Beyond Competitive Advantage: Strategy in the Anthropocene

When more than fifty researchers and practitioners gathered in Lyon, France in September 2025 for the workshop Designing Alternative Futures, Strategies, and Systems-Changes in the Anthropocene, a shared sense of urgency framed the discussions.

The premise was clear. Business strategy, as traditionally conceived, is ill-equipped for a world whose biophysical foundations are eroding. By “Anthropocene,” we mean the proposed geological epoch in which human activity has become a planetary force, destabilizing the socio-ecological systems on which economic activity ultimately depends. 

For business strategy, this new era means that ecological disruption is no longer an external issue to be monitored, nor a sustainability topic to be managed at the margins. The environment increasingly constrains the conditions under which organizations can operate, invest, innovate, and cooperate. 

The challenge for our event was therefore not merely to critique existing paradigms but to imagine new ways of thinking and organizing in the face of irreversible ecological disruption.

Across two intense days of keynotes, spotlight sessions, and facilitated group discussions, a collective insight emerged: Strategy must evolve from a discipline of competition to a practice of cooperation within planetary boundaries. As one participant put it: “We’ve optimized ourselves into the corner of collapse.”

This realization marked a turning point in how participants understood strategic purpose. Rather than focusing on maximizing firm-level performance, the conversation shifted toward designing strategies that support socio-ecological systems. The workshop also showed that this shift is not only conceptual but is beginning to appear in corporate foresight, industrial transition strategies, regenerative urban experiments, and cross-sector collaborations. A participant summarized the shift: “The question is no longer how to win, but how to last ethically, ecologically, and collectively.”

From critique to construction: reimagining future(s)-making

The first track, Future(s)-Making in the Anthropocene, invited participants to move beyond images of progress and growth. The conversation began with a provocation: How can organizations imagine futures that are both ecologically viable and socially desirable?

Throughout the discussions, a recurring theme was the inadequacy of conventional future-making tools, including scenario planning, trend analysis, and long-term vision statements, when the biophysical foundations of our world are in flux. One participant remarked, “Our strategic foresight models still assume the Earth is stable. But the Earth is now a stakeholder with agency.”

Rather than traditional approaches like projecting linear growth or imposing disruption scenarios, groups explored future-making as a collective act of design. They experimented with the idea that organizations should not only anticipate change but actively co-create both desirable and feasible futures through shared narratives. “We don’t plan the future anymore,” one participant reflected. “We negotiate it with the planet, with society, and with time itself.”

Such future-making is already becoming an organizational practice. At Michelin, for example, foresight is not treated simply as a tool for forecasting market trends. Laure Jaubert, Director of Foresight, describes multiple roles for foresight:

• actively confronting the company with different futures

• helping organizational entities develop a systemic view of possible trajectories

• preparing for non-linear change

• supporting innovation

• creating future-oriented conversations across the organization. 

The point is not to predict one future, but to make strategic dialogue clearer when environmental, technological, demographic, and geopolitical uncertainties interact.

But these new approaches also reveal central dilemmas for industrial firms. How do they meet short-term objectives while preparing for systemic long-term challenges? How to evolve products and services in a way that can carry an entire sector? And how to maintain the social cohesion needed for transformation in an increasingly polarized world? There are no easy answers to these questions.

Strategizing and organizing under constraint

The second track, Strategizing and Organizing in the Anthropocene, tackled the core issue of how strategy itself must evolve when planetary boundaries become non-negotiable. If the first track focused on imagination, this one addressed execution and how to align organizations to act within biophysical and ethical limits.

The discussion opened with a reminder of “strategy’s ecological fallacy”, which is the mistaken belief that optimizing firm-level performance automatically yields society-level benefit. Participants confronted this head-on. “Strategy has been obsessed with efficiency,” one person observed, “but efficiency without sufficiency leads straight to overshoot.” Efficiency too often means growth without consideration of human needs or planetary constraints.

In breakout groups, one question led the debate: How can organizations embed socio-ecological realities into their decision frameworks?

Rail company Alstom illustrates the complexity of turning foresight into operational strategy. Michaël Haddad, Director of Innovation and Partnerships, explains that foresight is led by the innovation function, working closely with corporate strategy, marketing teams, product platform directors, and the CSR department. They want a vision that is not too centralized and long-term scenarios useful for teams that must make concrete decisions today. To overcome strategic paralysis, they connect future changes to indicators such as passenger-kilometer demand, risks of raw material shortages, business-plan assumptions, R&D opportunities, and long-term product-platform decisions. This translation helps move the organization from a reactive posture of responding to tenders toward a proactive anticipation of future mobility needs.

Renault Trucks shows another implementation challenge: acting at the scale and speed required by ecological disruption. Christophe Voisin, Sustainability Director, describes the company’s challenge as selling electric trucks quickly and at scale to decarbonize transport, while also improving transport productivity and increasing circularity around components, beginning with batteries. Instead of simply adding sustainability objectives to a conventional strategy, they want to define a strategy appropriate to the scale, gravity, and urgency of the transformation.

These examples also illustrate why implementation is difficult. Anthropocene strategy requires organizations to change not only what they discuss, but what they count, fund, reward, and treat as urgent. It asks managers to do new and often complicated actions, such as connecting long-term ecological disruption with short-term investment decisions, translating systemic uncertainty into operational language, coordinating beyond the boundaries of the firm, and convincing decision-makers whose incentives often remain tied to near-term performance. 

The missing intervention is therefore not another call for awareness. It is the patient work of translation from planetary boundaries to decision rules, from scenarios to investments, from sustainability commitments to product choices, and from isolated initiatives to sector-level coordination. These actions require efforts within and outside a company.

Embracing systems transformation

The third and final track, Designing Systems-Changes in the Anthropocene, looked beyond individual organizations to the ecosystems they inhabit. The central question was both practical and philosophical: How can we foster systemic transformations that are both regenerative and just?

In keynote and group exchanges, participants grappled with the challenge of acting within complex, interconnected systems characterized by feedback loops and tipping points. “We’ve been trained to pull levers,” one participant said. “But as systems change, there are no levers, only relationships.”

The discussions drew on systems thinking, complexity theory, and real-world examples of cross-sector collaborations. Participants analyzed cases of implementation failure in transformation programs and debated how to design “ecologies of transformation” where diverse actors, including corporations, governments, NGOs, and communities, can align without central control.

A participant summarized this realization: “No organization transforms alone. The question is: How do we design transformation as a shared property of a system, not as a heroic act of a leader?”

Another reflection resonated throughout the day: “Every system is perfectly designed to produce the results it gets. To change outcomes, we must redesign relationships.” This insight underscored the shift from linear intervention to relational stewardship.

Bouygues Construction offers a concrete illustration of systems transformation. Its foresight team was created to inform long-term strategy through a systemic approach. It analyzes megatrends and risks in order to illuminate the interconnections between global phenomena and local decisions. In response to climate change, biodiversity collapse or soil artificialization, the company is exploring regenerative urban models with public and private partners. These experiments include new business models, forms of governance that integrate living systems throughout the life cycle of real estate and urban projects, and indicators of regenerative performance. This is promising, but not easy. As Claire Meunier, Deputy Head of Foresight, emphasizes, systems transformation cannot be implemented by one firm acting alone.

Through these exchanges, systems thinking emerged not as an abstract intellectual exercise but as a pragmatic orientation for leadership. Leaders need to cultivate systems literacy and the capacity to see interconnections, anticipate unintended consequences, and design for collective resilience. As one participant concluded, “Systems change is not a department. It’s a new way of seeing.”

From insight to impact: toward a new strategic ethos

Beyond conceptual discussions, the workshop’s structure embodied its philosophy of dialogue, co-creation, and cross-pollination between academia and practice. As academics, we cannot implement these transformations on behalf of organizations. But we do have real power. We can help make visible the assumptions that hold current strategies in place, bring Earth system science into strategic conversations, and create spaces where executives, researchers, consultants, and students can test new ways of deciding under constraint. The closing sessions focused on identifying tangible collaborations and research questions that could carry forward the emerging agenda.

In the final reflection, the group agreed that the Anthropocene demands more than incremental change. It requires a moral and cognitive reorientation of strategy itself. The strategist of the future must integrate the rigor of sciences with the humility of stewardship. As one person said, “We’re not managing uncertainty anymore; we’re managing our entanglement with the Earth.”

The workshop ended without definitive answers, and that may be precisely what made it useful. Participants did not leave with a universal framework for strategy in the Anthropocene. They left with a more concrete agenda to turn practitioner dilemmas into research questions, to build action-research collaborations across companies and academic fields, and to develop tools that connect foresight, strategy, governance, and systems transformation.

Continuing the experiment therefore means more than upgrading strategizing at the level of individual firms, or even learning to strategize at the level of systems. It also requires working on the complementary leverage points that make such strategizing credible, actionable, and consequential. These include governance rules, performance metrics, investor and board expectations, forms of sectoral coordination, the legal and regulatory pressures that redefine corporate responsibility, and how societies decide what counts as progress, robustness, or habitability. 

No single company, however focused, can ensure that collective activity remains within planetary boundaries. The challenge is therefore not only to help firms see differently, but to build the conditions under which different ways of seeing can aggregate into different patterns of action. 

This is why we need spaces of collective systemic inquiry, bringing together researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and other actors. These spaces do not provide a definitive answer to the Anthropocene condition, but they help create the intellectual, relational, and institutional infrastructure through which strategy can become a force for viable futures rather than a mechanism for deepening overshoot.

Find out more

IF initiative, a collaborative business approach led by Carbone 4 with the support of six research teams and around 15 industrial and corporate partners, is aimed at building and disseminating a new framework for strategic foresight and corporate strategy facing challenges of the Anthropocene.

Alternative Futures Institute facilitates an ongoing dialogue among researchers, business leaders, and public decision-makers, with the goal of developing robust strategies that align with planetary limits.