This is the third in a series on Strategic Hope. If hope is what people need most from their leaders - overwhelmingly, across every culture and context - then where is the hope-centred leadership this hinge moment requires? And what does it look like for the founders and leaders building the future they want?
In the autumn of 2024, I watched the Prime Minister stand in the Rose Garden at Downing Street after the Southport tragedy and deliver what became known as the "rot and decline" speech. Britain was broken. The country was in crisis. The rot ran deep.
I'd spent months working to elect this government. I'd believed it would advance the values I'd held since Kenya - the Sustainable Development Goals, climate resilience, reindustrialisation. Instead, what I was watching was a government with no clear driving purpose, no vision for what it wanted to achieve, and a narrative built on what was wrong rather than what could be built.
Through the lens of Hope Theory, I recognised exactly what I was seeing. No clear goals that people could rally behind. No visible pathways forward. No sense of agency - no feeling among citizens that their efforts could lead somewhere meaningful. Years of successive governments had talked Britain down - "Broken Britain," ungovernable, declining. The language of rot and decline was the continuation of a pattern, not a departure from it. And through the framework I'd been studying, the diagnosis was precise: this was an absence of hope.
Responders and Initiators
Shane Lopez, in his work at Gallup, drew a distinction between two kinds of leaders that I think about constantly.
Responders see problems and obstacles and knock them out. They make good things happen in good times and bad. They deal with what's in front of them - the crisis, the setbacks, the immediate challenges - and they deal with it well.
Initiators do something different. They step back and say: I'm going to put a big idea on the table and try to move it forward. I'm going to take us in a new direction. I'm looking to create something where nothing exists yet. Initiators are the people who, as Lopez put it, will be standing tall in two or three years when things begin to recover - because they were building while everyone else was reacting.
The leaders who build for the future are both. They respond to what's in front of them and they initiate what comes next.
What I was watching in the UK was a government that was barely responding - and certainly not initiating. There was no big idea. No direction. No future people could see and believe in. The leadership deficit was a hope deficit.
What the Research Confirms
In February 2025, Gallup published the Global Leadership Report at the World Government Summit. The findings, based on research across 52 countries, confirmed what I'd already been seeing.
When people were asked what they needed most from their leaders, hope accounted for 56% of all positive leadership attributes - far outstripping trust at 33%, compassion at 7%, and stability at 4%. For organisational leaders specifically - the managers, founders, and executives people work for - hope rose to 64%.
Earlier Gallup research put it even more starkly: 69% of followers who strongly agreed that their leaders made them feel enthusiastic about the future were engaged at work. Among those who disagreed, just 1% were engaged. One per cent.
Lopez had said it plainly: "a leader's personal hope is a public resource." The people around you - your team, your clients, your community - are affected by your hope or its absence. If a leader's personal hope is a public resource, then the absence of hope at the top of a government, or a business, or any organisation radiates outward. Everyone feels it.
Carney: Both a Responder and an Initiator
At the same time I was watching the UK government struggle to articulate a vision, I was watching Mark Carney's rise in Canada. Here was someone doing something completely different.
Clear purpose. A visible vision people could see and believe in. And a consistent, deliberate focus on agency. "Nous sommes maîtres chez nous" - we are masters in our own house. "We have agency." "Focus on what we can control." Carney returned to these ideas again and again, and each time he did, he was doing exactly what Hope Theory describes: providing clear goals that people could rally behind, visible pathways they could believe in, and a sense of agency grounded in evidence and national capability.
This was hope-centred leadership in action at the national level - whether Carney knew Snyder's framework or not. He was both a responder and an initiator. He responded to the crises in front of him - trade disputes, economic pressure, the shifting international order. And he initiated a vision for Canada that was bigger than any single crisis - a vision of sovereignty, self-reliance, and strategic independence that gave Canadians a future they could work toward.
Lopez would have called Carney a hopemonger - someone who actively creates and spreads hope. The contrast with what was happening in the UK could hardly have been starker.
The Question That Became A Global Hinge Moment
"Where is the hope-centred leadership this hinge moment requires?"
That question - coming at a time when Trump 2.0 was upending the international order, when the old institutional certainties were dissolving, and when the need for purpose-led leadership had never been more urgent - became the driving force behind A Global Hinge Moment, my independent research project.
A Global Hinge Moment is about building the pipeline of purpose-led leaders this moment requires. Leaders who can both respond and initiate. Leaders who understand that their personal hope is a public resource. Leaders who are willing to step forward with a vision and the strategic clarity to pursue it - at every scale, in every sector.
Because the response to this hinge moment will come from governments and international institutions. But it will also come from the founders building climate businesses, the leaders transforming their organisations around the Triple Bottom Line, the community builders stewarding their local environments, and the entrepreneurs creating fairer, more sustainable ways of working. The pipeline of purpose-led companies and trusted leaders is one of the most important things we can build right now.
What This Means for the Business You're Leading
The same dynamics that play out at the national level play out in every business, every team, every organisation.
When a founder has clarity of purpose and a vision that the people around them can see and believe in, the business moves forward. When that clarity is absent - when the leader is stuck in reactive mode, responding to one crisis after another without a clear direction - the team feels it. Momentum stalls. The best people start to disengage. The flywheel stops turning.
Are you responding or initiating? Are you knocking out obstacles as they come, or are you also stepping back and putting the big idea on the table? Are you both?
Hope-centred leadership applies at every scale. It's for the founder leading a team of five. The CEO navigating a turnaround. The Parish Council Chair stewarding a community of 19,000. The scale changes. The cognitive framework is the same. Your personal hope is a public resource - and the people around you need you to be both a responder and an initiator.
What Comes Next
Having explored hope in business and hope in leadership, the next piece in this series asks: what is Strategic Hope? The synthesis - bringing together everything the series has explored into a coherent methodology designed for founders and leaders building the future they want.
Further Resources
Gallup, Global Leadership Report: What Followers Want (2025)
Shane J. Lopez, Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (2013)
This is Part 3 of the Strategic Hope Series. Read Part 1: Strategic Hope: The Methodology at the Heart of The Purpose Company, or explore the other pieces in the series:
I work with purpose-led founders and leaders at every stage of growth. If this piece has sparked something - and you'd like to think about what it means for your business, I'd welcome a conversation.
