Fixing a bearing on a viable future
Suppose we’ve digested the previous memo and the idea that innovation without purpose is simply fiddling whilst the world burns.
Let’s continue our transformation journey and imagine we are prototyping a fabulous new Net Zero product that radiates purpose with every ounce of carbon saved.
Could that make things worse? And I don’t mean how the term ‘Net Zero’ has become yet another talisman in the culture wars. But rather, could Net Zero continue to push us over the edge of critical planetary boundaries?
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a handy visual to summarise these scenarios? As luck would have it, there is: the Three Horizons Framework, as envisaged by Bill Sharpe.
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He describes it as:
“a prompt for developing a ‘future consciousness’ – a rich and multifaceted awareness of the future potential of the present moment.”
The future potential of the present moment, wow.
As this great video explainer by Kate Raworth highlights, however, that exciting Horizon Two, where purposeful innovation builds a bridge between the future and the present, can still be co-opted by business as usual, making that viable future of Horizon Three unachievable.
Here, we have both a practical and a spiritual problem. Jason Hickel describes the practicalities in simple terms:
“Clean energy might help deal with emissions, but it does nothing to reverse deforestation, overfishing, soil depletion and mass extinction. A growth-obsessed economy powered by clean energy will still tip us into ecological disaster.”
He’s reminding us about the other eight planetary boundaries along with climate change, specifically the five we are already dangerously beyond: biodiversity loss, land conversion, phosphorous & nitrogen pollution, plastics pollution and freshwater pollution.
It’s also worth considering how change happens; change is not linear. We can’t incrementally edge our way towards a viable future. And nor do we overcome social inertia until we are forced to by an overwhelming crisis such as the one unfolding around us.
We actually need an existential challenge to create change, but there is no point in being half-hearted about it; it will only prolong the agony, by which I mean actual human suffering.
Despite long-standing representations from visionary thinkers (The Limits to Growth, which proved remarkably prescient, was published in 1972 for example), only this time of crisis and collapse has made us realise that we can’t continue with business as usual.
But business as usual also includes busying ourselves with ‘solutions’ that only address symptoms, not causes such as our growth-obsessed economy.
Global material use has more than trebled since 1970, particularly non-metallic minerals, up from 30 billion tonnes per year in 1970 to 106 billion tonnes per year in 2023. And it’s continuing to grow along with pretty much every other indicator of humanity’s ‘progress’ and the demise of the rest of the natural world.
Let’s return to Bill Sharpe for his thoughts on how the Three Horizons Framework describes the problem and, thus, the opportunity:
“We are suffering from an attempt to know our way into the future instead of living our way.”
As long as we continue trying to ‘know’ what to do, we will continue generating solutions such as new products and services that are co-opted by business as usual despite their best intentions (see Sam Rawsons’ related thoughts on ‘The problem with First Horizon Gossip‘ for some great examples of initially promising ideas gobbled up by the growth economy).
If the business generating these green innovations is still geared towards growth, then creating Net Zero, circular economy, or bio-mimicry products and services will continue pushing us over the edge.
We’re continually thinking, ‘What can we do?’ instead of the hardest question that the Three Horizons framework demands of us, ‘What will we stop doing?’.
What should we be helping to die as painlessly as possible, or hospicing, whilst we also nurture the new, as the two-loop model of the Berkana Institute suggests?
Asking and answering that profound question requires both personal and business transformations; only then will we really change direction and move towards that viable future.
That is not to say that we don’t re-orient ourselves via a series of manageable stages; of course, we do, but in doing so, we must keep that viable future fixed as our destination, and that demands an ambition that stretches way beyond ‘Net Zero’.
Otherwise, we will wake up one grim morning and realise all our efforts were simply in service of the same old same old.
In the existential human race between social and environmental tipping points, society is undoubtedly losing—for now.
Only the clearest of visions and the bravest of choices will close the gap.
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