From Snapshot Patchwork Vision to Dynamic Factors Vision
Whether in business or personal life, leaders are often required to provide a vision. Such a vision guides decisions, effort, trade-offs, and arbitration, while providing purpose and engagement.
A Little Exercise
In such a world, imagination is key. Let’s do a little exercise together here!
Think of anything that might be a vision for you: the life you want, the state of business you want, the state of relationship you hope for, or the activity you would like to do this weekend, what you would enjoy creating, etc. Take time to picture it. Break down this vision into elements and list them somewhere (a sheet of paper, an Obsidian markdown file, anything…).
Now, next to each of these elements, note where you drew inspiration from (if you can recall), where it is or when it was. For example, if you wish for a life by a Swiss-like lake with retro-gaming from your teenage years, alongside friends you know from work and family members who currently live far from you in Japan, then it’s easy to trace where or when in time each element can be found. If you want a particular job or lifestyle, ask yourself where these ideas came from. It can even be from fiction: If you wish to build Iron Man’s armor or Batman TAS’s utility belt, you can locate the fiction and when you were first exposed to it. If parts of this vision are formulated as negations, for example “I don’t want to…”, you can also include where you have seen these problems.
Here is an example list of some elements and where I imagine it originates from:
| Element of vision | Origin of imagination (most probably) in time and space if possible |
|---|---|
| Martial arts practice everyday with friends, Wing Tsun specifically | Paris, 2018 |
| Be someone who trains the next generation for free or almost like the masters I have met | From Paris, since 2010 |
| Italian food, vietnamese food, Chinese food, diversity of food from Parisian restaurant, food not to expensive | Obviously from many countries, key places are Puglia, Sicilia, Paris |
| Healthy lifestyle with enough time to sleep, to read | Paris, 2022 |
| Friends and Family nearby | mostly from Paris, but also a few (not the least important at all) from Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, the US |
| Sunny weather but not too hot, with rain by night only for the plants | France and south of France for the sunny and not to hot. Rain by night only: Barcelona |
| Surroundings are safe for the kids, elderly, or whoever to be outside | Switzerland, Japan, Korea |
| Rich cultural life, festivals outside | Paris, Barcelona |
| Full remote job or almost to avoid forced crowded transportation | Paris, since 2021 Crowded transportation: Paris |
| Meaningful job where I can help people | Paris, since 2014 |
| Job in which I can think strategically and on a deeper level, leaving a large part of the execution to robots and being focused on architecture. | Paris, mostly since 2024-2025 |
| Create crazy technical stuff like John Carmack with friend | Book “Masters of Doom”, happening in the US |
| Creating a robot that interacts with humans and develop humans | Movies, my youth |
| Forest like place but accessible by foot from the city | Bois de Vincennes, 2019 |
| Economic growth of the country with hope in the future and belief in others, lifting each other up | France, my youth China, now |
| No major health problems thanks to lifestyle, health security | France, the last 40 years |
I could continue this list forever, but I assume you understand the pattern as well. I just did it for the exercise and I hope you did the same.
What the “Vision Element Origin” exercise taught me
- My dream vision is a composition of elements I have probably seen elsewhere.
- These elements are of different natures and involve different objects; this variety can be described by the concept of “parameters”—the vision having multiple parameters.
- Therefore, my references could evolve with what I am exposed to. The more I am exposed to good things in life, the richer the vision can be. I could spend more time meeting and observing “good” places, understanding how they work and how they got there.
- One part of “getting towards the vision” is the job of collecting these elements and sustaining them in one place and time.
- Just imagining the snapshot is not enough.
If you did the exercise yourself, there are also many chances that:
- Not all origins are from the same place or time (“I want the comfort of this location here, and the people from there, or what it will probably become in the future, and also key elements from my past…”),
- Not many origins are ourselves (“I want what X has or I want to do what Y does or something similar”),
- The current state is not as satisfying as “The Vision” (“I like this part of the situation, but I can still improve”).
Otherwise, if every wish we have in the vision is happening at the same spot, at the same time, at a decent level of appreciation, then it would not be a vision—it would be sheer gratitude (which is great, by the way; the exercise feels really good and life becomes better as gratitude develops).
Challenging a Snapshot-Patchwork Vision
When considering the exercise we just did, we can qualify this type of vision as a “Snapshot patchwork vision,” which means it combines in the same imaginative “picture” mostly concrete (sensory) elements that were taken from many parts of our memories and imagination.
The questions that come to me now, as a systems analyst, are:
- Why do so many visions fail to be realized?
- Why, even if realized, do so many visions fail to sustain?
The most frequent answers to these questions, from what I understand of the culture around me, are:
- The level of expectations for each element is set too high. They come from too many places and are too far from each other.
- There are too many diverse parameters for them to happen at one time, in one place, for all people.
And the behavioral responses to these answers are:
- Stop being so naive
- Stop dreaming; dream smaller
- Be realistic
- Develop more gratitude (which, I say again, is great)
These answers and behavioral responses do acknowledge the extremely low probability of a given vision happening, assuming that the error lies in the estimation. These answers can also lead to resignation (or gratitude in the best-case scenario) because there would not be enough tension between an acceptable realistic vision and reality—this tension would be below the threshold that activates people into action.
But what is not questioned here is the process of envisioning. We challenge the level of parameters in the Snapshot patchwork vision, not the Snapshot-patchwork process itself, because it is considered the most natural, common, frequent, and potentially the only existing process for visioning.
Back to Business Life: The Ambition Dilemma
Imagine now being a business leader if you’re not already one. You just arrived in your new position, and you are implicitly tasked with taking the company, the department, your area, or whatever scope of responsibility you have, to the next stage. For this, you require a vision.
Would you go for an unrealistic snapshot-patchwork vision that would have the team deem you as unaware of local realities? Naive? Or even dumb?
Would you go for a realistic snapshot-patchwork vision that works with local capabilities but doesn’t change much from the current situation? And take the risk of being deemed a status quo defender, a bland leader, “just another operator,” or even worse, a leadership slacker or dodger?
Of course not, but you would mostly feel that you can only navigate and set the cursor between these two extremes. Because the level of expectations is the only variable you can set (the diversity of expectations being, somehow, a kind of level).
Some may just say “It’s a matter of personality”—you would have on one side bold and slightly crazy leaders, and on the other side cautious and slightly conservative leaders. But such a raw dichotomy is not always necessary.
Breaking the Limits of Snapshot Vision
Remember how we characterized the type of vision above? Snapshot (fixed in time, like a stone forest) patchwork (getting parameters and expectations from everywhere).
What if we change our way of establishing a vision by changing these two parameters of our process (not of our vision)?
When I analyzed many visions that are realized for a short while but do not hold over time, there are commonalities in the realization process: the variables that define the system are not regulated.
In terms other than system dynamics, I would say that so much energy is dedicated to attracting all elements together (patchworking effort) in the same snapshot (place and time) that not much is left to design systems to sustainably keep them together.
A personal life example would be wanting to have a big house, kids, a good marriage, and to reach this point at a certain moment in life. But what about health? How do you sustain health when you have a demanding job to sustain such a life? What about sustaining the relationship with your kids and not just having the house to house them? What about maintenance of the house? Of your couple’s life?
Business examples of vision elements would be targeting “having X% of the market share,” selling a certain number of licenses, reaching a certain level of revenue, team size, etc.
The limit of the snapshot process is that the imagination itself is so satisfying that it’s enough to motivate, but it can fail to help us make the right choices at implementation time. We think of constant values instead of variables. The snapshot gathers elements at time t, but does not clearly contain the information that at “t+1” the situation has not collapsed.
Whether in usual life goals or in business, we go for OKRs that are static values and not dynamic system properties. Because it’s easier, because it sets the reference and doesn’t go into the intricacies of systems thinking.
What if we break down the goals again into elements, but rather than just thinking about the snapshot, we identify the variables to sustain?
| Snapshot goal vision | Related variables 0: direct variable 1: influence variable |
Types of regulators |
|---|---|---|
| Be a big player in the market, 30% of the market share | 0:Market shares, 1: competitiveness |
Market Intelligence, sales and innovation systems to maintain position every year |
| Hire the 300 best country talent in our field | 0:Team size 1: Turnover, inflow of talents |
Company vision and HR system that contribute to retain, attract high-end talents. |
| Reach 350M revenue | 0: Revenue 1: Number of recurring leads, revenue per lead, customer retention |
Sales and pre-sale systems to increase number of leads Up-sell to increase revenu per lead |
In the column about the related variables, I pointed out the variables that are directly described in the snapshot-type vision (0: direct variable), and some variables that may influence how the snapshot is maintained (1: influence variable).
These influence variables are properties of the system that are explicitly presented as influences on other variables: we are starting to describe our goal in a dynamic way, in the sense that the object of our vision is imagined as a living system with its own dynamics and changing properties.
An Example of Dynamic Envisioning
This is what I call here the Dynamic Vision, and this is what we can find in many fields (I did not invent the concept per se, of course).
Wanting to a sustained city flower-garden is not the same to wanting a specific picture in time of a city flower-garden.
For the first vision I would want plants that go along with each other, can grow and live in the climate conditions of the target city, for which maintenance is manageable by staff and in terms of costs.
For the second vision, I can spend everything to collect beautiful trees and flowers from everywhere, take a picture and let it slowly die because I would not have thought of the many conditions to maintain everything together.
In the first vision, I would have more chances of creating a legacy that can reproduce experiences for next generations to come, more chances to enjoy progressive building of the garden, more chances to do trials-and-errors.
For the second vision, the legacy would be an event or a picture, a short magic moment in time destined to be recorded in souvenirs and then disappear, leaving behind a less beautiful garden.
Same question applies to a team, an organization: Building an organization out of understanding their dynamics so that the organization starts to sustain itself and manage its own variables, is not like collecting people with massive incentives before the system collapses out of internal strife, external pressure and overall management issues.
But reaching the possibility of realizing a Dynamic vision starts with transforming our own vision process to dynamic visioning instead of snapshot visioning.
Dynamic envisioning still leaves room for ambition, dynamic vision links better with strategy (because some variables are identified), and it combines ambition with realism by the call to regulation mechanisms to think about.
There are therefore many advantages for the cost of being more difficult, more abstract, and often requiring more domain knowledge to understand the regulators. The more you understand what up-regulates or down-regulates a system, the stronger you become at dynamic envisioning.
Inevitability: Another Bonus of Dynamic Vision
Wise visions are often recognized by their value over time, because of they take into account the dynamics, the trends, and also inevitable phenomena. Such visions integrate the ideas that people age, people die (none come back), people leave, people grow, same for all living beings, same for culture, for market forces, global entropy increases, etc.
All these elements are absent from the snapshot vision, and even from basic dynamic visions that only aim to regulate a specific snapshot situation in time.
The many variables and phenomenons that are inevitable can be listed, here are two example list: For personal life:
- I will age and die
- My parents will age and die if not already
- My kids (if any) will grow and age
- Some trendy technologies will become mainstream
- Some trendy culture will become oldies, nostalgia
- There will be something new, even if formed from “retro” content
- My tastes and interests in life can change, same for all people
For business life:
- People (including you) will not stay forever in their position
- Any technological competitive advantage can be replaced by the next generation of technology
- Some changes will be cultural challenges
- Large organizations can divide, small organizations can gather
- Low competitiveness players will disappear
- New competition can appear from outside or from inside
A 5-Steps Process Starting from Snapshot Vision
Now how do we get to the dynamic vision starting from a well-known habit of snapshot vision process?
- Start with a snapshot vision.
- From the snapshot vision, push your imagination further: What can change from this point in time? What are the variables?
- What are your growth or decrease goals about these variables? How will you regulate these variables?
- What is inevitable?
- How can you integrate inevitable phenomena in your vision?
These questions are not easy, especially for large complex systems, like companies or any type of organizations. I’ve been studying and working on this for years, and now the advent of artificial intelligence tools helps push the world-system representation even further. Yet, as any human, I still have to make decisions, about me, about my economic activity, about what I want for whoever surrounds me, and about what I want for the world in general.
Not Finished Yet: From Patchwork to Dynamic Factors Questions
The first part of the conversion from snapshot to dynamic was about changing a fixed-time goal envisioning process to a dynamic system process. There was also another part of the envisioning process that we did not consider explicitly up to now: the patchwork part.
Why is this patchwork part coming AFTER the system dynamics view? Let’s say that it relies on an assumption that some properties of a certain context are not always fully accidental to this context, and that that the perceivable properties could be consequences of other properties of the context, as in system dynamics.
Let’s take an example: Italian food is great for many reasons. The ingredients, the culture that leaves dedicated time for cooking and appreciating meals, the appreciation behavior and gratitude when we are eating, the recipes that come down of generations of experiments through various types of cooking techniques. In other words: the pleasure of Italian food does not come from nowhere.
For my own example of snapshot patchwork vision, same applies to the pleasure of working on robots (with the idea that cumbersome tasks can be relieved through automation, that electricity and programming and even robots are accessible, etc), to the quality of relationship with potential kids (it also relies on the education they would have received, the love, the mental health of both them and us, etc.).
What I want to say here is that patchwork vision calls for even more complex patchwork of conditions that can help these “vision elements” to naturally emerge, or have way more chances to emerge. When it comes to safety, accidents and problems, we talk about risk factors. We could as well talk of “serendipity factors” for the good parts of establishing our dynamic vision.
Therefore, one way to define our vision would not only be about what we want in the snapshot, but what factors (risk and serendipity) we want and do not want so that some elements of our initial snapshot logically happen.
These factors combine well with the compound, factorio, clicker way of thinking you may find on my blog.
Also, if we mention these factors, even a snapshot vision becomes more complete. Let’s say for example in business that the factors are:
- Regularity of challenge by new circumstances
- Regularity of exposure to new business ideas
- Level of health of leaders and employees
- Quality of relationships in the ecosystem surrounding the company
- Overall proportion of resources for strategy and deeper questions
We could well imagine that one business leader can establish targets on revenue, team size, market share, and also targets on the factors above, which regulate the flow of ideas, of talents, etc the initial target elements.
The resulting strategy from this vision would be way more grounded with starting reality without sacrificing ambitions, as the strategy would need to integrate systems that work on the factors so that the snapshot-vision-goals become order 1 or order 2 consequences of the strategy.
Conclusion
Through the very exercise of reviewing how we establish our visions as individuals, as leaders, as collectives, as organization, we found that the usual snapshot-patchwork vision can lead to some drawbacks, even if this process of envisioning is common and easy. Challenging the process of envisioning instead of just the level of expectation can lead to other alternatives to explore. A mental exercise and training about dynamic vision, that would call into a system dynamics understanding of situations and goals, integrate inevitable changes and situation-influencing factors can bring more rich, complex, and sustainable visions that do not trade ambition off for realism.