FOB's idea to invite John Elkington to the Fair was an excellent one. After all, over his 50-year career he has repeatedly sensed coming changes with great accuracy: sometimes announcing them well in advance, sometimes with shorter notice, and often it was his ideas and concepts that shaped the changes to come. Today, after a hard 2025 and an even more geopolitically chaotic start to 2026, we need someone whose vision reaches beyond the next quarter or year.
I won't try to faithfully summarise everything John said during his presentation and the subsequent discussion with Irena Pichola and Prof. Bolesław Rok; I'll only try to highlight the elements that personally resonated more strongly with me. Many of you took part in the event, and for the rest – perhaps there's a chance FOB will publish recordings of both talks?
Almost everything John said is set within a framework of systemic change, which he describes in line with Thomas Kuhn's concept from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Systems (social, economic) need 70–80 years for a paradigm shift to occur. For most of that period the changes are very slow and seem to all of us like natural development. Eventually come 10–15 years when everything changes very abruptly; and these are changes both for the better and for the worse. Perhaps, as John points out, the event triggering this acceleration is Donald Trump's second term. I don't know about you, but I'm very glad that this period of total change falls during a time when I'm professionally active 😊
I felt somewhat unsatisfied with how John commented on the concept of degrowth. I have the impression that my views on this topic are consistent with his approach, but the argument that degrowth is backed by people who simply dislike business, markets and capitalism and are guided by a utopian vision of the future strikes me as rather shallow. The manifesto of six economists mentioned (de Schutter, Stiglitz, Ghosh, Piketty, Raworth, Hickel) is not a simple restatement of theses about the need to end economic growth, but a summary of a broader plan to eliminate poverty; one that would not be limited to the non-functioning concept of economic growth, taxation and social transfers.
The concept of MVS, Minimum Viable System, is very interesting. It alludes to MVP, Minimum Viable Product, the simplest functional version of a product that can be released to the market. MVS is something similar, but in relation to markets, supply and demand systems, or, as I read it, value chains. I have a feeling that John is right about the direction, but I don't know what would be needed to implement this on a larger scale. Maybe it's enough to wait and not get in the way, because in some areas of sustainability (e.g. in the circular economy) dozens of such MVS are launched every year, engaging hundreds of entities; many of them turn out to be dead ends, but others gain scale and transform entire industries.
The role of financial institutions in the sustainable transition of companies and whole sectors, the possibilities of using artificial intelligence, or the shift from "soft" to "hard" sustainability are fairly obvious matters; more observations of trends already visible than predictions about the future. John is convinced that environmental issues will gain even greater significance in sustainability management. In my view they already have, even at the expense of social and governance matters. The key problem, however, is how to deal with capturing externalities in financial reporting and in investor decision-making. I would have gladly listened to his ideas on solving this problem, but unfortunately there was no time left for that.
If what I wrote above seems a touch chaotic to some of you — well, these are my impressions and some of my reflections following both of John's talks at the ESG Ideas Fair. You can read more, and in a more orderly structure, in his newsletter, and I encourage you to subscribe 😊
P.S. During the ESG Ideas Fair, MATERIALITY presented PowerESRS, our solution that simplifies reporting-related challenges. If you'd be interested but weren't at the Fair, or didn't have enough time, I invite you to visit the website, where you can arrange a meeting, a demo and a trial of the tool..
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