I used to work with a “visionary.”
He would “come up with ideas.”
He was “the idea guy.”
Other people could have ideas, but he was the one with the “good ideas.”
Obligatory Chris Farley (Bennet Brauer) reference with the excessive “quotes.” If you don’t know this old SNL skit, check it out.
Anyway, let’s get back to this “visionary.”
Frequently, the team would develop solutions to problems, but they just didn’t look right to him. He’d say “we’re going with this other plan.” Which, you guessed it, was his.
There’s this weird idea that “visionaries” are misunderstood geniuses who have sparks of inspirational clarity where, unbeknownst to them, they are able to provide surprising solutions that no one else could have dreamt.
At their best, these “visionaries” are quirky magicians who seem to have surprising answers to old questions that have stumped us for years. At their worst, these “visionaries” understand themselves as “mad geniuses” where they should be held in such high regard that everyone around them ought to aide and abet their downright jerky-ness.
Jerk-hood? Jerk-ship?
Whatever the word is, this is a huge, wreaking, slimy ball of fallacy.
Not just the genius part, I wrote a post about that a couple of years ago.
Vision is not something that special people pull out of thin air. It’s the culmination of seeing the same pattern of evidence again and again. It’s a realization of what’s happening that others haven’t been able to articulate, yet.
Vision is something that comes to you after you’ve done 100 repetitions. Vision is not something that you conjure all alone in a vacuum.
Vision is a discipline, not a gift.
More on this tomorrow.