Catchy phrases in businesses come and go, and more often than not it’s good to see them leave.
Circle back to some low hanging fruit if you have the bandwidth, for instance, and you can think outside the box to decide if your team is on the bleeding edge with its core competencies. It’ll be a game changer – if you have your ducks in a row.
Those types of phrases, however, can serve a purpose. Sometimes, at least at the outset, they provide fresh language to inspire us and move us forward.
A few have caught my attention in recent months, and I thought I’d share three of them before they morph from clever to jargon. These aren’t brand, new terms or brand, new ideas, but lately I think they’ve helped create some momentum for businesses that are geared toward social good.
Moral Imagination
Jacqueline Novogratz, the founder and CEO of Acumen, mentioned this phrase in a conversation she had in February with Fortune’s Diane Brady.
Neither Novogratz nor Brady defined the term, but it dates back at least to 1790 when Edmund Burke used it in Reflections on the Revolution in France. In our times, I think of it as a mindset that produces innovation (imaging a better future and ways to create it) for the good of society (the moral component).
Acumen was founded a couple of decades ago with the goal of investing in social innovations through business opportunities. Its investments combine philanthropy with entrepreneurism to help break cycles of poverty.
“Our 215 investees — who possess the moral imagination to see the world as it is and imagine what it could be — have reached 650 million low-income people,” Novogratz wrote in a LinkedIn post. “None of this happens without a nuanced approach, one that recognizes that philanthropy isn’t just charity — it can be a catalyst for making markets work for low-income communities and partnering with governments to tackle our biggest challenges.”
Quests
The idea of pursuing “quests” in business has piggybacked on the popularity of the gaming industry. Players often assume a role and pursue a specific quest. Now, I’m not a “gamer,” but I appreciate the idea that we can be inspired and motivated by a long search for something that’s typically difficult to find.
When a quest moves from gaming to business, it describes an organization’s big idea or vision for the future. And if we are taking a team on a quest, it should be both big and noble.
Trae Stephens and Markie Wagner did a nice job of describing this concept in an article they wrote in 2022. And while they come at it mainly from a Silicon Valley perspective, the concept transfers to any industry.
“Quests tend to manifest as an objective we center our lives around,” they wrote. And a good quest “makes the future better than our world today, while a bad quest doesn’t improve the world much at all, or even makes it worse.”
Stephens and Wagner use “armchair philosophizing on Twitter” and “de facto retirement at age 35” as examples of bad quests for folks in the tech sector. And most good quests, they note, are hard – so hard that we need a moral imperative that inspires us to take them on. If we embrace the challenge, however, it can lead to transformative change for society (the combustion engine, penicillin, nuclear fission).
Not everyone has to pursue some world-changing quest, but the best and the brightest among us have an obligation to use what we’re given to do what we can.
“If you are an exceptionally capable person, failure to pursue a good quest is not neutral,” Stephens and Wagner wrote. “It constitutes a loss for humanity. Among our very best, dropping out, or chasing nonsense, is actually unethical.”
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Re-risking
Praxis is a non-profit that, much like Acumen, invests in innovative businesses, but it does so from a faith-based perspective.
It calls itself, “a venture-building ecosystem with a redemptive imagination, supporting founders, funders, and innovators motivated by their faith to address the major issues of our time.”
The leaders of Praxis use phrases like “redemptive entrepreneurship” and “redemptive quests,” which paint great word pictures for their mission. And in describing their work, Praxis CEO Dave Blanchard has used the phrase “re-risking” (as opposed to “de-risking”), and that’s a concept that applies for all leaders regardless of our faith perspective.
As we succeed in business and life, we’re better equipped to use our resources and experiences for the good of society, Blanchard notes, but often tempted to take fewer risks (de-risk our lives) rather than re-risking what we have on big ideas with the potential for a big impact (good quests, or what he calls redemptive quests).
“We often experience the cynicism that can come with either success or failure,” he says, “and we lose some of our belief that things can change, becoming in the process the loudest risk-avoidance voice in our own lives.”
De-risking or re-risking are clearly relevant to major decisions we make but also, Blanchard says, “a choice in many everyday decisions.” In other words, we consistently encounter opportunities to say or do things that come with a risk, and we have to decide if we will take the risk or play it safe. All of these phrases – moral imagination, quests, and re-risking – challenge us to step out of our comfort zones and act in ways that make a positive difference in the world. But our steps don’t have to be big, bold actions. In fact, most of the time they start very small and perhaps only impact a few people. But big or small, they are steps that move us forward.
