To Better Futures

Some say it's what makes us human, the search for a meaningful future, that is. As much as we are learning about non-human mammals with a brain-to-body ratio approaching our own, scientists still lack evidence suggesting that porpoises or primates dream of a better future. We do.

In preparing last month to work with two Wake County Renaissance Schools--schools re-populated with new teachers and principals specifically hired for their potential to improve flagging student performance--I had occasion to re-read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. The book's message took center stage when I prepared staff to re-image their school's vision statement. As I'll demonstrate, Man's Search for Meaning is really about leading the future.

I once read that tomorrow is "a highly-probable event." Supposedly, if you write .9 followed by nine nines, that is the probability that you will wake up tomorrow morning. But once awake, will tomorrow and all the tomorrows after that be the future you prefer? What would be the difference in outcomes that matter of our living aimlessly versus our intervening to make a most-improbable thing possible in the face of most-challenging circumstances?

If we are leading both our lives and our organizations responsibly, Frankl suggests, the choice between indifference and intervention may not be so hard: "It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future . . . And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task" (p. 73). Who is this Viktor Frankl anyway?

An eminent psychotherapist who also happened to be a Jew working in Vienna in the middle half of the 20th century, Dr. Frankl was a survivor of Hell on Earth--the Nazi concentration camps of World War II.  Jews captured who were not killed immediately were forced into labor. Most laborers died.

It was not the work, however, that killed men compelled to endure mind-numbing, bone--bruising, sixteen-hour-days; rather it was the inability to work brought on by psychological resignation. Malaise led to physical illness and even self-induced starvation. If a man couldn't or wouldn't work, the Nazis had no use for him. In a sense, such a life was more given than taken. But not everyone succumbed.

Early in captivity, Frankl made a conscious decision that he would live if he could. Only a few men joined him in that decision. But why would he or they chose life under such brutal, uncertain circumstances? The answer: to do something yet undone. A consummate healer of the mind, the undone thing and compelling future that Frankl imaged for himself was one in which he was addressing his peers on the psychology of the concentration camp. Imagine that.

What seemed to be working for Frankl, he noted, appeared to be true of everyone who survived. Whether a book yet to be written, a loved one with whom to reunite, or a dutiful act yet to be rendered, finding what meant most in each man's life, as demonstrated by what and for whom his undone act represented, literally meant the difference between life and death. What are our dreams of a better future? Here are a few of my own as a citizen and a professional:

Standing at the edge of the ten-year anniversary of the most horrific act of terror ever to victimize citizens of the United States, I want our political and faith leaders to fix our mind on a better future, a preferred future where such acts are rendered unnecessary even by our nation's most ardent critics. I want a nation where a job is available for everyone who needs it. I want to be part of a people who care for one another. And I want us to be responsible for whom we vote in seeking that preferred future.

Professionally, I want a future where my Gardner-Webb and North Carolina State University students who are just now taking the first steps in school-leader preparation become the wise principals we need in our public schools. I want a future where every learning professional with whom I am working use research and craft knowledge to improve students' life chances, turning possible futures of hopelessness into preferred futures of societal contribution.

Nearing death at 92 yet still actively teaching, Frankl was asked to express in one sentence the meaning of life. He wrote on a piece of paper, folded it, and asked his students to guess what he had written. After no more than five seconds, a young man confidently responded, "The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs."

"That was it exactly," said Frankl later. "Those were the exact words I had written." I urge the leader in you to consider the same.