Hope Is Not a Method

When I came home from Bosnia in 1998, I read “Hope Is Not a Method”, written by the former US Army Chief of Staff Gordon R. Sullivan together with Michael V. Harper. Sullivan led the US Army from 1991 to 1995 – in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when a huge organisation had to change fundamentally while being ready to carry out missions every single day.

The title is often quoted as “hope is not a strategy”. But that is not what the book is about. It is about method: The concrete practices, techniques and habits that make change happen in practice – even when nobody knows exactly what the future will look like.

That is exactly why it is still relevant. Today it is about new conflicts, cyberattacks, AI and markets that move faster than the budgets. The challenge for leaders is the same: To shape the future rather than wait and hope it will pass by itself.

In “Good to Great”, Jim Collins made another military role model famous: The American admiral James Stockdale, who spent almost eight years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Collins asked him who did not make it. The answer was surprising: The optimists. Those who were sure they would be out by Christmas – and then by Easter – and who finally broke when their hopes were dashed again and again.

Stockdale survived because he combined two things that seem to contradict each other: An unshakeable faith that he would prevail in the end – and the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of his situation as it was right now.

That is the dilemma in any change. The leader who is only an optimist promises it will all be over soon, and loses credibility with every deadline that slips. The leader who only sees the facts creates helplessness. It is the combination that creates the ability to act.

Hope is good to have. But it is no plan, no method – and no substitute for facing reality.

One of Sullivan’s core principles is to expect to be surprised. Not as pessimism, but as professionalism. The future never follows the plan, so the organisation must be built to act when it does not.

It is deeply rooted in me from my time as an emergency management officer. I still reverse into parking spaces so I am ready to drive off quickly. It sounds small, but it is a way of thinking: Prepare while things are calm, so you have reserves when they are not.

Readiness has two sides. One is the physical plans and arrangements: Who does what, what do we prioritise, and what must be protected at all costs? The other is mental – what I call inner readiness: The surplus mentality and the ability to mobilise strength when it matters. In the Danish special forces they say you must always be ready to be ready. I have written more about it in “Ready to Be Ready”.

In organisations this means that leaders do not only ask “what is the plan?”, but also “what do we do when it does not hold?”. And that employees know the intent so well that they can act independently when reality departs from the plan.

In military leadership you talk about the commander’s intent: Why are we doing this, and what does it look like when we have succeeded? A plan can become obsolete the moment it meets reality. A clear intent lasts longer, because it allows people to make the right decisions when the plan no longer fits.

Stephen Bungay describes the same thing in “The Art of Action”, which I used during my CBA studies and still use in my work advising and running development programmes for executive teams and leadership teams: Clear direction, freedom to act close to the situation, and continuous adjustment as long as the shared intent holds.

You can read more here about a current, concrete case of a C-level development programme called LEAP: Leadership Execution Acceleration Program.

Many change projects do the opposite: The plan is detailed, but the intent unclear. As soon as the plan meets resistance, people stall because they do not know what to prioritise.

Sullivan is a strong advocate of the idea that leadership in change is about building strong coalitions and teams that bring the organisation’s combined firepower into play – to use a military expression. No leader carries out a major change alone, and no change succeeds if it only lives in the executive team.

That is exactly the thinking behind my method Ildstorm (Firestorm). Instead of presenting the whole vision at once and hoping for support, you find one passionate change agent who wants to carry a specific initiative. Then one more. Gradually a ring of fire forms across hierarchy and seniority, working its way towards the centre – the strategic goal. The energy grows because people have chosen to contribute themselves.

As early as 1990, John Kotter described the difference in Harvard Business Review: Management is about coping with complexity and creating order. Leadership is about coping with change.

Many organisations have plenty of management – budgets, steering committees and status reports – but too little leadership of the change itself. The point is not to choose one over the other, but to know which task you face and switch deliberately.

Resistance to change, by the way, is neither ill will nor a bad attitude. It is a natural attempt to find a new equilibrium, as I have described in “When strategy meets Monday morning”. That is why it must be planned in from the start as a working condition – not handled as a surprise along the way.

Sullivan was one of those who made the After Action Review a fixed habit throughout the US Army. After every exercise and every mission, four simple questions are asked: What was supposed to happen? What happened? Why? And what will we do differently next time?

The genius is not the questions, but the discipline of asking them every time, immediately and without looking for scapegoats. Then learning becomes part of operations rather than something that happens at an evaluation six months later – and you can adjust while it still makes a difference.

Sullivan also saw fast learning as the key to one of the hardest leadership disciplines: Being ambidextrous – exploring the new and unknown while exploiting and optimising what already exists, equally good with both hands. Few organisations master it, but it can be trained, best through learning by doing. You can read more about this in the article “Action Learning in Practice”.

How to do it in practice:

Change rarely succeeds because management hoped it would. It succeeds because the leaders faced reality, held on to the goal, made the intent clear, built a coalition of passionate change agents, prepared for surprises and learned along the way.

It also demands something of the leader: An inner readiness that makes it possible to stay calm and keep your reserves when the plan does not hold. It can be trained – and it is the best insurance against hope becoming the only method you have left.

So the question for your leadership team is simple: Which of your ongoing changes is in reality built on hope?

This article builds on my LinkedIn article “Forandringsledelse i praksis” (2025).