Why Visions Matter More Than Goals

Hans Leo Bader · 7 June 2026 · DE · EN · ES

We live in an age of goals.

Companies define performance targets. Public administrations formulate objectives. Political parties adopt target figures. Projects are divided into milestones. Even personal development is often measured in goals: more success, more performance, more reach, more efficiency.

Goals are regarded as rational. They convey clarity, manageability and control.

But the longer I observe processes of social change, the more another question presses itself upon me:

What if our problem is not a lack of goals?

What if something else is missing?

Perhaps what we lack is not clarity about goals.

Perhaps what we lack is orientation.

The world as a project

Goals work extremely well when the task is known.

Anyone building a house needs a plan. Anyone constructing a bridge needs schedules, budgets and milestones. Anyone developing a machine must define when each function is to be fulfilled.

In such situations, goals are indispensable.

Over time, however, we have begun to apply the same logic to almost every sphere of life.

Society becomes a project.

Nature becomes an object of management.

Politics becomes a task of control.

The future becomes a planning problem.

The question is almost always:

What do we want to achieve?

Less often do we ask:

What actually is the reality in which we live?

This is where a deeper distinction begins.

The question of what for — and the question of what

Goals arise from a purpose-oriented view of the world.

They ask:

• What is something for?
• What use does it have?
• What function does it fulfil?
• How can we control it?

These questions matter.

But they are not the only questions.

Before the question of purpose comes another:

What actually is this?

What is a river?

A water supplier?

A source of energy?

A flood-protection system?

A recreational space?

Or is a river first of all a living water system with its own dynamics, its own history and its own relationships?

The answers differ fundamentally.

Those who ask first about utility will make different decisions from those who ask first about what something is.

The forgotten question

Philosophy calls this inquiry into being and the nature of things ontology.

The term sounds academic, but it describes something very simple:

It does not first ask what we can do with the world.

It asks what the world is.

In many areas of modern society, this question seems to have receded into the background.

We discuss the use of soils, waters, forests and landscapes.

We calculate ecosystem services.

We value resources.

We optimise processes.

Yet in doing so, we often treat the living world around us primarily in terms of its function.

Questions of intrinsic value, particular character or integrity are often subordinated.

Perhaps this helps explain why many debates feel strangely incomplete despite ever better data and increasingly sophisticated instruments.

What is missing is not knowledge.

What is missing is a deeper orientation.

Where visions come from

Visions rarely emerge from tables.

They rarely emerge from metrics.

And they rarely emerge from project plans.

Visions often begin with a changed perception.

Someone recognises a connection that had previously remained invisible.

Someone sees a possibility that others do not yet see.

Someone looks at the same reality — but with different eyes.

That is why visions are often difficult to translate into numbers.

They do not describe a precisely fixed final state.

They describe a direction.

A vision does not say:

This is where we will be on 17 October 2035.

A vision says:

This is the direction in which we should move.

Why major change begins with visions

Significant social changes can rarely be reduced to systems of targets.

The abolition of slavery was driven by political struggles, resistance, religious, moral, legal and also economic arguments. At the same time, a fundamental idea of how human beings may be treated in law and society changed.

The development of women's rights was likewise a long political and social process. At its centre was a recurring struggle over what equality and equal rights actually mean.

Many ecological questions ultimately touch this level as well.

The decisive question is not only:

How do we protect nature?

But also:

What do we understand nature to be?

A raw material?

A backdrop?

A resource?

Or part of a living world to which we ourselves belong?

Depending on how we answer this question, different goals emerge.

But the vision arises before them.

Visions as a compass

Goals matter.

Without goals, much remains non-binding.

But goals alone are not enough.

Goals answer the question of the next step.

Visions answer the question of direction.

A goal can be achieved.

A vision can provide orientation across generations.

A goal often belongs to a project.

A vision belongs to a worldview.

Perhaps that is precisely where its significance lies.

The future is not a technical problem to be solved.

It is an open space in which people make decisions.

Those who possess only goals can move efficiently and still lose their direction.

Those who possess a vision may not know every step in advance.

But they know what guides them.

The future begins with a question

Perhaps social change therefore does not begin with the question:

What do we want to achieve?

But with another:

What do we recognise as reality?

Our values emerge from that answer.

Our visions emerge from our values.

And our goals ultimately emerge from our visions.

Those who reverse this order risk planning the future without knowing where they are actually heading.

Visions are therefore not the opposite of goals.

They are their origin.

A further question

Perhaps social change does not begin with the question of which goals we pursue. Perhaps it begins with the question of which reality we recognise at all.

This reflection was also written in memory of my brother, Dr Reinhold Bader, with whom I shared many conversations about ontology, reality and social orientation.

Licence

This article is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Structure and parts of the wording were developed with the assistance of AI (GPT, OpenAI). Content responsibility: Hans Leo Bader.