To creatively approach the future it is helpful to diagnose the problems of the present and to consider their roots. The range of problems that our planet faces is enormous and all too tragically familiar – war and the threat of war, terrorism, ecological degradation and species loss on an unprecedented scale, the erosion of cultures and languages, pollution and an increasingly toxic environment, hyperurbanization, refugees and accelerating patterns of migration, the ‘dark web’ and cybercrime displacing the optimistic hopes for a digitally united world, the downsides of economic globalization, and the risks associated with a world increasingly dependent on what are actually fragile but now essential technological systems. To discuss leadership and management without placing them in this context should be politically and philosophically pointless, and to propose any form of “business as usual” is to be complicity in the destructive forces that genuinely threaten the possibility of the continuation of any form of civilized life on our planet. Even to speak of “sustainability” is a kind of failure, a minimalist position in which we hope to merely keep things going, even if that is still now a possibility. In fact, I will argue, we need a much more expansive and imaginative model of the future and of how to get there, one which involves both a critique of our current modes of thinking and practice in the world and visionary and creative (but realistic) suggestions of transformative action and thinking. This paper will propose some modest ways in which this might be done, ones that perhaps transcend the usual models of political and economic activity, which experience tells us have largely failed. Clearly, a ‘larger’ model is required, one that re-thinks the basis of knowledge and action and which asks different questions than those proposed for example by conventional social science.