Futuresphere was originally founded in London in 2013 to respond to what has subsequently been termed poly-crisis. In the wake of the global financial crisis, the ensuing UK banking crisis and Eurozone debt crisis, as well as the global climate crisis, a group of like-minded professionals believed that business had to change. But ‘day jobs’ took priority; the initiative stalled.

A decade later, the original Futuresphere is not the only thing that has been revealed to have stalled. While time has healed some of the most vociferous complaints about the wounds of 2008, it has done little to address the structural problems and contradictions that led to the 2008 global financial crisis; action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions has been nugatory and certainly has not kept up with the lofty and pious rhetoric of Paris in 2015 or national politicians since then.

In the meantime, other problems have proliferated internationally and at home. Along with many other western polities, Britain appears lost, rudderless and despondent; increasingly, the West seems out of ideas that do more than funnel additional wealth to the wealthy. Its politicians appear impotent to address the unintended consequences of even incrementalist policy agendas; purposive social action has earned a ‘bad rep’. The liberal aspiration of justice as fairness (in Rawls’ great phrase) seems to be flickering, if not almost extinguished. Reform (the process, not the atavistic political return of Nigel Farage) and a solution the ‘productivity puzzle’ that could reverse the slide of Britain in to being, in the words of former BoE governor Mark Cairney, ‘Argentina on the Thames,’ seem a distant prospect. Sound research, original ideas and pragmatic realism about the future are needed now more than ever.

Futuresphere is needed now more than ever.