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Broadly stated, the first 50 years of environmentalism saw processes of social fission at work. The one overarching agenda split into a set of different issues, each with different advocates and organizations rallying behind them. The result has been the release of an immense amount of negative energy as they fragmented society into different camps on key issues. The toxic consequences of these silos live on, particularly in areas like climate change. Nor have we seen the back of this political fission: it is still at work in the relations between business and government, the BRIC and non-BRIC countries, and between present and future generations. If this continues, we risk a future described by a ‘fission scenario’: a world where the focus is narrower, shallower, lower and shorter than it should be—and where, as a result, the best that can be achieved is incremental change. A more positive scenario foresees a future based on social fusion, where new initiatives convene leading businesses and other actors to address key challenges. The fusion agenda depends critically on creating market and governance conditions where doing the right thing becomes the default setting for business and financial markets. Leadership would then involve thinking and investing over significantly longer time-scales in pursuit of transformational system change.
If fission is the status quo, what would need to happen to take us into a future of fusion? What would that future quo be? Stretching the time horizons of leaders in boards, C-suites, cabinets or other centers of power is part of the solution. But we believe that there are actually five dimensions across which leadership must stretch to take us to a fusion future. These are shown in Panel 4 on pages 18–19. It is important to remember that the job of any leader is not only to focus on the future, but also to have the ability to work in the space between their vision and what is needed at a practical level in order to implement that vision under present conditions. Like a pendulum swinging to both extremes to reach the middle, leaders need increasingly to swing to the right side future quo characteristics (for example, incremental to systemic, or shorter to longer) in order to make up for the huge momentum with which society has been pulling us back towards the status quo.
@FutureQuo 5 dimensions of high FQ leadership: 1. Systemic 2. Wider 3. Deeper 4. Higher 5. Longer. #FutureQuo