Over the past few months, I’ve been writing about failure — the failure of systems, the failure of solutions, and the illusions we cling to. Walking through the ChangeNOW conference in Paris with a lens tuned to notice promising seeds rather than polished pitches, I felt something unfamiliar: not hope exactly, but a kind of steady, grounded resolve that perhaps something real can still take root.
Call me a sustainability conference skeptic. Or maybe just jaded after more than twenty years in the business. There’s often a sameness to these gatherings: the buzzwords, the Patagonia vests, the startup vibes, the promises of “solutions” to systemic problems, the gurus and self-proclaimed thought leaders. But there was something different about ChangeNOW, a massive gathering inside Paris’s Grand Palais, dedicated to "accelerating the transition to a sustainable world" and "amplifying concrete actions that inspire and change norms, companies, and individuals." Something got to me.
Thinkers and doers, side by side. Problem-solvers from many sectors, many corners of the Earth. No silver bullets, no miracle cures, but perhaps enough arrows pointing toward other ways of doing?
I can’t quite put my finger on it yet. But there is something there. And I needed that.
Inside the Grand Palais, the flood of "1,000+ solutions to the world’s ecological and social crises" can be overwhelming. How do you walk among hundreds of ideas and innovations without getting lost in wishful thinking, in “sweet but won’t work”-thinking, or trapped in cynicism? I tried to carry a simple lens with me: definitely not looking for the next unicorn startup (that’s not my thing), but asking quietly, booth after booth: Does this nourish real change? Or is it just dressing up yesterday’s logic in different clothes (recycled, of course)?
In conventional startup fairs, the logic is brutal and simple: pick the winner. You walk into a hall of a thousand ideas, sift through the noise and flashing lights, shortlist a hundred, invest in ten, and pray that two or three survive. With luck, one becomes a unicorn. It’s a game of elimination, acceleration, and exit. Success is measured in multiples and market share. Failure is just the cost of playing — and something to learn from.
But walking through ChangeNOW with a composting lens, you feel something shift. Here, the logic isn’t about thinning the herd. It’s about growing the soil. The goal isn’t (or shouldn’t be) to pick a few winners; it’s to give as many initiatives as possible the chance to take root, to evolve, to succeed on their own terms. Because here, just like in my vegetable garden, many need to survive and grow.
And something else stood out. It’s not the “me-promotion” of the conventional startup pitch: the polished founder story, the personal brand, the crisp slide deck, the hunger for exit. At ChangeNOW, there’s a different current: a spirit of “we-promotion.” Entrepreneurs aren’t standing alone on stage polishing their legend; they are part of a larger wave, a field, a shared movement toward something new. The solutions are not framed as heroic moonshots, but as contributions to a greater ecosystem of change.
You see it in projects like Urban Forests, planting biodiversity back into cities; BeeOdiversity, using bees to map ecosystem health; Peel Lab, making pineapple leather from leftover leaves; ReTraze, recycling plastic waste from Asian mountains into textiles; ETRE, training young people for ecological work; and MycoFarming, engineering biofilters with fungi and mycelium. None are chasing blitzscale. They are reaching toward deeper forms of belonging and repair.
Through a venture capitalist’s eyes, many of these projects might look like weak bets: too slow, too small, too risky. But through a composting lens, they look like what they are: seeds. Some will sprout, some won’t. But all will enrich the soil for futures we cannot yet fully imagine.
If ChangeNOW really points toward something new, then what needs composting isn’t just outdated technologies. It’s the whole mindset of competitive individualism and the old measures of success that must return to the earth. Will that happen? We can't know — and the resistance from incumbent systems will be massive. But one signal I kept picking up was that some French business schools are taking this shift seriously, not just in theory, but in structure and pedagogy. Change on the scale we need will require that new generations of entrepreneurs, innovators, and emerging leaders carry different perspectives than those of the stewards of the systems now fraying. Some of this shift must begin inside the classroom. It was therefore heart-warming to see that there are several dozen postgraduate programs across French universities and business schools focused on purpose-driven entrepreneurship, regenerative innovation, and values-based leadership. Some are even rethinking the classroom: at HEC, perhaps the most well-known French business school, the Master’s program doesn’t start at the campus, but in the Chamonix valley. Prof Rodolphe Durand described how students spend time with the melting Alpine glaciers to look at, understand, and feel what is happening.
Of course, my enthusiasm needs to be tempered. ChangeNOW fills the Grand Palais with energy, creativity, and hopeful new experiments, but it’s held together by a familiar scaffolding. Corporate sponsors, familiar logos, institutional partnerships. Even though all these are far less prevalent than elsewhere, the old system is still very much here, underwriting the search for the new. It’s a strange in-between place: emergent futures nested inside legacy forms. Radical ideas framed by conventional structures. Startups working for regeneration, while still dependent on the flows of capital and recognition shaped by another era.
This isn’t a critique of ChangeNOW. It’s a recognition of where we are: standing with one foot in a dying system, and one foot reaching for something not yet fully born. Walking through the Grand Palais, you can feel both worlds humming at once. The question is not whether the old scaffolding exists; of course it does. The question is whether we are willing to see it for what it is, and compost it in time.
As I look back at my days in the Grand Palais, I find myself thinking about collapse. Not as a prediction, but as a presence: quiet, ambient, everywhere. I kept wondering: How collapse-aware are all these entrepreneurs, activists, and innovators? The answer, I think, is: more than we might expect. But what struck me most wasn’t just the awareness itself — it was the quality of it.
There’s one kind of collapse-awareness that paralyzes — that drives panic, despair, or numbness. But what I sensed at ChangeNOW was something else entirely. Not denial. Not distraction. A kind of empowering collapse-awareness: the kind that doesn’t look away, but also doesn’t freeze. That doesn’t ask “How can I outrun the storm?” but “What can I make grow in the ruins?” A "Just do it" attitude, to quote the famous swoosh slogan. "Self-possessed, resolute, act without any thoughts of results, open to success or failure," as the Bhagavad Gita says. It’s a different kind of urgency — not panic-fueled, but soil-building.
That, more than any single innovation, felt like the real signal. Not a shiny solution, but a shift in stance. Not a roadmap, but a way of walking. This was also mirrored in the voices from the stages. There were some legends, real "anciens combattants" like Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd. Then there were people and names that were familiar to me, and who provided really good food for thought. Like economist Hans Stegeman of Triodos Bank (who really challenges the view that "micro results add up to macro outcomes", or that business can in any way lead the way), Sandrine Dixon-Declève of Club of Rome and Earth4All, youth climate activist Agata Meysner, Dark Matter Labs co-founder Indy Johar (presciently warning of “degenerative volatility”), Otto Scharmer calling for “islands of coherence” where newly formed collectives can birth new seeds, or Fadhel Kaboub (“No decarbonizing without decolonizing”). Common for these was their quiet resolve, their steady voice, their contained but persistent anger. That was important.
And how fitting that this all played out beneath the steel and glass vault of the Grand Palais. It was built for the Universal Exhibition of 1900 that celebrated the marvels of modernity: electric lighting, gas-powered engines, moving sidewalks, and industrial optimism.
Now, 125 years later, it may be holding a different kind of new. The marvels on display are not meant to dazzle or dominate. No longer the spectacle of modernity and progress. Now the slow, uncertain work of repair. The Grand Palais has already witnessed one age of innovation rise and fall. Perhaps it’s the right place to begin composting the next.
Note: Inside the event, the For Good Leaders community had convened the United Leaders Summit at ChangeNOW 2025. I am grateful for Marcello Palazzi for inviting me.
Found you and this post via our shared friend Minna Laurell-Thorslund. What great writing. Nourishing change rather than finding solutions is the big idea I've ony recently arrived at and been struggling to articulate within and without. (And I've just this year starting composting!) Thanks for the work and delighted to connect.