It’s a big idea – actually three big ideas, but we’ll get to that – wrapped around a very simple premise.
The subtitle of Future Normal, a fascinating new book by Griffith Business School academics Nick Barter and Chris Fleming, is “eight questions to create businesses your children will be proud of”, explained in the introduction in this way: “As a leader, you will think about legacy, your own and the one your business is leaving. Yet none of us get to write our legacy, that is for those who come after.”
Anyone who has ever run a business, large or small, will recognise the dilemma – profits now or legacy later? Or can you have both? The authors frame their challenge to the business community to rethink the future around the framework of eight core questions:
1. Does your business’ vision perpetuate a world you want to live in?
2. Is your business aligned with our world?
3. Does your business listen to all its stakeholders?
4. Does your business have the metrics?
5. Does your business use language that enables?
6. Does your business understand its footprint and tread carefully?
7. Does your business learn from nature?
8. Does your business lead by enabling others?
This slim but powerful volume challenged my perceptions of how business should be run in our fast-changing world, but also raised as many questions as it answered, so I happily accepted the invitation of Professors Barter and Fleming to join them for a festive season pub lunch in Peregian Beach, where Chris has a holiday home.
Phil Jarratt: You know you’re not the first Future Normal, don’t you? The Future Normal, by a couple of trend curators and futurists, beat you by a couple of months, but I suspect it’s a very different book.
Nick Barter: Yes, it certainly is different, but we’ve been using the name in different forms for quite some time. In fact “Future Normal” came to me when I was doing my PhD in the UK in the late 2000s, as a result of two interviews I’d done. One was talking about what should be done in the future and the other was about how to make it appear more normal. I remember sitting in my study in Edinburgh and thinking, that’s the name! I’m putting that one in my back pocket. I had the idea of writing a book in that space but it took me and Chris getting together to make it happen. We met in 2011 when I joined Griffith, but around 2019 an opportunity came up to help one of our clients become, well basically “future normal”, although we wouldn’t have described it in those terms then. At that time I shared with Chris a very rough early draft of my ideas. He flew to Melbourne and when he came back he went, right!
Chris Fleming: It was really just a sketch of an idea, but I read it thoroughly on the plane and thought, well, there’s something here. One of the claims to fame of Griffith University is that it was always meant to be different. Established in the 1970s to be progressive, it had the first environmental studies program in Australia, the first Asian studies program, and the Business School that we’re part of has always tried to be progressive. But we were a bit nervous about getting this thing going in Queensland because it’s a resources state and there are all kinds of pressures, but then Nick turned up from St Andrews and was given the role of MBA director. His attitude was that if we describe ourselves as a progressive business school, let’s really lean into it. He went through every MBA course and pushed them in this direction.
Phil: It sounds a bit like a gag line: a Pommie and a Kiwi walk into a university in dumb-bum Queensland with all these revolutionary ideas about how to teach business…
Chris: (Laughs) I’d come out of working for the Helen Clark New Zealand Labour government which was progressive in that direction, so I was confident but still a bit nervous, or at least our bosses were a bit nervous, as in, will this program sell? And the course sold surprisingly well. In 2015 I took over the MBA director’s role from Nick, held it for the next five years and continued on this path. For the last four years the Griffith MBA program has been rated as the best in the world for its commitment to sustainability.
Phil: You reference Gordon Gecko and Wall Street in relation to the greed you’re trying to get away from, but I haven’t seen a reference to ethical investment, which was such a buzz concept a decade or so ago when you were getting Future Normal off the ground.
Chris: I think there have been a bunch of drivers of this ship and ethical investment is one of them. Ethical consumerism is another. Part of it is getting grief from your kids about what we’re doing for their generation. An element of our book is how do you respond to that.
Nick: One of the first chapters is called History Haunts the Present, and it talks about business theories and where they came from and how they’re not fit for how we live today because they were built for a world of one billion, not eight billion. They were built for an environment we thought we’d never ruin, and where government was stronger and would tax business properly. Basically, the fit was for a world where business is not concerned with society. So the outcome is that we are operating on old theories in a new world, so we have to re-evaluate our thinking on business. Old thinking in business is, if I do it this way it’s going to cost me more. New thinking is, if I do it the right way I’ll make more money, but that’s not my only goal. It’s important to realise that the book is not anti-profit, it’s pro long-term value.
Phil: At Cop28 in Dubai a couple of weeks back, the chair, Sultan Al Jaber, said there was no science behind fossil fuel reductions. Does that make you think, will anyone listen to us?
Nick: I sometimes wonder about that, but I also know that as you get older you understand better who you are, and you become a long-term thinker. I don’t think either of us want to live in a world where we haven’t had a go. We know it’s stacked against us, but we’re having a go.
Chris: I think also that the MBA program [at Griffith] has given us both confidence in putting these ideas out to leaders and managers because it’s selling. Yes, there are people opposed to these concepts, but there is a growing number, particularly in the new generation, who look around and think, this is not working. You don’t have to look very hard to realise that the current models of business are causing us problems, both social and environmental.
Phil: I’m sure there are courses out there primarily designed to make business leaders feel better about themselves. Have you put up screens around them?
Chris: It’s a good question. In our careers both of us have done a bit of that fly-in-fly-out consulting where you put up a few points on a whiteboard and get out of there. Neither of us want to be back there. One of the first things we tell our strategy clients is, we want this to be a long-term arrangement, and most of them are that. We’re there for the journey, and the companies who just want to tick a box are not up for that and don’t last.
Phil: Let’s look at your 3 Big Ideas, starting with, “Businesses are the tools we use to shape our world”.
Nick: Just about everything we’re looking at here has been enabled by private enterprise, and if you expand that thinking, that means pretty much everyone’s hopes and dreams have been enabled that way. That is just the way that businesses shape our world, but we tend to take business at face value and forget there is a lot more going on that has a much deeper impact on our lives. The argument we make in the book is that because they shape our world, they need to take a new look at what they’re doing.
Chris: When businesses look at what they’re doing, they tend to look at how it impacts customers and shareholders, but the framework of stakeholders is so much broader than that.
Phil: The second Big Idea is, “Long term business value is optimised when society thrives”. But the long term value of some companies, like a machine gun manufacturer, for example, is possibly optimised when society is doing the opposite.
Nick: Good point. We tackle that in the book by talking about the fact that there is always a spectrum in business, and we’re not trying to live in a world where it’s uniformly lovely. We’re trying to say, can we shift the spectrum so that what you’re talking about becomes a smaller part of it? It will still be there, but maybe it will be overshadowed by its opposite. What we’re really saying about society thriving is, when do businesses make the most money? When people feel confident and economically secure and they can afford small luxuries, like a muffin with their coffee, then society thrives. When it’s all about shareholder wealth and the money circulating around the top, everyone else feels precarious, and that actually undermines long term value.
Chris: Every business wants employees who are healthy and happy and well-educated, and customers who are the same. You can’t destroy the society you rely on.
Phil: The third Big Idea needs a bit of explanation, for my benefit if no one else’s. “The questions you ask matter, asking the now radical enables the Future Normal.”
Chris: We need to credit Nick’s daughter for the “now radical”. We basically argue that ideas that seem radical now will seem perfectly normal in the future. If you look back at the struggle of the suffragettes to get women the vote, a 40-hour week, paid sick leave – all of these things had to be fought for and were seen as radical at the time.
Phil: The eight questions are listed in the introduction, so if you could just walk me through them generally please?
Chris: We had 20 at one stage and we spent a lot of time scribbling on butcher’s paper to reduce it to this. We really got down to the core ideas and eliminated the peripheral.
Nick: The first three questions go to, what is your business all about? What is the story you’re trying to tell? Who do you listen to? Then we ask how you measure performance, how you talk to each other, how you learn from the circularity of nature. Finally, we move to a different strategic perspective and ask do you lead by enabling others?
Chris: All of which takes us to another baked-in component of the book, how we regard competition. So much business language is framed in the language of war – rallying the troops, launching assaults on the market and so on. We push back with the idea that if you have great ideas then sharing them is a much more powerful business tool.
Future Normal is available from Annie’s Books on Peregian. For more information visit futurenormal.net
