“In Germany, if you have a vision, you should see a Doctor!”

This was said to me in a break at a leadership development program.

One of the participants was a young manager from Hamburg, and he came up to me after my lecture on “Creating a Vision – a leadership task”. He was joking, sort of.
But he had two very powerful observations: One, he perceived a cultural challenge in our “management speak”. The lofty, hairy and motivational speeches were not so motivational for him. I will touch upon that part in a later post.
Secondly, he underlined the problem of so many company visions: 1) They are perceived as unrealistic hollow words, and 2) They change, not because we have achieved them and need another more challenging one, but because we change our managers! At times we are tempted to change it by overambitious marketers too.

The Vision can be illustrated by holding a rubber band between two hands.

The distance creates tension. The longer away the hands are, the more tension, obviously.
The upper hand can symbolise the vision, and the lower hand the current reality. The vision should create interesting tension, not so far away that the string breaks, and not so close that it becomes lame and uninspiring.

The challenge is that the tension could be resolved in two ways: 1) to lift the current reality closer to the vision, but also 2) to lower the vision (or ambition), or to change it totally. ;-)

In addition the vision should paint an inspiring picture of where we are at some stage (timeframe depend on culture and business reality), and what it looks like when we get there. Too many visions are intentions, and intentions seldom get us anywhere.

Is my vision or ambition interestingly far away from current reality? Does it create inspiration? Are all of my efforts aimed at lifting the current reality? If we are tempted to lower the ambition to ease the tension, do we have the guts to stop and remind ourselves that our task is to move us and the business towards the vision!