What's an innovator to do? Making change in dark times

If you've ever tried to inspire innovation in a climate with a toxic past or creativity in a department with crushed morale, you may have encountered a level of disappointment that has persisted so long that it's hard for people to believe in change or participate in making things better.

This is cynicism: the biggest, baddest blocker to great work. It's the belief that there is no possibility of good in our work or in each other, and so there is no use in trying for anything better. Cynics don't make things. They mock things.

As Caitlin Moran writes, "When cynicism becomes the default language, playfulness and invention become impossible. Cynicism scours through a culture like bleach, wiping out millions of small, seedling ideas. Cynicism means your automatic answer becomes 'No.' Cynicism means you presume everything will end in disappointment... Cynicism is, ultimately, fear. Cynicism makes contact with your skin, and a thick black carapace begins to grow — like insect armor. This armor will protect your heart, from disappointment — but it leaves you almost unable to walk. You cannot dance in this armor. Cynicism keeps you pinned to the spot, in the same posture, forever."

Lately there are times when I feel that cynicism is consuming our culture at an unprecedented pace, throwing suffocating blanket of hopelessness over our personal and professional lives. If you make the mistake of scrolling through your smartphone newsfeed first thing in the morning - as I have many days - you may have felt the power of its bias toward negativity and divisiveness and its corrosive effects on a sense of possibility. I try to put away the phone before it grows in me that carapace. If we believe nothing can change, nothing will.

The creative impulse and faith in change are among the most vulnerable of human urges. Most people who have tried to make things remember the insidious power of an early encounter with a cynic who discouraged them - someone who scolded them for asking so many questions or a teacher who criticized their art. Maybe a colleague ignored an idea, dismissing it with a passive aggressive "I don't disagree." It's easy to internalize that judgement. How sadly contagious is the sentiment that we cannot make something original - or make something better.

Maria Popova , who highlighted Moran's work, has written that "To live with sincerity in our culture of cynicism is a difficult dance — one that comes easily only to the very young and the very old. The rest of us are left to tussle with two polarizing forces ripping the psyche asunder by beckoning to it from opposite directions — critical thinking and hope. Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. Hope without critical thinking is na?veté."

So what are you to do in the face of cynicism as a leader, as an innovator or as a human being?

I can think of three things.

First, recognize cynicism when we encounter it within ourselves or others and seek to frame it as suffering rather than hopelessness. Cynicism is born of fear, hurt, anger or scar tissue. Acknowledging the root of pain with compassion - but not victimhood - is important. Self-awareness in ourselves is no salve but it is a start to healing.

Second, try to train ourselves and others to look for the good one thing within us or around us. There is always at least one. When you notice it, you recognize more good things, and a creative energy starts to awaken. Dan and Chip Heath talked about the power of bright spots in their book Switch - a good roadmap to the path beyond cynicism.?They write, "Instead of emphasizing ‘What isn’t working and needs to be fixed?’ ask ‘What is working, and how can we clone it?’" We tend to analyze problems, but not success - yet analyzing success is the only sure way to create more of it. “The question is 'How can my organization be like itself at its best moments?'"

Third, reform or (if that doesn't work), remove the cynics from your workplace if they are spreading their suffering and stifling the sparks of creation that are needed to ignite innovation. They may not be in the majority, but they can bring down everyone else. As a dear colleague of mine has said, if you can't change the people, change the people.

At a time when a lot of things seem really messed up, I try to focus on the many people among us who make rather than mock, who build things up rather than tear them down, and who never stop trying to find a better way. Cynicism may be contagious, but so is creativity. If cynicism is a self-imposed blindness (as Stephen Colbert has said), then creativity - its opposite - is the ultimate opening of the eyes. Even when it's dark, we don't have to all be in the dark. Some of us - most of us, I like to think - are creatures drawn to light.

We may have to look hard, but there is good to see or at least envision in the form of possibility. Not in the way of denial of reality, but in the way of building something new where the old needs to change.

Innovation is above all an act of faith in that process, a dogged effort to test and learn forward. Cynics will wallow in the idea there is no way but the broken way. I hope for all of us this steadfast hope: that broken things make room for better things.