Oh, so you’re an idealist!

It is only possible to start an organisational transformation if you are idealistic. Most of the time, an idealistic narrative will be all you have to sustain you.

Each time a man stands up for an ideal acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring those ripples to build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

John F. Kennedy, University of Cape Town, South Africa, June 6, 1966

“Do you think you were too idealistic?” they said.  “No,” I replied. “It’s a transformation. It can’t help but be idealistic.”

I was 444 days old when John F. Kennedy made his ‘ripples of hope’ speech in South Africa. And, over 20,000 days later, his words continue to resonate. It is difficult to rationalise our desire for Hope if we look around us, but without it, we are lost.

I am an idealist. I search for Hope. Hope is an exciting idea.

Pandora comes to town

Hope was put in a jar by Zeus to be carried by a woman fashioned out of clay, Pandora, to Prometheus's brother as an obscure act of revenge for the whole ‘give fire to the people’ incident. So, when the clay lady opened the jar, Hope was released into the world along with many other nasty things to plague humankind.

The optimistic version is that Hope came out last to give us all something good to hang on to. But if you think about it from Zeus' perspective, why would he do that? He was up for revenge, and he was mighty angry at Prometheus. So, it is as likely that he put Hope in the jar because nothing is worse for people than having Hope crushed.

Yet, most people seem to be hopeful idealists

You're an idealist if you believe in ‘mind over matter’. You say that what you think and imagine can be actioned to overcome and change what exists.

When it comes to people and organisations, everything we put in place to improve performance is idealistic. We set ‘stretch’ goals, we encourage people to be more than they think they can be through coaching, and we aspire to growth that completely disregards the possibility of a changing environment.

Yet, despite all this, idealism becomes a negative characteristic when it comes to conversations about ‘practical’ delivery. ‘You expect too much.” “You are dreaming.” “It’s not possible.” Best of all, “You should try to be more practical.”

We encourage Hope in aspiration but are taught to lose Hope in management. So, Zeus laughs and laughs and laughs.

In organisational transformation, there is no choice but to be idealistic

It is only possible to start a transformation if you are idealistic. Most of the time, an idealistic narrative will be all you have to sustain you.

In a transformation, we must never lose sight of the possibility that our actions today will be the ‘ripples of hope’ that lead to better outcomes. Otherwise, why bother?

To Hope is a reasonable response to an impractical aspiration.

Our narrative of transformational Hope is not confined to a set of meaningless form words. It is bound in our actions and the stories (little and big) that we tell ourselves and others every time we connect.

It is connection and energy delivered constantly. It requires endurance, persistence, timing, and luck. It is rarely planned and always opportunistic.

It is not optimistic or pessimistic. These words have become tools to constrain Hope through categorisation. They are mostly meaningless. My pessimistic attitude might be a reasonable response to my environment rather than a fundamental personality flaw.

Hope, however, carries context, emotion, and practicality within its meaning. The opportunity for a better outcome is always present.

As a final observation, I am attracted to Goethe’s view in the classic story of individual transformation from 1795, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship:

When we take people merely as they are, we make them worse; when we treat them as if they were what they should be, we improve them as far as they can be improved. 

I remain happily idealistic.