Category: Blogs

“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.

Recruiting for Senior Leadership positions is costly and high risk. Fraendi can help you reduce that risk and hire well by using our Leadership Profiles. Leadership profiles use the best researched Harvard based profiles to look into enabling factors in a person and what they are capable of, and look into the mind and thinking of people. They will help you recruit ambitious leaders that have the inner development and skills to meet the novel and complex challenges that businesses and organisations are facing today. 

Today’s leaders face an increasing number of novel and complex challenges within a multitude of contexts and require a particular set of developmental skills to navigate these well. Leaders are being called to lead in the face of the unknown and uncertain. Leadership is no longer mainly about ensuring stability or the question of adapting to a huge technological shift. There is a strong demand for a more in-depth ability to perceive what is actually happening, create orientation and clarity when there is general uncertainty and to make decisions without knowing in advance what the outcome will be. 

These living strategies are vital for your business or organisation and yet, only leaders with a particular leadership profile have the skills to enable them to meet and navigate within these living systems.

What is the cost of recruiting Leaders who cannot meet today’s challenges?

Remember the Senior Leadership hire that started out full of ambition, single-minded focus and created expectation that was so attractive to the business but was unable to sustain or deliver over the medium term. 

The pattern of this ‘tunnel view’ approach reveals itself over time in one or more symptoms:

• toxic leadership, 
• micromanagement, 
• harassment 
• increasing numbers of complaints.

Remember the disappointment, dysfunction and damage that emerged as the vitality of the organisation waned and instead of breakthroughs, black holes began to appear. Remember how the team(s) became a high stress, low energy workforce and a breakdown in trust began to take over. Perhaps, for example, after an initial boost in sales in the first year that the following 2-5 years showed a drop in quality and expectations and long term client relationships began to fray. By the time you realised what was happening the damage had been done and this leader, who lacked empathy, had no sense or awareness of the damage they were creating. 

These leaders have a self-orientated profile.

What skills and abilities does a leader with the most suitable developmental profile bring?

A leader with the most suitable developmental profile has a self orientation that allows them to be self-authoring. At first appearance these leaders may seem less ambitious than people with a self-orientated profile because they are calibrating the opportunities they are living within with their own principles and view of the world. In interviews these leaders might not sell themselves as strongly as a person with a self-orientated profile.

We have all met these leaders as our boss or colleague at some point in our lives. They are distinguished by: 

• Independence of thought and judgement
• Developed sense of empathy
• Ability to take difficult decisions well and with consideration
• Ability to articulate own principles 
• Skills to create reliable lasting relationships 
• Ability to calibrate well and choose differently
• Share their inner worlds and can reflect on it

The pattern of this self-authoring approach reveals itself over time in the ability to:

• Recognise and navigate within the complexity
• Deliver systems growth (not just self growth)
• See and live well within the systems they are part of – perceive seemingly unrelated relationships
• Evolve a generative vitality that can sustain, adapt, transform or metamorphosize

These are the leaders that can deliver a living strategy for the business when the ground is unknown and uncertain.

How can leadership profiles tell the difference between leadership patterns?

If at first glance self-orientated and self-authored profiles can appear similar what will allow you to discern the difference at the hiring stage?

Leadership profiles differ because of the quality of the 50-minute in depth interview/conversation. In most interviews a self-orientated profile will be able to ‘hide’ and ‘play the game’ of what you want to hear. The leadership profile interview counteracts these tendencies such that after a while a self-orientated profile cannot sustain ‘playing the game’ and will drop into the reality of where their lived centre of gravity really is. 

A self-authored person will want to share their inner worlds and reflect on it, revealing rather than hiding themselves and embracing the conversation as an enriching process. As generative people they like the interview/conversation and learn a lot from it. 

The leadership leadership profiles allow you to:

• Go behind the mask and look into enabling factors a person has developed
• Understand what their inner development capacities are and are capable of
• Identify the edges of current perception and ground for action
• Deconstruct how people define opportunities
  •  how they see organisations as systems
  •  how they can meet and navigate complexity

If these profiles interest you, to find out more or to organise for an assessment for yourself or a colleague, please email: hema@fraendi.org

Family businesses are complex living systems that contribute to the wider weave of contexts and communities in which they ‘live’ – family, economy, ecology, culture, education, history, etc. So, what would happen if instead of focussing on what the ‘definition’ of a family business is, we shift perspective and explore where the edge of a family business might be and what strategies coalesce to maintain its vitality.

Where is the edge of a business?

If you reflect on this question it can become quite tricky to pinpoint. A family business is in some ways like a gathering. There are plenty of examples of family businesses who consider their employees as ‘extended family’ and family businesses can often comprise one or more families. So where is the edge? Is it in the family, the extended family, the customers, within the bricks and mortar building (if one exists), is it in the numbers in the Annual Report? And what happens if your family business holds 350-years of history in its craft, in its buildings and across many other contexts – now what has happened to the edge of the business?

A Living Strategy

The wisdom of not reducing a family business to one ’thing’, is that it invites us to consider how the business lives, and how it can continue as a vital business. At the present time businesses are facing a polycrisis and business as usual no longer seems to apply. Businesses are required to be resilient, flexible, curious, playful, to embrace uncertainty and to own their complexity.

And that resilience, flexibility, curiousness, playfulness, embracing of uncertainty and owning complexity requires more than a response or reaction to outside ‘threats’, it also invites the opportunity for leadership to emerge in new ways and with new possibilities through ‘inner development’. What kind of leadership is required to navigate the polycrisis? And where does leadership reside in a family business? What new skills and strategies might be helpful to care for a family business and tend to the unfolding crisis at the same time?

One possibility is to imagine the business as a living system and to develop a living strategy that weaves into a collective development to navigate the uncertainty. Strategy after all is everything that a family business does, all its interactions, its way of being, which has an effect on the outside world. A good strategy makes this explicit, understandable and actionable for employees and stakeholders. It is alive.

Fraendi’s Living Strategy process is a holistic, dynamic, self-regulating methodology designed to help leadership teams chart new paradigm-shifting pathways and build purposeful objectives for stakeholders and decision-makers alike. If a family business strategy could respond and adapt with care, compassion and tenderness for all that is present – how might that emerge as a strategy? It will be different for each family business because each family business lives in its own unique complexity, and is part of a larger weave.

Often a family business is already taking a long term and sustainable view within its overall strategy, looking generations back and forward to craft a way forward that lives in ideas of stewardship and of being custodians for future generations. And this is complex as there is a constant need to allow outdated strategies to die off at the same time as tending the soil for resilient, adaptive strategies to emerge and support the business and wider ecologies longer term.

If you are curious to learn more about Fraendi’s Living Strategy process or 2035 or how to make the livingness of the living system be a shared practice and a shared belief that Fraendi supports organisations with, then reach out at hello@fraendi.org