About Dr. Thomas
Meet the Person Behind Vision360.
Vision360 Leadership began with three questions:
-
Can an organization learn to see?
-
If not, why not? If so, how do effective organizations practice seeing?
Those questions have shaped my work for more than 20 years.
I have spent that time studying how people, teams, and organizations develop and realize vision, drawing from personal experience, observation, research, and work with more than 50 individual, team, and organizational cases.
The framework that emerged from that work is Vision360 Leadership.
Vision360 began with a question about seeing.
.png)
The Winding Road to Vision360
The story begins with architecture.
During my senior year at Columbia University, I was studying architecture under Celia Imrey when she introduced me to a little-known concept called anamorphosis.
Anamorphosis explores how an image can change its appearance depending on the vantage point from which it is viewed.
I became fascinated by the idea.
What began as research for an architecture project became something much more significant. Studying anamorphosis introduced me to questions about human vision and perception and, eventually, to a different way of thinking about my own life, work, and future.
After graduating in 2003, I continued exploring the concept while building businesses and working in different organizational environments.
I began to recognize that perspective does more than change what we see. It can change what becomes visible.
That insight eventually led me to ask whether organizations could learn to see differently, and if so, how they might practice seeing more effectively.
From Seeing to Vision Development
My questions about perception eventually became questions about organizations.
While working in a faith-based nonprofit, I created a role focused on vision development and began applying what I had been learning about perspective, perception, vision, and change.
That experience provided an opportunity to study vision development within an existing organization.
From there, the work continued across different organizational settings and roles, including nonprofit organizations, large school systems, small businesses, startups, and entrepreneurial ventures.
My experience with visionary leadership has therefore been shaped by working from different positions within organizations rather than observing them from a single vantage point.
I have been a self-employed musician, a middle manager and public speaker in faith-based nonprofit organizations, a support professional within two of the largest school districts in the country, and a coach, consultant, and facilitator working with small businesses and startups.
Each experience gave me another vantage point from which to examine how vision develops and how organizations attempt to realize it.
The Research Behind the Framework
The Vision360 framework has been in development for more than 20 years.
I do not claim to have all the answers. What I have developed is a framework for representing how the phenomenon of vision development and realization works, based on a synthesis of vision-related leadership principles, personal experience, observation, and research.
That work eventually became the subject of my doctoral research at Regent University.
In developing Vision360, I considered literature ranging from the natural and biological sciences to leadership and organization theory, futures studies, and design thinking methodologies.
What I found was that many business and leadership programs provide pieces of the vision-development process, but those pieces are often presented separately.
Vision360 was developed as a way to connect those pieces.
Vision360 is a framework for connecting the dots between vision development and realization.
A New Container for Vision
Traditional visionary leadership has often centered on the leader at the top of the organization communicating a compelling picture of the future.
That remains an important part of visionary leadership.
But it does not capture everything that happens between developing a vision and realizing it.
Vision development and realization extend across people, teams, organizational levels, and the conditions surrounding the organization.
They involve more than communicating a vision statement.
They involve seeing, interpreting, creating, adapting, deciding, acting, and responding to what happens next.
Vision360 was created as a new container for exploring that process.
The framework gives leaders and organizations a way to connect the dots between vision, people, organizational dynamics, changing conditions, and action.
From Research to Practice
My goal has never been to create a framework that simply sits on a shelf.
The purpose of Vision360 is to equip leaders, particularly founder-CEOs and organizational leaders, with a mental model for understanding the vision development and realization process and using that understanding in practice.
Today, I bring Vision360 into executive coaching, consulting, facilitation, speaking, workshops, and focused Vision360 engagements.
The work may begin with an individual question, an organizational challenge, an emerging opportunity, or a situation that has become difficult to see clearly.
Whatever the starting point, the underlying questions remain:
What are we seeing?
What does it mean?
What are we creating?
What comes next?
Vision Is Still Becoming
Vision360 is not a finished theory.
It has been developing for more than 20 years, and the work continues.
Every organization, every leadership situation, and every set of changing conditions provides another opportunity to examine what vision development and realization actually look like in practice.
That is part of the reason I continue to research, test, refine, and apply the framework.
Vision360 is itself an iteration.
The Book
Ready to Step Into What's Next?
I am the author of Visionary Leadership: A Guidebook for 21st Century Organizations and Entrepreneurial Teams, published by Springer.
The book brings together the research, observations, experiences, and framework that have shaped Vision360 Leadership.
It examines visionary leadership beyond the traditional emphasis on vision statements and leader communication and explores the common ground between strategic leadership, foresight, and vision.
Explore the Book
Let's Talk
If something is changing, emerging, unclear, or difficult to see from where you are standing, I would be interested in exploring it with you.
You don't need to arrive with a fully formed question or a predetermined solution.
Start With the Situation.
Start a Conversation