Risk & InnovationOct 2026 · 6 min read

The Business of Hopelessness

Why recognizing risk is only half the work of leadership.

We have become remarkably good at explaining everything that could go wrong. Artificial intelligence will eliminate jobs. Climate change will overwhelm our infrastructure. Entire industries will disappear. Institutions will fail to keep pace. The technologies we create will eventually outgrow our ability to control them.

Some of these risks are very real. Others remain uncertain. All deserve serious consideration.

But there is something peculiar about the way we discuss the future. We devote enormous energy to explaining why things are getting worse, then wonder why people seem reluctant to do anything about it.

The problem may have less to do with the risks themselves than with what happens when people come to believe those risks are inevitable. And for anyone responsible for leading change, that distinction matters.

We have an attention problem disguised as an information problem

In a recent Guardian essay, social psychologist Jay Van Bavel examines the psychology of doomerism and the unintended consequences of repeatedly telling people that the future is headed toward disaster. His argument raises an interesting question: what happens when the messages that are most effective at capturing our attention are among the least useful for helping us move forward?

In a 2023 study published in Nature Human Behaviour, Van Bavel and his colleagues analyzed 22,743 randomized headline experiments conducted by Upworthy, encompassing more than 105,000 headline variations and 370 million impressions. They found that, for a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%.

Negative language was effective at getting people to pay attention. The experiments measured clicks, so they show what people chose to read, and say nothing about what they did afterward. But it reveals an important characteristic of the information environment in which we make decisions.

We have built systems that reward our ability to make people concerned. Those systems are far less interested in whether that concern translates into useful action. And the same dynamic can find its way into our organizations.

The language of inevitability

Think about how frequently major changes are described as foregone conclusions:

AI is coming for your industry.
Your business model is becoming obsolete.
Your competitors are already ahead.
The window to act is closing.

There is often a legitimate observation beneath these warnings. Market conditions do change. Competitive advantages erode. Technologies alter the economics of existing businesses.

But the language of inevitability quietly removes something essential from the conversation: the possibility of influence. If disruption is presented as something that simply happens to us, the natural response is to protect what we have, wait for greater certainty, or attempt to avoid being among the casualties.

Organizations can become consumed by assessing threats while making remarkably little progress toward responding to them. More research. Another strategy workshop. Another presentation about the pace of change. All potentially valuable activities. Yet none necessarily creates the capacity to do anything differently.

Fear can motivate. Agency makes it useful.

Research on fear-based communication offers a more nuanced picture than the idea that alarming messages inevitably produce paralysis. A meta-analysis of 127 papers, encompassing more than 27,000 participants, found that fear appeals can positively influence attitudes, intentions, and behavior. Importantly, they were more effective when accompanied by information about actions that could reduce the threat.

A separate meta-analysis published in the Journal of Communication similarly found stronger behavioral effects when messages communicated that the recommended response could work.

The implication for leadership is important. People don’t necessarily need to feel reassured before they act. They need some reason to believe their actions can make a difference. That belief is often described as efficacy.

It is different from optimism. Optimism is an expectation that things may turn out well. Efficacy is the belief that a particular action can produce a meaningful result.

The goal is to make people more capable of shaping it.

Uncertainty is where strategy begins

There is a tendency to treat uncertainty as a problem to eliminate before committing to action. We want better forecasts, clearer market signals, more reliable evidence, and greater confidence that an investment will produce the intended result. Understandably so. Strategic decisions often involve substantial resources and consequences.

But uncertainty is also the condition that makes strategy necessary. If the future were already determined, there would be little need to choose among competing possibilities. Strategy matters because different actions can produce different outcomes.

Consider a company facing potential disruption from AI. It could spend the next year trying to predict exactly how its industry will change. It could reorganize around the assumption that its existing model will soon become irrelevant. Or it could begin identifying where its current capabilities might create value under several plausible futures.

It might test a new commercial offering, develop a partnership, experiment with a different delivery model, or enter a narrowly defined adjacent market. None of those actions requires certainty about the future. They require a sufficiently credible hypothesis, a manageable commitment of resources, and a willingness to learn.

The organization develops better information through action. Over time, its options expand because its capabilities expand. This is one of the underappreciated characteristics of innovation: acting intelligently under uncertainty can change what becomes possible.

The danger of mistaking awareness for progress

But awareness is an intermediate outcome. Knowing that a market is changing does not mean an organization has developed a response. Recognizing an opportunity does not mean it possesses the capabilities to pursue it. And communicating urgency does not mean people know what to do next.

This is where leadership can inadvertently reinforce the paralysis it is trying to overcome. When every discussion begins with the scale of the threat, teams may come away with a growing appreciation for the problem and a diminishing sense of their ability to affect it.

A better approach is to connect the threat to specific decisions:

What assumptions about our business need to be tested?
Which existing capabilities could become more valuable?
Where do we have an opportunity to influence the direction of the market?
What could we learn in the next 90 days that would materially improve our choices?

These questions move the conversation from predicting what will happen to determining what the organization can do. They also create the conditions for progress to become visible.

Hope is a capability problem

Hope is frequently discussed as a personal attitude, something individuals either possess or lack. In organizations, it can also be understood as a consequence of capability. People become more confident about navigating change when they have evidence that they can respond to it:

They have tried something unfamiliar and learned from the experience.
They have developed expertise that didn’t previously exist.
They have found an opportunity where they initially saw only a threat.
They have demonstrated that a difficult problem can be broken into decisions they are capable of making.

That experience changes how future uncertainty is interpreted. The unfamiliar becomes something to investigate. The difficult becomes something to work through. The future becomes a set of possibilities that people can influence.

This doesn’t guarantee success. Organizations can make thoughtful decisions, develop strong capabilities, and still encounter circumstances beyond their control. But they are better positioned to respond because they have practiced responding. And that matters far more than a reassuring prediction.

Give people something to do with what they know

Three panels in sequence: a warning creates understanding, a strategy creates choices, an organization creates the capabilities to act. — From awareness to capability.

A warning should create understanding.
A strategy should create choices.
An organization should create the capabilities required to act on those choices.

When all we offer people is a more detailed account of what might go wrong, we leave them with the burden of awareness and little means of response. The responsibility of leadership extends further. It involves helping people identify what remains within their influence, even when much of the future does not.

Perhaps that is the more useful definition of hope in uncertain times. Not the conviction that everything will work out. The conviction that what we do next still matters.