Why hope?#
In cybernetics, conversations about systems change have been inextricably paired with discussions about hope. This isn’t incidental. As cybernetic practitioners, we see the human as a future-making system, intuitively and constantly absorbing information from the past and present, anticipating what might come next, and acting. In this paper, we explore a simple but powerful idea: hope is not just an emotion – it is both feedback and feedforward, acting as a new input.
Today, at this moment, we find ourselves caught up in stories of technological despair – fear of automation, of AI overreach, of misinformation, of climate inaction, of digital alienation. These stories, while founded on real risk, have a way of narrowing our sense of what’s possible. They numb imagination, reduce agency, and freeze inertia. Hope, under these terms, as the work of American writer and activist Rebecca Sonit reminds us, isn’t a distraction or denial of risk or complexity – it’s a necessary counterweight. Hope lets us get a sense of a different direction, imagine different futures, and take action.
Hope isn’t wishful thinking. It’s a form of constructive sensemaking. It helps individuals and collectives define preferable futures, stay engaged and empowered amid uncertainty, and act even when conditions feel volatile. It offers the cognitive and emotional fuel required for persistence, reflection, and creativity.
Our research supports the notion that hope can be a mechanism for resilience, engagement, and creativity. It encourages people to continue searching for new pathways when others seem blocked. It underwrites collaboration and imagination. Hope provides the psychological infrastructures for innovation.
Research in psychology illustrates that hope may significantly affect outcomes by enhancing resilience, fostering engagement, and encouraging creative problem-solving.
Humans may even be biologically inclined to hope. Neuroscience research suggests that optimism biases are hardwired into our cognition, giving us an evolutionary edge in goal-directed behaviour.
In complex systems, hope is not simply a strategy. Hope can serve to activate feedback and feedforward loops that drive transformation. And in this sense, hope is deeply cybernetic
Rethinking hope#
Hope is often misunderstood as passive, naïve, or indulgent. But research in psychology, sociology, and futures studies paints a more complex picture. Hope can be active, cognitive, and goal oriented and offers a mode of engaging with uncertainty that combines expectation with intention, planning, and persistence.
We take inspiration from philosopher George Herbert Mead’s view of humans as beings embedded in time, constantly reconstructing their pasts and futures; pioneering systems thinker Sir Geoffrey Vickers’s description of processes of selective observation, judgement and meaning-making; and from sociology that frames hope as an active temporal practice with an orientation that enables future-directed social action in work on overcoming the “valley of despair” by Potosky & Azan.
By taking a cybernetic approach, with Cybernetic Futures, we might think of hope as part of a loop: a way of perceiving possibilities, updating beliefs, and acting, recursively. Hope feeds back into a system and shapes what that system can do next. In this way, hope also feeds forward.
Hope in systems and society#
The utility of hope extends beyond individuals. In organisations, institutions, and movements, hope helps sustain momentum and envision alternatives in the face of inertia or collapse. Polish futurist Fred Polak observed that societies with positive images of the future are empowered by those images to act creatively in the present, while societies that don’t, according to Polak, struggle and may not survive.
Hope encourages collective action and sustains movements for social change. When embedded into leadership practices, it can support futures aligned with sustainability, equity, and long-term flourishing.
Hope does not ask us to ignore complexity. Instead, hope asks us to engage differently to seek leverage where change is possible and meaningful. It invites us to hold onto values while updating strategies. Hope makes systems steerable.
In our own work, we see that hope becomes most useful to systems change when linked to agency. By agency, we mean the capacity to act intentionally and effect change, even within complex or constraining systems. Despite feeling like small players within large dynamic systems, we still can assert influence and change, often in surprisingly powerful ways.
The idea of a trimtab, as articulated by American architect, systems theorist, and futurist, Buckminster Fuller, illustrates this well. A trimtab is a small surface on a ship’s rudder that stabilises the craft without the need for constant control force being applied by the operator, allowing the vessel to be steered with minimal effort. In systems thinking, trimtabs represent small, well-placed interventions that catalyse broader systemic transformation.
For a cybernetic approach, this means focusing not only on system behaviour, but also on models, frames, and feedback loops. American cybernetician Michael Lissack argues that what we pay attention to determines what we can change. Rethinking our models can open new affordances (actionable and relational possibilities) that encourage new courses of action and new outcomes.
Hope and agency play a role by enabling us to imagine that change is possible, and by helping us act in accordance with that belief. American environmental scientist Donella Meadows’ work on leverage points shows that big, effective change often comes not from tweaking parameters, but from changing the rules, goals, or paradigms that underpin a system. Building on this work, writing about sustainability interventions and power dynamics, Abson et al. have described three realms of leverage as “re-structure, re-connect and re-think”. Cybernetic Futures embraces this reflective practice and explicitly includes creativity, community, and hope as conditions for effective change. By mapping the technical, human, and ecological dimensions of a system, we can identify where strategic hope-based interventions might gain traction and amplify agency, and show where constraints must be.
Putting hope to work#
In the first Feedforward paper, we introduced a working definition of Cybernetic Futures as offering: generative and critical ways of thinking and doing to navigate future actions, informed by the past, by governing in the present, for the hopeful re/imagination of systems. We suggested it can unfold into the following three principles:
- The future is not a destination but an invitation: we build it every day in the present.
- Navigating uncertainty requires diverse perspectives and an awareness of systems, which are comprised of people, technologies and ecologies.
- Creativity, community and hope enable us to think, act and adapt in the present.
In this Feedforward paper, we wish to encourage what it means to engage in system change through an explicit and intentional use of hope in the design, redesign, regulation, leadership, creativity and imagination of your systems of interest. We invite you to consider:
- Where in your system of interest is hope showing up?
- Where is hope missing?
- What would it mean to treat hope as agency – the capacity to act?
The new tools we have introduced: the Cybernetic Futures Framework (Feedforward paper three) and the Cybernetic Futures Compass (Feedforward paper four), can be applied with these questions in mind to assist in revealing where and how hope influences your system of interest.
Hope invites us to act not in spite of uncertainty, but through it.
By treating hope as a meaningful input to change, we can participate with intention. This means crafting systems that are not only functional, but capable of holding imagination, joy, care, and transformation.
Let’s build futures worth hoping for, and systems that are equipped to sustain them.
Conclusion#
What comes next? Well, that’s now up to you. We commenced the Feedforward papers by asking: How might we best approach the choices we make today to better inform the future of tomorrow? How might we think about, describe, and visualise our futures and enact them in the present?