Trailblazing sustainability strategies

Leadership in the 2020s is about your organisation’s ability to positively influence its operating context. We help ambitious organisations to understand the opportunities, and then how to unlock them.

The scale and urgency of the sustainability challenges we face mean that having a future-fit strategy is vital. These strategies must also be able to support the transformational change needed, both in how your organisation operates and its wider operating context.

By 2030, organisations must move well beyond the idea of ‘doing less harm’ to embrace regenerative and net positive approaches. In order to meet the challenges we face, we all need to be putting back more into society, the environment and economy than we take out. It means tackling structural inequalities in your sector and moving towards more resilient business models.

As a non-profit, we offer a distinctive approach to strategy development: Leveraging our role as a trusted ‘critical friend’ and deploying our strengths in applied futures and systems thinking to navigate complex sustainable development challenges.

At Forum, we have a long track record of partnering with trailblazing organisations to understand the sustainability challenges they face, their root causes, and their implications. As a result, we advise on a strategy that has truly systemic potential.

We deliver strategies with multiple benefits at multiple levels. And every step along the way, we coach and guide teams to drive and embed lasting change.

See examples of our work with partners:

We support the development and delivery of trailblazing sustainability strategies

We're able to inform senior level strategy and scale-up the organisation’s impact on issues like product innovation, influencing consumer demand, reshaping markets through collaboration and driving policy advocacy, which ultimately leads to change across entire sectors and systems.

For nearly 25 years we have partnered with Unilever as a ‘critical friend’. We helped shape their ground-breaking Unilever sustainability strategies and guided the implementation so as to catalyse deeper system change.

We've worked with multiple organisations one to one and through the Net Positive Project to help them set goals that reduce negative impacts, and maximise the positive impact the organisation has on the world in a robust and credible way.

We devise strategies to help organisations tackle systemic challenges

Many of the organisations that approach us have experienced the frustration of failing to create positive shifts in their operating context, when working alone.

For example, we helped Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation strengthen the effectiveness of its oceans work, bringing together its key NGO partners in a unique collaboration. We helped Robert Bosch Foundation to use systems change thinking to refresh their strategy in 2020. As well as supporting them to set more transformational goals, they moved from a linear input, output, outcome impact approach to embracing a more emergent approach to strategy delivery.

We use futures thinking to make your plan future-fit

As the pace of change accelerates, it's vital we understand how the world around us is changing right now, and what that might mean for the years ahead. What if we reimagine our future? What do we want it to look like? And how do we get there?

Our applied futures tools were a key element of how we helped Diageo to develop their ambitious Society 2030 strategy and ensure a robust approach for their rapidly changing context.

We support you to deliver your strategy over time

Too often, an ambitious strategic vision can become diluted during implementation. We act as a long-term partner and troubleshooter, working with companies such as Aditya Birla and Swire Pacific Offshore and China Navigation Company.

Change systems with us

We have a 25-year track-record of solving complex sustainability challenges on a global scale. We are looking to work with organisations that are truly ambitious for change, and that want to unlock greater shifts in broader systems.

If you’re looking for simplistic approaches, incremental targets or a quantitative model, we probably aren’t for you.

We offer an engaging strategy process that combines setting an ambitious vision of the future with the grounded know-how to deliver transformative change in practice.

To get started on this journey, contact our team of strategists.

Read more about how we help shape ambitious, transformational strategies:

From pioneering ambition to game-changing goals - James Payne, Associate Director for Transformational Strategies, shares insights from Forum for the Future’s partnership with Diageo, one of the world’s largest producers of spirits and beers.
Time for business to find its voice, speak up and act for change - Dr Sally Uren OBE, Chief Executive, explores why we must reform our economic and societal structures, and how businesses are building societal resilience in a world where all the rules are changing.
Warning: More turbulence and disruption ahead - James Payne, Associate Director of Transformational Strategies, weighs in on how businesses can better prepare for a turbulent decade.
The limits of science-based targets - Iain Watt explores the idea that corporate targets should be based on what’s required, rather than what feels achievable.

Latest

Reflections from the next generation working in sustainability

This International Youth Day, Sangam Paudel, Forum’s first Sustainable Futures Fellow, shares his personal reflections on his past year working in the sustainability sector and what it could mean for youth hoping to make a positive difference through their work.
Zoya Lukyanova

Zoya is a skilled facilitator and ecosystem enabler for impact driven networks, cross-sector collaborations and social innovation. She is a network partner for the School of System Change in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, facilitating learning experiences and cultivating the field in this region.
Reuters Events: Energy Transition Asia Pacific 2022

Reuters Events: Energy Transition Asia Pacific 2022 (30 November-1st December, Online) unites public and private sector leaders to establish the region's net zero strategy. Define the future energy system, map out business and governance pathways and explore leading technologies and solutions to accelerate and secure an equitable transition.
Framing the future as ‘just and regenerative’: why and how

At Forum for the Future we have set our vision as a just and regenerative future, and our mission is to accelerate the transition towards it. A just and regenerative approach means strengthening the capacity of all living systems to adapt, replenish and regenerate; respecting everyone’s human rights and potential to thrive; and rewiring our economies and societies to serve both people and the planet.

Strategies for tackling global challenges

We devise strategies to help organisations tackle systemic challenges. We helped Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation strengthen the effectiveness of its oceans work, bringing together its key NGO partners in a unique collaboration.

The Five Capitals - a framework for sustainability

The Five Capitals Model provides a basis for understanding sustainability in terms of the economic concept of wealth creation or ‘capital’. Any organisation will use five types of capital to deliver its products or services. A sustainable organisation will maintain and where possible enhance these stocks of capital assets, rather than deplete or degrade them.
Reinventing the way the world works.

Forum for the Future is a leading international sustainability non-profit. We specialise in addressing critical global challenges by catalysing change in key systems, from food to apparel, energy to shipping. We do this by convening transformational collaborations to drive change, by partnering with organisations to help them lead by example, and by building a global community of pioneers and change makers.
Jobs

We are a growing organisation and we are regularly on the look out for new recruits to join our teams around the world.
Become a system change agent

Learn more about upcoming system change programmes and express your interest.
Sustainability and system change

Climate change, malnutrition, inequality, poverty, ecological degradation. The global challenges we face are so urgent and tricky that we need a solution to match their scale and complexity. This is where system change comes in. We use systems thinking to understand the web of interrelations that create complex problems, anticipate unintended consequences, and identify how and where to take action to meet the SDG goals.
What is Net Positive?

We reinvent strategies for a 1.5°C world. Our Net Positive approach helps business put back more into society and environment than it takes out. Unilever’s pioneering commitment to eliminate fossil fuels from its operations and directly support the generation of more renewable energy than they consume was driven behind the scenes by Forum.
Growing our Future USA

Working together to accelerate the transition to a just and regenerative agriculture system in the United States.
Trailblazing sustainability strategies

Leadership in the 2020s is about your organisation’s ability to positively influence its operating context. We help you to understand the opportunities, and then how to unlock them.
Cotton 2040

Cotton 2040 aims to create a resilient cotton industry in an increasingly climate-disrupted world by bringing together stakeholders across the value chain.
6 ways Unilever has achieved success through sustainability - and how your business can too

A year ago this week, Unilever launched its Sustainable Living Plan (USLP), one of the most ambitious strategies that a global company has ever embarked on. Pioneering a bold new business model, the company pledged to double in size at the same time as halving its environmental footprint.