Let's create hope for a better future together!
Osmo Nieminen raised an important theme with the headline “Society must give its members hope” (HS 6.9.). Our current climate of debate is not very hopeful and does not offer a vision of the future worth striving for. But this is something we all desperately need. The future is not just something that is driven, it is a will that is increasingly being made. Through active action - here and now.
Hope is the opposite of hopelessness. In an age of economic efficiency and productivity programmes, it is easy to fall into despair, especially if people feel that they have no control, that their choices do not matter, or even that their values are somehow wrong.
Action matters
“A problem cannot be solved at the level at which it is created”, Albert Einstein once said. What is needed is a new way of thinking and doing, a way of looking to the future. Action is the key. A different kind of action from that which has led to the current situation. Finland will not rise by lamenting our situation and pining for the past.
It takes all of us to create hope and make it concrete. It is the role of management to pave the way and send the message that “optimism is a duty”, as the philosopher Karl Popper once said. At the same time, we cannot outsource the creation of hope for the future to certain ‘leaders’, ‘change agents’ or ‘futurologists’. As Robin Sharma has eloquently described, leadership is not a title or a position, but an attitude. Everyone has the opportunity to lead every day. It is about using our own actions to leave the people we meet happier and our environment better than before we met them.
It is important to build hope together, across different borders
A systems approach opens up a world of possibilities. Solutions to a single problem can be found by looking at it in the context of other single problems. In a situation that seems desperate, solutions suddenly appear. Even from unexpected directions, if you have the courage to raise your altitude a little and abandon the efficiency bias created by sub-optimisation.
In my experience, many experts across society have an innate desire to work for the common good and to share their knowledge and contributions beyond their own organisation. These actors have great potential that is not yet fully exploited.
Formal and informal structures need each other. It would be important to find a mutually beneficial, interactive way of working between them. This would also put us in the best position to strike a dynamic balance between efficiency and effectiveness. Working together is the only sensible way to spend our precious tax money.
Towards the Year of Hope 2025
We have started to work together with different actors on the idea of a “Year of Hope 2025”. Our aim is that during the Year, hope will be born and made concrete in many different ways. We will be sharing more about the progress of this idea later this autumn. We hope to see you at Hope!
Virpi Einola-Pekkinen
The author is a retired government developer who has had a long career as a development manager in the Ministry of Finance and is now involved in building a better society from a civilian perspective.