A vision that only paints the destination is a wish, and wishes don't move people. The credibility lives in the path. Draw the bridge, not just the shore.
One of my leads brought a multi-year vision to review this week, and it was genuinely good. The destination was clear and ambitious, the kind of three-year picture that makes people sit up. They’d done real thinking about where their area should be. And the feedback from my boss landed on the one thing the vision didn’t have, which I’d missed on first read because I was enjoying the view. It showed the far shore without showing the bridge.
The note wasn’t “your strategy is wrong.” It was “I believe the destination. I don’t see what it takes to get there.” No sequence, no sense of the first hard thing or the second, no acknowledgment of what has to be true at each step. Just here’s where we are and here’s the promised land, with the crossing left as an exercise for the reader.
I’ve been guilty of exactly this, often, because the destination is the fun part to draw. Painting the future is generative and it photographs well in a deck. The path is where you have to admit the unglamorous middle: the dependency that isn’t resolved, the year where it gets harder before it gets better. So we skip it, and we tell ourselves the vision is doing its job because the room nodded at the picture. But a vision that only shows the shore doesn’t actually move anyone. It can’t be acted on, because no one knows where to put their feet. People nod, and then they go back to their week, and nothing changes.
The fix is to draw the bridge with the same care as the shore. What’s the first move, and why that one? What has to be true before the second. Where’s the part that gets worse before it gets better, named plainly so it doesn’t ambush anyone later. A vision is believable when the path is credible enough that someone could start walking it on Monday. When the destination is inspiring, that’s the dessert.
And that’s the difference between a vision and a wish. A wish describes a better place. A vision shows you how to get there, including the parts you’d rather leave off the slide.
The teachable part
A vision that only paints the destination is a wish, and wishes don’t mobilize anyone. The credibility, and the ability to get people moving, lives in the path: the first move and why it’s first, what has to be true before the next, the stretch that gets harder before it pays off. Draw the bridge with the same care you draw the shore. People act on a path they can see their feet on, not on a destination they admire from across the water.
On the shelf
If the bridge problem is the one you keep running into, these four sit right on it.
The shelf
