Sections TBC... #p/ffw

• My first stupid decision
• The value of unusual punishments
• A toe in the water of work
• Avoiding a job, part 1: doing a PhD
• Avoiding a job, attempt 2: starting my own business
• Trying to transform user interfaces, one swipe at a time
• Finally working for the man
• Finding an escape hatch

Trying to save the world, part 1: sustainability consulting

Around 2010 I learned how bad the climate crisis was, and in response I decided to switch careers, moving from the world of software startups to sustainability consulting. I managed to get a job as Development Director at SustainAbility, a London-based consultancy and think tank founded way back in 1987 by John Elkington who coined the term Triple Bottom Line.

In this new role I was full of hope that I could play a small but meaningful part in nudging the global economy onto a new trajectory — one which would move us ever closer toward a future where humanity and all other life flourish on Earth together. But it didn't take long before my optimism faded, as I witnessed time and again how difficult it was to get people to take rapid and radical action in the face of climate change, biodiversity loss, inequality, and other the systemic crises which are taking society ever closer to the brink of collapse.

Trying to save the world, part 2: defining what it means to be future-fit

I quit my consulting job in 2013 to start Future‑Fit Foundation, in the (now comically naive) belief that the reason for this paralysis was just one of inadequate information. What all economic actors lacked was a clear destination to aim for, and the metrics necessary to measure and guide progress toward it. Our Future‑Fit "hopeothesis" was that if we could fill this need — with a robust, open source methodology that anyone could use for free — businesses would wake up and finally see how and how much their actions needed to change, and would raise their ambitions accordingly. Our aim was to trigger a snowball effect, led by bold companies, supported by far-sighted investors, and — eventually — embraced by regulators.

Looking back, we did a passable job of closing the information gap. The Future‑Fit Business Benchmark was launched to great enthusiasm in 2015, backed by a handful of progressive companies including The Body Shop and Novo Nordisk. Hundreds of consultants around the world started using it, many of whom asked us for training to get the best from it. The methodology has been cited and recommended in dozens of publications from the UN and other high-profile institutions, and its explanations of what's wrong with the economy today and how to fix it have become essential "week one" reading in some of the world's top MBA programmes.

All promising stuff, but none of it translated into meaningful action at scale. Adoption of the Benchmark never took off, and some of the early adopters fell away as their most passionate advocates got disillusioned with the lack of progress and moved on to other organisations. I'd love to say that Future‑Fit put a sizeable dent in the sustainable business agenda, but the truth is that we barely scratched it.

And so last spring, after several years of chasing funding and never securing enough to really build momentum, I decided it was time to move on. I needed to try a different tack, albeit with the same ultimate vision: an economy in service of all life on Earth.

Trying to save the world, part 3: from urgency to agency

While ruminating on what we'd learned at Future-Fit, my colleague Tom Bregman and I reached three conclusions:

• First, we were right about the need for a clear destination. Incremental thinking didn't put a man on the moon — and if that route had been taken we'd still be at the top of Everest looking up. Businesses will be just as doomed if they try to respond to today's systemic challenges in an incremental way.
• Second, the barriers to fundamental change within organisations are huge — but from our experience working with wannabe Future-Fit companies, the behaviours needed to overcome those barriers are strikingly consistent across businesses of every shape and size.
• Third, those same behaviours are the key to building business resilience in today's world — but they can't be outsourced.

This last point is underscored in a new book: The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies. As the authors put it, “The more governments and businesses outsource, the less they know how to do.”

Relying on consultants to drive change in your organisation is like paying someone to go to the gym on your behalf, in the hope that their effort will make you fit. That won't work, but consultants encourage it anyway. Since they aim to maximise billable hours, it's not in their interest to get you into shape so that you can do your own heavy lifting in the future.

To build your organisational muscles for change you need the right guidance at the right time, backed up by a team of world-class coaches to help you apply it.

My new hopeothesis is founded in the belief that Future-Fit only solved half the problem: it instilled in people the urgency for change, but they still lacked the agency to make it happen. That's the gap we're attempting to close at Transition Agency, through a new "Business Resilience as a Service" model which seeks to be the antidote to business consulting. Watch this space!