I’m not your usual optimist

I've long been an idealist. I have an almost stubborn faith in our ability to do better, in progress, in human kindness. And yet, with no small amount of cognitive dissonance, I also believe people can be rubbish.

So when I say I'm an optimist, I don't mean the sunny, uncomplicated kind. Put me in a room of relentlessly cheerful people and I'm the one pointing at the risks. Put me in a room of cynics and they'll think I'm naive. I'm both, and I've made my peace with it, because I think critically rather than negatively, and there's a real difference between the two.

And I’m confident the difference matters - that radical realistic optimism works. I've spent twenty years doing this work in genuinely hard places. At the Treasury I was a programme manager on the scheme that helped keep a major bank standing through the financial crisis. During the pandemic I was the senior responsible owner for a national community testing service, leading a team of 200 through about as much uncertainty as a job can hold. I've been a Chief Digital Officer, building a government department's digital capability from scratch. These days I'm a Digital Transformation Director at Public Digital, working with huge creaky public sector bureaucracies trying to deliver services quickly despite mountains of legacy tech and deeply traditional mindsets.

Wishful thinking achieves nothing in the face of such challenges. You can only look the reality of it square in the eye, decide it can still be improved, and start on the unglamorous work of improving it. That's the only kind of optimism I've ever found useful, and I've watched it outperform both the head-in-the-sand cheerfulness and the articulate despair, again and again.

Some people call what I do "digital transformation consultancy". I think of it as strategic design, and a lot of it means helping leaders redesign the dark matter of their own organisations, the invisible stuff (incentives, narratives, governance, fear) that quietly decides what's possible. I'm also an executive coach, a writer and a speaker. I've stood in front of audiences of hundreds talking about organisational politics, and how to drive up the impact we can have at work and in the world. I'm a student of behavioural psychology, so I do care about making sure what I say is evidenced. And I'm a mother and passionate feminist.

For the last few years I've been spreading the word on radical, realistic optimism, in public speaking, podcasts, and now in this book. I'm writing it for a simple, slightly selfish reason: it's the book I need to read. I need the optimism. I need the tools, the reminders, the evidence that it's worth trying. I'm fairly sure I'm not the only one.

If you're tired of toxic positivity and equally tired of the people who've decided nothing can change, you and I are going to get along.

Start with the free tool, or follow along on Instagram where I'm building this in the open.