In my online classes for high school students, I often talk about vision. We talk about a vision as a direction, but in reality, the visions we see and hear about have a clear deadline and a level of achievement. For example, President John F. Kennedy's vision of sending human to the moon and bringing them back safely by the end of the 1960s is very clear. But there is no contradiction between saying that this vision is a direction and having a clear achievement.
When President John F. Kennedy announced the Apollo program, the Soviet Union had already launched a simple satellite over the United States. The American people had seen it in the night sky. So the rationale for winning the space race was to create a clear moonshot vision. But before that, the President, or someone who advised him, must have seen the Soviet Union's satellites and knew that something had to be done. At first, it would have been all intuitive thinking, and there would not have been a clear goal. You could say it was a revelation from the sky (enlightenment). From there, there can be logical reasoning or a direction that leads to a clearer goal. These can happen simultaneously, resulting in a vision with a clear level of achievement and a set deadline, like a moonshot.
As for Impressionism in Paris, France, Monet's scribe says, "At first I don't know what Impressionism is, it's just a direction that's there. The Impressionists didn't paint from their imagination in the studio; they took their paints and brushes under the sky and painted what they felt at the time. There is also a logical reason for the invention of paint tubes, which made it possible for them to paint outside. Monet and Camille may not have had a clear vision of what they wanted Impressionism to look like in the salons of Paris, but there was already a logical reason and direction for it. But the first beginnings must have been someone's revelation from the sky.
The vision I wrote about the other day of cycling around Australia started as a hunch, with no clear rationale but a clear goal. I remember the initial impetus came from a vision I saw in the library of a field of yellow flowers in the Simpson Desert that stretched to the horizon.
All UN, European Union, and other development projects also have a vision as a goal with a level to be achieved and a clear deadline. With their clear timelines and levels of achievement, the SDGs were probably first inspired by Amina J. Mohammed of Nigeria, who was in charge of establishing the SDGs at the time.
Any vision that we aim for in an organisation needs to be clearly defined and have a logical basis, or it wouldn't have started that way. It seems that a fuzzy vision is not a good thing because we see "vision" as the finished product. However, Professor Roberto Berganti of Politecnico di Milano also says that we should not force ourselves to create a vision but gradually delve into it as a direction. So if you feel the beginnings of a vision, like a revelation from the sky, don't force it, gradually cultivate it from there. I think it's better to understand the intuitive revelation logically and then make it into an explicit vision in that order. I don't think it's a good idea to create a vision like my "I'm going to travel around Australia by bicycle", but when you're young it's possible (^^;). I'll talk about how to turn intuition into logic another time.
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