The Way Vision Actually Forms

At the beginning of the year, we leaders find ourselves returning to the same question: What is the vision? 

Sometimes it shows up in formal spaces, strategy sessions, planning days, board discussions, leadership off-sites. But just as often it arrives quietly, in the in-between moments: when we are reviewing priorities, scanning the year ahead, and sensing that something important is still not fully named.

Most of us have been taught to treat vision as something you define, articulate, and then execute. Once the words are set, the work becomes alignment and delivery. It can be presented as a statement, a direction, or a destination.

The comfort of this approach is obvious. It suggests clarity and certainty. It implies that once the vision is written, decisions should become easier.

But that is rarely what we actually experience. Because the moment vision matters most is often the moment certainty is least available.

We can hold a vision statement and still feel uncertain when it comes time to choose. We can have strategic goals and still feel a quiet misalignment, an unsettled sense that the work is moving, but not clearly. Not in a way that fully reflects what matters most now.

This is the gap that deserves attention.

In lived leadership, vision rarely functions as a fixed endpoint. More often, it behaves like a practice—something we return to, not because we are confused, but because the context keeps shifting and the internal picture keeps developing. Vision becomes less about having the perfect words, and more about staying connected to what is becoming clear.

The limits of treating vision like a destination

In leadership culture, vision is often framed as a deliverable. We are expected to “set the vision,” communicate it clearly, and align people to it. When done well, this can create real energy and direction across a system.

But the challenge is subtle. When vision is treated mainly as a destination, we can feel pressure to arrive at clarity quickly.

You see it in the way the work gets approached. The rush to finalise the language, the urge to sound certain or the desire to lock in a direction before the situation has finished changing.

If you’re thinking, “But we can’t wait forever,” you’re right. Leadership requires movement. People need decisions and the business needs action.

The issue is not speed. It is moving as though the picture is complete when it is still forming.

When we feel that pressure, one of two things tends to happen.

Some of us stay in the conceptual layer and craft something that is technically correct, but hard for people to feel and use. It reads well, but it doesn’t guide real decisions. It becomes something we present, rather than something we live.

Others of us hold back from naming the vision too soon. Not because we are disengaged, but because we can sense that what is true inside us doesn’t yet fit into neat words. We don’t want to promise a story we are not ready to stand behind.

In both cases, vision can become external. It becomes something to produce, rather than something to work with.

What we actually experience when we think about vision

When we talk honestly, vision rarely arrives as a full picture. It arrives in fragments.

A repeated thought or a pattern you keep noticing. A moment in a meeting where something feels misaligned, and you can’t ignore it. A decision that should be simple, but isn’t, because it touches something deeper.

This is why we often find ourselves asking questions that don’t fit neatly into a plan.

- Why does this issue keep returning to my attention?

- What feels less important than it used to?

- What kind of leadership is this moment asking of me?

These are not execution questions. They are not “What should we do next?” questions.

They are orientation questions. They are questions of direction, meaning, and identity.

And that is usually where vision begin, not as a statement, but as a relationship with what is becoming clearer inside us.

Vision as a leadership practice

When vision is treated as a practice, its role changes.

Rather than being something we finalise once, vision becomes something we return to. It becomes a reference point we keep testing against reality. It helps us choose, not just once, but again and again.

This matters because leadership is rarely held back by effort alone. It is more often diluted when energy and attention are pulled in too many directions.

Even with real drive and clear communication, teams can still feel uncertain when direction keeps shifting under real-world pressure, new information, competing demands, changing constraints. The work may look busy on the surface, but it won’t feel anchored. People won’t be sure what to hold steady, what to move faster on, and what to let go of.

Vision, practiced over time, shapes how we interpret information, not just what we pursue. It changes what we notice. It changes what we accept as normal. It changes what we are willing to trade.

It also changes how we communicate. We stop trying to sound perfectly certain. Instead, we offer something more useful: a clear sense of what matters, even when outcomes are still unfolding.

This does not make leadership vague or indecisive. In many cases, it does the opposite. It creates coherence. Our choices start to make sense as a set. People may not agree with every decision, but they can feel the logic beneath them.

Vision becomes steadiness, not performance.