Hope Is Not a Strategy

Toni Peters. October 28, 2026.

What twenty years in wind energy taught a woman who writes about hope.

On Sundays, I write to you about faith. About purpose. About chariots on a hill you can’t see until your eyes are opened. I am, for lack of a better word, the hope lady.

On Mondays, I go to work and help kill budgets.

I don’t lead with that at parties. It doesn’t pair well with the faith writing, and it takes a minute to explain. But I’ve spent more than two decades in the wind energy industry, and I love it, and I want to tell you about the day one sentence from a conference room lodged itself in my brain and never left.

Budget season

We were outside Houston, deep in budget season. If you’ve never done a corporate budget cycle, picture this: a windowless room, too much coffee, and a spreadsheet the size of a small country. Our job was to go farm by farm, every wind site in the region, and find money. Cut a cost here. Squeeze an efficiency there. Then roll it all up into one regional number clean enough to send to headquarters without flinching. We were hunting margin. We wanted the bottom line healthy, and healthy bottom lines do not appear because you were nice to the spreadsheet.

Somewhere in hour three, someone floated a cost-cutting idea. A teammate looked at it, thought about it, and said the most human thing a tired person can say in a budget meeting:

“I hope that’ll work.”

And one of our Service Area Managers, a man not known for speeches, looked up and said, flat as a level floor:

“Hope is not a strategy.”

Reader, I nearly applauded.

Which is a little rich, coming from me. I had, at that point, already started writing about hope in my off hours. Hope as a lifeline. Hope as the thing that carries you through the fire. And there I was in a fluorescent-lit room in Texas, nodding hard at a man telling a room full of adults that hope would not, in fact, lower our cost per megawatt.

Both things are true. That’s the part I want to talk about. But first I have to confess something embarrassing.

I love a strategic plan

I mean I love it. I have two bachelor’s degrees and an MBA, and nothing makes me happier than a real plan with a measurable goal, action items, honest deadlines, milestones you can actually check, and a column for what we’ll do when reality laughs at the first three. Show me accountability and a clean set of milestones and I will get more excited than a grown woman probably should. My family has watched this happen. They’re used to it. It’s a thing.

So the SAM was singing my song. Because here’s what twenty years in this industry taught me about the difference between a plan that works and a plan that doesn’t, and hope has nothing to do with either one.

A solid plan. Clear goal, real action items, deadlines with teeth, milestones, room to adjust when the wind does something the forecast didn’t. That plan, executed, moves the number. Every time. Not always in the direction you wanted, but it moves, and you can see why, and you can steer.

A weak plan. Vague goals, fuzzy milestones, nobody actually accountable, communication that dies somewhere between the meeting and the doing. That plan produces frustration, low morale, and a bottom line that limps. Also every time. And no amount of hoping at it has ever once nudged it back into the black. I’ve watched people hope at a bad plan with real sincerity. The plan did not care.

So the SAM was right. At work, hope is not a strategy. I’d put it on the wall if the wall weren’t already covered in safety posters.

But I went back to my hotel room that night still turning it over, because I’m me, and I couldn’t quite let it sit as clean as it sounded in the room.

Where the hope lady and the budget lady shake hands

Hope was never supposed to be the strategy. That was never its job. Hope is the reason you sit down and build the strategy in the first place. It’s the thing that says this is worth the windowless room and the giant spreadsheet and the hard conversation about accountability. Hope points at a future worth the work. Then you still have to do the work. The two just clock in on different shifts.

I’ve lived the version of this that has nothing to do with wind farms. I’ve spent seasons of my life hoping. Hoping something would change, hoping a situation would fix itself, hoping and praying and waiting for a different life to arrive on its own. It didn’t. Not once. What changed things was hope followed by a plan followed by actually doing the thing. Hope opened the door. My feet had to walk through it.

God can part a whole sea.
You’ve still got to walk across the floor of it.

So I keep both hats, and I’ve made peace with the pair of them. On Sunday I’ll tell you hope is worth everything. On Monday I’ll tell a room full of colleagues that hope is not a strategy. And I mean both, all the way down.

The folks at work don’t know about the Sunday hat.

Now you do.