What It Takes to Make Progress When the Future Feels Out of Control

ADI IGNATIUS: I’m Adi Ignatius.

ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, Alison, here’s my question for you today. What does it take to make progress when the future feels out of control?

ALISON BEARD: So, I think the psychologist that I’ve talked to over the years would say when you really have no influence on external factors, you’ve got to change your own mindset and behaviors.

ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. It is a simple idea. It is not at all simple to execute, and it’s actually an essential part of the argument that today’s guest is making. Martin Seligman is a renowned professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and after decades of studying optimism, resilience, and human flourishing, he has set his sights on agency, on how we can have more of it to achieve positive outcomes. He defines agency as being made up of three things, efficacy, the belief that you can achieve a goal now, optimism, the belief that you can achieve it in the future, and imagination, the ability to envision possibilities that don’t yet exist.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah, all of those sound like hallmarks of any successful business leader I can think of, but I’d love to hear more about how people and organizations can cultivate them.

ADI IGNATIUS: All right. Well, stay tuned. We will hear advice from Seligman on how to do just that. Plus, what’s happening to Agency as AI gets more integrated into the world. He’s the author of a new book, Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress. Here’s our conversation.

So, I love the ideas you’re exploring in the book about agency, about progress. I also want to talk about how businesses and individuals can think about and apply these findings, but let’s start with agency.

MARTY SELIGMAN: Agency is a psychological state that has three components. It’s overall the belief that you can do it. The first component is efficacy, and that’s the belief that you can achieve a specific goal in the here and now. The second component is optimism, and that’s the belief that you can achieve that goal in the far future. And the third is imagination. That’s the range of goals that you can achieve in the future. Efficacy works by trying. If you believe you can do it, you try. Optimism works by persistence and maintenance. If you believe you can do it in the far future, you overcome obstacles and do it. And imagination works by innovation. The notion of agency says that when individual human agency is high, that’s when you get progress.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, if you define agency as you did, as efficacy, optimism and imagination, if you were advising a CEO, which of those three do you think organizations are most deficient in?

MARTY SELIGMAN: Let me give you the background to my answer here, and indeed I’ll say the way in which I would and in fact do advise CEOs. In the middle of the Iraq War, the chief of staff of the Army, George Casey, called me to the Pentagon and basically said, “Post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide, panic, divorce, drug abuse. What does positive psychology say about that?” And my answer to that was we should move the entire distribution of soldiers from post-traumatic stress disorder in the direction of post-traumatic growth.

So, I became the chief civilian in comprehensive soldier fitness, and that led me to a study of success versus failure in the army. The army is not only a bigger corporation than Walmart, but it’s got 130 different job descriptions. So, on day one, everyone in the army takes a hundred item questionnaire that we designed about psychological strengths and weaknesses. 900,000 people, we follow them for five years, and the army has two medals that it gives relevant to your question about advising a CEO. The first is exemplary work and the second is heroism. In five years, 12% of a population, 12% of the army wins those medals. So, the question is, can you predict it from day one statistically? And the answer is robustly yes.

There are three variables that predict exemplary work. The first is high optimism, the second is high positive emotion, and the third is low negative emotion, not being a complainer. Now, that tells essentially CEO, hire happy people, but CEO realistically doesn’t have the freedom to only hire happy people. And then the second piece of advice is we now know quite a bit about interventions that build efficacy, optimism, and imagination. So, hire happy people and train, teach your pessimists the techniques of optimism.

So, we had, again, this is not a sample. We have the entire army here, 75,000 people in five years deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. 3,500 of them, about 5% are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. There are two predictors of post-traumatic stress disorder. One we already knew, and that was how awful is the combat? But most interestingly, it’s the catastrophizers, the people who believe when bad events occur, everything unravels, are more than twice as likely to come down with PTSD. So, there are two lessons here for the CEO, hire happy people and train unhappy people about wellbeing. And secondly, avoid catastrophizers.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, I mean, this has profound implications. How do leaders encourage optimism without creating a culture of unrealistic confidence or wishful thinking that is also uncalled for?

MARTY SELIGMAN: Superficial optimism, mouthing the words doesn’t work. It’s no good for a CEO to get in there and say, “We’re going to crush them. Everything’s going to work out.” So, the question is, how can you learn non-shallow optimism? I’m a pessimist, a depressive by birth, and I’ve had to develop a lot of the techniques myself and use them. And indeed, one of the most effective techniques which produces a real optimism is disputation.

So, Adi, I woke up at 4:00 AM, and I said to myself, “Oh my God, HBR, they’re right at the edge of leadership and corporations. I’m 84 years old. I live in the past. I’m over the hill. I can’t possibly do an HBR interview.” That’s actually what I said to myself at 4:00 in the morning. And indeed, as a pessimist and a depressive, the automatic thoughts never go away, but I have become a very good arguer against them. I said, “Hey, wait a minute. I did two interviews last week and they went splendidly”

Now, importantly, argument against catastrophic thinking has to be realistic. You have to treat these thoughts, not as gospel, but as something that’s being said to you by a person whose mission in life was to make you miserable, who’s a rival for your job, and your job is to dispute it realistically.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, if you were in charge of, let’s say, redesigning a corporation specifically to maximize the kind of human agency that can lead to progress, what would you change? How would you think about this organizationally?

MARTY SELIGMAN: Hire happy people, one. Take your unhappy people and teach them techniques like disputation and decastrophization. Avoid complainers. Now, there’s a lot more that I think a CEO can do, and one of them has to do with imagination and abduction. I think it’s the imaginative corporation that’s going to innovate more. And I work on imagination and it’s a difficult thing.

So, like almost everyone you’ve probably interviewed, I’ve been doing AI almost full-time for the last couple of years. Right at the beginning of ChatGPT, one of my former graduate student who’s a professor in Beijing emailed me and said, “Hey, Marty, we’ve got the same problems of depression, anxiety, suicide in China that you do in America, but we don’t have enough therapists or coaches to go around, so we’ve created a virtual Seligman. We fed it with all of your books and speeches. Try it out.”

You can ask for advice, like my boss is a micromanager, and you get my voice in either Mandarin or in English giving you advice. The advice is generally very good, but for our purposes, I’ve been interested in the question of hallucinations and its relationship to creativity and imagination.

So, I’ve now looked at a thousand of the Ask Martin responses, and it only hallucinated once. Here’s what it led to. I went back to Claude and I said, “Okay, are you a coherence machine or a correspondence machine?” The two theories of truth: correspondence theory that P is true if P obtains in the world, cat is on the mat is true if the cat is on the mat. Coherence is not about reality, it’s about what you already believe.” And Claude said, “Marty, I’m a coherence machine. Well, I don’t have sensors, eyes, ears, hands. Everything you hear from me is an expansion and coherent with what I already believe.”

So, I said, “What are the 20 greatest accomplishments in human science? How many of those could you have done on your own?” “Well, I could have done seven. I would’ve done plate tectonics, it just fits South America to Africa. I could have done Mendelian genetics, Algebra. I could have done Big Bang. It’s a mathematication of explosions over time.”

“Which couldn’t you have done?” “Well, I couldn’t have done Darwin and I couldn’t have done Einstein. I don’t do abduction. I don’t make leaps to the best explanation possible.”

So, I’ve become very interested in the teaching of abduction, which I think is uniquely human and the machines cannot by their very design being coherence machines do it. We need more imagination at the cutting edge of a corporation, and we need to come to understand and train the notion of taking leaps beyond the evidence, the notion of abduction. And that’s something I’m intimately involved in now, trying to teach people to become better leapers of explanations. I think a lot of success has to do with leaping beyond the evidence.

ADI IGNATIUS: I want to get back to the question of how you set up organizations that can achieve the right level of agency. This is a question that companies face all the time. To what extent do you empower people? You talked about hiring the right people and trying to make them less pessimistic, teach them to be less pessimistic and to see possibilities. But there are also some basic questions about what is the right level of agency to… People look to leaders to provide answers, but it may be that a leader’s most important job is really to make other people feel they could affect outcomes, that they have that kind of agency. So how do you think about that interplay between the agency of the leader versus empowering people at all levels to have that same kind of agency? At some level, it’s the paradox of management.

MARTY SELIGMAN: There are techniques beyond empowerment that make people better at agency. So, I want to take catastrophization. So, remember I said in our study of 75,000 soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, it was the catastrophizers who come down with PTSD. Now, catastrophization is a paralyzer. It not only feels bad, but it makes you helpless and paralyzes you and undermines imagination, optimism, and efficacy.

Here’s the technique. It’s called put it in perspective. Close your eyes for a moment, Adi, if you would. It’s noon on Friday and you get an email from your boss that says, “Come see me at 4:00.” Now, what do you think? Well, almost everyone catastrophizes.

ADI IGNATIUS: This is bad.

MARTY SELIGMAN: But some are extreme catastrophizers. So, here’s what we do systematically: say, “Okay, what’s the very worst that can happen at 4:00?” “Well, she read my memo on the advertising campaign. She hates it and I’m going to be fired. Okay.

What’s the very best that could happen at 4:00?” “Well, she read my memo, she loves it, and I’m getting a raise. ” Okay. “What’s the most likely thing that’s going to happen at 4:00?” “Well, she read my memo. She liked a lot of it, but she thought the budget was over the top.”

Okay, what can you do to plan for the most likely scenario?” “Well, I’m going to spend the next three hours going over the budget. I’m going to try to justify the really expensive parts and I’m going to cut the fat in preparation.” Now, we find that when we teach people, put it in perspective, they become significantly less catastrophizing.

And so, this is one of several techniques, realistic techniques that CEOs and managers can use beyond urging people to be more optimistic and more imaginative. I think the words of urging are fine, and I think people very often imitate the optimism of their managers, but I think you want to teach the skills underlying efficacy, optimism, and imagination, and one of them is decatastrophization.

ADI IGNATIUS: I have to ask about this particular period in time right now. I mean, everybody seems to refer to this period, certainly in the business world as an era of uncertainty, that we’re buffeted by forces we cannot control, whether it’s AI, geopolitics, economic uncertainty, climate change.

We have this consensus, right or wrong, that things have never been this out of control, that we’ve never had less agency as leaders, as individuals. What do you think about that? Does this period of an unusual break from the norms we’ve been used to for 50 years, say, require extra levels of thinking about how to get people out of this sense that they are passive victims of forces they can’t control and into a stage of more agency and being able to think again about creating progress?

MARTY SELIGMAN: Well, I think this really is a period of uncertainty, and I don’t know any techniques for denying that, but there are some verities here that I guess are general purpose tools against uncertainty. So let me take one very important one that I’ve been involved in, and it’s the relationship of company wellbeing to productivity in times of uncertainty.

In the last 20 years, I find myself occasionally with CEOs and CFOs boosting the idea that workers under you should be happy, should be positive, and that positive psychology is a good thing to have in your company. And then the CFO will say something after five minutes like, “Is it profitable?” And up until about a year and a half ago, I honestly had to say there are about five studies in literature of profitability and the happiness of workers, and they go in the direction of the happier the company, the more the… but none of them meet my scientific standards. So, I basically, to be honest, the answer was, “I didn’t know.”

Along comes Jan-Emmanuel De Neve about a year and a half ago, a professor at Oxford, and what he’s done is taken 1,600 American companies that employ, I think, 15 million people. And the company takes four wellbeing questions at the outset, the employees, one is how happy are you at work? How satisfied are you with your job? How much purpose and meaning does your job have, and how stressed are you at work? And so, they look at those four questions, they quantify the companies.

Then importantly, through this period of uncertainty, they come back nine months later and ask stock market price, profitability, return on investment, and there’s a linear relationship between how happy the company is on those four questions at time one and profitability and stock market price at time two.

And so, there’s a verity here, Adi, that’s important, which I wasn’t able to say a year and a half ago that in the face of uncertainty, one thing I think we can do is increase the wellbeing, those four questions of our employees. And while that doesn’t change the uncertainty of the situation, wellbeing, optimism, having a purpose, being satisfied are good buffers against uncertainty.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, are you saying that wellbeing and happiness, there’s a causal effect to business success or that business success leads to wellbeing and happiness?

MARTY SELIGMAN: Well, this is what the book Agency is about at length. And that is a question, are these psychological variables like optimism causal or are they determined by the world and the economics? I think the best view is that they’re reciprocally causal. When important developments like the Wright brothers occur, that’s a fact out in the world, heavier than air flight is possible.

That in the world causes other people who are working than heavier than air flight to be optimistic that they can now improve on heavier than air flight. They now get into a mental state of agency and they produce better steering. Better steering, the flights now occur for 30 minutes at a time. That increases the optimism of people who are working on long-term effects of heavier than air flight.

So, I think the best evidence is not that historical inevitability, material, technological success is the cause, but it causes an increase in agency psychologically and agency causes more trying, more persistence and more innovation, which in turn produces more technological development, which in turn produces more agency. And indeed, I think that’s been the history of the industrial revolution.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, if I’m a CEO listening to this conversation and I think, “All right, my organization has become too passive, too risk-averse, has a mindset that nothing we can do is going to turn things around,” what’s the first thing you would tell me to do on Monday morning?

MARTY SELIGMAN: The first thing would be let’s measure systematically the optimism and pessimism of your organization. These things are well measured now. Let’s now train the staff, the managers and the people below them with the techniques that decrease pessimism and passivity. So that’s the first Monday morning thing is let’s measure and then counter the pessimism of a company with techniques that are proven to work.

ADI IGNATIUS: Marty, thank you very much for being on the HBR IdeaCast.

MARTY SELIGMAN: Happy to be here, Adi.

ADI IGNATIUS: That was Martin Seligman, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the new book, Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress. Check back in the feed on Thursday for the first episode of our series on how AI is fundamentally changing leadership in organizations. In the initial episode, we’ll dive into how it’s affecting talent management and culture.

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Thanks to senior producer, Mary Dooe and senior production editor, Kristin Murphy Romano, and thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Adi Ignatius.