WHY A VISION IS HARD, AND (LOVE HIM OR HATE HIM) WHAT ELON teaches us
Image credit: Trevor Cokley—U.S. Air Force/U.S. Department of Defense
Why don’t we have more world changing Visionaries in business?
From biology to cultural context, there is a lot stopping us from creating a Vision:
We’re Wired to Focus on the Present: The human brain is hardwired for survival, and that means prioritizing the here and now. For thousands of years, our ancestors had to respond to immediate threats, like being eaten by a bear, for example. The prefrontal cortex, which handles things like decision-making and long-term planning, is underdeveloped when it comes to future thinking. The majority of us are just not built for it. And then there’s dopamine — our brains are all about short-term rewards. It makes long-term, abstract goals feel like a chore.
It’s Hard to Imagine Something You Haven’t Experienced: The brain likes the familiar. That’s why it’s so easy to remember things you’ve experienced. But the future? It’s all guesswork. There’s no real sensory experience of what tomorrow looks like, unless we create it - more about this later. Your brain doesn’t have the data to paint that picture with accuracy. It’s all abstract, and that can feel like a mental roadblock.
Image credit: Vitor Paladini x Unsplash
We Only Have Limited Energy: Thinking about the future is mentally exhausting. Our brains only have so much cognitive bandwidth, and long-term thinking demands that we juggle a ton of variables — uncertainty, probabilities, predictions. It's overwhelming. And that’s why it’s so much easier to focus on what's right in front of us instead of wrestling with what might be down the road.
We’re Not All Raised to Be Dreamers: Let’s be honest, most of us weren’t raised to think bigger than the world we’re born into. I certainly wasn’t. I was taught to get my head down and to focus on what was right in front of me. Dreaming about the future? That feels like a luxury. But just like any skill, visionary thinking takes practice. It needs training. You have to develop the muscle, and that takes time and intentionality.
So, yes, it’s hard to create a Vision for many reasons.
In fact, as future forecaster Nu Gotah says in the Deem Audio podcast it’s easier to write a list of what is going wrong with the world than to write a new story for what you want. I wholly agree. That’s a biological thing too. It's easier to focus on negative information due to a psychological phenomenon called "negativity bias," where our brains are wired to pay more attention to and remember negative experiences than positive ones, likely as a survival mechanism
But once you unlock that Vision, the possibilities for Growth, impact and innovation open up exponentially. Don’t just take my word for it – let’s take a peek at Elon. Whilst the way he’s doing it is highly contentious, he more than anyone right now feels like he’s making his dreams come true. So what can we learn from this?
(LOVE HIM OR HATE HIM) How Elon and his companies show us what a Vision can do
I look to Elon Musk as perhaps the best current day example of a company/companies and a person at the helm with a clear Vision.
That said, I will caveat all this with the fact that Elon is now a very powerful man within the US government and many consider him to be reckless and inhumane. This thinking I’m sharing here isn’t about how he’s going about implementing DOGE in the US, or his narratives on X (formally Twitter). It’s about his private work in the space industry until now. And specifically which bits do teach us something helpful.
Love him or hate him, Elon Musk is focused and motivated, and even with all the chaos he’s creating, knows how to motivate some of the best brains in the world across his various companies and beyond. To the point where Space X has recently become the world’s most valuable tech start up, valued at $350 billion USD. This blows my mind.
Why do people continue to follow him into space?
I believe it’s because he has a clear Vision.
Of Space X he says on the website “You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great - and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.”
Image credit: Space X website
Space X and partner companies are working towards the Vision seeking to build the technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, and the team there are proving for the first time in the earth’s 4 billion year history it might just be doable.
If you look at where he is now, with his fingers all over the US government, on the surface it makes little sense that he would wander into the world of politics. As journalist Kara Swisher notes in her PIVOT predictions podcast for 2025, Elon isn’t shaped for the government - he’s going to get bored easily, even with the unlocking of additional finances and power as a result of his new role.
Scratching beneath the surface further though, you could argue his most likely motivation for getting involved in politics is to get rid of the red tape getting in the way of his vision for multiplanetary life. A lot of what has been said by him and his CEO Gwynne Shotwell in the last 18 months points to this.
“Technology is easy. Physics is easy. People are hard, and regulator people are the hardest. All we ask is: regulate industries. Make them safe, make them right, make them fair. But we’ve got to go faster. Much faster.”
- GWYNNE SHOTWELL, NOVEMBER 2024
Image credit: Gwynne Shotwell, CEO of Space X. Ted Talks
It certainly stacks up knowing how many government agencies he is tackling that have influence and financial power over his companies.
Now, Elon bringing together his business interests with a government role is an ethical and legal landmine, so there’s a discussion here around when a Vision takes you too far. I’m keen to explore this, but let’s park that and come back to in another article.
Of course working through the US Government is just one of the ways he’s delivering on his Vision. Other famous and not so famous examples include creating reusable rockets; space clothing; global internet infrastructure; less famous systems that sustain humankind with air, water, food, and radiation; electric-powered transportation; tunnels for moving around underground; solar energy storage and beyond.
There is no doubt about it, whilst a lot of what makes Elon questionable is out there for us all to see, he still has millions of smart people across all his companies pioneering the way in multiplanetary life – and that’s because Elon Musk is one of the lucky ones, much like folk like Steve Jobs, blessed with a super-human ability to pinpoint and deliver on a single Vision. I believe the rest - money and power - comes from this.
Looking at other companies
By contrast to Space X it’s also helpful to look at other companies and the picture they paint through their own company Visions.
For example, in 2023 old clients of mine, The Coca Cola Company (TCCC) relaunched their Vision. While I admire a lot of people who work at the company, and so much about TCCC is impressive, their corporate strategy is pinned on a Vision that reads like it was honestly formed by a committee of really nice people: “Our Vision is to craft the brands and choice of drinks that people love, to refresh them in body & spirit. And done in ways that create a more sustainable business and better shared future that makes a difference in people’s lives, communities and our planet” (you can read more about it here).
Image credit: The Coca Cola Company
It’s long. And what does refreshing in body and spirit, and making a difference in people’s lives, communities and our planet actually mean? The bit about the planet doesn’t feel particularly mobilising or even super sincere right now, in 2025, with The Coca Cola Company rolling back their sustainability commitments.
I actually appreciate that within their framework the conscious they follow (“if we make mistakes, act quickly to make things right”) means they give themselves permission to pivot, but the narrative around Sustainability is hard to track or get on board with. I note The Coca Cola Company do seem to be taking their commitment to “a better shared future” seriously based on their current DEI stance.
All this taken into account, I’d love to see TCCC aim higher than the Vision they currently have, focusing the company on, for example, “redefining refreshment for the billions”. In a world heating up, dealing with water shortages and plastic issues but also needing a kick of caffeine to get through the day, TCCC are well placed to both lean into their scale and redefine refreshment globally, and that mandate is exciting, and sums up the current Vision language in a more meaningful package. And it’s also short.
In the next articles we’re going to look at more examples of Corporate Visions, what makes for a good Vision, and how to create your own Vision. Look forward to seeing you there. Thank you for being on this journey with me.
VISION SERIES / CRAFTING YOUR OWN VISION
VISION SERIES / VISION AND INNOVATION - SEEING IS BELIEVING
If anything sparks your interest in this or the following articles, please do email helen@purposefulgrowth.co.
