In 1957, Jørn Utzon's visionary entry for a new opera house in Sydney was excluded from the bidding process without further ado. It was in violation of a number of rules for the tender; in particular, it lacked any plausible cost estimates and feasible construction planning. Basically, the draft was nothing more than a rough, visionary sketch. Yet the visionary power of the draft eventually triumphed over a total of 233 proposals which were submitted. Today, the opera house, along with Ayers Rock, is the most famous symbol for Australia in the world. The UNESCO added it to the list of World Heritage Sites in 2007.

The history behind the creation of the Sydney opera house is also a lesson about the transformation process for the realization of visions – especially because the path to the realization of this vision as a project was anything but straight and narrow. The original draft had to be adapted repeatedly to take into account the realities of what was technically feasible from a construction standpoint, constantly evolving and in some aspects moving far from the original vision. Lay people expect architects to come up with artistically stunning designs together with detailed construction plans describing minutely and without any errors how these designs can be carried out, right down to the last electrical outlet. They want the architects sitting at their drafting tables to plan even the most visionary designs in such detail that the construction itself is nothing more than risk-free execution of these plans. But anyone who has experienced the building of "merely" a single-family house knows only too well that this is wishful thinking in actual practice.   

Managers frequently find themselves confronted with similar expectations whenever they set about realizing new business ideas or technologies in their companies. On the one hand, the idea must be as novel and innovative as possible; otherwise, it is not regarded as being truly visionary or, even worse, there is suspicion that it has been copied from the competition. On the other hand, it is taken for granted that a valid estimate of the costs of implementation, the project duration, and the future turnover which can be expected will be provided right away. The upcoming business transformation, which is supposed to achieve a completely new, visionary goal, must also be as amenable to planning and budgeting as possible. In reality, the results at the end of a transformation usually differ from the intellectual, often rather academic ivory tower which, as a vision, provided the impetus and the motivation for the transformation.