Futures Mode: Why Capabilities Built in Calm Cost Less
This week I wrote about borrowed relevance — the debt that accumulates when you lean on external architecture you didn’t build and can’t control.
Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, delivered a special address at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting 2026. In Davos, he named it. Nations that borrowed security from alliances they didn’t maintain. Organisations that borrowed efficiency from suppliers. Leaders who borrowed competence from stable systems.
Carney’s special address resonated more than I expected. Which tells me something: people are feeling the exposure, even if they couldn’t name it until now.
But diagnosis isn’t enough.
Seeing the debt is the first step. The harder question is: what do you do about it?
Three Modes of Operating
Most organisations I work with believe they’re operating strategically. They see themselves as thoughtful, responsive, and adaptive.
The reality is usually different.
There are three modes of operating. Most organisations are stuck in the first. They think they’re in the second. They need to reach the third.
Reactive Mode. Something hurts. Apply treatment.
Engagement scores drop → launch a culture initiative.
Delivery slows → hire more people.
Revenue dips → cut costs.
Competitor moves → copy them.
This is treatment without diagnosis. The symptom gets attention. The underlying condition doesn’t. Which is why the same problems keep recurring, wearing different costumes.
Diagnostic Mode. Read the conditions. Then respond.
Understand why engagement is dropping before launching initiatives. Identify what’s actually slowing delivery before adding headcount. Diagnose the constraint before applying the remedy.
This is where most organisations think they are. Few actually operate here consistently.
Futures Mode. Forecast conditions. Pre-build capabilities.
Don’t wait for the weather to arrive → anticipate what’s plausible and build what you’ll need before you need it.
This is where organisations need to be. Almost none are.
The Two Jumps
Here’s what this means practically: most leaders need to make two jumps, not one.
Jump 1: Reactive → Diagnostic
Stop treating symptoms. Start reading conditions.
This is harder than it sounds. Reactive Mode feels productive. You’re doing things. Launching initiatives. Responding to problems. There’s motion, activity, and effort.
Diagnostic Mode requires you to slow down before you speed up. To sit with the discomfort of not knowing before you act. To resist the organisational pressure to “just do something.”
Most organisations skip this jump entirely. They move from one treatment to the next, never pausing to ask whether they’ve understood the condition they’re treating.
Jump 2: Diagnostic → Futures
Stop waiting for conditions to arrive. Start building for conditions that are plausible.
This jump is different. It’s not about slowing down — it’s about extending your time horizon. Looking beyond the current weather to what weather patterns might be forming.
You can’t make this jump without first mastering Diagnostic Mode. If you can’t read conditions accurately in the present, you certainly can’t forecast them for the future.
Why Reactive Mode Dominates
If Diagnostic Mode is better than Reactive, and Futures Mode is better still, why do most organisations stay stuck?
Three reasons:
Reactive Mode is rewarded. The leader who “takes decisive action” gets praised. The leader who says “let’s understand this properly before we respond” gets accused of analysis paralysis. Organisations reward visible activity, not invisible diagnosis.
Reactive Mode feels safe. If a treatment for a symptom doesn’t work, you can try another. You’re responding to something real and observable. Diagnostic Mode requires you to name conditions that might be wrong. Futures Mode requires you to build for conditions that might not arrive. Both feel riskier.
Reactive Mode is easier. Diagnosis takes skill. Forecasting takes discipline. Treatment just takes willingness. Most organisations default to what’s easiest, especially under pressure.
The result: a perpetual cycle of initiative churn. New programmes layered on old programmes. Problems that keep recurring because the underlying conditions were never addressed. Exhausted teams who’ve learned that “transformation” means more activity, not better outcomes.
This is the world I’ve navigated for three decades. In some cases, the fatigued teams had endured six years of initiative churn before I arrived. When I offered diagnosis and better outcomes, they were highly resistant.
Not because they were cynical. Because they were protecting themselves.
Six years of activity without outcomes teaches teams that “transformation” is something to be survived, not engaged with. Enthusiasm gets punished. Belief leads to disappointment. The safest strategy is to keep your head down and wait for this initiative to pass, as with the previous “initiatives”.
So when someone arrives offering a genuine diagnosis, the resistance isn’t obstruction. It’s scar tissue. They’ve been burned too many times to risk hoping again.
This is the hidden cost of Reactive Mode. It doesn’t just fail to solve problems. It damages the organisation’s capacity to engage with solutions when they finally arrive.
CIRCA: The Discipline of Diagnostic Mode
To move from Reactive to Diagnostic, you need a way to read conditions — not just symptoms.
This isn’t a new idea. VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) has been around since the 1980s. BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible) is a more recent frame. These models help leaders name what they’re facing.
But naming conditions isn’t enough. You also need to know what to do next. When you’re neck-deep in quicksand, “this is quicksand” isn’t the insight that saves you — the right response is.
That’s where most condition-reading frameworks stop. They offer orientation, not action: a way to interpret the environment, but not a matched response for each condition.
Over the past decade, I’ve been developing a framework to close that gap. It emerged from pattern recognition across dozens of transformation recoveries — the work that begins when initial approaches stall and organisations need diagnostic precision, not repeated generic methodology.
Over the past decade, I’ve developed a framework to close that gap. It emerged from patterns I saw across dozens of transformation recoveries—when initial approaches stall and organisations need diagnostic precision, not the same generic playbook repeated in the hope it works this time.
I call it CIRCA-CLEAR. CIRCA reads the conditions. CLEAR provides the matched levers.
CIRCA — Five conditions that create turbulence:
Complex. Overwhelming interdependence. Too many moving parts to hold in your head. Changes in one place cascade unpredictably elsewhere. The system is beyond any individual’s ability to fully comprehend, which means traditional command-and-control approaches fail. You can’t direct what you can’t see.
Insecure. Trust deficit. People don’t feel safe to speak candidly, surface problems, or challenge decisions. Information gets filtered on its way up. Bad news arrives late or not at all. Reality gets distorted by self-protection. The organisation is flying on instruments that aren’t telling the truth.
Rapid. Pace overwhelming capacity. The environment is changing faster than your ability to respond. You’re always behind, not because you’re slow, but because the rate of external change exceeds your rate of internal adaptation. The gap compounds.
Contradictory. Competing priorities that can’t all be true simultaneously. Grow and cut costs. Innovate and standardise. Move fast and don’t break anything. Serve customers and hit quarterly targets. People are caught in impossible binds, asked to deliver outcomes that conflict with each other.
Anxious. Uncertainty paralysing action. People know something needs to change but can’t commit to a direction. Every option feels risky. Decision-making stalls. The organisation is frozen, not because it lacks options, but because it can’t metabolise the uncertainty enough to choose.
Most organisations experience these in combination. The conditions layer and interact. But typically one is dominant — the binding constraint that’s setting the ceiling on everything else.
Reactive Mode ↔ you treat symptoms without knowing which condition is generating them.
Diagnostic Mode ↔ you identify the dominant condition before you intervene.
The difference in outcomes is profound.
CLEAR: Matching Response to Condition
Each condition has a matched response. Not a solution — these conditions aren’t problems to be solved and closed. They’re weather to be navigated. But there are levers that work better than others depending on what you’re facing.
I call these the CLEAR levers:
Clarity — The response to Contradictory. When people are caught in impossible binds, the leadership work is to force-rank priorities, establish decision rights, and make the trade-offs explicit. Not “both/and” — that’s the language that created the bind. Real trade-offs. Even-over statements. This matters more than that. Now people can act.
Learning — The response to Complex. When the system is beyond anyone’s ability to fully comprehend, you need collective intelligence and systematic exploration. Small experiments that generate signal. Diverse perspectives that see different parts of the elephant. The goal isn’t to achieve complete understanding — that’s impossible. The goal is to learn faster than the complexity evolves.
Empathy — The response to Insecure. When trust has broken down and information is being filtered, you don’t fix it with better reporting processes. You fix it with leadership vulnerability. Creating conditions where candour is safe. Going first in acknowledging uncertainty. Making it acceptable to surface problems without being punished for them.
Agility — The response to Anxious. When uncertainty is paralysing action, the answer isn’t more analysis or better forecasts. It’s demonstrating that small, reversible moves are safe. Right-size the response. Replace prediction with adaptation. Small wins make the next move less frightening. Movement breaks the freeze.
Resilience — The response to Rapid. When pace is overwhelming capacity, the work is to restore sustainable throughput. WIP discipline — stop starting so much. Protect buffers. Build slack into the system. Resilience isn’t about pushing harder. It’s about creating the conditions where consistent delivery is possible without burning people out.
The trap — and I’ve seen this dozens of times — is applying the wrong lever to the wrong condition.
Demanding agility when the real problem is insecurity. People can’t move fast when they’re afraid. Pushing for clarity when the real problem is complexity. You can’t force-rank priorities when you don’t understand the interdependencies. Rolling out empathy initiatives when the real problem is contradictory mandates. Safety doesn’t help if people are caught in genuine binds.
Diagnosis before prescription. Always.
This is what Diagnostic Mode looks like in practice. Read the condition. Match the lever. Intervene with precision.
“𝗗𝗶𝗮𝗴𝗻𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘂𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗮𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗽𝘀𝘆. 𝗧𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗱𝗶𝗮𝗴𝗻𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗺𝗮𝗹𝗽𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗲.”
Futures Mode: The Second Jump
Diagnostic Mode is essential. But it’s still reactive — you’re reading conditions that have already arrived, then responding.
Futures Mode extends the discipline forward in time.
The question shifts from “What condition are we in?” to “What conditions are plausible?” And from “What lever do we need?” to “What capabilities should we build before we need them?”
This isn’t prediction in the fortune-telling sense. You don’t need to know exactly what will happen. That’s impossible, and chasing certainty is its own trap.
What you need is a sense of what categories of condition are plausible — and what capabilities those conditions would demand if they arrived.
Then you build those capabilities before you need them.
The Economics Most Leaders Miss
Here’s the insight that changed how I think about this:
Capabilities built under calm conditions cost less, embed deeper, and perform better under pressure.
Every quarter without the capability a future condition will demand, the cost of acquiring it increases. You’re paying interest on a loan you haven’t acknowledged.
Think about learning a new skill when you have time. You can practice. Make mistakes. Iterate. Let it embed properly. The learning has room to deepen.
Now think about learning the same skill in a crisis. You’re under pressure. Taking shortcuts. Hoping it holds. The skill is fragile because the conditions didn’t allow for proper formation. The cost — in stress, in errors, in incomplete embedding — is significantly higher.
Organisations work the same way.
Building supplier diversification before your primary vendor has “issues” — that’s a strategic project with reasonable timelines and considered options.
Building supplier diversification after your primary vendor fails — that’s crisis management with whatever options remain available.
The capability you end up with might look similar. The cost of acquisition is not.
I think about the two trading firms I wrote about last week. One built independence over 18 months, under relatively calm conditions. Expensive, but manageable. The other tried to respond after their platform had “issues.” They didn’t get 18 months. They got acquired.
Same capability gap. Radically different outcomes. The difference was when they chose to act.
Futures Mode in Practice
Here’s how this applies to borrowed relevance:
Step 1: Map your dependencies.
What external architecture are you leaning on? Suppliers. Platforms. Cloud providers. Alliances. Key talent you’ve outsourced. Market conditions you’re assuming will hold. Regulatory frameworks you’re relying on.
Don’t filter for “realistic” failures. Map everything you’re dependent on. You’re looking for exposure, not probability.
Step 2: Stress-test each dependency.
For each significant dependency, ask: what condition would emerge if this failed?
Your cloud provider goes down for a week. Rapid? Complex? Anxious? What does that failure cascade into?
Your primary customer changes strategy and pulls their contract. What condition does that create?
The regulatory framework you’ve built your compliance around shifts. What now?
Step 3: Identify the capability gap.
For each stress-tested scenario, which CLEAR lever would you need to pull?
If the condition is Rapid, do you have Resilience capability? Can you actually restore sustainable throughput through WIP discipline and protected buffers? Or do you just push harder until people burn out?
If the condition is Anxious, do you have Agility capability? Can you run small, reversible experiments that break the paralysis? Or do you wait for certainty that never arrives?
If the condition is Complex, do you have Learning capability? Can you run systematic experiments and aggregate collective intelligence? Or do you rely on a few experts who might not see the whole picture?
Be honest. The question isn’t whether you have the concept. It’s whether you have the capability — embedded, practised, available under pressure.
Step 4: Pre-build under calm.
For each critical dependency, develop the response capability before the condition arrives.
The cost is lower now. The embedding will be deeper. The performance under pressure will be better.
You’re paying down the debt while interest rates are low.
Carney: A Career in Futures Mode
When I look at Mark Carney’s tenure as Governor of the Bank of England, I see Futures Mode practised consistently — and the political cost of practising it in a world that rewards Reactive Mode.
The Tragedy of the Horizon (2015)
Three years before climate risk became mainstream financial conversation, Carney gave a speech naming the structural problem: the horizon for climate impacts extends beyond the horizon for business cycles, political cycles, and most investment decisions.
He forecast the condition — assets becoming stranded, physical risks materialising, portfolios exposed to repricing they hadn’t accounted for. Then he started building the capability: the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD).
TCFD didn’t wait for climate disasters to hit balance sheets. It created a framework that forced institutions to measure exposure before they needed to. Pre-built under calm conditions. Now embedded globally.
That’s Futures Mode.
Brexit Morning (2016)
The morning after the referendum, the pound was crashing. Markets were in panic. The political class was in shock.
Carney appeared on television, calm, and confirmed that the Bank had £250bn of liquidity ready to support the financial system.
He didn’t scramble that morning. The capability was pre-built. He’d forecast the condition — market turbulence following a Leave vote — and ensured the response was already in place before the condition arrived.
The intervention is widely credited with preventing a financial crisis in the immediate aftermath. But notice: the work happened before the vote, not after it.
That’s Futures Mode.
The “Unreliable Boyfriend”
Carney was criticised throughout his tenure for signalling rate changes that didn’t materialise. Commentators called him the “unreliable boyfriend” — hinting at action, then not following through.
But look at what he was actually doing.
He was signalling conditions that hadn’t fully arrived yet. Preparing the market for weather it couldn’t see. Building optionality so the Bank could respond to multiple plausible futures rather than committing to one.
His critics wanted Reactive Mode — respond to what’s measurable today, commit to a clear path, deliver predictable guidance. Carney was operating in Futures Mode — maintaining flexibility, building capability for multiple scenarios, adjusting as conditions evolved.
They called it inconsistency. It was foresight with optionality.
The Political Cost of Futures Mode
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Futures Mode is politically expensive.
When you forecast conditions that haven’t arrived, you look like you’re crying wolf. When you pre-build capabilities for scenarios that don’t materialise, you look like you’ve wasted resources. When you maintain optionality instead of committing to a single path, you look indecisive.
Carney was accused of “Project Fear” for warning about Brexit’s economic impact. Many of his predictions came true — the falling pound, rising inflation, stalled business investment. But by then, the narrative had moved on. He got blamed for the disruption he was trying to prevent.
This is the bind Futures Mode creates. If you succeed in pre-building capability, the crisis doesn’t happen — and no one credits you for the crisis that didn’t occur. If you warn of conditions that take time to materialise, you’re dismissed as alarmist.
Reactive Mode is easier to defend. You responded to what happened. The cause and effect are visible. Futures Mode requires defending investments in capabilities for conditions that may never fully arrive — or that arrive so gradually that no one connects your preparation to the outcome.
From Governor to Prime Minister
At Davos, Carney applied the same discipline to geopolitics.
He forecast the condition — a world where middle powers can no longer borrow security from alliances they didn’t maintain. He named the capability gap — strategic optionality, diversified trade relationships, reduced dependence on architecture Canada doesn’t control.
And he started building.
The difference now: he’s not constrained by institutional neutrality. As Governor, he could warn and prepare. As Prime Minister, he can act.
Mark Carney, the Governor, was a manager of risk who was hated for pointing out that the house was on fire.
Mark Carney, the Prime Minister, has positioned himself as the architect of the rebuild.
Same discipline. Different mandate.
Futures Mode applied at national scale.
Starting Now
Reactive Mode asks: What hurts? How do we make it stop?
Diagnostic Mode asks: What condition is creating this? What response matches it?
Futures Mode asks: What conditions are plausible? What capabilities would they demand? Can we build them before we need them?
Most leaders are stuck in Reactive Mode. Treating symptoms. Launching initiatives. Wondering why the same problems keep returning.
The first jump — Reactive to Diagnostic — requires slowing down before you speed up. Learning to read conditions, not just symptoms. Matching interventions to what’s actually happening.
The second jump — Diagnostic to Futures — requires extending your time horizon. Looking beyond current conditions to plausible future conditions. Building capabilities before they’re urgent.
Both jumps are hard. Both are necessary.
The organisations that thrive in turbulence won’t be the ones with the best reactive capabilities. They’ll be the ones that built what they needed before they needed it.
They’ll be the ones who paid down the debt while the interest was still manageable.
A Practical Starting Point
If this resonates, here’s where to begin.
First, be honest about which mode you’re actually in.
Not which mode you aspire to. Which mode your organisation defaults to under pressure. When something goes wrong, does leadership reach for treatment — or pause for diagnosis?
If you’re in Reactive Mode, the first jump is your priority. Futures Mode can wait.
If you’re ready for Futures Mode, pick one dependency.
One piece of external architecture you’re leaning on that you didn’t build and can’t control.
Ask three questions:
1. What condition emerges if this fails? Use CIRCA. Is it complexity? Rapid change? Anxiety? Contradiction? Insecurity? Some combination?
2. What response capability would we need? Use CLEAR. Which lever matches the condition?
3. Do we have that capability now — or are we assuming we’ll build it under pressure?
If the answer to question three is “we’ll figure it out when we need to” — you’ve identified borrowed relevance with interest accruing.
The capability costs less today than it will tomorrow.
Start building.
Reactive Mode treats symptoms. Diagnostic Mode reads conditions. Futures Mode builds the ship that can handle storms you haven’t seen yet.
Which mode is your organisation actually operating in?
This is the second in a series on adaptation debt. The first article, “Borrowed Relevance: The Debt You Can’t See Until It’s Due,” is available on LinkedIn. The ideas here form the foundation of my forthcoming book on why leaders can’t afford to wait.