Building in the In-Between
5 minute read
Field Notes is a series by The Beautiful Truth, where the TBT team share their contemporary takes on workplace challenges.
Twenty years ago, many of the questions now troubling business leaders would have been dismissed as thought experiments. Interesting perhaps, but too distant from the realities of 2005 to merit serious attention. And yet, one by one, those questions have moved from speculation into lived experience.
Never Miss A Story
What would happen if the global financial system crashed? That arrived in 2007. Would the way we communicate fundamentally change? YouTube launched in 2005, Facebook arrived in the UK in 2006, Twitter soon after. A global pandemic followed in 2020. Electric cars became commercially viable with the Tesla Roadster in 2008. Solar energy costs have fallen by around 90 percent since 2005. The average global temperature reached 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels in 2024. A reality TV presenter became President of the United States in 2016, and again in 2024. And as for the Spice Girls reuniting, some questions remain unanswered.
“The future rarely looks like the past, or even much like the present.”
What this sequence makes clear is something we should have learnt by now. The future rarely looks like the past, or even much like the present. Geopolitical shifts, technological advancements, demographic change, climate breakdown and biodiversity loss are just some of the forces creating disruption and unpredictability, challenging assumptions that have underpinned our economies and societies for decades.
In some ways, this is nothing new. Human history is a story of change and adaptation. But it does feel possible that we are living through a particularly significant liminal moment, a space between paradigms. The dominant worldview of the last half-century is losing its grip, while a new one, shaped by environmental limits, social expectations and technological power, is still coming into view. As Gramsci observed, this is the time of monsters. But it is also a time of possibility. Multiple futures are available to us, and the decisions taken now will make some more likely than others.
“This is the time of monsters. But it is also a time of possibility.”
This raises a fundamental question about the role of business in shaping what comes next. Should organisations simply adapt to new conditions as best they can, guided by the assumptions of the past fifty years, broadly speaking, maximising profit within the law and treating people as resources in service of that goal? Or should business actively help shape the emerging paradigm, guided by different assumptions altogether?
Those assumptions might include the idea that a business exists to generate value for society, with profit as a necessary outcome rather than the overriding objective. They might also include a commitment to treating people as human beings with inherent dignity, not simply as inputs to be deployed. From this perspective, important questions follow. How might organisations built on these foundations be better suited to a changing world? Might they be more trusted by stakeholders, more in tune with their context, and therefore more able to adapt and thrive in a future that does not resemble the past? And to what extent does the health of the social and environmental systems on which we all depend require business to work differently, in partnership with government and civil society?
These questions are no longer abstract. They have already sparked countless conversations, experiments and initiatives. The B Corp movement continues to grow, offering tangible examples of businesses that pursue pro-social purpose while meeting standards far higher than the legal minimum. Regulation is evolving as governments attempt to keep pace with public expectations and emerging technologies, setting new baselines for acceptable behaviour.
Economists are developing alternative models of success that aim to deliver genuine human flourishing within planetary boundaries, rather than relying on GDP as a proxy for progress. AI ethicists are engaged in what has been described as philosophy with a deadline, racing to ensure that powerful technologies are directed towards outcomes that improve life for people now and in the future. Impact investors are working to redirect capital towards social and environmental good, while still generating returns. Citizens’ assemblies are opening up new forms of democratic participation. Leaders across business, politics, education and healthcare are wrestling with complexity in pursuit of better outcomes for people and the planet.
We need all of this. Faced with vast forces of disruption, it can be tempting to respond with passivity or fatalism, assuming our only option is to adapt to whatever comes next. But that overlooks the many ways in which individuals and organisations are already imagining better futures and inventing practical ways to bring them into being.
“Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the action that is taken depends upon the ideas that are lying around.”
Milton Friedman
As Milton Friedman once observed, “only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the action that is taken depends upon the ideas that are lying around.” We have no shortage of crises. What we need is an abundance of ideas for how to make the future better for everyone. We need everything, everywhere, all at once. And perhaps Friedman’s words are best held alongside a line from the film of that name, “Please, be kind. Especially when we don’t know what’s going on.”
None of us really knows what the world will look like in another twenty years. The Spice Girls may yet surprise us. But while the future is unlikely to resemble the past, if it is to be kinder and better, it will be because we dared to imagine that it was possible, and then built the kinds of businesses that helped make it so.
