Creating an Enabling Context

The Challenge

Right now, businesses have an urgent need and opportunity to transform why they exist and how they operate. They need to shift from focusing on maximising short-term profit to driving long-term social justice and regeneration. But there's a problem: businesses are operating within an economic system that's not conducive to this transformation. Unless our current economic systems and structures - which have led to mounting inequalities, environmental degradation, and resource depletion - fundamentally change, business transformation will be held back.

The good news? Change is possible if businesses step up to help influence, rethink and reshape our economic structures. This includes intellectual property rights, corporate tax regimes, limited liability legal entities, the global financial structure and more.

It sounds daunting, but we must remember that economic systems are not determined by 'natural' laws. Instead, they are created by us; our collective decisions, assumptions and mindsets. This means we have the power to reshape them to create a just and regenerative economy.

Our Approach

Forum is collaborating with key stakeholders throughout the market ecosystem, such as financial institutions, regulators and civil society organisations, who influence the actions, goals and incentives of businesses.

Together, we will redesign instruments and structures that stakeholders across the economy use to make decisions, such as the corporate disclosure and accountability frameworks that hold businesses to account. In doing so, we will build the capacity of these actors to embed systems thinking in their work and tools.

Examples of Our Work

Forum brings a unique blend of futures and systems thinking. We innovate and collaborate. Recent initiatives include:

Partnering with Aviva Investors and the School of System Change to launch the first-ever School of System Change in Finance. The programme equips financial changemakers with systems change tools to tackle complex macro-finance challenges.
Facilitating the merger of two coalitions to create the Taskforce for Inequality Related Financial Disclosures, which aims to develop a systemic risk management framework that can reduce inequality created by the private sector.
Protein Challenge Southeast Asia, through which we’re exploring how financial actors can drive the transition to a just and regenerative protein system.
The North Star Transitions: Regenerative Finance Lab, a unique collaboration between investors and businesses to identify and work towards creating a regenerative market economy and system.

What Our Partners Say

“The complex challenges facing the world today - inequality, climate change, biodiversity loss, among others - require holistic solutions that are co-created through multi-stakeholder and multi-disciplinary approaches. But navigating discussions with diverse stakeholders who bring different lived experiences, learned experiences and worldviews, and finding interconnections and common ground, is difficult work. I’ve been consistently impressed with Forum for the Future’s design and facilitation skills which guide such stakeholders through co-learning and co-design, opening pathways for shared solutions.” - Delilah Rothenberg, Executive Director, Predistribution Initiative

Get in Touch

Interested in influencing the bigger picture by reshaping the wider operating context in which your business sits? Get in touch with Charlie Thorneycroft, Senior Change Designer, to explore more.

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