📜 Announcing: The Vision Guide

Developing an interactive vision stage tool

TL;DR: We’re creating a 64-page interactive mini-book to support right relationship with vision, and inviting your support to complete it.

Fellow travelers,

In our last newsletter, we shared our intentions for a winter integration period: taking a little break to regenerate ourselves, harvest the lessons of 2025, tend to relationships, clarify the path forward, and see what emerges in the silence.

However, there is one project that will naturally stay humming in the background. A seed that has been steadily sprouting over the course of the year, and is poised to become a central focus of 2026: The Vision Guide.

For many years, I’ve had a recurring vision of standing outside places of visionary experience (meditation hall, maloka, mountain, festival) as young visionaries walk out, starry-eyed and ready to go fast and hard on a big new idea…

I hand them something. An artifact that will help guide their next steps in a good way. Then I gently take them by the hand and walk down to a creek, where we sit on some stones and begin a conversation that will shift how they enact the vision they received..

Midjourney art

The essence of this vision has to do with intervening as close to the moment of the initial spark/vision/insight/download/idea as possible. Introducing positive friction, or a moment of mindfulness, at the delicate vision stage in which every conversation and practice has an outsized influence on what unfolds.

In the interest of practicing what I preach, I haven’t rushed to enact this vision in the literal way I’ve seen it. Rather, I’m trying to stay spacious and curious about what it wants to be; listening for the right moment to energize it into form.

Something naturally started to arise this summer, when I felt moved to create and distribute a PSA flyer at Burning Man:

This one-pager version of the artifact in my vision is based on initial conversations with wisdom keepers across traditions on the subject, and inspired by many a transformational experience in which I’ve received some sort of vision --> fell into familiar patterns of taking things too literally, rushing to enact, and inevitably stumbling.

Encouraged by the positive reception, the muse started flowing and I found myself outlining a whole book on vision!

Then, when I realized Canva allows one to print a 24-page booklet with a couple of clicks, I set a goal to print something by the end of the year within this smaller design constraint.

Crafting a booklet has served as a beautiful context to integrate what we have been learning from teachers at School of Wise Innovation, and through the process of starting a vocationally-oriented wisdom school.

This draft PDF is as rough as it gets, but you can get a sense of what it wants to be, and surely find some use in it – whether you are working with a new vision, or checking in with something you have been energizing for awhile.

We’ve been on a journey to understand how different cultures understand and orient to vision, translate that to a modern entrepreneurial culture, and experiment with tools and experiences to visionaries embody a more holistic approach to vision enactment.

This inquiry around “right relationship with vision” has gradually become the center of the center of our work, as we see vision as the headwaters of human-created reality. Like the headwaters of a river, the health at the source impacts the entire downstream ecosystem.

Or just like a new human through gestation, newborn, and early childhood, what happens in the beginning overwhelmingly determines what unfolds.

If the vision stage is where mindsets, worldviews, blind spots, motivations, patterns and processes are crystallized, then intervening here is a high leverage way to minimize negative externalities and cultivate wise innovation, organizations, and individuals.

—> We see an opportunity to create a powerful resource for entrepreneurially trained people exploring inner development to cultivate greater “vision literacy.”

---

🌱 Want to be part of the story?

We’re working on a 64-page, limited-edition, interactive mini-book called The Vision Guide.

Designed to be an accessible, beautifully crafted tool that helps founders and changemakers navigate the delicate vision stage with greater wisdom. So they may be supported in bringing ideas to life in ways that are better all touched, including themselves and the relationships that matter most.

The interactive artifact – which we see as more of a tool than a guide book – will blend reflection prompts, short teachings, ritual instructions, and practical exercises. It will also include digital elements like guided audio journeys and custom software to support a more more intentional enactment process. Perhaps even access to an elder council and other elements of the vision ecology we’re building towards.

We envision this becoming a must-read for anybody fresh off a vision (friends don’t let friends enact vision irresponsibly!) – especially those in tech/startups/business/innovation/regeneration who are interested in wisdom/spirituality/healing/leadership/innerdev. A coveted object, fit for an altar, engaged with ritually and shared with close ones during special moments.

Isn’t it obvious? Take a beat to make sure you actually want to devote years of precious life force to this. Integrate the painful lessons from the last collaboration or thing you built. Inquire what success actually looks like at this stage of your life. Stay open to what form this vision wants to take. Get curious about what needs to shift inside yourself to be a responsible steward.

As part of the research effort, we intend to interview vision stage wisdom keepers across sectors and walks of life: Bill Plotkin, Katsi Cook, Simon Mont, Dajé Alōh, Josh Schrei, Susan Barnes, Josie Siegel, Jennifer Armburst, Belinda Liu and others in our orbit.

We’ve been self-funding the project so far, and can see it all the way through alone if needed, but would enthusiastically welcome additional financial and other types of support in order to do it well. Even simple words of encouragement go a long way. It’s such an uphill cultural battle out there – we can’t understate how much it helps to know that other people see what we see and believe in what we’re doing 🙏

The total cost to complete the project (targeting Sept 2026) is $24,000 - which will support:

• Content development and project management

• Professional editing

• Book design and illustrations

• Small research honorariums for expert contributors

• Printing 250+ copies

• Distribution to high-impact individuals and institutions around Silicon Valley (Apple, Google, Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, Stanford, YC, Esalen; as well coaches, therapists, teachers, investors, and healers working with early-stage innovators)

We’re already half way to our goal. Will you help us close the final amount?

Donations are tax-deductible through School of Wise Innovation, a fiscally sponsored 501(c)(3). Donation amounts are not publicly displayed, and you can choose to remain anonymous. No amount is insignificant. Donations over $50 will receive a copy of the mini-book and credit in the final text, if you’d like!

+ if you feel called to contribute your unique perspective and genius, we’d love to find a way to have your energy in the mix! What have you learned about vision, and from who? Got words of wisdom on writing book (especially working with printers)? Want to review early drafts and give feedback? Know key nodes who we should give a copy to? Please get in touch.

If you are interested in making a donation and want to learn more, feel free schedule a call here. We’d love to hear your ideas and explore ways we can work together.

With gratitude,
Andrew Dunn
School of Wise Innovation