After meeting with one of my new CEOs for a couple of months, I began to notice a consistent pattern to our conversations. Most of the time, the CEO brought up his problem-of-the-day for us to discuss: how to deal with a difficult employee, how to respond to the threat of losing a major customer, how to motivate his team to meet profit expectations for the month.
He had fallen into the trap of being a Firefighter CEO. Much of his daily action was simply reaction to problems he saw. In fact, he had succumbed to the habit of looking for fires to put out each day.
This is one of the vision ruts into which leaders can fall.
1. Looking Backward: The Firefighting Executive looks backward and solves the problem-of-the-day. This is a reactionary, problem-solving mode of vision. The leader is focused on the fires around him and only feels successful when a fire is put out. The danger here is that he gets into a habit of consistently putting out fires. He may start to only see the fires. The mindset that “something is always wrong” begins to become self-fulfilling. Opportunities where things are going well don’t get his attention.
Another common way that leaders see is in 24-hour increments.
2. Looking Around: The Incremental Executive looks around at the end of the day and finds satisfaction in any progress made. He thinks, “Hey, we’re further ahead than we were yesterday!” When a leader is focused on doing better today than yesterday, he will likely see incremental improvement in isolated categories. While progress is good, the leader is missing the big picture. He’s measuring against where he used to be, instead of against where he could be.
There is a 3rd, BETTER mode of seeing.
3. Looking Ahead: The Visionary Executive looks past the daily frenzy and into the future. This leader has clarity on where she wants the organization to go, regardless of the day-to-day results. She measures progress from where the organization was yesterday to where they want to be tomorrow. She leaves the details and problems of daily operations to others.
Each type of focus is necessary in an organization and must be addressed on a daily basis. The leadership problem occurs when there is a mismatch between the type of vision and the people doing the looking. Here’s the ideal breakdown of who should be looking at what:

• Looking Backward: this is the domain of managers.
• Looking Around: this is the domain of managers and junior leaders.
• Looking Ahead: this is the responsibility of CEOs and senior executives.

If you are the CEO, being a visionary is non-negotiable. There is no one else to whom you can delegate this task of looking toward the future. Number one on Harvard Business Review’s 2014 list of traits that innovative leaders possess was Vision: “The most effective innovation leaders could vividly describe their vision of the future.”
I’ll never forget a quote from one of the first business coaches in my life, Claude Dollins. Claude said, “Whatever you focus on, expands.” I have worked with leaders who were tempted to abandon the visionary thing because they could not immediately imagine new outcomes. But the longer they worked on it, the more their vision expanded. New opportunities began to appear.
The New York Times recently ran an article about one CEO’s plan to break his reactive addiction to email (consistently Looking Backward). He purposefully stepped away from his email while on vacation. The results on coming back to work? He writes: “I feel more in control. I’m less reactive and more intentional about where I put my attention.”
Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels, said: “Vision is the art of seeing the invisible.”
Seeing the invisible requires imagination. Imagination requires sustained focus, oriented toward the future. If you aren’t looking into the future for your organization, who will?