The Norwegian George Harbo was 32 and his fellow countryman Frank Samuelson was 26. In 1896, they invested all the money that had saved into a six-meter wooden boat. They had a very clear ambition: they wanted to be the first to row from the USA to Europe. From New York to Le Havre in France, a journey of over 5.000 km or about 2.700 nautical miles. In those days such an adventureous journey was considered completely crazy. The New York Herald wrote on 6 June 1986: “They are very confident that fortune is ahead of them, but seafaring men say it is nothing short of suicide”.

Harbo and Samuelson packed their boat with the necessary provisions: almost 200 liter of water, canned beef and ham, biscuits, coffee and eggs. To navigate their way to Europe, they carried a compass and a sextant. That’s it. Harbo and Samuelson calculated that they would arrive in France in 54 days. After several weeks on the Atlantic Ocean, they crossed the German steamer SS Fürst Bismarck, an ocean liner that did transatlantic crossings between Hamburg and New York. The New York Herald described the meeting as follows: “The captain of the liner waited until they got within hearing distance and then shouted, “Are you shipwrecked?” “No. Bound for Europe.” “In that boat? Never. Better let me take you back.” “Thanks, no,” they replied. “Are you crazy?” “No, indeed.”
Every ship they met on the ocean offered to carry them home, but Harbo and Samuelson would not be persuaded. Rough water, near-death experiences and heavy storms did not stop them and they finally arrived at Le Havre on 7 August 1896. That was 62 days after leaving New York.

If you look at their achievement in hindsight, it was a truly heroic journey. Harbo and Samuelson were the first to cross the ocean in such a small boat and for 114 years it was also bookmarked as the fastest crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Today, rowing or kayaking across the Atlantic is no longer an exception. However, most people take advantage of the subtropical current by going from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean. Harbo and Samuelson took a more demanding route: from west to east across the volatile North Atlantic Ocean. Their record was finally broken in 2010 when CNN headlined on 1 August “Team breaks North Atlantic rowing record”: “The Artemis Ocean Racing team, led by Leven Brown, finished in 43 days, 21 hours, 26 minutes and 48 seconds, knocking more than 11 days off the 55-day record set by a pair of Norwegians in 1896”.

The biggest achievement of George Harbo and Frank Samuelson was that they changed the perception of what is possible – and that’s exactly also what inspiring leaders do when they communicate. In “The Leadership Challenge”, James Kouzes and Barry Posner argue that “leaders are possibility thinkers, not probability thinkers”. That sentence captures for me the essence of inspirational leadership communication quite well. There are so many situations in life that involve some elements that you can change and some that you cannot. The critical skill is spotting the difference.

As probability thinkers, inspiring leaders create options and they don’t let barriers cloud their vision. History is full of examples of possibility thinkers who envisioned something that did not yet exist but could become reality by ignoring limitations: the Wright Brothers who made failure their friend and who pointed out possibilities that the whole world thought were unattainable or that they never dared to dream or expect. Or Robert Bannister, the first man who ever managed to run one mile in less than four minutes. They all saw possibilities instead of limitations. They all dreamed one size bigger and that had an inspiring effect. Nelson Mandela was that type of leader too.

On 10 May 1994, he was inaugurated as President of South Africa in Pretoria. The speech he gave showed that it was possible to go against a wrong system and that change was possible: “Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another and suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the world. Let freedom reign. The sun shall never set on so glorious a human achievement!”

As probability thinkers, inspiring leaders also create a new perception of reality: they help people forget their limitations and they affirm the possibilities and the joint capabilities of their team. In their communication, they focus on people’s strengths and contributions. In his classic book “The Effective Executive”, published in 1967, management guru Peter Drucker wrote: “Strengths are the true opportunities”. So when leaders want to inspire, they focus on strengths. They remind people of their positive qualities and of what they are capable of accomplishing. That’s how they create possibilities in the people they lead – even if their current performance is below par. They know that current performance is not an indicator, but a hypothesis.

To change the perception of what is possible, they also help people to forget their failures – simply because inspiring leaders are immune to the recency effect. The recency effect is a psychological term that simply means the most recent experiences we go through are the ones we are likely to remember and we assume those experiences will continue into the future. Inspiring leaders are immune to the recency effect because they understand that no difficult situation is ever as bad as it seems in the moment. They understand that the last thing that happened is almost never an indication about what’s coming next. Indeed, the past does not always contain the best information about the future. Finally, these leaders also understand that the linear thinking of simple cause-effect reasoning, often so typical of the human mind, is not always a good tool to inspire actions and decisions.

So if things go wrong, they take the long view and they see the big picture, reminding their colleagues of the long-term. At the same time, they acknowledge that there can be hard times ahead, but they combine it with a “we can do this together” attitude. In his inauguration speech in 1994, Mandela said: “We understand it still that there is no easy road to freedom. We know it well that none of us acting alone can achieve success. We must therefore act together as a united people, for national reconciliation, for nation building, for the birth of a new world”. Uniting people to make a vision possible is a key characteristic of an inspiring leader.

Uniting people is also what New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern did during her lockdown speech on 23 March 2020: “Together we have an opportunity to contain the spread and prevent the worst. I cannot stress enough the need for every New Zealander to follow the advice I have laid out today. The Government will do all it can to protect you. Now I’m asking you to do everything you can to protect us all. None of us can do this alone. Your actions will be critical to our collective ability to stop the spread of COVID-19”.

In the 1950s, National Public Radio (NPR) in the USA broadcast a series called “This I Believe”. It was hosted by the famous journalist Edward R. Murrow and it became a real cultural phenomenon. According to NPR, eighty-five leading newspapers printed a weekly column based on ‘This I Believe’. A collection of essays published in 1952 sold 300,000 copies – second only to the Bible that year. The series was also translated and broadcast around the globe on the Voice of America. In 2006, NPR revived that popular radio programme and wrote on its website about the the history of “This I believe”: “Each day, some 39 million Americans gathered by their radios to hear compelling essays from the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Robinson, Helen Keller and Harry Truman as well as corporate leaders, cab drivers, scientists and secretaries — anyone able to distill into a few minutes the guiding principles by which the lived. Their words brought comfort and inspiration to a country worried about the Cold War, McCarthyism and racial division”.

In those days, one of the speakers was Jackie Robinson, a famous athlete and the first black person to play Major League Baseball. After his successful baseball career, he campaigned against racial segregation. This is what he said in his 1952 speech “I believe in the human race” on NPR: “I believe that imperfections are human (…) I do not believe that every person, in every walk of life, can succeed in spite of any handicap. That would be perfection. But I do believe – and with every fiber in me – that what I was able to attain came to be because we put behind us (no matter how slowly) the dogmas of the past: to discover the truth of today; and perhaps find the greatness of tomorrow. I believe in the human race. I believe in the warm heart. I believe in man’s integrity. I believe in the goodness of a free society. And I believe that the society can remain good only as long as we are willing to fight for it – and to fight against whatever imperfections may exist”.

Jackie Robinson believed in the human race. Ask yourself the question now: what do I believe in as a leader? What do I deeply believe in? If you want to inspire your audience, you should adopt a two-dimentional communication approach: focus on what you know, which is the left-brain part of your communication, but focus especially also on what believe – the right-brain part of your message.

To build confidence, inspiring leaders will use the language of belief – not just the language of facts. When challenges are high, your audience is yearning from something to believe in, something that will help them to stay on course. By going deeper and by going beyond the facts of the day, you increase your impact, your inspirational power and the transformational effect of your words.

Inspiring leaders know that belief creates vision and strength when times or challenges ahead are tough. When expressing a belief, you make the invisible visible. You make visible what has not yet materialized or what has not yet been accomplished. Think of J.F. Kennedy who said in his Moon speech in 1961 “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth”. And then he continued by explaining the path to do so: “We propose to accelerate the development of the appropriate lunar space craft. We propose to develop alternate liquid and solid fuel boosters, much larger than any now being developed, until certain which is superior. We propose additional funds for other engine development and for unmanned explorations–explorations which are particularly important for one purpose which this nation will never overlook: the survival of the man who first makes this daring flight. But in a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon–if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there”.

During the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara (Mexico) in September 2016, Elon Musk delivered a speech about the SpaceX Mars architecture and his ambition to make humans a multiplanetary species. His words are a nice example of the power of communicating highly ambitious goals and sparking strategic imagination: “One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event. The alternative is to become a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species. So how do we figure out how to take you to Mars and create a self-sustaining city? A city that it is not merely an outpost, but could become planet in its own right, and thus we could become a truly multi-planet species”. Furthermore he adds “If we could warm Mars up, we would once again have a thick atmosphere and liquid oceans.”

With that speech, Elon Musk made people dream. He communicated an aspirational goal to his audience and by doing so he planted a compelling and inspiring image in their mind. What also added to the inspiring and magnetic effect of his message was the fact that he focused on the extreme rather than the average. It makes me think of what Kennedy said: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”.

Focusing on the extreme is also what John Chambers did in 2010 as CEO of Cisco. Everybody who was new at the company received his 3-minute video message that he ended by saying “We set long term goals and we almost always achieve those. We have no fear about entering a new market or taking on new peers in the industry but we have a lot of healthy paranoia about what could go wrong. And we are setting an aspirational goal that many will say is impossible to achieve but I think we can. To become the best in the world and the best for the world”.

If you as leader want to stretch your ambitions and your strategy, you first have to stretch people’s thinking. The goal of John Chambers’ message was to inspire his colleagues to greatness – which is, after all, what true leadership is all about, isn’t it? Setting high standards, without making unreasonable demands, can force imaginative thinking – especially so if you as a speaker also convey confidence in achieving them. By doing so, you also enhance people’s self-esteem and self-worth.

In your next presentation, it’s that (sometimes crazy-sounding) ‘message from the future’ that could become an inflection point for your audience to reimagine the potential of the company or their potential as a team.

In fact, I couldn’t agree more with a statement in Rotman Magazine in September 2019: “Companies need to learn to compete on imagination, which lies upstream of innovation: in order to realize new possibilities, we first need inspiration (a reason to see things differently) and then imagination (the ability to identify possibilities that are not currently the case but could be)”. Think about it: great 21st century inventions like robotic exoskeletons, touchscreen glass, capsule endoscopy, e-readers or Elon Musk’s multi-use rockets would never have been possible without first imagining them. The chief source of all these inventions was indeed imagination.

However, in an era where success has become less permanent, it’s a pity that some companies create an imagination gap by focusing blindly on the short term. Dear leaders of the world, you have an obligation to imagine. So dare to shake reality and set highly ambitious goals.

Sociologist Murray Davis once stated this: “If you want to be interesting, challenge the (weakly held) assumptions  of your audience”.  However, it may be interesting to add a nuance here.

Some weeks ago, I spoke at a leadership conference in Germany and what I typically do in my keynotes is not only highlighting the counterintuitive, the unexpected or the overlooked.  I especially focus also on obvious insights.  I deeply believe there is a high value in obvious insights.  It’s not a must to always put such a high premium on the unexpected.  Yes indeed, the banal is not boring at all.  Even more, spreading obvious insights in the workplace is often the most powerful force for change.  And why?  Because common sense is not always common practice.  If you would ask managers what “smart productivity” looks like – just to take an example – they will perfectly explain you the critical factors.  However, the key is to get them to act on that insight, and that’s where the obvious can help.

What I do as a speaker – and what leaders could also do on a daily basis – is this: I try to make obvious insights more intriguing.  It’s difficult to explain how I do that, but let me give an example.  You can make obvious insights more interesting and more impactful by quantifying the big impact of small changes.  Take this example: is it obvious that you will be more productive if your desk is near a high performer? Probably.  But would you have guessed that sitting near a single star appears to boost your productivity by 15%?  Probably not.  Is it obvious that you will be more motivated if you find out how your work benefits others?  Of course.  But did you know that meeting a single person who benefited from your work could be enough to double your effort and triple your productivity?

Voilà,  do you get the point?  Your data don’t always have to say something new if they say something true.  And that’s how obvious insights can have real impact.