What is a Visionary?

A call for contributions

Earlier this year, Perspectiva was selected to work with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) to help design their new Visionaries project, as part of their Emerging Futures Programme. One of the key principles of this work is the importance of ‘harnessing collective intelligence and imagination’. In that spirit, we are excited to share with you an opportunity to contribute by offering your own intuitions, long-held wisdom, or budding ideas to the question, ‘What is a Visionary?’ 

In the following post, Perspectiva’s CEO Jonathan Rowson offers his own thoughts on how a visionary represents a kind of ‘anticipatory consciousness’, and why this is so crucial for our current historical moment.¹ He asks us to consider the power dynamics of who gets to decide who is a visionary, and proposes the idea of a visionary as a kind of way-finder, someone who ‘see[s] something that offers others a sense of direction.’ Beyond simply seeing ahead, the visionary is poetic in her speech, and knows how to inspire in others not just a vision for the future but how a different version of the future might feel. 

Now we are keen to hear from you, and source further ideas for this work from a wider field: we have developed a survey, where you’re invited to contribute your own thoughts about ‘what is a visionary?’, tell us about those you recognize as visionary (within your immediate community and/or throughout history), and how we might seek out visionaries who are less well-known, or who might not identify themselves as such. This is part of our pilot research process, so we are looking for leads as well as patterns — there is scope to share whatever seems most relevant to you. We’ll be incorporating some of these responses into a report to be shared with JRF in September. We will also be hosting two facilitated inquiry sessions on this topic in the coming weeks — you’re welcome to join one of the two sessions by registering here: Aug 22, 2023 03:00 PM BST or Aug 29, 2023 07:00 PM BST.

You might (or might not!) use Jonathan’s piece below as inspiration, or use it as a starting-point to form an alternative perspective: what is overemphasized in his conception of a ‘visionary’? What is missing? What might even be problematic about the very concept of ‘visionary’? For example, I read the section about visionaries’ ‘inspir[ing] an infectious feeling’ as having both an exciting aspect – but with equal potential for this kind of soft power to be used in a harmful, self-aggrandizing way. I also questioned the emphasis on language as ‘an active ingredient that shifts collective perception’: I would want to include the visionary power of nonverbal creation, such as through music, visual art, and dance.

And one last piece of inspiration, from Quaker and author Alistair McIntosh’s ‘Thought for the Day’ last week on BBC Radio Scotland, prompted by our request to speak with him about this project:  ‘vision [...] isn’t just another strategic plan. Vision is a reordering of how we see reality.’

~Leigh Biddlecome, Visiting Curator & Editor, Perspectiva 

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What is a Visionary?

by Jonathan Rowson

It might seem whimsical to say that the future is not what it used to be, but it’s true. Uncertainty about our personal futures is the perennial human condition, but social futures can no longer be premised on the intergenerational transmission of culture. Today, private interests drive technological change in ways that militate against the formation of collective wisdom in the public realm, while developments in artificial intelligence and synthetic biology heighten catastrophic risks. And political futures are fraught because times of chaos yield dark temptations of order. Perhaps most fundamentally, our ecological future is in doubt; our cosmic home has become volatile, now more a fearsome variable than a reliable constant. The young especially are living in what Margaret Mead called a prefigurative culture, in which the clues to their future are unlikely to be found in the past.

This moment in time will not wait for the perfect articulation of its premises. After years of railing against what we sometimes lazily call ‘the system’, the Kairotic responsibility of civil society actors today is to relinquish the self-aggrandising thrills of critique. We need to create space for the kinds of vision and method to arise for a different kind of context – one world ending, another world being born. We need vision as method, and method as vision, co-arising with different stories that are socially born, not technocratically made. We need not just a new plotline, but a metanoia, a completely revitalised, refashioned and reenchanted arena with new settings, characters and purposes.

And it matters where we start. Humanity may not be the best reference point. For there is surely no Royal We – in fact it may be generative to accept that we live with an Impossible We. We are only truly in it together when we learn how to understand power and share it, but that possibility is not credible unless we recognise that this very stance will be fiercely contested. So perhaps each of us really does need to start where we are, even if our apparently humble niches are now suffused with a charged social setting and a beguiling planetary sensibility. As tenacious thinkers with an appetite for what is really going on, we need the big picture, but as embodied beings we find meaning in the shifting context of our day-to-day lives, through what the novelist Murakami calls ‘the steady accumulation of small realities’. Perhaps the most pernicious risk of all is that we become infatuated with despair and trapped in auto-critique about all that’s wrong, holding on to the hope that the next sophisticated diagnosis will save us.

What then might elicit the vision we need? What is a visionary? And more precisely what is a visionary now? Who gets to decide who is a visionary? Why might we need to find and support more visionaries today? (And how do we go about that?)

To put it very simply: a visionary is a person with good ideas about the future. They might have qualities of the prophet or the designer, or the artist, but above all, they see something that offers others a sense of direction. 

Historically, a visionary was someone with anticipatory consciousness who could transcend and include the present moment by envisaging and articulating an inspiring form of life. They helped others believe in this ‘form’ to the extent that it began to be ushered into being. Visionaries are often poetic, not just for the love of being poetic, but because language is an active ingredient that shifts collective perception and reanimates the world’s sense of its own possibilities. Visionaries are also ‘poieticians’ in the sense of engendering a process of poiesis that brings new worlds into being. For its context, tenor, and resonance Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech is quintessentially visionary in this regard, even though it was specific to civil rights in a particular place and time. 

At the birth of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru’s speech about his country’s “tryst with destiny” at the moment when “the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance” is similar in its momentous spirit and enduring inspiration, but also in its geographic and historical specificity. More recently, when asked to reflect on responses to the Rodney King case in the early nineties, where there was a clear and public injustice, bell hooks said it was important for Black people to realise that they were indeed being victimized. But she asked whether rage is the only or the most appropriate response: “What would people have thought if rather than Black people exploding in rage about the Rodney King incident, if there had been a week of silence? Something that would have just so unsettled people’s stereotypes.” Here we begin to see the relationship between vision and method.

There is still a place for vision within bounded contexts, but the visionaries needed today will have to speak to lived experience in a digital and planetary context that is at once nascent and moribund, when capitalism is running out of frontiers, democracy is fighting for her life, and it feels like modernity might be ending. Joe Brewer’s work on regenerating the earth through bioregional learning centres is one example of visionary work in this context, as is Nobel prize winner Maria Ressa’s acceptance speech in 2021 where she says: “An invisible atom bomb has exploded inside our information ecosystem and the world must act as it did after Hiroshima. Like that time, we need to create new institutions…new codes stating our values…a multilateral approach that all of us must be part of.” Such statements are visionary, but their scope and tenor are different from prior visions that applied to particular places. Visions today are not just about the emancipation of one group from the other – though that is there – it’s also about cutting through the delusion that we can collectively continue as we are. What is needed are forms of insight and practice that make personal, local and political contributions to saving civilisation from itself.

Today the visionary is still needed to solve particular problems, but above all, they are needed to paint an alluring picture, inspire an infectious feeling, and model a generative sensibility. Articulating how the future feels may matter more than showing how it looks, because the challenge is to pull us towards viable and desirable futures from the conviction that we are, after all, still at home in the world. Since visionary world-creation gives rise to meaningful embodied action in localised (including digitalised) contexts, I suggest the kinds of qualities to look out for in new visionaries today include: a capacity to be at ease in the three worlds of inner, outer, and shared realities; to move fluently between temporal horizons; to work with generative rather than descriptive ontologies, to be epistemically plural, agile and grounded; and not to be tempted by Utopia, but instead to envisage the right kinds of struggle.

1. This post has been edited and adapted from Jonathan Rowson’s earlier piece here.