THE LEAP METHOD: E IS FOR ENVISION
Dream Bigger Than Feels Reasonable
When did you last let yourself imagine something that felt genuinely out of reach? Not a stretch goal with a deadline attached or a five-year plan dressed up as a dream. But something that, if you said it out loud in a meeting, would make people shift in their seats?
If you can’t remember, you’re not alone, and you’re not failing at your job. Most organizations schedule one, maybe 2 envisioning retreats a year: a single day of blue-sky thinking sandwiched between months of relentless execution. That’s not envisioning. That’s a token gesture toward bold, expansive thinking, performed once and then filed away while everyone gets back to the real work.
Rigorous envisioning is a regular practice, not an annual event. And most leaders have quietly let it atrophy.
This is the second phase of the LEAP Method. Once you’ve done the work of Leverage – taking inventory of what you already carry – Envision is where you decide what you’re carrying it toward.
Dream Bigger Than Feels Reasonable
When did you last let yourself imagine something that felt genuinely out of reach? Not a stretch goal with a deadline attached ora five-year plan dressed up as a dream. But something that, if you said it out loud in a meeting, would make people shift in their seats?
If you can’t remember, you’re not alone, and you’re not failing at your job. Most organizations schedule one, maybe 2 envisioning retreats a year: a single day of blue-sky thinking sandwiched between months of relentless execution. That’s not envisioning. That’s a token gesture toward bold, expansive thinking, performed once and then filed away while everyone gets back to the real work.
Rigorous envisioning is a regular practice, not an annual event. And most leaders have quietly let it atrophy.
This is the second phase of the LEAP Method. Once you’ve done the work of Leverage – taking inventory of what you already carry – Envision is where you decide what you’re carrying it toward.
Why Leaders Skip Envisioning
Envisioning is the most skipped phase in any change process, and I understand exactly why.
Leaders are rewarded for execution, not dreaming. Show a board a five-year vision and you’ll get polite nods. Show them this quarter’s numbers and you’ll get real engagement. Over time, that reward structure teaches even the most imaginative people that dreaming is an irresponsible, even indulgent luxury for people with more time than you have.
Then there’s urgency. The present is loud. It has deadlines and fires and inboxes. The future is quiet by comparison, and quiet things lose to loud things almost every time, unless you protect space for them deliberately.
And underneath both of those is something more tender: fear. Many leaders are afraid to envision boldly because they’re afraid of the disappointment of not getting there. It feels safer to want less, but there’s a cost for that safety: without a vivid, expansive future state to move toward, execution becomes incremental at best and directionless at worst. You can execute beautifully and still be building the wrong thing, because you never took the time to imagine what the right thing looked like.
What Envisioning Actually Is
Let’s be precise about this, because envisioning gets a bad reputation as wishful thinking. It is not. Envisioning is disciplined imagination: the rigorous practice of forecasting, dreaming, and gathering inspiration in service of a specific future state.
This is WonderRigor™ in full expression: deliberately applying curiosity, audacity, and awe to the future. Envisioning includes forecasting trends where you gather images and language that serve as “signals” and resonate with you, even before you know why. It also encompasses asking “what if” questions and resisting the urge to immediately answer them; and spending time with art, with nature and with ideas well outside your industry, because insight rarely arrives from staring harder at the problem directly in front of you.
Innovation requires leaps of imagination and those leaps only come from envisioning. This is where Moonshot ideas and goals get born: not in the execution meeting, but in the liminal space (or the walk, or the gallery, or the drive) where you let yourself want something you can’t yet explain how to build.
Envisioning as a Regular Practice
My advice is to build envisioning into the rhythm of your leadership instead of reserving it for a once-a-year offsite.
So what might that look like?
- A weekly twenty-minute “wonder window” — protected, uninterrupted, on the calendar like any other meeting.
- A vision board that lives on a wall, not a hard drive, where you’ll actually see it instead of forgetting it’s there.
- A reading diet that includes voices well outside your field, so your inputs aren’t just more of the same industry thinking recycled back to you.
The leaders who innovate consistently are not more creative by nature. They have simply built wonder and rigor into their operating system, the way other leaders build in budget reviews or one-on-ones.
Envisioning does not require certainty. It requires permission. Give yourself permission to not know how yet. The “how” belongs to a later phase. Right now, your only job is to want something clearly enough to describe it.
Try this: Spend fifteen uninterrupted minutes answering one question: “If I knew I could not fail, what would my next move look like? How would I show up to new encounters and situations?” Write
The Bridge to Ask
Envisioning produces the raw material of a leap. But raw material needs to be shaped, and shaping begins with asking better questions.
The Ask phase is where the dream gets its edge.
→ Ready to go deeper?
“Innovation doesn’t come from incremental steps alone. It requires leaps of imagination — and those only come from giving yourself permission to envision what doesn’t exist yet.”
About Natalie
Dr. Natalie Nixon is the creativity whisperer to the C-suite, helping leaders make better business decisions through wonder and rigor. At Figure 8 Thinking, she’s a creativity strategist, global keynote speaker and author of the award winning The Creativity Leap and the upcoming book Move. Think. Rest.: Redefining Productivity & Our Relationship with Time.
Real Leaders named Natalie one of the Top 50 keynote speakers of 2022 and she’s been featured in Forbes and Fast Company. She received her BA from Vassar College, and her PhD from the University of Westminster. These days you can find her on the ballroom floor fine-tuning her cha-cha and foxtrot.
Follow Natalie on Instagram: @natwnixon.