When I first met Tom and Tom back in early summer 2010, one of the things we did together was explore more deeply the stuff that was really troubling us in the world. And in the work we’d been doing in 15 years of our careers working across brand and business innovation, design and communications.

Personally I’d emerged from nearly three years working with Nokia on sustainability engagement and communications and was a year into a life changing and awesome Masters program in Sustainability and Responsibility.

A powerful program which exposed me to the darkside of humanity, business and consumption and demonstrated how the current operating system that we’ve created over the last couple of hundred years is the wrong one to take us into the future.

We were asking ourselves a lot of difficult questions. We still are.

We mashed up a film to try and express some of the tensions, fears and challenges of our time – it’s quite heavy, because it is what it is.

The uncomfortable truth.

We believe it’s critical to really understand that and to accept it in order to move on. To re-imagine and try to create a new, better and more resilient future.

We called this film SHOCK. 18 months on it feels more relevant than ever. So here it is again.

It’s one thing to reflect on this but what about the response, where’s the action?

What does a new operating system look like?

Well the bit we’re focused on is innovation at the messy intersection of business, brands, community, society and ecology.

Because it’s all part of the challenge and the solution – the interconnectedness of everything.

It’s what we call innovation with purpose.

Innovation with purpose happens when doing the same thing you’ve always done just doesn’t feel right anymore.

When your heart says enough of this.

Innovation with purpose happens when you’re truly open and honest –  when you start to say and do what you really feel in your gut.

Even though that may feel quite uncomfortable to start with.

For a business, Innovation with purpose happens when it openly accepts impossible resource constraints, unacceptable waste, and the unsustainable negative impacts of ‘doing business’ as usual. Like InterfaceFlor have.

It happens when a Business starts to consider and explore the massive inequalities in the societies and markets in which it plays. Like Who Made Your Pants do.

It happens when it acknowledges what it takes from nature to function everyday and doesn’t put back. Like Puma are.

When it accepts that landfill is full.

When it realises that deeper meaning and purpose beyond profit and growth at all costs will inspire a committed and innovative workforce like nothing else. Like Seventh Generation have.

When you have the space, freedom and safety to bring your whole self to work.

Innovation with purpose should begin by asking the question ‘what’s the role of a 21st century business?’

We’re passionate about business that has a social and environmental agenda alongside a commercial agenda, that seeks to solve environmental and social problems as well as making a profit. Like Finisterre.

Business that strives to create shared and distributed value – value for customers, communities, all employees and the biosphere that its everyday existence depends upon. Like Grameen and Danone.

Business that reaches out and collaborates with the grassroots communities and the social innovators, where networks for profit collide with networks for purpose and new hybrid products, services and enterprise emerge.

Ideas which use all the great things about business: scale, reach, speed, intelligence, organisation and creativity.

Ideas that start to hack a new operating system

One which nurtures fairer, resilient, more diverse, more creative, healthier and happier societies and economies.

Innovation with purpose is a lot of fun too.

This mash-up is called AWE. It’s some of the ideas, people and stuff that we felt and still feel inspired by and expresses parts of what this new type of business and operating system is about.

So grab a cuppa, stick your headphones on and have a watch.

We’d love to start a conversation on all this, so please do let us know your thoughts and reflections.