I decided long ago that the most important quality for a leader to have is vision. I recall using that one word answer to an interview question back in the 1980s when I was being vetted for a senior management position at what was then the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources (soon to become the Department of Environmental Protection). I got the job, so I guess they liked my answer.
No one asked me that question during my interview for my current senior management position back in the Fall. Had I been asked I would have answered the same. But then, that may have killed my chances for the position. You see there is none where I work. No vision. None that is articulated in any case. If I had to guess what it is, I would guess survival. As in survival of the organization.
The reason I bring this all up - the reason I thought of vision to begin with - is that I have been thinking of a story that I often used in talks for the Pennsylvania Environmental Council about the need for organizations and the people in them to listen. And in order to listen, you need to let go of your particular views a bit so that you can hear someone else's. The story is an account about mapmaking in the 1600s and 1700s first heard by me during a talk made to a group of folks by Joan Chittister, a Benedictine sister from Erie, Pennsylvania (check Joan and her impressive works out
here). So to Joan goes the credit for this story and for its moral: that vision is really the ability to realize that the truth is always larger than the partial present, the infallibility of tradition and the declarations of authority. Here's the story.
It was in the mid 17th century that Spanish seafarers sailed up the west coast of the Americas for the first time to what is now called the Baja Peninsula, a peninsula that juts southward from what we, today, call California. There is, as we all know, water between the Baja Peninsula and the mainland of Mexico – it’s called the Gulf of California. But what the mapmakers of the time did was extend that body of water in a straight line up from the Baja Peninsula north to Strait of Juan de Fuca between Vancouver Island and Washington State. Consequently, the maps that were published in 1635 show California very distinctly as an island.
Now, that might be only a quaint story if it were not for the fact that the missionaries of the time back in Spain were using that map to plan their travels inland. So, given the information on the early maps, they developed the first great pre-fabricated boat building project in history. They manufactured flatboats in Spain, cut them apart, sailed them to North America in pieces and, on the shores of Monterey, California, put them all back together again to be transported on the backs of mules to the other side of California, where they expected to find the sea that the mapmakers told them was there. So they carried those boats 12,000 feet up the Sierra Nevada Mountains for passage across the great strait, which their maps said ran from the Baja to the Puget Sound.
But marvel of marvels, on the other side of the mountains the missionaries discovered that there was no seashore at all. Much to their surprise they found, instead, what are now the state of Nevada and the beginning of the great American desert. California was the mainland!
Now, this is a rather amusing story. But one additional fact makes it sadly poignant: when the missionaries wrote back to tell the mapmakers and the Spanish king that California was not an island, no one believed them. In fact, the people back home insisted that the map was obviously correct and that it was the missionaries who were in the wrong place! What's more, in 1701 - almost 70 years later - the cartographers reissued an updated version of the same map. Those maps went unchanged for year after year because someone in Spain continued to work with partial information, assumed that data from the past had the infallibility of tradition and then used their authority to prove it.
Finally, after years and years of new reports, a few cartographers with vision and with the courage to buck the crown began to issue a new version. And in 1721, the last mapmaker holdout finally attached California to the mainland. But - and this is the really unbelievable part - it took almost thirty more years for the new maps to be declared official. It was not until the mid-century, in 1747, that King Ferdinand VII of Spain decreed that California was no longer an island. And all of this occurred despite the fact that the people who were there all the time knew differently over 100 years earlier, from the very first day.
