Want to step-change the purpose-led impact your business has?

More and more businesses like yours are setting ambitious targets for the positive impact you are seeking to have on your operations, your value chains and your wider operating context. The pivotal question facing many businesses today is the ‘big how’; how can you deliver transformative, purpose-led change in the face of an ever more volatile and uncertain operating context?

This is a huge challenge, but one we are very familiar with at Forum for the Future. For more than 25 years we have partnered with businesses like yours to navigate this complexity and design impactful solutions that deliver the deeper change that’s needed. Why not get in touch to find out more?

From challenges to opportunities

As a business leader, you face a growing list of challenges. From increasing citizen and customer expectations to demands from ESG-focused investors and mounting regulatory requirements, stakeholder pressure on sustainability issues is only getting stronger.

But these challenges also present opportunities. Imagine wowing your stakeholders by showcasing how your business is becoming a force for social justice and regeneration.

Meeting these higher expectations will require impact beyond your direct control. You may be wondering how you can effectively influence positive change across your scope 3 footprint and beyond. The answer is to use practical systems change tools that will allow you to influence your value chain and broader operating context.

The first few years of the 2020s have been marked by unprecedented disruption, from pandemics and extreme weather to inflation and war. And with mounting inequality and climate breakdown, volatility is likely to be the new normal for businesses.

But even in these uncertain times, there is an opportunity to make your business more resilient and future-fit. By using applied futures, you can take proactive steps to ensure your business is prepared for whatever the future may hold.

And by intentionally integrating your governance and approach to tackling environmental and social issues together, there is a clear business case and benefits for unlocking transformative change. For details, please review Forum’s six key recommendations for moving to a more effective interconnected sustainability approach.

How we can help you

In our experience we’ve found four key unlocks to enable purpose-led business transformation: inspiring visionary leadership, rethinking supply chains, reimagining consumption and creating a supportive enabling context.

Inspiring visionary leadership

We frequently work with both executive and non-executive directors and private business owners. This takes many forms, but always explores the kind of leadership that is called for in this decade, as we face such a critical inflection point of either breakdown or breakthrough for our civilization. It typically includes aspects of capability building, learning, coaching, facilitated conversations within leadership groups to drive alignment and action and convening trailblazing leaders across organisations.

We can support you to adopt a more effective, future-fit mindset, define your organisation’s change-making purpose and understand what’s needed to truly embed, live and deliver purpose-led change.

“As companies face a more uncertain and volatile operating context in the 2020s, purpose-led business transformation has never been more important. Forum combines deep insight into sustainability issues with the facilitation skills needed to effectively engage the most senior leaders in a business.”
- Anke Ehlers, Managing Director CRI, Aldi South

Rethinking value chains

More and more businesses are waking up the brittleness and fragility of their value chains.

This will only accelerate with growing, intersecting pressures from climate breakdown, geopolitical tension, shaky economies and inequality-fuelled social unrest. In the face of this, well-run businesses are already rethinking their approach to procurement. Exciting new market mechanisms and innovative business models are emerging that regenerate communities and landscapes, share value and risk in a fairer way, support supplier/producer resilience and tackle threats to human rights head-on.

Our Future-fit Value Chains programme offers a range of regionally-specific modules focused on key topics such as value chain innovation, responsible recruitment and commodity-specific challenges.

We can help you to build the long-term resilience of your supply chain.

”Is this worthwhile? Yes! There is currently not a radical enough inquiry in this space pushing across commodities for a new model.” - Wolfgang Weinmann - International Coffee Organization

Transforming consumption

How can more sustainable ways of consuming and living be aspirational, affordable and actionable? Enlightened businesses are confronting the limits of wasteful, resource-intensive business models and reimagining consumption.

Revenue growth plans that depend upon never-ending increases in the consumption of finite resources will be less and less viable in the 2020s. Instead, future-fit businesses will enable people to enjoy a good life within planetary boundaries.

We need innovative ways to break the link between quality of life and resource consumption. Exciting, profitable new approaches are emerging that can do this such as dematerialisation, circularity and the sharing economy. Forward-looking brands can help to make adopting these new approaches accessible and aspirational, aligning with cultural shifts that increasingly prioritise wellbeing and social connection over the accumulation of material possessions.

Join us to identify the business model innovation and cultural shifts needed to both grow revenue and radically reduce your business’ consumption of finite resources.

"Sustainable Brands are so pleased to be working with Forum on a new initiative, Reimagining Consumption, and co-hosting a session exploring what just and regenerative consumption models might look like at our upcoming Brand Led Culture change event in May in Minneapolis." - KoAnn Skrzyniarz, Chief Executive, Sustainable Brands

Creating an enabling context

There's a problem getting in the way of business transformation: businesses are operating within a market system that often hinders the level of change needed to make a liveable, hopeful future possible. The good news? Change is possible if businesses step up to help influence, rethink and reshape their operating context.

We support businesses to identify the most effective advocacy asks that are most likely to deliver a ripple of cascading, systemic change. We are supporting key players in the finance system to radically rethink their role to require business to go beyond only focusing on short-term profit maximisation. We are supporting the evolution of accountability mechanisms and engagement approaches that enable the deeper change that the health of your business operating context so badly needs.

We can assist you to identify the key leverage points in businesses’ operating context that will enable transformational rather than incremental change.

“Navigating discussions with diverse stakeholders, and finding interconnections and common ground, is difficult work. I’ve been impressed with Forum’s design and facilitation skills which guide stakeholders through co-learning and co-design, opening pathways for shared solutions.” - Delilah Rosenberg, Executive Director, Predistribution Initiative

Find out more about the four key unlocks for business transformation

Inspiring visionary leadership

Rethinking value chains

Transforming consumption

Creating an enabling context

Ready to transform business with us? Whether it’s rethinking your supply chain or resetting your ambition, reimagining how goods and services are consumed or influencing the wider context in which your business operates, there are many ways we can help.

Contact our team to find out more.

Our partners include

Unilever

Nestle

Aldi Süd

Target

3M

Reckitt

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