Crawl, Walk, Run (Part 3): Yes, Visions Take Time. That's Not What This Is About

In Part 1 and Part 2, I told you about a vision that got scaled back mid-crisis, and what it took to make that vision plain enough for my team to actually run with it. This is the last piece: what happens after the vision is plain, and you're still waiting for it to fully come to pass.

I want to be honest about something first. The wait is hard.

It's hard on leaders. You're the one steering, anticipating what's coming, holding the ten-steps-ahead view while everyone else is standing on the step they're on right now. That's a real weight, and it doesn't get talked about enough.

But the wait is hard on people too, and not for the reason you might think. It's hard when leadership hasn't built the right infrastructure, the right capacity, the right conditions for people to actually move.

It's like being asked to bake a cake, but handed the tools to build a fence.

No amount of effort closes that gap, because the tools were never going to produce the thing you're asking for. That's not a motivation issue. That's a design one — and it lands on people, not leaders, when it goes unaddressed.

When God tells Habakkuk though it tarry, wait for it, He is not asking him to sit still and hope.

The Hebrew is more active than our English reading of it. "Wait" here is chakah, and it carries the sense of to adhere to — and it arrives as an imperative, a command, not a consolation (Bible Hub). Adhering is something you do. It takes hold of something and stays with it.

And the word describing the vision's delay, yitmahmah, means something closer to to hesitate, to be reluctant. The vision isn't absent. It's hesitating at the threshold of an appointed time — mo'ed, a set meeting — that was never on your calendar to begin with.

So the wait isn't dead space between the plan and the payoff. It's assigned work. And the very next verse draws a contrast between two ways of existing inside it.

Here's the verse that follows, and it's the one the whole series has been building toward:

"Behold, his soul which is lifted up is not upright in him: but the just shall live by his faith." — Habakkuk 2:4

Two postures. One puffed up, self-sufficient, unable to be corrected. One living by faith — which, in the sense the passage means it, is not passivity but sustained trust in something that hasn't arrived yet.

The first posture looks like staying fixed. It sounds like that's not what the plan says, or we already decided this, we're staying the course — said to shut a conversation down, not open one. It looks like the same slide deck from the original planning retreat, dusted off at every check-in, unchanged, treated as sacred regardless of what's actually happening on the ground.

Underneath it, if you look closely, there's usually a kind of self-sufficiency at work: a plan built and defended without needing new input from the people doing the work. There's a reaching that's never satisfied — chasing bigger targets and faster timelines without ever building the capacity to sustain them. And there's a refusal to submit to timing — forcing the original plan to hold on its original schedule no matter what's changed, because adjusting would mean admitting the plan itself has limits.

For the people living inside that posture, waiting feels like enduring. Like raising a concern gets treated as disloyalty instead of information. Like there's nothing to actually do but hope the timeline resolves itself.

The other posture is something different entirely. Not passive, and not rigid either.

I think about it in terms of two things I keep coming back to in my own framework: Hear and Harmonize, and Reflect with Results.

Hearing and harmonizing means staying in real, ongoing conversation with the people closest to the work — not checking in once a quarter and calling it communication. Reflecting with results means honestly looking at what's happening — piloting, testing, asking is this working, or do we adjust — instead of assuming the plan is still accurate because it was accurate when it was written.

And reflecting with results isn't the end of the work. It's what makes real, intentional action possible in the first place. You cannot move with intention on something you haven't honestly looked at.

That's the real choice in front of every leader holding a vision that hasn't fully arrived: stay fixed, or stay in motion — anchored, but adaptive.

Here's where staying in motion gets concrete, because it asks something specific of you long before the vision arrives.

Most strategic plans have milestones. Leaders think in terms of the end result, and they think in terms of milestone one — the first stretch, the part closest to where everyone's already standing.

But what about milestone five? Milestone seven?

Have you anticipated what your people are going to need by then? Not just the outcome you want from them, but their actual capacity, the systems and infrastructure that will need to be in place, the adjustments that will have to happen along the way. If you haven't thought that far ahead, you won't hit the goal as effectively as you think you will — because the conditions for people to succeed at that stage were never built.

That's not an execution failure.

That's an anticipation failure.

The real work sits somewhere between too loose and too tight. Give people so little frame that they have nothing to build on, and they're lost. Give them so much frame that every step is already decided, and there's no room left for them to think. Somewhere in that middle is where real problem-solving lives — where the roadblocks people hit stop being obstacles and start becoming what I like to call enabling constraints.

And it isn't only about what people need from you. It's about what you, as a leader, need to keep stretching in yourself — your own capacity, your own accountability — so you can keep showing up as the vision moves through its stages.

Here's a principle I keep coming back to: you cannot ask someone to give something of themselves that they've never actually experienced. You can't ask your team to extend real patience, warmth, and clarity to the people you serve if leadership has never fostered that same experience with them. It doesn't matter what industry you're in. The principle holds. Telling someone what a posture is supposed to look like isn't the same as giving them the felt experience of it. If you want it from them, you have to have built it with them first.

This is what makes the difference between a wait that builds something and a wait that just burns people down.

I lived this.

After I'd helped my team see that the vision hadn't been erased — just adapted — the waiting period that followed wasn't passive at all. It was full of a very specific kind of work.

I asked my team a question I still come back to: if this strategic plan changes three, four, five more times, what's the work we're doing right now that will still be there through all of it? Not the plan. The work underneath the plan. Once we could name that — individually, and then together as a team — we could see how it branched out, how it rippled into other departments we worked alongside.

I used to describe it as a wheel. Their individual work, their department's work, all of it as spokes supporting one center: the vision itself. Every conversation kept coming back to that center, so no one lost the thread of how their day-to-day connected to where we were actually headed.

From there we built real infrastructure — research, pilots, testing. And we used data constantly, but not for its own sake. I spent real time helping my team understand the context behind the data, and why that context mattered, especially when we were sharing it with each other and making decisions together. Data without shared context is just numbers people nod at. Data with context is something a team can actually act on together.

And the vision did arrive.

But here's what mattered most. Because we'd taken the time to slow down and reanchor to what would carry the work forward — not just what felt urgent that year, but what would still matter no matter who was there to carry it — when other crises came later, they didn't hit nearly as hard. We had already built something that could absorb the shock, because we hadn't been white-knuckling a fixed plan the whole time. We'd been building.

That's the real difference between the two postures. One leaves you fragile when the next disruption comes. The other leaves you ready for it, because you were never standing still to begin with.

I don't want to leave this where it sounds like hold on no matter what, because I don't believe that.

Some visions are wrong. Some were right and stopped being right. Waiting faithfully on something that has genuinely stopped being true isn't faith — it's the first posture wearing better clothes.

The honest answer is that Reflect with Results is how you tell the difference, and it's the reason it can't be optional. A vision that's still right will keep producing evidence in the small tests — pilots that show movement, capacity that's visibly building, people who can articulate why the work matters without being coached. A vision that's stopped being right produces the opposite, consistently, across multiple honest looks. Not one bad quarter. A pattern.

So the question isn't am I willing to wait. It's am I looking honestly enough to have earned the waiting. If you haven't piloted anything, haven't asked the people closest to the work, haven't looked at what's actually happening — then you don't yet know whether you're being faithful or just stubborn. Those two feel identical from the inside. Only evidence separates them.

Here's what I keep landing on. The outcome's timeline was never fully yours to control. But the infrastructure-building — that part always was.

That's the whole shape of this series, if I'm honest. Write the vision. Make it plain enough that someone else could pick it up and run without you in the room. And then, while you wait for it to fully arrive, keep building. Keep hearing. Keep reflecting honestly on what's actually working.

Not because waiting is easy, but because what you do inside the wait determines whether the vision, when it finally comes, finds something ready to receive it.

Though it tarry — wait for it. Not by standing still. By building the whole way there.

As always, lead with heart. 💛