Is visionary really a characteristics of an individual?

In the Times of India, I read a column of Swaminathan Aiyar about the reforms in Bollywood. This is a brilliant example of how visions get created.

Imagine someone in Bollywood having a vision of making 'successful serious cinema' 15 years back, say in 1992. I am talking about making movies like Khosla ka Ghosla or Life in metro. In 1992, it would have looked like a dream of an exuberant impractical youngster who does not know anything of cinema industry. A empathatic viewer would have even lauded the ability of 'youth' to do the impossible.

A systems thinker however would have told us that such a dream required numerous elements to come together, most of which is outside control of any single person or group. For instance, it needed the deregulation of Indian TV to bring in new type of directors in the forefront: a critical mass who were willing to experiment and had nothing to lose. But that would not have been enough. It also needed a heavy dose of liberalisation in capital markets to provide finance to new producers. Even that would not have been enough without a adaptive distribution channel. State had to forego the entertainment tax for new cinema theatres to help make multiplex theaters. This enabled making of cinema halls which allowed 3 lakhs of Hindi speaking population in Karnataka to afford a Hindi movie or 1.21 lakhs population of Bengali in Delhi to enjoy the movie in Bengali. Each of these three different huge systems were required to make Khosla ka Ghosla possible over a period of 15 odd years.

Which youth can alone realise such a vision? Books and researchers explain that visionaries are needed to make a different industry. How true is that? As you would have realised, even money or resources alone, howesover large, cannot influence such large systems. Any amount of hard work, commitment, dedication cannot turn a vision into a reality because one cannot make things happen at such a large scale.

Therefore, when we see some individuals achieving their impossible dreams, we should be careful in describing their achievements. We could applaud their ability to patiently wait for the 'systems to change'. We could call them committed, hardworking, and passionate individuals who 'prepared' themselves fully for the system to present to them the right opportunity. But can we call these individuals visionaries in a strict sense?

If a systems thinker were to define a visionary individual he would define it differently! According to systems thinker, he would be an individual who can see the interplay of these large systems and can 'plant' the saplings in these systems to watch them grow. Not all saplings grow. So, depending on their growth or withering, he would keep on changing his course. If he has the resources to use leverage points, he will use them. Or else he will wait for his time to come. He would also forsee the presence of choke points in a system and initiate efforts to de-bottleneck them. And above all, like a farmer, he will wait for the right time to do the right thing and hope things will coalesce to convert the sapling into a fullfledged tree which can bear fruits. And if the fruits do not come in his life time, he will smile and hope someone younger than him could pluck the fruits.