Crawl, Walk, Run (Part 2): What Making It Plain Actually Looks Like

In Part 1, I told you about a moment that's stuck with me for years — a team meeting where someone said, flatly, "I don't come to work thinking for leaders about what this is supposed to look like." That was the cost of a vision that got written but never made plain. We talked about what leaders owe that middle space: the capacity-building, the bridge role, activating with intentional action instead of handing people a scaled-back plan and hoping they'd make peace with it.

Here, I want to go deeper. Not just how to avoid confusion, but what it actually feels like to people when a vision has genuinely landed — and how you can tell.

Because that's the question I get most often, and it's the harder one. Leaders don't usually ask me how to write a vision. They ask me why nobody's running with the one they already wrote.

Sitting with Habakkuk 2:2, I count three conditions before anyone can run with a vision.

First, it has to be written somewhere durable — on tablets. Not spoken once. Not implied. Something people can see and come back to, rather than something they have to remember correctly from a retreat or a planning months ago.

Second, it has to be readable and approachable — communicated in a way the person receiving it can actually understand, in the context of their own work.

Third, it has to be internalized and embodied — carried by the people who lead it before it can be caught by anyone else.

Most organizations are genuinely good at the first one. We have the strategic plan. It's written down. It has milestones and targets and a deck.

The gap is almost always in the second and third.

Here's what I've noticed about the moment a vision actually lands: making it plain isn't just making it clear.

Making it plain is also an invitation.

We tend to treat plainness as simplification — reduce the thing, smooth it out, make it easy enough that people say yes and move. But that's not plainness. That's a pitch. And it reveals a gap in our own capacity as leaders, because simplification is what you reach for when you haven't done the harder work of understanding what the people in front of you actually need in order to move.

The Hebrew backs this up in a way I find bracing. "Make it plain" is ba'ar — a word that carries the sense of to dig, to engrave, to explain (Bible Hub). Digging and engraving. Both of those are labor, and both of them are labor the writer does so that the reader doesn't have to. Plainness isn't a lighter version of the vision. It's the heavier version of the work.

And look at who's assigned the running: so that he may run who reads it. The person who writes the vision is never the person the verse sends out with it. Which means plainness can only ever be verified downstream — in someone else's legs, in a room you're not standing in.

Ask yourself honestly: how often have you had a leader come directly to your department and talk about the strategic vision in a way that actually resonated with the work you do, specifically? Most people's honest answer is rarely. That's the gap – and it's a missed opportunity more than it is a failure.

Here's what's actually happening in that passage, because it matters for what making it plain costs a leader.

Habakkuk had already brought God one complaint — injustice was everywhere in Judah, and God seemed silent about it. God's answer wasn't comfortable: He was raising up the Babylonians, a nation even more ruthless than Judah, to be the ones who brought judgment. That answer didn't settle Habakkuk. It deepened his frustration and questioning. To him, the cure looked worse than the disease.

That's the moment God tells him: write the vision, make it plain.

Not after Habakkuk's discomfort was resolved. Not once everything made sense. He was given enough of the vision to write down and hand to others while the full picture was still unfolding, still uncomfortable, still not fully justified to him.

That's the bridge role, exactly. Habakkuk wasn't the source of the plan. He was entrusted to make it plain for people downstream of him while he was still standing inside his own questions about it.

I think about the vision I had to make plain to my team in the middle of that scaled-back plan. It didn't look right to them either. "This isn't realistic" was their version of "the cure looks worse than the disease." My job wasn't to make that discomfort disappear before we moved forward. It was to help them make sense and meaning out of what was happening — inside the context of their work, the organization, and the communities we served — and then help them navigate the most practical path from there.

That's a real invitation, and notice that it isn't a resolved one:

Here's what I'm seeing. Here's what I'm still working through myself. Here's what we know, and here's the path we can take. Are you with me?

That's what most leaders miss when they talk about vision only in terms of a target — the North Star, the end result. A target tells people where. It doesn't tell them how to get started, and it definitely doesn't tell them whether there's room for them in getting there.

The tablet isn't only paper.

One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is treating the vision as a document — something you write, distribute, and then dust off at a mid-year check-in. But the vision gets written in more than one place. It's written in what leadership says, and just as much in what leadership does, every day, whether or not anyone seems to be watching.

People read both. They read the words you put in front of them, and they read your posture, your choices, where your attention actually goes when things get hard. When those two versions don't match, the written one loses. Every time.

So embodiment comes first, and it isn't optional. Before anyone else can catch a vision, the leaders carrying it have to have made it plain for themselves — done their own meaning-making, inside their own context and their people's.

There's one more piece of the verse worth naming here: so that he who reads it may run. Some translations render it whoever hears it (Bible Gateway). Both belong. Writing it down is what makes it durable. Saying it out loud — consistently, in the ordinary conversations people are already having — is what makes it real to the person standing in front of you.

A vision that's alive shows up constantly. Every decision, every check-in, every plan points back to the same thing, until it isn't something people have to be reminded of anymore. It's just how the culture thinks and acts.

So how do you actually know?

I look for it in two places: what's felt (the heart) and what's seen in how people move (the strategy). You need both, and they show up as one thing from two angles.

What you feel:

• You stop being the bottleneck. Decisions get made in rooms you're not in, and they're the decisions you would have made.

• The questions change shape. You get fewer "what did you mean by this" and more "here's what I'm thinking, does that track?"

• Disagreement gets sharper and smaller at the same time. People stop arguing about whether and start arguing about how. That's a very good sign.

• Problems reach you earlier. When people trust the vision, they surface risk while it's still cheap.

• You hear your own language back from people you never said it to.

What you see:

• People say no to genuinely good opportunities, and they cite the vision as the reason.

• Someone applies the vision to a situation you never anticipated — and gets it right.

• New people get taught the vision by their peers, not by you.

• The vision shows up in artifacts you didn't write: meeting agendas, budget requests, project scoping, job descriptions.

• Workarounds get shared instead of hoarded. Someone solves something locally and it travels across teams without a mandate.

• Course corrections come from the edges, with evidence attached.

• People can articulate how their own work connects to the larger vision, in their own words, without reaching for the deck.

And underneath all of it: leadership, learning, and systems are moving in alignment, and capacity is being built at every level — not assumed into existence.

Here are four things that look like when it's working, but they aren't. This is worth as much as the list above, because these are the ones that fool people.

• Fluency without change. People can recite the vision beautifully and their calendars look identical to last quarter. That's vocabulary adoption, not vision adoption.

• Enthusiasm without behavior. The room was energized. Nothing moved. Energy is not evidence.

• Compliance dressed as ownership. People do the work and cite you as the reason, not the vision. If your name is the justification, the vision isn't carrying it yet.

• Nobody saying no. If the vision has never once been used to decline something, it isn't functioning as a vision. It's a slogan. A vision that costs nothing to hold isn't shaping anything.

If you're sitting with a vision you know is right, and you're wondering why it isn't moving the way you hoped, sit with one question before you do anything else:

Have you made it plain enough that someone else could pick it up without you in the room to explain it?

Not simpler. Plain. Accessible enough to be a real invitation, not just information.

This week, take one vision you've already written and actually run that test.

Hand it to someone outside the room and watch what they do with it. If they can't pick it up yet, that's not a failure — that's your next draft.

And there's more to Habakkuk's story from here. Because sometimes you do all of this — you write it, you make it plain, people genuinely run — and the thing still hasn't arrived. That's exactly what the next verse raises: though it tarry, wait for it. That's Part 3.

As always, lead with heart. 💛