“Urgent Optimism is the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope for success.”

Jane McGonigal is a future forecaster and game designer specializing in alternate reality games that are “designed to improve real lives and solve real problems”. Her TED talks on “how games can make a better world” and “the game that can add 10 years to your life” have accumulated over 15 million views, placing them among the most popular TED talks ever.

“Future forecaster”. Now that is a cool title.

What in the world is a future forecaster you ask? And What does it have to do with optimism or leadership?

Let’s find out.

What in The World Is Urgent Optimism?

As Director of Games, Research & Development at the Institute for the Future, McGonigal runs the Urgent Optimists platform. This platform creates, among other things, Challenging future scenarios containing complex problems to be used as the basis of simulation games that challenge participants to use foresight and creative thinking in order to envision what it would be like to live in this whacky future world. The objective of the exercise is to cultivate Urgent Optimism and open-mindedness that will be useful when real-life events don’t go as planned.

This is fascinating work. As I followed my curiosity and read about the Institute for the Future and its Urgent Optimists platform I couldn’t help but think about how the mindset and tools developed while thinking of these significant, global issues can be applied in leadership on a more micro scale.

Urgent Optimist members are given a new scenario to ponder each month. They then share their experiences in online sessions hosted by McGonigal herself. The platform also hosts an annual online event called “10 days in the future”. During this immersive experience, the entire community comes together to simulate an urgent future designed by future forecasters. The following was the basic outline of a scenario explored by the group in 2010:

A respiratory pandemic begins in China and spreads through the world population. The effects of this airborne virus cause governments to enforce lockdowns and mask mandates. There are important repercussions on the job market and the global supply chain. As the pandemic evolves, there is a conspiracy group that is formed to spread misinformation, causing people to lose trust in their government while becoming confused about what’s going on. Simultaneously, California was faced with historical droughts and devastating wildfires.

Sound familiar?

The fact that this scenario played out almost exactly as they had imagined 10 years later is remarkable.

What I’m more interested in is the impact, if any, of the pandemic simulation on its participants when they came face to face with a real one 10 years later.

McGonigal reports that individuals who participated in this 2010 simulation spotted the first signs of the potential scale of the pandemic before there was even a single case in their country. Her inbox started to fill up with messages from participants recognizing the patterns developed in the simulation. Once lockdowns and mask mandates became widespread, they were prepared. They had tried wearing a mask all day and self-isolating during the original simulation. They’d had to think about all the obstacles they could face during a global pandemic and already had a good sense of how they could deal with them.

In other words, they had practiced for this scenario and reported having a strong sense of agency on how things would turn out for them during these strange and difficult times.

This doesn’t mean that the last two years have been fun or easy for them, they were simply able to be more optimistic and proactive about the challenges of this global setback.

Core Principles

It would be easy to perceive the difficult scenarios explored on the platform as grim, depressing images of a dystopian future and to avoid thinking about them altogether. It’s much easier to sweep these uncomfortable problems under the rug than to tackle them head-on.

A perfect example of this reaction is how people deal with the climate crisis. Another topic that is often explored on the Urgent Optimists platform. Regardless of a person’s beliefs on the causes of climate change, it’s a fact that it’s happening. Accepting this fact is uncomfortable. We don’t want to watch the video of the shrunken ice caps and the lone drowning polar bear. To make things worst, many of the potential upsides of immediate action on this particular problem won’t be measurable for years, making the choice to take difficult actions now instead of burying our heads in the sand a hard sell.

The urgent optimist mindset encourages the exact opposite approach by teaching us to act now to create a better future. They do so by relying on three key psychological strengths:

1. Psychological Flexibility: the ability to recognize that anything can become different in the future. Even things that seem impossible to change now.
2. Realistic Hope: balance of positive and shadow imagination. Being able to envision bad things happening while believing that they can work out in a positive way.
3. Future Power: the feeling of real agency over how the future turns out.

Urgent Optimism in Leadership

While learning about futurism and the urgent optimism mindset, I couldn’t help but think of the parallels between its attributes and those of good leaders.

Tackling issues immediately as they appear by understanding that things can (or will) go badly while maintaining the belief that you can positively impact the outcome is a powerful way to operate, especially if you are in a leading role.

When thinking of the great leaders of history in politics, business, sports or the military through the lens of urgent optimism, it becomes evident that although the institute for the future’s application of this concept for future forecasting is new and exciting, the mindset itself has been there all along.

The psychological strengths at the core of the urgent optimist movement are essential to leadership. Past leaders who shaped the world in which we live today were by default urgent optimists. They had to get their vision across to the masses and convince a large number of people that together, they could accomplish what others thought was impossible.

They had to recognize that anything can become different in the future.

They had to envision how things can go wrong in order to make them better.

They needed an unshakable belief that they could impact how the future turns out.

What is the alternative?

I’ve never considered myself an optimist in the traditional sense. My default setting is not to believe that things will ultimately work themselves out for the better. I’m a worrier by nature.

As a worrier, I can identify problems before they happen. Even when the problems are completely made up and exist only in my head.

When combined with urgent optimism, being worried by nature becomes a useful skill. You can pick out problems, think them through rationally and figure out which ones really deserve your attention. Without it, this never-ending identification of problems can induce paralyzing anxiety and self-doubt. Simply put, people who worry a lot wouldn’t be able to function if they didn’t have at least an iota of realistic optimism.

Leaders work in the problem-solving business. Good leaders can see some of these problems before they happen. They are the few people that many turn to when things get difficult. Leaders don’t necessarily have to find the solutions to these difficulties themselves, but they need to be the catalyst that brings the right people together to find solutions. They are responsible for aligning people towards a common goal that they believe can be achieved and creating an environment that enables them to do their best work every day.

Would you want to work for a leader that isn’t an Urgent Optimist?

What if I put it this way: Would you want to work for someone short-sighted, who has blind faith that “things happen” and doesn’t believe that anyone’s actions can impact future outcomes?

By becoming optimistically engaged in problem-solving, we take away excuses and finger-pointing. Wasting energy generating excuses or focusing on who is responsible for a problem rather than what we can do to solve it is the opposite of urgent optimism. Regardless of why the problem exists, it still needs resolution.

Leading with Urgent Optimism sets the tone for the mindset of the team. When faced with a new problem, the optimistic leader doesn’t get upset. She doesn’t lash out at the messenger of bad news. She works with them to get results.

She can help her team believe that they will conquer this setback while understanding the potential roadblocks.

Practice Makes Perfect

Urgent Optimism isn’t an attribute that someone is born with. It’s a skill that can be honed and perfected with deliberate practice.

Teaching this skill to the masses is the mission of the Urgent Optimists platform. Over the years, they’ve developed proven methods of measuring and improving levels of Urgent Optimism in participants.

Joining the Urgent Optimists is a great way to assess and develop your current level of optimism, but it isn’t the only way.

Next time you’re stuck with a challenging problem, try to create some space between its discovery and your reaction to it.

Harness psychological flexibility to think outside the box.

Cultivate realistic hope to visualize how you will overcome the hurdles on the path to success.

Lead with Urgent Optimism to show yourself and the people that you work with that each and every one of us has the ability to positively impact the future.

Bad things are inevitable, but good outcomes are created.

By training the Urgent Optimism muscle with each small roadblock, we’re able to make it stronger for the big ones while having a positive impact on those around us.