One spring morning, many years ago, I arrived at the office to find a curious contraption in the middle of our lobby. Overnight, a medium-sized, half-enclosed booth materialized there, with a large sign: Vision Checking Station.
Always curious, I asked HR whether it was to check if I agree with what the company thinks or to see if I needed new glasses. (The answer was that I ask too many questions.)
I just realized, the last 2-3 years turned our workplaces into a vision checking station too. Everyone knows (well, everyone who uses LinkedIn at least) we are very well supplied with visionary CTOs and visionary chief digital officers and other chief visionaries of whatever the actual new thing is.
There are two things about vision people sometimes forget:
Your vision has to be different from others. Just like opinions, the “here is my vision, if you don’t like it, I have others” is not super useful.
You have to actually do things differently because of that vision. Otherwise it’s just a mirage (very common in deserts, by the way).
We lived with AI (and related visions) long enough to make vision checking easy. Does your company do anything differently, or is your chief visionary still asking for extra headcount, more outsourced staff and another offshore delivery center? Cutting costs is a very useful thing, but that's from the ‘bean counting’ school of management, rather than from the ‘visionary’ one.
Of course, there is organizational inertia and bureaucracy, but when your title starts with a capital C, you don’t have that excuse.
By the way, I still think “visionary” should be the name of the place where I can get new glasses. Helps with one kind of vision at least.