This presentation explores hope as a serious psychological and organisational condition for systems change. Drawing on applied work with charities, funders, public bodies and organisations seeking to change systems that harm people, we argue that hope is not simply a feeling, a mood or an optimistic belief that things will turn out well. Hope is a future-oriented psychological capacity that allows people and organisations to act before certainty is available.

The presentation begins from the idea that we live inside other people’s impossible futures. Human societies have achieved changes that once seemed unimaginable: the eradication of smallpox, democratic transitions, peace agreements, public health advances, environmental recovery and rights movements. These achievements were not produced by hope as sentiment, but by hope becoming organised through systems, structures, relationships and sustained action.

We then examine the psychological difficulty of systems change. Organisations often have mission statements, strategies and theories of change, but struggle to describe in detail the future they are working towards. A world without homelessness, hunger, domestic abuse or exclusion can be morally compelling but psychologically hard to imagine. This matters because systems change asks people to act before evidence of success has arrived.

The presentation draws on several psychological traditions. Cognitive and motivational psychology help explain hope as future-oriented thinking, involving goals, pathways and agency. Social psychology highlights collective efficacy, shared identity and the belief that “we” can act together. Biological and affective perspectives suggest that anticipated futures shape attention, emotion, motivation and action. Hope, then, is not a vague positive feeling; it is closer to an embodied readiness to move towards a possible future.
We also consider the contemporary context of polycrisis, in which fear, uncertainty and chronic stress can narrow imagination and make collective futures harder to picture. Against this backdrop, we propose hope as scaffolding for systems change, made up of imagination, information, agency and trust.

The presentation concludes by asking what would change if organisations designed practice as though hope were necessary. Hope is not the reward at the end of systems change. It is one of the conditions that makes change possible.

Lara Norris is a Systems Psychologist and senior consultant at Curiosity Society, working with charities, funders, public bodies and social change organisations on systems change, organisational learning, evaluation and participation. Her work focuses on the human life of systems: how people think, relate, decide, organise, imagine and act together in conditions of complexity and uncertainty. Lara’s practice brings together applied psychology, participatory methods, evidence-informed learning and strategy, particularly where organisations are working with power, emotion, uncertainty and long-term social change.

Rita Maksimtseva is a senior consultant at Curiosity Society, working with organisations to strengthen their applied psychological practice, innovation, learning and change. She brings a distinctive combination of psychology, human-centred design, business innovation and organisational transformation. Rita has also worked as an Associate Professor at IE Business School, designing and delivering learning experiences on introspection, self-awareness, philosophy, career design, design thinking and creative problem-solving. She works across languages and cultures, bringing a strong interest in how people and organisations imagine, design and move towards better futures.