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 pioneering 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 pioneering 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 over 20 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 nearly 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.

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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.