“The bigger the vision, the easier it is to have a goal driven culture.”
Canva co-founder Melanie Perkins wrote this line in 2019 while explaining how a rapidly growing company kept hundreds of people aligned across teams and countries. Canva’s mission was intentionally broad: empower the world to design. Perkins distinguished that long horizon from quarterly goals, which served as tangible steps toward it. A large vision, in her account, helped people understand why individual projects mattered and gave separate teams a common direction.
Vision creates leverage when it simplifies choices. Teams can compare proposals with a shared picture of the future instead of waiting for every decision to move up the hierarchy. It can also attract people who want to contribute to the same outcome. The vision must be translated, however, into goals with owners, measures, and time frames. Without that translation, ambition becomes theater: stirring language disconnected from the work that consumes attention and money.
Bigger is not automatically better. An oversized mission can excuse scattered bets, obscure near-term economics, or pressure employees to treat ordinary limits as a lack of belief. Perkins’s own model links “crazy big” aspirations with concrete, celebration-worthy milestones. Good leaders also invite challenge: a vision should remain open to evidence about unintended harm, feasibility, and whether the organization’s capabilities truly match the promise.
The principle matters as companies scale beyond the founders’ direct reach. Rules alone cannot anticipate every local choice, while isolated targets can pull departments in opposite directions. A clear mission, repeatedly explained and connected to measurable goals, gives autonomy a boundary. Leaders can test the culture by asking whether employees at different levels can describe the same destination, explain their contribution, and stop work that no longer advances it. Vision becomes useful when it changes priorities today.
Perkins wrote about Canva’s 2019 approach to maintaining alignment as the company grew across teams and countries.
She separated a long-term shared mission from the concrete goals that move the organization toward it.
A strong vision helps decentralized teams make coherent choices and see why their projects matter.
Ambition must be translated into owned, measurable goals and remain open to evidence rather than becoming a license for scattered work.
Scale reduces the founders’ ability to coordinate decisions directly, making shared context more important.
A functioning vision appears in priorities, resource choices, and the ability to stop projects that no longer serve the larger mission.
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