Toward an Architecture of Visioning: Insights From Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia

Abstract

Vision is widely recognized as a central leadership mechanism for motivating followers and directing collective action. Yet, existing research has largely treated vision as a leader-articulated statement or communicative act, offering limited insight into how visions endure, evolve, and remain collectively enacted over extended periods of time. Drawing on Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia as a theoretical lens, this paper develops a theory of visioning as a generative organizing system of collective future-making. I conceptualize the architecture of visioning as comprising three interdependent processes: vision crafting , through which collective futures are imagined and articulated; vision structuring , through which they are anchored in temporal, symbolic and material arrangements; and vision resonating , through which they become collectively inhabited and carried forward by collaborators. Together, these processes operate recursively through the interplay of leadership and organizing, generating inviting and enabling effects that support the realization of collective futures. By shifting attention from vision statements to visioning systems, this paper reframes vision as an ongoing organizing accomplishment and offers a new perspective on how collective futures are created and sustained across generations.