Occasionally, there is a new leadership skills concept introduced that almost seems too simple and powerful to be true.
Visioning is one of those leadership skills concepts. Except it does work!
Visioning is a system-thinking leadership approach that enables and empowers leaders to make better decisions, solve problems and improve relationships with others.
An important question that all leaders must ask when making decisions is, “what future reality will I create with the choices I make from this point forward.”
Looking to the Past
Visioning is looking to the past to see how our current reality was constructed from our best thinking.
Just as today’s choices create tomorrow, yesterday’s choices helped create the reality we live in today. If we are to create a better future, we must learn from these choices and improve upon them.
We have to look into the past and ask ourselves:
- Where did our systems come from?
- How did they evolve? What was their purpose?
- What was the thinking of the time? Why did it fall short?
- Most of all, how can we improve upon them and the thinking that created them?
Leadership Skills Reality
Visioning is the new concept to help leaders answer those questions.
The world that we live in today is experiencing change at an unprecedented rate, with unprecedented volatility due to the increasingly connected state of our global reality. Visioning provides leaders with insights into why this is happening and what we need to do to survive it.
This is not a look at the future, where change will be a nice thing to have if we can afford it; it will be a place where we either change with the increasingly volatile and rapid world that is sweeping us along or drown in the ripples that we have created and we are continuing to create in our overly stable and dangerously inflexible systems and thinking.
Survival Tool
Visioning is where the great convergence of spiraling life cycles is creating change at ever-increasing speed and volatility.
Change is no longer a luxury to muse over but a survival tool that will weed out the fittest and most adaptable from the unwilling or unable to change.
Current systems are designed for stability, control, and predictability. Systems of the future will demand flexibility and adaptability. Visioning enables leaders to make decisions allowing their organizations to adapt to any environment.
Guiding Principles
Within the Visioning concept are six principles of adaptable systems. Leaders or Visioners use these principles to help their organizations survive the rate and volatility of change and also to provide resilience that will serve them well for some time. The six guiding principles are:
- Self Organize
- Recombine
- Sense and Respond
- Learn and Adapt
- Seed, Select & Amplify
- Destabilize
The Future is Your Own Creation
Visioning enables leaders to realize that the future really is their own creation, personally, professionally, and relationally.
In these three areas, they can change their organizations and change the lives of their employees. Visioning is where all improvements can be made personally and collectively. Choosing realities that are better than the ones we currently have is what Visioning enables leaders to do.
Our current thinking made the reality we experience in our world today. Our future reality will be created by the thinking of tomorrow, and Visioning is a concept that can shape the future.
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What About Visioning Leadership Skills?
If you have ideas about visioning leadership skills that might be helpful to readers, share them in the comments section below. Thanks!
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Excited to see you speak in San Juan, Puerto Rico in April.
Our actions and inactions today will result in a type of future we will either like or not. Visioneering should be practised by every individual and not only by organizations.
Thank you for the lesson.
Great concept Dr. Jackson.
Reminds me of a couple of books I read quite some time ago of visioning the systematic improvement — Visioneering — of skills necessary to play upper-level tennis and golf. Quite frankly, I found both books a benefit in my lower-skill level of both sports.
Thank you. Keep the Quest Alive!
thanks
[…] theory helps point out two types of leaders based on their leadership styles or behavior. These are leaders that get results through employee satisfaction or sheer […]
This is very instructive
I am involved in personal, towns and organisations visioning teaching and seminars for youths.