Let’s stop doing vision work

For years now, I’ve had this feeling that vision work is pointless. And I’m pulling from a decade plus of being the vision person. On one end I’ve co-created with stakeholders, collaborated across massive org footprints, brought both execs and build teams along on a journey, and on the other end I’ve co-created with customers, formed tiger teams, and created scoped framings that are able to scale. From big to small, and from consultant to employee, the one consistent thing has been that the outcome of vision work never ends up as effective as work that develops organically in a shared direction.

I’ve found the language for this, and a way to make vision work less pointless. The answer is in evolutionary biology, pulling from the work of Stuart Kauffman and his concept of The Adjacent Possible.

Here’s a technical definition of The Adjacent Possible (TAP), bear with me: The biosphere constitutes a non-ergodic domain qualitatively distinct from the ergodic physical domain. The biosphere cannot, in principle, be reduced to the physical. Higher-order phenomena such as agency, meaning and value are radically–i.e. ontologically rather than epistemically–emergent. They are the product of a creativity inherent to the universe rather than of physical laws and/or deterministic processes.

Basically, according to Kaufman, in any sufficiently complex system there is no way to predict or create what will come into being because so many things are possible and so many things will change and emerge along the way.

Applying this to vision work: The likelihood that a vision actually comes into being is extremely low, per the theory of TAP, and vision work is in a sense pointless because it’s temporary and simply sets things in motion. And while it can be a direction-setting exercise that helps people identify a shared sense of meaning and value—an idea of what a team could enable—it also has to allow them full agency to deviate completely from the meaning, the value, and even the entire vision whenever it makes sense.

The startup world knows this well, but it’s something that big companies (i.e., people inside a complex system) very naturally tend to lose sight of. What we can learn from TAP is that in any organization, vision cannot be a deterministic process and instead needs to be a process of so-called ‘enabling’ toward so-called ‘mattering’.

To put it in plain language: I think we all want to build something that matters. So we do vision work, thinking it will matter, and then have feelings when it almost inevitably doesn’t. Instead let’s stop doing vision work, see what’s possible today, do what matters right now, and stay willing to change direction, to build a better future together. It’s that simple… and also deeply complex when you get into it. Thanks for listening.

Source: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/03080188.2022.2125614