Why Visions Die Prematurely

WHY VISIONS DIE PREMATURELY

Many visions never take root and spread—despite having intrinsic merit. Several limits to growth structures can come into play to arrest the building of momentum behind a new vision. Understanding these structures can help considerably in sustaining the visioning process.

Visions spread because of a reinforcing process of increasing clarity, enthusiasm, communication and commitment. As people talk, the vision grows clearer. As it gets clearer, enthusiasm for its benefits builds. And soon, the vision starts to spread in a reinforcing spiral of communication and excitement. Enthusiasm can also be reinforced by early successes in pursuing the vision (another potential reinforcing process).

If the reinforcing process operated unfettered, it would lead to continuing growth in clarity and shared commitment toward the vision, among increasing numbers of people. But any of a variety of limiting factors can come into play to slow down this virtuous cycle.

The visioning process can wither if, as more people get involved, the diversity of views dissipates focus and generates unmanageable conflicts. People see different ideal futures. Must those who do not agree immediately with the emerging shared vision change their views? Do they conclude that the vision is set in stone and no longer influenceable? Do they feel that their own visions do not even matter? If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” the enrolling process can grind to a halt with a wave of increasing polarization.

This is a classic limits to growth structure, where the reinforcing process of growing enthusiasm for the vision interacts with a balancing process that limits the spread of the visions, due to increasing diversity and polarization. As enthusiasm builds, more people are talking about the vision and the diversity of views increases, leading to people expressing potentially conflicting visions. If other people are unable to allow this diversity to be expressed, polarization increases, reducing the clarity of the shared visions, and limiting the growth of enthusiasm.

In limits to growth structures, leverage usually lies in understanding the limiting factor, the implicit goal or norm that drives the balancing feedback process. In this case, that limiting factor is the ability (or inability) to inquire into diverse visions in such a way that deeper, common visions emerge. Diversity of visions will grow until it exceeds the organization’s capacity to “harmonize” diversity. The most important skills to circumvent this limit are the reflection and inquiry skills developed in Chapter 9, “Mental Models.” In effect, the visioning process is a special type of inquiry process. It is an inquiry into the future we truly seek to create. If it becomes a pure advocacy process, it will result in compliance, at best, not commitment.

Approaching the visioning as an inquiry process does not mean that I have to give up my view. On the contrary, visions need strong advocates. But advocates who can also inquire into others’ visions open the possibility for the vision to evolve, to become larger than our individual visions.

Visions can also die because people become discouraged by the apparent difficulty in bringing the vision into reality. As clarity about the nature of the vision increases so does awareness of the gap between the vision and current reality. People become disheartened, uncertain, or even cynical, leading to a decline in enthusiasm. This feedback pattern produces “organizational discouragement”: greater clarity reveals a difficult gap, and discouragement weakens the commitment needed to close it.

In this structure, the limiting factor is the capacity of people in the organization to “hold” creative tension, the central principle of personal mastery. This is why we say that personal mastery is the bedrock for developing shared vision—organizations that do not encourage personal mastery find it very difficult to foster sustained commitment to a lofty vision.

Emerging visions can also die because people get overwhelmed by the demands of current reality and lose their focus on the vision. The limiting factor becomes the time and energy to focus on a vision.

In this case, the leverage must lie either in finding ways to focus less time and effort on fighting crises and managing current reality, or breaking off those pursuing the new vision from those responsible for handling “current reality.” In many ways, this is the strategy of “skunk works,” small groups that quietly pursue new ideas out of the organizational mainstream. While this approach is often necessary, it is difficult to avoid fostering two polar extreme “camps” that no longer can support one another.

Lastly, a vision can die if people forget their connection to one another. This is one of the reasons that approaching visioning as a joint inquiry is so important. Once people stop asking “What do we really want to create?” and begin proselytizing the official vision, the quality of ongoing conversation, and the quality of relationships nourished through that conversation, erodes. One of the deepest desires underlying shared vision is the desire to be connected, to a larger purpose and to one another. The spirit of connection is fragile. It is undermined whenever we lose our respect for one another and for each other’s views. We then split into insiders and outsiders—those who are “true believers” in the vision and those who are not. When this happens, the visioning conversations no longer build enthusiasm for the vision.

The limiting factor when people begin proselytizing and lose their sense of relationship can be time or skills. If there is great urgency to “sign up” for the new vision, people may just not perceive that there is time to really talk and listen to one another. This will be especially likely if people are also unskilled in how to have such a conversation, how to share their vision in such a way that they are not proselytizing, but are encouraging others to reflect on their own visions.