VISION: A Critical Element of Sociological Safety®

The idea of leaders possessing “vision” and special abilities to envision a safe future for an organization can sound complex and daunting. And it can be. But “vision” as an exercise in predicting the future is something you and I do every day, on the fly. What are the core elements of “vision” and envisioning possible futures? They are faculties that everyone possesses and can develop with effort and training.

We use many different terms in different disciplines and practices for prognostication and preparing for our best guesses, like planning, strategy, goal setting, visioning, prophecy, predictive analytics, psychic ability, and more (see list in endnote).

Despite its many names and forms, we can’t see into the future with certainty or precision. The biggest reason for anxiety over the future, even short-term, stems largely from discomfort with uncertainty. We’re wired to seek predictability, control, and security. But continuous shifts in aspects of global society, regional circumstances, and our individual lives can often make us feel like we’re on a roller coaster ride into a dark tunnel.

Still, we have native temporal faculties that we employ as tools to probe ahead and envision the possibilities and probabilities. Our vision of possible futures is a synthesis at the convergence of hindsight, insight, and foresight. It’s the best we can do to create representational comprehensive models of what might lie ahead. Those models become our “Vision,” our holistic perspective on the possible future(s), achieved by integrating these three temporal perspectives. We then get to work preparing for them, to the extent possible.

Hindsight represents our understanding based on past events and analysis. It draws on history, data analysis, established rules and laws, constraints, phenomenology (things we experience), ontology (nature of things), epistemology (knowledge of things), and axiology (the values placed on things).

Insight represents our understanding of the present reality as context. It involves real-time situational awareness, individual points of view (not only our own), anamorphosis (seeing from different perspectives), calculations, understanding what is possible or impossible based on current conditions, assessing probabilities, and evaluating likelihoods for both strategic and tactical decision-making in the present moment.

Foresight represents our ability to anticipate future events and trends. It relies on complex techniques such as regression analysis, predictive modeling, recursion (repetitive processes), broad computational ability, and intuition.

It may sound like those require PhDs, but they don't. For practical purposes, we can and do naturally grow and sharpen each of those faculties over the decades through personal experience and with the assistance and training of parents, mentors, coaches, teachers, and trusted friends. We do the math without realizing we are doing the math.

The three central lens areas (piscis) bind the three dimensions around a core structure that encompasses what we have done, are now doing, and will do — to the extent we can know them. They represent filters through which we can process the present in the context of past observations and our motivated attempts to shape the future.

Relational lens: Signifies the relationships and relations between the objects in a moment.

Situational lens: Signifies real-time comprehensive knowledge and awareness of the facts in the present moment.

Individual lens: Signifies personal and subjective perspectives, interpretations, and symbolic meanings affecting our understanding.

We could neatly pop the six items into a standard 3x3 consulting matrix. However, the resulting little squares won’t capture the full spectrum of the dynamic nonlinear relationships, interactions, proportionalities, and interdependencies between the six. This (non-mathematical) use of the Venn diagram provides an integrative cognitive framing for considering the core dynamics of anticipating the future.

Hindsight (past), insight (present), and foresight (future) are the temporal faculties we use to build a more robust vision of the future, near-term and long-term, to keep ourselves in a state of relative safety, to the extent possible. We casually use this “vision heuristic” on the fly as we walk down the street to project what may be around the corner, or we can ramp it up for serious strategic planning for the longer-term future, employing sophisticated methods, techniques, and technological tools.

Whether it is one person engaged in charting a safe course home at the end of the workday, or a large room full of global experts on climate change charting the way to a safe planetary environment, in the end, seeing into the future boils down to the strength and quality of the three faculties of hindsight, insight, and foresight.

The graphic emphasizes the complex integrative function of our natural faculties for developing robust and informed visions of a safe future. We have a corporeal faculty of vision that relies on the gift of perspective, which provides the right impression of an object’s height, width, and depth relative to our physical proximal distance from the object. Likewise, our abstract “vision” provides the three faculties of past, present, and future sightedness.

Hindsight, insight, and foresight are not truly separate, independent faculties but integrated capabilities of our abstract "vision" along the timeline. They inform one another. Each contributes dynamically to our cognitive ability to judge, decide, and act in the present. Like the physical vision, we have them all at once, fully integrated into our perspectival sight. When we have full sight, we don’t have to think about which one we’ll use, though we often do choose to focus on one of the three.

We don’t confuse those with forethought and afterthought. They’re different matters in our cognitive structures and processes, with different temporal implications. One interesting sidenote about “thought” itself is that there is no single term in English for “presentthought.” I couldn’t come up with one in any other language, either, but I won’t make any definitive assertions about it at this point.

The linguistic “blank spot” may be a tipoff that we’re never cognitively “in the now,” but are continuously operating within a window between a fraction of a second in the past and a fraction of a second in the future. Though it’s only micromilliseconds, the lack of a definitive term for “nowthought” is supported by what we know about how the brain processes information. Our brain isn’t a quartz crystal watch. Machines keep time. We experience it. We’re constantly working in an abstract “now-ish” present to anticipate and predict what will happen in the next instant by making sense of what just happened.

Like Sha’Carri Richardson in a three-point stance in the starting blocks.

The blank spot is a reminder that even when we feel deeply, fully present, our minds are performing incredibly fast calculations about the world around us and within us. The “present moment” is less a static point and more a constantly updating synthesis of recent past and immediate future. It may be the one little cognitive trick of the universe that gives us the sense of what Stephen Wolfram called the illusion of being “persistent in time.”

In upcoming installments of the Sociological Safety® Insider (SSI) Thought Letter, we’ll discuss more about what that means for the proverbial “man on the street.”

Endnote: Sampling of additional terms for prognostication:

• Forecasting — Common in meteorology, finance, and business.
• Scenario Planning — Used in strategic planning and futures studies.
• Projection — Often used in economics and demography.
• Trend Analysis — Popular in marketing, social sciences, and technology.
• Roadmapping — Common in technology development and innovation.
• Speculation — Often found in economics, investing, and philosophy.
• Horizon Scanning — A method in futures research and policy-making.
• Foresight — Applied in strategic foresight and policy development.
• Divination — Rooted in cultural or spiritual traditions.
• Omen Reading — Associated with ancient and mystical practices.
• Risk Assessment — Used in engineering, healthcare, and project management.
• Simulations — Used in military, gaming, and complex systems analysis.
• Strategic Anticipation — A method in defense and intelligence.
• Intuition — Sometimes referenced in leadership and creativity.
• Backcasting — Starting with a desired future and planning backward.
• Modeling — Applied in climate science, physics, and economics.
• Extrapolation — Extending current data trends into the future.
• Omens and Augury — Found in mythology and history.
• Scenario Development — Constructing multiple plausible future states.
• Augury — Ancient practice of interpreting signs, especially from nature.
• Haruspicy — Divination by inspecting entrails, historically used in some cultures.
• Oracle — Pronouncements from a deity or seer.
• Clairvoyance — Perceived ability to see future events.
• Premonition — Intuitive sense or forewarning.
• Prophecy — Often tied to religious or spiritual revelation.
• Prescience — Knowledge of events before they happen.
• Cartomancy — Divination using cards, like tarot.
• Astrology — Forecasting based on celestial movements.
• Numerology — Divining meaning and predictions through numbers.
• Geomancy — Divination through markings in earth, sand, or soil.
• Oneiromancy — Divination through dreams.
• Chiromancy — Palmistry or palm reading.
• I Ching Consultation — Forecasting using ancient Chinese texts.
• Runecasting — Divination using runic alphabets.
• Sibylline Predictions — Inspired utterances of ancient sibyls.
• Extispicy — Reading omens from animal entrails (specific to certain cultures).
• Crystal Gazing — Using a crystal ball to foresee events.