This issue plagues many organizations - even apparently successful ones. It's the inability for their leaders to link daily activities between today's reality and a motivating vision of tomorrow. It's what I call "the today-tomorrow gap."
The oxbow is a bend in the river where the river has passed it by. That cutoff bend forms a stagnant lake, which over time, continues to fill into a boggy swamp. So my question for you is this: "Is your organization in danger of becoming an oxbow?"
In a lesson about Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, Mitchell's first-grade teacher in Arizona asked students to list their dreams and she would write them on the chalkboard. Mitchell shared his dream that everybody would come to know God.
On my desk I keep a jar filled with dirt. It comes from an Orwellian land where information has long been fanatically controlled. Since 1948, its cruel dictators have been venerated as gods, first the father and then his son. Meanwhile, most of its 24 million people subsist on tree bark, grass and whatever they can scavenge from this dirt.
If you are a Baha’i in Iran, chances are good that you are in jail. If you are a Copt in Egypt, your church may have been burnt to the ground in the past few months.