We Have Failed—Now Let’s Get Serious

The following framework served as the opening to a panel discussion with Otto Scharmer at the ChangeNOW Summit, co-hosted by B for Good Leaders.

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A call for systemic imagination in the face of degenerative volatility

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1. Opening the wound

Let me start where it hurts: we have failed—systemically, emphatically, repeatedly.

I say we because I helped build the very architecture now buckling under its own contradictions: Impact Hubs, WikiHouse, OpenDesk—projects conceived with the best intentions yet constrained by the same balance-sheet myopia we claimed to transcend. Social enterprise, impact investment, ESG gloss—they have proved inconsequential beside the scale of transformation the twenty-first century demands.

Sixty-eight per cent of large firms—as the data now screams—are functionally loss-making once you net their environmental and social costs. They appear profitable only by smearing their liabilities across the lungs, soils and futures of people they will never meet. In other words, the engine room of capitalism is not merely coughing; it is exhaling insolvency in planetary units.

This is more than an accounting scandal. It is a failure of imagination, a poverty of narrative, a collapse of the moral and technical firmware on which we organise economic life. Until we accept that wound—personally, institutionally—we will continue to chew at the edges while the edifice crumbles.

2. Degenerative volatility: the new baseline

Climate commentators still speak of volatility as if the system oscillates around a recognisable mean. But the baseline itself is falling away. We have entered what I call degenerative volatility: each spike down ratchets the floor lower, eroding the very stability on which markets, contracts and governance once relied.

At 1.7–1.9 °C of warming we lose a major global food basket; at 3 °C we trigger feedbacks no model can meaningfully bound.

Price whiplash follows, amplifying inequality; inequality severs the social contract; without a social contract, there are no tradable assets because asset ownership is nothing more than a collective hallucination about the future.

Thus our predicament is structural before it is moral. The timber beam above your head stores carbon for five centuries—who carries that liability? Under what jurisdiction? At what price? Our material economics registers none of this; the ledger is a fairytale.

3. Material and bio-regional transformation

We are therefore stumbling, unknowingly, into a material revolution. The most forward-looking clothing companies no longer “sell” garments; they assume custodianship, inviting the wearer into a public-trust relationship with fibres that must be stewarded, not discarded.

The same logic scales to buildings, infrastructure, even cities. Metallurgy is giving way to ligno-tech; concrete is facing its first credible challenger in a century. Every tonne of cross-laminated timber is a 500-year carbon bond. Every supply chain is quietly relaminating itself into bio-regions: hyper-local loops of nutrients, energy and data that treat place as a living asset rather than a pit stop on a global conveyor belt.

4. Re-inventing the human economy

None of this is possible inside the industrial mindset that treats humans as controllable inputs in a predictable machine. The factory cosmology—time-and-motion, Taylor, Ford—cannot run a complex, entangled planet.

We are multitudes in becoming, not single-function nodes. The future economy must prize reciprocal care, emancipatory technology, and the orchestration of many intelligences—cognitive, social, ecological—over the cheap optimisation of a single metric. Artificial intelligence, too, must be reframed: not servants of control but partners in stewardship, sensing and guiding flows we scarcely perceive.

5. From national security to system security

Because biospheres ignore borders, security can no longer be a national zero-sum game.

France cannot “defend itself” against the collapse of the Amazon. Britain cannot trench its way out of an Antarctic ice-shelf melt that swallows large swathes of inhabited costal land across the planer.

We must therefore build a politics of entangled security—an economics designed for resilient sufficiency rather than capital efficiency. Water, energy, nutrients, data, critical minerals: each becomes a shared nervous system. In such a world the logical institution is no longer a World Bank but a World Security Bank, underwriting planetary stability as the ultimate pre-condition for any portfolio on Earth.

6. Capital 2.0: arbitraging today’s price against tomorrow’s value

Impact investing as currently practised is venture capital with moral handcuffs: higher risk, lower return, extra paperwork. The answer is not to abandon finance but to rebuild its grammar.

Investors must learn to arbitrage present mis-pricing against long-term regenerative value. Soil health, tree canopies, democracies capable of collective reasoning—these are the blue-chip assets of the twenty-first century. Infrastructure banks should be deploying hundreds of millions to re-green Madrid with citizens, not imposing token offsets half a continent away.

Some funds are already adapting: holding 30 % liquidity to defend assets against volatility, seeking partnerships with land stewards rather than absentee landlords, experimenting with self-owning forests whose governance tokens expire if canopy cover falls. These are seedlings; they need a forest of capital willing to learn from complexity rather than flee it.

7. The risk of moral procrastination

Degenerative volatility has a hard deadline. As resource scarcity bites, geopolitical rivalry sharpens. Armed conflict is at its highest level in 65 years, and the war machine is off-balance-sheet in every climate ledger. Should we slide into runaway militarisation, our carbon budget will evaporate under the contrails of jet fighters.

Hence the urgency: ideas must move at the pace of events, not conference cycles. If progressives dither, the hard right will weaponise scarcity into fortress economics, tariffs, exclusion—Trumpian carbon taxes by another name. History shows that when complexity overwhelms imagination, people default to fear.

8. A candid invitation

I am not interested in performative doom. I am interested in inventive seriousness.

Yes, we have failed—but the privilege of failure is that it teaches what might work:

• Invest across whole value chains, not single points, so enterprises are born into regenerative ecosystems rather than expected to conjure them later.

• Treat democracy as an asset class, for nothing prices risk like the capacity of strangers to reason together.

• Design capital vehicles that can straddle infrastructure and community—blending patient public funds with catalytic private bets.

• Anchor every strategy in a bio-regional reality where materials, energy and meaning circulate locally first, globally only when sense demands.

• Expand the notion of security until it becomes the connective tissue of left and right alike: water you can drink, air you can breathe, soils that renew, data that serves the commons.

I speak bluntly not to wound but to invite liberation—from legacy metrics, legacy guilt, legacy careers. Candour clears the space for systemic imagination.

9. Conclusion: the work worth doing

We—you, me, everyone in this room—are the last generation with viable agency before degenerative volatility locks us into conflict and collapse. The window is painfully small but gloriously open.

So let us step beyond the incremental, the palliative, the “scaling” of yesterday’s logic. Let us build capital structures that think in centuries, enterprises that are verbs not nouns, technologies that extend care rather than extract value.

If that sounds impossible, remember: impossibility is merely a failure of narrative coherence. History is littered with moments when the unimaginable became the mundane overnight. This is such a moment—provided we supply it with relentless courage, systemic literacy, and a love for futures we will never personally inhabit.

Failure has taught us enough. It is time to practise success at civilisation scale.