Hope engineers are both practical and philosophical. They set audacious goals but also build pathways toward them, writes Nikolas Badminton, Hope Engineer & Chief Futurist at futurist.com
The World Economic Forum published their Global Risks Report for 2026 and found that half of all respondents expect the next two years to be turbulent, with environmental risks generating near-unanimous pessimism across the decade to 2036. Geopolitical confrontation, the societal disruption of human work through AI, climate breakdown, and the fracturing of the multilateral order are not isolated crises – they converge, interact, and amplify one another in unexpected ways that demand new strategies.
This is where things get interesting. Our collective response to this moment—and what we think may come next—is not to surrender to complexity or retreat into short-term risk management, but to get serious about resilience. To become Hope Engineers.
Shifting our mindset
I named 2025 “The Year of Hope” – a provocation to look up and see that we have a choice of what kind of mindset to employ. I aimed to highlight something urgent: that in the face of a turbulent epoch—some may call this the Fourth Turning—in global society, we see many leaders holding on to a 2000s mindset of change and a business model focused on relentless (and expected) growth while seeking out less revelation and learning of how to build a better world.
Yet, in 2026, we find ourselves in a world that has changed quickly and profoundly in structure – multipolar in its power, fractured in its institutions, accelerated with new technology emerging. Too many organizations and leaders still operate with frameworks designed for a more stable era.
The risks ahead through 2030 and beyond are daunting. Geoeconomic confrontation and the weaponization of trade, technology, and capital for geopolitical purposes triggered a multitude of global crises. Automation of machine and cognition is beginning to reshape labor markets in ways that will become more tangible between 2026 and 2030. Artificial Intelligence is itself entangled in the polycrisis: energy-hungry, demanding of land and water against the need for more agricultural production, geopolitically contested, and largely ungoverned as it progresses faster than expected. Climate impacts are moving from rhetoric to urgent warning and an unraveling economic reality, with extreme weather, biodiversity loss, and infrastructure vulnerability reinforcing one another in dangerous feedback loops. Social and political polarization is intensifying pressures on democratic systems, while trust in institutions continues to erode.
This is the landscape resilience and the Hope Engineer’s work must now inhabit and master. And it demands something more than risk matrices, contingency plans, and reaction when moments arise. The thoughts in this article are explored and presented in my upcoming book ‘The Hope Engineer’s Playbook: How Leaders Build Vision, Pathways, and Energy for Better Futures’.
Hope is a renewable energy for change
Hope is a force that allows leaders to set audacious goals, build pathways toward them, and sustain commitment within team and partnership structures when the journey gets hard. Research increasingly shows that high-hope leadership is a meaningful differentiator in delivering bold transformation across government, private and public companies. Organizations led by people with genuine, agency-driven hope outperform those led by optimists who lack the ability to see alternate pathways, or pragmatists who lack vision.
Hope Engineers sit at the intersection of futures work and hope theory. The role is both practical and philosophical. They work to seek the possibilities for better futures by decoding what’s happening in the present — scanning for signals of emerging change, identifying the pockets of the future that already exist — and then meeting those possibilities with disciplined, collaborative vision and delivery.
That means starting with honest inquiry. It means questioning our own history and perspectives — confronting the biases we carry, recognizing that “we’ve always done it this way” is the opening line of institutional decline and obsolescence. It means scanning for signals of change with genuine curiosity about what is emerging at the edges of our industries, our societies, our technologies. It means shifting from “what is” to “what if” — not as a rhetorical trick, but as a genuine and recurring discipline of imagination, anticipation and empathy. It also means recognizing frontier technologies—from AI and digital twinning to cutting-edge earth observation systems—not merely as tools of efficiency or disruption, but as instruments that can help shape a more resilient and sustainable future where humans and the natural world can coexist.
Crucially, it means bringing more people into the room. The Hope Engineer’s work is wildly collaborative by design: diverse in gender, ethnicity, age, neurodiversity, cultural background, and belief system; inclusive of customers as well as colleagues; open to ideas being critiqued, remixed, and reworked. The complexity of the challenges we face from 2026 to 2030 cannot be navigated from a boardroom or at a distance from the teams that need your leadership.
That means starting with honest inquiry. It means questioning our own history and perspectives — confronting the biases we carry, recognizing that “we’ve always done it this way” is the opening line of institutional decline and obsolescence. It means scanning for signals of change with genuine curiosity about what is emerging at the edges of our industries, our societies, our technologies. It means shifting from “what is” to “what if” — not as a rhetorical trick, but as a genuine and recurring discipline of imagination, anticipation and empathy. It also means recognizing frontier technologies—from AI and digital twinning to cutting-edge earth observation systems—not merely as tools of efficiency or disruption, but as instruments that can help shape a more resilient and sustainable future where humans and the natural world can coexist.
Crucially, it means bringing more people into the room. The Hope Engineer’s work is wildly collaborative by design: diverse in gender, ethnicity, age, neurodiversity, cultural background, and belief system; inclusive of customers as well as colleagues; open to ideas being critiqued, remixed, and reworked. The complexity of the challenges we face from 2026 to 2030 cannot be navigated from a boardroom or at a distance from the teams that need your leadership.
Navigating Futures with Hope, and Wisdom
One of the most useful frameworks for resilience leaders navigating this decade is the Futures, Hope, and Wisdom Cycle — three elements that work together cyclically to drive strategic leadership with vision, creativity, and impact.
Futures thinking gives us the capacity to scan for signals and trends, to anticipate the dynamics of change through scenarios, and to design possible futures before they arrive. In 2026, this means seriously engaging with the scenarios being mapped by institutions like the WEF and Brookings: a world of competing regional blocs rather than cohesive multilateral norms; accelerating automation; AI as a geopolitical asset as much as a commercial one; climate shocks that are no longer gradual but episodic and severe. It means asking not “will these things happen?” but “how do we act as if they might — and design our strategy accordingly?”
Hope provides the energy to move toward audacious goals despite that complexity. This is not naive. The most compelling resilience work being done today — in community systems, in adaptive organizations, in civic design — is powered by leaders who have decided that a better outcome is worth fighting for, and who have built the agency structures to pursue it. Hope mobilizes. It energizes teams and communities who would otherwise succumb to the paralysis that complexity tends to produce. Without it, futures thinking can collapse into anxiety.
Wisdom is what prevents futures thinking and hope from becoming unmoored. It is the accumulated knowledge of what has worked, what has failed, where assumptions were wrong and where they proved generative. Wisdom grounds the work in lived experience — personal, organizational, and collective. It allows us to integrate the provocations that futures scanning surfaces into strategic thinking that is actionable. In a decade defined by the failure of institutions that stopped learning, wisdom is the quality that allows resilient organizations to keep learning — and to steward actions that drive real change.
These three are not sequential. They are cyclical and mutually reinforcing. Futures thinking without hope becomes fatalism. Hope without wisdom becomes recklessness. Wisdom without futures thinking becomes conservatism that mistakes the past for a map of the future.
A new set of competencies for resilience
The practical competencies required of Hope Engineers are, perhaps not coincidentally, also the competencies required of anyone serious about resilience as we look to 2030 and beyond.
Cultural awareness and sensitivity, as the world reorganizes into competing regional power structures with profoundly different values and governance models.
Emotional intelligence and empathy, as social polarization creates organizations and communities under genuine psychological stress.
Creative problem-solving, as the standard playbooks prove inadequate to challenges that are genuinely novel in their combination.
A collaborative and elastic mindset with commitment to the broader world, not just organizational performance.
Resilience and adaptability, with the capacity to remain level-headed when conditions shift suddenly.
Comfort with ambiguity — which is, in 2026, simply the baseline condition of operating in any significant organization anywhere.
And the ability to balance optimism with pragmatism, governance, and process — because hope without structure is just a feeling.
None of these competencies are unfamiliar. However, it’s their integration that creates leaders who hold optimism and clear-eyed realism simultaneously, who scan the horizon and also tend to what is underfoot, who pursue audacious goals through meticulous pathways.
Those leaders embrace the Hope Engineer’s mindset, energy and drive for change.
The Work Starts Now
The question for resilience leaders in 2026 is not whether the challenges of the next decade are serious. They are. The question is what orientation and energy we bring to them.
Our complex age of progression and competition is also an age of choice. We must remind ourselves that the future is not predetermined but shaped by the choices we make and the actions we undertake today. Human choices about cooperation, innovation, resource allocation, and conflict management will shape the outcomes that unfold. History shows that order can be rebuilt when actors choose strategic collaboration even amid competition.
The rebuilding of trust, of systems, of institutions, of shared futures is not a technocratic, or narrow-focused project. It is a broad and deeply human one. It requires leaders who are willing to question everything, who treat futures work as a daily practice, and who carry hope not as a folly but as a professional, applied discipline.
It serves as a reminder that there is zero risk in questioning everything. The risk lies in staying the course when the map has already changed. It is time to stop fearing the future and start engineering the hope required to build it.