The Difference Between Leadership Vision and Fantasy
Some leaders build the future. Others just talk about it.
There comes a moment when a leader declares a bold new future. Their language is lofty, speaking of reinvention, transformation and a bright new tomorrow. For a moment, it really feels like something has shifted. A “next chapter,” full of upward pointing graphs, heartwarming values, and technological destiny.
Then, nothing happens.
Well, not nothing. There are workshops. A rebrand. Maybe a slide deck. But the core remains unchanged. The culture sags back into old habits. The team still isn’t clear on their priorities, or the new priorities don’t align with reality on the ground. The exciting new chapter doesn’t lead to a finished book. Instead, six months later the same cycle begins. Refreshes, restarts, pivots.
This is not leadership vision. This is leadership fantasy.
What Real Vision Is (And Isn’t)
In management studies, “vision” is not a poetic flourish. It’s a specific concept. Vision is a clear, compelling mental image of a desirable future state1. Visionary leadership2 involves three specific tasks:
imagining a credible future,
articulating that future in ways that inspire commitment, and
mobilising the systems and people necessary to realise it.
Vision isn’t abstract. It isn’t a brand statement. It’s a practical cognitive tool: a unifying mental model that helps people orient, act, and persist toward a shared goal. Real vision is:
Future-facing, not nostalgic or reactive
Emotionally driving, not just logical
Bold but grounded in reality, achievability, and specificity
Clear, but flexible
It gives people a reason to care, and a way to align their energy with something meaningful. Without it, organizations drift. With it, they move.
Vision Isn’t Vibes
“We’re reimagining the future.” “We’re unlocking human potential.” “We aim to be best in the market.” These are nice notions, but without implementation, that’s all they are.
Most leaders don’t lack ideas. They lack the discipline (and sometimes the courage) to stare directly at the present with enough clarity to build something that might actually change it.
In real organisations, visionary leadership is messy. It demands difficult conversations about what must end before anything new can begin. It can involve disappointing people. Killing sacred cows. Shifting power. Redistributing resources. It isn’t about imagination alone. It’s takes moral ambition plus systems thinking.
Vision without execution is hallucination — John Kotter3
Why We Fall For It
Why do so many leaders indulge in fantasy instead of real vision?
Reality is hard. There are personalities, politics, complexity, ambiguity, our hopes and fears. So we reach for something else. Fantasy is easy. It gives us the emotional payoff of leadership, the rush of announcing something new, without the burden of change. It allows leaders to feel bold and inspiring without risking anything.
But fantasy rarely survives first contact with reality. Reality has friction. It requires trade-offs. It has inertia. Fantasy has none of that.
Always a Beginning, Never a Middle or End
We’re always unveiling a new vision. A new framework. A new chapter. We say things like, “The past is behind us now,” as if the past were a bad dream we can wish away.
But there’s never a second act. No middle. No grind. No dirty work of aligning incentives, resolving conflicts, or realigning people who were operating on completely different mental maps. Why? Because that work, the messy, ambiguous, politically uncomfortable, emotionally taxing work, is the very reason we started dreaming in the first place.
The fantasy was an escape hatch from reality. We launched into a new “vision” of tomorrow to avoid the complexity we didn’t want to face today. We hoped that with enough momentum, we could outrun the dissatisying present.
But eventually, reality comes calling. The fantasy crashes into culture, into misalignment, into unmade decisions and unresolved tensions. And we do the only thing we know how to do: launch a new vision. Again.
It feels like forward motion. But we’re actually running in circles.
“There's probably thousands and thousands of people with thousands of brilliant ideas, that don't have the discipline to make that idea come to fruition. If you don't have that kind of discipline: to make things happen, your ideas are worthless.” — Jocko Willink4
Vision Is a Practice, Not a Personality
Another myth we fall for is that vision is a gift. Something innate. You either have it or you don’t. That’s false. Vision is a discipline.
It’s built on cognitive muscles and moral ones. You have to train in:
Strategic foresight: the ability to extrapolate credible futures from present trends
Sensemaking: the ability to interpret complexity and identify signal from noise
Systems thinking: connecting the dots, understanding cause and effect
Communication: the ability to structure ideas into motivating story arcs
Execution: the ability to connect ideas to structures, people, and actions, by turning those narratives into process, policy, and practice
Adaptation: adjusting when reality proves you wrong
Above all, it requires courage. Because vision does not guarantee applause. It often begins with friction. It breaks comfort zones. It threatens the status quo. That’s what’s often required to make the exciting future a reality.
The Cost of Getting It Wrong
The numbers are brutal, and they’re consistent across industries:
50–90% of strategic initiatives fail after launch (estimates vary, but the reality is stark) most never achieve their intended outcomes5.
Even worse, 60–90 percent of business strategies never launch, they stall in planning or fall over before execution.
These figures should cause a pit in the stomach of any executive. Odds are, your big vision is destined to fail. The good news: your competition is also struggling with the same issue. Making big ideas reality is hard work. So let’s roll up our sleeves and get to it. Once we have our big vision, effective implementation is what will give you the edge.
The Call to Builders, Not Dreamers
If you burn for a better future, don’t perform: build. Vision isn’t the end of the leader’s responsibility, it’s the beginning. If we want to escape the fantasy trap, we have to choose the path of real, grounded follow-through.
That means trading the relief of the announcement for the discipline of execution. It means staying with the vision all the way down, until it reshapes culture, alters behaviour, and creates results that weren’t there before.
The messy reality of vision work looks like:
Translating vision into concrete, measurable objectives, with clear success criteria
Creating credible, staged plans, with milestones, dependencies, and risks identified
Assigning real accountability, not vague responsibility, but names, timelines, and consequences
Resourcing the work: budget, people, time, and political capital, or it won’t move
Shepherding it through resistance, friction, and fatigue, because those aren’t detours; they are the path.
This is what vision demands: that we show up in the grind, not just the keynote. That we keep going long after the applause fades.
The true measure of a vision is not applause from the announcement. It’s the visible transformation, a year or more later, when a new product launches, a team works differently, and an organisation achieves what once seemed distant, because someone had the courage to not just imagine it, but build it.
When things start to feel too complex, too slow, too frustrating, that’s not a sign of failure, that’s a sign the work of the visionary leader has begun.
Nanus, B. (1995). Visionary leadership. John Wiley & Sons.
Conger, J. A., & Kanungo, R. N. (1998). Charismatic leadership in organizations. Sage Publications.
Kotter, J. P. (1996). Leading Change. Harvard Business Review Press.
Poulose, C. (2024). Identifying Major Obstacles Impacting Strategy Execution in Large-Scale and Small-Scale Organizations in the U.S. American Journal of Industrial and Business Management , 14 , 1313-1347. https://doi.org/10.4236/ajibm.2024.1410067
I enjoyed reading this one; the thesis that vision can be a cyclical escape hatch was insightful and interesting. I wonder how it overlays with management and mobility of leadership talent - are we in the midst of a two speed executive market? Ie come with me onboard - and then let me handover to exec B to replace me and deliver watered down vision (shoot for the moon land in the stars?) I think the dangerous thing about visionary leadership is the old foe the ego. The problem with vision is when it will inevitably be challenged by those required to do the implementing - how might that negotiation go?