Hope Is Not a Strategy, but It Is at the Heart of One

Reflections on leadership, change, and what we must do differently

I’m known to repeat the often-heard refrain “Hope is not a strategy.” 

I loved reading a recent article by Jessica Riddell (Bishop’s University), author of Hope Circuits: Rewiring Universities and Other Organizations for Human Flourishing, that reframes hope as a compelling feature of strategy. Riddell expertly presents hope as an intentional and rigorous stance that leaders can adopt to move forward, even when the path is unclear.

It reminded me that hope is a fundamental ingredient to developing good strategy, and perhaps especially so in the face of the complexity, uncertainty, and risk facing higher education today.

The following reflections build on her conceptual tools, in dialogue with what we’ve learned from leaders navigating these very tensions.

Pause

Too often, our leaders tend to defer to (re)action—getting the wheels in motion before understanding the terrain. The challenge we face in those moments is that we’re operating on heuristics, practices, and approaches built on a reasonable but potentially incorrect set of assumptions. When the landscape shifts, we can’t rely on old paradigms, beliefs, and approaches to address new challenges. And, in those moments, it is critical that we pause.

Pause to frame. Pause to understand. Pause to reflect.

Without the pause, we risk favoring movement over progress and mistaking speed for strategy.

Think Differently

In order to fully understand and appreciate our challenges, we must learn to think differently and ask different kinds of questions that get to the root of the issue. That shift requires more than brainstorming. It requires us to consider who we are thinking with. Who are your thought partners? Are they the right ones for the current challenge?

Riddell encourages leaders to embrace uncertainty and complexity by sitting with difficult questions instead of rushing toward easy answers. That mindset shift from “solve” to “understand” is a discipline, (not a delay), that disrupts the echo chamber of familiar voices.

Do Something Different

We tell our clients that the strategic question is not, “What will we do?” but rather, “What will we do differently?” We encourage leaders to take the time to be engage your community in questions.

• What will we start doing that we’ve not done before?

• What will we stop doing because it doesn’t work or may no longer serve us?

• What will we do more of or less of because it responds to this unique situation?

This doesn’t require us to abandon everything we’ve built. But it does require us to question what we think we know. Does what we do still serve us? If so, how, and more importantly, is that still an outcome that’s important to us?

Strategic thinking isn’t a to-do list. It’s a process of discernment that requires a willingness to step back, reassess, and realign.

Tolerate Discomfort

We have to embrace the mindset shift from “discomfort = trouble” to discomfort is a feature of change, not a bug. Too often, we see leaders avoid discomfort or shrink back into the security of the familiar. But resilience in leadership means learning to stay with discomfort long enough for insight to emerge. Not just holding the tension, but moving through it with clarity and commitment.

Expand the Circle

We learned something important post-COVID-19 pandemic. When we asked leaders to reflect on the effectiveness of their leadership teams throughout the crisis, a pattern emerged. Senior leaders agreed:

“The people who emerged as leaders were uncommon and unexpected.”

Staff in health services, student affairs, and residence life were among the most solution-oriented, tactical, and responsive leaders on campuses. Why? Because they were close to the problem. They were better networked, more attuned to real-time needs, and more equipped to act than senior leaders who were further removed from the student experience.

In times of crisis, we must expand our thinking and outreach to identify the talent best positioned to respond. This practice of broadening the circle, can fundamentally reshape how we identify leaders, generate ideas, and catalyze transformation.

Build Intentional Community

As Riddell asserts, leaders need one another to sharpen their thinking and disrupt stuck patterns. In times of stress and urgency, leaders in organizations tend to close ranks rather than invite and engage in a more open dialogue.

In our practice, we’ve found that leaders benefit enormously from working with external partners who offer perspective, and we work deliberately to triangulate information and connect one president or vice president to another. When leaders are around each other, thinking changes, solutions get better, and most importantly, they push back against the isolating nature of a crisis.

Risk breeds insularity, so we strive to cultivate connectivity, the capacity to see differently in order to do differently.

Closing Thought

Although, hope is not a strategy, it is at the heart of good strategy. Hope is what makes the pause worthwhile. What makes discomfort meaningful. What makes community possible. What makes actions align.

Hope is what dares you to imagine something better, even amid uncertainty.

As Riddell writes, and as we see every day: Hope is a circuit we build together.