both.

What the idea of telic and atelic activities really says

One starting point for this thought is the philosopher Kieran Setiya. In his article “Facing Your Mid-Career Crisis”, he distinguishes between telic activities, which have an inherent endpoint, and atelic activities, which are not exhausted by being completed. Completing a client assignment is telic. Working on a good client relationship can also have an ongoing, atelic dimension.

Setiya’s argument concerns individuals and their relationship with work. It is not an organisational study and does not demonstrate that companies without a picture of the future inevitably lose direction. Applying the idea to corporate leadership is therefore an editorial interpretation: organisations, too, can settle into a rhythm in which one completed goal is immediately replaced by the next. A great deal may be achieved while the connection between those goals is no longer collectively visible.

Goals matter—but they only carry you to the finish line

Goals create clarity. They set priorities, make progress visible and help teams assume responsibility. Without goals, much remains non-committal.

But every goal has an endpoint. The revenue target is reached. The product is launched. The new unit is established. The reorganisation is complete. Then comes the next goal—and another after that.

It becomes difficult when an organisation keeps producing new goals but can no longer answer collectively what those goals are for. In everyday work, this may look like this:

• The executive team resolves many operational questions while questions of direction remain unanswered.
• Teams deliver reliably but, when uncertainty arises, decide cautiously rather than boldly.
• Priorities keep shifting because there is no shared yardstick for difficult decisions.
• The people at the top increasingly hold the direction together personally.
• Strategy days produce new lists, but no image that still provides orientation months later.

These are possible patterns of observation, not a remote diagnosis. Similar symptoms can also arise from insufficient capacity, unclear mandates, market uncertainty or capability gaps.

Picture of the future, vision and purpose: related, but not the same

In practice, these terms are often mixed together. Research does not use them completely consistently either. A clear working definition is therefore important for this article.

Goals describe concrete, verifiable results or states. They answer: what do we want to achieve, and by when?

Vision is generally understood in organisational research as a desirable or idealised image of a future state. An empirical study on vision communication also shows that a vision becomes more tangible when it does not consist solely of abstract terms, but describes a future people can picture mentally. The study demonstrates the effect of image-based language on the quality and inspirational impact of communication—not automatically on a company’s commercial success. (Carton & Lucas, 2018)

In one strand of research, purpose describes an organisation’s longer-term reason for being: why it exists and what meaningful contribution it seeks to make. A qualitative study involving 44 experts from research and practice distinguishes purpose as an enduring “why” from vision as an imagined future state. At the same time, the authors point out that the field is not yet conceptually settled and that their model requires further empirical testing. (van Ingen et al., 2021)

I deliberately use picture of the future as a practical working term here, not as an independently validated scientific concept. It means a tangible, jointly held and decision-relevant form of vision: how should the company operate, create value and have an impact in a future phase?

A simple working logic connects the concepts like this:

Purpose can describe the more enduring why.
Vision or a picture of the future makes a desirable future imaginable.
Strategy brings together the decisions needed to get there.
Goals mark verifiable progress.

This is a management heuristic, not a law of nature. Nor does a company necessarily need four perfect sentences on four slides. What matters is whether the terms mean the same thing to the executive team and genuinely make decisions easier.

Where I use pictures of the future pragmatically

Not every task needs a grand corporate vision or a multi-day vision process. In a digitalisation project, a relaunch or the introduction of AI, the actual project goal may already be clear: a portal is to go live, a platform is to be introduced or a new process is to be implemented technically.

In situations like these, a picture of the future serves a smaller, highly practical purpose for me.

The people who will implement, own and later use the initiative jointly develop a view of what working reality should look like after the introduction.

• What will customers or employees be able to do better?
• Which processes, decisions or responsibilities will change?
• And a few months after go-live, how will we know that not only the technology works, but that the intended benefit is actually emerging?

This does not have to be a three-day workshop. A focused clarification process with the relevant people is often enough. Its value lies in bringing different perspectives together and making the why behind the project concrete enough that it does not get lost along the way.

Go-live is an important goal. But it is not yet the picture of the future.

Without this shared view, a project may focus enormous energy on the launch date. Once that date has been reached, the more difficult question only begins: how does the new system become a changed practice? A pragmatic picture of the future keeps that question present throughout the project.

This distinction reflects my practical way of working, not a separate scientific definition. It translates the preceding ideas about vision, shared imaginability and goals into a concrete project setting.

Why a concrete picture of the future matters for leadership

As long as the market, organisation and business model are stable, much can be managed through goals and routines. During phases of growth and change, however, questions arise for which no reliable metric yet exists:

• Which business areas genuinely belong to the future?
• How must the role of the people at the top change?
• What does the executive team need in order to carry more responsibility?
• Which decisions would be consistent—even if they are uncomfortable in the short term?

Without a shared picture, such questions easily migrate back to the top. The company remains capable of acting, but its direction increasingly depends on a small number of people.

What it means to integrate a vision

A vision is not integrated simply because it has been formulated, presented or published on the intranet. Research distinguishes between cognitive adoption and practical implementation: employees know and understand the vision, while also using it as a frame of reference for decisions and autonomous action in their daily work. The authors vividly describe this as anchoring the vision in “heads and feet”. (Slåtten et al., 2021)

In a cross-sectional study of 1,008 employees in a Norwegian hospital trust, this integration of vision was positively associated with self-reported creative performance (β = 0.16). Psychological capital—hope, self-efficacy, resilience and optimism—and the perceived attractiveness of the organisation were also positively associated with integration. This suggests that vision should not be treated solely as a communication task. Because of the cross-sectional design, self-reported data and specific hospital context, however, the study demonstrates neither causality nor a general formula for success.

A follow-up study in the same context describes integration more precisely as an interplay of adoption and application. It was positively associated with affective commitment to the organisation, an employee-oriented culture and autonomy-supportive leadership: leadership that explains meaning and reasons, listens to perspectives, enables initiative and grants room for decision-making within clear goals. These findings are also correlational and come from a single Norwegian hospital organisation. (“Promoting organizational vision integration”, 2022)

Across different strands of research, four cautious working principles can be derived:

1. Communicate clearly and repeatedly. A recent systematic review of 150 contributions identifies clarity, repeated communication and dialogue as relevant factors in the understanding and effect of visions. At the same time, it emphasises that findings vary by context, leadership, employees and relationships. (Zhao & Lian, 2026)
2. Do not merely inform people; involve them in the translation. A study of 13 change projects in higher education describes shared orientation, dialogic communication and genuine participation as ways of developing a shared vision of the future. The specific university context limits transferability, but the process observation is instructive for change initiatives. (“Developing a Shared Vision for Change”, 2020)
3. Align vision with concrete goals. A scenario study and a field study suggest that vision communication is perceived as more convincing when subsequently defined work goals reflect the same values and priorities. When day-to-day goals contradict the vision, the perceived integrity of leadership suffers. (Gochmann et al., 2022)
4. Test decisions and routines against it. Only when teams can relate the vision to priorities, responsibilities, resource allocation and concrete decision situations does a statement become an actionable frame of reference. This is the practical interpretation of the findings cited above—not a separately tested four-step model.

A vision is integrated when people can not only repeat it, but use it to make decisions in their daily work.

A picture of the future only becomes useful through its consequences

The question “Where do we want to be in ten years?” is rarely enough. It quickly produces grand words, but not yet reliable direction.

A picture of the future becomes useful when an executive team connects four levels:

1. The changed reality

What is changing for customers, markets, technology, employees or societal expectations? Which assumptions from the past no longer hold?

2. The organisation’s ambition

What impact should the company have in the future? What role does it want to play in its market or environment—beyond the next revenue milestone?

3. The consequences for today

Which decisions does this make necessary now? What must be stopped, started or prioritised differently?

4. The translation into leadership and execution

Which responsibilities, capabilities and ways of working does the next phase require? How does the picture become a shared course rather than a presentation slide?

The third and fourth points in particular are often skipped. A picture of the future may then inspire without changing anything. It only becomes effective when it influences decisions, priorities or responsibilities.

The reality check: not every lack of direction is a vision problem

The strongest objection to these ideas is: “This sounds good, but what we lack right now is not the picture—we lack time, people or reliable data.”

That may be true. A picture of the future replaces neither market analysis nor specialist expertise, capacity, funding or conflict resolution. Sometimes the direction is clear but the mandate is not. Sometimes capabilities are missing. Sometimes the strategy has not been decided. And sometimes execution fails simply because too many things were started at once.

An executive team should therefore ask the following questions before starting a vision process:

• Is the direction truly unclear—or has it simply not been decided?
• Do the people involved mean the same thing by vision, purpose and goals?
• Is a shared picture missing—or are the mandate, capabilities or capacity missing?
• Which specific decision would become easier with a clearer picture of the future?
• How would we notice in six months that the picture is having an effect in daily work?

If the fourth question does not produce a good answer, a vision workshop may not be what is needed. A different form of clarification may be more useful.

Sometimes direction requires distance from daily business

Questions like these can only be answered to a limited extent between two routine meetings. Not because leaders think too little, but because everyday work almost always pushes the urgent to the front.

A focused space for clarification can therefore be useful: a strategy day, a Business Retreat or focused sparring. The location is not what matters. What matters is that the right questions are put on the table and do not remain merely good thoughts.

If the clarification develops into a longer-term mandate for steering and execution, support as a Fractional Chief of Staff may be appropriate. The two formats address different parts of the same problem: focused clarification of direction on one side, and anchoring it in decisions and execution on the other.

The decisive question

Perhaps your company does not immediately need another goal. Perhaps it first needs a shared picture of why the next goals matter—and which decisions follow from that today.

Goals take a company to the next finish line. A vivid picture of the future helps it stay on course beyond that line.