In many ways, you could say executing a vision is like creating something from nothing. The structure, systems, processes and institutions that should champion and support the vision doesn’t exist yet. When your daily work centres upon building out a vision, you discover that there is no Standard Operating Procedure (SOP); written instructions that outline a routine or repetitive activity followed by an organization. In fact, there is no organization. That is why working on a vision is not like a normal job, where you’re debriefed on exactly what needs to be done. There’s nothing to be done until you take the initiative and develop the daily activities that would generate the results we desire.
Following “due process” is a great practice that helps to maintain the status quo. However, if the status quo was good enough, we would not be out here in search of something new. When a visionary gets obsessed with following due process, no revolutionary work gets done. In many ways, “due process” replaces thinking. When you think about it, you realize that there is no need to think when there is a template or procedure to follow. You simply take the template and fill in the blanks – done and on to the next task. Your vision probably can not thrive within existing “due processes”. You have got to reimagine things and actually think about how best to pursue your vision.
The only way to ensure that a vision continues long after the original visionaries are gone is to build institutions that champion the cause. This is how you go full circle. You begin with nothing more than an idea, and then you scale it up into an institution. Everything has got to get built brick-by-brick, no shortcuts. That is why visionaries are also self-starters. It is up to the visionaries to generate the activities that would produce the change we seek, and then others can be employed to help with the work. If you consider yourself a visionary, but struggle with generating daily tasks and recording some progress with the vision, you might have skipped some critical training and preparatory apprenticeships. If you cannot create something from nothing, you cannot run with a vision.
