Leadership Lessons 24 : Realizing a Vision

 Leadership Lessons 24

Realizing a Vision

While a solo visionary can imagine a great work of art, painting or literature, social visionaries need people to make the vision possible.

Hence, the most challenging aspect for a leader is to transform of his/her vision to a shared sense of vision by all those people who are going to make that vision possible.

Vision without people remains in the book. While Marx did dream and wrote an analytical prophetic vision, he simply did not organize people to share such a vision. Lenin did.

So it is one thing to have a vision and it is another thing to have shared vision and it is an entirely different thing to inspire a lots of people who work with you and beyond to internalize that vision, own that vision, work together to make such a vision happen. The ability to transform your sense of vision to a shared sense of vision and purpose is what make a leader unique.

It is not about creating followers of what you say. It is about creating a team - and a larger team- and much larger organisation to understand, appreciate and inspired by such a vision where they also feel they are making a difference. It is such collective visions that drive a society and make history possible.

There are those who dream for the entire society, there are those who dream for an institution or an organisation or for a new initiative .There are those who can dream for themselves and there are those who can dream for all the above.

In my case, I always see life and work for a period of on a scale of ten years of vision about the new initiative that I begin or at various points of life. It is a ten year perspective of purpose and a thirty years sense vision that drive me.

This ten year mile stones with a clarity of purpose and ability to pursue that direction with passion, commitment and determination is what all drives me. Without a larger dream to drive, life often becomes a routine.

It is the dreams and death that make life creative and interesting. That is why Robert Forst's lines are made famous by Nehru :

'The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep."

The most important aspect of vision is also about the experience evolving a vision There is nothing like a 'ready-made' vision or a 'success template' for a vision..

Without experience of lessons of leadership are like talking about swimming without ever swimming in reality.

When I joined my very first institution building role , there was one file, and two people and 4 lakhs rupees in a bank. I did not have a clue of what I was getting in to. What attracted me was the possibilities for experimenting with life and the excitement of experiment .

Many predicted the embryo of the institution will be a still-born baby that I was supposed to nurse and nurture. And many predicted I would not survive there. In the first moth, I was not clear.

But after few months of understanding, analyzing the situation and meditating over the possible options, I had a dream - about a clear imaginative potential that I would pursue and determined to make that happen.

I gave myself and that organisation ten years to fulfill that dream. When I left the organisation exactly after ten years, it became an institution known all over the world for the art and science of advocacy. In the course, we have been able to train 8000 people in sixty countries.

I took the institution from a small kitchen in Vasi in Mumbai and from a hole in the wall arrangement office in Lower Parel in Mumbi to something at that thrived and made change happen, known across the world. I literary grew up. with that institution and grew from local to the global in the process.

Many predicted doom. Many discouraged me to go back to academics when I chose to resign my teaching job. But I was sure about the direction and never looked back. From a table space and a chair and three people , we moved in to our own beautiful premises in Pune with a national and global profile and an institution that contributed immensely for many important policy change in India and made advocacy a popular word not only in India and across the world.

In my experience, ever since 1990, I have tried to build vision for ten year for any of my work and life- and also the initiatives that I began. Initiated several institutions in India and beyond with this ten year perspective/vision approach.

Almost all of them thrived and I moved on to my next dream project that excites me. The first dream about Bodhigram was in 1989/90. In 2004, I decided to make it happen in Kerala; earned money only for that for ten year , as I did not want to depend on any grant or external grant. In 2007 I decided to make it happen in Adoor and began my second cycle of journey once again from the very village I was born and brought up. And then Bodhigram just began. And it will grow much beyond the wildest guess many and in 2050. I did write a detailed plan Bodhigram 2050, which may look very wild. I may not live to see it. However I have shared and entrusted few who would make it happen.

Bodhigram will be known all over the world for making change happen . I know that from the depth of my soul as it was dream that I nurtured as a young man of ideals, ideas and dreams in 1989. I was two hundred percent convinced and did not think twice before spending all my life's saving on the dream that drives me, so that it will necessarily outlive me.

JS Adoor

To be continued