You Need a Future to Optimise For

A few days after the war began, one of my colleagues called me. He had just heard that the President of the United States had threatened to attack Iran's critical infrastructure, power plants, oil refineries, and the other systems on which everyday life depends on. The message he took from it was not that military targets might be hit. It was that everything supporting normal life could be ruined.

People began gathering emergency supplies: water, food, medicine, batteries, whatever they thought their families might need. Some described it as preparing for doomsday. My colleague was not sure whether he and his family would survive.

At work, we talk often about optimising for speed, faster decisions, shorter delivery cycles, quicker feedback, more rapid adaptation. But what does optimisation for speed mean when an employee is wondering whether his family will still be alive tomorrow?

You need a future to optimise for.

When the future becomes fragile

In ordinary times we plan almost automatically, the next sprint, the next quarter, the next stage of a transformation, because we assume the systems around us will keep functioning: electricity, salaries, safety. War removes those assumptions. A power plant stops being an abstract strategic asset and becomes hospitals, refrigeration for medicine, water, banking — the infrastructure that keeps a society running.

People start asking questions no transformation roadmap anticipates: what happens to my family if I'm gone, who looks after my children, will my parents get their medicine, will the company still pay salaries, where do we go if our neighbourhood is hit. These are not signs of resistance to change. They are signs that someone's sense of continuity has been damaged.

Working from home did not mean working away from the war; the war followed people into their homes. The working day happened through laptop screens while news alerts, worried family calls and the sound of bombardment sat in the background. Some colleagues told me even checking the news had become difficult; avoiding it created anxiety, but reading it often created more.

One moment has stayed with me. A developer was speaking almost under his breath, saying that everything would be destroyed and his life was ruined. I tried to reassure him, told him everything was going to be fine. I meant it as hope.

But I couldn't have known that. None of us could. That changed how I think about positive leadership: there's a real difference between offering hope and making a prediction we cannot guarantee.

"Everything will be fine" is a prediction. When someone can hear explosions near their home, it can quietly tell them their fear is inappropriate — that they need to hide it to seem professional. A more honest response would have been:

"I cannot promise what will happen, and I understand why you are frightened. You do not have to pretend this is normal. Your safety and your family come first. We will support you as much as we can, and take each decision together."

That doesn't remove hope. It makes hope credible.

Speed must mean something different

In a crisis, an organisation still needs speed, but it has to be precise about what it's accelerating. Speed cannot mean asking frightened people to produce more in less time. It should first mean the speed at which the organisation creates safety, clarity and options: how fast we can confirm people and their families are safe, communicate what we know and don't, strip away non-essential work, adjust workloads and leave arrangements, and protect salary continuity where we reasonably can.

Only after that does delivery speed mean anything. An organisation that shortens its release cycle while taking days to respond to an employee in danger hasn't gotten faster; it has optimised the wrong thing. A transformation that speeds up executive decisions while leaving employees uncertain about their livelihoods hasn't gotten more agile — it has simply moved the uncertainty from itself onto its people.

Sometimes the most valuable form of speed is a leader saying, quickly: "This isn't essential today. Leave it. Take care of yourself and your family." That isn't weakness. It's intelligent prioritisation.

The scar remains

Threats against Iran's infrastructure didn't disappear after the first days of the war; similar statements returned from time to time. They felt less sharp with each repetition, perhaps because we'd become tougher, perhaps more sceptical, perhaps just emotionally exhausted. But a reduced reaction isn't recovery. People can grow accustomed to living with an alarm without becoming free of its effects. They keep attending meetings and discussing long-term plans while carrying an entirely different understanding of what can happen to their lives. The visible fear fades; the scar shapes how they hear every promise that follows.

When leaders describe a three-year strategy, employees may quietly wonder whether the economy, the organisation, or their own circumstances will hold for three months. That isn't cynicism. It's what happens after you've learned that continuity can't be taken for granted.

The fear of layoffs

No one at Mofid Securities was laid off because of the war during the period I'm describing. That mattered; employment was one of the few remaining sources of stability in a world that had become unstable. But the absence of layoffs doesn't remove the fear of them, especially inside an organisation already mid-transformation, where uncertainty about roles and structures is magnified by everything else going on outside it.

Leaders shouldn't promise what they can't guarantee; "layoffs will never happen" can destroy trust the moment circumstances change. But silence isn't a responsible alternative either: when leaders say nothing, employees fill the gap with the worst plausible explanation. People need honest information about what the organisation knows, what it doesn't, and what principles will guide hard decisions, including whether alternatives like redeployment, reskilling or reduced hiring would be tried first. Employment decisions in wartime aren't only financial. They affect someone's ability to protect their family and imagine a future, and they need to be handled with exceptional care.

Transformation as a small area of agency

We were at the beginning of a transformation initiative at Mofid Securities when the war began, and we decided to continue — not because the war was unimportant, but because we still believed there were things worth improving, and that improving them might make us more resilient.

One of my more senior colleagues told me something unexpected: that the transformation was one of the things making him feel more comfortable during the war. At first this seemed contradictory. Why would anyone want more change when every day already contained too much of it?

The answer is the difference between change that happens to you and change you can influence. Outside the organisation, events were moving beyond anyone's control: the attacks, the negotiations, the economic consequences. Inside the transformation, he could contribute to a decision, help redesign a process, solve a problem. It gave him a small, genuine area of agency inside an environment dominated by uncertainty.

We were not only waiting to discover what might be destroyed. We were also deciding what we wanted to build.

Stillness, in that context, doesn't feel like calm; it feels like helplessness. Purposeful work can give the day structure and remind people they're still capable of choosing and acting, rather than only enduring.

But work must not become compulsory therapy

That comfort was one colleague's truth, not a rule. For someone else, a transformation workshop might consume the small amount of emotional energy they have left; discussing a future operating model after a night of bombardment might feel absurd. Neither response, throwing yourself into the work, or needing to withdraw from it — is more courageous or more professional than the other. A people-centred transformation has to leave room for both.

Employees shouldn't have to perform productivity to prove they're coping, and they shouldn't be judged for being unable to find motivation in a transformation while their families are in danger. Transformation creates agency only when people retain real choice over how they participate. Without that choice, purposeful movement becomes compulsory busyness, and an inspiring future becomes just another demand.

Two truths, held together

The colleague unsure whether his family would survive was telling the truth about fragility. The senior colleague who found comfort in the transformation was telling the truth about agency. A humane transformation has to hold both at once; it can't use the future to deny the present ("focus on the transformation, everything will be fine"), but it can use purposeful change to stop the present from consuming the entire future ("we cannot guarantee what will happen, but there are still things we can shape together").

That's the difference between unrealistic optimism and grounded hope. Optimism tells people the future is secure. Grounded hope acknowledges that it isn't, while pointing to what remains possible anyway.

A future worth moving towards

Transformation normally asks people to leave something familiar for something new. During war, the familiar no longer feels safe, and the new future doesn't feel guaranteed, which changes what's required of the people leading change. We can't talk only about efficiency, speed and execution. We have to protect the conditions that let people imagine themselves in the future we're describing: protecting people wherever possible, communicating honestly, treating employment decisions as human decisions, and giving people genuine influence over the parts of the change they can actually help shape.

Fragility, in these conditions, isn't a failure of professionalism. It's a human response to conditions that aren't normal.

The real question isn't how quickly our people can transform while the world around them destabilises. It's how quickly an organisation can create enough safety, clarity, dignity and agency for people to imagine a future again.

You need a future to optimise for. Conducted humanely, transformation can help keep that future alive.