vision: to be or not to be?

According to Niccolo Machiavelli and Leslie Gelb visionaries often do more harm than good. Quoting Gelb "Without vision, men die; with vision, more men die." (Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy, 2009) It has been my observation that vision leads people astray from their intentions, as it creates an unattainable reality that neither serves to improve their situation nor the situation of their neighbors. The most important tool in life is to remain open-minded to all possibilities whether you agree with the positions or not; to dismiss these viable options will leave you in peril. By no means is this a definitive statement conveying that all options, at all times, are functional solutions to a given problem. On the contrary, resolution will only come from thinking through all the steps of a situation and appropriately planning for their occurrence.

Visions can hide potential outcomes from our view, because we are unwilling to divert our gaze from the predetermined, prescribed pathway that we have already began to tread upon. Having and obtaining goals for the purpose of improvement is not to be discouraged but one must remain open to change if the goal is to be completed; no one can fully predict what barriers might stand to impede their progress. The question at this point becomes: How to get past the barriers that exist? (Does one go over, through, or around the given barrier? Moreover, what are the various consequences for their actions?) Regardless of the goal, if people cannot see a way past the existing barriers it is often because they have closed their mind's eye to the possibility. In other words, they have already told themselves that it will not work, without taking the time to play out all variations of the idea.

Visions are dangerous because we close ourselves up to change and treat visions as "paint-by-number" exercises where we have given up our free will and sense of imagination prior to even beginning the process. In this we are effectively following orders without question. This is not to say authority has no place in the world, but rather, that authority should be questioned as to its rightful place, time and use. When you remove the human component from the decision-making process, we are no different than machines. Machines can only calculate raw data, and translate it into a variety of possible outcomes. What machines lack is the ability to think outside the box; beyond the vision. This is uniquely human. The world needs thoughtful innovation not desultory idleness.