Project Vision 21

If we're honest, we must admit that in daily life we face challenges, problems, and situations to which we cannot respond because we cannot see them, both literally and figuratively. When that happens, what we see and what exists no longer align. The choices are to accept confusion or to activate creativity.

This situation was depicted decades ago in "Balance of Terror," an episode of Star Trek in which the Enterprise confronts a Romulan ship equipped with a device that allows them to vanish from sight. The ship is there, it moves, it fires, and it can destroy its adversaries, but it remains invisible.

Captain Kirk observes the ship's movements and interprets the signals. Although he cannot see the ship, he can detect the consequences of its actions. In this way, he learns to see what cannot be seen.

Thinking about that old episode reminded me of a story that Dr. Otto Scharmer often tells when explaining his Theory U. When Japanese automotive companies were beginning to transform the industry, American executives traveled to Japan to visit their factories.

What they found didn't look like a factory. There was less inventory, and activities the visitors considered essential were missing. Some thought the Japanese weren't showing them the real operation. But there was nothing hidden. The factory was right in front of their eyes.

The problem was different: those who were observing did not yet possess the necessary categories to recognize what they were seeing.

In turn, that story reminded me of Predator (1987). There, too, something is present but almost impossible to see: an alien uses technology that allows it to blend into the jungle. There are movements, sounds, and distortions, but its body ceases to stand out from the background. We then have three similar, yet different, situations.

In Star Trek, something is hidden. In Scharmer's story, nothing is hidden, but the observer cannot recognize it. In Predator, something becomes difficult to distinguish because it blends into the environment. And the strategies for seeing the invisible are also different.

Kirk follows the trail. Scharmer proposes examining the observer. In Predator, the protagonist alters the conditions of perception to create contrast. Perhaps these stories describe something of our current experience because we live surrounded by systems that produce visible consequences, even though we cannot always see how they were produced.

For example, the search engine decides which results appear first. A platform selects which posts we see. An automated system recommends, ranks, and discards. Some realities may be right in front of us, yet we don't see them. And other realities appear disguised: an advertisement masquerades as advice, and an AI image is presented as "real."

However, perhaps there is an even more unsettling form of invisibility today: that of not knowing that something remains invisible. Then, it is no longer simply a matter of knowing whether what we see is real, but also of asking ourselves how we can persevere “as seeing the Invisible” even if the invisible remains unseen.