{"id":2480,"date":"2026-05-04T09:33:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T09:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/?p=2480"},"modified":"2026-05-14T09:33:56","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T09:33:56","slug":"positive-thinking-as-a-leadership-practice-the-complete-blog-series-in-twelve-parts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbvp.nl\/en\/positive-thinking-as-a-leadership-practice-the-complete-blog-series-in-twelve-parts\/","title":{"rendered":"Positive Thinking as a Leadership Practice \u2014 The Complete Blog Series in Twelve Parts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why We Need to Stop Complaining About the Complaining, and What to Do Instead An introductory blog to the series \u2018Positive Thinking as a Leadership Practice\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Ren\u00e9 de Baaij | u\u0101t\u0113s \u2013 the art of leadership<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Had I wanted this blog to be widely shared, I would have needed to build an alarming frame around it: Dutch organisational culture in crisis, leaders failing, a generation of managers who can no longer tell the difference between critical thinking and structural complaining. But I am not doing that, and the reason is precisely the subject of this series. Robbert Dijkgraaf explained it with great precision recently in NRC: every additional negative word in a news headline increases the probability that people click on it by 2.3 percent, moral outrage is reinforced by social reward and algorithmic attention, and negativity pays. And we all sustain that system, with every click, every shared outrage, every meeting in which we dwell longer on what is going wrong than on what is working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What makes Dijkgraaf\u2019s column remarkable is not that he holds the media or politics to account. There are enough columns of that kind. What distinguishes it is that he ultimately points the finger at himself and at us. \u201cHere lies the painful truth,\u201d he writes: \u201cwe are all, in one way or another, complicit in a culture of negativity.\u201d It is a sentence I could not shake, because I recognise it every week in my work with executives, leadership teams and senior managers. Not as an abstract social phenomenon, but as a very concrete organisational pattern. The gossip that begins as a pressure valve and ends as a toxic undercurrent. The change process that stalls not because the plan is flawed, but because the language in which it is announced stirs fear rather than energy. The manager who calls himself a critical thinker but has in reality become an informed cynic. The team that is connected by shared frustration and therefore never arrives at shared ambition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The core of Dijkgraaf\u2019s argument is a contrast that is equally fundamental for organisations. Science is intrinsically optimistic: problems are cherished as opportunities for breakthroughs, and a colleague of his has a poster on the wall with the text that mathematics is such a drama queen that she cannot possibly have that many problems. Politics, by contrast, is structured around negativity as a business model, because crises mobilise voters and anger generates attention. But this distinction does not run only between science and politics. It runs straight through every organisation, between the leader who sees problems as research questions and the leader who sees them as confirmation of his own rightness, between the culture that celebrates progress and the culture that distrusts success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Positive thinking has an image problem in professional circles, and that image problem is partly deserved. It quickly calls to mind self-help books, the manager who says we all believe in this together while the organisation shakes at its foundations, a cheap optimism that makes reality look better than it is. Dijkgraaf flags that danger too: naive optimism is not an answer, it is an escape. But that is not what I mean, and it is not what science means either. Barbara Fredrickson demonstrated in her broaden-and-build theory that positive emotions broaden our thinking capacity and build lasting cognitive resources, while negative emotions narrow our thinking down to immediate survival. Positive thinking in this sense is not a mood but a discipline, not an attitude but a practised attention to what works, not because the problems are not there, but because that attention increases the capacity to solve them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the coming twelve weeks I will examine that discipline from twelve different angles, always with one foot in the scientific literature and one foot in the daily practice of organisations. The themes range from the neurobiology of our negativity bias, through the role of language in change processes and the breaking of zero-sum thinking in teams, to the daily discipline of attention to what works. Each blog ends with the three questions Dijkgraaf himself poses: where did I see progress today, who did something good, what actually worked. Not as a ritual, but as a deliberate correction for a brain that naturally looks the other way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The American psychiatrist Theodore Rubin formulated the fundamental attitude I want to help revise with this series: the problem is not that there are problems. The problem is that we expect the opposite and believe that having problems is itself a problem. That is precisely the reversal that leadership asks for, not the pretence that everything is fine, but the confidence that problems are solvable and that the way you look at them partly determines whether they become so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That begins next week, with the first blog: on the negativity bias as an evolutionary legacy and what leaders can do to rise deliberately above it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ren\u00e9 de Baaij is an organisational advisor and leadership coach at u\u0101t\u0113s \u2013 the art of leadership, based in Groesbeek, the Netherlands. He guides individuals, teams and organisations through processes of lasting change, with an emphasis on congruent leadership and meaningful connection. This blog series builds on the column by Robbert Dijkgraaf in NRC on negativity, politics and the culture of outrage.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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