Why You Should Anchor Everything You Do in the Future Vision of the World You Want to Create
Jul 31, 2025By Lynn Debilzen, Visioning Strategist at FutureGood
Lynn helps leaders reconnect with their long-term vision to lead with clarity and purpose. Connect with her on LinkedIn or email her at [email protected].
TL;DR
→ We don’t usually talk about daydreaming in systems change work. But future visioning isn’t fluff—it’s a leadership practice. This post explores why anchoring in your 30-year vision changes how you lead today, and includes a free guided meditation to help you or your team reconnect to the long game.
Let’s Talk About Daydreaming
We don’t usually talk about daydreaming in systems change work.
Daydreaming sounds so frilly and floaty, doesn’t it? Like something 9-year-old girls do when they are supposed to be focusing on…chores. (Just kidding, it’s my firm belief that a child’s work is play, play, and more play. Some chores are fine though, as they teach “responsibility” and “productivity.”)
Why don’t we talk about daydreaming at work?
Because we’re too busy holding the container. Managing funder expectations. Translating complexity into soundbites. Responding to another staffing shift. Picking up where someone else left off, mid-crisis. Again.
The truth is, most of the leaders I work with rarely have the space to pause—let alone imagine. They’re deeply committed to the long game, but their calendars are ruled by the short game. And I get it. That was me, too.
But here’s what I’ve learned:
Daydreaming is a leadership practice. It’s not a distraction.
This is true especially when the work you’re doing will take years–or even decades–to bear fruit.
Because when you don’t make space to reconnect with your long-game vision, you lose clarity.
You lose energy.
You lose your ability to prioritize.
You lose the sense of why this work matters at all.
Why Future Visioning Matters (In Systems Work and Real Life)
In systems change work, it’s easy to fall into the trap of reacting instead of reimagining. You spend so much time responding to immediate needs—showing up at partner events, writing a grant proposal for a recently-announced RFP (due in 30 days), updating data for this year—that you forget you’re building something for the long haul.
But systems don’t transform because we get through the next 30 days.
They transform because we stay anchored in what could be true 30 years from now.
The leaders I support are often the ones carrying the long-game vision for an entire community. That’s a beautiful responsibility—but also a heavy one. And without space to reconnect with that future, it’s easy to start chasing outputs instead of outcomes. Mistake urgency for clarity. Or prioritize the funder’s timeline over the community’s transformation.
This isn’t your fault, by the way. Our culture does everything it can to make everything feel urgent. And evolutionarily, cave(wo)men only had to think about the next day or two (what will we eat today?), not multiple years into the future. And, while our brains have evolved to process more complexity, our world has evolved faster than we ever could.
For the full post, including a free guided meditation and tools to reconnect with your long-game vision, visit Lynn’s blog here:
Read the full post on The Collective Shift
