The world doesn’t look great right now. Wars keep dragging on. Economies feel shaky. Trust in our institutions is cracking in a dozen places at once. If you’ve felt something close to hopeless lately, you’re not alone, and you’re not imagining it.
At the Victoria Forum, I heard a talk that changed how I think about hope. It came from the Cascade Institute @Royal Roads University, founded by Thomas Homer-Dixon. And it reframed hope for me. As a science finding and a leadership one.
His team modeled 11 of the world’s biggest systems. Things like economy, energy, health, and violence. They built a matrix that scores how every one of those systems affects the others, then ran the numbers on millions of different ways they could all combine by 2040. Most combinations landed somewhere bad. Only 67,178 of them settled into a stable, genuinely hopeful future. His team calls that the Hope Attractor. He actually wrote a book about it called Commanding Hope: the power we have to renew a world in peril.
Out of all those combinations, they mapped one clear route to get there. Nine specific shifts, in order. Move off fossil fuels. Manage AI instead of letting it run wild. Grow the economy on purpose instead of by default. Close the gap between rich and poor. Then, once those changes take hold, cut down on violence, modernize food and transportation, build stronger democratic institutions, and bring down the burden of disease.
None of that happens by accident. And here’s the warning inside the model. If the world just keeps doing what it’s doing, it doesn’t hold steady. It slides downward instead (to what he calls the Deterioration Attractor), a worse, less stable version of right now. Standing still isn’t neutral. It’s a decision to go backward.
That same pattern shows up inside organizations. You don’t get a resilient, hopeful culture by accident. You get it through the same kind of deliberate shifts.
Resilience is one of them. Less toxic conflict, more psychological safety, real care for people’s health instead of a burnout culture that quietly breaks everyone down. Equity is another. Closing the real gaps, in pay, in opportunity, in who actually gets heard, instead of settling for a policy that looks fair on paper. Technology matters too. Bringing in new tools with a plan and real guardrails, not bolting them on and hoping for the best. Involve the people with the changes that impact them. And governance, real voice for the people doing the work, decisions made in the open instead of behind closed doors.
Do enough of that, consistently, and you build hope, and trust. Stay comfortable with how things have always been done, and you don’t hold steady. You drift backward.
Which of these, resilience, equity, technology, or governance, does your organization most need to shift on purpose this year?