Insights · November 20th, 2024
Hope is not a strategy.
This declaration has been bandied around by thought leaders, executives, advisors and high-profile politicians for decades. There have been entire books written and philosophical movements propelled based on this idea.
But, here’s the thing, I see hope as a core strategy in modern business and government. And, we need hope more today than ever.
Business can be a cold, stark place that is focused on growth and profit and devoid of belief, emotion, and deep commitment to change. Many folks are climbing over each other to rise through the ranks or hopping from company to company to gain momentum in their career.It does not have to continue to exist like that. As leaders, we can be inspirational, vibrant, activistic and wildly hopeful. And, we can inject that energy into the business we do every damn day. That creates belief, loyalty, and even more hope for a better world.
And, yet here we are – facing the embodiment and critical state of 2025 and we’re not exactly sure who or what we are looking at in the companies we work for or at the economy as a hope. It’s becoming more clear that we are at risk of losing all hope.
As I do the important work of preparing modern business and government leaders for change, I find a world brimming with hope. I see visionary leaders pushing us beyond our collapsing industrial complex, and decoding what hope can mean in a modern context – setting audacious goals, forging pathways towards impactful change, and creating agency that continues to deliver energy for change. I also see them igniting imagination and building a new world in anticipation of change.
Over the years I have a history of sharing yearly predictions however we’ve moved from general ideas of what’s hot in the marketplan to wider arenas of thought. In this article I invite you to explore three areas that will gain incredible pace and volume in discussion over the next year, and hopefully inspire action:
- Creating agency in the face of technological totality
- Surviving geopolitical shifts
- Water, energy and food resiliency
Each is foundational, explored with reflections on their current states, and asks what if we change our focus.
Creating agency in the face of technological totality
2025 marks 30 years since the publishing of ‘The Californian Ideology’ and its critique of dotcom neoliberalism. Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron explored the nascent cybernetic, countercultural world of online business. There were also prescient with their thoughts:
“The prophets of the Californian Ideology argue that only the cybernetic flows and chaotic eddies of free markets and global communications will determine the future. Political debate therefore, is a waste of breath.”
With the US election shifting us back into a Republican administration we are seeing the technocrats take more control than ever, and it’s likely to abate.
The cycling of hype cycles and narratives of technological totalities and fearful disruptions will increase with this – from eCommerce, app economies, social web, crypto, web3, metaverse, spatial, generative AI, AGI, cat videos delivered across all channels, and Bitcoin maximalism will be remixed adinfinitum.
Alongside these we see a growing list of problems to be solved in our human-machine entwined world – digital addiction (and digital dementia in young adults), bad actors and misinformation (the ‘war on one’), cyberattacks, dead internet acceleration (read about ‘Dead Internet Theory’), and the behavioral modification of our children through ‘fun’, social apps like TikTok.
In addition, futurists, tech pundits, pseudo-leaders, and ill-informed influencers weave alarmist narratives about ‘we’ve never seen change happen so quickly’, ‘more change will happen in the next 10 years than the past 300’, or ‘disrupt yourself before someone disrupts you’.
The truth is that all of these start to feel true if we don’t stop and consider that absolute disruption never really happens and that the speed of change is actually closer to the volume of noise and the inferred worry that we are not doing enough than change itself. Complacency, and lack of ability to filter out the noise to see signals that indicate loss of market position, leads to a slow, painful decline and eventual organizational death for any legacy industry players.
With urgency, we must start to determine what is important in our technocracy. What goals matter, what pathways we want to forage forward and what agency we need to afford to ourselves and our partners to make positive change happen?
Computer scientist Timnit Gebru has been one of the most critical voices against the unethical use of AI. In this interview they talk about who is behind AI technology? Whose interests does it serve? And, how democratic is its use? A useful reference on breaking the TESCREAL (transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism) narratives.
As we struggle to break free from these technocratic narratives we must consider looking beyond and gifting agency to those motivated to create hope and make positive change happen in this world. I’ve experienced this a sum total of once in the 30 years I have been in the world of work.
In the early-2000s I worked in a company where the founder – an MIT Sloan School Fellow – gave us the permission to experiment and fix the product we delivered. Young folk rebuilt code and developed new modules of functionality in short periods of times – sometimes over weekends. I built new models of behavioral analysis in call detail record data and worked to advance the field of behavioral analysis. No idea was seen as bad, or a waste of time. Not only did we have a company driven by progress and profits, we had one driven by hope for an easier and more informed world, and the selfless personal and organizational betterment.
The kind of agency to drive new ideas like this is rare, and I’ve not experienced agency like this since. Sure, I’ve taken control and made calculated risks to drive progress but almost always in defiance of the leadership under which I served (I strongly advocate this approach, and absolve myself from your actions). Sometimes you have to put your beliefs and actions on the line. Futurism is activism after all.
It’s not to say it has never, or does not, exist. In the past we’ve seen companies like Google give employees 20% of their time to side projects however, across the board in the most profitable companies in the world, in 2025 we’re seeing these policies fall to the wayside and destruction of internal capabilities around design, innovation, futures work, long-term planning to make way for stack ‘em high, profit at any cost strategies.
This will continue through 2025 as ‘the most progressive’ companies opt for short term gain. The shareholder dragons need satiating, yet our futures are worth fighting for in the organizational growth mantra. This is short-sighted (natch) at best.
Research has shown us that future-prepared firms – those with foresight capabilities, higher degrees of preparedness and vigilance on what comes next have a 33% higher profitability and a 200% higher growth than those companies that do not (see Rohrbeck and Hum, 2018). When we see the global market cap rankings it seems like the juggernaut companies of Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, NVIDIA, Tencent and Saudi Aramco grow regardless of their casting aside of these capabilities. But, for how long with no, or even self-serving, long view with some consideration of the wellness of the wider world?
What if we hire people for the unique thinking they bring that takes us beyond the current state-of-play into more incredible and egalitarian futures?
What if we applaud and support our employees to explore the disciplines of creativity, art, design and futures thinking while affording our people the time and funding to try new things that evolve our businesses to better serve humanity and the natural world?
What if we convince our stakeholders and shareholders that the worked views of our futures are not folly and signpost a way forward towards new levels of impact, empowerment and profitability?
How does that feed into hope at an individual, market and global level?
Surviving geopolitical shifts
As we consider our current predicament, and the past 200 to 300 years of industrial progress, it seems like we are in repeating cycles of wider geopolitical change – and where we are today is part of that.
In support of this idea we can reference Strauss–Howe generational theory. This outlines that there are patterns in historical generations, and generational events, which are called ‘turnings’. I feel that this frames where we find ourselves in this world very well, so let’s break it down.
William Strauss and Neil Howe propose that history unfolds in cycles of roughly 80–100 years, which they call a “saeculum” (a long human life) where each consists of four turnings, or generational archetypes, which correspond to specific types of generational behavior and societal mood.
In their book ‘The Fourth Turning’, they describe a four-stage cycle of social or mood eras which they call ‘turnings’:
- The High (First Turning) – a period of strong institutions, collective confidence, and social order. Society is unified with a clear sense of purpose, but individualism is downplayed causing its own challenges.
- The Awakening (Second Turning) – a cultural or spiritual renewal. Institutions are challenged, and people seek greater personal freedom and authenticity. It’s a time of rising individualism.
- The Unraveling (Third Turning) – institutions weaken, and individualism dominates. Society becomes fragmented, values diverge, and there’s a sense of foreboding and division.
- The Crisis (Fourth Turning) – A period of upheaval where institutions are rebuilt and society undergoes a major transformation. This often includes war, revolution, or economic collapse, but it ends with societal renewal.
Van Niestat nicely summarizes and breaks things down here:
Sounds and feels familiar, and 2025 leads us deeper into the ‘crisis’ of the Fourth Turning where we started with the 2008 financial crisis and continues with a shift to right-wing politics, transforming global conflicts and societal challenges that have amplified and continue to foment. Alongside are our challenges, optimism and hope.
If history follows this cyclical pattern, this turning could culminate in a significant societal transformation by the mid-2020s or early 2030s, after which a new saeculum and First Turning will begin. It can’t come soon enough for many.
In reality, and I speculate, that we have around 5 to 7 years to ride it out with many economic shifts (as China and India become more dominant with a SE Asian cabal forming), true digitization of global economies through Central banking Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and the establishment of digital proxy reserve currencies – Digital Dollar, Digital Yuan and Digital Euro, and the borderless business empowered by the legitimate Internet and nefarious Dark Web.
Yes, conflict will continue from smaller tribal wranglings (at home in the US and Canada, across Europe and Oceania) to critical global stage warfare (Ukraine and the Middle East), and turmoil will come from short-termism (‘drill baby, drill’), the tensions of right-leaning to far right ideologies driving governments into rigid bureaucracies and conflict-based progress vs. open dialog and progress to a better world.
What if, in the next 5 years, we see a prototyping of bad (and good) decisions and policy as a reflection of short-term human needs for energy, transportation, information and profit?
What if we become and join with other boardroom (and door-bashing) philosophers and activists that will join us to fight for equity, equality and well-being?
What if the government and organizations are slowly eaten from within, like an ouroboros that destroys the bad and gives birth to the good, and that leads to a wellspring of hope and direct action?
Now is the time for us to build hope as that provides an energy to not only weather the tumultuous seas ahead, but to emerge inspired and driven to create lasting change for the goodness of the world.
Water, energy and food resiliency
In each of my 450+ keynotes delivered in the past decade, executives and government leaders have been challenged to consider creating resiliency and sustainability across water, energy and food. And, that all organizations will have to double down to protect these resources as they affect the wellness of employees and of the world at-large that they sell products and services to. New organizational abundance will emerge from these acts, and new companies will start to exhibit dominance.
It’s taken a long while to get from this idea to action. We were warned almost half a century ago that if the present growth trends in world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years (Source: Meadows, 1972).
There will be more action to address this through 2025, and at the heart of creating resiliency is the understanding and mastery of the Water-Energy-Food Nexus (WEF) – the interconnected and interdependent relationship between water, energy, and food systems. This was something I started to explore more deeply in my 2021 predictions -‘The Year of Transcendence’.
The WEF concept emphasizes that the management and use of resources in one of these sectors directly impact the others. Understanding and optimizing this nexus is critical for sustainable development, particularly in the context of increasing resource demands, climate change, and environmental degradation.
Let’s look at these intersections.
Water and energy are two closely interlinked and critical resources. The energy sector accounts for 10% of total global freshwater use and is essential for almost every part of producing energy, from electricity generation to biofuels cultivation. On the flipside, Energy is needed to extract water from aquifers, lakes, rivers and oceans, and treat water prior to delivering it to us to use.
We’re also facing an imminent water crisis, with demand expected to outstrip the supply of fresh water by 40% by 2030 (Source: The Guardian).
Global energy demand for desalination (a hotly debated item) has nearly doubled since 2010, and current trends point to another doubling to 2030. Some 21,000 desalination plants currently operate in about 150 countries. (Source: IEA).
Artificial Intelligence is also guzzling both water and energy with AI’s projected water usage could hit 6.6 billion m³ by 2027, signaling a need to tackle its water footprint as well. Take a look at ‘Making AI Less “Thirsty”: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models’.
Gulp!
When we look at the relationship between water and food we find that a quarter of the world’s crops are grown in areas where the water supply is highly stressed, highly unreliable or both. Global warming and climate change plus increasing competition for water are threatening our water supplies and security in our food supply.
More than half the world’s food calories are provided by rice, wheat and corn. These crops are particularly vulnerable: 33% of these three staple crops are produced using water supplies that are highly stressed or highly variable. We are facing these while we see that the world needs to produce 56% more food calories in 2050 than it did in 2010 to feed a population approaching 10 billion people. (Source: World Resources Institute)
Overall, the WEF security nexus is necessary for the benefit of human well-being, poverty reduction and sustainable development. It’s also a complex interplay of systems:
Fig. 1 – WEF general superstructure (García-Martínez et al)
The energy system uses different sources of energy to make electricity – from fossil fuels (dominant) to renewables (rising). In addition to surface and underground water (dams, aquifers), desalinated water and reclaimed water has the potential to be used to meet the demand for water. In addition, regional food production is categorized into distinct categories, including but not limited to vegetables, fruits, cereals, legumes, seeds, foods of animal origin, and dairy products. It helps us figure out how much each type of food has in terms of the important nutrients that people should have. (Source: Water–energy–food nexus analysis: A multi-stakeholder alliance-based framework, García-Martínez et al)
The ongoing import and export of water, energy, and food are considered to meet the needs of the system and will become more dominant markets going forward. Here in Canada I talk about Water Tankers over Oil Tankers.
The WEF nexus is found at the heart of sustainable, economic and environmental development and protection. The demand for all three resources continues to grow for various reasons: a growing population, ongoing population movements from farms to cities, rising incomes, increased desire to spend those incomes on energy and water intensive goods/varying diets, international trade, urbanization and climate change.
Now look at your organization. What’s your strategy for water, energy and food resiliency, and more importantly, sustainability as part of your local and global system? It’s likely you flush toilets with fresh, drinking water, import food held in plastics in vending machines, and think that your recycling efforts are good with blue bins strategically placed in office corners and kitchens.
The following graph (Source: McKinsey) highlights that we Fortune Global 500 got behind climate change initiatives but are woefully behind in other areas, likely due to lack of regulatory pressure.
Attention across all other areas is rising (within companies and from regulators themselves), and in 2025 we’ll find ourselves careering towards ESG2.0 – a place where leadership wants to look beyond rule and regulation to a higher level of responsibility because it is ecologically sound, empowering to the individual and good business. ESG is a bad word these days so expect a renaming – to SuperGreenWorld2.0 or something equally as good feeling and chintzy.
But, seriously…
What if we start to consider gray and black water systems for recycling of used water into secondary systems (toilets, plant watering, and even full processing to drinking water), placing solar panels and savonius wind turbines on your roofs, and even grow food there as well. What if you tap into the local food supply, and give back to the community with food not consumed (see the Chicago Love Fridge Project).
What if we supply beneficial funding to your employees to do the same at home, and support local schools and not-for-profit organizations to do the same. A connected community reaps benefits in both social cohesion and in profit plus your brand managers will feel great about how that feeds into an overall image and impact profile in the wider world.
What if we care a little deeper about the world our children and their children will inherit from us?
How does that feed into hope on an organizational, local and global scale?
We are Hope Engineers
It’s less of a question of whether 2025 is a year where we need hope, and more like an absolute call for everyone to dial up hope, set audacious goals and look towards our incredible futures where we will find a better and more resilient world for all. The adage of the only way out is through rings true.
Hope is a renewable energy, an emotional state, a call-to-arms to establish a well-informed strategy with audacious goals, to carve pathways forward through the greatest challenges we see, and to energize agency in ourselves, those around us and in the allies we choose to stand with.
Hope is essential, possibilities are endless, and futurism is activism. We are Hope Engineers, and we’re destined to build a new world together.
Reach out if you want to discuss.
About Nikolas Badminton
Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 300 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.
He helps shape the visions that shape impactful organizations, trillion-dollar companies, progressive governments, and 200+ billion dollar investment funds.
Nikolas Badminton’s book Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth has been selected for 2023 J.P. Morgan Summer Reading List, and featured as the ‘Next Gen Pick’ to inform the next generation of thinkers that lead us into our futures.
Nikolas is currently writing his next book – The Hope Playbook, due out in late-2025.Please contact futurist speaker and consultant Nikolas Badminton to discuss your engagement.
