2020 The Year of Vision

It’s a happy coincidence, and a delightful omen, that ‘The Year of Vision’ is to be 2020.

The first two decades of the 21st Century have been remarkable for their technological progress and political regress. While invention stimulates creative disruption, political fomentation of the street protest sort stimulates division and lack of cooperation. Leaders have much to do with the latter and many have spent the last twenty years dishing out prescriptions for leadership that have proved basically wrong.

That’s not to say they shouldn’t have tried. The big lesson learnt in the last half of the 20th Century was that mistakes are the most valuable source of learning. Time everyone applied that rather more enthusiastically, isn’t it? We must learn the lessons too. I’d put it like this. The earnestness with which the business schools have applied hard work to their infallible systems has simply compounded the error of the process in the first place.

Or you could say: “The harder we try the more likely we are to become trying.”

The man who pumped fuel into the firebox of the steam engine pulling the express train north from London made it run very fast. In fact, it was on course to beat the record for doing the journey in the shortest time. To achieve this he ignored the signals. They had always been at green before; no reason to think they wouldn’t be this time. But they were red. They told his family that – after his speeding train had ploughed into a slow freighter inadvertently shunted onto his line.

We have been flashing red signals about leadership training for some time. Leadership has nothing to do with process, everything to do with thinking – and that includes thinking about what a leader of any particular organisation is for at any particular time. For a leader is not a man in uniform with gold braid on his cap. It is a person who sees the opportunity and grasps it; it is a person who perceives the problem and solves it. But above all it is someone who cares about their people and teaches them to be the ones to see, grasp and solve.

To do this they must have a clear Vision of why they are doing it. So embroiled in details have our leaders become that Vision has been left to the PR department and a book of platitudes nobody believes in or cares about. Step back and think what the world needs now. Obviously behaviour that will help to save the planet. Political riots won’t do that for all their good intentions. 50% of their effort must be put into people going to see their members of parliament and making it clear that if they want the next vote they must make real progress to save Earth. The other 50% must be personally training people to do it.

For our Vision must be about succeeding generations. Any other Vision is now unacceptable. Any shareholder briefing a Board to any other Vision should be paraded and pilloried. We do not want nasty people on the planet. They only help to destroy it. We want decent people who care for the future. That is why the Vision can no longer be left to top people. The fast communications we command require us to use them in a way that everyone can exchange ideas all the time. It is only as we exchange ideas that we encourage others to create them.

So the Vision we all need to have and to show to others is one of confidence in the future we are ourselves going to create. It must be translated into the culture of every business, every organisation, every religion, every profession. Obviously any organisation will have a Vision for itself that incorporates the Universal Vision of Planet Survival. If you lead a group, a team, a party of any kind please make 2020 the reason for your clear Vision and make sure all can see it.

The Vision for Terrific Mentors International is that we will do all in our power to help people find their fulfillment, satisfaction and joy of life while working strenuously to see that others have it later on. Our cause of survival is a rich uniting purpose. Our evidence is that those with good purpose have good lives.

May you have a Very Happy 2020 and a Vision to unite and inspire all who associate with you.

And for all who are suffering or fearful, may we who have good Visions help you to enjoy the same.

Our new decade is the most critical in the history of the world.