Development of our mission, vision and values

"There is a time and place for everything." I read some time ago and I think this sentence also fits very well here. When we started implementing what is now enduco a good three years ago (depending on how you count, it was a little more or a little less long ago), we asked ourselves early on about our vision, our mission and also our values. And we also formulated something at that time. But the more time went by, the more we realized that a) no one had really internalized what was actually there, and that b) we probably just let ourselves be seduced into setting these things up back then - after all, as a cool, hip startup, you have to have those things.

With a little distance, one often judges things differently, as is the case here. We had not yet found each other in the way that was needed for a really well-founded formulation of these three "pillars". Now, a good three years later, things look different.

With the (rightly) significantly increased, perceptible self-confidence of each and every individual in the team after the launch of our actual core product, the time was right to reformulate the vision, mission and the values behind it - with the entire team. Of course, once you reach a certain size, that's no longer possible, and for us, too, the coordination involved a lot of effort, but in return, everyone stands behind the result. And that's what it's all about. In the worst case, it would have turned out that someone would not even see himself/herself continuing with us because of "our" convictions - hard to imagine, but not impossible. Fortunately, that's not the case.

After an initial kick-off with a presentation of the topic by me, the brainstorming started. I had previously sent material to everyone for preparation and so everyone could think about it in advance. I was surprised by what was then said. Hierarchies are very flat in our company - however, I had not expected the level of preparation by working students and interns.

After the first, nearly 2-hour kick off, I created "word clouds" to more easily represent the most commonly mentioned points, each for our vision, mission and values.

This was followed by a good three-week exchange in Google Drive documents, which I will abbreviate here for the sake of simplicity. Many things were formulated, reduced, renamed - in the end, it was all about individual words that everyone - presumably due to personal experience - perhaps interprets somewhat differently than the person who wrote it.

After the final review with the team and further changes, I had the first external experts look over our drafts. Topics like these - even if they represent our own values, etc. - have too much radiance externally and internally for me to want to allow possible misinterpretations in formulations.

So after a long, intensive process, we can present them today. Our vision at enduco (Where do we want to go?), our mission (How do we intend to achieve our vision), and our values (Who are we, how do we work?). 

Are these final forever? Surely not. The world around us is moving, we are moving (fast) - the same applies here as in training: adaptation is necessary. And so these "signposts" will (have to) adapt again and again. And yet, as of today, they are a good representation of where we want to go and how we will get there.