A vision isn't meant to be admired or obeyed. It's a direction clear enough that the teams who build it can make it better than you ever drew.
Most vision work fails in one of two ways. Either the deck is beautiful and gets ignored, or it's taken so literally that people build exactly what was drawn and nothing more. Both come from the same mistake: treating the vision as the answer instead of the starting line.
I think about a vision as a floor, not a ceiling. A guiding star, a general direction, not a detailed plan. Its job is to get a lot of people pointed the same way with enough clarity that they can move without being told what to do at every step - and then to get out of their way.
The real measure of a vision isn't whether the thing you shipped matches the thing you drew. It's whether the people who built it made it better. If the end state only equals the deck, the vision became a ceiling and you capped your own teams. If it exceeds the deck, the vision did its actual job: it aligned people, then freed them.
This is why I'm careful about how a vision gets made. The standard move - a few senior people produce it and hand it down - almost guarantees order-takers. People who had no part in building a direction don't own it; they execute it, literally and without heart. So I'd rather pay the upfront cost of bringing the people who will build it into the room where it's defined. It's slower to start and far faster to ship.
When I ran the Disney+ vision sprint, the hardest part was never the ideas. It was getting around sixty people across product, design, engineering, and research to one direction, and then resisting the urge to over-specify it. We set the direction. The teams took it somewhere better than anything we drew that week. That wasn't the vision failing. That was the entire point.
The job of a leader isn't to have the best idea in the room. It's to create enough shared clarity that a few hundred people can build the same thing without a script - and to leave enough room that they can beat your version of it. Hold the direction firmly and the details loosely. The direction is yours to protect. The details belong to the people doing the work.
Set the floor. Then get out of the way.