“We are ill-prepared to respond to the gravity of the tsunami that is coming.”

What is 2035?

2035 is an initiative for businesses to host a future-focused senior team and/or boardroom meeting to radically reimagine the people, priorities and processes needed to meet climate change and other relevant issues of our polycrisis over the next 11 years.

2035 is an invitation for organisations and businesses to go beyond sustaining BAU and into conversations that really matter and that allow the innovative, disruptive and adaptive changes required to emerge. 

2035 is based on the open-source B-Labs idea Boards 2030. The experience generates deep, disruptive shifts in understanding about the sort of changes and new territory people and organisations will find themselves in. Learnings and insights from a conversation based around future scenarios are surprisingly impactful challenging existing thinking on:

• Organisational Strategy
• Business Models 
• Risk
• Supply Chain
• Organisational and human capacities

As part of the process, when people come back into a 2024 conversation informed with insights and learnings, a new sense of what is important is generated that creates energy and possibilities on how to take next steps, consider contingencies and risk for the organisation and the whole sector. 

Every choice, every decision about what is helpful is vital. Many of the less difficult choices and actions have been done. Businesses and organisations now need to move on to the most difficult issues to find simple and effective choices and actions. 2035 is a way to help you see and understand what innovations, prototypes and adaptations work for your organisation and your sector. 

Why is 2035 critical now for senior leadership teams and boards?

The basis of business is being questioned. To meet this, businesses and organisations need to let go of familiar ground to explore, but still need enough familiar ground to function. Leaders can sense this but are feeling uncertain about how to navigate the diversity of opinions that exist and the seemingly entrenched institutions and influences of power.

Many people share similar concerns, and it is critically important that people come together to explore these difficult questions. 2035 can help you hold and navigate these conversations so they are not so difficult.

Many organisations and sectors won’t survive unless they start to think in disruptive and innovative ways.

“Exponential change takes time but when it comes it has a profound impact.”

Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 2023

There are differing potential 2035 futures for your industry and sector depending on the extent of climate breakdown and your sector’s embrace of transformative adaptation. All the alternative scenarios are driven ultimately by taking greenhouse gas reduction and transformative adaptation/resilience-building seriously. However, the answer to other crises like wars, disruptions in the supply chain, technology disruptions, floods, migration etc. will equally inform your orientation.

Businesses and organisations need to move beyond bureaucratic tick box approaches to ‘sustainability’ and move rapidly into adaptive changes. 2035 is a critical step on the journey, and it will generate prototypes, innovations and shifts that feel real, that are authentic, that cohere, and that stand up to scrutiny.

A single company or organisation cannot make the changes alone and survive, whole sectors need to go together. Fraendi is working alongside the Climate Majority Project on their business campaign looking to work with whole sectors to ask the government to regulate sectors. Fraendi is part of hosting these much needed conversations, where we have been inviting in the leaders who are holding their power and wisdom well in these critical times.

What will happen during 2035?

2035 is experiential and Fraendi will prepare with you and co-host a lively, thought provoking 1⁄2 day senior management or board meeting, as if it is 2035.

It involves a three stage process:

1. Getting Ready

• Meet, connect and prepare with colleagues and diverse stakeholders. Deep dive into future scenarios and implications for your organisation and sector and how to hold difficult and inspiring conversations around this.
• Research and interview new voices and diverse stakeholders to inform future scenarios.
• Share perspectives and find common ground.
• Align on the 2035 meeting design based on scenarios and strategic questions that will underpin the simulated experience.

2. The Simulation

Fraendi will collaborate with you to host a half-day senior management or board meeting, as if in 2035.

3. Review & Next Steps

Reflection and review conversation (90 minutes) to deepen and awaken disruptive thinking, key insights, possibilities and pragmatic or bold next steps.

Outcomes – Getting Real

Walk away with:

• A deeper understanding of the resilience of your business model and identified areas of risk, possibly mapped against probability and impact on the business
• Clarity on future senior leadership team capacities required to meet the change and disruption of the next decade
• A clearer sense of how to adapt to broader organisational needs within an increasingly disruptive environment and multiple complex challenges

Everything we do now to adapt to what is coming makes a difference.