Stop Calling It a Vision

Every government plan in this part of the world is, currently, a Vision. The word has done useful work for two decades. The word is tired. The word should, in the interest of basic narrative hygiene, retire. There are several reasons to be polite about this, and one reason to be firm.

Polite first. The word Vision earned its place. In the early years of the Gulf transformation cycle, the word communicated something genuinely new. It said: this is not a plan, this is a horizon. It said: we are not announcing a budget, we are announcing a destination. The word did important framing work, and a number of the plans the word framed have, in fact, delivered against the destination they pointed at.

But the word has now been used so often, by so many governments, for so many plans, that the framing work it once did has collapsed into a kind of background noise. When the third government in a six-month period announces a Vision, the word does not communicate anything specific. It communicates that an announcement is being made. That is a much weaker thing for a word to communicate, and it leaves the actual content of the announcement weaker than it should be.

What the word has been smuggling

Here is the firmer reason. The word Vision has, increasingly, been smuggling content past the reader. A plan announced as a Vision is, by the rhetorical force of the word, expected to be aspirational rather than operational. The reader is invited to engage with the plan at the level of the destination, not at the level of the work to get there. The journalist covering the launch is expected to praise the ambition rather than examine the timeline.

This was, in the early cycle, a useful permission. It gave the plans room to be more imaginative than a purely operational budget would have allowed. It is now, increasingly, a problem. The plans are being launched with the Vision framing, the framing is being taken up by the press, and the actual operational substance of the plan, which is often perfectly sound, is going unexamined. When the plan eventually runs into the operational realities, the public reckoning lands harder than it should have, because the press never asked the operational questions in the first place.

What to use instead

Several options. Plan, simply. Strategy. Programme. Roadmap. Each carries different connotations, and each invites the press and the public to engage with the substance at a different angle. A Programme is something you fund. A Roadmap is something you measure progress against. A Strategy is something you can rationally disagree with, in part, while supporting in whole. A Plan is something that has a budget line.

None of these words is as romantic as Vision. That is the point. The romance has been doing too much work for too long. Pulling it out lets the substance show up. The substance, in many of the plans that need to retire the word, is good. It deserves to be read as substance.