What do you see in the image below?
A duck?
A bunny?
How fast can you switch between the two?
This duck-rabbit illusion was first used by psychologist Joseph Jastrow in 1899 to make the point that perception involves active perspective-taking.
Different people see things differently at different times, and it's possible to see the same situation in more than one equally-valid way.
This is exactly what happens when teams think about the future. Everyone has their own vision of where they're headed. Some see a duck, others see a bunny. Most leaders exhaust themselves trying to get everyone to see the same animal.
But we think there's a better way, because ...
You don’t actually need a singular, agreed-upon vision to move forward with project or product work today. In fact, it’s nearly always better without one.
We know, this statement is controversial. It's prone to ringing big juicy alarm bells in people's heads.
Perhaps for you too?
“But how can we prioritise if we don’t have a vision?”
“How will we avoid people working on the wrong things? Your way means scope creep and endless debates!”
“No, you’re forgetting the motivational effect of vision. The people want clarity and direction.”
“Big hairy audacious goals!”
"Our investors/board/stakeholders expect a vision that we can report progress against – how do we explain our strategy without one?"
As we've emphasised before (and we'll darn-well keep retreading the same old ground until the grass is pulped underfoot), you don't have to fight people's instincts.
We're not saying “don’t have visions”
Firstly, you couldn’t stop yourself if you tried. We all have many visions of possible futures floating around in our heads. These are personal, vague, partial. They can even be subconscious – guiding intent and action without being explicable. Brilliant!
What we're saying is this:
Don’t waste a single moment trying to align a group of people on a singular, official vision.
Instead, allow multiple visions to coexist and use them all together to prioritise action today that will make them all likelier and/or clearer.
How? We’ll get to that in a moment.
First, let's enjoy these three unpalatable reasons why the singular official vision is so wasteful:
1) It takes an enormous amount of time and effort to persuade enough people in an organisation to rally behind any singular, official vision.
2) Even when you have surface-level alignment, there are still a lot of disgruntled folks biting their tongues and biding their time.
3) They already know that the singular, official vision has no basis in reality. But trying to argue against it would only waste even more time and energy. So they’re preparing to ride out the failure ... whether with a sad sense of resignation or a cackling "I told you so". (Then you go back to step 1 and repeat.)
A friend of The Reach told us how his R&D team used visions. Once a quarter, their boss would ask them to dream up a few smoke-and-mirror fantasy screenshots that could be presented in the company-wide meeting. Something exciting, dazzling … and completely unrelated to what they were really working on.
Strategy and innovation involves uncertainty, failure, surprises. At least half of your organisation does not want to know how the sausage is made.
Your official vision can be a tchotchke that keeps people happy, entertained and looking the other way, so that your team can ignore it and get on with the real work.
(As quick side note, do you feel like you have no choice but to cook up an official singular vision for political reasons – board, investors, process? This need is real, so go ahead. Just be sure to treat it like a marketing brochure, and avoid falling into the trap of believing that it’s an instructive tool to help your team.)
After the 2024 Olympics, YouGov ran a poll in the UK
They asked the Brits:
“The next Olympic Games will be held in Los Angeles in 2028. Hypothetically speaking, if you began training TODAY, which of the following sports, if any, do you think you could qualify for the 2028 Olympics with?”
And 27% of people actually picked a sport.
OK, the framing of the question is a little unfair as it nudges you to pick a sport.
And to be fair … 15% said 10m Air Rifle, inspired by the Turkish everyman in a slouchy tee who became a viral meme overnight, so this is sort of understandable – you might’ve seen someone who looks a bit like you.
But 6% said 100m sprint! That's more than 4 million people.
Something about this is strikingly similar to corporate vision-setting situations. The notion that the organisation will be capable of competing at the highest level is a given, and all that remains is to align on the correct target. Naturally, you wouldn't want to put effort into qualifying for rhythmic gymnastics (3%) if you can all pull in the same direction and go for rowing (7%).
Never mind that you have no real clue about the work it would take to get there, the obstacles that lie ahead, or what the competition will be like.
Never mind that to get on the Olympic team for rowing, you’d’ve needed to start with certain genetic advantages, and you’d’ve had to start training a decade earlier.
The disconnect here is stunning. It's also understandable – it’s fun and inspiring to imagine shooting for the moon.
One founder we worked with was dead set on his future vision of exponential startup success … despite taking almost none of the action that would make such success possible. In the face of blaring signals that this was not a workable path for him, he guided his team to rebuild the same failing idea in three different technologies. (Each one fell over and sunk into the swamp.) Rather like our 27% of confident soon-to-be-Olympians, he had absolutely no concept of the vast chasm between him and the elite in his chosen field.
Wisps o' nuthin'
Maybe you think we’re cherry-picking examples? Not all leaders are that deluded! What about all the successful companies that DID have clear visions?
The thing is, if you look closely, you'll see that they didn’t have a clear vision. They presented the impression of having one. When you tug on the threads, you see that they are deliberately vague. Wisps of smoke that disappear between your fingers. Like a Nostradamus prophecy, they can be reinterpreted later to fit the narrative of whatever ends up happening.
Something so vague may well have political utility, but it doesn’t help anyone make real decisions in the near term.
Picture a room full of leadership bigwigs at a hyper-growth startup. Senior execs, heads of departments. And a younger and less bewhiskered Tom facilitating a strategic workshop.
We won’t list the precise exercises from that day, but they’d be familiar to you if you’ve been in a corporate vision-setting workshop. The exercises were designed to tease the strategic insights out of the leaders’ heads where they clearly lived. The goal was to make the future vision tangible, so the whole company could feel less confused and make some decisions they were struggling with.
The energy was high. Stacks of sticky notes were filling up with Sharpie scrawl. It felt like clarity and purpose distilled, at last!
What shocked younger Tom — as he scanned through the post-its — was that there was nothing really there. No actual vision, only vague platitudes.
- “Seamless”
- “Great UX”
- “Mobile app!”
Huh ... this was pretty much just the same noises the leadership had been spouting all along.
The exercises had been designed to try to get into the details. What do you actually mean when you say “great UX”? What’s the movie scene of someone experiencing “great UX” ... so the teams know what to actually build?
But the closest any post-it got to a movie scene was the story of a billboard that scanned your eyes and gave you a personalised advert. Which a) didn’t have anything to do with this company’s IP, and b) was probably because they’d recently watched Minority Report, an actual movie that contains that actual scene.
Of course the leadership couldn’t share precise, crispy movie scenes about the future. Having the letter “C” in your job title doesn’t give you psychic powers. This wasn’t a team of precogs like Agatha (Minority Report again). At best, it was a team of Mystic Megs sharing wispy wishy-washy statements that could all be reframed as true later – if you squint from the right angle.
And guess what ...
It didn’t matter that they couldn’t predict the future
At time of writing, that company is a billion dollar concern, riding high and looking swell. Do they have “great UX”? Sure, it’s not bad, compared with the competition. Still waiting on that retina-scanning personalisation though.
Younger Tom was dismayed by this experience. He felt that the job of leadership was to be exquisitely clear about what they wanted to have happen so that their employees could make it so. And now it was exquisitely clear to him: any visions the leadership had were either vague and formless or sci-fi hokum.
Still, he was stuck. He didn’t yet know how to make progress without a singular, official vision.
He figured he'd just been unlucky. Other companies would get it right, right? But as he looked wider and deeper, he realised – nope.
It wasn't long before he moved into leadership positions himself. Now others were looking to him for precognition. They wanted him to tell them the future so they could simply get on and build it for it.
Everywhere he looked, people were:
- preparing for the journey … but never quite setting off
- chasing in circles after a vague vision … that never resolves into something clear
- building big for a future vision … that never materialises
- feeling frustrated when the vision changes due to new info, because of course it has to - over and over again.
You’ve probably experienced some of those yourself. (We go into lots more detail about this situation and the traps of visions in Part 2.)
Is it a bunny or is it a duck?
When people are waiting for a singular vision, try Bunny Ducking.
We nabbed this term from Jabe Bloom and Ben Mosior, and it’s about managing the evolutionary potential of the present.
The illusion at the top of this email is a sketch of 2 visions in superposition. Different people tend to perceive different visions at different times, and can switch between both.
It’s a metaphor for what’s happening in your head when you think of future visions for your business, technology, career ... anything. You can hold multiple contradictory possibilities at the same time without having to resolve them.
Your next step isn’t to try to force people to choose your preferred bunny when they really prefer the duck. Doing so might feel more comfortable for you in the short term. But in the long term you might learn that you should have chosen duck. And in the meantime, you’ve created a secret cabal of duck separatists who may unwittingly undermine your bunny-shaped efforts.
Instead, ask people to make the blurry sketch of both animals into better sketch. Prioritise actions that will help resolve both animals into something clearer; both futures. Then take a look again.
Perhaps the duck or the bunny is now obviously closer to reality.
More commonly however, you find that a third, previously imperceptible animal emerges. You realise you’ve got a swan. Or even a platypus.
The Bunny Ducking illusion is artificially simple. There are only 2 possibilities laid out, and they can both be seen clearly.
When it comes to organisational visions, there are many, many more possible resolutions. They’re hidden inside people’s heads, semi-expressible only through imperfect language.
So, what to do about it?
We have a practical approach to share with you.
Why isn't it already a duck?
Allow everyone to have their vague visions. Don’t worry about trying to describe them in detail. Don’t debate them directly.
Simply ask: “what are the biggest factors stopping your personal vision from already being reality?”.
(We borrowed this question from Ben Mosior again – this time with David Holl on the Better Now card in their Strategy Tactics deck – a great pairing with Innovation Tactics.)
This question surfaces constraints in your current situation by letting everyone consider what’s blocking their own vision.
You can consider whatever’s blocking each vision to be a constraint on that vision. Basically, if the constraints weren’t present, the vision would be already happening.
As you ask more people to list constraints, you’ll see patterns start to emerge. You’ll realise that everyone’s circling around the same few constraints. And you’ll start to get a sense of some constraints that you can tackle today.
This is why it works. The list of current constraints is finite and within practical reach. Meanwhile, the list of potential visions is infinite and tends towards wishful thinking.
The patterns that emerge among the constraints will show you changes you could make (actions you could take) that could help you resolve and/or clarify many visions at once, to make many potential futures slightly more likely.
RELEASE THE PLATYPUS
Some changes will be every org’s favourite things: “quick wins” and “low hanging fruit”. This is the small stuff that’s been niggling for ages but is never momentous enough to prioritise. They might be worth prioritising to get them out of the way, but they’re unlikely to have a big effect.
Some constraints will seem monumental. Unrealistic, or even impossible, to tackle from where you are today. Note them, but don’t be tempted to start boil-the-ocean projects. The “grand rebuild” is in this camp, alongside “the technology doesn’t exist yet” and “regulations say no”.
In between these extremes, you’ll find a sweet spot of changes that are a good size to start work on today. They’ll be things that help make all visions more likely, and that also clarify the probabilities of different visions.
They're also changes you'd have had to make anyway in order to realise any singular official vision you might've chosen. But — here's the magic — you can just get on with them right now, instead of wasting time trying to predict the unpredictable.
You've probably already experienced this in your personal life. For example, once upon a time, we needed to move house, and we were trying to figure out where to move to. And it blocked us from doing anything at all. Until we realised that there were certain tasks that needed to be done regardless of where we ended up going. (The other thing we did was safe-to-fail probes to help us unpack the details of different options.)
The niftiest part of the Bunny Ducking approach?
As you take action to tackle the constraints you've identified, you’ll accidentally gather loads more information about reality. Oops!
This will show you more constraints, but it will also subconsciously alter the kinds of visions that people tend to hold, and shorten your vision chasm by several miles.
No debate needed. You just wake up one day to realise that everyone on your rowing crew has forgotten about bunnies and ducks, and insists they knew it was going to be a platypus all along.
Until next time,
Tom & Corissa x
P.S. If you know someone who'd enjoy this, please take a moment to forward it on to them.
