Hero Work: Building Capacity, Courage, and Compassion in Challenging Times
The mystery and mythology of superheroes has long taken up considerable space on our cultural bookshelves -- from the ancient swordsmen of Chinese literature, to the mind-readers and magicians of the Middle East, to the Musketeers of Victorian novels, to the modern mutants and intergalactic avengers of contemporary comics.
The evolved capabilities of our most imaginative heroes are matched only by their seemingly endless reserve of courage and moral clarity. They call upon powers seemingly far beyond our human limitations to right what has been wronged, to intervene when all seems lost.
These colorful characters externalize one of our deepest hopes: that when disaster is on the horizon, we will find the heroes among us. When needed most, these special few will burst from the shadows behind us, emerge from the phone booth, the library, the cave, and lead us to triumph and rescue.
Embedded right here, these stories claim, hidden in plain sight, is some larger competency, something bolder and braver and more magical.
Our extraordinary and exigent times call for heroes no less remarkable.
In our companies that struggle to make work inclusive and human.
In our supply chains clumsy in their attempt to restore responsibility to people and planet.
Among our corporate cultures that mistake metrics for meaning.
In our communities divided by ideology and inequality.
Among our families and friendships atomized by technology.
These are not hopeless times. They are hero times. And the world—your world—can wait no longer.
And therein is the great gift of hero stories: not in the fantastical but in the functional. In these dramatic arcs we can identify a framework for our own emergence into hero work. Not only in the most famous of hero’s journeys, but even more so in the secret history of heroinism, where bold women marshalled skills of storytelling and community to change history in ways our culture is just now remembering, honoring and promoting. Their actions and archetypes offer us a journey map -- a way to identify key values and internal resources required to step more boldly into Hero Work, to lead the conversations we need to have, and the work we need to do.
Whatever challenges you face—to form a team, to finalize a product, to foster a community, to fix a failed partnership, to future-proof a company—you face one challenge above all: to heed the hero stirring within you, and to activate the remarkable human capacity to shape the world we wish to have.
