Peter Fisk is a global thought leader

Imagine that you are an Olympic athlete in the midst of competition. As you prepare for the greatest race of your life, you imagine the moments ahead, anticipate what might happen, consider alternative strategies. And maybe just dare to dream.

In reality, you need to be ready for anything. It’s no use overthinking. You are in the best condition of your life, and you have run many races before. In reality you are simply consumed by the moment, at one with your body, focused on the race.

When you are at your “peak”, your body and mind flow in unison, you know what to do.

Finding your future flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi believes that peak performance comes from inside, and that people have the unique ability to create environments that facilitate the development of a state of mind which he calls “flow”, or what some might call “in the zone”.

Flow is the experience I get when I’m working intensely on a project, the challenge is significant, the team around me are great people, the timeframes are tight, and the ambition is very high. Once I am into the project, I find I can work at great pace, there is a stream of consciousness, ideas emerge rapidly.

Under the stress and stretch of high octane situations, we can often do our best work. Csikszentmihalyi says “the best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something we make happen”

It is a feeling of immersion, focus and concentration, removed from the repetition and distractions of everyday, you feel like you have more purpose, with heightened awareness of the situation and possibilities. Complexity seems less intimidating, and uncertainty less daunting. You are energised, you are empowered, you can achieve so much more.

Flow is achieved through an intensity of concentration and effort as you apply yourself to the task. You are energised by possibility, and released from the fear of failure. You rise above yourself, above the distractions of today. The experience of this flow is as good as the outcomes.

5 ways for business leaders to find their “flow” state every day are:

Select tasks that are stimulating and engaging, they challenge you to the point of excitement. They are problems you would love to solve.
Assemble a great team, people you love and trust, who you know that together you can do great things (or you, on occasions, you can also do this alone).
Define audacious goals, that go beyond the accepted norms, 10x not 10% targets, and also a sense of what the rewards could be, personal or organisational.
Focus your mind, a stream of consciousness towards the goal, eliminating the daily trivia, the distractions of the normal workspace
Immerse yourself in the moment, active not passive, thinking ideas, doing tasks, making progress, building momentum, going for the goal.

The “flow” state of mind becomes the everyday state of business leaders. It becomes normal. Every day, working towards the future, whilst also delivering today. Your mind working overtime, connecting ideas, searching for progress, focused on the actions which will create a better tomorrow. Indeed, you can only ever do things today, even it is focused on a better future.

Playing to your strengths

We have grown used to exploring the “strengths and weaknesses” of human character, or in this case of leadership behaviour. The problem is that this kind of diagnostic encourages us to focus on our weaknesses, to make them better, to be “good enough” at everything.

An alternative is focus on your strengths and how to make them better.

Yet few business leaders say they get to use their strengths in most of their work. The challenge in any team is to bring a diverse group of people together, where their combined strengths are irresistible. This means that as long as all the important attributes are covered, then the team will be strong in all areas, and amplify its impact far beyond that of any individual.

Psychologist Martin Seligman studied cultures around the world to understand what they regarded as “strengths” in leaders. The research explored major religions and philosophical traditions and found that the same six virtues were shared in almost all cultures. Gallup’s StrengthFinder assessment model is one of the most useful tool for exploring the practical component of these virtues as 24 character strengths:

Virtue of Wisdom: the more curious and creative we become, the more we gain perspective, knowledge and wisdom. Component strengths are creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, love of learning, and perspective.
Virtue of Courage: the braver and more persistent we become, the more confident we feel, and more courageous we act. Component strengths are bravery, perseverance, honesty and vitality.
Virtue of Humanity: the more we approach people with respect, appreciation, and interest, the more engaged they become. Component strengths are love, kindness and social intelligence.
Virtue of Justice: the more responsible we are, embracing fairness and justice, the more stable community we can build for mutual benefit. Component strengths are teamwork, fairness and leadership.
Virtue of Temperance: being forgiving, humble, prudent, and in control of our behaviours, helps us to avoid being arrogant, selfish, and unbalanced. Component strengths are forgiveness, humility, prudence and self-control.
Virtue of Transcendence: never losing hope in humanity’s potential, appreciating nature and people, enables us to connect with a higher purpose. Component strengths are appreciation of beauty, gratitude, hope, humour and spirituality.

Additional studies have shown that women typically score higher in interpersonal strengths, such as love and kindness, honesty and gratitude. Men tend to score higher on cognitive strengths, creativity and curiosity, hope and humour, but also highly on honesty. Whilst these differences are interesting, and largely conform to stereotypes suggesting that they might be shaped by culture, there are also many shared strengths.

Playing to your strengths not only enables you to perform better, and contribute more to a team, it can also result in feeling more engaged and confident, and enable you to progress faster.

The leader’s plastic brain

We used to assume that we each have our established ways of thinking and behaving, and as we get older the capability of our brain to learn and adapt declines. Yet our brain can grow new neurons at any age. Each neuron can transmit up to 1,000 nerve signals a second and make as many as 10,000 connections with other neurons. Our thoughts come from the chemical signals that pass across the synaptic gaps between neurons: the more connections we make, the more powerful and adaptive our brain can be.

Tara Swart is a neuroscientist, practising medical doctor, and executive coach, with a background in psychiatry. I first met her on stage in Bratislava, where we both were delivering our “Big Idea” for Europe. Her first book, “Neuroscience for Leadership” was more of an academic text, while her new book is “The Source” is more populist, and claims most of the things we want from life – health, happiness, wealth, love – are governed by our ability to think, feel and act. In other words, by our brain.

Keeping the brain fit through exercise, continual learning and rich experiences, enhances your mental agility. In the past leaders relied more upon experience and procedure, in today’s world we need leaders who can make sense of new patterns, imagine new possibilities, thrive on diversity of thought and complexity of action. Leaders need to have a mind that is always ahead, seeing and anticipating what next.

“Think of the brain as the hardware of a computer” says Swart. “Your mind is the software. You’re the coder who upgrades the software to transform the data (your thoughts). You also control the power supply that fuels the computer — the food and drink you consume, when and how to exercise and meditate, who to interact with… You have the power to maintain or destroy your neural connections.”

Mindful activities such as yoga or meditation reduce levels of cortisol and increase the fold of the outer cortex of the brain, allowing the pre-frontal cortex to better regulate our emotional responses. Swart says just 12 minutes a day, most days of the week, will make a noticeable difference. New experiences such as travel, learning a skill, such as a foreign language, and meeting new people can stimulate the growth of new neurons.

There are some obvious ways to improve your brain function, such as drink more water, get more exercise, and don’t read from electronic screens in the last hour before bed. Sleeping less than seven to eight hours a night isn’t sustainable for most people, because that’s how long it takes to clear out toxins. Sleeping on your left side helps the brain to flush out toxins more efficiently, and downing a spoonful of coconut oil before a big meeting boosts brain power for about 20 minutes.

The journey ahead will have high and lows. Endurance demands physical fitness and emotional agility, but also taking moments to pause, and celebrate progress.

James Dyson took 15 years and 5127 attempts to perfect his bagless vacuum. When he succeeded, he created a revolution, but it required incredible persistence to get there. Not only is the future difficult to create, but everything keeps changing on the journey towards it.

The mental toughness, the grit to persist, is not just about keeping going, but the resilience to overcome challenges and obstacles. Sometimes, just the sheer volume of information – emails, analysis, reports, ideas, articles, books, meetings – will become overbearing. As a leader it’s easy to feel overloaded.

It’s also easy to feel you need to know everything, which you don’t, although you do need to prioritise what matters most. The biggest challenge for any visionary leader is not how to make ideas happen, but how to overcome all the people who say that they won’t. Critics and pessimists can be frustrating, and a motivational drain.

There will also be moments of great success, people might even call you a hero. It will feel good, even to the humblest, and you will inevitably remind everyone that it was a team effort. Yet the euphoria can quickly disappear, with the next challenge.

Leaders need endurance, resilience, and gratitude, to cope with relentless change; to be able to change your own mind, to stay on the rollercoaster of progress, to keep teams engaged, and to thrive at both work and in your life.

The endurance of leaders

Endurance is as much about mind as muscle power.

Like an athlete – runner, cyclist, rower – there are many physiological elements at play, from core body temperature to oxygen intake, plus psychological factors, such as perceived effort and pain tolerance. Each of these factors is significant in the level of athletic performance humans which any person is capable of, especially when testing the perceived limits of performance, such as setting new world records.

Almost every athlete will attest to faster recovery if they jump into an ice bath after a competition. Yet studies show that this practice doesn’t actually decrease inflammation levels, the thing the baths are intended to reduce. However most physiologists will still say that if there’s a method that helps you recover, even if it’s purely psychological, then it is useful because sometimes belief is just as influential as science.

In “Endure” Alex Hutchinson starts by retelling the race to break 4 minutes for one mile. For years, men across the globe had raced to within a second or two of the barrier, but never quite breaking the iconic time. When Britain’s Roger Bannister finally ran 3.59.4 in 1954, Australian John Landy who had been trying to run the time for years, went on to improve Banister’s time by another second, only weeks later.

A number of important factors can help people, including business leaders, to endure more:

We always have a little more to give. Watch how athletes pace themselves so that they always have one final effort at the end of a long distance event. And somehow an Olympic champion, despite a punishing race, can always rise to celebrate victory
We can endure more than we think. Athletes have a higher than normal pain tolerance enabling them to push harder. They learn to cope with this by training at a “threshold” pace, learning to sustain oxygen debt, despite its searing pain.
Fitness enables us to perform better. Athletic performance greatly relies on oxygen intake, which is enhanced through heightened fitness. Business leaders also need oxygen, and the physical fitness to sustain leadership performance.
Fatigue reduces our performance.Having a tired brain can affect how much we can endure physically. A tired brain is one that doesn’t have a break, isn’t refuelled, doesn’t have variety, doesn’t keep learning, doesn’t get enough sleep.
Stress stops us performing. Of the many factors, stress can be the killer. However stress comes in two forms – stress from outside, eg timescales, and stress we put on ourselves. External stress can stimulate us, internal stress we can control.

Hutchinson’s research led him to South Africa to work with Tim Noakes, the controversial sports scientist who first proposed the “central governor theory,” which argues that the brain limits performance well before the body has reached its maximum output. He also explores the research of another pioneering scientist, Samuele Marcora, who has developed a series of brain-training exercises to push that governor.

He also recalls talking to Eliud Kipchoge just before he ran the world’s first sub-2 hour marathon, when the Kenyan said he hadn’t really changed anything in his training. What then, he asked, would make the difference? “My mind will be different” replied the runner. People he says, have a curiously elastic limit to what they can achieve, driven mainly be their mental toughness.

The resilience of leaders

Resilience is our ability to bounce back from adversity. It’s what allows us to recover quickly from change or setbacks, trauma or failure, whether at work or in life. It is the ability to maintain a sense if purpose, a positive attitude, a belief in better, throughout times of challenge. Resilience sustains progress, whilst others might give up.

Angela Duckworth calls it grit. “Grit is passion and perseverance for long-term goals” she says. She compares it not to a marathon, but to a series of sprints combined with a boxing match. In business you are not just running but also getting hit along the way. As you seek to deliver on your strategy, to make new ideas happen, to transform the business, it’s not just about coping with the time and effort. It’s also about overcoming many challenges.

Grit keeps you moving forward through the sting of rejection, pain of failure, and struggle with adversity. “When things knock you down, you may want to stay down and give up, but grit won’t let you quit” says Duckworth.

Most entrepreneurs have tremendous resilience, because they’ve had to fight for the business through some of the most difficult times. The search for seed funding when every VC dismissed them with a laugh or smile, the long days in a bedroom or garage trying to make the first prototype or win the first contract, the growing pains of scale-up as they have to adapt to survive and thrive. Letting go of control as investors take over, making you wealthy but taking away your baby. Most entrepreneurs know about grit.

But then so do corporate leaders. If not from starting up, then from surviving the challenges of internal politics, of learning how to engage and influence people in a positive way, of progressing as a star individual whilst keeping colleagues and teams on side. Of balancing personal ambition with collective progress. Resilience demands that we:

Have ambition:Knowing what you truly want, and are prepared to work hard and persevere in order to achieve it. Vision isn’t just a milestone, it becomes a pursuit. Whilst not everybody will know your ambition, you will, and it will keep you striving.
Have purpose: This is why you want to achieve more, it’s about what will be better when you achieve your ambition, not just for you, but your business, your family, your world. Purpose is how you contribute, what you fight for, why you get up in the morning.
Have passion: You need to love it, to be great at it. Otherwise it’s not worth the sacrifices, the long hours, and the pain. Aligning your purpose and ambition allows you to find love, for your work, your team, your business, and the world you seek to impact.
Have persistence: You will sometimes fail. Few things change without challenges. Failure doesn’t define you, it refines you. If you didn’t fail, you wouldn’t learn. There is always another way. Stay confident and stay strong.

Nelson Mandela was a great example of resilience. He was sent to prison as a young firebrand who believed in taking up violent resistance when the justice system failed him in apartheid South Africa. 27 years later, he walked out of Robben Island prison advocating peace and reconciliation. During his long confinement, Mandela mastered what he later called self-leadership. He took great inspiration in the poem “Invictus,” written by William Ernest Henley, which ends with the lines “I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.”

Takashi Murakami is often called the next Andy Warhol, fusing high and low art, combining ideas from both Japan’s rich artistic heritage, and its vibrant consumer culture. But whilst the American icon created multi-million dollar works of art, Murakami is much more interested in creating everyday objects for everyone, from bubble gum and t-shirts to phone covers and limited-edition Louis Vuitton handbags.

He started in the traditions of Japan, then studied “Nihonga” art which is a combination of 19th century eastern and western styles but became distracted by the rise of anime and manga in Japanese eighties culture. He loved the modern styles which connected with people, and the issues and aspirations of today’s society. He was fascinated by what made iconic characters such as Hello Kitty and Mickey Mouse so popular and enduring.

Japan has a centuries long tradition of “flat” art, achieved with bold outlines, flat colouring, and a disregard for perspective, depth, and three-dimensionality. “Superflat” was a term Murakami started to use in 2001 and has evolved into one of modern art’s most active movements, combining the traditions flat art with anime and manga, taking components of high and low culture to defy categorisation. He says that he uses the style to also reflect what he sees as the flat, shallowness of consumer culture.

Today Murakami is a rock-star artist, highly aware of his image and brand, and an avid user of social media. He loves fame and commercialism. His business has been helped by collaborations with celebrities, creating animated music videos for Kanye West and designing sculptures with Pharrell Williams.

If “ingenuity” is about thinking and performing in a way that is original and inventive, it is a good descriptor of Murakami. He is inspired by both the past and the future create his own distinctive presence, to connect with and challenges his environment, embrace personal insight and opinion to defy conventions, and them his audience with him.

Imagination, creativity and innovation.

Imagination is often called the primary gift of human consciousness.

In a world of ubiquitous technology which challenges our humanity, a world of infinite yet largely derivative choices, and a world of noise and uncertainty, there is nothing quite like being human.

Imagination move us forwards. It allows us to leap beyond the conventions, the limits of our current world. It takes us beyond the algorithms of AI-enabled robots who can create perfection out of the world which they know, but struggle beyond it. It inspires us to think in new ways, to shape hypotheses to test, and aesthetic designs to enjoy.

Sir Ken Robinson is probably best known for his self-deprecating sense of humour with which he delivers a very important message: “Imagination is the source of all human achievement.” The Times said of his UK government report on creativity, education and the economy that “it raises some of the most important issues facing business in the 21st century. It should have every CEO thumping the table and demanding action.”

His book “Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative” argues that our world is the product of the ideas, beliefs and values of human imagination that have shaped it over centuries. He says, “the human mind is profoundly and uniquely creative, but too many people have no sense of their true talents.”

Imagination explores new possibilities and captures them as new ideas
Creativity shapes and stretches the potential of existing ideas
Innovation takes existing ideas and makes them practical

Creativity is applied imagination, innovation is applied creativity, you could say.

I remember back to when my two daughters were young, the pictures they drew and models they built, the questions they asked and answers they imagined. There’s was a world unlimited by experience, by prejudice or conformity. Their brush strokes were simple, their colours bold, their questions were simple but disturbingly difficult.

As adults we shift to a productivity mindset, preferring to get things done, rather than explore possibilities. We seek to reduce complexity to its simplest form and describe ideas in the context of what we already know, squeezing out any nuggets of newness.

We are all born creative, but somehow lose that spark, or at the confidence to allow it out. Some people, we say, are creative, and others not. Yet we all have the same neurons and synapses which drive the process. The reality is that no individual is as creative as even the dullest people once they start working together. If we could reclaim our creativity, we could discover our passion, allowing us to feel more alive, and do so much more.

Harvard professor Howard Gardner identified 8 “intelligences” or ways to solve problems. They range from linguistics (limited only by the words you use), logical (mainly through mathematics), spatial (as used by designers), musical, physical (like athletes), natural (like farmers), intrapersonal (within yourself), and interpersonal (with others).

The point is that we have many ways to be creative, or even combinations of our mental and physical capabilities. As Leonardo da Vinci loved to say, inspired by his own polymath life as artist and musician, anatomist and sculptor, architect and engineer, creativity is ultimately about making new connections.

Innovation makes life better

The purpose of any business, and therefore any innovation, is to make life better. It drives human and social progress, as well as seizing new opportunities for business growth. Whilst it is a practical, technical and process-based challenge, it is also human and philosophical, strategic and futuristic.

The Royal Society of Arts recently published a document “How to be Ingenious” starting with a definition of ingenuity as having three components:

an inclination to work with the resources easily to hand
a knack for combining these resources in a surprising way
and in doing so, an ability to solve some practical problem

Another way to describe it is the ability to do unexpectedly more for less in the face of constrained resources. Given the social and environmental challenges facing every business today, that might be a useful addition.

The Huit Denim Company is a great innovator for social good. Cardigan, a small town on the west coast of Wales, used to have Britain’s biggest jeans factory. It employed 400 people in a town of 4,000 people, making 35,000 pairs a week, but it closed suddenly in 2001. It had a huge effect on employment, but also on confidence in the town.

David and Claire Hieatt responded by deciding that they would to try to get 400 people their jobs back. Huit Denim Co was born, and now with a cult global following. Their semi-automated, hand-stitched process still takes 5 times as long as most jeans factories, but they can then sell them online direct to consumer for $300 a pair, securing a profit margin that keeps the town in work again.

A more inspired approach to innovation

Innovation demands human ingenuity.

It is exciting, it is about people, about the future, with limitless possibilities.

It is an essential role of every business leader, every business function. Whilst innovation has long centred around the tangible, technical icon of the product, organisations have finally opened their minds to many more forms of innovation.

Innovation used to be associated with long, disciplined, stage-gated processes by which ideas were productised and taken to market. Today’s innovators, in small and large businesses, get excited by design thinking and lean development. These are useful tools to create more insightful and faster solutions, but there is much more to innovation.

A more inspired approach to innovation has 9 dimensions

Human-centred rather than driven by products
Problem-solving rather than limited by capability
Future shaping rather than aligning with today
Whole business rather than functionally isolated
Fast and experimental rather than slow and perfect
Sustainable impact rather than profit obsessed
Active adaptation rather than launch and forgotten
Growth driving rather than unaligned commercially
Portfolio building rather than isolated innovations

Innovation is not like most other business functions and activities. There is no department or VP of innovation in most companies. There is rarely even an innovation strategy or budget. There are few standard templates, rules, processes, or consistent measures of success. In a sense, each act of innovation is a unique feat, a leap of imagination that can be neither predicted nor replicated. It is certainly not business as usual.

That’s also the beauty. Innovation is pervasive, a challenge for every function and person across the business. It can have process, but it can also break all the rules, and sometimes needs to. By being rooted in every part of the business, and drawing on budgets from each, it can be a more collaborative, integrated and formidable approach.

Leaders are the ultimate innovators in companies, not necessarily entrepreneurs as in the founders of start-ups, but setting the agenda, ensuring that it has the resources and space to thrive, and that the business delivers today, but also creates a better tomorrow.

The lucky iron fish

When Canadian science graduate Christopher Charles visited Cambodia, he discovered that anaemia was a huge public health problem.

In the villages of Kandai province, instead of bright young children, Charles found many were small and weak with slow mental development. Women were suffering from tiredness and headaches, and were unable to work. Pregnant women faced serious complications before and after childbirth. He realised that anaemia was a huge problem, with almost 50% of women and children suffering due to a deficiency of iron in their diets. Regular solutions, like iron supplements, were neither affordable or available, and were distrusted by many people.

Charles had a novel idea. Inspired by previous research which showed that cooking in cast iron pots increased the iron content of food, he decided to put a lump of iron into the cooking pot, made from melted-down metal. However people rejected that too, not keen on a coarse lump of metal mixed into their food.

He searched deeper into local anthropology, and then hit upon the symbol of luck in Cambodian culture, the fish. He recast his iron in the shape of a fish, and called it the “Lucky Iron Fish”, and designed it to release iron at the right concentration to provide the nutrients that so many women and children in the country were lacking.

Scientific analysis showed that, by using the iron fish each day, it provided 75% of an adult’s daily recommended intake of iron. In practice he found that within 12 months, around half of those using it were no longer anaemic, and after 3 years, then condition was largely eliminated.

Where do good ideas come from?

The romance of the “eureka” moment, when amazingly smart individuals have sudden creative epiphanies, and jump out of their overflowing baths like Archimedes, is unrealistic.

In “Where Good Ideas Come From” Stephen Johnson says that most new ideas emerge out of the fragments of others, a product of new environments which allow new possibilities. Indeed most good ideas can actually be broken down into the useful remains of the failures of others.

Bill Gates tells how the origins of Microsoft, lay not in a flash of genius, but evolved from many hours with his friend Paul Allen tinkering with their high school’s mainframe computers, a culture of change blowing through society, and a hunch that computers could be made much smaller and more connected.

Crisis, recessions, wars are often the birthplace of new ideas, as markets are shaken-up, consumers think differently, and there is an urgency to create something different, cheaper, faster, better. Microsoft’s founding environment in 1975 was shaped by an economic downturn that put an end to years of post-war growth. Similarly, Disney in 1929, McDonalds in 1955, CNN in 1980, Airbnb in 2008, all emerged out of tough times

Taking inspiration from Johnson, here are nine sources of better ideas:

Adjacent ideas: most innovations are derived from the fragments of what exists today, bringing together other ideas, new capabilities, or aspirations.
Evolving ideas: most new concepts tend to emerge slowly, gaining acceptance as they mature, and their founders gain confidence in their evolving work.
Building ideas: ideas tend to build on each other like platforms, Apple’s insight into computing led to the iPod, to iTunes, to iPhones, to AppStore.
Network ideas: exposing ideas to more people, enables them to spread faster, and for ideas to multiply in richness and rise in crowds.
Collaborative ideas: openness of ideas allow them to grow further and faster, rather than competition that restricts them and patents that hide them.
Random ideas: sometimes new possibilities emerge by chance, out of chaos or unintended actions driving lucky combinations or new insights.
Serendipitous ideas: ideas converge in a shared physical or intellectual space, bringing a diversity of people together and enabling creative collisions.
Unconventional ideas: Errors can be surprisingly creative moments, because they challenge what we think is right, and show possibility beyond convention.
Recycled ideas: Expatiation is when something developed for a specific purpose is eventually used in a completely different way.

Ideas are the currency of today’s world. Where machines can outperform us at anything which we already know, we need ideas to move us forwards. In the business world, we codify ideas into intellectual properties – patents, designs, trademarks, and brands.

Ideas are packages of consciousness, of creativity, and of inspiration. As a result, they are not only the building blocks of the future, of innovations and progress, they also captivate us, they give us hope, they fuel our dreams and desires, we want them.

Troublemakers and rulebreakers

“Rebels have a bad reputation”, says Francesca Gino, a behavioural scientist. “Rebels are people who break rules that should be broken. They break rules that hold them and others back, and their way of rule breaking is constructive rather than destructive. It creates positive change.”

Gino tells the story of the time when she was browsing the shelves at a bookstore when she came across an unusual-looking book in the cooking section: Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef by Massimo Bottura. The recipes in it were playful, quirky and improbable. Snails were paired with coffee sauce, veal tongue with charcoal powder. Francesca, who is Italian, says remixing classic recipes like this is a kind of heresy in Italian cooking. “We really cherish the old way,” she says. But this chef, one of the most influential in the world, couldn’t resist circling back to one, big question: Why do we have to follow these rules?

“We think of them as troublemakers, outcasts, contrarians: those colleagues, friends, and family members who complicate seemingly straightforward decisions, create chaos, and disagree when everyone else is in agreement. But in truth, rebels are also those among us who change the world for the better with their unconventional outlooks. Instead of clinging to what is safe and familiar, and falling back on routines and tradition, rebels defy the status quo. They are masters of innovation and reinvention, and they have a lot to teach us.”

Gino argues that the future belongs to the rebel. Curiosity and insistence on questioning the status quo are among the qualities she believes separate good leaders from great ones, and the people who can’t wait to get to work from the ones who count the minutes until they can leave. These qualities are part of an instinct to rebel against what feels comfortable. Adopting them she says is the key to “creativity, productivity, and making work suck less”.

Start by asking better questions

Start by asking why … then why, why, why, why, why, why.

The “seven whys” is an incredibly simple technique when talking to somebody and seeking to understand their real problem. As you learn more, keep asking why again, each time delving deeper into the real drivers of a problem. If you can get to the bottom of a problem, then of course, you have a better opportunity to solve it.

“The important and difficult job is never to find the right answers, it is to find the right question. For there are few things as useless, if not dangerous, as the right answer to the wrong question” said Peter Drucker.

Drucker’s insight has long been an inspiration for Hal Gregersen who is based at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He believes that the best starting point for innovation is to ask powerful provocative questions. The most innovative leaders question the world constantly, provoking others to think openly and differently.

Key to this is asking the right questions, or “catalytic questions” as he calls them – what if, why not – questions that breakdown the limits of people’s current thinking, allow them to challenge more of the conventions, to see things from different perspectives, and accelerate their better thinking.

Gregerson uses his distinctive “Question Burst” methodology as an alternative to more conventional brainstorming-type approaches. These seek to explore the question through rapid collaboration, rather than jumping to the answer. This allows people to concentrate on the problem, rather than jump to quickly and superficially to solutions.

He uses three steps in the process:

Explore the challenge: Select a challenge you care deeply about. Invite a few people to help you consider that challenge from fresh angles. Ideally, choose people who have no direct experience with the problem and whose worldview is starkly different from yours. In two minutes, describe the challenge.
Expand the question: Spend the next four minutes collectively generating as many questions as possible about the challenge. Don’t answer any of the questions and don’t explain why you’re asking the questions. Go for at least 15-20 questions in four fast minutes. Write them down word for word.

Commit to the quest: Consider the questions and select a few “catalytic” questions from the list, ones that hold the most potential for disrupting the status quo. Commit to pursuing at least one new pathway you’ve glimpsed, and use that as the foundation of the problem to solve

As we progress through organisations to become business leaders, we shift from functional experts where we are expected to have all the answers, to a broader perspective where our most useful contributions, to ask better questions. At the same time, with years of experience we feel we know much more than many others, and can become closed and defensive, rather than good listeners. Former Uber CEO, Travis Kalanik was caught on video whilst taking a ride being challenged about the business by his driver who was unaware of his passenger’s identity. Kalanik’s defensive verbal attack on the driver went viral and resulted in him being fired.

More for business leaders from Peter Fisk:

Next Agenda of best ideas and priorities for business
Megatrends 2030 in a world accelerated by pandemic
49 Codes to help you develop a better business future
250 companies innovators shaking up the world
100 leaders with the courage to shape a better future
Education that is innovative, issue-driven, action-driving
Consulting that is collaborative, strategic and innovative
Speaking that is inspiring, topical, engaging and actionable

Keanu Reeves described his 1999 movie “The Matrix” as a wake-up call to the speed of our changing world. Two decades later we can see many of the movie’s themes in our everyday lives – the primacy of the individual, disregard for the old system, anti-corporate backlash, the blur of fake and reality.

Today’s markets are a matrix of possibilities, where we could say that almost nothing has changed in those last 20 years, or everything has. The lens by which you see your market shapes everything else about what you do, your strategy and innovation, and how you work, your organisation and people. Time for leaders to wake up.

Blurred boundaries

We used to think of markets as defined spaces – industry sectors – with clear boundaries and categorisation, industry standards and predictable competition. And then markets started to blur and fragment.

Amazon disrupts fashion, Alphabet disrupts travel, Apple disrupts healthcare, Tesla disrupts energy, Alibaba disrupts finance, Snap disrupts movies.

Sectors like telecoms and technology, communication and media, data and information, entertainment and gaming, converge into each other. Or pharmaceuticals and healthcare, wellness and food, fashion and sport, become a boundaryless continuum.

You can define your business any way you want. What kind of company are you? What market are you in? Anyone can frame their market “space” in this new market matrix.

The blur of boundaries has evolved in multi-dimensions

The blur of digital and physical: Fortnite’s online games become a physical stadium event, Nike’s flagship stores are navigated and enhanced by smartphones, L’Oréal’s magic mirror customises your cosmetics and delivers to your home.
The blur of products and services: Harley Davidson’s holidays embrace bike hire plus flights and hotels, Adobe’s software is delivered “as a service”, Disneyland experiences can be planned and continued online at home.
The blur of categories and sectors: Grab is a delivery company with a data and finance core, CVS is a pharmacy that reframed as a health and wellness store, athleisure wear is sporting apparel made stylish for everyday fashion.
The blur of industry and functional roles: IBM was the computer manufacturer who became trusted advisor, Amazon is a retailer but also a leading brand of own-label products and services, Casper the mattress sold direct to consumers.
The blur of business and consumer: Glossier is a cosmetics brand but equally a community of people who share and co-create, Avon is a brand of consumer sellers, Rapha calls its stores Cycle Clubs, meeting places as well as retail stores.

Taking advantage of non-linear value chains, and brands that have evolved beyond descriptors of products, manufacturers can think like retailers, creating direct to consumer (DTC) channels, with more trust and style than a commoditising intermediary. Think of Apple or Allbirds, Dollar Shave Club or Warby Parker.

Equally retailers like Carrefour and Target realised that private label products don’t have to be inferior to the products of consumer brands like Heinz and P&G. Indeed, many are made by the same manufacturers. Retailers have many advantages, with more opportunities to engage consumers more intimately, to add adjacent services such as advice, and understand consumers personally. Target could be a stronger brand than P&G.

Multi-dimensional markets

What are the major challenges for the markets of today, new business models, sustainable impacts, and rapidly changing aspirations of stakeholders?

Automotive: Facing its most profound change in 100 years, with autonomous vehicles, electrification and other fuels, new models of ownership and connected ecosystems. Add to this, AI and smart road infrastructure, connectivity and entertainment. Issues like safety will still matter, Volvo for example, is installing new sensors to detect poor driving, intoxication or excess speed, and take action.
Beauty: Personalisation and environmentally friendly products are key to the future of skin and colour products, with new science creating sophisticated functionality. Influencers like Michelle Phan rather than advertising shapes attitudes, whilst the subscription models of Birchbox and direct to consumer models of Beauty Pie have transformed the traditional purchase experience from instore to bathroom.
Energy: Decarbonisation, decentralisation and digitalisation are the key challenges for every power generator or distributor. As oil and gas, mining and fracking, give way to solar and wind, there is also a shift to city and home management, from local generation to automated control. Lanzatech turning waste into clean energy, Fluence a huge battery business from Siemens, and Watty are typical disruptors.
Fashion: New materials, new business models and new technologies are transforming fashion. From Agua Bendita’s beautiful bikinis made out of scraps to Bolt Thread’s synthetic spider silk, Unspun’s custom-made jeans using a 20 second Fit3D bodyscan to ThredUP’s resale platform, environmental impact has become the biggest issues in an industry which is one of the biggest polluters.
Finance: Digital entrants and emerging technologies are transforming banking, from DBS transforming to become “invisible” inside other services, to Atom and Number26 seeking speed and simplicity. Lemonade has embraced AI to transform the business model of insurance, while AXA explores new applications of blockchain, and cryptocurrencies evolve.
Food and drink: Wellness and sustainability have topped the agendas of major businesses like Danone, Nestle and Unilever, whilst animal and dairy-based categories have been challenged by plant-based alternatives such as Impossible and Beyond Meat. New channels and business models have been driven by a huge rise in snacking and on-the-go markets, plus home delivery and meal kits.
Healthcare: From positive health to personalised pharma, people are seeking to engage with healthcare in new ways. Combine 23andMe genetic profiling with PatientsLikeMe’s peer to peer advice, Babylon’s AI-enabled diagnostics and wearable health trackers, Minute Clinic’s simple consultations and Zipline’s drone deliveries, Organova’s 3D printed organs, gene editing and personalised medicines.
Media: Playing games to streaming television, virtual reality and instant messaging, have transformed how we immerse ourselves in content. New business models, in particular subscription, enable access across platforms, as we now shift to content that is even more user-generated and interactive. Platforms like Twitch and Spotify will become more important in curating content and building community.
Retail: In a sector dominated by Amazon, innovators like Shopify have helped direct brands to sell and deliver faster. Glossier has shown the power of community and pop-up stores, whilst Etsy has allowed artisans to reach the world, Alibaba embraces gamification to engage consumers more deeply, whilst intelligent delivery businesses like Meituan Dianping know consumers most personally.
Technology: AI and cloud will embed tech ever further into our lives, enabling more intelligent and individual choices and behaviours. In telecoms the shift to 5G will enable realtime engagement like never before, video-based content will accelerate with particular application to education and work, whilst our primary user interfaces will continue to shift to voice, eye tracking, and ultimately the brain.
Travel: AI will drive transportation to become automated, intelligent and efficient, health and environmental issues will continue to challenge airlines, hospitality and vacations. The shift to cleaner fuels and responsible tourism will be accelerated through innovations like those of Selina’s nomadic places to live, Lilium’s electric flying cars, and Ctrip in the huge Asian travel market.

What business are you really in?

Within the next decade, automotive companies will no longer sell cars, instead facilitating mobility on-demand, ride sharing and logistics services. They could also converge with other service providers such as scooters and trains, planes and hotels, energy and telecoms. Within the next decade we will subscribe to smart homes, which will manage our utilities, organise our shopping, stream our entertainment.

Who will provide these services? Tesla has long defined itself as an energy company, rather than an auto manufacturer. With “accelerate to renewable energy” as its defined purpose, it has a diversified business in batteries, energy systems and transportation. Indeed, it combines sales of cars with Powerwall charging systems, and even its solar roof tiles, creating an all-in-one subscription model that transforms value perceptions.

And there will be completely new markets too. Here are just a few examples of areas that are expected to be worth at least $100 billion by 2025: autonomous vehicles, IOT software and sensors, tissue engineering, smart grid technology and renewable energy.

The best way to “frame” your market space is around customers, and what you enable them to do. Like we defined purpose, define your market around why you exist, rather than just what you do, or how you do it. The “why” framing gives you a much richer space to play in, a broad range of market opportunities which by definition are desired, and more valuable to your customers.

Framing your market space is also a source of competitive advantage. By framing it differently from your competitors, you define your business and the value you offer in a more inspiring way. A new frame sets you alongside different alternatives, with different value perceptions and market models.

Consider other stakeholders too. Ask your employees, would they prefer to work in a telecom or tech company, a drug or wellness company? Similarly form alternatively framed markets will be seen with different risks and rewards, directly affecting your market value.

More for business leaders from Peter Fisk:

Next Agenda of best ideas and priorities for business
Megatrends 2030 in a world accelerated by pandemic
49 Codes to help you develop a better business future
250 companies innovators shaking up the world
100 leaders with the courage to shape a better future
Education that is innovative, issue-driven, action-driving
Consulting that is collaborative, strategic and innovative
Speaking that is inspiring, topical, engaging and actionable

Shigetaka Komori, CEO of Fujifilm has a mantra, “never stop transforming.”

As a result, the Japanese business has created innovative solutions in a wide variety of fields, leveraged its imaging and information technology to become a global presence known for innovation in healthcare, graphic systems, optical devices, specialist materials and other high-tech areas.

In the 1960s, Fujifilm was a distant second place to Kodak in the photographic film market. But today, digitalisation has transformed how we take photos, Kodak is gone (bankrupt in 2012), and Fujifilm has shifted focus and resources into new areas.

In 2000 the film-related business accounted for 60% of Fujifilm’s sales and 70% of its operating profit but fell to less than 1% within a decade. The traditional photographic imaging business, the core of the business, was largely replaced by other types of imaging, such as for healthcare.

“Whilst Kodak tried to survive in a declining market, Fujifilm looked to new futures” says Komori, when contrasting how the two companies responded to market change.

Imaging rapidly evolved into digital information, and a vast range of new businesses emerged in areas from medical system to pharmaceuticals, regenerative medicine to cosmetics, flat panel displays to graphic systems.

As an example, Fujifilm’s cosmetics business started in 2006 with the launch of its Astalift skin-care products, which then extended into make-up, and from them into other types of medical and wellbeing solutions. Whilst camera film and cosmetics might seem unrelated, camera film happened to be the same thickness (around 0.2 mm) as human hair. Collagen was used in its film to retain the material qualities, such as moisture and elasticity, over time. This expertise in manufacturing collagen is also fundamental to making skincare products.

Fujifilm introduced medical diagnostic imaging systems using its digital camera technology, which then gave it a platform for doing fundamental research into new medicines. Drug development is increasingly built on informatics, such as genetic analysis, fields in which Fujifilm could combine its expertise, giving it an advantage over traditional pharma companies.

You can see the transformations of Fujifilm here:

Infinite and invincible

In his book “The Infinite Game”, Simon Sinek explore how businesses can achieve long-lasting success, a relentless approach to transformation and growth, and sustained long-term value.

“In finite games, like football or chess, the players are known, the rules are fixed, and the endpoint is clear. The winners and losers are easily identified” he says. “In infinite games, like business or politics or life itself, the players come and go, the rules are changeable, and there is no defined endpoint. There are no winners or losers in an infinite game; there is only ahead and behind.”

Many businesses struggle because their business has a finite, or fixed, mindset. They set themselves an internal goal to be the best at something, or to launch a specific product, and they end up being a slave to it. Such narrowly-defined, sales-targeted, product-centric businesses find it difficult to break out of their current approach. They only know how to do more of the same with diminishing returns. Sales stagnate, momentum is lost, innovation slows, energy dips, and they lag behind.

Leaders with an infinite, or growth, mindset – not just in terms of experimenting to find new ways forwards, but in terms of their whole approach to strategy and innovation – do much better. They are purpose-driven, growth targeted, customer-centric. This builds direction and alignment, momentum and energy. These factors drive them naturally to keep evolving, to adapt and innovate, to move with a changing world. They even create a rhythm of change ahead of the market, and so can shape the world to their advantage.

Creating a growth portfolio

Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur famously created the business model canvas, a one-page diagram in which to capture the essential components of any business model, and crucially to explore the connections and trade-offs which exist between different choices. However, they increasingly found that the best companies develop a series, or portfolio of business models, which can serve them over time.

Their new book is “The Invincible Company” because companies who build a growth portfolio are sustained over time, not just in mindset, but also by a whole series of great ideas, innovations and business models that ensure its success today, and into the future.

Invincible companies manage a dynamic portfolio of established and emerging businesses – to protect established business models from disruption as long as possible, while simultaneously cultivating the business models of tomorrow. They need to “exploit” the present, and “explore” the future

Exploit the present requires leaders to manage and improve the existing businesses, focusing on their profitability, and their risk of disruption by new competitors, new technology, new markets, or regulatory changes.
Explore the future requires leaders to also search for new areas of growth, evaluating the potential profitability of new ideas which is drive by size and scalability, and also the risk associated with innovation, and how to make new ideas more certain.

To remain relevant and prosperous companies need to develop truly “ambidextrous” organisational structures which can create the future, whilst also delivering today. Innovation becomes just as important as delivery, but requires a distinctive culture, distinctive skills and metrics in order to be explorers of the future.

Leading for relentless growth

Leaders, themselves, need to be ambidextrous – to be the delivers of today, and also the creators of tomorrow.

Komori’s success has not come through creating one business, but a sequence of business concepts which keep building off each other. This sequence might take the form of leveraging distinctive capabilities with various applications into different sectors like Alphabet has done, or it might be about taking more businesses to the same audience as Apple, or it might be a series of ways of working within the same sector as Microsoft.

Amazon is a good example of a company that intentionally manages a diverse portfolio of existing and promising new business models. The company continues to produce growth with its existing businesses (online retail, AWS, logistics), whilst also developing a portfolio of potential future growth engines that may become big profit generators one day (Alexa, Echo, Dash Button, Prime Air, Amazon Fresh, etc).

Long-term sustained growth is built on a portfolio of short and long-term innovative business models. Such “invincible” companies can better allocate capital and resources at each stage of development. A culture and process that drives a continuous flow of new ideas and innovation is much more likely to sustain your business in turbulent times and uncertain futures.

More for business leaders from Peter Fisk:

Next Agenda of best ideas and priorities for business
Megatrends 2030 in a world accelerated by pandemic
49 Codes to help you develop a better business future
250 companies innovators shaking up the world
100 leaders with the courage to shape a better future
Education that is innovative, issue-driven, action-driving
Consulting that is collaborative, strategic and innovative
Speaking that is inspiring, topical, engaging and actionable

As 1999 ended, optimism was sky high as a new millennium of possibilities approached. For me it was particularly exciting as my first child, Anna, was born just weeks before the start of 2000. As clocks chimed to ring in the new year, my wife Alison and I stood outside our home at midnight, our new baby asleep in my arms, as the most dazzling fireworks display I have ever seen lit up the skies around us.

However economies come in cycles, and within three months of celebrating a new century, I vividly remember the day of the dotcom crash. The starry eyed dreams of many online entrepreneurs came crashing down. Bezos survived, but many others didn’t, including my own venture. I realised that, now with a young family, I needed to be smarter at building a business, and at anticipating the future.

Most people took their inspiration from a Seattle-based start-up called Amazon. A few years earlier in 1993, Jeff Bezos was working on Wall Street, a 30 year rising star of the hedge fund world. On his desk a report landed describing how the emerging Internet could become a huge virtual marketplace, that could reach across the old boundaries of nations and markets. Tim Berners-Lee at CERN had just launched the World Wide Web earlier that same year, enabling anyone to start to build a business online, simply and cheaply.

Within a few weeks Bezos left his high-flying job, packed a campervan and drove west with his young wife still asking huge questions. In Seattle, where most tech people clustered around Microsoft, he set out his business plan with a dream to create the world’s largest bookstore. Initially he called it Cadabra, then considered Relentless, but eventually settled upon Amazon. Within three years, he took the business public with an IPO. Anybody who invested $5000 in Bezos’s company back then would be worth around $5 million today.

At that same time, Anne Wojcicki, a 25 year old junior investment analyst, was sitting at her desk on Wall Street, not far from Bezos’ old office.

She read that the future of healthcare was all about data, genetic profiling of each individual enabling personalised medicines and care. No longer would people need to rely upon standardised drugs with limited effectiveness, seeking to address already developed illnesses often too late. Instead healthcare could be transformed to become personal, positive and proactive.

Like Bezos, a passion to create a better future was stirred inside her, and within weeks she quit her job and headed to San Francisco to start up a DNA profiling business, 23andMe.

At the time it cost around $300,000 to sequence an entire human genome. Wojcicki sought to dramatically reduce the cost by using a technology called genotyping, which spot checks specific parts of a gene for mutations know to be linked with certain diseases, instead of a creating a full sequence. They launched the brand to consumers in 2007, with testing packs available by mail order for $999, and later directly from the pharmacy’s shelf.

The revolutionary genetics business combined ideas of new genome technology and crowdsourced funding, into a model that has since reduced the cost of DNA profiling to $99 and is likely to fall much further in the coming years. She now leads a healthcare revolution.

Look forwards not back

Too many people in business spend too much time looking backwards.

As a CEO I spent the vast majority of every day, reviewing and reflecting on our past performance, or otherwise fire-fighting through the issues of the present moment. Almost all the data I tracked was about previous quarters, compared to previous years. Most time in meetings was spent discussing the relative success of past activities, and what we needed to do now to fix problems or improve their efficiency.

Most business reports focus on what companies have done, most analyst reports evaluate business based on financial histories. Even most future projections, and ultimately investment advice, is based on an extrapolation of the past. Strategy is usually based on building on what we currently do, rather than what we could do. It assumes that the future will largely be a continuum of what has gone before.

Looking forwards is a rare luxury.

A few weeks in the year are typically allocated to future planning. And of that, only a few days maybe even hours, with a serious discussion of future possibilities, vision development, and plotting out new directions. Ideas for the future are captured on flipcharts, slides and slogans, before their magic is quickly lost in a furious round of budget negotiations focusing on limiting expenditures rather than unlocking new revenues. Inspiring ideas for tomorrow are quickly diminished by the machinery of managing today.

It shouldn’t be like this. And in a turbulent world of relentless change, it can’t be.

Business leaders need to have their heads up, not heads down.

Of course, we need success today in order to create tomorrow, but creating the future matters more. Most business leaders will claim they are powerless to jump out of this cycle, to spend more time looking forwards. They are slaves to quarterly reporting demanded by investors, and short term attitudes of many analysts. But that is largely an excuse.

Paul Poleman, when CEO of the British/Dutch consumer goods giant Unilever, famously decided to end quarterly reporting, arguing that he could never get anything else done, and that his projects to invest and develop future ideas were always compromised by an inevitable desire to make today’s result look as good as possible. In a showdown with investors, he made the case that they too should be much more interested in long-term growth, rather than short-term glory. He won his battle, and Unilever began to thrive.

The challenge is to focus on the future, to engage everyone in exploring and creating your future potential. A business’ economic value is measured as the sum of future cashflows, not past profits. These can only grow through more future-focused initiatives. The alternative is to squeeze ever more revenues and less costs out of the existing business with diminishing returns. That’s not much fun, and certainly not the way to a better future.

Investors who understand, through better information and dialogue, the future potential of longer-term future initiatives, will reward the business with their confidence. This flows through to stock markets and market capitalisation.

Intangible assets, in the forms of everything from brands and patents, to contracts and customer bases, are the building blocks of innovation and future performance. Around 52% of the cumulative enterprise value of all publicly traded companies is intangible, worth $57.3 trillion according to Brand Finance’s “Global Intangible Finance Tracker”. The majority of business value is therefore about its future potential.

If business leaders can more clearly articulate future strategies for changing markets, new business models for engaging customers better, and innovation portfolios to drive new ideas into action, then even more of this future potential can be captured in the value of their businesses.

What is your future potential?

The world has progressed rapidly since the industrial revolution – steam engine to telephones, automobiles and aeroplanes, space travel and digital revolution. Today’s tech-fuelled revolution will be just as dramatic, but much faster.

The next decade’s accelerating change, proliferation of technologies, rapid speed of adoption, and the exponential impacts that result, will dwarf the scale of previous progress. How will we rethink and reinvent our worlds?

Markets are malleable things – they rise and fall, collide and evolve. Power shifts economically and politically, culturally and collectively. Entrepreneurial start-ups grab the attention, whilst the larger, older incumbent companies struggle to respond and adapt. Technology disrupts the rules of play, and the possibilities by which we can win. Huge opportunities, but where to focus?

We have more choices than ever before – in terms of who, where, what and how. Global or local? China or India? Online or physical? Human or machines? Make or partner? These are not binary choices, but a huge spectrum of options. How will you make the smarter choices, the right choices for your future?

“Future potential” is the ability of an organisation, and an individual, to utilise the future for its advantage. It is latent or unrealised ability, the capacity to do better. How you will unlock this ability is not always clear. However it is not simply by doing what you’ve always done, a little better, faster or cheaper, by working harder.

Potential lies in your ability to unlock the talents of yourself, and your organisation, in new unimagined ways. It lies in your ability to embrace new contexts as the world around us changes – economies and markets, customers and capabilities. Of all these, technology probably changes the context more than anything today.

How will you unlock your “future potential”?

Future potential of your business: what you could achieve together, embracing the best opportunities, unlocking the most valuable assets, extending capability through partners, driving faster innovation and new types of growth?
Future potential of your yourself: what you could achieve personally, embracing your dreams and ambitions, building more capacity to do more, amplifying the potential of those you work with, looking further ahead.

Future potential isn’t just about improving your existing business, but also about where you can go beyond it. Finding this future space, be it an entirely new space like Jeff Bezos found, in areas adjacent to what you do now, creates more opportunity.

Some businesses are always in “survive” mode, typically resisting the need to change, seeing it as a threat. Others are in “thrive” model, looking ahead for change, seeing it as an opportunity. Some people have the ability to change, others don’t. As leaders, we need to encourage the visionaries, the future seekers, those prepared to embrace change. We need to be those people.

The future is yours to shape, in the way you want, to your advantage. Far better to embrace a future of your own design, than to live in the shadow of one shaped by others.

Leaders need to be farsighted

When I asked Jim Snabe, former co-CEO of SAP, and now chairman of Siemens, how he makes sense of his business world, he paused. His first reaction was the obvious, to understand his specific industries, his customer and competitors, today. But then he reflected on the inadequacy of that current view. If what comes next will be different, then he needs to look differently for it, he said.

Seeing the bigger picture, is one way to change our viewpoint, but it’s probably still not enough. We still put ourselves at the centre, and then explore the obvious adjacencies. Instead we need new perspectives, seeing the emerging patterns of change, the parallels and possibilities, how to react to them, to seize the best new opportunities first. Put simply it’s about being farsighted.

Beth Comstock, former chief marketing and commercial officer of GE wrote about her leadership experiences as the business faced the challenges of rapidly changing markets. Her book Imagine it Forward: Courage, Creativity and the Power of Change is a call to action for all those executives who felt that they could continue doing what they had always done, and they and their company would be ok.

Comstock starts with a passion “The pace of change is never going to be slower than today.” She points out that 50 years ago the life expectancy of a Fortune 500 firm would have been around 75 years, whereas now it’s 15 years.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil goes further in an article entitled The Law of Accelerating Returns, saying “We won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21^st century, it will be more like 20,000 years of progress.”

The ability to be forward-looking and focused on the future, the capacity to imagine and articular future possibilities, sets the great leader apart from others. Whilst the rest of the organisation is focused on the shorter-term deliverables, they look to the leader to put what they do into the context of where they are going, and how it contributes to the journey.

Leaders as strategists are intensely curious about the future, looking beyond their own organisations and industries, to make sense of a changing world. They look to the changing dynamics of markets, of how organisations compete, but also of the shifts in macro-economics, politics and society. Indeed, the real catalysts for change are outside, not inside, an organisation.

The ability to look forwards, say Barry Posner and Jim Kouzes in The Leadership Challenge, is second only to honesty as the most admired trait in leaders. They found that 70% of employees say forward looking is the attribute they most look to in their leaders. This is not just about communicating a compelling vision, but being able to make sense of complexity, connecting the dots into a bigger picture, and to anticipate events before they happen.

My new research at IE Business School explored the reality of farsighted leaders.

We found that forwards thinking escalates with levels of leadership. Front-line supervisors need to look months ahead, mid-level managers who lead complex projects need to look 1-3 years ahead. C-suite executives should be thinking 5-10 years forwards, even if they plan and focus their actions on a shorter timeframe.

Yet the research also showed that most senior executives currently spend around 5% of their time thinking about the future – which could be a few hours every week, or more likely one or two weeks every year.

Contrast this to some of the great business leaders. Talking at his annual Berkshire Hathaway AGM in Omaha Nebraska, Warren Buffett claimed to have spent around 80% of his career reading and thinking. That seems extreme, but so is his performance as one of the world’s great investors.

Richard Branson told me how he always tries to take a swim for around an hour each morning, often a lap around the shore of his Caribbean island, giving himself time to think before anything else in the day. He also famously drinks 20 cups of tea each day, saying it gives him time to pause amidst the daily chaos, and just think a little. Jeff Bezos schedules “thinking” meetings about future ideas at 10am every morning, when he is fresh and alert, and never in the afternoon.

The future is an infinite array of possibilities – for you to decode as options and choices. Firstly, we need to make sense of what those options are, then explore what they could mean for us, and then decide how to make the right choices.

Forward-looking leaders embrace four important tenants

The future is fast: while the speed of change accelerates relentlessly, we shouldn’t be intimated by it, or jump to knee-jerk actions in panic, but take our time to think longer-term, and how to achieve progress.
The future is complex: while the search for simplicity is admirable, it is not always possible or the best solution, instead we need to recognise that today’s world is not about reducing things to 2×2 matrices, or binary choices.
The future is unpredictable: while we have a desire to be complete, and right, the future does not offer such precision, instead we need to embrace uncertainty as a positive force, to define our north star then embrace the journey as it evolves.
The future is there to be created: while we like to limit ourselves to what we know, what markets and sectors we are in, there are no boundaries or rules that limit where we can go. Imagination is our guide to write the future we want.

In his book “Farsighted: How to Make Decisions that Matter” Steven Johnson asks, if the most difficult choices are the ones with most consequences, why do we spend so little time thinking about them. It is fashionable, he says, to argue that we live in an age of short attention spans, requiring quick thinking and rapid action. Yet he argues that we have become much better at holistic thinking – connecting multiple ideas together, connecting the dots, systems-based approaches. Speed of change requires bigger thinking, he says.

Adam Grant reflected on Johnson’s challenge. He argued that a good way to think bigger is by reading novels, enabling us to transport our brains into new spaces and gain new perspectives – including exploring ideas for the future, through science fiction. Star Trek, for example, is a lifetime obsession of Jeff Bezos.

The IE research suggests that many leaders are averse to future thinking because there are no absolutes, no detailed analytics on which to base decisions. Indeed, over the last decade we have embraced scientific method into our business to such an extent that we now feel exposed without it. Instead making future choices requires intuition and imagination, and courage.

Psychologist Ellen Langer’s advice for making difficult choices about unpredictable futures, is “Don’t make the right decision, make the decision right”. Her point is to think about how we might explore the opportunities ahead of us, and their implications. Given you are never likely to have as much information as you’d like, don’t search for the perfect answer, consider how we can make the best choices from what you know.

However these choices will be infinitely better, if you open your eyes to broader horizons – to new perspectives and new directions – and thereby increase your future potential.

More for business leaders from Peter Fisk:

Next Agenda of best ideas and priorities for business
Megatrends 2030 in a world accelerated by pandemic
49 Codes to help you develop a better business future
250 companies innovators shaking up the world
100 leaders with the courage to shape a better future
Education that is innovative, issue-driven, action-driving
Consulting that is collaborative, strategic and innovative
Speaking that is inspiring, topical, engaging and actionable

The Middle East is a fascinating yet bewildering place for many foreign visitors.

Whilst it is mostly welcoming and safe, it has grown over recent years with a jumble of traditional culture and western influence. Working in Kuwait City recently, I ventured out from my hotel to explore skyscrapers mixed with traditional souq markets, cafes full of smoking locals, and small shops packed high with local delicacies.

Then I came across a minimalist single-floored glass building, % Arabica. It was full of young professionals, lined up for the best coffee and snacks in town, a meeting place that was an alternative to the crowded environs.

Japanese designer Ken Shoji told me that he had brought his Asian coffee concept to the Gulf state simply because it was so different. It was an inspiring fusion of multiculturalism – Asian architecture, African coffee roastery, and Arabic meeting place. Since launching a year ago, “%” had become a cult brand.

Creating new markets

Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne are both professors at the beautiful INSEAD business school based in Fontainebleau, 60km south of Paris. It was founded in 1957 by Georges Doriot, often called the father of venture capitalism, which makes it a fitting place to explore new markets.

“Blue Ocean Strategy” published in 2004 has become a business text of our times. I first met Mauborgne in Istanbul, in the same year. She explained the concept incredibly simply, saying “red oceans are the crowded markets where everyone crowds in to compete, blue oceans are the unexplored markets which are quite and uncontested”.

For the last 15 years they have told the story of Cirque du Soleil, how it blended the ideas of opera and ballet with traditional circus, whilst eliminating animals and raising prices. Or Southwest Airlines, offering shuttle buses to secondary airports with limited service, the first low cost airline. Or Nintendo Wii, taking the established concept of video games but adding multi-players and augmented reality to enable family participation.

Kim offers four ways to innovate the “strategy canvas” which maps out the attributes of a market, exploring what to reduce, what to enhance, what to eliminate, what to create. The results for Cirque’s Guy Laliberté, Southwest’s Herb Kelleher, and Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, were innovative businesses that dominated new market spaces.

Creating a new market space, in my experience happens in one of three ways:

Forming markets: this is the most radical, in that it creates a completely new business opportunity, responding to a new need and aspiration of the customer. Red Bull’s Dietmar Mateschitz returned from Asia, tired after a long flight, with the inspiration to create an “energy drink”, and the likes of Gatorade later followed.
Fusing markets: combining the best ideas of two different markets, potentially to reach new audiences with new applications. Apple did this with the iPhone. When Steve Jobs launched it he described it as “a combination of a mobile phone, entertainment player and internet browser”.
Framing markets: redefining the boundaries, domain and descriptors of a market as trends shift, categories evolve, and new possibilities can be included. Shell, the oil giant, redefined itself as an energy company. Danone, the French food manufacturer, as a health company.

In three decades of working with hundreds of companies, these two latter concepts have proved the most enduring for me. More than any clever technique, name-checked model, or guru inspiration, the simple acts of “fusing” and “framing” have been most productive.

Power to the people

The most significant shift in business over the last 30 years has been from product-centred to customer-centred thinking. Many companies are still not there, but I suspect more has been invested in trying to make that transformation, that anything else, even the digital transformations of recent years.

30 years ago, when I started my business career, all 30,000 staff in the company were asked to go on a two-day program called “Winning for Customers”.

At the time, led by an inspired people-thinking CEO, Colin Marshall, it seemed radical and fresh. At the same time, for an airline, it seemed obvious. The primacy of the customer experience, rather than the functionality of any component – parking, check-in, boarding, seats, entertainment, food, transfers – seemed obvious. It was easy to think “horizontal” and follow the customer’s journey, crossing over the “vertical” silos of internal functions and product and service components.

Customer-centric companies succeed in three ways:

Customer control: the customer is the starting point of any transaction, determining when and how they want to do business. Technology empowers their choices and preferences, whilst imperfect responses are quickly challenged.
Customer creativity: increasingly customers want to be more active in the design and shaping of what they buy, be it through co-creation of personalised solutions, or more strategic involvement through partnerships.
Customer collaboration: customers trust and influence each other, advertising is largely background noise in today’s marketing world, as customers seek to do more together, sharing their passions and projects in communities enabled by brands.

Technology has finally made customer-centric thinking obvious for every type of business. Power is now unquestionably in the hands of customers. They have infinite choice, they can access your business or any other, with a simple click, and there is a surplus of supply rather than demand.

Businesses now even struggle to engage customers in a relationship, let alone gain their loyalty, as customers trust each other more than any brand, and are loyal to their community rather than any supplier.

Every business is a “consumer” business

This power shift from product to customer fundamentally changes the mindset and structure of businesses.

Businesses (B) are organised by customer (C) or segment rather than product or category, with internal alignment of capabilities giving way to an alignment of insight. In reality, a business needs to achieve both.

As supply chains become ecosystems, networks rather than linear flows, the relationships between businesses and customers change. Businesses can reach end-customers directly by developing direct channels, giving them much more ability to self-assemble components, be it organising vacations or building their own homes.

As a result, the end customer, or the “consumer”, becomes the lead actor in a reconfigured play. We can see the shifts here, evolving over time:

From B2C to C2B: empowered by technology, transparency and choice, consumers demand businesses and brands to act on their terms – when, where, how, what they need – they demand more, and influencers drive preference. Examples: L’Oréal personalisation direct. Netflix video on demand.
From B2B to B2B2C to C2B2B to C2B: enabled by technology, businesses no longer need to work through aggregators of solutions, or distribution intermediaries, instead the most “industrial” of businesses connect directly with consumers, again on their terms. Examples: Goldman Sachs’ consumer bank, Cemex direct to consumer.
From C2B to C2C: enabled by technology, consumers find each other, seeking to share their passions, and possibly enabled by brands. Even if brands provide products and services, they are secondary to what the consumer seeks to achieve. Examples: Glossier’s beauty community. Rapha’s Cycle Clubs.

Every business is a “consumer” business.

Alibaba’s “C2B” model shows how to use the power of AI and machine learning to respond to customers’ rapidly changing needs and aspirations. Ming Zeng, chief strategy officer, says that in a digital world, all successful companies use the latest tech, but Alibaba has taken the underlying principles of e-commerce the furthest, with a model based on machine learning and the comprehensive “datafication” of the consumer’s experience.

The technology allows the company to put consumers at the centre of business, constantly collecting data on them and their purchase choices in real time and using feedback loops to drive machine learning. When consumers log on they see a customised webpage with a selection of products curated from the billions offered by millions of sellers.

The model requires several connected elements: a network that can dynamically adjust the supply and quality of service offerings, an interface where customers can easily articulate their needs and responses, a modular structure that can grow from an initial beachhead, and purchasing platforms than can provide agility and innovation.

Every consumer exchange supplies more data, which goes into the feedback loops required for machine learning. This system requires that a large number of actions and decisions are taken out of human hands. Algorithms automatically make incremental adjustments that increase system-wide efficiency.

For the brands of P&G, it means a new way of engaging, as demonstrated by L’Oréal. For industrial businesses like commodity miners, cement producers, agricultural farmers, it is a huge opportunity to connect directly with consumers, to add value in new ways and transform profitability.

It also means that there is no such thing as a “commodity”.

Excerpt from “Business Recoded” by Peter Fisk

Change drives opportunity.

Megatrends are the most powerful forces shaking up and rapidly redefining our world. From socio-demographic tsunamis (45% increase in global over 60s by 2030) and economic shifts (Asia’s $10 trillion new middle class) to scientific breakthroughs (quantum computing even more profoundly than AI) and new demands (9 billion people, 35% more food, 50% more energy).

They capture people’s imagination, themes of change that rise above the fads and fashions of today, to understand the superhighways to our future, and how we can be part of it.

The real story, is about how these megatrends drive and catalyse new opportunities, new spaces to think differently, to ways to create a better world. Where are the best opportunities for growth, for innovation? Which of the powerful drivers, including a cadre of incredible technologies, will be most significant?

And what do we start today, in order to create a better tomorrow.

Dubai’s Future Foundation is a phenomenal source of foresight about global change. Yes, it matters to the UAE as it looks far beyond sand and oil, to transform itself into a thought-leading hub of the future. But it is equally important wherever you are in the world. Increasingly, with digitally-enabled reach, everyone can shape the future.

While the 10 megatrends capture the headlines, they are driven by uncertainties and assumptions, which are important too (see later). From these emerge the “50 global opportunities” which are clustered into 5 themes:

Health Reimagined: Redefine mental and physical health, support longer lives, drawing on both science, technology and nature towards better health and new ways to personalise access for individuals and communities everywhere.
Collaboration Advanced: Enhance problem-solving, innovation and trust by redesigning collaborative structures and processes between humans – including across generations as well as between machines and between humans and machines.
Nature Restored: Minimise environmental risks, harness nature’s capacity to restore itself or have a positive impact on crucial environmental ecosystems and habitats, creating a more stable, healthier planet for all.
Societies Empowered: Empower societies by offering solutions to humanity’s most complex and universal needs, optimising systems they rely on, safeguarding risks that could make societies more fragile in the face of crises and extending individual and collective potential for growth and development.
Transformational: The power to radically change ways of life by replacing the models that countries, communities and individuals live by. These new models enable individuals and communities to innovate and improve and aid the transformation of humanity to new digital and non-digital realities.

Driving these opportunities are a range of uncertainties and assumptions. In a world of dramatic change, we increasingly see quantum shifts in thinking and capability. But it also requires a reflection on purpose, and what we really mean by growth, prosperity and wellbeing.

Growth … considering not just our outputs, but our impacts too, or net-positive growth.
Prosperity … safe and secure, wealth but also more personalised, and society’s overall gains.
Wellbeing … beyond physical and mental health, to embrace progress for ourselves and each other.

Some of the key uncertainties include

Collaboration .. from multilateral to multipolar, as more effective governance models would build trust and enable data flows – for example in global health data- sharing.
Values … from universal to unique, as education improves understanding and tolerance, and societies become more diverse and innovative to share benefits.
Technology … from multiplier to master, as intelligent connected systems can improve access to services and quality of life, opening up new ways to realise human potential.
Nature … from renewal to degradation, as new materials and engineering techniques can reduce waste and offer new solutions for food, water and energy.
Systems … from fragile to resilient, as AI’s problem-solving capacity may enable systems to continuously adapt to contextual changes to achieve greater resilience.

These then drive the 10 megatrends, the pathways to new opportunities:

Materials revolution: Researchers are studying nature to find inspiration for synthetic biological materials with novel physical properties that can be made in a laboratory. Over the next few decades, technological advances in materials science could result in wide-ranging applications to enhance sustainability, durability and efficiency. Supply chains may be re-engineered as individuals become producers in a regenerative or self- sufficient economy.
Devaluation of data: Ubiquitous real-time data is increasingly challenging the viability of business models based on asymmetric information. As more data becomes open, competition shifts from the question of who has the best data to that of who can best analyse the data that is available to everyone. New kinds of data – such as open-source DNA of many living organisms, brain mapping and microbiome analysis – can provide platforms for innovation in areas such as disease prevention and treatment.
Increasing technological and biological vulnerabilities: The more data becomes open, and the more interconnected and intelligent systems become, the more vulnerable a range of critical infrastructure and services will be – from finance to supply chains to potentially hackable DNA-based personalised medicine. Complexity could grow faster than the capacity to mitigate risks of system failure and cyberattacks. Quantum-proofing the internet will require new solutions and may be very complex.
Pushing the boundaries on energy: New solutions for electricity generation and storage, some not involving batteries or heat, are set to enable new models of energy distribution when combined with smart grids and superconductors. Examples include facilitating peer-to-peer electricity sharing across buildings and bringing cheap and consistent power to remote communities without the need for generators, allowing them to develop rapidly. Fusion could make energy limitless and bring immense benefits worldwide.
Management of ecosystems: Environmental impacts are seen less in terms of specific processes and more in terms of ecosystems. Ecosystem services are valued more highly with a greater understanding of their role in innovation and climate change mitigation and the connections between the biological world, humans and the digital world. More accurately assessing the value to humanity of the natural habitats of different countries could drive the emergence of new models to invest in ecosystem services. Community- and building-level ecosystems can become regenerative micro-economies that need to be served differently by governments and utilities.
Borderless world: Health, education and other services increasingly cross borders, pointing to a digital future with minimal transfer of physical goods. There is a growing need to clarify jurisdictions for cross-border transactions and set up international dispute resolution mechanisms that can resolve issues for everyone, wherever they are in the world.
Digital Realities, living in immersive virtual and digital spaces: Digital platforms evolve into digital realities beyond digital twins. Brain– computer interfaces could lead to a new symbiosis between the human and virtual worlds, allowing people to touch, smell, feel, see and hear surroundings in which they are not physically present. This would enable many aspects of life to be replicated in virtual spaces, including work and legal systems. It would also raise policy questions, such as how physical- world legalities and ethics apply in virtual spaces.
Living with autonomous robots: Humans may come to trust robots more than other humans because they act predictably, ensure confidentiality and make better decisions. But robots also pose ethical questions. How
far should they be granted rights? When should they be made available, and for whom? A sharing economy could involve robots that create opportunities to aid greater growth, prosperity and even well-being.
Repurposing human purpose: Advanced artificial intelligence can open new ways to realise human potential and reconfigure our purpose in the future. Intelligent, connected systems are enabling more personalised access to goods and services within people’s homes. Mental health conditions may be remedied by brain–computer interfaces and real-time testing and monitoring. People will seek income in different ways in future, with the economy set to revolve more around creative problem- solving – for example, there is potential for people to initiate inventions and solutions and own part of the intellectual property. Throughout history, technological shifts have led to new kinds of occupations emerging, suggesting that fears about job displacement can be alleviated if we know how to mentor people to operate in a more efficient world.
Advanced health and nutrition: Biofoundries that harness biological processes to produce sustainable products, including novel agritech and foods, have the potential to improve individual and collective outcomes while reducing environmental stresses. Personalised metabolic and genetic nutritional profiles can enable huge advances in addressing a range of physical and mental conditions, boosting longevity, productivity and well-being. Food and nutrition may become more regenerative, health diagnoses instantaneous and treatment more available either in people’s homes or through nutrition and robots for therapy. More accessible gene editing and gene therapy can, with appropriate regulations, bring many benefits.

From that emerges the 50 opportunities, or you could see them as possibilities to explore in your own organisation … 50 “what ifs” …

Health Reimagined. What if…

1. we improved our natural internal armour?
2. we all held on to our stem cells?
3. we could reprogramme proteins?
4. the world’s most disadvantaged had access to real-time diagnostics?
5. cities went silent?
6. we could protect our future selves from past trauma?
7. technology-free zones were part of urban planning?
8. we spent more time awake?
9. an we protect ourselves from the possibility of electromagnetic harm or disruption?
10. if geriatrics was the new paediatrics?

Collaboration Advanced. What if…

11. machines could brainstorm ideas?
12. the future of work was to challenge the machine?
13. we had a new model for public goods?
14. differing opinions could connect and improve business and society?
15. generational diversity was a must in the board room?
16. space traffic was internationally regulated?
17. comprehensive data was a public good?
18. we adopted Space Development Goals?
19. we built a digital climate catalogue?
20. knowledge was effortlessly shared?
21. no one was left behind in the transition to digital realities?

Nature Restored. What if…

22. we returned the planet to its natural state?
23. the next wave of car technology innovation was in the wheels?
24. we had a responsive centennial plan for the planet?
25. the atmosphere was given the ability to self-heal?
26. we could recool the planet by saving the ice caps?
27. we achieved zero emissions?
28. we could absorb greenhouse gas emissions and particulate matter on demand anywhere in the world?
29. agriculture cut its dependence on water?

Societies Empowered. What if…

30. decentralised autonomous organisations became a force for positive change?
31. the people of the world voted for action on global challenges?
32. paid social national service was standard?
33. social policies were designed and monitored at a community level and in real time?
34. hybrid intelligence reduced groupthink?
35. we had a convention of rights for digital realities?
36. we secured our digital identities using quantum encryption?
37. we designed a liveability index for digital realities?
38. we tokenised our most sensitive data?
39. this is the end of secondary education as we know it?

Transformational. What if…

40. solar farms were moved to space?
41. digital realities rewrote liability laws in the real world?
42. accounting reinvented itself?
43. deliveries went underground?
44. we could make new materials in seconds?
45. the Fortune Global 500 was purely virtual?
46. future potential was reported alongside GDP?
47. we could X-ray the whole planet?
48. energy was stored in space?
49. businesses considered the future beyond ESG?
50. teleportation was a reality?

On Monday I landed in Istanbul for a two-day work trip. 4 hours later, the earthquake struck. 4am. It was 1000 km away, I felt nothing from my hotel bed.

At breakfast, a few hours later, people were staring intently at their mobile phones. I didn’t have time to catch the news as I woke, and at that time nobody was reporting the scale of what had happened.

Taking in such a disaster is not easy.

My Turkish hosts were deeply concerned, but wanted to keep going. We started as planned at 9am.

We tried to explore what we could do to help. The textile business who I was working with wanted to send a million items of warm clothing immediately. The logistics of doing so were much less clear. But soon plans started to swing into action. To leverage the resources of the business, to do what we could.

3 days later, now sitting in Sweden, and the true scale of what happened is now much more apparent. I have been reflecting on how to best express my feelings on this week’s tragedy in Turkey and Syria, one of the worst natural disasters of this century.

Turkey is close to my heart. I have many friends there. In fact I’ve been visiting for almost 20 years, almost since the last huge earthquake. That time much closer to Istanbul.

I deeply admire the people, their history, their courage, their stories. They certainly don’t have an easy time.

It is very difficult to speak about such a disaster, it takes time to process, and you wonder what you can do from a distance. Yet we all can take urgent action to contribute towards minimizing the impact of this terrible event.

My friends in Turkey have recommended to donate through AKUT or Ahbap in order to make sure help gets directly and fast to the people who need it most. In the UK, donations are being coordinated by DEC.

Together we can help each other in times of need, and over time, work to make the world a better place.

I’m sending my best wishes to all my friends in Turkey, at this incredibly challenging moment.

8 years ago, a team at outdoor clothing brand Patagonia, with a mission to “save our home planet” started to study the environmental impacts of micro plastics.

With every load of laundry, millions of microfibres, each less than 5 mm long, wash down the drain. Some are filtered out at water treatment plants, but others end up in the ocean, where fibres from synthetic fabric make up a surprisingly large amount of plastic pollution – 35%, by one estimate.

Patagonia, of course, are a leading manufacturer of fleece jackets, from where many of those microfibres emerge.

Patagonia and Samsung have now joined forces to flight the microplastics that emerge from clothes.

Microplastics as a result of clothes washing has to date not received the same awareness campaign compared to other sustainability efforts, such as water-saving technologies. When synthetic textiles are washed, microplastics from garments including stretchy denim, fleeces, nylon and polyester will all see microplastics end up in the waterways. Even delicate cycles release copious amounts of plastics.

Add-on filters for washing machines and protective laundry bags are just some of the solutions that are now available to help capture some of the microplastics released during washing.

Samsung says that they are working with Patagonia on a feasible, effective and expandable way to combat the microplastics that result from textiles and laundry. Samsung is designing new machines that minimise the impact of microplastics.

The release of microplastics from synthetic clothes is mainly caused by the mechanical and chemical stresses that fabrics undergo during a washing process in a laundry machine, which lead to the detachment of microfibres from the yarns that constitute the textile.

Last year Samsung pledged it would accelerate the development of eco-conscious home appliances through innovative products and services that can be used in everyday life.

The Patagonia and Samsung collaboration will see select machines using a new filter system and cycle, with both companies look at reducing micro plastics by up to 54%. The washing machines are expected to be available later this year.

Update: see also this Fast Company article.

The fashion industry produces almost 20% of the world’s wastewater and is responsible for 2-8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations.

Natural fibres like cotton and wool require significant land and water; and synthetic fibres, such as nylon, are derived from oil, gas, or coal in an energy-intensive chemical process. Producing a pair of jeans requires about 2,000 gallons of water, more than enough to supply a person with eight cups of drinking water per day for ten years.

If nothing is done, the fashion industry will account for more than a quarter of the world’s carbon footprint by 2050.

According to the UN, the average consumer buys 60% more pieces of clothing today than 15 years ago, and uses each item only half as long. That means we’re throwing away more clothes than we know what to do with, as the mountains of used garments washing up on African beaches attest to. According to one estimate, consumers in the UK keep their clothes only 2.2 years, on average.

Other surveys show garments being tossed after being worn only seven times. Around the world, a truckload of textiles is landfilled or incinerated every second, according to a European Commission strategy paper on sustainable textiles. The paper predicts that the consumption of clothing and footwear is expected to increase 63% by 2030, making recycling a more urgent imperative than ever.

Here are some of the most interesting reports on the future of textiles and fashion:

The State of Fashion 2023 by BOF and McKinsey
Future of Fashion 2022 by CB Insights
A New Textiles Economy by Ellen McArthur Foundation
Smart Fabric Textiles by MDPI
Trends Kaleidoscope 2023 by Peter Fisk
250 Companies to Inspire You by Peter Fisk

Fashion used to be all about style, typically driven by luxury brands and premium designers. Fashion was a statement about who we are, or want to be. It was aspirational, desirable and largely superficial.

Today, its about much more. Products (and services) that can improve our lives.

Take Veja shoes for example, the fashion-essential white sneakers, made with sustainable Amazonian rubber, constructed in Brazil, by a French company. It’s good for the world, and it makes a statement about what we believe in ourselves.

Many brands still stand out for beautiful products, but also with an inspiring, innovative story too. Often, it is retail brands rather than product brands who can tell this story best, and also have more scope to innovate.

Consider Farfetch, founded in 2007 by the Portuguese entrepreneur Jose Neves, the luxury marketplace that partners with small boutiques around the world, poured its profits into sustainability initiatives, including acquiring the resale technology company Luxclusif to power its own secondhand business, Second Life, and launching an in-house eco-friendly label, There Was One, (created by Italy’s New Guards Group, exclusively for Farfetch) which creates durable basics.

Here are some of the most interesting reports:

The State of Fashion 2023 by BOF and McKinsey
Future of Fashion 2022 by CB Insights
A New Textiles Economy by Ellen McArthur Foundation
Smart Fabric Textiles by MDPI
Trends Kaleidoscope 2023 by Peter Fisk
250 Companies to Inspire You by Peter Fisk

Sustainable and desirable

The average shopper now buys 60% more clothes than they did 50 years ago. And wears only 30% of of them, typically 5-6 times before disposal. The fashion industry has been a major contributor to climate change and biodiversity loss—which means the industry’s sustainability efforts are critical to our planet’s health. The fashion industry produces almost 20% of the world’s wastewater and is responsible for 2-8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations.

On, the Swiss sportswear business, born in Switzerland seven years ago, has become the fastest growing global running brand. Ithas launched a 100% recyclable, bio-based performance running shoe. Some claimed it was impossible. But we chose to Dream On. The Cloudneo is now available via subscription to our Cyclon™ circularity program. Run. Recycle. Repeat.

Designer Tracy Reese took the radical step of moving her HQ from New York to Detroit as part of her mission to transform the city into a hub of ethical fashion manufacturing. Johannesburg-based designer Thebe Magugu used his collections to narrate stories about politics and history; for his 2021 collection, he interviewed South African women who worked as spies during apartheid, creating outfits that spoke to issues of gender and colonialism.

Some brands focused on creatively responding to consumers’ unmet needs. Myya, for instance, created a luxurious lingerie shopping experience for breast cancer patients, who historically have been forced to buy prosthetics and specialized bras at medical supply stores. Figs designed tasteful and comfortable scrubs for medical professionals, cultivating a loyal following of 1.7 million customers who appreciate the care that has gone into these outfits.

Denim brand Good American recognized that women’s bodies fluctuate in size 31 times over the course of their lives, forcing them to buy new clothes. The brand launched its Always Fits jeans and swimwear collections, which are designed to span four sizes, ensuring they look flattering even as customers’ bodies change.

Shoe brand Hoka developed by two former Salomon executives in Annoy, France, has paid close attention to runners’ needs, developing new foams and carbon-fibre plates that give them extra propulsion, without sacrificing comfort. While the industry sought minimalist designs, it went for a maximalist (lots of cushioning!) approach.

Direct and realtime

Lets talk about Shein. Forget fast fashion, this is realtime. In fact most items are not even made when ordered, but then made and shipped within 24 hours, direct to your door. The $100 billion Chinese brand produces ultra-cheap clothes at ultra-fast speed, creating an ultra-big hype on social media. The Haul. TikTok on steroids. There’s waste, and human rights, and more. But there also some insights to learn from – AI predictive, on demand, social influence.

Gymshark is now 10 years old, but Ben Francis’ business continues to thrive, built on an online platform selling direct to consumers, fuelled by social media, and is now extending into physical stores. In 2020, the company was valued at over £1 billion.

Virtual and metaverse

While Zuckerberg’s Meta vision resulted in a 70% fall in his company’s share price, the web3-enabled world is taking shape with brands like Ledger and The Dematerialised. Nike acquired RTFKT to merge physical and virtual worlds. The latest evolution of the Nike Adapt platform features auto-lacing, haptic feedback, enhanced lighting, gesture control, walk detection, wireless charging, NFC link, App connectivity, AI/ML algo, and Move to Earn.

Dress X became the world’s largest digital fashion store targeting Gen Z awho seek digital, sustainable, and affordable fashion – even if it’s virtual. The company was named one of the finalists of LVMH Innovation Award 2022 in the category 3D/Virtual Product Experience & Metaverse.

Retailers as brands

Farfetch stocks goods from various boutiques big and small in over 50 different countries. It is stepping out with its very own in-house fashion brand. Dubbed ‘ There Was One ‘ the line takes inspiration from elevated classics and includes tailored blazers, soft slip dresses, denim jackets, and zippered leggings, and draws from the platform’s data-driven insights on what customers are actively searching for on Farfetch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-8XTsvBrRU

Brands beyond products

Brands are becoming increasingly independent of products, and more about consumers and communities. Take gaming brands for example. They define a lifestyle, culture, value set. Take 100 Thieves. The gaming brand collaborates with Gucci – including a limited-edition backpack from the Gucci Off The Grid collection—made from recycled and sustainably sourced materials— in a new shade of bright red featuring a distinctive circular patch with the 100 Thieves logo.

Brands with stories

ISKO, a brand of Turkey’s Sanko Group, is the world’s largest producer of denim fabric, with 250 million meters of fabric a year. It says it “creates the soul of jeans, the essence of the most popular fashion style that has become universal.” It is a great example of building an ingredient brand, in a way that the premium ingredient enhances the core brand. Read more.

Outerknown seeks to make clothing differently. Created by world champion surfer Kelly Slater in 2015, with the goal of creating high-quality, sustainable fashion that would stand up to any conditions—including those you’ll find in the water. The brand’s clothing is made using eco-conscious materials like organic cotton and hemp fibres, as well as recycled polyester derived from recycled plastic bottles. Their jeans are made at the world’s cleanest denim facility, using less water, fewer chemicals, and organic cotton. They guarantee S.E.A. JEANS for life. Now your most comfortable jeans are also your most sustainable.

Cool and conscious

18 years ago, VEJA‘s founders decided to travel to the Amazon rainforest and meet the producers of wild rubber in person, the same rubber we use in every one of our VEJA soles. Those producers protect the forest and live in harmony with it. This rubber, extracted from forest trees, is a completely ecological raw material. Last year, a team of VEJA members traveled to the Amazon rainforest to discover the Chico Mendes reserve. One of the many reserves that VEJA works to keep the Amazon rainforest alive. These families of rubber producers we work with are paid 4 times more than the market price.

Vestiaire Collective is banning fast fashion from being bought, sold or listed on the platform. “We say no to a system that supports overconsumption, poor quality and over production. Its mission is to drive change from within the fashion industry. We aim, over the next 3 years, to become a fast fashion-free platform that celebrates quality, craftsmanship and sustainability.”

Fabrics and production

Swiss innovator HeiQ creates some of the most high performance textile technologies in the market today. Founded in 2005 as a spin-off of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Two examples: HeiQ Smart Temp provides textiles with the ability to dynamically respond to body heat, keeping you cool and dry when you are hot, and retaining body heat when you get chilly. This keeps you comfortable at all times. HeiQ Clean Tech makes processing of textiles more ecological, improves productivity and efficiency of textile manufacturing, and helps to significantly lower CO2 emission. In many cases by more than 30%. HeiQ AeoniQ makes yarn from cellulosic raw materials in a process that captures five tons of carbon for each ton of yarn. It operates a pilot plant with a capacity of 100 tons per year and plans a giga-factory for 2025

Swedish company Renewcell recently opened the world’s first commercial-scale textile recycling plant, turning old clothes that would have gone to landfill into a new sustainable material called circulose. The factory process, which also saves some 90 billion liters of fresh water a year, is based on a raft of custom-made ABB technologies.

MAS is one of the world’s leading textile creators and manufacturers, promoting unconventional idea-generation to inspire the world’s fashion and retail brands. Innovation and sustainability are key. MAS is globally recognised as a pioneer of women’s empowerment in the global apparel industry through the award winning programme – Women Go Beyond, improving and sustaining employee livelihoods, nurturing communities, whilst working aggressively to identify and minimise the environmental impact of our operations and products. MAS owns the world’s first purpose built eco-manufacturing plant – Thurulie. Their lean driven, empowered and people-centric culture facilitates innovation throughout the value chain. The strategic investment portfolio of businesses includes raw materials, brands and private industrial parks, with an active presence across Asia, Middle East, North America and Africa.

NEFFA a Dutch textiles business founded by Aniela Hoitink, its focused on developing mushroom-based mycelium, and using 3D printing to create customised products using body scans to create the perfect fit. The result is a seamless, customised, sustainable product. Operationally she is supported by German shoe machinery company Desma.

Infinited Fiber is a Finnish biotech with the technology to turn old clothes into new, super versatile, high-quality textile fibres that look and feel like cotton – regenerating cotton into Infinna (TM). “It’s like some kind of magical Willy Wonka machine. Throw in your old clothes, or used cardboard boxes, and they magically become my new T-shirt or jeans”

Vegea was founded in 2016 in Milan, Italy, creating an alternative to leather .For every 2 bottles of wine produced there is a bottle of waste. Vegea takes the waste from winemaking, and turns the dried grape marc into an eco-composite alternative to leather … now used in Bentley interiors and Gucci shoes.

More disruptors

German startup circular.fashion develops a platform that enables fashion brands to design garments for circularity from the very beginning of their lifecycle. The platform enables a transparent flow of information between material suppliers, fashion brands, customers, and recyclers. It features a database containing hundreds of fabrics selected for their sustainable properties and validated for future recyclability, as well as circular design guidelines. The company also provides a unique circularity.ID for each piece, enabling full transparency into a garment’s journey.

One of the challenges that limit garment recycling is the need to disassemble large volumes of clothing very fast. Resortecs – REcycling, SORting, TEChnologieS – is an H&M Global change award-winning start-up that develops technology to empower smart, industrial-scale textile disassembly and recycling. Founded in 2017 by Belgium’s Cédric Vanhoeck and Vanessa Counaert, Resortecs drives circularity in the textile industry with innovative heat-dissolvable stitching threads and thermal disassembly systems that make recycling easy. All without sacrificing the creativity, design, and quality of clothing. Garments are difficult to recycle because they are difficult to disassemble. Resortecs’ globally patented solution consists of two steps: Smart Stitch™: garments designed for disassembly by simply changing the thread The heat-dissolvable threads melt at high temperatures (150-200°C), making the seams disappear automatically. Smart Disassembly™: patented thermal systems to dismantle garments 5x faster, with industrial ovens processing up to 10 tons of textiles per day. No risk of damaging the fabric thanks to low-oxygen chamber.

Technologies that allow recovery of materials from discarded textile enable resource reuse for the creation of new products. Australian startup BlockTexx recovers polyester and cellulose from discarded textiles and clothing of any color or condition. The startup’s proprietary technology separates polyester and cotton clothes, sheets, and towels back into raw materials. It turns them into high-quality polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and cellulose for reuse in new products. The startup’s recovered materials find applications in many industries, including textile, packaging, building products, pharmaceutical, and food.

Technologies that allow for continuous recoloring of textiles without the use of toxic additives promote the reuse of produced clothes. Swedish startup Vividye develops a reversible coloring technology. It enables the application of all sorts of colors and designs to textiles, which can later be removed to re-apply new ones. The process is resource-efficient and does not require toxic chemicals. The company uses filtered and reused wastewater to further reduce the environmental impact. Vividye’s technology introduces new creative opportunities for designers, making it possible to color and recolor textiles multiple times.

Rifò is an Italian startup that makes high-quality garments and accessories, using recycled and recyclable textile fibers. The startup transforms old clothes into yarn to create new cashmere sweaters and hats. It utilizes a unique mechanical and craftsmanship process to turn fabric leftovers and old clothes into new garments with identical qualities to the original products. This method allows to recycle textile waste, as well as to reduce the amount of water, dyes, and chemicals used to create new clothes.

Hong Kong-based startup The R Collective upcycles rescued textiles, reuse materials, and collaborates with fashion designers to create circular apparel. The startup utilizes a broad range of rescued quality waste materials from fibers and fabrics to fasteners. It diverts the best materials from landfills into the circular fashion system by upcycling them into clothes.