How to Build a Vision When You Don't Feel Like a Visionary
Building a vision is not dependent on your personality type. You have to train it like any other skill.
One of the things I genuinely love about this work is helping leaders and their teams develop a vision and a strategic plan — and then watching them actually bring it to fruition. There’s something rewarding in that. Not just the planning part. Watching a direction someone named out loud become something real.
Over the years, there are a couple of things I’ve run into when it comes to building vision. One is a generic vision. The other is people believing that only a visionary can build a vision.
I was in a session with one of my executive coaching clients. We were talking about their strategic plan, and when we got to the company’s existing vision, he said, “Yeah, well, the current vision is really generic.” And when he said that, I had one of those moments and responded with “Generic vision leads to generic actions, which yields you generic results.” He stopped, looked at it, wrote that down. “Yeah, that’s good, and that’s why we need to develop a new vision,” he said.
As we started the process of developing the vision, he was very hesitant about putting forward any ideas. As we worked through it, he asked:
“How do I create a vision when I’m not a visionary?”
For him this was a statement of fact. He didn’t think he had the ability to create a vision, because he’d decided there was a category of person who gets to do that, and he wasn’t in it.
Once that’s the story running in your head, it stops mattering how capable you actually are. You’ll never start because you won’t see the point. So if that’s the sentence sitting in your head, “I’m not a visionary, so I can’t do this,” let that belief go. That’s something you’re using as an excuse, and it’s absolutely holding you back.
You have to learn to look at building a vision as a skill and not an inherent trait. Skills can be learned and improved. With a trait, you either have it or you don’t.
Building a Vision is a Skill
A visionary is a person with original ideas about what their future will or could be like, who’s capable of providing a picture and sharing that vision with others. That’s the common definition, and it’s true. But here’s the trap: when you hear “visionary,” it conjures up images of extraordinary people with an innate ability to see the future — Jeff Bezos taking a bookstore and turning it into Amazon, Satya Nadella walking into Microsoft and remaking it around a mobile-first, cloud-first vision. Those are extraordinary individuals. No doubt about it.
So where’s the myth? The myth is that only visionaries can develop compelling visions. That’s just not true. Vision creation is not limited to a select group of special people with special powers. It’s a skill that can be developed by anyone willing to put in the effort.
Creating a vision is a process that involves tapping into your own aspirations — or the aspirations of your organization, or your customers — your values, and your understanding of the world around you. It’s about setting a direction. And it’s a skill, learned and formed over time.
Training the skill
Building a vision is a skill you develop through practice, self-reflection, and learning from your own experience and other people’s. Here are some of the steps that I walked through with my client.
Brainstorm without judgment. Spend some time and just brainstorm ideas. Approach it from a position of curiosity. This is where it gets hard, because there are times you’ll come up with an idea and judge yourself for it — that’s a stupid idea. No, it’s not. It’s an idea you came up with in the process. Do not stifle your creativity through judgment. Get a piece of paper, start writing your ideas down, and if one doesn’t sound like it’ll work, keep it on there anyway. Keep writing. All this part is about is collecting the ideas — not deciding yet which ones are good.
Get clear on your why. This is the deeper thing underneath the vision — what you’re honoring, what would still matter to you even if it didn’t have to matter to anyone else. A vision that’s linked to your why gives you a reason to get up in the morning, a reason to keep moving forward, a reason to press on when things get hard. Without it, the vision doesn’t have anything underneath it to pull from when the work gets difficult.
Visualize the impact. Not a picture of yourself succeeding — the actual effect on the people this touches. What’s different for your team, your client, the person on the other end of what you’re building.
Your why is what’s driving you. The impact is what actually happens as an end result of your vision. You need both — a vision that’s strong on why but vague on impact is still going to feel thin to the people you need to bring along with you.
Seek outside perspective. Surround yourself with people who have a different vantage point than you. If you’re building a vision for your team or your company, go get those perspectives. A lot of times, people can see the value we have — even when that value is a blind spot to us, because to us it’s just who we are, it’s just how we show up. But people on the outside looking in, they see something very special. Getting that outside view is often genuinely eye-opening, for exactly that reason: it’s showing you something you structurally cannot see on your own.
What’s the difference between a vision built by a visionary and one that’s not?
Nothing.
When we finally rolled out the vision, nobody in that room treated it like a rough draft from a guy who wasn’t a visionary. They owned it and started executing on it. That’s really the only test a vision has to pass. Can the team move it forward.
He built a vision and still doesn't call himself a visionary. He didn't need to. He just had to treat it the way he'd treat any other skill worth having — something you design your way into on purpose, not something you wait to feel.
— Dr. James Bryant, P.E.
P.S. — Where have you gotten stuck trying to build a vision — brainstorming, getting outside perspective, something else? Reply and let me know — I read every one.