What Works When Nothing Works
Unlocking Humanity's Most Renewable Resource
Opening the Box
We praise “thinking outside the box” as a proxy for progress.
But Pandora, driven by her curiosity, opened a box too. She didn’t unlock value — she unleashed chaos: envy, greed, sorrow, and death.
Sound familiar? It’s not far off from the mess we’ve made in the name of disruption — move fast, break things, deregulate broadly, and hope the consequences sort themselves out.
We’re living in the aftermath of opening Pandora’s box. We see it in the headlines. In the federal chaos. In every article that leaves us feeling heavier. We hear it in catch-up conversations that drift into unease, in the unspoken ambiguity underlying meetings and decisions. We feel it in the way everyday choices — from what to say, to what to buy — carry existential weight.
The fallout is personal. And constant.
But in Pandora’s story, after everything else had escaped, one thing remained:
Hope.
That’s what mythology says was left behind. And it’s where I want to begin… not with what gets celebrated as innovation, or what gets the headlines, but with what sustains people when systems break down — and how we can use that power to rebuild what’s broken.
The Innovation Dilemma
At its best, innovation helps us solve urgent problems, stretch the boundaries of what's possible, and challenge entrenched assumptions. But in practice, it often prioritizes what's measurable and marketable over what's meaningful. Across sectors — whether in Silicon Valley, philanthropy, or government — innovation tends to revolve around novelty, optimization, disruption, fundability, visibility, and scale. These traits become proxies for progress: easy to see, fund, and celebrate but not necessarily to validate.
There's safety in following established patterns, especially when other players default to status-quo logic. Innovation has become a kind of social currency, used to attract attention or signal credibility. Because innovation is inherently risky, it leans on metrics and validation to reduce uncertainty. But many metrics we value are signals; they're not truths. When we project value onto signals, we risk mistaking surface validation for meaningful change.
The trade-off is subtle but profound: we begin designing for what's legible to institutions, not what's nourishing to people. And when we're optimizing for the greatest common denominator, we're designing for no one.
That's not innovation. That's maintenance of the status quo in disguise.
Hope as a Radical Response
So… here we are (again!) The box has been opened, and we’re caught in the chaos it unleashed: fear in decision-making, pride in certainty, envy in competition. And despair… the quiet kind that settles in when no one’s bothering to ask what matters anymore. We may not know what the consequences will be, but we know there will be consequences.
But still, hope remains. And in times like these, hope isn’t soft or naive. It’s calloused. It’s courageous. It’s cracked enough to let the light in.
It’s a radical act of beginning again.
We’ve been innovating in environments that valorize resilience: the ability to endure, to keep going, to bend without breaking. But in this context, resilience centers the status quo. It asks people and communities to tolerate, navigate, and survive systems that extract more than they give back — draining resources, energy, trust, or capacity without replenishing them. This shows up as:
Social media platforms that harvest our attention while leaving us more anxious and divided
Health insurance systems that profit from denying care and limiting access
Gig work that shifts all risks to workers while extracting the profits
These approaches deplete the communities they claim to serve.
Hope centers something different. It doesn’t settle for “good enough.” It pushes us to imagine what could — should — might be, if we dare to try.
And when innovation efforts are intentionally built to harness and sustain hope — not as a virtue, but as a force — they unlock not only better futures, but the capacity to reach them.
That’s what makes hope so dangerous to systems that rely on extraction, and so essential to making innovation worth doing. Because it’s a form of power. And like any power, it can be depleted. Overused. Misused. Designed against.
If we don’t start treating hope like strategic infrastructure, we’ll keep mistaking its absence as an individual’s failure — not an environmental or systemic failure. And we’re already seeing the consequences: climate inaction, rising authoritarianism, eroding trust in institutions, political violence, burnout.
These are not just signs of systems under strain. They’re signs of what happens when people stop believing anything can change. They’re symptoms of what happens when hope becomes unsustainable. And if we don’t do something to protect it, foster it, or even acknowledge it — we’ll continue to erode the conditions that make innovation possible. Not all at once, but incrementally. Quietly. Until we no longer have the muscle to meet the extinction level challenges barreling toward us.
We’ll lose the will to even try.
The Case for Hope
We’re not only facing a climate crisis, or a crisis of trust, or a leadership vacuum. We’re facing a crisis of hope.
Hope is a word that is used as frequently as it's misunderstood, often written off as emotional, passive, or just wishful thinking. But in reality, it's far more robust. And when grounded in the true spirit of human progress, innovation becomes the most fertile ground we have to cultivate it. Because at its best, innovation doesn't just make things better. It makes better things imaginable. And it equips us to act.
Dr. Chan Hellman, founding director of the Hope Research Center at the University of Oklahoma defines hope as “the belief that the future can be better than today, and that we have the power to make it so.”
An ecologist, David Orr, put it more simply, “Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up.”
The common thread? Hope doesn’t just work — it does the work. It’s a critical factor in leadership, with research showing that followers actively seek leaders who can provide stability, trust, compassion and hope. Studies demonstrate a significant positive link between hope and creativity, with research indicating that high-hope individuals demonstrate enhanced flexible thinking and creativity because they believe they can follow more alternative pathways toward the future. Research also links hope to increased productivity, with hopeful employees reaching quotas more often and meeting goals more consistently. In organizational settings, psychological capital including hope can be cultivated and contributes to reduced burnout and higher employee engagement, important drivers of organizational performance. That isn’t just inspiring – it's a strategic competitive advantage.
Psychologist Charles Snyder took a cognitive approach. He framed hope as a process made up of:
Goals: the ability to set meaningful direction
Pathways: the flexibility to imagine multiple strategies
Agency: the internal motivation to keep going
Sound familiar? These three components map almost exactly to how innovation unfolds:
Goals → identifying problems to solve or a vision for the future
Pathways → taking an iterative approach to explore ideas, build prototypes, and solicit feedback – even when the first (or third) solution doesn’t work
Agency → the intrinsic motivation and enabling structures that sustain momentum
In that light, hope isn’t a feeling — it’s a cognitive process. The architecture that sustains both people and systems in the face of rising uncertainty. A feedback loop between imagination and action. And that loop is exactly what innovation depends on.
A Tale of Two Recoveries
The difference between communities that merely survive crisis and those that transform through it revolves around whether people believe they can meaningfully shape what comes next.
Let’s explore the importance of designing for hope through the lens of a familiar scenario: a community reeling from a crisis — whether a flood, a pandemic, or a fire.
Without hope, the response is reactive. Scarcity mindset dominates. Recovery plans are designed for and driven by damage control, rigid timelines, and institutional checkboxes. There’s a pressure to “keep it simple,” which often means “keep it familiar.” The goal is to return to baseline — as fast and as visibly as possible. Decisions are made by the same structures that might have failed. Residents are told to be resilient. To adapt. To endure. To keep showing up to work. And over time, that’s exactly what they do: survive. Figure it out alone. Lower their expectations. Trust erodes. Cynicism sets in. And the next time there’s an opportunity to shape the future — whether it’s a community meeting, participatory budget, or ballot box – fewer people show up. Not because they don’t care. But because they’ve learned it won’t change anything.
With hope, the approach changes. The community is more proactive and engaged. Questions shift from, “How do we return to normal?” to “What could be better than before?” There’s space for new coalitions, new priorities, new ideas. Local leadership recognizes that harnessing that energy is an opportunity to co-create a better future. Neighbors are inspired by one another’s efforts and motivated to get involved. People aren’t just recovering – they’re rebuilding futures and reinvesting in the local economy. They stay. They stay involved. They stay committed. Because they’re shaping a world they believe in, which sustains their capacity to imagine and build again.
Same crisis. Same damage. In one community, goals narrowed to survival, pathways collapsed to 'return to normal,' and agency eroded until people stopped trying. In the other, shared goals expanded beyond recovery, multiple pathways emerged through new coalitions, and collective agency grew with each small victory.
Hope didn’t change what happened. It changed what happened next.
Same Box, New Toolkit
What we're experiencing isn’t the fault of innovation itself. But the way we've been opening boxes — move fast, break things, disrupt first and ask questions later — has shaped the world we're living in. We've rewarded disruption for its own sake and called it progress. Hope is radical because even after all that chaos, it can still take root again, offering us a chance to choose differently. When we design for it intentionally, it compounds — expanding our capacity to solve what lies ahead.
And now comes our test.
We opened the box once. And we’re opening it again; this time, with tools far more powerful than we’ve ever held. AI, biotechnology, quantum computing, immersive environments — technologies capable of reshaping our experiences, our systems, and the fabric of imagination itself.
What once took decades now unfolds in months. What was once regional is now global. For the first time in history, the ability to act on hope isn’t limited by geography, capital, or gatekeepers. These tools don’t just multiply capability — they multiply possibility. But possibility alone isn’t enough.
Hope is what we build from or what we risk losing entirely. And this raises the stakes — what we choose to imagine now will either reinforce the world we were handed — or begin to remake it.
We need the moral courage to imagine something better.
Something more adaptive than resilience.
Something that doesn’t just survive disruption when the box opens, but learns from it.
Builds through it.
Thrives in it.
What Comes Next
We need regenerative approaches to innovation.
In biology, regeneration isn’t about healing to a prior state. It’s the process of renewal, restoration, and growth that makes organisms resilient to disruption. And it’s not always sexy.
Take the humble slime mold: a single-celled organism with no brain. Easy to overlook. Possibly hard to stomach. But when its network is damaged, it reroutes, adapts, and builds back stronger. Over 15 years ago, researchers used slime mold to recreate Tokyo's famously efficient subway system – and more recently, researchers found it could model subway networks that ran 10% faster and were 40% more resilient to disruption.
This is a biological blueprint for how human systems can repair, adapt, and evolve differently. What if innovation responded to problems the same way? Rerouting around what's broken, learning from new conditions, and building back stronger than before.
Slime mold regenerates instinctively. Human communities need something more — a shared belief in what's possible. Take Opportunity Threads in North Carolina: what began with a single sewing machine in a deindustrialized town became a worker-owned ecosystem, restoring both economic capacity and collective agency to the tune of $64 million generated for the regional economy. What makes this example powerful isn’t just scale — it’s how hope operated as infrastructure: clear goals (worker dignity), diverse pathways (cross-sector collaboration), and sustained agency (shared ownership as a business model). This wasn’t innovation optimized for institutional metrics — it was built around what’s nourishing to people. Within seven years, a community hollowed out by industrial departure had become a community building its own wealth.
This is regenerative innovation: not only sustaining, but replenishing. Not prescribing, but rediscovering possibility in overlooked places. It's resourceful rather than resource-intensive — building from what's available rather than waiting for perfect conditions.
By designing for agency over engagement, capacity over endurance, and real validation over visible signals, we create a virtuous cycle — one that keeps hope renewable.
Make the Box Your Toolkit
We can't close Pandora's box. But we can choose what to carry forward. The box gave us powerful instruments — AI, biotechnology, quantum computing. But it also left us the tool to use them wisely: hope. If hope is what remained, maybe it was never a consolation prize but the real tool all along.
How we can treat hope as renewable infrastructure:
Practice pathways thinking: Are we falling in love with our solution instead of the problem? Train teams to see beyond the first good idea and imagine multiple ways forward using approaches like combinatorial play.
Reframe what success looks like: Are we optimizing for visibility – or vitality? Choose interventions that shift power and build capacity, not just apply band-aids or create dependencies.
Build with, not for: How might we sustainably solve problems together? Look beyond individual solutions toward mutualist structures like cooperatives, credit unions, mutual aid networks, and community ownership models that build both collective success and shared agency.
Center overlooked wisdom: Who has a seat at the table? Include experts from adjacent areas and voices usually left out of the room. The missing voice often holds the missing piece.
Make hope visible: What’s already working? Capture and share regenerative wins, no matter the size. Visibility expands what's imaginable and gives others, even AI, a foundation to build from.
These aren't silver bullets. But together, they form a practice — a way of treating hope not as a luxury, but as our most renewable resource. A way of meeting the future as an infinite succession of presents, where each step we take makes more possible than the last.
The irony is that in our rush to optimize, scale, and sell innovation, we've engineered out the thing that makes innovation possible. Not ideas. Not funding. Not even technology. But the underlying hope that better futures are not only imaginable — but achievable through collective effort.
When we replenish that hope — when we design for people's lived experiences rather than institutional metrics — something shifts. People stay willing to begin again. To stay engaged. To expect more than mere survival. To work toward a better tomorrow. In a world where extraction has become the default, regeneration is what makes innovation sustainable. Because systems need hopeful people, and people need systems that don't drain them.
Hope is not what softens collapse. It's what dares to interrupt it. And in this moment, that might be the most radical kind of innovation we have.
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
