I've spent a lot of time in rooms where teams were arguing about the difference between their mission and their vision. Marketers and strategists would go back and forth. Decks would be built. Consultants would be brought in. And at the end of it all, nobody could remember which was which — let alone use any of it to make a real decision.

I recently picked up a book called Nobody Cares About Your Career by Erica Keswin. It's aimed at individuals — how to own your professional path with clarity and intention. But one of the ideas that stuck with me was the importance of having a personal vision: not just goals, but a true north that shapes how you operate. It made me think about what we've gotten wrong about this at the team level.

After over a decade leading customer education at HubSpot — scaling a team from roughly 20 to 65+ people — I've come to believe that most teams are swimming in language they can't actually use. Purpose. Vision. Mission. Moonshot. Values. Principles. OKRs. They get layered on top of each other until the whole thing collapses under its own weight.

And then I went back to something I've returned to more than once over the years: Jim Collins' work in Built to Last and Good to Great. Collins introduces a concept that I think is the missing connective tissue in most team frameworks — the BHAG. The Big Hairy Audacious Goal. And when you layer that into the picture, everything gets a lot clearer.

So let me offer you the framework I actually use — reconciling both. It's not new or revolutionary. But it's clear — and I think that's the point.

Purpose is your reason for existing as a team. It answers the question: why does this team need to be here?

Here's the most important thing about purpose: you don't complete it. You don't cross it off. It's not an OKR. A purpose is a compass bearing — you're always orienting toward it, never arriving at it.

This is where most teams go wrong. They write a purpose statement, put it in a deck, declare victory, and move on. But purpose isn't a deliverable. It's a filter. Every major decision — who to hire, which initiatives to fund, what to stop doing — should be tested against it.

At HubSpot Academy, our team's purpose wasn't to "produce certifications" or "train customers." It was something closer to: educate and inspire so that we could transform the way the world did business. That purpose survived every org change, every product pivot, every leadership shift. It was stable because it was true — not because we protected it in a slide.

Yes, purpose can evolve. Companies change. Teams mature. But you should be updating your purpose because your understanding has deepened — not because a new VP came in and wanted to put their stamp on something.

This is where Jim Collins earns his place in the conversation. In Built to Last, Collins and Jerry Porras introduced the concept of the Big Hairy Audacious Goal — a long-horizon, galvanizing challenge that sits between your timeless purpose and your near-term vision.

A BHAG is typically a 10-to-25-year goal. It's ambitious enough to feel slightly uncomfortable — if your whole team immediately says "yeah, we can do that," it's not a BHAG. But it's also specific enough that you'll know when you've achieved it. Collins' canonical example is NASA in 1961: "Put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the decade." Audacious. Time-bound. Unmistakable.

The BHAG does something that purpose alone can't: it translates the permanent into the directional. Purpose tells you why you exist. The BHAG tells you what you're building toward over the long arc. It's the mountain. Vision is base camp.

For CS and revenue leaders, a BHAG might look like: "Become the team that proves customer education is a primary revenue driver at this company" — not this year, but over the next decade of work. Or: "Build the most reference-able post-sale customer experience in our category." Big enough to stretch. Specific enough to steer.

What I've seen break down without this layer: teams write a vision, achieve it, and then drift. There's no larger mountain to orient toward. The BHAG is what prevents vision fatigue — each vision is a step, not the destination.

If purpose is your compass, vision is your destination. And here's the critical word: achievable.

I've seen too many teams write vision statements so lofty they're functionally useless. "Be the world's most trusted learning platform." "Transform how customers succeed." Okay — but what does that look like in 18 months? What does done feel like?

A vision should be specific enough that when you get there, you know it. You can celebrate it. And then you can set a new one.

This is the part most leaders resist — because it feels like shrinking the ambition. It isn't. It's translating ambition into something that can actually motivate a team. People don't run harder because the finish line is invisible. They run harder when they can see it.

Visions are renewable. You're allowed to have multiple over time. In fact, the best teams do — each vision builds on the last, creating momentum instead of confusion.

Values — sometimes called principles, operating norms, or team agreements — are the how. They define how your team goes about doing the work.

This piece tends to get the least attention, and it's arguably the most important in practice. Because the truth is: getting somewhere by burning your people out, cutting corners on quality, or compromising trust isn't winning. It's mortgaging your future.

Values matter because they make decisions easier at every level of the team. When someone faces a hard call — do we ship this before it's ready? do we say yes to a customer when we shouldn't? — values should give them a framework that doesn't require escalation.

The best values I've seen are specific and behavioral. Not "we value integrity" — but "we say the hard thing in the room, not after the meeting." Not "we put the customer first" — but "we flag it when a customer's request isn't actually what they need."

Generic values are wallpaper. Specific values are tools.

At the bottom — and that's exactly where they belong.

Each year, layer in your OKRs, quarterly priorities, and big bets. Call them what you want. These are the executable layer: specific, time-bound, measurable. They're where the work actually happens.

But here's what breaks when you skip the foundation: every year becomes Year Zero. You rebuild strategy from scratch. Teams lose continuity. High performers disengage because they can't connect what they're doing on a Tuesday afternoon to anything that actually matters.

When purpose, BHAG, vision, and values are in place, annual goals have context. People understand not just what they're being asked to do — but why it matters, and how to make judgment calls when the plan meets reality.

Here's what I now believe the complete framework looks like, synthesizing the practitioner experience with Collins' model:

Purpose: Why does this team exist? (Permanent. Never finished. A filter for every decision.)

BHAG: What's the mountain we're climbing? (10-25 years. Audacious but winnable. Gives purpose a direction.)

Values: How do we operate? (Behavioral. Specific. The guardrails at every level.)

Vision: Where are we going in the next 3-5 years? (Achievable. Specific enough to celebrate. Renewable.)

Strategy: How are we going to get there? (The choices you make about where to focus.)

Tactics/OKRs: What are we doing this quarter/year? (Executable. Measurable. Time-bound.)

What Collins adds that I find most useful is the sequencing logic: clarity flows downward. Purpose generates the BHAG. The BHAG generates the vision. The vision generates strategy. Strategy generates tactics. Each layer is accountable to the one above it.

Most teams skip straight to the bottom two layers and wonder why nothing feels meaningful. Or they write the top layers in a Word doc that no one reads, without actually connecting them to how decisions get made. Both are the same failure — just dressed differently.

The reason I keep coming back to this — for teams and for myself — is that the absence of this clarity is expensive. Not just in productivity, but in trust.

When a team doesn't have a shared purpose, every reorg feels like a threat. When there's no vision, every new initiative feels arbitrary. When values aren't defined, the loudest or most senior voice in the room sets the culture by default.

You don't need a three-day offsite and an expensive consultant to get clear on these three things. But you do need to be intentional. And you do need to stop treating purpose as a sentence on a slide.

Your team deserves a reason to show up that they can actually feel.

Learning by Design is written by Courtney Sembler. Courtney currently helps companies build scalable customer education programs. After spending over a decade scaling HubSpot Academy globally, she now explores the systems, strategies, and realities of workplace learning, leadership, and customer experience—the kind that drives retention, adoption, and revenue by design, not by accident. Published twice weekly with monthly deep dives. Connect with her on LinkedIn and subscribe to Learning by Design.