# 112: Visionary Leadership — Living in the Future, Reading about the Past
Story behind the Passage
I am thinking a lot about how much I ignored the fact that people think differently. This sounds quite stupid, right? Is it not self-evident that we all think differently, especially to someone who talks about ‘diversity’ so much? But I am talking about temporal thinking, as I would call it. To make this very short: Some people think and live backwards-oriented, some people are always future-oriented. I do not care whether or not this is something given to people by birth. I just know that it can be taken away from you by people, i.e., social environments. For sure, you have a say in what people do to you. But in order to respond to it, you have to realize it in the first place.
I do not think I got this very basic insight early enough.
When I was a kid, I always lived in the future with what I was thinking about and doing — mostly doing. Yes, I thought it was nice to learn about the stuff that people discovered in the past but I was personally more concerned about what I would be doing in the future, how I could do things that people would use in the future. I was never among the very first to buy something new in the sense of innovative (mostly because I was not among the rich kids) but at least, I usually informed myself about innovations and then worked hard to get it. This was the case with my beloved Gameboy, the Tamagotchi, and the first Telmi pager by Motorola.
Then, later, I found myself in an environment that focused very much on the past. And you know why? It is not necessarily because people do not think about the future at all in scholarship. But especially in fields in which you deal with literature or culture, there is an immanent past-orientation in the system. This is a logical consequence. If your method is interpretation (and maybe explanation), you always have to work with material from the past. Anything that is written down contains information about the past. For sure, you can write science fiction which is a different story but the insights you draw in these fields are always backward-looking. You interpret the past in order to make sense of the present.
Where is the future in this scenario?
See, it sounds quite easy but I had not thought about the magnitude of this dynamic. There is no judgement involved, of course. It was just a personal epiphany that I noticed that other fields, the sciences, of course, are concerned about the future. You build technology for the future. You do not build it for people in the middle ages, not even for the present really. You make predictions about the era to come. As an individual scholar working in this environment, you are surrounded by people who always think about how to make the world a better place — in the future. I am not saying that the other folks from cultural studies are ignoring this. Still, the methodology of reading tales of the past — simply because written documents always run behind real life at it happens right now — makes you more past-oriented.
When saying that some people think about the future more than others, this brings up the issue of visionary leadership. I have written about this before in some other contexts and I will probably write about it in the months to come. It is obviously something that keeps occupying me. I figured out so many things that can make you feel like a stranger among some people and comfortable among others. But I always missed this temporal dimension — at least I was not aware of it while I might have talked about it quite often. All this made me pick the passage about visionary leadership today. This is not a book that I would read like a novel (I hardly read novels these days) but sometimes it makes sense to have some good handbooks available to just get reassurance that what you are thinking has actually been thought by other people before — see, there it is again, the backward orientation…
My Learnings
“A successful social entrepreneur easily anticipates the social need and its nature by being visionary.” Visionary entrepreneurship is of course not bound to social entrepreneurship. Still, it makes sense to discuss the two elements together. I always have a problem with the term “social entrepreneurship” because to me, any entrepreneurship is social in the end. People usually pay for stuff that brings them ahead as human beings and collectively speaking, this means that society at large gains something. This is what social thinking is all about. Still, I know that there are many *…hole industries that produce stuff that kills people. And this, obviously, is not very social.
Being a visionary therefore is typical of any entrepreneur but it is particularly helpful for social entrepreneurs; i.e., those who explicitly target (global) social ills. You have to be crazy about the future in order to start building stuff that helps people. Since entrepreneurship is about making money with what you do, there is no way that you can think backward-oriented. If you did that, you would already be running out of business in the near future. All this is very basic again but the entire reason why I am writing about this is because I simply did not realize the entire dimension of how different people are when it comes to living in the future and building products that people will need in the future.
What I find quite interesting in this sentence is the tiny adverb “easily.” Easily can of course mean that you have little trouble thinking ahead and you have little trouble seeing what others do not see in other people, i.e., needs. But it can, of course, also be interpreted to mean ‘superficially’ or even ‘irresponsibly’ in a way. This, for sure, is not the intended meaning of the sentence. I am just saying that the adjective ‘easy’ sometimes tends to get interpreted in ways that are quite difficult to pin down. For me, the easy part is related to the nature part of the sentence. If something is in your DNA, you have no trouble doing it.
The trouble only starts if you do not do it.
For me, this has been quite a recent realization. My best friend today just texted me saying that “Silke has so many realizations.” But really, it explains a lot. It explains why some people just never want to hear about certain things. And I have to say: I almost became one of them — I was one of them, at least for a while. Yes, as a coach, you always explain to clients that you are solution-oriented and helping people build their future. But really, you are mostly working with examples from the past, trying to remove behavior patterns from the past. Then you are also mostly working on short-term goals instead of visionary long-term goals.
This is, of course, the danger of people who always live in the future in their heads. “You cannot enjoy the present moment.” At least, this is what others often accuse you of. I do not see it this way anymore, but it takes time and practice to truly and fully commit to being a visionary while at the same time not stressing yourself all the time. It puts a lot of pressure on you when you always think of tomorrow, even of the next year or even decade. You can never do enough if you are trying to prepare for such a long time span. Still, the technology issue, my rising fascination with technology and the excitement that goes along with this — gives you an inner source of power that I somehow forgot for many years.
Yes, it is kind of rewarding to fix a human problem from the past in order to help a person in the present. And yes, this will of course change the future course of someone’s life. But sensing and seeing the needs of people in the present who do not come to you because they have some kind of problem but you are instead using your own vision to already prepare solutions for problems that will only occur in the future — this is a really exciting and energizing thing that I had forgotten for a while when I was so human-and little tech-centered.
Maybe this episode of swinging from one pole to the other — from the tech-oriented to the human-focused and back has ended now. Well, it will probably never end. But the point is, I feel more at home where I am now. After all, visionaries always have communication problems with other humans because these other humans do not necessarily understand what you are talking about. This is fair, no doubt. Still, it makes the life of visionaries easier to withdraw from the compulsory need to always explain where your thoughts are coming from and where they are going and instead just build stuff that helps. If I have learned one thing from being an entrepreneur:
Good stuff makes people happy.
Happy people do not ask what exactly made the stuff so good.
You can go ahead building even better stuff without always forcing yourself to explain everything.
Reflection Questions
1) Has your focus concerning past- or future-orientation changed in the course of your life?
2) How would you characterize the people that you feel most comfortable working with? Are they more future- or past-oriented?
3) Do you sometimes feel like you do not want to work with people at all — just with technology?