Vision Is Almost Free

A coworker said something this week that I haven’t been able to shake - “having a vision costs almost nothing”. We were talking about how easy it is, in a big company, to settle into unhealthy norms, and how much easier it is for a leader to accept them than to change them. Changing them starts with something simple: decide what you want things to look like, and say it clearly. Having a vision costs almost nothing. Communicating it costs almost nothing. The return can be enormous.

Most of what we do to improve an organization is expensive: hiring, reorgs, new systems, training. Explaining where you’re going and why is nearly free, and I think leaders routinely underestimate that.

By vision I don’t mean an all-hands deck about becoming the world’s leading something. I mean something people can use to make decisions, so that when they’re choosing between two reasonable options they can pick one without waiting for someone higher up. My ten good decisions are worth a lot less than a hundred people making slightly better ones on their own every day.

You can’t hand someone agency without also handing them context. Without it, “you’re empowered” really means “make the call yourself, but try to guess what I would have wanted.” (The other side of that, how organizations teach people to wait, is in The Best Engineers Don’t Wait for Permission.) With a clear vision, people stop asking what their boss would want and start asking which choice gets them closer to where we said we’re going.

There’s also a trap in getting good at this job. You make good decisions, so more of them come to you, until your judgment is on the critical path for everything. It feels like effectiveness, but what you’ve built is a system that scales at the speed of your calendar.

That matters more now that AI is making execution cheap. Ten teams moving slowly in ten directions is a coordination problem. Make each of them five times faster and you have the same problem, arriving sooner. It’s the same shift behind Scarcity Doesn’t Disappear. It Moves.: once the work is cheap, deciding what’s worth doing is the hard part.

The part I find uncomfortable is that leaders get bored with their own message long before anyone else has absorbed it. By the time you share a strategy, you’ve lived with it for months, so it feels obvious. You say it once and move on, while most of the organization is hearing it for the first time. John Kotter flagged this more than thirty years ago in Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail, where “undercommunicating the vision by a factor of ten” is one of the eight errors he lists. My guess is that the moment you start to feel slightly ridiculous repeating yourself is about when people are starting to internalize it.

So explain where you’re going and why, be honest about the tradeoffs, and keep saying it long after you’re tired of hearing yourself. I’m still working on that last part.