Crawl, Walk, Run (Part 1): We Write the Vision — But Do We Make It Plain?

Someone said that in a team meeting I sat in years ago. I wasn't leading that meeting — another leader was. I was just in the room. An initiative had been released across the organization, and the first questions that came back from the team weren't about the vision itself. They were more basic than that. What are we supposed to do with this? What does this actually mean?

That sentence has stayed with me because of how true it was. The person wasn't being difficult. They were naming something a lot of people feel and don't say out loud: it is not a team's job to sit around guessing what leadership meant.

Here's what I've come to understand, watching this pattern repeat itself across organizations for twenty-five years. Leaders almost always have the vision part. The heart is there. The heart is right. What gets left out is the part where that vision becomes something someone else can actually pick up and run with.

Leaders have the idea. They have the expectation that people will move on it. What they skip is everything in between — the capacity-building for what leadership itself needs to acquire, what people need to learn, what systems need to be in place. All of it moving together, not assumed into existence.

That initiative — the one that landed in the meeting and confused everyone in the room — wasn't a new idea leadership had dreamed up out of nowhere. It was a response.

The organization was in its second or third major shift in two years, and a crisis had just hit. Leadership, trying to hold onto a traditional, rigid structure that no longer matched what was happening on the ground, scaled back a vision they'd shared with everyone the year before. And the team could see the gap between what leadership said we were moving toward and the reality of their day-to-day.

"This is not realistic."

That's what came out of that gap. Not confusion. Something closer to disbelief. Because from where a team member sits, if leadership doesn't seem to have an accurate read on where things actually are, how are you supposed to take the plan seriously?

That's the cost of skipping the middle. And I want to be precise about what kind of cost it is, because it gets misdiagnosed constantly.

It's not a communication problem. It's a trust problem.

Here's where I want to slow down.

When people talk about vision, they often reach for Habakkuk 2:2 — write the vision, make it plain, so that he may run who reads it. It gets quoted as encouragement. Write it down, believe it, go.

What I hear in that verse is a skip.

Look at who's assigned the running. It isn't the person who writes the vision. It's the person who reads it. The writer never gets to be the one who runs — which means there is real distance between writing a vision and someone else actually moving on it, and the only thing that carries a person across that distance is making it plain.

That's the part we don't sit with long enough. We treat plainness as a formatting step at the end, when it's actually the whole bridge.

This is Part 1 of a three-part look at Habakkuk 2:2–3. Here, I'm sitting with the first two pieces: write the vision, and make it plain.

Leaders usually have this part. It's not the hard part — but it's worth naming honestly, because even the writing of a vision doesn't happen in a vacuum.

When that crisis hit, leadership went into something close to panic. From where I sat, as a mid-level leader, watching them scale that vision back — okay, well, we can't go get this — it felt reactive. Understandable, but reactive.

I didn't just accept that and pass it down. I went and had conversations. With my superiors, with other leaders who were closer to the decision — because I needed a real understanding of what had happened before I could help my own team move forward.

I want to be honest about what that actually looked like, because I hear this a lot: you can't get the information from the leaders above you. I didn't have all of it either. That's not something you're handed. It comes from asking the right questions.

I wasn't demanding a seat at the table. I was being strategic about what I was asking, so I could get to what I actually needed. And there's a real cognitive lift in that, because you're not translating from a safe distance. You're doing that work while you're still standing inside the disruption yourself.

This is the part that gets skipped. And I think it gets skipped because it's the hardest one — it asks something different of leadership than having good intentions and a good idea.

Making it plain isn't clearer language. It's leadership action, learning, and systems moving together, in tandem — not sequentially, not by assumption. It means understanding what people actually need in order to do the work, not just what results you're hoping for on the other end.

Results come. They come more solid, and they hold longer, when this groundwork gets built first. That's what lets a plan survive the next crisis — because something underneath it is actually solid.

Here's what that looked like for me, inside that same disrupted plan.

My job wasn't to hand my team a scaled-back version of the vision and hope they'd make peace with it. It was to sit with them and walk through what was still there — what we were still doing, and what the deeper, consistent work was underneath all of it. The work that existed for the people we were serving, not just for the plan on paper.

I had to help them see that the vision hadn't been erased. It had been adapted — because that was the best leadership knew how to do in that moment, trying to hold the mission steady while thinking ahead to what would put us in a better position the following year.

That distinction mattered enormously.

A plan that's been scaled back under real constraint is not the same as a plan that's been abandoned. But if no one says that plainly, out loud, people cannot tell the difference. And when they can't tell the difference, they start to believe their work no longer matters — especially when the change happened without anyone hearing from them first.

So making it plain isn't a downstream communication step. It's the difference between a team that feels erased and a team that knows exactly what to keep building, what to set down for now, and what to carry forward.

That's what I mean by activating with intentional action. Not a productivity trick — the actual discipline of helping people see, specifically, what's still theirs to hold and move on, even when the shape of the plan keeps changing. It wasn't abstract. It was concrete enough that my team could walk out of that room knowing exactly what came next.

None of this happens without the bridge role, and I don't think we talk about that role honestly enough.

Upper leadership shares the vision. People are expected to understand it and run. But there's a whole layer of leadership in the middle whose job is to harmonize — to hear what's coming from above, hear what's actually happening on the ground, and interpret the distance between the two so people can act with real clarity instead of compliance.

That's a gift and a superpower all on its own. We'll talk more about that soon.

For now, if you're holding a vision you've already written, I'd sit with one question before you write another word of it: what would someone need to already have — in learning, in leadership, in systems — for this to be runnable?

If you can't answer that, the vision isn't finished. It's just written.

Lead with heart. 💛