Stuck in the Middle #16 Vision as Utopia8 min read

Leaders need vision!

I am sure you have heard this said over and over again. In leadership positions, we often discuss vision as a critical attribute a leader must have. A leader needs to create a vision to inspire the team and see where they are headed.

But what if the value of vision isn’t to show exactly where we are headed? What if it isn’t even about inspiration as such?

Utopia is a parallel to vision, and thinking about Utopia can shift how we think and use vision in our work.

But before we go there, what do most leadership thinkers mean when they say Vision?

Leadership Vision

Leaders seem obsessed with visions. Visionary leadership has become redundant, as it is believed that all leaders need to have visions and that without a vision, you are not a leader.

Oleg Konovalov has written a book on how to be a visionary leader. In it, he claims:

Vision defines why and where effort should be placed. Leadership is blind without a clear and robust vision. Thus, a vision must be clear so that leaders know how best to direct their team. ¹

This is a standard proposition that the leader’s job is to create an image of the future that everyone can rally around to bring into existence. With this, he focuses on the clarity of creation, the ability to make the vision real, the viability of the vision, influencing people to believe in the vision, acting or executing against the vision, revitalization, and the ability to manage changes along the way.

I won’t explore his thinking too deeply here, only to highlight it as a paradigmatic view of visionary leadership. This view lends itself to clear, actionable, and attainable visions.

On the other hand, thinkers like Dave Snowden take a complexity-influenced approach and say that we should start where we are, focus on understanding the present, and start with a sense of direction rather than a vision. “One of the principles of managing a complex system is starting journeys with a general sense of direction rather than having specific goals. A complex system is so deeply entangled that the same thing is unlikely to happen the same way twice other than by accident.” ²

And this makes sense. We have all seen the case where the goals were too lofty or disconnected from reality. And in a complex system, you can’t get from here to there directly.

This is why Jameson has remarked: “Ontologies of the present demand archeologies of the future, not forecasts of the past.” ³ The way to discover the path forward is not to make predictions based on what has happened before but to understand the seeds of the future that have already been planted and to tend to those that will create the growth we want.

Jameson’s approach to this archeology of the future is through Utopia.

What (where) is Utopia?

Utopia is hard to imagine. Snowden has an exercise, “Future Backward,” which asks teams to imagine utopian and dystopian futures. The value of this exercise is to see how different paths that led to where we are today could have led to an impossibly good or impossibly bad future.

When I ran this exercise with a team, they struggled to develop a utopia that was anything other than an incremental improvement on where they were. This is common. It is hard to imagine something radically different than where we are today. I would argue that part of the reason is that we expect it to be a realizable future.

The original meaning of utopia is no place. It is, by definition, nonexistent. Utopia is impossible. It can’t exist. It contradicts the paradigmatic view of vision as something attainable.

In Jameson’s view, the point of utopia is not about attainment at all. The value is in the unimaginability of utopia as such.

utopia is somehow negative; and that it is most authentic when we cannot imagine it. Its function lies not in helping us to imagine a better future but rather in demonstrating our utter incapacity to imagine such a future—our imprisonment in a non-utopian present without historicity or futurity—so as to reveal the ideological closure of the system in which we are somehow trapped and confined. ⁴

The point of utopia is to cause us to see what our current perspective and ideology excludes and what it makes impossible. By highlighting the impossible, it becomes clear what limitations we currently see.

One way to create a utopian vision is to imagine some “elimination of this or that ‘root of all evil’” ⁵ And to ask the question,

[W]hat would today be the most radical demand to make on our own system—that demand which could not be fulfilled or satisfied without transforming the system beyond recognition, and which would at once usher in a society structurally distinct from this one in every conceivable way, from the psychological to the sociological, from the cultural to the political”⁶

The example Jameson cites would be full employment, not the current (capitalist) definition of full employment, meaning 4-5% employment, but actual 100% employment. This utopian idea would require a complete change of our systems.

As this highlights, a utopia will not be perfect for everyone. It involves some choice that people will view positively or negatively. Many executives and business owners would hate Jameson’s utopian ideal of full employment as it would change the dynamic with workers. There is no universal utopia.

Every utopia since Utopia has also been, clearly or obscurely, actually or possibly, in the author’s or in the readers’ judgment, both a good place and a bad one. Every eutopia contains a dystopia, every dystopia contains a eutopia. ⁷

One of the challenges of Utopia is that it is impossible to represent the totality of it. Jameson says:

The social totality is always unrepresentable, even for the most numerically limited groups of people; but it can sometimes be mapped and allow a small-scale model to be constructed on which the fundamental tendencies and the lines of flight can more clearly be read. At other times, this representational process is impossible, and people face history and the social totality as a bewildering chaos, whose forces are indiscernible.⁸

We can’t define every aspect of a vision or a utopia. We can’t define how everything would need to be for a utopia to become real. This is another aspect of what makes it impossible to imagine a utopia fully. There are always details that cannot be understood.

Part of this is the recognition that we can’t understand exactly how we would cause the utopia to come into being. The goal isn’t to paint the path to a perfect future but to create a new lens to see the present. Jameson looks at science fiction as a key example of Utopian discourse and shares his view like this:

I would argue, however, that the most characteristic SF does not seriously attempt to imagine the “real” future of our social system. Rather, its multiple mock futures serve the quite different function of transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come. It is this present moment – unavailable to us for contemplation in its own right because the sheer quantitative immensity of objects and individual lives it comprises is untotalizable and hence unimaginable, and also because it is occluded by the density of our private fantasies as well as of the proliferating stereotypes of a media culture that penetrates every remote zone of our existence – that upon our return from the imaginary constructs of SF is offered to us in the form of some future world’s remote past, as if posthumous and as though collectively remembered. ⁹

The idea for a utopian vision is to create a break that allows people to see their present conditions more fully. Said another way the goal is:

not to give us “images” of the future… but rather to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present, and to do so in specific ways distinct from all other forms of defamiliarization. ¹⁰

Making our present conditions seem unfamiliar creates the ability to see them from some distance, to see the ideology at play that makes another future unimaginable, and to be able to see the break.

The Utopian form itself is the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system. But it asserts this by forcing us to think the break itself, and not by offering a more traditional picture of what things would be like after the break.¹¹

What can you do as a middle manager?

1. The definition of a vision or utopia should not come from the leader alone but from the team. Brainstorm individually and together.
2. Rather than imagining an ideal future, imagine a break with current circumstances that will force you to see everything differently. What one thing could change that would move everything else to shift?
3. Understand what that break tells you about the current situation. What is the ideology that makes that break seem impossible?
4. Where are the seeds of that future in the current situation? What can be nurtured and what can be suppressed to change the direction of change?
   

Utopia also serves a vital political function today which goes well beyond mere ideological expression or replication. The formal flaw – how to articulate the Utopian break in such a way that it is transformed into a practical-political transition – now becomes a rhetorical and political strength – in that it forces us precisely to concentrate on the break itself: a meditation on the impossible, on the unrealizable in its own right. ¹²

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1. Oleg Konovalov, The Vision Code ↩
2. https://thecynefin.co/cynefin-st-davids-2024-estuarine-3-5/ ↩
3. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (p215) ↩
4. Fredric Jameson, The Politics of Utopia New Left Review 25 (Jan/Feb 2004): (p46) ↩
5. Ibid (p37) ↩
6. Ibid ↩
7. Ursula K. LeGuin, “Utopiyin, Utopiyang” in Utopia ↩
8. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (p14) ↩
9. Ibid (p288) ↩
10. Ibid (p286-287) ↩
11. Ibid (p232) ↩
12. Ibid ↩