Most vision work fails for a simple reason.
It treats vision as something you say, rather than something you build.
That may sound like a subtle distinction, but the consequences are enormous.
Most vision exercises assume the future already exists in some usable form inside the entrepreneur’s head. The task, then, is to articulate it more clearly, make it more inspiring, or repeat it more often. When that doesn’t work, people usually assume the problem is communication.
In my experience, that’s almost never the real issue.
The real problem is that the future hasn’t been specified enough to exist as a coherent object yet.
And until it does, no amount of articulation will help.
This is why so many vision workshops feel good in the room but change very little afterward. People leave inspired, aligned, and motivated, and then slowly drift back into old patterns. The vision sounded compelling, but it wasn’t solid enough to organize action, decisions, or commitment over time.
Vision, done well, is not inspiration.
It’s design.
If you want other human beings to move toward a future with you, certain things must be specified. Not everything, but not nothing either.
Questions like:
Without structure, vision stays expansive and infinite. It feels meaningful to the founder and confusing to everyone else.
Over the years, I’ve seen many different approaches to vision, and the truth is, they’re more similar than people want to admit. They are all different ways of forcing the same kind of discipline: deciding what must be made explicit for a future to become followable.
This is why I often use tools like the VTO.
Not because it’s magical.
Not because it’s the only way.
But because it does a very good job of identifying the minimum set of things that need to be specified for a business to exist clearly enough in the minds of other people.
Used properly, structure is not restrictive.
It’s the constraint that produces coherence.
This is where most people miss the deeper point.
Even with structure, you still have to understand how human beings actually decide to follow.
We do not have biology for assessing businesses.
We do not have sensors for organizations, strategies, or operating models.
We can’t feel a company the way we can feel a person.
What we do have is exquisitely tuned biology for assessing other human beings.
Within moments, we are sensing:
When people hear about a business, they unconsciously try to use those same biological tools.
This is why I often say that good vision work anthropomorphizes the business.
Not as a metaphor.
As a perceptual translation.
A well-designed vision allows people to assess a business the same way they assess a person:
When those questions are answered coherently, people don’t need to be convinced. They can simply sense whether this is something they want to follow.
If you want a practical guide to this way of thinking, you can download my free paper:
Anthropomorphizing Your Business: A Field Guide to Making Vision Work for Humans.
Most vision exercises focus on wording, alignment, or buy-in.
Very few focus on coherence.
Internal coherence:
Do the pieces of the future actually fit together, or do they subtly contradict one another?
External coherence:
Does this future make sense given the world, the market, the people involved, and the constraints you’re operating inside?
When coherence is missing, people don’t push back. They don’t argue. They simply hesitate. They disengage. They keep their options open.
And founders are left wondering why something that feels so clear to them doesn’t land.
This is not a personality issue.
It’s not a motivation issue.
It’s not a communication issue.
It’s a design issue.
After working with entrepreneurs for decades, I can say this with confidence.
Every once in a while, you meet someone who is genuinely extraordinary. Not just successful, but unmistakably so. People trust them. People follow them. People talk about them differently.
Almost without exception, what sets these people apart is not intelligence, hustle, or tactics.
It’s their ability to invent a future clearly enough, coherently enough, and humanly enough that others can see themselves inside it.
That capability is not optional if you want to build something meaningful at scale.
And it’s not something most entrepreneurs are ever taught.
In future writing, I’ll get more concrete about what human beings are actually listening for when they decide whether to follow a business, and how vision work can be designed to meet that listening instead of fighting it.
Most vision work fails because it treats vision as communication instead of design. Without structure, coherence, and a human-centered way of making the future perceptible, vision remains inspiring but ineffective. Effective vision work requires designing a future that people can sense, assess, and trust. When vision is coherent, specific, and humanly legible, people don’t need to be persuaded. They naturally choose to follow.