This is why we are called The Dragonfly Files. If the dragonfly is a symbol of all three – transformation, growth and adaptability – then let’s be informed by its joyful lifecycle transformation, the lightness of spirit with which it matures and the freedom with which it adapts. Global business and all its institutions would do well to take note.

It’s not as if transformation has not been on the agenda for decades. The word has made it into numerous listed companies’ vision statements. And yet here we are. Stuck in post-war ways of doing business and aspiring to do what business used to do but bigger, faster and hopefully cleaner, but definitely with no real minds’ eye of where to go or how to get there.

It’s why corporate reports are so short on scenario analysis. And why strategic reports are so dull. Perhaps it also accounts for why, when reading a corporate report from cover to cover, it’s hard to tell where the company is headed or why its main interface with the outside world is so disjointed (presumably, to answer my own question, because it is authored by so many preparers).

In the absence of real transformative vision, it’s little wonder that the corporate world is being led by the nose by policymakers, regulators, lawmakers, standard-setters and auditors, all of whom are primarily backward-looking.

We can blame our backward stance on our obsession with data – I too am obsessed – but we need to be obsessed with creativity too, with ideas and with reimagining the future without all the evidence neatly lined up and the ability to prove our vision to naysayers. We’re going to have to be brave and take a few moonshots.

It’s not like we’ve not had the chance to reimagine the future of business, government, communities, the planet and its people before. There have been numerous opportunities – all of which have been missed.

Chance 1

I don’t wish to drag you back too far but let’s take the end of the Soviet era as a place to start. I was there as a financial journalist, knocking on doors of government buildings in 1989-1992, looking for evidence of a market economy as the Berlin Wall was still being dismantled.

I trudged the pavements of Warsaw and Prague, armed with dollars and translators, with a financial and business language completely alien to those populating government buildings at the end of the communist era.

I found delightful people. They were interested in me, but they had nothing to tell. They were literally a clean slate, presiding over empty coffers, but with so much potential if only they had the language to articulate their vision. But they had been starved of ideation opportunities and were looking to us, in London and other global cities, to guide them to a magical future.

What I really wanted to know was whether they would buy our worn out fleets of stinky aircraft or commercial vehicles and, if so, what sort of lease arrangement would they prefer, and how could London price deals in such a way to make a decent margin. Shame on us.

While in Prague, the Czech Republic split from Slovakia without a voice raised let alone a shot fired or a country leader made to squirm. It was a lesson for the West in how to transform gracefully.

So, what was Eastern Europe became West-like and still we did not shift from the world’s post-war vision of how to do business and finance.

Chance 2

The global financial crisis of 2008 was supposed to teach us a lesson or two. It’s not as if we never predicted the securitisation of unsecured receivables would bring the markets crashing down; some of us were even reporting on it in the late 1980s.

But did we build the global financial industry back better? Or did we replace it largely with what had gone before and hope for the best. The latter.

Perhaps we have seen the growth of green investment vehicles since 2008 but many of those have turned out to be a damp squib; and it’s not as if they were aimed at financing that dragonfly future we are searching for.

Chance 3

Let’s skip forward a couple of decades to the Covid era when some of us truly thought the recovery would be transformative. Many of us – me included – truly believed in a green and fair recovery (albeit still true and fair).

COPs have come and gone. Each has given a bit more language than the previous one to describe the mire we are in as businesses and economies; but none of them have given us that vision that truly unlocks capital expenditure to build the best future.

Chance 4 – is it coming?

If the global conversation revolves around anything in this fractured world, it’s around security. While defence dominates this security conversation, that is largely the domain of global institutions and governments. For companies, other than aerospace and defence companies, security is about imagining a safe future. Yes, this means safe borders, and yes this means energy security, but it also means being safe given the world is now overwhelmed by forest fires, floods, rising sea levels, extreme heat and the melting of the ice caps.

In 2025, all the cards are up in the air on the security and safety front. But this could also be our next chance to think holistically, strategically and differently.

So, if we unshackle ourselves and think about business, government, communities, the planet and its people in a different way – in a way that is transformative, promotes growth but is adaptable – perhaps we will start to imagine the future in a way we have not been able to imagine before.

We have the tools. Do we have the will?