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

Alison Beard (0:02)

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Adi Ignatius (1:21)

I'm Adi Ignatius.

Alison Beard (1:22)

I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

Adi Ignatius (1:32)

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 (1:39)

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 (1:50)

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 (2:28)

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 (2:39)

All right, well stay tuned. We will hear advice from Seligman on how to do just that, plus what happens to agency as AI gets more integrated into the workforce. He's the author of the 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.

Martin Seligman (3:10)

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 (4:19)

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?

Martin Seligman (4:32)

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?

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.