On the occasion of an approaching publication of arkH3’s latest systemic projections and a resource for business leaders, we sat down with some of its authors and contributions – Alice Kalro (lead author), Dr Claudia Gasparovic, and Dr Julio Campos, to discuss the implications of their findings for strategy and business leaders in charge of organisations and portfolios in an increasingly Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world. The ebook “Leading through the Polycollapse: A Guide to Systemic Foresight for VUCA Native Strategy” is set to come out on May 20, 2025 – published by arkH3. Alice and Claudia will also be presenting a keynote at the Common Home summit in London on May 21, 2025.
You describe the future as one of inevitable polycollapse. Why do mainstream business and political leaders still act as if incremental change were enough, in your opinion?
Alice: The answer may not be completely the same for business leaders and policy makers, although much of it likely overlaps. There are probably multiple factors at play, related to awareness, motivation, a sense of conflicting obligations, as well as to access to capabilities (or lack thereof).
When it comes to awareness, many self-described “collapse-aware” people begrudgingly claim that business and political leaders “know, and choose not to act”, or “choose to protect the current system”. I personally deeply disagree. Indeed, many leaders may have a sense that things might be going downhill in the future when it comes to impacts of the multiple interrelated environmental crises, a sense that their business models and the current economic system are unsustainable, and so on. But this notion is most likely vague and distorted – and much more optimistic than what the current trajectory and range of plausible futures actually look like. I am yet to meet a business leader who is truly aware, prior to engaging with our work.
Claudia: I would also add that we need to consider the context in which leaders operate – the systemic forces, incentives and restrictions of a highly connected and complex world. In such a context, there is a limit to what personal willingness alone can accomplish. To give an example, a recent WRI study concluded that the potential for avoiding carbon emissions through individual action was 6,5 tons per year per person. However, 90% of that amount stays inaccessible to people willing to perform the necessary lifestyle changes, because they depend on systemic changes – such as expanded public transport infrastructure. The same is true for business: companies and leaders wishing to work towards sustainability – whether we mean compatibility with a future economy, with a livable future on the planet, or wellbeing for all – operate within an unsustainable economic system that highly constricts what they can do. Hence why we need approaches that are attuned to the VUCA nature of our systems, and that aim for systemic transformation.
Alice: Indeed. And business leaders specifically need to realise that removing the systemic barriers that hold them back from taking transformational action is itself up to them – that this is what they must do, in coalitions of first movers, because nobody else is likely to do so. And they already have the necessary influence, capabilities and platforms to take on this task and be great at it.
Julio: Also, because business leaders greatly underestimate the polycrisis, as Alice said, it also means that they also tend toward complacency: Looking back, we survived previous economic crises relatively well – such as 1929, the 70’s oil crisis, 2008, and so on. So there is a widespread assumption that we can predict, and hence adapt to, the current crisis, as we did in the past. Leaders see the crisis from a mainstream economic point of view, which leads us to think that we’ll be able to find a solution to the current/future one. However, all those past situations originated within the economy itself, and since the economy caused it, it was able to fix it too. Today the economy is facing an unprecedented scale of disruption, the seeds of which were indeed planted by our economic model in the past, but which has grown to become something new, external, self-powered, and unrelated to the economy – except for its colossally disruptive effect – which it has no tools to deal with.
You say that things are worse than what leaders believe. Surely that’s bad news?
Alice: Well, from the perspective of the state of the planet, the scale of economic disruption ahead, the suffering that is increasingly inevitable for more and more people, and so on, it is bad news. But it is also in a sense good news – it means that the urgency that arises from truly grasping the severity of the current situation and the future outlook can make what has hitherto seemed impossible possible – such as the removal of systemic barriers to large scale transformation, to changes in the current economic system, be they legal structures, antitrust law, the culture of expectations of perpetual short-term returns, and so on. And it also means there is no reason to assume that our leaders act out of malice, and no reason to indulge in casting blame, which is not a very helpful attitude. It means there is hope that spreading systemic awareness can actually lead to relevant action.
Julio: It’s known that we, as humans, usually join forces and move towards action when facing pressing situations. What holds us back from acting may be analysis-paralysis – trying to find the best way to deal with a crisis, sometimes mere procrastination, sometimes, as today, plain inability to grasp the proportion of the task that we are facing. The upside to this is that we’re unstoppable while whatever we’re dealing with isn’t solved. The downside is that today, we do need to take time and think through about what we’re going to do, or we may very easily rush ourselves into a worse situation – and time is what we do not have.
Alice also mentioned motivation, conflicting obligations and missing capabilities.
Alice: Yes! Both lack of motivation and a sense of conflicting obligations relate to not having sufficient access to systemic foresight. We can assume that many leaders do not act on the existential challenges facing humanity, the economy and business – or rather on their beliefs about these challenges – because of their perceived self-interest: in other words, they believe that not acting on these challenges now is in their best interest – the best they can do for their own prospects, those of their families or inner circles. This is a misconception. A closer examination of how perhaps any leader in the world and their inner circle are likely to be impacted, how their wealth and assets are likely to be impacted, very soon – within years – in fact reveals that immediate radical action is in anyone’s enlightened self-interest.
Julio: In whose best interests do leaders act? Let’s rephrase the question of motivation that way and it gets very interesting. Given that the polycrisis extends far beyond the economy, reaching every single person on the planet, I would say that strategic leaders should be concerned with the best interest of their major stakeholders: their own family. One serious mistake, which results from assessing the crisis through a narrow or shallow analysis, is looking at it as something that will affect someone else, somewhere else. We need to understand how close to us it is, how it will affect those who we cherish the most, we need to make it personal. That way it can get easier to boost, or bring back, the motivation required to drive the change.
Alice: I fully agree with Julio. Not only business leaders, but most people for example assume that things will only go seriously wrong for future generations. That’s not what the latest data suggests – the lives of all of us still alive 10 years from now will be significantly disrupted, and that is putting it mildly. And this includes business leaders and their families and inner circles – which brings us back to enlightened self-interest.
The relationship between systemic foresight and how leaders interpret their legal or professional obligation is similar. Because of a general gross underestimation of the onset and scale of impacts of the planetary emergency on business and the economy at large, many leaders believe that for the time being, prioritising short-term returns and catering to short-term challenges and disruptions is the crux of their job, what they are paid for, their legal duty. When presented with a systemic view of the outer context they operate in, they’d likely themselves conclude that the very actions that maximise short-term returns now are very likely the same actions that actually undermine future financial returns, shareholder value, business viability and even viability of a global economy as a whole, in addition to undermining the prospects of humanity surviving on this planet later this century.
As long as we can assume that investors, shareholders and owners wish for their portfolios and assets to be worth anything at all ten years later, then business-, industry- and economic transformation must be an immediate priority – and any other course of action puts executives and boards in breach of fiduciary duty.
What role do capabilities play?
Claudia: The quote by Archilochus says it all – “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” This is especially true for crises, and for how we operate in complex systems. Capacity building is an extremely high leverage (although somewhat underestimated) intervention to drive systemic transformation and promote resilience – especially in the VUCA world context. If we look at living systems, developing capacities is how they are able to evolve, thrive, and secure future viability. In the natural succession of a forest, for instance, when so-called primary species first occupy inhospitable land, they develop capacities – retention of water in the soil, production of organic matter, eventually providing shadow – that allow so-called secondary and climax species to appear. Securing future viability, much like in nature, requires that we embody this ability to adapt, innovate and evolve as conditions change. On a human and social level, that’s what regeneration is really about. But this only works within supporting ecosystems. From this perspective, therefore, capacity is not just about individual or organizational skills, but about designing the conditions and enabling the contexts that allow the system to evolve, and a new state of improved resilience and vitality to emerge.
Alice: When it comes to personal competencies, in short, as a society, we have not nurtured systems thinking – we have actually tried to weed it out through the design of our specialised study pathways and career pathways. Therefore, it is no surprise that leaders of today are under-equipped when it comes to thinking in systems, systemic strategy and interventions, and that providing systemic leadership may not come to most naturally. And this personal competence gap is indeed mirrored in organisational capabilities as well, and has widespread implications – it permeates all decisions about what the core business does. Also, as a result, everyone expects someone else to be in charge of mitigating planetary risks – hence the hitherto shortage of true systemic leadership at this critical point in time. The good news is that these gaps can be filled – that’s what we are here to do, in partnership with business leaders – we aspire to equip them and help them play out their historic role so to speak.
Julio: Below Boards and C-Suites, this gap is also reflected in the design of corporate sustainability teams. They are usually structured as a multidisciplinary group of specialists together, since sustainability is a multidisciplinary science. But they miss a critical point: multidisciplinarity must be embodied by every single of the team members. Specialists are needed to propose ways, solutions, to the problems faced, but it’s up to the generalistic, systemic aspect of multidisciplinarity to assess what’s being proposed at the big picture level – its potential for effectiveness or unexpected negative impacts, relative to other options. A critical missing capability – among sustainability teams, in corporations, among entrepreneurs .. – is being open to asking “How can my proposition go wrong?”, and being open to changing one’s direction based on the answer. course if so.
What is the most critical misunderstanding about the future that you see in boardrooms today?
Alice: We touched on it already – the broader planetary context and its interplay with human-made systems such as the global economy, financial system, and so on – are generally under-assessed and as a result grossly misunderstood, and their impacts on future business continuity and shareholder value grossly under-estimated. This relates to what Julio pointed at in the beginning of the interview: It is often the case that market forces and macroeconomic trends are still considered the most critical potential sources of future disruption, and that’s what future scenarios are modelled around. In turn, organisations of today unknowingly design strategies for futures that are little more than fairy tales, and in this unprecedented context, these very strategies are unlikely to deliver anything other than eradication of shareholder value – not just that of a single undertaking, but of whole portfolios. This situation is again an outcome of many systemic influences, it is not like we can blame business leaders for what they currently don’t know – even though they might be held accountable for it. And it again shows that there is lots of untapped potential.
Julio: I’d say the most critical misunderstanding is what I mentioned before: the flawed perception that we can, or even know, how to handle the current crisis. For the first time in our history, we find ourselves in a paradoxical set up of events: We know that we’re facing a crisis, we can have a glimpse about some of its short term consequences, and – at least in the academic and activist circles – we know what must be done, for over fifty years now. But our cognitive biases keep leading us to believe that business-as-usual can solve it, and a powerful inertia keeps us from actually moving away from the status quo into new ways of doing, and thinking of, business.
You in essence argue that continuing with “business as usual” is already a breach of fiduciary duty. What does true strategic leadership look like today?
Alice: This is a very broad topic, but just keeping to the essence: Leaders must realise not only that abandoning business-as-usual immediately and taking on swift and radical business transformation is what they actually owe their shareholders, investors, owners, as well as everybody else. They must also realise that, with so-called points of no return about to be crossed, within the span of just a few years – which are illustrated on the summary timeline here, and we explain in detail in our ebook and training programs – even the notion of a company doing their “fair share”, meaning aligning the impacts of its operations and value chain with proportional allocations from budgets linked to the co-called 9 planetary boundaries – even this approach is obsolete now. What we need is what we at arkH3 call Corporate Systemic Leadership – we need business leaders to realise that delivering stability and sustainability of the outer environmental and societal contexts, which business continuity vitally depends on, is their responsibility – it is what they owe their shareholders, investors and owners. And therefore they must do much more than their “fair share” – they must take upon themselves the task of delivering large scale industry and economic transformation within years. Nothing less will do.
I know from having seen the draft of your ebook that there is also a social dimension to this – can you tell us more?
Alice: Indeed. From our systemic projections and their interpretation into implications for business and the global economy, we conclude that an immediate transition to a sufficiency-based wellbeing economy is the best available strategy for ensuring future viability of there being a global economy in the first place, and therefore ensuring future business continuity. Intentionally reorienting the economy towards delivering essential needs for all is necessary, in this fast deteriorating outer context, in order to ensure survival of large humanity of billions of people – which itself is a precondition for there being a viable global economy in the decades to come. If the whole point is to ensure survival and essential needs of all people, then indeed all business and economic activity needs to be immediately decoupled from negative social impacts, such as paying supply chain workers less than a living wage, which inevitably results in cyclical poverty, and in them being perpetually deprived of their basic needs, as one example. We cannot be effectively working to meet essential needs – as a matter of business imperative – on the one hand, and simultaneously undermining them on the other. That itself too, would amount to irresponsible conduct vis-a-vis what we owe our shareholders, investors and owners.
You call for a shift to systemic foresight. Can you explain what that means in practice — and why existing foresight models aren’t enough?
Alice: This comes back to the hitherto lack of highly developed strategic frameworks that would bring a systemic perspective front and center. Because of the general lack of understanding and underestimation of the planetary context and its interaction with macroeconomic trends, which we already spoke about, strategic planning teams are guided by current frameworks and mainstream advice to model future scenarios around the completely wrong sets of uncertainties as key variables. Mainstream sustainability functions and consultancies generally are not better equipped to help – they tend to adopt narrow models, often singularity focusing on climate change (even though there are 9 planetary boundaries and of those 6-7 already transgressed into danger zone, with climate change only one among those), and on greenhouse gas emissions as the driving cause of climate change. This is analogical to, in a state of emergency, checking on only one vital organ in a body, and then making conclusions on whether the patient will survive or not, what kind of treatment they need, and how long they might live or how much time they need to recover. We all can understand through our common sense that this approach cannot lead to good outcomes. All we say is that current strategic foresight exercises need to be thoroughly updated with a systemic lens – this is a precondition for making one’s strategy what we call “VUCA native” – i.e. designed to deliver in the realities of a 21st century world that is Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous.
Julio: Indeed, the underlying reason why existing foresight models aren’t enough is their reductionist way of working: breaking the systems into smaller pieces, processing them, and adding back the results. That approach works for simple systems, but not for complex ones, whose complexity generates unknown levels of uncertainty, hence making any attempt to understand the system by looking at its components useless. In a business world preoccupied with metrics, the most important and meaningful one is missing: the metric which results in the “I don’t know, hence let’s be careful” answer – which would guide us to apply the precautionary principle. For some, this presents a major paradigm shift and a steep learning curve into the realms of complex systems foresight.
How do you suggest organizations confront psychological resistance to facing such uncomfortable futures as your systemic projections describe?
Alice: “Confront” is an interesting word choice, actually, since a “confrontation” may further aggravate resistance. We must anticipate resistance and actively and methodically work with it. Some people believe that this resistance is triggered due an inherent existential fear of death. I personally sign up for a different school of thought – which says that the threat of any of our objects of attachment being taken from us – whether they be our loved ones, our careers, cherished homes, reputation, and so on – triggers anxiety and severe and acute discomfort. Either way, the reaction often manifests as grief. And anticipating a roller coaster of feelings or thoughts and catering to its processing and metabolization simultaneously with the development of new strategy inputs and transformation roadmaps is key. Not only in the context of consulting engagements, but also shorter training programs – which is what we do in our own capability building programs and have received excellent feedback for.
The good news is that there is a sufficient number of highly qualified organisational psychologists and systemic coaches with solid track records in catering to the inner and personal aspects of processing severe disruption and in guiding personal transformation that may occur in parallel with broader business transformation. We have a growing network of such collaborators across geographies, and can therefore make sure that attending to transcending either personal resistance or organisational inertia is part of the plan from the start.
Julio: Maybe we need to ask what’s uncomfortable about the future scenarios: Moving back to within the planetary boundaries? Living within them? The lifestyle changes required? The business changes required? Maybe first of all, we need to get ideas such as the end of life on the planet out of the way. What we’re seeing is just the planet, and its system, adapting, changing, itself as a consequence of what we caused. It will go on, no problems here. How we will be able to get by in the future is of concern, both as individuals and businesses. Businesses as we know them won’t be able to exist, they’ll collapse by themselves. If the discomfort is about how we’ll change with the planet, then it may be soothing to know how to control the transition has already been studied for some time. For example, a groundbreaking guide for navigating polycollapse in a manageable way was written in 2001 by Howard T. Odum, titled “A Prosperous Way Down: Principles and Policies”. Now, if what’s uncomfortable is the consequences of the transition, the economic ones, well, we must confront the fact that it will happen, whether under our control or not, but it will, and for business-as-usual, that’s a scary scenario. Therefore exerting our agency and influence on the process is the best we can do.
In your view, what industries are most urgently in need of systemic foresight — and which ones, if any, are getting it right?
Alice: All industries are in need of systemic foresight, because, on the current trajectory, we are on track for the current global economy collapsing sometime in the 2030s – not a recession, but an irreversible collapse of the system – meaning that all industries will be severely disrupted and decimated through this cascade of events, unless we steer towards a different scenario. However, if you would like me to “point fingers”, the most vulnerable industries will be the first to fold. These are all the industries catering to non-essential needs (arbitrary “wants”); industries that rely on agricultural products as inputs in their supply chains; those operating on thin margins even under normal conditions; and those already operating with the least amount of redundancy and buffers.
There are no industries getting systemic foresight right at this point. While we indeed can’t know “what’s cooking” in every strategy room or boardroom around the world, we are yet to meet an organisation that has already methodically assessed the degree of their compatibility with a future economy, with a range plausible of futures all featuring polycollapse, and so on. But we hope this answer will be different a few months later, as we eagerly anticipate some pilot programs with first-mover companies.
There are however industries that are by default more compatible with a future economy – especially those catering to essential needs, who “only” need to radically innovate to remove environmental and social harms, and other metaphorically toxic elements from their business models and value chains, but do not need to pivot towards being in the business of something else in order to secure future business continuity. We say “only” – in quotation marks, because it is less severe than the task ahead of other industries, but it is indeed no small feat.
We also see some companies already modelling systemic leadership on a limited scale – without it being informed through systemic foresight necessarily – such as Tony’s Chocolonely with their activist approach to uplifting the whole industry and whole value chains.
Some leaders fear talking openly about collapse scenarios. How do you recommend balancing realism with hope when leading organizations through systemic change?
Alice: Well, if we don’t openly talk about collapse scenarios, we have no hope for surviving – as a species, or as a global economy and society, or as organisations. This is highly individual, but there are people who feel invigorated by having clarity on “how bad things actually are” and on what specifically they can do about it that is the most effective – it gives them an immediate sense of agency, and a sense that they can meaningfully act and make a difference in this outer context. Hence, for them, as well as for me, realism and hope are not a dichotomy – realism is the source of hope. This must be related to our individual “windows of tolerance” – a concept from psychology. Those who can face these existential threats and themes without feeling paralysed are the most likely first-movers who will be absolutely instrumental in turning things around. They are who we primarily wish to work with, as a top priority.
Claudia: I would also add that there can be deep discomfort and anxiety stemming from the disconnect between one person’s intuition and the mainstream discourse about the current state of our systems and possible future outcomes. Addressing that gap, even if it requires us to process grief, can ease the anxiety of sensing that this grief is impending without allowing oneself to examine it, which is something, I believe, many people are feeling. It also alleviates the sense of moral injury that can arise from feeling a disconnect between what we do and what our integrity would require us to do. That is fertile soil for hope to grow from.
Julio: We do have a plethora of information, perceptions, feelings about what’s happening. Every single person has their own stock of these, some of them more informed, some less, some people living the crisis, some learning about it on the news. Hence the reception when we talk about collapse is widely mixed. The best way to find a balance is probably leading by example. Not only talking about it but showing that things are actually being done. Showing results instead of commitments, action instead of promises. Experiencing real change can help reduce people’s unrest, and improve their willingness to accept, and help, the change.
Is there still a path to avoid the worst outcomes — or is it more about surviving and adapting now?
Alice: There are a lot of misconceptions about what “worst outcomes” we are to expect. Some people speak about building “post-collapse readiness”, which sounds odd to me personally – but the challenge is that different people mean different things when they say “collapse”. That is why we suggest using the term polycollapse, and referring to specific subsystems collapsing when making statements about the present or future outlook, in order to avoid misunderstandings.
On the current, most probable trajectory, predictable outcomes could hardly get worse – they include a decimation of the human population – into small, likely scattered and isolated pockets of survivors living in extremely harsh and constricted conditions, an uninhabitable state of the planet lasting at minimum decades, but possibly centuries and millennia, and potentially an extremely turbulent, chaotic, deprived and even violent descent of the human society – depending on what tendencies prevail in the future, in different contexts.
What we can no longer avoid is significant disruption, social unrest, political instability, shocks to the food systems and a broad range of other frequent shocks, the end of the global economy as we know it, and some scale of mass suffering. But we still have a very limited window of opportunity for averting the worst outcomes – a catastrophic food systems collapse, a complete collapse of ecosystems with the ecosystem services they provide – which all human survival and activity depend on – especially anything akin to global economy, a population collapse due to toxicity of the environment, and so on. We can also work to minimise the scale of social unrest, political instability and prevalence of national bankruptcies and failed states, armed conflict and violence, mass migration and displacement, and so on. All of these variables are within our sphere of influence, within our agency.
Avoiding the worst outcomes – meaning steering away from the current trajectory through radical systemic action over the next 2-4 years – is a precondition for surviving and adaptation, it’s not an optional nice-to-have. From where I stand, there is very little waiting for us “post collapse” that we could ready for – and survive and adapt to.
Julio: Looking from a global, generalistic perspective, we need to understand that being pushed back into the planetary boundaries will be uncomfortable, even traumatic, for those used to living outside the boundaries, through a destructive, resource intensive model. But as these groups return to within the boundaries, the groups already inside – mostly struggling to survive – will have some room to develop, sustainably. Interestingly enough, these groups are already the most adapted to the planetary changes. They have coping mechanisms for dealing with droughts, floods, crop loss, famine, etc… For those currently privileged, who have also contributed the most to the crisis that we’re seeing now, the level of trauma that they experience will be proportional to their individual, respective degree of willingness to accept the need to change – or lack thereof. The more insistent and determined they are to maintain their current way of life, the worse their personal outcomes will be.
You propose a 5-step method to operationalize systemic foresight in six months. What’s the hardest step for organizations to actually implement?
Alice: The 5 organisational exercises are actually designed to be straightforward, and time-efficient – because in order to adapt in time, we simply do not have the time for 2-year strategic planning cycles. The hardest part is building the initial alignment necessary in order to get started. The exercises must be agreed upon and resourced as a top priority: A matter of survival, a matter of fiduciary responsibility, a matter of shareholder value protection, of legal duty… they cannot be pushed out or deprioritised under any circumstances… Meaning that organisations must also actively counteract the potential for derailing and distractions.
Building such alignment, considering very different personal starting points and perceived priorities, must indeed be challenging…
Alice: Yes it can. We can help in getting everyone “on board” through sensitisation talks, awareness building workshops, and so on. Working through the personal impacts of polycollapse – understanding that radical action now is in fact in one’s best enlightened self-interest, in addition to it being a legal obligation – can be an important enabler… As we said in the beginning of the interview, upon closer inspection – with systemic foresight, quick radical action is actually in any business leader’s self-interest, the best available personal mitigation and adaptation strategy. And this is where our approach is so novel too and makes things easier – we do not need leaders to develop a feeling of compassion for all humanity or nature before radical organisational transformation can begin. We can work with first mover leaders to compel their peers to act on the basis of what’s best for their organisations, shareholders, and personal lives alone.
How can businesses not just adapt to collapse but also lead the transformation of broken systems?
Alice: In fact, taking on systemic leadership and initiating and co-orchestrating the transformation of broken systems is not only the best available mitigation and adaptation strategy for organisations – it is an absolutely necessary factor, without which attempts to preserve shareholder value or business continuity amid the scale of disruption ahead are most likely to fail. At arkH3, we’ve developed detailed enough guidance for ideating, scoping, and prioritising systemic interventions that organisations can undertake alone or with their allies – based on each intervention’s relative efficiency and effectiveness. A list of top priority interventions are de facto an organisation’s corporate systemic leadership strategy. We assist teams through the development of these systemic strategies in our workshops.
If you could deliver one urgent message to today’s CEOs and political leaders, what would it be?
Alice: If you’ve had a vague notion that things might fall apart pretty soon, your intuition is right – and we can help you fill in the contours into a very concrete vision of what is ahead. If you’ve felt unclear about what to do, come talk to us – we have the guidance and toolkit to empower you to get your organisation on track within months. We are here for you. Do not waste a day – you will thank yourself in the future.
Julio: Where do you want to be in a hundred years? Remembered as the one who delivered the largest, greatest growth or profit the fastest – for a long ago bankrupted company or economy, or the one who set the conditions to allow that economy or company to thrive through those one hundred years and into the next one hundred?
Claudia: The knowledge of planetary risks is a luxury; an opportunity to be cherished. Don’t we all wish we could have been forewarned before Covid? When we talk about existential risks, this value increases exponentially. Let’s look back at how nature maintains survival: by adapting and evolving. As environmental pressures become evident, companies will need to justify their existence. They will need to transform. The sooner we start, the more time we will have to build the capabilities that we will need to thrive.
What’s next for you personally in advancing this work on systemic foresight?
Alice: It is hard to separate the personal and professional for me, as we live and breathe this work. We have a lot of awareness-building activities planned for the next few months – engaging broader audiences in different countries – and we hope to roll out pilot programs with first-mover organisations in parallel. I personally do need to walk the talk and expand my own “personal mitigation and adaptation plans to polycollapse” – to the range of plausible futures – although I already know that the work we do is the best I can do for mitigation of the worst outcomes.
Claudia: On the corporate sustainability front, I recently collaborated in delivering the first Global South training of UNRISD’s ‘Authentic Sustainability’ reporting framework—a milestone I hope to build on through expanded knowledge-sharing initiatives here in Brazil, including a very exciting project later this year. In parallel, I’m deeply involved in climate technologies. I’m currently facilitating a regenerative design process as part of an Australia–UK collaborative project, and developing a new resource aimed at guiding emerging climate entrepreneurs toward systemic thinking and regenerative solutions. Later this month, I’ll also be co-presenting some key insights from this work with Alice at the Common Home – London conference, which I’m really looking forward to.
Júlio: for me the most attractive, and challenging, aspect of sustainability is the intertwined relationship between all kinds of systems, resulting in the unpredictable results of our actions. That leads to the constant need to keep learning, in an ever evolving field.
Hence, as a tool to deal with the challenge of reducing the risks, of new solutions, by accepting how uncertain their consequences can be, is the major contribution that systemic foresight can provide. In that scenario, the possibility, for me, to be able to contribute with such endeavor is not only refreshing, but, personally, helps me get a deeper insight on how to bring the academic knowledge into business practices.
Bios:
Alice Kalro
Alice is a natural born systems thinker, systemic leader, business strategist and an eloquent communicator. She is increasingly recognised as an exceptional thought leader on sustainable business and delivery of systems change – building bridges across paradigms, and sharing distinctively “rational-first”, actionable guidance on science-informed business adaptation roadmaps, and broader systemic intervention strategies.
Alice has been leading business transformation programs and developing stakeholder-centric business strategies since 2014. In 2023, she founded arkH3 – aiming to close the gap in Systemic Foresight exhibited by leading strategy advisories – and authored the arkH3 Theory of Change.
A global citizen and a Global South advocate at heart, Alice continues to operate across geographies, has led teams and worked with clients across five continents, and lived in Europe, China, and India.
Dr Claudia Luiza Manfredi Gasparovic
Dr. Claudia Gasparovic is an environmental engineer, researcher and sustainability consultant working at the intersection of technology, corporate strategy, and planetary care. She draws on flow systems science and regenerative design to guide initiatives toward systemic change.
Her experience includes advancing environmental justice in sanitation policy, assessing clean technologies using the Planetary Boundaries framework, and designing sustainability strategies for leading organizations in Brazil.
She holds a Masters degree in Environmental Technologies by the Federal University of Technology – Parana, a Doctorate in Environmental Engineering by the Federal University of Parana, and is trained on several sustainability and regeneration approaches, incl. arkH3’s SWoN, RegenIntel’s Foundations course, Capital Institute’s Introduction to Regenerative Economics and the UN SDPI standard.
Dr José Julio Ferraz de Campos Jr.
Currently dedicated to identifying points of conflict in sustainability actions that result in their loss of effectiveness, Julio works in a systemic way seeking to determine the points of unsustainability in these actions.
Oceanographer, Master in Ecology, Doctor in Energy Planning and Environmental Economics, works as a Consultant with an emphasis on the viability of sustainability projects, mainly in the following themes: Ecological and doughnut economy, assessment of socio-environmental impacts, sustainable development, socio-environmental inclusion and clean technologies.
INTERVIEW by Christian Sarkar