Hope Isn’t a Strategy. Agency Is.

Snow-covered rural road bordered by dense evergreen trees, heavy with fresh snow, beneath a pale winter sky. Photograph by Charissa Simmons

When conditions are uncertain and control is limited, leaders fall back on a familiar line:
“Hope isn’t a strategy.”

It’s not wrong—but it has become a cliché because it’s incomplete.

Too often, the phrase gets used as a rhetorical shrug. Leaders say it, nod, and move on without naming what actually replaces hope when certainty is unavailable. That’s how a useful truth turns into empty commentary.

Because hope does belong in leadership. Just not where people keep putting it.

Where Hope Belongs (and Where It Doesn’t)

Hope is not useless. It’s miscast.

Hope belongs as emotional fuel:

• It steadies leaders when outcomes are unclear.

• It keeps fear from driving reactive decisions.

• It helps people endure uncertainty without resorting to panic or urgency theater.

What hope does not do is move reality.

Hope stabilizes.
It does not execute.

When leaders treat hope like a plan, progress stalls. When they strip hope out entirely, leadership becomes brittle. Both approaches fail under pressure.

What Replaces Hope as the Strategy: Agency

If you’re going to say “hope isn’t a strategy,” you have to finish the thought.

Hope isn’t the strategy.
Agency is.

Agency is the disciplined use of what remains within your control—especially under constraint.

You may not control:

• the market

• timing

• upstream decisions

• other people’s behavior

But you always control something.

Agency is the refusal to confuse lack of control with lack of responsibility.

What Agency Looks Like in Practice

In real leadership conditions, agency shows up as:

• Clarity when answers are incomplete

• Standards when excuses are available

• Consistency when the future is unsettled

• Boundaries when pressure is high

• Preparation while others are waiting

Hope waits for conditions to improve.
Agency acts inside the conditions that exist.

The Leadership Reframe

Don’t eliminate hope.

Demote it.

Hope belongs inside the leader—not inside the plan.

Hope steadies the nervous system.
Agency drives decisions, behavior, and execution.

If hope feels like all you have, that’s not a leadership dead end.

It’s a signal that you haven’t fully named your agency yet.

The Bottom Line

Hope helps you endure uncertainty.
Agency helps you shape it.

Hope can stay—but it doesn’t get to drive.

Agency does.

If this resonated, you may want to read this next →When Steadiness Creates Space