In futures work, hope is often misunderstood. It’s sometimes treated as optimism, a belief that things will turn out well. But in complex systems, that kind of hope rarely survives contact with reality.
The kind of hope I’m interested in is different. It’s the capacity to act without guarantees. In most systems worth changing, cause and effect aren’t proportional or immediate. Effort doesn’t reliably produce visible results. Change happens slowly, unevenly, and often below the threshold of what we can see. When we expect linear progress and quick feedback, cynicism becomes a rational response.
From a futures perspective, this isn’t a failure of motivation. It’s a mismatch between how systems actually change and the mental models we use to interpret them.
Hope, in this sense, is a form of systems literacy. A systems skill, as Charley Johnson so eloquently puts it. It’s the ability to stay engaged when outcomes are uncertain, feedback is delayed, and agency feels diffuse. It’s what allows people to keep acting even when they can’t trace a straight line between effort and impact.
This is one reason I’m wary of futures work that promises certainty, and of technologies that collapse uncertainty into fluent answers. They feed a desire for control that complex systems can’t satisfy.
Good futures facilitation doesn’t eliminate uncertainty. It helps people work with it, and recognise that not seeing change doesn’t mean nothing is happening. In “Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power”, Rebecca Solnit says:
“Hope locates itself in the premise that we don’t know what will happen, and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.”
In this sense, hope isn’t naïve. It’s a skill. And it’s one deserves to be practiced in futures work and elsewhere.