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"Cuando el caballo esta muerto, dejalo. [When your horse is dead, get off it.]"
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Leadership Notes -- Thoughts on Leading People and Making a Difference in Organizations

Word count this issue: 504

Estimated reading time:   2.45 minutes 

 

Hope is in Our DNA

 

I have a good friend, a very gifted consultant, who famously said once, ‘hope is not a strategy.’  http://www.pjosler.com/people.html  She is right. This is not a time for us to simply ‘hope’ that things will turn out well.  That said, hope is in our DNA; it motivates, invigorates, pulls, pushes and cajoles. It inspires, comforts, and tickles us.  Hope is entirely intrinsic; there is no pill, there is no button to press. 

 

The most effective leaders know this. The most effective leaders create environments where others find meaning, where other’s presence is valued and where others can make a difference.  Think about the teachers, the coaches, the managers you’ve had in your life; the best ones had confidence in you and your skills and abilities. They gave you hope and you then chose to build on it. One example from early in my career was my boss at the time asking me to go to a client site to teach a course on a subject I was only just learning myself. I remember standing between the two beds in the hotel room, the overhead transparencies (yes that long ago) spread out on one of the beds, as I rehearsed and prepared for the gig. She had confidence in me, she gave me hope and I haven’t looked back since. 

 

I am neither a techno-optimist, nor a techno-pessimist, I am both. The digital (r)evolution demands that we hold the two in tension; in the place that Parker Palmer calls the ‘tragic gap”. The ‘tragic gap’ is the place between hard reality and what we know is possible. This book is about how we might thrive through this (r)evolution, sitting uncomfortably in the ‘tragic gap.” The possible we know is that we can build a better world for our children and their children, and their children and beyond. 

 

In the English translations of ancient religious texts from the Greek, the same root pisteou is translated as both ‘trust’ and ‘believe’. This book then is about my trust and my belief in human kind to do the right thing most of the time. My trust and belief that we strive to be the best that we can be and that we thrive through adversity and pain. I am also keenly aware of the hard realities around us; this will not be an easy next 20 years. 

 

I trust and believe that there is an ethic of friendship and love that exists at our deepest cores and I believe after years of working with young women and men that people growing up now are smarter, better connected and more capable than previous generations. I believe then that as difficult as the future will be, there is hope. 

 

Excerpt from my forthcoming book, 5 Thrives for the Digital (R)evolution to be published by Fairwinds Press