The vision phenomenon: Towards a theoretical underpinning of visions of the future and the process of envisioning

Visions of the future and the method of envisioning are common approaches for making claims about and for the future. On the one hand, we can have our own vision, and we also expect certain people (mostly leaders) to have vision. On the other hand, most futures practitioners confirm that a (shared) vision is needed for successful action, and the active development of vision is therefore to be encouraged. However, theory development has been limited and many authors do not go beyond the confirmation that it is important to have or develop (a) vision, mostly in relation to a specific desire for action. Vision appears to be much more a phenomenon (in its original sense as ‘appearance’) than a theory. Hence, what we should expect from a vision theory is a deeper understanding of what vision is, what the added value of the process of visioning could be, and how we have to appreciate and assess (explicit) vision statements. In this contribution, we propose a basic theoretical framework in order to move towards the underpinning of ‘visionary’ approaches.