Getting Fit for the Future
&You: Geoff Kendall
We speak to Geoff Kendall about how the Future-Fit Foundation is helping companies see beyond least-worst thinking and move positively towards a flourishing future.
Environmentally restorative, socially just and economically inclusive — these are the conditions necessary for continued and flourishing life on Earth according to the Future-Fit Foundation, a non-profit whose mission is to help business leaders, investors, and policy makers respond authentically to today’s biggest challenges.
It was co-founded by the inimitable Geoff Kendall, a man so forward thinking he gained a PHD in Artificial Intelligence back when AI was nothing more than a dystopian trope in a sci-fi movie.
And that keen eye for foresight was at play back in 2014 when Geoff left a comfy Director role and ploughed everything he had into creating one of the most leading-edge organisations in the sustainable development space today.
The last year has been a big one for the Foundation. It published the second release of its innovative Business Benchmark and welcomed a number of high-profile investment and asset management firms to its Development Council. We caught up with Geoff on a typically wet January afternoon at his local co-working space to find out what the future holds.
We start by asking about the challenges facing business and how Future-Fit is aiming to help. “A few years back The Economist said the only thing we can be certain of in the next 25 years is how uncertain it is all going to be. And causing this uncertainty are three macro level forces affecting how business is done. One is increasing environmental pressures, whether that is climate change, resource scarcity and so on. The second is changes in societal expectations, like the assumption that you get stuff for free, that everything is on demand, that businesses can’t be trusted, etc. And then the third thing is exponentially disruptive technologies, things like gene editing, artificial intelligence and so forth. These three things are affecting every single business sector. But if you’re a business leader and you’re having a hard time just focusing on paying the bills — how are you supposed to make sense of all that stuff?”
“So what we do is we take all of the best thinking out there, all the best systems science and advice from people like The World Economic Forum and the like, and distil it down into clear, freely available guidance on what a company has to aim for and why, and how they measure progress towards that. In a way that will ensure that your company is delivering as much value as possible for society as a whole, while still thriving commercially”.
So far so simple. But how does it actually work? We ask Geoff about the people he works with and what they get in practice. “Most interest is actually in three groups. The first are startups who really care about the impact they’re having in the world, who want to make sense of it and really bake us into their business model. The second is global companies who understand that being a leader in the future is about more than just being slightly better than everyone else. That they need to be trail blazers if we are to get where we need to get to. And the third are investors who care about what their money does. For example pension funds, who are focused on long-term returns. And actually think where do we want to be in thirty years or so”.
Geoff goes on, “ Our main tool is called the Future-Fitness Business Benchmark which sets out the line in the sand that every business needs to eventually reach across all the environmental and social issues. It provides them with a clear destination and a way to measure progress towards it. The first release in 2015 focused on how you get to that line, essentially avoiding causing any harm across your value chain. But everybody is of course also trying to do good, not just to be less bad. And that’s where our recently launched Release 2 comes in. It adds that second bit of the puzzle: what it actually means to do good in the world from a systems perspective. There are many ways that you can do this, such as providing renewable energy, meeting the unmet needs of under-served communities and so on. Release 2 helps you determine and articulate the things you are doing that are positively contributing to society in a way that an investor or a customer could see and think ‘yeah, that has credibility’”.
It’s a compelling vision and one that many high profile businesses have come on board with. The Benchmark already has multinationals such as The Body Shop, Avery Denison, De Beers and Eileen Fisher committed to its goals. So what does the future hold for Future-Fit? “It’s going to be all about raising awareness and increasing adoption of our tools. We’ve had some global institutions come to us and say they want to work with us. We’ve had business schools and professors come to us and say that what we’ve done is now required reading on their MBA programmes. Which is great, but these are isolated pockets at the moment. The entire reason that we set up as a non-profit and to create these things as free public goods is to mirror what happened in the tech sector with open-source software. If you give something away and if it is useful and usable, people will start using it. But you’ve got to make them aware of it. So this year, our focus is on scaling that up as quickly as possible”.
It’s nearly time to finish, Geoff is a busy man after all. If he’s not rushing from one partnership meeting to the next he’s off to speak at a global conference. So we close by asking how someone who is interested can get involved? “All of our stuff is free to download from our website, but we’re conscious that plunging into a detailed 100-page report is not something most people have time for. So, within the next couple of months we’ll be launching a free video crash course that will tell you everything you need to know about how to get started. We’re also soon to launch an online community so that everyone pursuing future-fitness can learn from each other”.
And that’s it, he whisks away, off to infuse the philosophy of Future-Fit into the mind of another willing listener. Something tells us we’ll be seeing a lot more of Future-Fit in the months ahead, and that can only be a good thing for society and the planet.
To find out more visit: futurefitbusiness.org
