Talent with purpose.

We live in a complex environment characterized by a loss of absolute trust in the system, the institutions, and the media. The constant deluge/availability of information and the availability bias make it increasingly complex to find the truth, see progress and remain optimistic in the great challenges we are facing.

The greatest social progress in the history of humanity has taken place in the last 50 years. It is essential to listen to the scientific community and to analyse problems with a critical mind, not just intuitively.

Despite this tremendous progress, there are still big social and environmental challenges in our planet. In order to solve these problems, we must first recognize and celebrate the progress that has been made.

Today entrepreneurs are funding companies to solve problems, large companies are improving their clients experience by solving their problems, and investors are placing their trust in financing companies and projects that solve problems.

Sometimes the constant use of words in different contexts causes them to end up losing their original meaning. The word "problem" is certainly an example of this. It is time to differentiate problems from drawbacks. The actual problems we are facing have already been identified globally through the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

These are the problems that we must study, deep dive into, and fight against. These are problems that need to be addressed in a systemic way and that need global transformative solution.

With the industrial revolution came great advances that changed the world forever, giving rise to a multitude of companies, sectors, and industries that continue to evolve as technology advances.

Ever since this revolution, the role of companies revolved around the economic benefit, while other agents such as NGOs, associations, foundations or the public sector itself were in charge of dealing with social and environmental problems.

Faced with this situation, companies created corporate social responsibility and sustainability areas in order to increase their role in preserving our planet and society. These areas have been treated as cost and expense areas, providing little value to the company and being far removed from its business model.

The time has come for us to change our perspective and to understand that it is possible to achieve economic growth and generate positive impact at the same time.

Sustainability is defined as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Most private companies have this approach to sustainability, where long-term plans are designed to guarantee the future preservation of the company itself.

But just having a long-term sustainability strategy is not enough. The real challenge is to execute that sustainability strategy in the business model while creating new products and services.

The problems we are facing require urgent solutions to have a positive impact.It is time to be practical and proactive, investing in projects and solutions that can be measured and that allow us to learn as these solutions are scaled. Strategy offers us a framework for thinking, but innovation and execution are what generate a real impact.

The real positive impact is generated by building products that transform the business model, not through plans or presentations.

It is essential to distinguish between the causes, the symptoms and the consequences of a problem when creating products that have a positive impact.

There are many organizations that operate under the principle of striving to minimize harm, creating products focused on risk management, damage reduction, and negative impact mitigation. Products that ultimately do not solve the problem, but rather reduce many of its effects or consequences.

The challenges that we face require us to respond quickly, creating global and scalable solutions. The time to be “less bad” is over, it is time to regenerate and create solutions that directly contribute to solving social or environmental problems.

Since the creation of the internet and the digital revolution, technology has become one of the main engines of transformation here on Earth.

A culture of "technological solutionism" has emerged alongside this technological revolution. This culture puts the power of technology above all else and imbues it with a false sense of empowerment to supposedly solve any kind of problem. No matter what the cause of the problem is, there is a common belief that a pioneering technology will solve it.

This culture creates confusion. Treating technology as an end in itself rather than a means can lead to forgetting the systemic and human aspects of the problem. It is important to always remember that technology is a tool that needs purpose to be really transformative.

Ever since the birth of consultancy, people from different backgrounds have been attracted to this industry and have worked to transform and improve the business model and operation of private companies across different sectors.

Other people wanted to use their talent to study and solve global problems and to have a positive impact on the world. The main alternatives for them were to work for an NGO, an association, academia, a science institution or the public sector.

While in the business world it is common to hire homogeneous talent, other types of profiles are needed to solve global problems. We are committed to having diverse teams made up of people from different disciplines.

We believe in the private sector as the key agent for change for their capacity of innovating and scaling rapid solutions.

Design studios and innovation firms are being founded every day. Design thinking, service design, user-centered design, innovation workshops, and even future design are among the buzzwords being widely utilized to drive innovation in working methods across various sectors.

A lot of value has been created by using these co-creation- and user research-based techniques to design new products—but this is not enough. The human-centered approach measures the success of a product based mostly on two variables: user desirability and product viability for the company.

We believe that people don’t always know what they want, and at some time, this could limit innovation and new ideas. And what is even more important, user decisions and desires could be bad for the health of our planet or go against social progress.

Solving global problems requires research, expertise and knowledge. It forces us to recognize our ignorance and to design from a system perspective where we consider all the interdependencies between different agents.

In our economic system, companies and people interact via the consumption and purchase of products and services.

This becomes even clearer when we realize that companies commonly refer to people as “consumers.” Language and words play an important role at this point because we are assuming that the role of people is to consume and that this is the only relationship that matters to corporations.

We prefer to talk about citizens, not consumers. The role of the people within the economic system is not only to consume but also to act as citizens that value responsibility and sustainability in their relationship with companies. The word “citizen” plays a much bigger role: It reflects the responsibility of individuals to be agents for change.

Many of the challenges we are facing depend on the behaviour of many citizens. We have an important role to educate, raise awareness and give the people the ability to choose with transparency and truth.