I’m an optimist. I’ve always been one.
Yet, being an optimist is tough. Every day, I get reminded of what “will” go wrong in our world: extremes are rising, a new world war is imminent, and our planet is dying!
The tech layoffs, the recession outlook, and the AI revolution “endangering” our jobs and more feed our pessimistic stance.
I still can reassure myself that it’s all cyclical, growth and prosperity will prevail, and AI will save millions of lives and help eradicate cancer.
But it doesn’t matter much. Most optimists and pessimists share one major challenge: their vision of the future is so entrenched and polarized that they cannot fathom a different perspective.
It happens at work too. Think of your colleagues who are so enthusiastic about an opportunity that they disregard significant risks. Or those who fear failure so much and stick to the status quo.
The solution?
No one knows, but one thing will help: be curious and bring more nuance into the equation.
How?
By letting go of our deterministic tendency and exploring various probable futures.
Deterministic thinking can be a plague. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, it is the notion that a specific outcome is unavoidable if you do something a particular way.
That’s fine when applying most laws of nature. Physical gravity on Earth is here to stay for the foreseeable future. There’s no need for nuance or debating it.
But for most other topics, especially at work, I’ve learned to beware of people who see themselves as quite rational. Those who are raising the common sense flag, yet still need to do their homework on different scenarios and their consequences.
There’s never been a better time for optimists and pessimists to join forces and build a stronger future.
It requires curiosity from all of us to understand better the problems at hand, their context, and the forces at play and start to project different “what if” scenarios. Some of these scenarios are more probable than others.
So, come together, collaborate, and dig further into these. Chances are you’ll build a more robust shared perspective on their likelihood and what to do or avoid for these to happen.
Like in the scientific world, it takes some protocols to evaluate possible outcomes effectively. So, don’t hesitate to establish robust mechanisms and facilitation to ease the conversations and bring more perspectives together.
It will help you take opinions for what they are: beliefs, not absolute truths. Yet, you’ll be able to bring all these opinions together. They’ll feed each other and help you avoid the traps of deterministic thinking.
So, be curious and not afraid of challenging your thinking!