Hello friends,
Welcome back. Also, hello to all the new subscribers who've joined recently. There are rather a lot of you, which is both wonderful and slightly terrifying. (Welcome. You're in the right place. I think?)
I've just come back from The Power Of Storytelling conference in București, one of those rare events where you leave feeling like yourself again. The theme of the festival was hope, not as a feeling, but as a verb. As something you do, something you choose, something with agency baked into it.
So, this week, I’d like to talk about how to operationalise hope to benefit your team, organisation or community.
(Not yet subscribed to Theory of Change? Maybe fix that?)
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❓WHAT IS IT ❓
Hope seems like it is in pretty short supply these days among folks like us. If it’s not the polycrisis (AKA world dumpster fire), then it’s the intracrisis (funding cuts, political pressure, you know the score). There aren’t many moments to be hopeful.
But hope, in the sense I mean here, is not entirely absent from the work we do.
In fact, when we think of it as an orientation toward a specific, possible future - one that isn't guaranteed, but isn't out of reach either - it’s very, very present.
If you’re reading this, chances are you hold the belief that things can be different. And if you can combine that with the willingness to act as though they will be, then, well… you’re hopeful, I guess.
The trouble is, too many of us (myself included) don’t work with hope consciously enough. Which means most of us are leaving one of the most powerful planning tools we have just sitting on the table.
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⚙️ HOW IT WORKS ⚙️
The reason this definition of hope-as-action is useful (like, genuinely useful, not just reframed-for-a-newsletter useful) is that it changes your relationship to uncertainty.
Most organisations treat uncertainty as a problem to be managed, hedged against, or papered over with an overly confident board presentation.
But Rebecca Solnit in Hope in the Dark makes a more interesting argument: uncertainty isn't the enemy of hope. It's the condition for it. As she puts it, hope locates itself in the premise that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of that not-knowing, there is room to act.
Hope, then, is precisely what becomes possible, and necessary, when the outcome isn't guaranteed. (Which, if you work in the nonprofit sector, describes basically every Monday morning).
Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, in their book Active Hope, push this further in a way I find particularly useful for purpose-led leaders: they argue that hope isn't something you feel, it's something you practise.
You don't wait until conditions improve to act hopefully. You can choose to act as though change is possible, and you build structures around that choice.
The distinction between hope-as-mood and hope-as-discipline is what separates leade that sustain momentum for the long-term from the ones that only move when things feel good.
Which, in the current climate, is quite an important distinction, wouldn’t you say?
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🚦 GET STARTED 🚦
Anyways, enough of the philosophy. You're all busy people. Here are my tips on how to apply this across some of the work you are doing every day.
Fundraising: I genuinely believe we should stop presenting certainty we don't have. A fundraising strategy that names what it's genuinely betting on (and what it doesn't yet know, obvs) is more honest, more resilient, and more interesting to funders than a confident projection that nobody quite believes. Hope isn't a risk to hide. It's the premise of every ask you make.
Community engagement: The people we serve are already holding hope - often more of it, and more specifically - than our strategy documents reflect. The reframe here is simple: stop communicating hope downward and start gathering it upward. Your community/team likely knows what possible looks like better than you.
Organisational design: If your structure only works when everything is going swimmingly, it isn't designed for the sector you're actually in. Build in adaptation points - moments where you've agreed in advance to reassess, pivot, or name what's changed - and model agility as a desirable organisational trait.
Team-building: The most motivated teams I've worked with aren't the ones with the most resources. They're the ones who collectively name what they're working toward, not just the outputs, but the actual change they believe is possible.
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📅 TRY IT THIS WEEK 📅
Here are three frameworks that do this work in practice. None of them use the word hope, but all of them are trading in it one way or another.
Three Horizons (see 010: Three Horizons (adapted) 🌈) is probably the most useful place to start if your organisation has a strategy that everyone nominally agrees on but nobody quite believes in. It maps three states simultaneously: what currently works (H1), what you're genuinely hoping will emerge (H3), and the messy, contested transition between them (H2). Draw it with your team and name what sits in each layer right now. You'll quickly discover whether everyone is actually hoping for the same H3.
Backcasting is how you do hope in Excel. Start from a specific future - not vague ("we want to be sustainable") but concrete ("in five years, 60% of our income is unrestricted") - and work backwards. What would have had to be true two years before that? One year? Next quarter? Try it with one goal you currently describe in hopeful but vague terms.
Pre-mortem (but forwards). Most people know the pre-mortem as a failure exercise. Run it in reverse. Imagine the project succeeded spectacularly - what specifically happened? Who did what? Write it as a short narrative, not a list. You'll surface hidden assumptions your team hasn't yet named out loud, which is often more valuable than the success story itself.
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🌊 WAVE GOODBYE 🌊
Rebecca Solnit’s book is built on a Virginia Woolf line (from her journal):
"The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think."
I love that. Most organisations treat the unknown as a risk register. Woolf and Solnit are asking us to treat it as a drawing board. The best leaders I work with are fluent in this. Not naively optimistic: they've seen too much. But they've developed a practice, almost a discipline, of staying oriented toward what's possible even when the evidence (and hope) is seemingly hard to find.
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Thanks, as ever, for being here.
To all the new subscribers: if this particular edition wasn't your thing - totally fair enough, I contain multitudes and the unsub link is down below.
You might prefer my creative updates (narrative nonfiction, music, YouTube) over at Infinite Content. Or my YouTube channel itself where I talk through building a multipassionate career and make visual essays on mid-life identity, work, relationships, and adjacent stuff.
Take care,
Adam
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p.s. If you were forwarded this, welcome! You can subscribe over at my website.
p.p.s If you've been here for a while, thank you too! If you'd like to support my work in any of its many forms, you can tip me and I will ring a little bell next to my desk.
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Where to find me (AKA my many, many hats)
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