What’s vision and how do I get some?

Lots of management and leadership writing starts from the premise that you know what you’re doing. Case in point: “vision.”

Leaders most organizations behave in one of two ways: they are either compelled to talk about their vision at every possible chance, or the vision is only thought about during the annual strategic planning sessions and pointedly ignored the rest of the time.

There are lots of management books that talk about why neither of these is very effective. All of which is graduate level work if you are a new manager terrified at the thought of being asked what your “vision” is. If you’re that guy (or gal), this post is for you.

Big picture: breathe normally and take enough time to do it right.

A vision: how things ought to be

Vision is a $50, cottage-industry-spawning, buzzword. But really a vision is simply your mental image of how things could or ought to be. In general this should be fairly high level, so that you don’t have lots of visions. If you do, it’s fairly likely that what you really have are goals related to a single overarching vision.

For example, my vision for high performance computing is to remove the barriers to access in order to encourage scientific discovery. In plain English, this means that I want to make high performance computers so easy to use that the scientists and engineers using them can focus only on what they want to do, not how to get it done.

My vision involves changing the way things have been done for the past thirty-five years. In general, visions are like this; they are stretch goals, not the next logical step in the chain, but a big leap over to a new chain of logical things entirely.

Forming a vision takes time: don’t rush it

If you’re still in school or recently graduated, the odds are fairly good you don’t have a vision. If you’ve just recently started to lead as a part of the executing team in your organization, the odds are still good you don’t have a vision, even if you and others think you do (or at least they think you should).

This is fine.

One of the necessary conditions for creating a vision of your own is being able—either by virtue of training, natural ability, or time in a position of sufficient seniority—to see the big picture and then to see what’s wrong with that picture and imagine how things could be better.

When you are just starting out, you don’t see the big picture. You may not even know there is a picture. You’ve got your head down, getting the job done.

Training yourself to create a vision

But eventually someone will ask you to pick your head up a little. They’ll ask, “You know, our code-revision system is really pretty old and seems kind of clumsy to use. Could we manage the code base more effectively? What do you think?”

And you’ll look around at the landscape of one particular problem, and see part of the picture. As time goes on and your experience and level in the organization grow, you’ll naturally see more and more of the picture. Then, if you are paying attention to what you see and trying to stay out front then eventually you’ll start to see the flaws in the image. Once you see these flaws, and come up with a new picture, then you’ve got a vision.

But I need an answer now

How long does this take to do well? As long as it takes. Unfortunately, you might be expected to articulate a vision before you are ready. You should try your best to avoid this by training yourself from the very beginning to look around and understand the big picture. But if you are pressed for an answer and you aren’t sure your idea is cooked all the way yet, focus on something fairly obvious and incremental that moves you in a direction consistent with where you think you are ultimately headed.

Why buy the extra time? Because visions are best when they are only infrequently changed. If you rush an answer out with a grandiose vision that’s half-baked (or worse, simply impossible to achieve) you’re going to have to change it pretty quickly. And then you’ll lose credibility and demoralize your team. Not good.

Focus on the value of the contribution

Incidentally, not all visions are unique. Probably very few are. I certainly am not the first person to have my particular vision for high-performance computing, and I’m not even the only one who cares about it right now. Lots and lots of people all over the world share this vision. The important point is to contribute something unique, not that the vision itself be unique.

This post is inspired by material in my book, The Only Trait of a Leader.