Vision: Leadership & living beyond the horizon

I remember when I completed writing and publishing The 18 Challenges of Leadership thinking to myself, “what next?”.  What I actually said to myself was “what would a good leader do now?”.  The simplest definition of leadership I ever came up with was “lift up your head”.  Non leaders are busy walking with their heads facing down to their toes; looking at what is, the immediate, what is under their nose, what the terrain looks like right now and how to organise and navigate myself through it.  Leaders, by contrast, lift up their heads, so that they can see the future and walk towards it. Their feet are firmly on the ground (they are realists) and their eyes are on the horizon (they are visionaries).  But there is a small Bear trap here for leaders and it is in the word ‘vision’.  Of course, in one sense ‘vision’ is the right word because it’s all about seeing and that is what vision means. But it’s a Bear trap because just as walking with your head down can lead you to becoming a functionary of the present situation, so also just lifting up your head can result in looking up and accepting what lies on the horizon and walking towards the inevitable. True vision, for leaders, has three dimensions to it. Each dimension is prefixed by an essential word – “Create”. Leaders don’t just inhabit a laid-out future, they create it. They see what their eyes show to them and then they re-imagine it. “What could this look like?” and then they walk towards it, drawing others onto the journey. 

The first dimension of creating vision is often called Perspective. Perspective challenges us to challenge ourselves about what we are seeing in front of us. Ken Wilber’s Integral approach teaches us to look at every issue from at least four perspectives. There is a personal, subjective viewpoint, (what it looks like from inside of my own mind, emotions, attitudes), there is a personal, objective view point (what it looks like from an external observers’ point of view), but then there are also two collective perspectives. How do we, together, see this situation from the inside of our group, tribe, culture or organisation (what does it feel like to us? How do we view it? Sometimes this is called a paradigm), and then, how is this situation observed from the external perspective - if a group of people were looking at the same issue.  

Spiral Dynamics is another perspective builder.  Using the image of climbing a spiral staircase, at ground level there is only antagonism or negotiation. Spiral Dynamics encourages us to climb upwards and see the issues from higher and higher perspectives. The personal can be seen from the level of the tribe, group or family, the tribe can be viewed from the level of the globe, the globe can be viewed from the level of the universe, the universe can be viewed from the level of the transpersonal. With each shift upwards in perspective new understanding and new solutions are revealed.  Vision is created through perspective. 

 Once I heard the true story of two lovers being torn apart by family pressures because of two totally different cultural and faith backgrounds. The perspectives of these waring attitudes were getting destructively inside the couples’ relationship. A wise person counselled them both to choose the book that was dearest to their heart, that captured their faith and culture and perspectives, that they would love to invite their partner to read. They swapped precious books and each partner found, as they read the book they had been gifted, a deep insight into their partners world view, their heart, their faith, their culture and their love-perspectives. When they met and shared all they had learned they discovered that their learning had created a whole new space between them that transcended the polarised views they were being pressured with. It was no longer a conflict, it was no longer a negotiation with winners and losers, it was a new way of seeing life, each other and a life together, within this larger perspective. 

The second dimension of vison is to create the future. Leaders do not just see what is, what can be viewed with the regular eye, they see how they want it to be.  “How do I want the future to look like: How do I want to be as a person in the future?” increasingly the word “re-imagine” is seen as the key. When you look into the future you can imagine how it will be, but more than that, how you want it to be.  Re-imagine how you desire it to be. 

When I first visited the Dandora area of Nairobi, Kenya, it was one of the poorest, most dangerous, most unhygienic places in the city, especially as it was built on the city’s vast garbage dump.  If you drew a straight line from the present to the future you could see what Dandora would look like in 10, 20 years from now.  But that isn’t vision, it’s just sight. It isn’t re-imagining the future.  What the youth, who were beginning to own their own leadership potential, asked themselves was, “what kind of future would amaze us here? What could Dandora become positively famous for?” Music and dance and art were emerging as a vibrant force among the local youth and so they re-imagined Dandora by saying, “What if Dandora were to become famous across Nairobi and beyond, as a centre for excellence for youth in the area of the arts?”; “What if when you thought of brilliant hip-hop the first word that would come to your mind would be Dandora?” And because they re-imagined the future, this then-impossible future is now a vibrant reality. The young leaders of Dandora embodied the leadership of vision, summed up in the words of John O’Donohue, when he said,

“May you have a mind that loves frontiers, so that you can evoke the bright fields that lie beyond the view of the regular eye”[1].

The third dimension of vision is to create a legacy. Parsival, one of the legendary Knights of King Arthur’s Round Table, reveals the fundamental question that we need to ask as we search for the holy grail of leadership, and it is this, “Who does the Grail serve?”.  Vision for who? Vision in service of what?  It was wonderfully said of Nelson Mandela by his close ally, Cyril Ramaphosa that,

“..he’s a historical man, he was thinking ahead of us. He had posterity in mind. How will they view what we’ve done? And history has absolved him; It turned out exactly as he thought it would[2]”

This is the vision of legacy. What is the story we want to write beyond this horizon, not on the horizon? Many leaders can get as far as the horizon, but only the wisest of leaders goes beyond – whether that is the horizon of their tenure, or their career, or their lifetime. True leadership looks beyond. A friend of mine’s father once said to him, “Eddie, the most unselfish thing you can do with your life  is to plant a walnut tree…. because you probably won’t see the fruit in your own life time”.  

Whether we are creating families, organisations, or, as in the case of Mandela, a whole nation, we should ask ourselves, “how will the future judge us?” What investment will they see that we made in the past, so that they could reap the story they enjoy in the future? 

A future that is sustainable, just, peaceful, equal?  Stengel, Mandela’s aide in working on his autobiography, Long Walk To Freedom, observed him day in and day out for years and concluded of Mandela,

“He was looking over the horizon”. He was always seeing where you cannot see with the naked eye, in order to create a legacy for future generations that cannot yet be seen.

When we say that leaders are people of vision, it means they are growing all three of these dimensions,

The vision of perspective

The vision of re-imagining

and

The vision of legacy

Of course, there is one more thing. It isn’t vision that motives people; its shared vision. 

But that’s for another article!

[1] For A Leader by John O’Donohue

[2] Mandela’s Way           Richard Stengel         Crown Publishers        2010