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Cultivate Hope: Found, Not Lost

Oana Branzei

Hope is a common, mundane experience, a deep belief that people and situations can and will change—for the better. Everyone hopes, some of the time. However, the consistent and persistent cultivation of hope is a virtuous and noteworthy undertaking.¹ At full strength hope can be heroic, even transformational. As President Obama explained, hope is “imagining and then fighting for and struggling for and sometimes dying for what didn’t seem possible before.”²

As a way of seeing, feeling, and being, hope has fundamentally changed the course of human history. Hope has been practiced over space and time, called forth by political leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, preached by religious leaders like Mother Theresa and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and harnessed into thriving organizations by modern-day business leaders like Virgin founder Richard Branson or Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus.³ Once they believed that a better future was forthcoming, these leaders actively searched for human potentiality and acted repeatedly and persistently to promote human betterment, even in the midst of adversity.

The cultivation of hope by exemplary leaders models how any leader can lead with hope, rather than without it. This chapter is about cultivating hope at work: a guide to how you too can find lost hope in your organization, how to hold on to hope in the midst of despair, not letting it fade or decay over time, and spreading it as broadly as possible. On the jagged roller coaster of life’s unavoidable ups and downs, leaders who cultivate hope never lose heart or sight of the future they are after. To lead with hope is to know when you are about to lose it—and work to earn it right back. To sense the fullness of hope approaching—yet be on the lookout for the next bump along the road. Leveraging the author’s three decades of research in philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and business, this chapter introduces hope as a “powerful leadership tool” and a “sustainable form of human motivation.”⁴

The Value of Hope

In its broadest definition, hope is “a way of feeling, a way of thinking, a way of behaving, and a way of relating to oneself and to one’s world.” This definition emphasizes the four different ways in which hope recharges us. Affectively, hope is an energizing force that “propels persons forward when the odds seem against them.” Cognitively, hope fortifies people who have found a way and helps them improvise work-arounds when the way no longer works. Behaviorally, hope involves an active search for possible and appropriate ways to get to one’s goal. Spiritually, hope helps us “rise above difficult circumstances” and “find one’s soul.”⁵

Across cultures, measures, and methods, hope is the will to keep searching for something better, especially when clear ways to get there from here are still unclear, unavailable, or unfeasible. Hope enables leaders to press on and boldly go where they really want to, not merely where they know they can. Hope opens us to imagine unexpected possibilities. It energizes our striving for more, even in extremely stressful and strenuous circumstances.⁶ And it often endures, until the hoped-for outcome is achieved.

Hope’s main function is to ignite and sustain action toward future goals, to move individuals and collectives onward into a risky and often underresourced future. Hope allows us to hang on to cherished goals and ideals long enough to figure out how we may attain them. Thus it is an “emergency virtue” helping us to deal with challenging situations.⁷

Cultivating hope helps leaders imprint and sustain forward momentum for their organizations, when the future they want is really hard to attain. Hope helps leaders become “unreasonable,” namely, to pursue goals they deem worthwhile by being unencumbered by current means.⁸ Hope is found at the root of radical prosocial organizing and is conspicuous in the genesis of radical business models that alleviate human suffering and repair or reverse environmental damage.

Over the last thirty years, we have accumulated many helpful insights about the presence and the influence of hope for individuals, organizations, communities, and societies⁹ by studying the psychological underpinnings of hope, philosophies of hope, vocabularies of hope, even pedagogies for inviting and sustaining hope. Some of us already enjoy the many positive consequences of hope, from meeting the most basic needs for survival and dignity, to improvements in our education, health, and engagement at work—where hope betters our self-confidence, clarity, creativity, work ethic, and productivity.¹⁰ But we can definitely do more to cultivate hope at work, especially in difficult times. The three principles I introduce and illustrate help leaders resuscitate, redirect, and renew hope. The sidebar at the end of this chapter showcases two leaders who combine all three principles to habitually find lost hope—and help many others do the same.

Three Principles and Practices of Cultivating Hope

These three principles speak to, and tap into, our innate capacity, even necessity, to hope for something better for everyone and in every circumstance. First, we need to imagine the future we want and hold onto it just long enough so we can take the very first small step in its direction. Second, we need to look out, and compensate in whatever little ways we can, for any obstacles along the way that may delay or divert the pursuit of hope. Third, we need continuous reminders of the hope that already exists elsewhere so we can help our hope persist a while longer. Leaders like you can bring each principle to life by engaging, and role modeling, in one simple practice: acting “as if” the imagined future is within reach; helping out employees who fall down or lose their way along the journey; and continuously piecing together any acts of hope you find scattered and spread throughout the organization to create and sustain the perception of a continuous stream of hope at work.

Hope Principle 1: Act “As If”

Cultivating hope is all about taking action, right now—but not just any action. Former IDEO associate partner, innovation consultant, and entrepreneur Thomas Stat practices, and recommends to everyone, acting exactly as “if the future were guaranteed.”¹¹ Taking even the smallest of steps keeps one’s hope alive. It also ranks worthwhile but hard-to-achieve goals as priorities and constantly (re)aligns one’s experiences and relationships with the structure of one’s faith, beliefs, and values in life. Taking action “as if” the desired goal was possible helps overcome the inertia of the status quo and conquers the initial fear of the unknown, complex, and difficult road ahead. Acts are powerful wellsprings of hope. They rekindle one’s motivation to move forward and enact their will although no ways are available—yet.

Acting “as if” keeps our sense of possibility alive. Even the simplest and smallest of acts resurrect hope, by awakening and aligning our cognitive, affective, behavioral, and spiritual capabilities with a cherished but often distant goal. Muhammad Yunus asked, “What if you could harness the power of the free market to solve the problems of poverty, hunger, and inequality?”¹² And then he began acting “as if” he really could. Hopeful leaders do not merely ask “What If?” but also begin acting “as if” the future they want were sure to shortly come their way.

No act is too small to resuscitate hope. Any steps that keep us searching in the right direction prepare and enable us to discern the future we want—or at least get us unstuck from an unwanted place. Some steps, such as resistance or protest acts, may help us hang on to the little hope we still have. Others, such as making promises, questioning naysayers, or gathering allies, keep us running in place until the right opportunities, capabilities, and technologies finally open up.

Great change often has humble beginnings.¹³ Nelson Mandela’s small acts of protest are famous for igniting world-changing hope. In prison Mandela was issued short pants because he was a black South African¹⁴ while prisoners of other ethnicities received long pants—along with better meals and treatment. Mandela repeatedly asked for long pants, and “after complaining for a week, he woke up to find a pair of pants in his cell. [But] he noticed that no one else had them in his prison, so he gave them back.”¹⁵ Then he kept on protesting. “We put our foot down and insisted on being respected,” he explained. Mandela acted “as if” throughout his twenty-seven years in prison and continued to do so afterward. Acting “as if” gave Mandela the “courage to do better than your best.”¹⁶

But hope is not always humble. Ray Anderson was the founder and chairman of Interface, Inc., a $1.1 billion carpet company, until his death in 2011. Anderson’s 1994 “promise to eliminate any negative impact our company may have on the environment by the year 2020” (missionzero)¹⁷ was boastful and deemed mission impossible for the next decade. But Anderson persisted, and by 2009, he was already halfway there. By 2011, Anderson not only reversed his company’s “pillaging and damaging the land,” but also created one of the first proenvironmental business consultancies that helped industry peers and other leaders make and keep similar promises. His thousand-plus speeches influenced generations of leaders to follow suit. Many who initially doubted his promise have since set their own mission-zero targets, and some have already achieved them.

Any leader can act “as if,” using small protests and/or large promises, to resuscitate hope at work.

Hope Principle 2: “Kiss It Better”

Bearing witness to human pain and suffering wears hope thin. Even organizations specializing in sustaining hope may lose it at times.¹⁸ Hopeful leaders are no strangers to hopelessness, but any dips are short lived because they act swiftly to catch and reverse downfalls. They believe in miracles, just enough to make some happen. They remember, retell, and relive successful reversals, dwelling on the happiest of endings to the most challenging of situations. They replay and rehearse what went well, often collectively and publicly, and downplay the myriad other factors that could well have gotten in the way.

Hopelessness invites and welcomes relief. Leaders can restore and shore up hopefulness by contrasting moments of despair with less visible but longer-lasting skills, strengths, and especially dreams of better times ahead. They can also fend off the erosion of hope and temper sudden drops by offering persuasive, frequent, even routinized, reminders to (re)focus on the positive and to keep moving forward even when a step back might have been unavoidable.

Globally practiced by mothers and fathers, this “kiss it better” approach has been shown to swiftly and effectively redirect hopelessness to hopefulness in hospitals, schools, even in the aftermath of disasters.¹⁹ The approach is simple, but not trivial. Because redirections are more effective when remedies are delivered immediately and persuasively, leaders often need to foresee and prepare for different contingencies so they can be prepared; they must be able, willing, and ready to reach out for hopeful stories, scripts, and supports anytime or any-place a redirection may be called for.

In postgenocide Rwanda, widows used to “struggle most of the time, … when we have children, … teach them that happiness doesn’t exist, that there is no pure love and, as legacy, we give them our despair, our debts, our doubts, our tears, our failures.”²⁰ In 2005, Odile Gakire Katese, fondly known as Kiki, founded Ingoma Nshya, Rwanda’s first and only group of women drummers. Sharing stories, moving together, and making loud, energizing music week after week created a predictable and highly effective reversal. Now over one hundred strong, the world-acclaimed troupe is so hopeful that it reignites others’ hope. Then Katese founded Inzozi Nziza, the country’s first and only ice cream parlor, creating a sharp contrast that deliberately invited hope back in, not just for the widows, but also for everyone struggling with bouts of hopelessness. She said, “We want to share moments that are not embossed by despair and death…. We want to create a space where poverty, disease, illiteracy … are not obstacles to happiness and barriers between human beings.”

In New York City, Lisa Honig Buksbaum, CEO and founder of Soaring Words,²¹ works to shore up bouts of hopelessness for hospitalized children fighting for their life and their worry-stricken parents. Buksbaum has helped 250,000 families thus far. She invites tenfold more healthy children and grown-ups to contribute multiple visual, verbal, and textured messages of hope, from cards and poems to vividly decorated warm quilts. These remind sick children of their strength and dreams, so they do not run out of hope when they need it the most.

Although music, ice cream, and quilts may often work, leaders can choose from a variety of organizational tools and artifacts to “kiss it better” when something bad happens at work. There are moments when clients are lost, opportunities missed, cherished projects fall through, or relationships unravel. Leaders need to recognize the lapse in hope, and before hopelessness sets in, swiftly call on—preferably publicly and vividly—reminders of everyone’s already proven ability to see the current challenge through.

Hope Principle 3: “Shared, Not Stored”

Hope is renewable. The more it flows, the more it becomes cognitively, affectively, behaviorally, and spiritually energizing. But hope does not renew automatically or effortlessly. Leaders need to know the people, projects, and places where hope naturally occurs and pools—there, the future looks a little closer and brighter; forthcoming events are infused with possibilities, and projects are steeped in expectations of success rather than failure; “can’t do” is unheard of because everyone is ready, even anxious, to take a step ahead and is looking forward to what is coming next. Then leaders deliberately tap these hope pools by staging opportunities for contagion. Activities such as spontaneous get-togethers and impromptu contests help hope flow. Hopeful exchanges can set off chain reactions: sharing unexpected opportunities or revealing positive surprises spark additional “as if” acts that put new hope cycles in motion.

Remember that hope is asking for nothing but the will to see or to do things differently; the forward momentum enabled by such will can release constraints, reveal new paths or even build them against the odds. It is not how much further one looks, but how much more hopeful one is about eventually getting there, that betters one’s odds of finding the way there. However hopeful you are as a leader, yours is but one will; share it with hundreds, thousands, even millions and watch your odds turn in your favor.

Ela R. Bhatt founded the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in 1972 to serve the 94 percent of the working women in India who lacked any prospects of fair, let alone formal, employment. More than a million women, whom Bhatt calls her “sisters,” pooled their hope together. First they imagined what could be possible in the future. Then they acted on each possibility, developing the skills they needed to match their unmet needs. As their numbers grew, so did their needs and their skills. SEWA is now a network of self-sustaining enterprises and a fast-growing movement.²² Like Bhatt, hopeful leaders do not let hope sit idle. As soon as they muster some hope, they stir it up to multiply manifold the few possibilities they foresee.

Putting It All Together

Cultivating hope at work matters because doing so focuses leadership attention on the possibilities ahead. It helps everyone else see beyond the many obstacles, even setbacks, unavoidably awaiting them along the way, so they can get going toward making their dreams come true. There is undeniable magic in bringing someone’s hope up, but in this chapter we revealed three simple strategies well within every leader’s reach. With practice, the magic of hope can become a way of life even in organizations that face significant pain or struggle. So we invite you to raise some hope at work, starting today. If times are particularly tough, start by acting “as if” hope is just around the corner. This will help you hold fast and keep looking for ways forward, even as your organization is being buffeted by waves of hopelessness. If you are already catching glimpses of hope, welcome them and work hard through repeated reminders and personal touches so the flame of possibility does not get prematurely extinguished. And once you have gotten the flame of hope burning bright, give it plenty of fuel so it spreads throughout your organization.

CULTIVATING HOPE AT FREE THE CHILDREN AND ME TO WE

Free the Children and Me to We are sister ventures, the nonprofit and for-profit arms of a single entity cofounded by two brothers, Craig and Marc Kielburger. Both ventures were “as if” acts. After reading about the gruesome execution of a boy his own age, Craig Kielburger, then age twelve, stood up in class and asked his classmates to join him and fight together against child slavery. Eleven said yes, and Free the Children was instantly born. A decade ago, Me to We was deliberately designed to enable “thousands of people who believe in social change” to also act “as if” because they wanted to transform customers “into world-changers, one action and experience at a time.”²³

Craig and Marc Kielburger redirect hope at both ends of the spectrum: striving to improve childhoods around the world by improving the lives of those living in poverty with the resources they badly need and enriching the lives of those living in abundance with causes they can care deeply about. Every transaction is a crafted contrast, simultaneously restoring hope for the givers and receivers. And they renew hope not only by tapping into pools of hope, but by creating proprietary cascades where it flows abundantly and freely among prestigious or popular speakers and large audiences. Through the movement “We Day,”²⁴ their organization is now millions strong across traditional media, TV networks, and online forums, and Craig and Marc Kielburger host a series of large-scale annual gatherings where young social agents swap stories and share experiences. Their hope continues to flourish long after the events, (re)kindled by songs, dances, and memories that go viral across different media. Carefully crafted and supported linkages before, during, and after these events help (re)circulate hope among existing pools and encourage the emergence of new pools, inside and outside the organization.

TWEETS

Now is a good time to fight off hopelessness.

Hopeful leaders believe in miracles, just enough to make some happen.

Dwell on the happiest of endings to the most challenging of situations.