As I sat down on a Sunday afternoon to write this article, I reached out for inputs from my Twitter circle. I was taken aback by the number of tweets that talked of gloom and doom. Not a surprise though, as the prophets of doom outnumbered the congregation in Davos too. While enough has been said about what is wrong with the world and I agree with most of it, as I reflected on my five days at the World Economic Forum, something just did not add up.

Let me explain what I mean there – Imagine that you and I were on a ledge of a building that is on fire. I guess we have three options. Call for a fire brigade and hope it comes on time, take a risk and jump to safety or do nothing and simply shout for help in hope that someone will come and save us. As I looked around the attendees at Davos, many were indeed shouting for help, but I was in search for people who were “doing” something to save themselves and the building. Fortunately, I did find them in a good number and was able to see the outlines of a vivid rainbow on the Davos sky.

Talking to Nobel Laureates , CEOs and world leaders, I came back with a firm view that we are in a challenging phase but definitely not at the ‘beginning of the end’ ! The global economy, is still growing, it’s expected to grow 2.2% this year if not more. And most CEOs in Davos believed that the US too may deliver a positive surprise, backed by a 2.8% growth in the last quarter. So how does one explain the noise?

A prominent economist I met at Davos defined it as “solid at the core with turbulence at the edges” . Although there’s a lot of turbulence at the periphery, which is generating a lot of noise, core countries and companies are doing well. For example, while Greece and Italy are experiencing economic turmoil, Germany at the core is growing.

Similarly, good companies are growing, though some companies on the edges who have got their strategy wrong are struggling to remain relevant. Global institutions are largely intact and we are solving more and more problems through conversation and dialogue, not war. The world economy seems to be driven by three factors – fundamentals, policy and confidence . While fundamentals continue to be strong at the core and the right policy frameworks are being debated and decided, the real challenge is around confidence. The consensus at Davos was that if confidence can be restored , an economic resurgence will undoubtedly follow.

This call for optimism was also writ large in the Forum’s agenda this year, which sought to find solutions for fixing economic disparity that is threatening social unrest . The solution, most people felt, was not to kill capitalism , which has brought us to our steadily improving world, but to adapt it to changing times. Another hope that ran adjacent was the increasing clout of the emerging markets . Interestingly , this acknowledgment of a shift in economic power toward emerging economies was accompanied by a ‘softening’ of the problem definition. Sessions mulling on ‘value context’ , ‘wise leadership’ and ‘ethical dilemmas’ were full to their seams. And for the first time ever I noticed that the Davos vocabulary, which used to have a strongly economic cast, today includes terms like ‘moral compass’!

I would like to believe that this “spiritualization of Davos” brought in a well-meaning determination in most dialogues. In the cross-industry CEO meeting on job creation , for example, it was clear to me that most companies both planned to hire more people and build new pools of workforce. There was a sense of urgent commitment in the room, a collective ownership of the problem and a collective resolve to solve it.

What more can one expect ? Rome was not built in a day and neither can we hope to solve all the global problems in one shot or at one place. There are many issues indeed that need to be resolved today, but their number or scale is not any less than what it was a decade ago or will be in the one ahead. Human evolution is always accompanied by new challenges; the important point is not to be overwhelmed by them. At Davos I saw tremendous resolve on the faces of some of the brightest brains in the world to solve the problems in front of us. I believe that is enough reason for us to be pragmatic if not optimistic and more importantly to keep the faith. If we could only lift our eyes and look up…there is a rainbow on the horizon and it’s only getting brighter by the day.

Originally published in Times of India. You can read the article here