H.O.P.E.

Acronyms! Our white paper ‘What in the world is going on? Mapping Vertical and VUCA beyond the bandwagon’ acknowledged that they can start to tire. More recently we have come across one originated by anthropologist, author and futurist Jamais Cascio: BANI - brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible. Argues author, TEDx speaker and futurist Stephan Grabmeier “We seem to face chaos larger than VUCA – in politics, global warming and the current pandemic, and many other spheres of life. For future purposes, I therefore would like to propose that we apply the BANI acronym instead of VUCA.” 

Although Grabmeier does offer a sense of opportunities offered by our present context (https://stephangrabmeier.de/bani-versus-vuca/) we felt that something a little more uplifting would be nice. So we’ve opted for HOPE.

It’s not that we want to deny what’s going on. As a client recounted to me only this morning, seven of his senior leadership team of 11 have Covid. The past two years of battling through the pandemic have led people to feel burnt out and exhausted and there is limited resilience to face the coming storms as inflation and energy costs soar. And yet, during the pandemic, many leaders and organisations recognised the need for a more human and empathic stance. Some organisations re-wrote their leadership expectations frameworks and updated their talent succession lists to recognise the need to navigate turbulence well and not deliver performance at the expense of wellbeing. As we face new storms, can we overcome a reactive return to performance anxiety and desire to be in control - the antithesis of leading in complexity? For UK readers the present Conservative Party leadership contest seems to mirror this narrowing, with ‘green crap’ and ‘woke nonsense’ disparaged by some. When did fear for a planet on fire or under water or concern for others become objectionable? Other proposals might leave us wondering how massive and unaffordable tax cuts will help lower inflation, but I digress…

Back to HOPE. Obviously a deliberate choice of word on our part and we have arranged our thoughts to fit – but we believe the content stands.

H is for heart.  Of all the words that might have begun with ‘H’ we chose heart because of the association with heartfelt courage. As my colleague Julie Allan would remind me, the word ‘courage’ originates from the old French ‘corage’ and the Latin ‘cor’ meaning to take heart or to speak from the heart. “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the one that guarantees the others” (generally attributed to Aristotle although other choices are available). In anxious and incomprehensible times it takes courage to lead with purpose and in accordance with values. I’ve spent many a coaching session of late with coachees navigating difficult situations or transitions in their lives and careers, exploring what’s really important for them and how to act in accordance with values in a more surefooted way – to benefit themselves and others.  

O is for optimism, and not in a fluffy or panglossian sense. We mean in a realistic yet not fatalistic sense of optimism, one that inspires and sustains action for.  Gritty optimism gives hope and agency to face into the challenges ahead, not with a certainty of success to achieve fixed outcomes but rather to nudge a situation into a configuration that could enable better outcomes.  Many social activists that I meet - those that don’t burn out through an overwhelming emphasis on an end goal - are imbued with this sense of gritty optimism and agency.   

P is for perspective.  In the midst of challenging times we can lose sight of what might be going on for others, or how our own pattern of wiring can distort what we see and what we don’t. “We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.” (Rabbi Shemuel ben Nachmani, as quoted in the Talmudic tractate Berakhot). If leaders are to lead with empathy, then they need to feel into different perspectives and listen to learn, not just to fix the person/problem or win the argument. Can we step back and look at the relationship dynamics around us that are under strain, see new connections that need to be made? Are we aware that our noticings are always subjective, filtered by who and how we are.  Only this week with a coachee I found myself reaching for the Ladder of Inference as a pragmatic way to discuss assumptions being made in the heat of a situation.  

E is for engaged.  In the face of perceived and actual crisis, it’s easy to dis-engage through overwhelm.  The issues are real, with breakdowns in our social, political and ecological spheres, (mis)information overload, and new challenges impacting home and working lives. Graham Leicester and Maureen O’Hara of the International Futures Forum, in their book Dancing at the Edge: Competence, Culture and Organisation in the 21st Century, describe three potential responses to such crises:

1.      Denial: this defends against anxiety, shielding us from realities we don’t want to face. “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest”, to quote Simon and Garfunkel. Such denial was found in the early response of the SA government to HIV, for example, or in many countries to paedophilia in the Roman Catholic church.  We accept “alternative facts” or “amuse ourselves to death” with social media or Love Island.  

2.     Collapse: we lose connection and fall into delusion or fantasy. “Eat, drink and be merry” would describe this option, not because people wish to party but rather to insulate from what’s happening and, paradoxically, isolate from each other. So we have substance abuse or the inhumanity of death cults or genocides. There is a global epidemic in serious mental distress. 

And here’s the final one: 

3.     Growth or transformational response: engage with reality, sit with it, develop and grow through it. More than 100,000 years of evidence shows that humans as a species have adapted – not solely determined by genetics. We can transcend apparent chaos and expand into something genuinely new. But just because it is our nature or we have the capacity doesn’t mean it is easy. “In its essence it is a process of growth and learning that enables us to expand personal mental and organisational capacities to keep pace with and thrive on the higher levels of complexity we seem destined to create.” (p53)

Leicester and O’Hara clearly offer the third as a best way forward and this requires us to engage with reality, in a deliberately developmental way and – no matter the acronym that describes our context - with HOPE.