Leading Vision

This is a short post about how difficult it can be to join visions with others whilst impossible to build anything great on your own.

The Realisation

It took me a long time to realise that if I wanted to build something great, I needed more than just me.

Take the example the movie The Martian and the vision of flying to Mars. I could spend my entire life working on just a piece of this overall vision. The engines. The fuel. The life support.

There just isn’t enough time for me to build the entire vision. Even if there was, it would be an extremely slow process and another team would definitely beat me to the punch.

My Vision

My vision for the project maybe something like

I want to fly people to Mars to determine if it’s possible to sustain human life on Mars by providing a food source.

A nice, well defined vision that others could read and determine the purpose pretty instantaneously.

Collective Vision

What’s extremely hard is to meet others who share the same vision. Word for word. As you have it in your head.

Even though the vision is well defined, another person joining the team and leading the vision might say

Hey, I think we should forget about the potatoes and soil crops and just bring one big space cow.

Hold on a sec! My vision was to bring as many food types as possible. Primarily crops because we can fit more varieties within the space craft. I don’t want to be riding shotgun with a cow.

Recruited Vision

The key, I believe is to recruit a well rounded team. The initial vision has been set but not in stone. It allows for agility. Allowing the team to be dynamic in it’s decisions.

If the goal of the vision is to provide a sustainable food source on Mars, we must listen to our teams experts and decide as a collective the best foot forward from the information and data we have.