What is a Visionary?
At first, I thought this was a dumb question wrapped up in purple prose. I realize it's a good question I can't answer sufficiently, at least not without some help.
Man, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know. —Louie Armstrong
I was playing with my daughter outside on a hot Summer day when I paused to look at my smartphone. I caught a group email query from the venerable
, who asked: “What is a Visionary?”First, I struggled to come up with a good answer. So, I deflected, trying to recall the exact formulation of Louie Armstrong’s famous quote about what jazz is.
I replied to his thread with some formulation in standard English, which caused me to miss the jazz of Armstrong’s original phrase and prompted Rowson's response: “lame.”
Rowson was also kind enough to supply the correct quote—in the vernacular.
Rowson was right. My answer had been lame.
But the little sting of his response became a challenge. More respondents in the thread weighed in, but their answers struck me as obtuse, verbose, or performative. Still, I had nothing better to offer.
Rowson’s question was meant to frame, then operationalize, a nonprofit project designed to attract visionaries—if I’m not mistaken, with a fellowship of some sort. Admittedly, my initial response had been terse, mainly because I had just come off writing a warning about so-called ‘systems thinkers’:
Perhaps you’ve met her. Whether she’s haunting the corridors of the EU buildings in Brussels, or sent off to Davos to expound on her ideas before the WEF elites, she spends her days in deep reflection, rigorous analysis, or synthesizing information from various disciplines. She sees possibilities that escape the notice of the laity, trapped as they are in linear thinking.
In the realm of “systems thinking,” she stands apart. Not only can she appreciate complexity and interconnection, but she can also plan such systems for others through intelligent design. While most are content with a surface-level understanding, she perceives the underlying dynamics that govern reality. To her, everything is woven into a tapestry of relationships and patterns—transcending the ordinary, penetrating the superficial. She is the weaver.
In her eyes, only those with a truly exceptional intellectual curiosity can hope to walk the path she has carved. In her mind, she’s no authoritarian. She’s a servant leader capable of making decisions for the common good. And she’s getting noticed. Her grasp of systems thinking is not just a pursuit. It’s a way of life. Her global outlook promises to heal a benighted world.
We should beware of this person. But why?
One word: humility.
I couldn’t help but be biased by my own assessment, as Rowson seeks to develop something like a dragnet for visionaries. Systems thinkers too often fancy they are visionaries, but complexity shatters technocratic visions as an angry god. Just because Venn Diagram circles overlap doesn’t mean my concern about technocrats disqualifies exploration of visionaries—though perhaps the distinction is helpful.
The truth is, though, I still can’t give Rowson (or you) a thorough answer. But the following is assembled from my notes on the matter. Maybe it can be fodder:
The Visionary:
Sees better with her eyes closed, but opens our eyes.
Is an oracle with a sandbox.
Operationalizes dreams.
Is an alchemist.
Reorganizes reality.
Is an arbitrageur of fantasy and reality.
Mates imagination with the status quo.
Is a telescope in space-time.
Is capable of sculpting aether.
Sees god in the kaleidoscope.
Is a Shamanoid.
Is a spellcaster.
Lives her tomorrow while the rest of us live our yesterdays.
Sees reality more clearly despite its weirdness.
Sees weirdness more clearly in reality.
Builds new worlds from the detritus of the old.
Without her there is no progress.
Without her we would be stumbling around in the dark.
Okay, so these are but shards of understanding. What does it matter?
The truth is, a big theme of this publication is subversive innovation, which implies the existence of subversive innovators. These are the people whose creative powers can bring about peaceful, liberatory change.
In short, subversive innovators are a species of visionary.
We need to attract and inspire them. But to attract and inspire subversive innovators, we need to understand their nature as visionaries.
What do you think?
To repeat, all of my noodling on the question seems insufficient. But I thought I’d share my half-baked thoughts with you.
If you have an answer to the question “What is a visionary?” feel free to leave even a notion or partial idea in the comments. Maybe more blind folks’ hands on the elephant will help us see it a bit better.
Do it inductively. Start with a list of people who you think were visionaries, then look for commonalities. Also, there’s going to be bias because most visionaries don’t succeed. So that means we never hear about them. So that means the question really is what is a successful visionary? Or, what is a visionary who has achieved at least some of his vision in a way that the rest of the world can see? Also, you need a society which is wealthy and dynamic and expanding the permits visionaries to actually have a realistic possibility of making their vision actual. That means in practice you are limited to western civilization in the last few centuries. Also, implicitly, we’re going to want to rule out visionaries whose aims were evil, even though some of the most effective visionaries have been malicious in their intentions. You may want to come up with your own list, keep it to 10 or a dozen people, then look for common threads.