Vision is born from pain: why guiding visions are not created at whiteboards
There is one place where visions do not emerge: the workshop room, between sticky notes and coffee pots, when a team is tasked with "drafting a vision statement". What emerges there are sentences. A vision emerges somewhere else — where something hurts.
Where there is burden, vision is born
Every vision that carries, in my experience, has the same origin: a pain that could no longer be borne. A state of things where someone said — not like this. Not on my watch. Not any longer. For me it was seeing children who had no chance of school because they were needed at home. The Jona Foundation was born out of that burden — not out of a market analysis.
This is not only true for NGOs. In companies too, the strongest visions are those behind which stands a real, felt problem: a condition the founder, the leadership team, the organisation refuses to accept any longer. Where there is no burden, no vision is born — only a slogan. And you can tell the difference immediately: slogans have to be memorised. Visions are remembered, because they touch something in us.
"Where there is no vision, the people perish." — after Proverbs 29:18
Vision as a guiding image — not a poster
This ancient line from the Bible describes precisely what happens in organisations without vision: things fray. Everyone works hard, but everyone in their own direction. Priorities are negotiated case by case instead of derived from a shared picture. A vision is not a decorative sentence for the website — it is a guiding image in the literal sense: an image that guides. A thousand small decisions align with it that no one could order individually. It is what holds an organisation together when the plan changes — and plans always change.
Part of a whole: the power of the many
There is a misunderstanding about visionaries: that they are individuals who move great things. My experience is different. Power does not unfold from the work of individuals but from the work of many who understand themselves as part of a whole. The vision gives that whole its direction — but it is carried by people who recognise themselves in it: the local team on the ground, the donor, the partner, the colleague who carries an idea forward. A vision that belongs only to its author remains a dream. A vision begins to work when it is shared — in both senses of the word.
The drop in the ocean
The most common objection to big visions is meant to make them small: "That's just a drop in the ocean." I have heard this sentence often. It sounds like realism and is usually just resignation in sensible clothing — as if some had long given up on the world in order to explain their own inaction.
The truth is: the drop is often where change begins. Every movement that ever changed anything started as a drop — as one decision, one project, one place. A kindergarten in Mityana that gives 80 children access to education, safety and a childhood is not a drop in the ocean. For those 80 children, it is everything. And for everyone who helped build it, it is proof that change is possible — the most dangerous idea a vision can release into the world.
In closing
When I work with leadership teams, founders or NGOs on their vision, we therefore do not start with the words but with the burden: What is the state of things you refuse to accept any longer? Who shares this pain with you? And what would be the first drop? From those answers grows a guiding image that carries — not because it is beautifully phrased, but because it is true. The rest is craft: translating the vision, communicating it, giving it structure. But it is always born in the same place. Where the burden is.
Websites, AI and automation · Cologne · Founder of an international NGO