In November 2001, an eclectic gathering of consultants and change agents sat around the living room of Paul Gibbons, who had recently left the world of big-4 consulting and founded Future Considerations. Collectively we had over three centuries of diverse experience in leadership development and organisational change and an even more diverse range of previous careers and sectors.
What unified us, sitting in Paul’s living room, was a desire for something more. More transformational. More integral and holistic. More effective and lasting within client organisations. More impact on society. And more personally fulfilling.
Clients who wanted more emerged from the private and public sector. We developed a style of leadership programme that, while the content always varied, has remained our hallmark to this day – deep interventions that called us to be at our best as facilitators, as coaches and as partners.
Senior leaders and leadership teams asked us to help bring life to their strategies and their sustainability goals. And those working in the space where the deepest societal innovation happens – between and across the sectors – turned to us for help as facilitators and partners in their journeys.
As we grew, we learnt how to take our own medicine.
One of our core beliefs is that individuals and organisations evolve through stages of development; and this could not have been more true than for Future Considerations. Not without some pain too.
We went from a small partnership to a more traditional hierarchy (with the benefits and trappings that go along with that), to a leaner, more purposeful model, and now to our current experiment, centred on agility and purposefulness.
We have learnt – and continue to learn – how to strip away all the assumptions taken for granted of traditional organisation that can distract from purpose. And we are learning to create those ways of working and being together that enhance our purposeful impact with clients and in the world – what we and some others call “Teal” organising.
We are still on a journey – with ourselves and others.
We want the positive impact we have with organisations to spread more directly into the society and environment in which those organisations operate. And help to influence the conversations at community, government and institution level. We believe our experience to date gives us the foundation for more.
We share a commitment to support the growing global trends for societal, environmental and economic change, and we take inspiration and direction from Otto Scharmer’s view of a Society 4.0, where all of the sectors play an active role in building a better and more integrated society.
We are honest with ourselves when we, and our clients, fall short of this ideal. No doubt, we still have much to reconsider.