One of my mentors used to tell me that "Hope is not a strategy." The line always made logical sense to me, and it has stuck with me for years. What I am starting to appreciate, however, is that he wasn't completely correct. Hope can be a strategy. Let me explain.
What my mentor was really referring to was the simple fact that "not having a strategy" wasn't a strategy. In other words, we shouldn't just go through our personal and professional lives without a plan. We shouldn't just "hope for the best" and see how everything plays out.
As I've mentioned several times in the last couple of months, I've been paying a lot more attention recently to the Harvard Business School professor Arthur C. Brooks, who studies happiness and how it applies to leadership. His tagline says it all, "Blending cutting-edge research in behavioral science and neuroscience with philosophy and wisdom traditions, Dr. Arthur Brooks teaches people from all walks of life how to live a better, happier life." I've been reading his articles (and a book he recently co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, Build the Life You Want) and listening to his podcasts. One of the things he emphasizes is that hope and optimism are two different things. It's even the subject of one of his articles in The Atlantic magazine, "The Difference Between Hope and Optimism". Dr. Brooks emphasizes that hope is active, while optimism is more passive. "Hope" involves personal agency - not only are we going to take an optimistic viewpoint, but also we are going to do the necessary things to make things better. Optimism is a vision, while hope is a strategy.
Jamil Zaki, professor of psychology at Stanford University, wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review entitled "The Strategic Power of Hope". He says that we are evolutionarily wired to be pessimistic. Early humans had to anticipate all of the bad things that could happen to them - if they didn't, they could end up as lunch for some ancient predator. Dr. Zaki suggests that even organizations are hard-wired to focus on what could go wrong - it's even one of the foundational principles of so-called High Reliability Organizations ("Preoccupation with Failure").
Dr. Zaki also says that there are important differences between optimism and hope. He explains, "Optimists tend to be happy but complacent, waiting patiently for a bright tomorrow. Hopeful people, on the other hand, believe that things might turn out well - but they also believe that in that context of uncertainty, actions matter. Being hopeful doesn't just involve imaging positive outcomes...it also involves willpower (a desire to bring about hoped for outcomes) and waypower (the charting of a clear path to achieve them)."
Similarly, Deborah Mills-Scofield, a strategy and innovation consultant, wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review entitled "Hope is a strategy (well, sort of)". She would respond to my mentor's comment ("Hope is not a strategy") by saying, "It isn't, especially when based on illusion, delusion, fiction, or false assumptions." She defines hope as "the belief that something is possible and probable" but again she emphasizes that hope is action-oriented, while optimism is not.
So how can we leverage hope as a strategy? Dr. Brooks suggests that we take three important steps:
1. Imagine a better future, and detail what makes it so.
2. Envision yourself taking action.
3. Act.
Dr. Zaki adds that leaders need to find ways to empower the individuals on their teams, writing, "Hope blooms only when people feel agency over their future. That's something that you can help them with - for example, by delegating important tasks and loosening the managerial reins." He also suggests that we celebrate progress, writing, "Focusing people on their wins, and how they have managed to take control of their work lives, makes them more likely to feel agency in the future."
Dr. Zaki ends his article by stating, "There will be storms ahead, but it's the hopeful leaders who can best chart a course through them. If you anchor their strategies in hope - not naïve optimism but a deliberate belief in shared goals and action - you can steer your organization toward growth, connection, and creativity. Hope doesn't just imagine a better future; it helps you build one."
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