Practice 3-1. Your current visionary self.
What we see is often determined by what we are prepared to see.
—PAUL SCHOEMAKER AND GEORGE DAY
Researchers Sooksan Kantabutra and Gayle Avery had a practical question regarding the Vision Thing. Ample anecdotal evidence demonstrates that a powerful vision inspires, but does this translate into real business value? Specifically, they wanted to know how the presence, or absence, of a vision affects and motivates followers—the so-called followers effect.1 Can a vision provide greater job satisfaction, happier customers, and overall increased business success?
For their study they chose an unlikely setting: retail stores, including shoe shops, furniture outlets, and boutiques. This was a very interesting choice, as we are more likely to think of vision in terms of the corporate world and iconic companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon. Would a vision also be important in a sporting-goods chain, a supermarket, or a pet store?
Using a scale of one to nine, Kantabutra and Avery interviewed employees about the extent to which they considered their leaders or bosses to have a vision for the business. They also asked whether the vision provided guidance and direction in the choices the employees needed to make in the store on a day-to-day basis. And their third question was whether it motivated and energized them to operate at their best. Remember, this was at a bookstore or a deli, not a corporation led by Richard Branson! What they found was quite remarkable: Even in this unassuming setting, there was a positive correlation between the level of visionary leadership and the level of motivation of the employees. The presence of a vision also positively correlated with the perception of a helpful sense of direction. It turns out that even in such down-to-earth places, the Vision Thing is useful.
But there’s more. The study also set out to determine whether the presence of a compelling vision had a monetary effect: Did it result in more and better business and improve overall business results? Tying the collected data on the impact of visionary leadership to a financial outcome was a challenge. After all, results are the sum of many factors, including location, economic conditions, aggressive competition, and marketing strategies. So, how could Kantabutra and Avery single out vision to see if, and how, it affects the bottom line? They decided to gather two more data points, both strong indicators of business performance and success.
The first was the level of employee satisfaction. Happy employees typically enjoy working for the company, provide good service, spread the word, and go the extra mile for their employers. Higher levels of employee satisfaction are therefore widely considered to have a positive effect on business performance. The second was customer satisfaction. High scores would indicate happy customers, who are known to provide word-of-mouth advertising, repeat sales, and other positive business effects. To get this data, the researchers expanded the scope of their interviews to include shoppers.
Guess what they found? Perhaps unsurprisingly, their results indicated a positive relationship between the presence of a vision and employee satisfaction. But, more interestingly, shops that had scored high on the assessment of the leader’s visionary side also showed higher levels of customer satisfaction. Think about that: Shoppers probably have no particular awareness that the store is led by a more visionary leader. They’re just shopping. Yet they still reported higher customer satisfaction scores at such stores. Apparently, the guidance and inspiration that a vision provides doesn’t just affect people directly (followers who are aware of the vision), but also indirectly affects people (customers who are unaware of the presence of a particular leadership vision).
The results seem to indicate that the Vision Thing—when done right— leads to happier employees and happier customers, and thereby undoubtedly has a positive effect on the bottom line.
Sometimes you are told a compelling future-oriented story, one that includes exciting descriptions of the changes the speaker envisions, spiced up with fascinating trends, intriguing future trigger events, and great clarity on how it all fits together. If the speaker does a good job, you are probably impressed and likely to conclude that the story is inspiring and the speaker is very gifted. It’s easy (and all too common) to conclude that this ability to connect so powerfully, to provide such clear insights and voice them with such confidence and conviction, is a God-given talent. Some of us have it, and others don’t. Great communicators such as Jack Welch, Larry Ellison, and Sam Walton are some of the people that fit this category.
If you are not in that category—and, honestly, most of us aren’t—becoming more visionary and inspiring seems a daunting task. As a result, we might alienate ourselves from the Vision Thing, file it away in the “too hard” box because we believe it is not for us mortal souls. Steven Johnson, the author of Where Good Ideas Come From, explores a similar phenomenon of misconception: the generation of innovative ideas. We tend to believe that great ideas come as epiphanies, in breakthrough eureka moments when a lightbulb switches on within the mind of these rare, unique, and remarkable characters. That belief is probably strengthened by story—it’s much more engaging to recount an epiphany as the tale of lightning striking and brilliance flashing before someone’s eyes than to describe hours, days, and weeks of deliberate thought and research, writing and rewriting, bouncing half-baked ideas around, and many moments of getting it wrong before finally getting it right. We enjoy the illusion of a brilliant mind suddenly producing brilliant insights.
Reality is almost always quite different. To quote Johnson, “good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and occasionally, contracts) over time.”2 This is akin to the process of visioning: Most visions emerge gradually. They demand soaking time. They start with an insight that’s not typically as profound or lucid as it will become. And then they require time to form, bounce back and forth a few times, and become what they are eventually remembered for. Thomas Edison famously created thousands of lightbulbs before inventing one that worked.
Johnson calls this the slow hunch. He notes that virtually all innovative ideas start off as impressions rather than breakthroughs. The ensuing breakthrough idea is the product of perseverance and often a combination of hunches that collide and merge over time—not a flash of insight that instantly makes sense. A vision arises the same way. It’s not a stroke of genius, but rather an emerging concept that requires work and time in combination with a perceptive and tolerant mindset.
Let’s go back to 1937. Meet Malcolm McLean, a trucker who delivers cotton bales to Hoboken, New Jersey, from Fayetteville, North Carolina. Three years earlier, McLean saved enough money to buy a secondhand truck for $120. He now makes the monotonous 1,200-mile round trip up the East Coast and back a few times a week. After arriving at Hoboken with his goods, a long wait starts; it takes hours to get his truck unloaded. Staring out his window, he sees hundreds of longshoremen working hard to load and unload cargo from ships to trucks and vice versa. It strikes him that this is a great waste of time and money. One crate after another gets lifted off a truck, placed on the dock, tightened into a sling, and loaded into the hold of a ship. It happens piece by piece, one by one: a slow, endless, unrewarding, and even dangerous process. But it keeps a large crowd of people employed, and it’s necessary work.
Contemplating the scene, McLean wonders if there’s another way. “The thought occurred to me, as I waited around that day, that it would be easier to lift my trailer up and, without any of its content being touched, put it onto the ship,”3 he later recalled.
It was the beginning of a vision that would transform the shipping industry and grow a multimillion-dollar company. Malcolm McLean became the inventor of the container, the same one that dominates the view of most ports worldwide today. His early insight also made him a very wealthy man. McLean’s story is often told as an epiphany, a stroke of brilliance that came to him as he sat in his truck. It sounds heroic and satisfies the deeply rooted desire of the audience to be awed by the sudden, momentous birth of a groundbreaking idea.
But that’s not how it went. It wasn’t until the early fifties, some fifteen years later, that McLean fully realized the potential of his 1937 insight. After that particular trip to Hoboken, he continued to expand his trucking business, successfully building the largest trucking fleet in the South. Mc-Lean Trucking Company operated over 1,700 trucks and thirty-seven transport terminals along the Eastern Seaboard.4 As he was amassing his trucking fleet, he wasn’t spending time advancing his early business idea of “lifting his trailer up.”
In fact, the original insight wasn’t the container as we know it today, either. The seed of the idea needed soaking time—and a helping of external circumstances. It wasn’t until some states adopted weight restrictions and levied taxes on interstate trucking that McLean revisited the idea, which must have been simmering in the back of his mind all that time. The dissonance between the state governments’ restrictions made interstate transport by trucks a balancing act for truckers, who aimed to transport as many goods as possible while avoiding heavy taxes and fines.
McLean realized that efficient overseas transport of goods would avoid much of this frustration. As his 1937 insight began to take shape, he envisioned various seaport hubs that would work to transport large amounts of goods by ship, with trucks conducting the short, mostly intrastate, beginning or end leg of the journey. The new system would be cheaper (by avoiding taxes) and more effective.
He eventually redesigned his trailers into two parts: a base with wheels and an independent container. He also acquired a shipping company, which granted him shipping and docking rights to most important eastern ports, and he started to promote and develop the business. Not everyone bought into the vision immediately, though. McLean had to overcome strong resistance from unions, win over port authorities, and make significant upfront investments. His personal moment of truth came in 1955. With authorities unwilling to support him in expanding both businesses at the same time, he had to make a choice: his safe and established trucking business or his highly speculative shipping venture. He chose the latter, sold off his interests in McLean Trucking, and became the owner of Pan-Atlantic, which he renamed Sea-Land Industries. Containerization was born.
McLean’s story is one of symbiosis between entrepreneurship and vision that transformed an industry that had remained virtually unchanged for centuries. He was a true innovator, among the most heralded business leaders of the twentieth century. But we must remember that his transformative vision emerged over a number of years; it didn’t spring from his mind fully formed the way we like to think of brilliant ideas.
McLean’s story illustrates that, rather than a gift, the potential to come up with—and hold on to and cultivate—a brilliant idea or a vision is within all of us. Visionary leadership isn’t a personality trait, although it is sometimes confused with concepts like charismatic leadership, which do have a strong personality-oriented element. This is the risk in using people like John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Steve Jobs as examples: They all seem to have had front-row tickets when the gift of charisma was handed out.
Visionary capacity is different. We all can work consciously and continuously to grow our ability to anticipate, improve our game of looking ahead, have more remarkable insights, and become more inspirational in how we speak about the future. We all can benefit from the effects of a compelling vision in the part of the world we influence. Being able to think, behave, act, and communicate in a more future-oriented fashion provides direction for the road ahead and guidance for decisions that will need to be made. It also inspires and fuels innovation and breakthrough thinking. And it energizes your followers with purpose and meaning.
The big question is how. How do you go about developing this crucial leadership competence? How and where do you start? How do you sustain it, and how do you integrate it into your daily life? As with learning a new sport, you will need to deliberately work on some specific abilities, getting the basics right, learning what to focus on first, transforming unproductive habits and routines, and making seemingly complicated things as simple as possible (but not one bit simpler, as Einstein famously said).
Naturally, as with all things in life, some of us will be better at this competence than others. But we all can improve our game. What we need is a developmental framework, something that simplifies this inherently complex learning curve and guides us with a process. That’s what you’ll find in the rest of this chapter.
Based on my observations (and testing done with hundreds of senior leaders, whom I work with on vision, strategy, and leadership), there are two critical developmental dimensions for growing your visionary capacity:
1. Your ability to see things early. The first signs of change often manifest as random noise or faint warning signals, often at the periphery of our attention and far less explicit in their game-changing nature than they are later. Growing your ability to notice these signals early, and recognize their potential impact, is an essential part of raising your visionary capacity.
2. Your ability to connect the dots, to create coherence in the future you face and turn it into a “bigger picture” story. This implies constructively and intelligently working through the complexity of the mul-tifaceted and multidimensional future.
We’ll explore both concepts briefly here, but since they are both vital dimensions in your development, I devoted a full chapter to each of them, to explain what they are about and how you go about nurturing both abilities (see Chapters 4 and 5).
The first developmental dimension for your visionary capacity is the ability to see things early. In Chapter 2 we explored the brain’s ability to tune out the noise, allowing you to focus on what seems most important. When the noise—let’s say it’s street traffic—becomes something else—squealing tires—your attention shifts to it. Also in our day-to-day information overload, most of what we hear is noise in terms of future change—but some of it is something else. It could be an early signal of change that could, potentially, create a substantial opportunity, and you would want to be among the first to recognize it. Improving your ability to detect, acknowledge, and understand such signals before others do is a key to developing visionary capacity. That’s what Malcolm McLean did as he looked out his windshield in 1937. He picked up the signal and had a sufficient understanding of its potential impact as he realized that the process of docking could be redesigned and made much more efficient. It’s what Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, did when he realized the furniture industry did not address the needs of a large group of consumers.
This ability to anticipate and notice things early was one of the first things Alan Mulally pursued at Ford, after he took the wheel as CEO in 2006 and turned around the company from bankruptcy. “The first thing a leader does is facilitate connections between the organization and the outside world,”5 he asserts. To institutionalize this practice of context scanning, he made it an intense part of the regular senior leadership rhythm:
Every week we have a Business Plan Review meeting. Our entire global leadership team, every business leader, every functional leader, attends either remotely or in person. We talk about the worldwide business environment at that moment—things like the economy, the energy and technology sectors, global labor, government relationships, demographic trends, what our competitors are doing, what is going on with our customer. [ . . . ] Then we take it a step further and discuss how these trends are likely to evolve. Looking ahead is critical. We talk about more than what our customers value right now. We talk about the forces in the world that are going to shape what they will value in the future.6
The possibilities inherent in early signals deviate from conventional wisdom and only get picked up by those whose antennas are tuned to them. Luck occasionally plays a part, but getting this critical information early depends more reliably on being receptive to it, being mentally ready to understand what it could mean and to turn it into an opportunity for yourself and your organization. You might also decide that the time isn’t right and choose not to take the opportunity. But that choice can only be present if you see things early; those who don’t aren’t even aware of the potential.
To take some of the pressure off, don’t mistake early for first. You want to be among the early group to identify the signal of change, make use of it productively, integrate it into your vision, and possibly create opportunities with it. Neither Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com), nor Michael Dell (Dell Computers), nor Larry Page (Google) invented the Internet, or retailing, or distance sales, or search engines. However, they were in the early group that recognized the potential. That was more than just good luck (which is surely also always part of it); there was an open-mindedness that allowed them to embrace uncertainty and take advantage of an opportunity.
In fact, Malcolm McLean’s early insight on containerization was not completely new, either. As early as 1929, a similar system of shipping containers was in operation between New York and Cuba. Railroad boxcars were used to drive cargo onto sea vessels and were, upon arrival, collected by a locomotive to continue the journey. It was also not uncommon for shipping companies to stack large, similar-size boxes on board. It just took someone like McLean to see it and to connect the dots properly.
A powerful vision is never merely the early identification of a changing reality. Like McLean, you need to connect the dots, combining imagination and foresight into a comprehensive, coherent, and robust story about the future of your industry, organization, or the part of it that you are responsible for. The coherence factor is critical because visions do not exist in a vacuum. The ever-evolving world and the ever-changing future shape the context in which the vision needs to thrive.
Advances in technology, the results of legislation and government policies, shifting geopolitical powers, or “simply” the (future) readiness of society to conceive of a different future are examples of factors outside the control of the visionary that influence the context and therefore the conditions for success of the vision. Consequently, the story needs to be more than one or a few remarkable insights into what might be changing: It needs to connect and integrate with a larger context of future developments. The coherence factor makes it a holistic story that is rounded and complete and doesn’t suffer from “flavor of the month-ism.” This is where it becomes difficult to play the remarkable and unconventional card, as the coherence factor pushes the story from wild and radical (inspired by the seeing things early dimension) back into the realm of a responsible, don’t-bet-the-house kind of perspective.
This might make the vision less tantalizing, but presumably more legitimate. Research conducted by Jerker Denrell, a professor of behavioral science at the Warwick Business School, exposed this catch in our fascination with the unusual. His finding: People who successfully foresee an unusual event tend to be wrong about the future over the long run. By analyzing years of experts’ quarterly forecasts for interest rates and inflation, he observed that the analyst who successfully predicted the highest number of rogue events (six) had the worst forecasting record by far. Yet out-of-the-ordinary predictions that turn out to be right draw attention. Denrell says, “We tend to admire these people because we remember that they hit and no one else did—they separated themselves from the pack.” But he continues, “If you rely heavily on the person who had that hit, you probably won’t come out ahead.”7 Balancing exciting, out-of-the-ordinary perspectives with an appropriate—but not dampening—sense of realism is a more responsible way of working.
The art form of connecting the dots is therefore about maintaining the sense of excitement around the changes the future might hold without losing sight of the bigger picture of context and time. The coherence factor is pivotal in your visionary capacity since it stops you from becoming delusional. Often timing is everything. Visions that come too early die prematurely (e.g., Microsoft’s Tablet PC introduced in 2000), and visions that come too late are nothing but me-too ideas.
McLean’s vision of containerization illustrates these points clearly. He saw the potential for change in his industry earlier than most others did (as far as we know), envisioning a very different way of working. However, he didn’t bring it together until external conditions, such as increased interstate taxes, levies, and weight restrictions, provided the right context to shape his insight into a grand vision of containerized cargo traveling between seaport hubs. With great sensitivity to context—something we’ll look at in depth later—McLean was able to connect various dots into a larger scheme, which in combination with his early insight made him the great visionary he deserves to be remembered as.
At this point you may be thinking, “Okay, but how can I see things early and how can I connect the dots? It sounds good, but I don’t know how to do it.” Your mind is racing ahead; rest assured, we will turn to some powerful and proven techniques in the chapters dedicated to each ability. For now, let’s explore this developmental framework further so that you’ll get a better idea of its intention and its use.
The two dimensions are key. They are also independent of one another. Seeing change early is about spotting isolated signals of change on the horizon while connecting the dots is about integrating the larger context, the so-called big picture. In more colloquial terms, the first one is about your eye for detail whereas the second is about your helicopter view. So, you might be good at one, but that does not imply you are good at the other. For our visionary capacity to grow, we want to become good at both. Therefore, each dimension warrants its own practices.
The fact that they are so different and independent allows us to portray them in a two-by-two (2x2) matrix,8 as shown in Figure 3-1. Each axis differentiates a low and high skill level of both dimensions. The four cells that emerge distinguish four different archetypes of visionary capacity, and even of visionary leadership.
Now that you have developed a good understanding of the framework, it’s worthwhile to take a moment to reflect on where you currently stand. Try out the practice, and establish for yourself how you do on both dimensions.
In the lower left quadrant of Figure 3-1, we find the Follower: someone neither very good at early noticing nor skilled in creating and communicating a coherent story from the various insights he or she has about what the future might bring.
This is not to say that Followers don’t have any idea of what the future might bring for their part of the organization or industry. They just don’t have a compelling story or image ready to share when provided an opportunity to ignite others. It’s either absent, poorly developed and unformulated, or all over the place and lacking coherence. The Follower may well be a wonderful person and an excellent manager, but don’t expect this person to be a rich source of inspiration, to drive innovation, fuel fresh breakthrough ideas, or help others overcome mental barriers in order to go beyond today’s reality.
Being a Follower isn’t necessarily a bad thing (where would leaders be without them?) and can indeed be a fruitful strategy, particularly in risk-avoiding organizations. Healthy levels of carefulness, critical thinking, and apprehension can work for every leader, including the visionary one. But if you’re a Follower all the time, don’t expect any of the great benefits to emerge. You won’t stretch the boundaries of your people’s imagination, reap the fruits of new ways of doing business, or be seen as a source of inspiration and energy to your followers. It just won’t happen. The upside, though, is that you will probably not experience the dark side of vision (tunnel or a fraud-inducing vision), either. In the short term, it’s relatively safe ground and, especially in hindsight, sometimes even the wisest position to take. But in the long run it could severely hurt your organization or your team, since your preoccupation with today keeps you from anticipating what comes next, and over time your role, business, or skill set might lose its relevance.
This safe ground might also stop you from reaching your full potential. Business consultant Paul Smith points out that “most businesspeople will go an entire career and never have the opportunity to impact the future of the business beyond the next fiscal year.”9 Nurturing your visionary capacity puts you in a position to potentially impact the next decade of the organization. Rethinking the future, challenging conventional wisdom, imagining a better tomorrow should not only be exciting and inspiring, but they are also a great way to explore all of your talents. Ellen Langer, professor of psychology at Harvard, clarifies that “continually re-experiencing life from a fresh vantage point is part of being truly alive.”10
In her fascinating work Fad Surfing in the Boardroom: Managing in the Age of Instant Answers, Eileen Shapiro defines fad surfing as “the practice of riding the crest of the latest management panacea and then paddling out again just in time to ride the next one; always absorbing for managers and lucrative for consultants; frequently disastrous for organizations.”11
This is a perfect description of the Trend Hopper, the person who has a well-developed ability to see things early, is very much in tune with what’s on the edge, and is existentially willing to embrace changing realities. The Trend Hopper is often an early adopter of new technology and among the first to fantasize about how things can become different— most always radically different in their view—soon. Trend Hoppers are usually inspiring to engage with and have plenty of compelling stories to share about what’s happening on the cutting-edge of the business.
But the Trend Hopper isn’t very good at turning early-stage insights into a coherent story that justifies an active strategic pursuit. It’s not in this person’s nature to find an appropriate balance between what could become radically different and what remains essentially the same, in the foreseeable future at least. The Trend Hopper runs the risk of becoming dogmatic, embracing radical views, and losing traction with the rest of the organization.
Those in this category (lower right quadrant of Figure 3-1) are less likely to develop true leadership profiles or to acquire a critical mass of dedicated followers. After chasing several flavor-of-the-month ideas, many people mentally tune out with the Trend Hopper and become reluctant to chase yet another “groundbreaking” idea or development. Trend Hoppers, or Fad Surfers, are therefore ineffective in the long run in engaging the organization, mostly because they do not successfully integrate their early insights into a larger context that provides coherence. They are the kind of people we like to listen to on Friday afternoon, but not on Monday morning.
Which brings us to the upper left quadrant of Figure 3-1, the leaders adept at connecting the dots and spinning a story that makes sense. They like to cite patterns, facts, and figures—ideally in PowerPoint—and marvel at making the road traveled so far look very coherent and intentional. When you listen to them, it all makes sense. But they have their eye trained on the factually true past, not on the imaginative uncertain future. They’re not very good at spotting where the early signals are coming from and how these could become potential game changers. I call them the Historians. They have a strong thinking preference for consistency and logic, and are therefore less interested in what breaks with coherence (unlike Trend Hoppers). Their focus is on making everyone understand why we are where we are today by integrating past events into a logically consistent perspective.
I first spotted this archetype several years ago when I was hosting a series of three-day interventions with senior and future leaders of a very large organization. Midway through these repetitive events, one of the leaders of the company’s executive team would be invited and engaged in a two-hour open dialogue with the group. Soon enough, someone would ask this leader for a clarification of the corporate strategy or some other strategic project. To me, this was always the moment of truth: Would the senior leader provide a compelling story of what the future might look like, where this strategy might bring us or how this strategic project will help prepare us for a promising future?
Sadly, I have found that these rare moments to demonstrate such forward-oriented leadership often get passed on. And I’ve been noticing this phenomenon ever since—with business leaders as well as political leaders. It seems that most of them, when given a unique opportunity to show their leadership, recite the past instead of envisioning the future. They start off saying something like, “Let me explain where we came from. Three years ago, we started with the new change program ONE that brought our focus back to the customer. As you’ll remember, we started with three key initiatives. . . . “ What follows is a careful reconstruction of history that explains why we are where we are today and justifies the chosen strategy. By the time the story ends, we have a historic, factually accurate recount of recent history that fails to inspire or energize anyone (but every head nods in agreement—or drowsiness). If you are really unlucky, the leader might say, “Glad you asked,” and launch into a fifteen-page PowerPoint slide set that he has conveniently brought along in order to nicely explain where we came from—and you get to sit politely through this “exciting” recount.
Once they’ve covered this past ground, if anyone is still listening, they often treat the future as a reverse image of the past, emphasizing that a desired outcome will be reached if “we stay on course.” It’s an extrapolative trap, one that describes the past as somehow ordained and assumes the future is more certain than it actually is.
I’ll let you think about how a visionary leader would have taken this question for clarification on the strategy or a strategic project—and give you some idea when we get to our final quadrant.
But let’s explore this archetype a bit more, since the Historian doesn’t just miss opportunities to demonstrate leadership. There are some real dangers to this overreliance on the past. For one, Historians are susceptible to tunnel vision. Their stories are so convincing that they rarely reconsider their assumptions, holding on to belief systems that have become fixated by past experiences. But we all know that the future is unlikely to be a copy of the past. Yet, not for Historians; they hold on to patterns of the past.
Moreover, Historians also quickly become, or are perceived as, cynics. And in the words of the remarkable Irish writer and philosopher Charles Handy, “There are two kinds of people. Drains and Radiators. And I have chosen to spent my life with the latter.” Cynics fall into Handy’s first category: the people who sap your energy as they explain one more time why things are the way they are, and why your unconventional idea is not going to work. Sometimes it’s reassuring to listen to a cynic, or even to be cynical yourself, but you’ll never get a powerful vision from one.
I’ve come to believe that cynicism tops the list of unhelpful attitudes in leadership and organizational life. Cynics don’t reframe, ignite, or energize—they drain.
Marketing guru Seth Godin is even more explicit on the destructive value of cynics. Under the title The Selfish Cynic, he writes on his blog: “Someone betting on the worst outcomes is going to be correct now and then, but that doesn’t mean we need to have him on our team. I’d rather work with people brave enough to embrace possible futures at the expense of being disappointed now and then. Don’t expect kudos or respect for being a cynic. It’s selfish.”12
That said, there is of course value in some historical perspective. It’s important to understand your heritage, the roots of the organization, and what it stands for. It’s important to have historical context, like the founder’s story, the collective wisdom about the successes and failures of the organization, and a good awareness of the values the company authentically carries. What is important is to not let history cripple your ability to engage constructively with the future.
A quote attributed to Albert Schweitzer says that “an optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stop-light. . . . The truly wise person is color-blind.” I’d like to extend the metaphor and let our visionary be color-blind. The visionary would not overoptimistically jump on every fad that passes by, as our Trend Hopper risks. Nor would he become a naysayer and launch into the Historian mode. The visionary takes a mindful, future-oriented perspective, balancing the need for a compelling future with the awareness of the inherent dangers of becoming dogmatic and overoptimistic.
How would a visionary leader have dealt with the opportunity described in the previous paragraphs? Visionary leaders would seize the opportunity to energize, inspire, and mobilize followers by starting their explanation of the chosen strategy in the future: “Let me explain where we’re heading. Three years from now, our company equals what FC Barcelona is in today’s soccer: a globally recognized power brand that stands for intimacy with our fans, beautiful products, and a keen eye for continuous renewal.” Or something similar: a fad-free, optimistic, hope-giving, and energizing perspective on the future (unless your company is based in Madrid, of course).
Such a response unleashes energy and engages people’s imagination, allowing them to freely associate with the vision and derive purpose and meaning from it. That’s what a vision foremost needs to do: allow others to “see” and embrace it. The future therefore concerns an aspirational image; it is something that we see, feel, and smell rather than something we need to process intellectually by a series of jammed PowerPoint slides or dreary bullet points.
Regrettably, I don’t see many leaders who operate at this aspirational level and are able to convincingly share a compelling future-oriented perspective that fills people with meaning and energy. Maybe it’s because they don’t have a story ready to tell at such leadership moments of truth. Or maybe it’s because it is much safer to stay within the historical context of demonstrable facts than to tap into your own and your followers’ imaginations. It might also be because they don’t understand the critical value of inspiration in engaging people in a desired transformation. Whatever the cause, it’s a missed opportunity to guide, influence, and persuade those that matter most in your leadership, and who are pivotal in helping you achieve the goals and transformation you are aiming for.
The Follower, the Trend Hopper, and the Historian are archetypes. And while their descriptions are pretty extreme, you’ve probably met all of them (perhaps in a watered-down version) in your organizational life. You probably have firsthand knowledge of how each one falls short in the vision department. If they’re good at seeing things early, they’re not always good at connecting the dots. Or if they connect the dots, they fall short when it comes to picking up early signals.
To become a visionary leader, you will need to develop both of these essential dimensions. They’re the topics of our next two chapters, in which I take you through the practical side of growing both abilities. In the two final sections of this chapter, let’s dive deeper into the differences between the two dimensions, and discover how we differentiate proclaimed larger-than-life visionaries from true visionaries.
The two dimensions—seeing things early and connecting the dots—have a number of things in common. Both are future-oriented; built around imagination; exploratory; anticipatory; potentially frame-breaking; and engage positively with uncertainty. On the developmental front, these similarities imply that there are a number of conditional factors essential for both. Behaviors and mindset factors such as curiosity, open-mindedness, and playfulness are important to the development of both dimensions. We will explore these human aspects, attitudes, and productive behaviors in more depth in Chapters 6 and 7.
But there are also key differences, ones that mean we need separate approaches for sharpening and growing those abilities. Let’s lay out those differences.
Research suggests that the average person consumes about 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words of information in a single day.13 Because we’re operating on constant information overload, it’s vital that we filter out what’s important and what’s not. The ability to see change early depends on judging weak signals according to the relevance they represent. Without specific effort, you will only be able to identify events that were early manifestations of change in retrospect. But that’s usually when it’s too late. You want to identify them as they unfold or even before they unfold. So it becomes important to establish the relevance of certain early-warning signals to the future of the industry, country, organization, or whatever future you’re interested in.
The ability to connect the dots, though, is focused on implications of changing realities. It takes the ideas generated from the early noticing ability and integrates them with other important factors, putting the early signals of a changing reality into perspective and making them logically consistent. The resulting story is then complete to potentially serve as a powerful vision.
In a parliamentary hearing broadcast on national television in the Netherlands, one of the key planners of the Dutch Planning Bureau defended the organization for not having foreseen the financial crisis of 2008. He sounded like a lot of other planners that year: “Our models just did not cater to the eventuality that banks would no longer be willing to lend each other money.” For the Netherlands, the financial crisis resulted in nationalization of one of its three main banks (ABN AMRO Bank) and massive financial support to other banks of Dutch descent, such as ING. Naturally, there was no shortage of questions about how they’d gotten there and who was to blame.
At first glance, the planner’s statement about their models seems reasonable. After all, the financial crisis was unprecedented. Maybe it was unrealistic to expect the planning bureau to consider such extreme possibilities in its models.
Or was it? Let’s go back a year before the crisis fully unfolded, before the fall of Lehman Brothers. It was on September 12, 2007, that the interbank lending market locked up overnight fully unexpectedly. Suddenly, banks refused to lend money to one other to cover short-term liquidity needs, a practice otherwise all too common in the banking industry. Trust in each other’s ability to repay abruptly disappeared. To keep the system afloat and prevent banks from going under, the European Bank, the U.K. National Bank, and the U.S. Federal Reserve pumped billions of euros into the interbank lending market, an unprecedented move.
Soon it became clear that the sudden banking panic was due to a rumor. British bank Northern Rock had just borrowed funds from the government to avoid a liquidity crisis, and the move sparked fears that it would go bankrupt. When word got out, depositors stormed in to withdraw their savings. It was the first run on a British bank in 150 years. The rumor was felt internationally as the wholesale markets froze, shutting down a system that had operated successfully for years. Once the culprit was identified, banks gradually eased their reluctance and started lending each other money again.
So let’s get back to the Dutch Planning Bureau. It knew—or for sure could have known—that a sudden lockup of the wholesale markets was possible; it had already happened because of the fear that just one bank would fail. Twelve months before the fall of Lehman Brothers, the bureau’s planners should have absorbed this data and made their models more robust for such (no-longer-obscure) eventualities, if they had had their eye sharpened to seeing things early. Regrettably, however, planning bureaus tend to focus more on connecting the dots, looking for the fairly coherent relationships between parameters instead of looking for rogue events.
Nassim Taleb’s classic The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable was, improbably, published a few months before the run on Northern Rock. The former trader’s story and philosophy was written up by Malcolm Gladwell and published in The New Yorker in 2002.14 As Gladwell describes him, Taleb runs an investment fund with a very unconventional approach. While nearly all fund managers pride themselves on their (often illusionary) ability to pick stocks, Taleb’s fund is rather uniquely managed with the belief that rogue, unexpected events always appear in a market. Sooner or later the market will experience a big negative shock due to a rogue event such as 9/11 or Enron’s collapse, or Lehman Brothers’s demise, Dubai’s insolvency announcement, Greece’s fraud with its economic statistics, or Japan’s tsunami. Therefore, the fund only invests in put options, investment instruments that materialize with falling prices. When that happens, as Taleb knows it will one day, his continuous day-to-day losses endured during uneventful periods are widely offset by the leveraged profits they make on that one day. It requires nerve to bear seemingly endless losses in normal periods of market growth, but since Taleb is convinced that rogue events are inevitable, he happily accepts these losses.
The Dutch Planning Bureau took—and probably still takes—a “connecting the dots” approach to engaging with the future. This bias creates an illusion of control, which we will recognize in Chapter 6 as one of the dangers leading to tunnel vision. Sometimes one data point can defy all the logic in the model. Even though it represents a different and often unwanted reality, it’s the outlier that must be considered in serious planning. The ability to connect the dots isn’t enough. A model, like a vision, requires an understanding of the relevance of single data points in addition to the model, even if these points are outliers. Especially if they happened just twelve months earlier.
The third core difference between seeing things early and connecting the dots is a behavioral one. The ability to see things early requires astute attention to detail. You need to filter the signal from the noise, focusing on one or possibly a few weak signals that are undetected by most.
The ability to create a coherent story, however, takes a helicopter view. A generalist who isn’t hampered by too much attention to detail can understand the implications of various developments and connect them in a logical, compelling story.
Developing both abilities requires the skills and focus of the specialist and the generalist. You must consider the relevance and potential consequences of rather vague, weak signals and then step into the helicopter and combine the signals with larger, possibly macroeconomic, trends and developments at play in the world and your industry. Collectively, these skills help us spot manifestations of changing realities earlier than others (e.g., competitors) and turn them into an overarching story that is both intriguing (through its early identifications) and logical (through its connections to other observable phenomena).
The fourth and last difference I want to bring to the surface—and which is perhaps the most pivotal in understanding visionary capacity as I promote it—relates to perceptions of risks. Your ability to identify change is about looking beyond the conventional and questioning the way things are as they are today. Hence, a challenging, risk-seeking stance. Your ability to connect the dots is more conservative and risk-averse, however, since it looks for a coherent bigger picture. In other words, it forces you to be mindful about the stance you take and not bet the house over attractive yet highly speculative views brought to you by your improved ability to identify early changes.
This fourth difference relates to a much larger theme in understanding visionary leadership—at least, the perspective I take on it. Let’s zoom in on that in this chapter’s next and final section.
To round off our introduction to the framework of visionary development proposed here, it might be interesting to contemplate how well the model informs us about visionary leadership in real life. To paraphrase John Kotter’s landmark article titled “What Leaders Really Do,” let’s ask ourselves the question: What do visionary leaders really do?
The problem with this question is that the colloquial use of the term visionary blurs with overlapping concepts such as charisma, entrepreneurship, and narcissism. Let’s dig deeper, since it is important to understand the perspective we take here on the meaning of visionary, for it will guide our further exploration.
Many leadership challenges revolve around mediating dilemmas and trade-offs. Entrepreneurship is good, but too much of it might spin things out of control. Long-term focus is important, but without short-term gains it becomes hard to sustain. Incentives work well in aligning action, but too many might push people over ethical and legal boundaries. Growth is important, but so is sustainability. Persistence is a great leadership quality, but dogmatism is not. All such dilemmas call for finding an appropriate balance between forces deemed important in the strategy and leadership field. It is the leader’s role to identify, confront, manage, and sometimes resolve these dilemmas, taking into account culture, legacy, aspiration, risk-profile, reputation, and other contextual themes.
Our visionary framework also represents such a dilemma. Stretching the boundaries by “seeing things early” and jumping on changing realities leans toward risk seeking: challenging the status quo, thinking differently, and exploring new opportunities early. On the other hand, seeking coherence by “connecting the dots” in a responsible way, and working from a richer position than one of mere faith and wishful thinking, leans toward risk aversion. We should be very mindful of our limited perspective and the risk of tunnel vision, so we must keep in mind that our version of connecting the dots is but one version of how the dots of the future can be connected.
Hence, the two axes are the yin and yang of visionary capacity: risk seeking vs. risk aversion. Balancing them is the real art of looking ahead. Therefore, our exploration of what visionary leaders really do should not be confused with anecdotal evidence of leaders who predominantly had their eye on the changing realities (that is, in “seeing things early”) and turned their early insight into a formidable success. Such stories of heroic leadership have great appeal, but it’s responsible visionary leadership that we should aim to develop—not “leadership by gambling.”
The real challenge we face, therefore, is the popular use of the word visionary. We’re inclined to apply the term to mystical, larger-than-life personalities who make the cover of Fortune magazine and whose books about themselves and their successes are instant bestsellers. Think of Larry Ellison, Andy Grove, Jack Welch, but equally Napoléon Bonaparte, Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill, and Bill Clinton.
The most prominent example in recent times would be Steve Jobs, undoubtedly topping most people’s list of contemporary visionary leaders. His remarkable and astonishing track record at Apple, in particular its evolution from near bankruptcy in the mid-nineties to being the most valuable company in the world just a little more than a decade later, is a recovery story beyond imagination. Anyone’s intuitive reaction to the question of whether Steve Jobs was a visionary leader would likely be affirmative. But notwithstanding his amazing achievements at Apple, and his extraordinary re-creation of the much-adored company (I’m a big fan of Apple’s products), I must disagree. Let’s elaborate, since I know this position is controversial.
Visionary leaders are often mixed up with what really are narcissistic leaders. Narcissists who get to the point of being leaders are—seemingly— very good at the Vision Thing. They readily share “big picture” stories, speak eloquently, and are self-assured in their ideas. But you do not need to be a narcissist in order to become good at the Vision Thing. According to Freud, who conceptualized the term in the psychoanalytic field in his work On Narcissism, “people of this type impress others as being ‘personalities.’ ” He praised them for their ability to “give a fresh stimulus to cultural development or damage the established state of affairs.” But he also identified their dark side: “Achievement can feed feelings of grandiosity”15 in such personalities.
In today’s world, the term narcissism generally has a negative undertone; narcissists have strong egos, care mainly about themselves, like to be the center of attention, and consider their point of view to be the only valid one. They can radiate an abrasive level of self-confidence, are often shamelessly assertive, and can be very pretentious, to mention just a few negative associations. Some extreme personalities even think of themselves as “the chosen ones.” An executive at Oracle once characterized his narcissistic CEO Larry Ellison by saying that the “only difference between God and Larry is that God doesn’t believe he is Larry.”
Anthropologist and psychotherapist Michael Maccoby favorably reinterpreted part of that negative image when he introduced the concept of productive narcissism. In his acclaimed article “Narcissistic Leaders,”16 he acknowledges the dark side, but points out that this type of personality can be extraordinarily useful in times of change, when decisive leadership is called for. Under these circumstances, narcissistic leaders excel at rallying the troops through inspiration, motivation, and direction setting—the same qualities that contribute to a powerful vision. “They are gifted and creative strategists who see the big picture and find meaning in the risky challenge of changing the world and leaving behind a legacy,” Maccoby says.17 Narcissists have the capacity to incite massive change.
So where do the two concepts of narcissism and visionary disconnect? This is where we return to Steve Jobs, whose biography provided a clear peek into his character and personality.18 Jobs possessed all the positive qualities Maccoby pointed out: He managed to inspire and lead Apple through its tremendous transformation. His passionate personality was a perfect fit for Apple—in that period of time. Jobs spotted the changes on the horizons of the music industry, the cell phone industry, and the tablet industry very early, and he mobilized his troops with energizing views and speeches: a clear ten out of ten on “seeing things early.”
Studying his biography, you don’t need a Ph.D. in psychology to spot the dark sides of Jobs’s personality. He had remarkably little empathy, was a poor listener, intolerant toward different perspectives, dogmatic, self-absorbed, stubborn, and a fanatical troublemaker (also when it was unproductive). All qualities we would normally consider harmful in responsibly developing your ability to better connect the dots of the future.
Jobs undeniably got the big picture right—which we know with the benefit of hindsight. But the ability to connect the dots is not about getting the big picture right: It’s about understanding that you are operating under great uncertainty, and therefore prudence is required. It creates balance between the risk-seeking yin of seeing things early and the risk-averse yang of connecting the dots. Qualities such as open-mindedness, thoughtfulness, playfulness with other perspectives, and genuinely listening to others are very important for developing this coherence-seeking dimension in a responsible way.
Remember, our two axes are developmental axes. In hindsight everything might look clear and obvious, but looking forward, being narrow-sighted, overconfident, and dogmatic can (too) easily lead to irresponsible big bets. Thus, these should not be considered qualities to strive for in developing your visionary side.
Making big bets fits perfectly with the narcissistic leadership profile. Narcissists love gripping visions of radical change. However, as Maccoby warns, the “tendency toward grandiosity is the Achilles’ heel of narcissists.” History has taught us that over time, narcissists tend to alienate themselves from reality and start overestimating their abilities. Their successes feed this tendency, frequently leading to destruction. To quote Maccoby once more, “One of the greatest problems is that the narcissist’s faults tend to become more pronounced as he becomes more successful.”19 So, while Steve Jobs—and many other seemingly larger-than-life leaders—fits the profile of the big-thinking productive narcissist, this doesn’t necessarily mean he is also a visionary. Not in my definition of responsible visionary leadership, at least, which puts risk seeking and disruption in check with a dimension of risk aversion and coherence.
To avoid confusion, we should be careful in defining what “visionary” really means. I propose to define it by the two—opposing—dimensions of early noticing (risk seeking, disruption) and creating coherence (risk-averse). True visionaries develop unconventional and possibly game-changing perspectives, but they are equally sensitive to the risks involved and take action to prevent their dream from becoming a hallucination. They are less publicity-prone than the spotlight-seeking narcissist is, and their success stories are featured on the cover of Fortune far less often.
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In this chapter we’ve established a developmental framework for learning how to responsibly anticipate the future and grow your visionary capacity. It boils down to increasing your abilities to see things early and to connect the dots.
Now, we’ll discuss how to go about cultivating these abilities in real life. What can you do to train yourself and your team to see change before others do? And what can you do to turn these early signs into a coherent story that becomes a compelling and powerful vision? These are intriguing questions, and the answers are not all that obvious.
