Surely the state of the world, and society, is itself evidence that the actions organisations are taking are not sufficient.
Take sustainability. The framing that has dominated for twenty years (voluntary targets, minimum standards written into law, reporting frameworks) has not produced outcomes at the scale required. Even if the targets are met on paper. The underlying trajectory has not changed.
This is not because the people involved are incompetent. It is because the frame within which they are operating cannot reach the problem it was designed to solve. Improving execution inside that frame will not close the gap. The frame itself needs examining. But we have felt that something is better than nothing for all this time.
There is a harder point underneath this. The operating environment can shift faster than any strategy cycle. Brexit upended assumptions. COVID upended them again. The current shifts in global geopolitics are doing the same. Each time, commitments that were built on instrumental logic (because they were pragmatic, because they served a purpose within a particular political or economic context) collapsed as soon as that context changed.
The organisations that cope with this kind of disruption are not the ones with the best contingency plans. They are the ones whose understanding of what they are for does not depend on external conditions staying stable. That is what examining fundamentals means in practice: not as an intellectual exercise, but as the only form of preparation that survives contact with a genuinely changed world.
This is the case for the diagnostic work. Not as a philosophical nicety, but as a practical response to what is actually happening.
The argument is obvious at the societal level. Harder to land at the organisational level, where the question becomes: what has any of this got to do with us? That gap, between seeing the problem in the world and recognising it in your own operating assumptions, is precisely where the diagnostic work begins.
Related
- Frame failure
- Productive collapse
- Three mechanisms that keep it in place
- From optimised to resilient
- Why the frame cannot see itself
- Which markets are ready — on who is positioned to act on this recognition