by William “Bill” Brashers, Ph.D., Featured Contributor
[su_dropcap style=”flat”]N[/su_dropcap]OTE THE WORDING in the title. Vision, as we described in prior columns, is an activity more than an output. I’m introducing the term “Visioning” to emphasize the active nature of vision. If you are visioning regularly, you’ll see many “visions,” and the ones you already have will evolve (unless you’ve chiseled your old vision-statement into your building’s cornerstone – just funnin’).
The topic of this current column is about Vision Focal Length. As your managerial experience has shown, people look into the future at varying distances. All of us look ahead when we consider which store we want to buy an item from, or anticipate some fun event set for this weekend. We don’t really have a word for this because it’s so everyday-common. We use the word “Planning” to refer to the future slightly further out, and “Strategic Planning” for more distant futures. We use the word “Foresight” to denote the visioning we deploy to ground our data-based planning. All these ways of seeing into the future are within the bounds of our available data.
When visioning at focal lengths that outrun the available data by a sizeable margin, how can we validate our visions? Don’t ask me; if I had that answer I could put my whole neighborhood on easy-street for a couple of generations. The best I can do is offer an alternative lens for looking at the problem.
Do visionary leaders discern the future or create it? Are there multiple futures that exist (as modern physics suggests) that we discern and choose amongst? Or do we visualize a desired future, then create it? Again, I don’t know.
What I do know from my experience and the experiences of my clients is that:
Visions act as self-fulfilling prophecies.
This is a lens I think we can live with. Not too spooky, not too data-constrained. What we see when we vision beyond our data, tends to come true, and more-so to the degree that we invest our imagination, thinking, and passion in that vision. More on applications of visioning next time.
Great post William – very succinct in putting across the dynamic nature of vision and the varying focal lengths people adopt. It’s an area people do not give enough thought to. Thanks for the insights.