Leadership — Vision

Vision

This is where the innovation part of the series has got to: the walls are down, you can see yourself, the idea flow is running. One question left — you have a flow of ideas, so who decides where it flows?

A team can be full of ideas and loud discussion, but if every idea points in a different direction, more ideas is just internal friction. This chapter’s answer is vision: not the slogan on the wall, but the sense of direction the ideas share — and the real line between “someone who has ideas” and “a leader who drives innovation”.

Vision is personal

When the book talks about vision, everything rides on the word “personal”. Behind almost every successful innovator is a picture they genuinely believe in, often a slightly odd one — not the kind of slogan that goes on a company wall. And vision is double: half of it is the mission everyone shares, the other half is your particular way of contributing — stack the two and that’s your vision.

More importantly: everyone already has a personal vision, it’s just buried — under cynicism, under self-doubt, under “will people laugh if I say something that big”. Part of becoming a leader is digging it up and daring to say it out loud.

Vision is contagious — that’s what influence is

A leader doesn’t announce the vision to the team — the team catches it. That’s the difference between push and pull: push people with your position and they stop the moment you stop pushing; but someone who genuinely believes their own vision pulls the people around them along with the picture. The reverse holds too: a leader without a vision has almost no lasting influence — which is the gardener logic of organic thinking. The arrows in the picture above line up not because the leader drew a map and made everyone follow it, but because everyone saw the same picture.

What a vision does day to day

Vision sounds abstract, but it does three very concrete things every day:

1. Separates what matters from what’s noise — with the picture in front of you, you know which problems deserve your best work and which aren’t worth wrestling with. It also makes saying no cheap: a vision publishes the environmental reasons in advance, so rejecting an idea stops being a judgment on a person and becomes a conversation in front of the same map.
2. Holds the bar when nobody’s checking — not discipline; the picture pulling you.
3. A reason to get up after a setback — getting through the pain of the transition was never about willpower. It’s the picture you haven’t reached yet.

Reflection

I can’t make this one a summary. Reading the line “everyone has a personal vision, it’s just buried”, I noticed something awkward: I don’t have a stated vision of my own. So this reflection is the whole process of actually digging mine out — if you don’t have that sentence either, you can dig along the same line.

Digging backwards: peak moments

First question: which moments in my career made me feel “this is what it was for”? Two came up.

One was years ago at Grindr: I added a trie to a search feature, dug further and upgraded it to a compressed trie, and made the whole thing faster — and while I was there, brought in a unit-test and performance-test framework. The other is recent, at my current company thingnario: for one unusual computation I shrank the table earlier in the pipeline and used Redis pipelining to cut the number of round trips, which took p50 down by 25% and improved p95 by 40% — plus an integration-test mechanism to make sure the computation stayed correct.

What the two have in common: I dug deeper than the requirement asked, good and bad were measured, and each one left a verification mechanism behind. And there’s a tail to it — not every member understood any of this, and I was happy and proud anyway. My pride doesn’t need an audience.

Dissection: which part is the pride actually coming from?

Then a thought experiment: split the story into three versions, each keeping only one element, and see which version still counts as a peak moment. Score on instinct, 1 to 10:

Version	What’s left	Score
A	The numbers are just as good, but the approach was copying a library and tuning parameters, with no tests left behind	3
B	I worked out a beautiful solution, but it never shipped, there are no numbers, and nobody knows	9
C	Someone else did the optimisation; all I left is the test framework the team still uses	6.5

B = 9 is a very clean signal: even unshipped, with no audience, “genuinely understanding it, then producing a beautiful solution” is almost the entirety of the pride. And A = 3 says the numbers were never the source of the joy — they’re its anti-counterfeit label: I need proof that the solution really is beautiful and not just flattering to me. C’s 6.5 is a derivative: a test framework keeps “correct” verifiable after I’ve left the room.

What you’re angry at

Next question: what makes me angrier than the surface severity warrants?

The two stories from last time are the answer. When the order-statistics design lost, I was furious — furious enough to go straight into the winning implementation’s code review, stricter than I’d ever been, and pull out several real bugs and wasted cycles. Note: the bugs I pulled out were real — even my anger ran on evidence. And with clean architecture, I was furious afterwards at myself.

One looks like anger at someone else and the other like anger at me, but the bullseye is identical: judging without understanding. I’m angry at it whoever does it — which tells me it isn’t an emotion about winning, it’s a principle being stepped on. And the principle is global: when my wife casually calls some dish bad, my reflex is “you haven’t tried it, how can you call it bad — at least take a bite before you rate it”; when a family member asserts that some official “obviously hadn’t checked, which is why he wouldn’t answer”, I reconstruct the structure he sits in first — the responsibilities are separated, that information doesn’t reach his level at all — understand the constraints a person is inside, then decide how to judge them. It fires even on things that have nothing to do with me, which means it isn’t a strategy. It’s a factory setting.

Recognising it, not inventing it

The last piece is envy. Years ago I watched Simon Sinek talk about the infinite game and leadership, and two things stuck: the infinite game — the goal isn’t to win this round, it’s to keep the game worth playing; and empathy — a manager can’t look at people only through KPIs. Looking back, it’s no surprise those two landed. Judging people purely by KPI is the human version of “judging without understanding” — a convenient proxy metric that saves you the effort of actually understanding a person. And the test frameworks I keep leaving behind, the posts that turn complicated things into diagrams, are all infinite-game moves: keep the good thing running after I’ve left the room.

Having dug this far, I tried to forge it all into one elegant vision statement — I forged several. Every one of them was accurate, and every one read like somebody else’s.

Then I remembered a line I saw six months ago, one I’ve carried since:

I know how to think about a problem in the right frame, I can state the trade-offs, and I can be honest about what I don’t know — that’s enough.

Unpack it: “think in the right frame” is understanding — systems and people both; “state the trade-offs” is being able to give reasons for a judgment; “honest about what I don’t know” is the same principle pointed at myself — better to admit I haven’t understood it yet than to fake a verdict; and “that’s enough” is B = 9: understand the thing properly, prove good and bad honestly, and whether it gets picked takes nothing away from me.

So I’d been carrying my vision for six months without recognising it. The words haven’t changed, but now the compressed trie hangs off them, and A3/B9/C6.5, and order statistics and clean architecture, and “you haven’t tried it, how can you call it bad” — same key, more doors.

Weinberg says everyone’s vision is there, just buried. Mine wasn’t even buried deep — it had been sitting in my head for half a year, waiting for someone to call it by name. So the last thing the innovation part taught me is this: the end point of innovation isn’t ideas, it’s a sense of direction — and a sense of direction is usually not the thing you lack, it’s the thing you haven’t recognised yet.