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. 

We allow excuses to get in the way of important (but not urgent) work required to move things forward. Over time, this comes back to haunt us because without consistent high quality execution, the vision is no good. Execution and excuses don’t mix. You cannot be defined by your vision and your ability to give excuses at the same time. Sooner or later, you would realize that you have to choose: are you going to continue with the vision, or are you going to succumb to excuses?

A lot of times, it is easier to find an excuse to stop going, rather than the will to keep moving. This is why visionaries are usually known to possess a strong will and a healthy dose of stubbornness. The critical activities required to birth a vision rarely carry with it any urgency, deceiving the naïve into thinking execution can wait until a more favourable time. It cannot. There will always be a thousand and one reasons something cannot be done at the moment. To make matters more complicated, most of these things will not come with hard deadlines, only the brave can carry through with the plans.

After all is said and done, the success of the vision boils down to the quality of execution. A vision picks up momentum over time and can snowball into something really special. However, the early days can be slow, and the vision dies if one fails to generate enough activities around it. It takes focus and great discipline to understand that except one makes the time and commit to work on the vision daily, there will be no activity to demand your time daily as well. Excuses make it difficult to build up momentum around your vision and must be eradicated.

“Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.” – George Washington Carver

When you become serious about your heavenly assignment to watch over the world and steer the rest of us towards a better future, you would see clearly that it goes beyond what a single person can do. It does not matter how talented or gifted an individual can be, a true vision will require many people working together with one heart and one mind. You can single-handedly push your ambitious projects across the finish line, but if it is a true vision, you will need people. Jesus famously had more than a hundred disciples, twelve apostles and an inner caucus of three (1).

Do you want to change the world or merely desire to “do what you can”? If all you desire is to do what you can, then you are not bound to this principle. However, if you desire to truly impact and positively transform your world, there is no other way. A husband and wife team is adorable and commendable, but you would need more than that for a global footprint.  If you want to impact the world, you require at the very least four to eight true believers in the idea.

You cannot save, deliver or change the world alone. The principal mistake of Samson was that he thought he was gifted enough to single-handedly execute a vision. He was wrong. Throughout history, there has NEVER being someone that single-handedly changed the world at a meaningful scale. When you go beyond the surface and really investigate great men who seemed to single-handedly accomplish much, you find their team. Jesus had his apostles and disciples. Moses had Aaron, Miriam, Hur and Joshua, then seventy more elders to support, not counting the leaders he instated at various levels as well (2). Gideon famously assembled an army of three hundred. You cannot change the world alone.

If you are serious about changing the world, you should team up with a true visionary or try to get others to team up with you to execute the heavenly vision in your heart.

FOOTNOTES:

1. There were 120 disciples gathered at the upper room (Acts 1:15). Jesus named 12 apostles (Luke 6:13) and it is well-known that he had a smaller leadership team of three within the twelve (Peter, James and John).
2. Seventy elders were appointed to aid Moses at Numbers 11:16-25, and you can see Moses raises numerous leaders to serve in various levels at Exodus 18:14 – 26.

Every day, you hear about some visionary championing a worthy cause only to fizzle out over time. There is such a long list of visions that we can consider to be dead. We have to remember that conceiving a vision and even planning it out counts for little if there is nothing to power the vision. The vision fails when there is not enough to power it up. Vision is powered by the collective consciousness and efforts of a people, and without that, nothing happens. The basic kinds of power required for a vision to find a firm footing are spiritual and intellectual powers.

It is hard to find any activity that is more important to a true visionary than prayer and meditation. Conceiving a vision can be exciting and empowering, however, execution is usually boring and one runs into obstacles all the time. Without constantly drawing from that secret place of strength, love and warmth, the vision fades away over time. So, a visionary that is pushing a vision much bigger than themselves must understand the need for spiritual power. Every success story out there includes some luck or unexplainable circumstances that helped. You will always need some “grace” or “good luck” to forge ahead with your work. If prayer could increase your chances, why not?

You have got to acquire spiritual and intellectual powers. Thinking everything will happen just because you have prayed about it is incredibly naïve. This is where the prayer warriors get it wrong. Prayer, fasting and other spiritual activities generally make grace available for the work. The next thing to do after praying is to figure out HOW TO proceed with whatever you have been praying about. The vision will fail if we do not develop the necessary intellectual capacity for the work. You have got to decide to pursue the best education you can and collaborate with others better than you. As a rule of thumb; you want to pray hard and work hard simultaneously.

It is very important for a visionary to understand that the implementation of a vision will depend upon how much power one is able to generate. There is a need to understand and accept that knowing what to do and being able to do what needs to be done are two separate things entirely. Your smartphone is always programmed to function, but without a battery to power it up, it cannot execute its programming. Therefore, as you develop your original ideas about what the future could look like, do not forget to consider the kind of powers you would need to implement the vision.

In practice, it would seem like it is easy to dream up and develop original ideas about which way your world needs to go. The trouble is always around implementation. It would seem that visionaries can be quite naïve when the conversation shifts from vision planning to vision execution. One can only execute to the extent to which power is available. We need more visionaries to recognize the need to really understand the power requirements of their visions. Stop developing plans without any thought with respect to what it would take to drive those changes. What kind of spiritual, intellectual, cultural, economic, and governmental powers would you need to drive the vision in your spirit?

It takes some maturity to understand the kind of power required to drive a vision. We need to become more thoughtful in our approach towards vision planning and execution. Perhaps it could be helpful to understand the limitations one faces and then proceed to plan and execute within those limits. You might not have enough power to drive a change globally, but maybe you wield a lot of influence in your neighbourhood. What changes could you drive with that? You would do well to consider how much power and resources are available to you per time and the kind of changes it could power. How much power do you need to implement the change you dream about?

It has been said over and over again:

Where there is no vision, the people perish: But he that keepeth the law, happy is he.

Proverbs 29:18 KJV

We tend to focus more on the “people perish where there is no vision” and not enough on the fact that “vision perish where there are not enough people” to believe in it. We need to be reminded that a true vision is by definition the redemptive plan of God for a people group, it will always take more than a person to deliver the result. That is why a visionary must understand the need to build a core team with humility and self-sacrifice. The vision dies without people actively working together to make it work.

The number one job of a principal is to sell the vision and get people to buy into it. It is impossible to succeed alone, you cannot succeed alone. We are not talking about some personal ambition like buying a house or starting a business, we are talking about big, world-changing visions. A vision that originates from heaven will always be too big for a single individual to accomplish. It would be very difficult, if not out rightly impossible, for an individual to gather enough knowledge and effort that is required for massive success. This was the principal mistake of Samson; he tried to execute a vision single-handedly. No team.

A study of the bible would reveal that when you have a world-changing vision, the first step is to build a team. We all consider Jesus to be the Son of God, God in human flesh, all-powerful and all-knowing, yet, even Jesus had a team. He recruited people, trained them in his vision for a better world, and led them with humility and self-sacrifice. There is no way around this. Your vision might not see the light of day unless you get at least five people to coordinate with you in a spirit of harmony for a definitive purpose. When there are not enough people to believe in the vision, we will fail to generate enough power to birth the vision. There is no way around this.

A vision that originates from heaven can be confusing and overwhelming, and that’s OK. Sometimes we confuse having a vision for setting an ambitious target, but really, it is not the same thing. When you can successfully outline how the vision will play out from the beginning, it is probably not going to be a game-changer. If you can plan out and execute the entire process from start to finish, what would you need faith in God for? Your vision should not make sense and should require a leap of faith to get started. 

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Isaiah 55:8-9 ESV

A watchman should be possessed by some incredible vision that will usher us collectively into our brighter future. Anything less than that would not achieve the desired result. When we say we are managing and governing the world as faithful stewards of the Almighty God, it really begins with aligning our thoughts and motives with that which originates from above. When we understand that a vision in its true sense refers to God’s redemptive plan for a people, we see clearly that by definition it would be overwhelming and even seem nonsensical to an individual, and that’s fine.

People perish where there is no vision, as there would be no central purpose to rally around. When a vision drives us, everyone wins and even though there might be some central characters associated with the execution of a vision, one sees clearly that it would be hard to give a single person the entire glory. A proper vision should not be “yours”, it should originate from above and paint a brighter future for a defined set of people. It should shake you to your core and require you to learn to love, trust and have faith in God and others to play their own role.

Your vision should not make sense because it’s not yours. You’re just the herald, sent here to describe what a better future could look like and inspire us all to find our role within it. 

And the Lord answered me: “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it”

Habakkuk 2:2 (ESV)

Your grand vision must be so clear that you can work on it every single day. There is a real risk that one is so impressed by the vision statement that writing down the vision statement becomes an achievement in itself. However, there is a clear difference between writing down a vision statement and actually implementing the vision. A vision that has not been “made plain” cannot become a reality over time. Until the grand vision is so defined that people can understand it enough to contribute their time and resources, nothing gets done.

The Watchman must avoid every false sense of accomplishment by maintaining the proper perspectives at all time. Writing down the vision is nothing more than the first step on a laundry list of things that must be done in order for us to see the change that we seek. The vision must be made plain, it must be explained and broken down into smaller chunks, down to daily tasks. There is a possibility for a vision to be specific and yet, vague at the same time. For example, if your vision is to ensure everyone in your society is literate, but no clear timeline or call to action.

It is incredibly vague. It may seem defined (literacy for everyone!), but it is actually vague without a breakdown of milestones, goals and daily tasks. This makes it incredibly hard for the vision runner to read the vision (penned down by the visionary) and run with it. You want people to be able to contribute their quota to the vision by simply taking a glance. When one fails to break down the vision into actionable, daily tasks, the vision becomes nothing more than an empty slogan and overtime, people see it for what it really is: a mirage.

Great thinkers like to take pride in the high quality of their ideas, and rightly so, after all… certain quarters claim ideas rule the world. However, we know that even though generating good ideas or great once-in-a-lifetime ideas could be a lot of mental work, none of it counts if there is no excellence in execution. Getting the idea is like ten percent of the work, excellent execution is what counts and most of the time, there is a tendency to underestimate just how much effort one needs to invest. A mediocre idea with excellent execution will always win over an excellent idea with mediocre execution.

I grew up in a culture that did not encourage craftsmanship or taking pride in one’s work. It was always about the minimum effort required to get paid or achieve some result etc. This culture is responsible for many brilliant minds of my generation achieving mediocre results overall. This is due to the fact that despite receiving ideas from God that could transform their world, they lack the work ethic and craftsmanship required to truly make a difference. A watchman must understand that nothing happens unless someone gets to work, and that a lot of time, we underestimate just how hard the work is.

While we love to hate on people more successful than us and ascribe their success to privileges or luck, a lot of the time, if we keep a cool head, we can see clearly how their work ethic and craftsmanship towers over our own. Anyone who out-works the other will eventually win over time, and the serious minded watchman must see the wisdom in choosing to put in the work over discrediting the work of others. We must understand that people more successful than you are working harder than you.

A great deal of visionary people out there fail to make any meaningful progress with their vision. I think this is because they somehow allow the grand vision to overwhelm them so much that it ends up becoming a dream. A vague idea that is never properly defined enough in order for any implementation to begin. It could also be due to a lack of discipline and the necessary work ethic to make it happen. You have to get started, start as small as you can. Then build up some momentum. Whatever you do, ensure that it becomes a daily affair.

And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.

Acts 2:46 – 47 ESV

The early Church grew daily and became a formidable force because they were able to define their vision enough to take action every day. If it will become great, it has got to become a daily affair. When your vision fails to gather some momentum and engage people every day, overtime, people will lose interest and slack off. Their attention will be pulled into something else. When you get serious with your vision, you realise that you must design and kick-start the smallest possible project you can and build momentum from there.

The Lord added to their number day by day because they were also putting in the work, day by day. If your visionary project will become a reality, it has to become a daily affair.