Motivation

Starfield overlaid with the words 'What do we do when hope is lost' - Adventurous Visions

Adventurous Visions

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How do adventurous visions provide a source of hope – engaging your people in a cause bigger than themselves?

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Hope is the most powerful force in existence. It turns losers into winners. It helps defeat impossible odds. Hope keeps people going when they would otherwise give up. It inspires incredible acts of bravery. Hope ignites creativity. And it transforms businesses.

What do we do when Hope is Lost?

Hope - reaching out for a vision - Cottonbro-viaPexelsBut when we see a world around us which is struggling. And we see evil go unchecked and unpunished. The things we value are being lost. And it all seems to be heading in the wrong direction. What then happens to our hope?
Typically, it retrenches. We still have hope, but within boundaries. And unfortunately those boundaries are shrinking.
The danger is that we have a misunderstanding of hope. That we see it is a consequence, rather than a cause. That we hold onto it as a comfort, not as something that drives us to bravely, creatively and triumphantly fight back. Perhaps we are consumers of hope, rather than its creators?

Creators of Hope

The thing is, someone has to create hope. If all everybody is doing is either holding on to it, or stealing it away from others, how will it grow? True, most of us are not in a position to create hope for the whole world. But we can create hope where we are.
hope - young man staring into sky courtesy myicahel-tamburini-viaPexelsAnd for those of us that lead or influence organisations, we have to ask ourselves, what are we doing to increase hope? Where are our people placing their hope? And what is the role of our organisation in inspiring and channeling that hope? How do we and our organisation become creators of hope?

Hope in Community

Religious groups have long understood the fact that hope is sustained better in community. But, like many communities, they sometimes lose sight of the need to ensure that the outworking of their hope is worthy of that community. That its ambition and adventure brings hope to those around it, and brings growth to the individuals within it.
The same is true for all organisations. If their sense of ambition and adventure is insufficiently large, they will fail to develop and harness the true potential of their people. And they will fail to realise their own potential to impact the world around them. They will function, they may even survive, but they are unlikely to really inspire.

Adventurous Visions

hope - adventurous visions - courtesy lukas_viaPexelsWhat is needed is what we call adventurous vision. A creative expansion of the perspective of the organisation and the people within it. A shared picture of a future that matters, and which creates meaning for all involved in it. Something that makes a real difference for the people within the organisation, and the people they interact with outside of it. A pursuit that offers them a sense of pride in the difference they will make – what they truly, confidently, HOPE to achieve.

Un-Adventurous Visions

Very few people get inspired by the requirement for incremental steps in their performance. 10% here and there is for many simply an invitation to work harder and longer. Normally for somebody else’s benefit, usually for someone who already has more money than they do. Numbers and increments do not inspire – well not unless they really mean something that is. It is the implications of the numbers that matter – the difference they make in the world.
But if it is the implications that matter. If it is the narrative around the numbers that is the real source of hope. Then wouldn’t it be better to cast the vision in those terms?

Creating Adventurous Visions

Hope - awakening adventure - Pixabay-viaPexelsThe two most important things in creating adventurous visions are conversation, and asking the questions ‘Why?’ and ‘What if …?’.
Conversations can help people to understand what is important to ourselves and each other. As a result, they begin to reconcile a narrative around meaning and potential. And they begin to generate deeper and more meaningful relationships.
Key to this is the question ‘Why?’. Understanding the reasons why people do what they do, and think as they think, can build new links between people’s stories. Successive levels of ‘Why?’ can open up new insights, and creative opportunities for doing things differently. Thinking about these opportunities together can generate new sense of hope and optimism. And it can bond people together, and to the organisation, in pursuit of this.

Inspiring Creativity

Asking ‘What if …?’ helps to break down some of the habits and paradigms that hold our perception of the work we do in the routine and mundane. It opens up further possibilities and fires people’s imaginations.
At the organisation level, it can to some extent recast the organisation’s role. It can help the leadership see further than the product or service into the potential impact this is having on their customers, and even their customers’ customers. And the impact it has on society, on the environment, on humanity, and potentially on history.

Dreaming Big

Hope - Adventurous Visions metaphor - person bestriding a mountainHistory? Really?
Most certainly. The people who change history are no different from you and I, except in one thing. In some way, they have the belief, the hope, that they CAN change history. The people who don’t change history are no different from you and I except, perhaps, in one thing. They think that changing history is the role of others.
But who are these others? What if we all think it is the role of others? Who then will shine as a light in the darkness?
At some level, and in some way, your organisation could be the next really big thing. But you and your people have to see it, and believe it, and make that their hope. Then again, is that not the role of a leader?

Dreaming Small

Much of this article has been aimed at organisations. But organisations are simply patterns of collections of people. And it often takes just one of those people to make the change.
If you have felt motivated in some way by what is written here, you might be the one that makes the difference to your organisation, that makes a difference to the world. Of course, your organisation might not move. Or even if it did move, you still don’t believe in what it is doing. If that is the case, them maybe your first move is to move to an organisation that you can believe in.
On the other hand, if it might move, you might find some further help in the articles below.

Related Articles

Image of someone pondering the idea of adventure

Why Adventure?

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3 reasons …

  1. Adventure, as a metaphor, describes the future we are all facing – the territory is unknown, wild, rapidly changing, treacherous, but with amazing things to see and experience
  2. Adventure reflects the mindset that we need to develop if we are to give ourselves the best opportunity of not only surviving this future, but thriving in it
  3. ‘Adventure’ is something that resonates with us. From childhood, it is a vocabulary that taps into our spirit. Into dreams, resources and values that reflect an aspiration. For many of us, it is something we wanted for ourselves ‘when we grew up’. And now  … We have grown up, and we need to repossess that child inside before they are permanently lost to us.

We are all on an adventure …

Life IS an adventure. The choices we make within that adventure impact how we experience it and our ability to influence it for good.
Staying the same is a decreasingly tenable option; one that puts us at a significant disadvantage and under a lot of stress.
Leading by Adventure is about how we engage and shape our adventure more proactively. Experimenting with how we engage with it, and using those experiments to deepen our understanding and insight into ourselves and into the nature of our adventure (and team). The adventure is different for each one of us.

About the future …

In the future, more and more of what we currently do will be automated and handled by Artificial Intelligence. It is tempting to look at our roles and say computers will never do that, or it won’t be economic, or people won’t accept it. But take a look back over some of the automation you are seeing around you. Would you have though the same about some of those things a decade or two ago?  Even where automation seems unlikely, we see the World adapt to make it possible. And this is a good thing. It is good to see freedom from mindless repetitive tasks. It frees us up to do more creative, relational, human things.
And key to this will be individual creativity and continuous learning. It is about doing things that machines cannot do.
The purpose of this series is to put you back in touch with those things, and to expand your capabilities within them.

Your challenge …

Your challenge – should you choose to accept it – is to implement at least one of the challenges each month. We make no promises (we cannot, the adventures are yours and yours alone). The purpose of the adventures is simply to provide the opportunity to take your perspective to different places, and to enable you to make informed choices about what you would like to do about the view. Some of the places may be a bit of a struggle to get to, but that is part of the exercise. To encourage you in this, we might suggest you take 10 minutes to watch Carol Dweck’s excellent TED talk on Growth Mindset.
The key question for you is, are you willing to commit (to yourself) to pitch your creativity against the unknown (the tasks)? To find some way to look differently and still get value out of it? And confront your existing patterns, go somewhere else, and see if you like it?

Including your team …

We would encourage you in the first instance to take this journey alone. However, if you have a team, you may at some point find that you want to use some of the resources to stretch their thinking. This could happen individually, or as a team.
If you want them to engage as a team, we suggest you hand-pick certain exercises which you are confident will move you all forward as a team. Ensure you have clear goals for the difference you want to achieve through the exercise, and explain this to them before you start. Explain, what you are preparing them for and why.
If you want them to engage individually, please bear in mind that everyone has their own adventures. It will only work if they are committed to use the adventures on their own behalf. Therefore take the time to explain why, what you are getting from it, and the difference that you hope they will be able to get from it. Help them develop their own vision for how they would like ‘future me’ to be different.
There is a lot of value in sharing your journey with others, learning from and encouraging each other. Whether or not you manage to enlist those around you, please help us by engaging with our on-line communities. Post your own experiences ( include #LeadingbyAdventure in your post) and read those of others, at:

Staying on track …

“Why in all the plenitude of God’s great universe do you choose to fall asleep in this small dark prison?”
With this pithy question, Rumi speaks so insightfully of the human condition. Our thinking is limited by walls (paradigms) all around us. But we often do not see them, because they give us comfort – they enable us to coast where we are – we can fall asleep within them. We hope these adventures will help you face some of those walls and knock holes in them.
You will of course find other walls a bit further out, but all the time your thinking has greater freedom and space to roam.
But, to quote Thomas Jefferson, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance”. The price of stopping the walls from creeping back in is to keep doing exercises that maintain your wider awareness, and keeps your perspectives open.
And, lets face it, we all know how easy it is to fall asleep. How many things have you started with the best of intentions, and then woke up three months later wondering why it stopped?
It happens to all of us. So if you are serious about this, can I suggest some strategies that will help you to retain vigilance if you need it.

  • Firstly, create a picture of how you want to be ‘different’ in six months time, and send it to your future self using https://www.futureme.org/ or  https://theself.club/future-self/
  • Plan time into your calendar – whether it is for this programme or something else – weekly, monthly – to give yourself space to invest in yourself in this way
  • Set a phone alarm, or an Evernote alarm, or some other sort of digital alarm 6 months into the future,
  • Make sure the weekly emails from Leading by Adventure appear in your inbox. Sort out the issues if they don’t. And promise yourself to ALWAYS open them
  • Set yourself review points, where you can be honest about whether you are maintaining your commitment to develop yourself
  • Select an friend to keep you real – set an appointment in their calendar