A Human Centered Breakfast Club – Discussing the Future of Human Centered Business

A while back, we had the honor of hosting a breakfast gathering at Urban Deli Sveavägen in Stockholm. This was an opportunity for us to share thoughts on the ground-breaking potential of Human Centered Business with other brilliant minds in an informal (and mouth-watering!) setting.

After decades of an ever-increasing awareness of the social, economic and political challenges engendered by ecological change, all of us could agree that the time is ripe for Human Centered Business. Human Centered Business is purpose-driven with freedom to fail, encompassing existing values while forging new ones for a new generation. There are several reasons why we should keep our eyes set on businesses: rising societal pressure, combined with the availability of resources and decision-making processes, provides fertile soil for quick and lasting change. The hardest part for a business is to integrate and apply knowledge to its place in the system, but once that happens, unsustainable practices simply become bad business.

‘Business beyond sustainability’, as defined by Lumen Behavior, should not be misinterpreted as ‘leaving sustainability behind’. Rather, ‘business beyond sustainability’ highlights the importance of learning to navigate the current landscape. With this is in mind, a question emerged around the table: what kind of skills do business leaders need in order to bring a sustainable future into being? Human Centered Business takes sustainability from something carried by individual experts, to something inherent to core business; it equips leaders with tools to undergo that shift, while also staying on track.

At the heart of Human Centered Business is the idea that a venture and its purpose exist within the relationship to the stakeholder and society. Leading with purpose is what ultimately creates preparedness and resilience. Thus, while purpose is not comparable, we can compare whether various ventures’ actions are aligned with their respective purposes.

The Human Centered Business Index tracks and compares the extent to which a given company aligns its actions with purpose, connects with empathy, understands themselves in systems, and acts with resilience. Scalable across countries and sectors, the Index highlights best practices while enabling measurement and comparability, as well as providing tools for communication. The Index also allows individual companies to benchmark against other actors, using it as a tool to stay on purpose, support staff, and project the venture into the future. Lumen Behavior supports management teams using strategy, follow-up, reporting and governance tools – in short, to simply ‘hang in there’!

As the breakfast progressed, there was also opportunity to assess the current state of affairs. We noted how progressive companies are trying to meet the challenge of taking the next brave step, while businesses that have so far avoided this perceived ‘risky zone’ are facing an increasing pressure to act. Leaders and companies need to shift focus and become insatiable – and what should this mean in practice? Instead of patting our own shoulders by structuring reporting around past achievements, we should also look forward, keeping our eyes firmly set on the direction, remaining gaps, and the hurdles we need to overcome in order to reach the end goal. Many of us are too accustomed to finding comfort in ‘being on top’ and winning against those we perceive as our competitors, but Human Centered Business makes it clear: the real challenge ahead is to adopt purpose, empathy, systems-thinking and resilience as the way forward.