What then occurs when the group finds no visionary leader. When this occurs, then the group is likely to wander around aimlessly. There is no Emerald City nor is there a compelling dream of equity and justice. As Fred Polak (1971) noted in his extensive analysis of compelling visions of the future, a society without a compelling vision will soon dry up. Similarly, a group will dry up. While the group might still operate, it will not only be aimless, the group will also lose its collective motivation. There is no glue holding the group together unless they revert to finding an enemy or listening passively “learning” from the wise leader.
As with wisdom and courage, there is the third pathway. Members of the group can search for their own internal vision and share it with other group members on the way to building a collective vision of the future. Quiet a few years ago, I was consulting with a medical team in California. The team had been energized for several years since its founding by the prospect of serving minority patients (especially farm workers). Revised government policies and shifting funding priorities (both governmental and private) have shattered this enthusiasm and commitment to serving the underserved. When I met with the doctors, I began by asking each of them to talk about the reasons they had chosen to become physicians and the reasons they joined this medical team.
This exercise was just supposed to be a warmup exercise; however, it ended up occupying the entire morning and extended into lunch and the early afternoon. Members of the team had either never heard these stories (especially about entering the medical profession) or forgotten them. The second half of the first afternoon and all the second day of this retreat was spent in recovering these dreams and reframing them to meet the challenges of shifting governmental regulation, priorities and public/private financial support. Within a month, this team mounted a very successful funding campaign based on the compelling vision they produced while at the retreat.
I have been fortunate to witness this same powerful reclaiming by group members of vision, as well as courage and wisdom. While most of the research has focused on the remarkable wisdom and knowledge to be found in collective intelligence (Arima, 2021; Seebacher and Legat, 2024), we are likely to find that the collective can also produce more courage and a more compelling vision than can be found in the head or heart of any one member of the group.
While nothingness is scary and can produce false lions and impractical visions, there is also the opportunity of the group to produce something of worth (independent of threat) and something to guide the group’s collective future (independent of opportunistic “flim-flam”). As proposed by many social and organizational psychologists, the group can transform into a team when reclaiming its own wisdom, courage and vision (Hill and Lineback, 2011; Bergquist, Sandstrom and Mura, 2023).
