Business 3.0: Entering the age of the living enterprise

We are living through a time where once-in-a-century events happen every year. This world of uncertainty requires new practices for how we fund, govern, and structure business. This is Business 3.0

Dec 16, 2025

We are living through a time where once-in-a-century events happen every year; recent examples include eg. natural disasters, kinetic and customs war and pandemics. This world of uncertainty requires new practices for how we fund, govern, and structure business. This is what Business 3.0 proposes.

Business 1.0 and 2.0: How we got here

The first business paradigm of modernity, Business 1.0, was industrialization—an era that started around the early 1800s. Business 2.0 emerged in the post-war period, where many of the same principles (or refined versions of them) still dominate the belief system. Digitalisation and increasing the efficiency, interconnectivity and globalisation is the core trend. The computer (rather than the machine) dominates the imagery and analogies in describing business. The purpose of business is primarily about capture and dominion to extract value. Business 1.0 and 2.0 frames business as a machine (or computer) for problem solving, growth and creation of financial capital.

The remaining greenfield areas of exploration shrank, and fierce competition ensued. Some point to the 1970s as an important divider: the end of BrettonWoods, the publication of Limits to Growth and the orientation of systemic work towards systems of innovation rather than transformation among other events. Jim Rutt, one of the founders who found success at the onset of the internet, noted a change in the 1980s—from businesspeople being persons of honor with an ethical code toward an increasing willingness to color outside the lines. What one did not do in business was first determined by the letter of the law and then simply by what one could get away with. The claims of Milton Friedman were internalized. Business became about profit only. Everything else was an impediment.

The pressure increased on ecosystems and societies. 2008 is the year some identify as the phase shift, where the underlying dynamics surfaced. This is when it became clear that business is now too big to be insulated. The modern world depends on business to continue revolving. Some businesses are so important they are deemed “too big to fail,” leaving governments and people subservient to the machine we built. M. Mazzucato points to this in her book The Value of Everything. Governments funded much of the basic research (GPS, the internet, etc.), but ideologically the public sphere could not create value. It was up to business to maximize the extraction of surplus from these technologies. During the 2010s, increasing pressures on institutions and cascading, interconnected crises further changed the context in which we operate. The habits we had formed in the post-war period were no longer working.

The cascading crises are often called a polycrisis or even a metacrisis. Without describing the entire theory here, the core thesis is that ecosystem collapse, ocean acidification, climate change, biodiversity loss, health and mental health crises, economic volatility, epistemic crisis (fracture of the common narrative), and political and geopolitical crises are all related and interconnected. Research shows positive feedback loops between these crises. Rigorous arguments point to the fact that these are all consequences of how we currently solve problems—proof that our current worldview is failing.

Business 3.0 - the age of the living enterprise

Enter Business 3.0. In parallel with sequential revolutions in biology and the increasing understanding of the quantum realms of physics that challenge classic institutions, we are entering the age of complexity. We are no longer in the complicated world where increased efficiency, tighter controls, better risk mitigation, and more precision are the most effective strategies. Complexity requires a different stance.

Business 3.0 is not a new ideology—it is a response to the world we live in. Business 3.0 focuses on creating resilience through panarchic (multi-level) alignment and operating according to living systems principles. Welcome to the age of the living enterprise.

Core Aspects

Business 3.0 is a response. It is the search for new, effective ways of moving in a world where speed will not get you anywhere unless you know where you are going. The paradigm shift invites us to ask: What is the function of business? What is the function of your business?

Reimagining the function of business

The first invitation is to discover that function. What is the exploration your business will take you on? That is the horizon you are moving toward. It is not a mountaintop - set of metrics to achieve. Horizons move with you—they give you an orientation, and they are a place you will never reach. Business 3.0 is not about solving problems; it is about exploration and value creation. Problems and KPIs will need to be solved and achieved along the way—where will you get your crew, your funding, your customers and partners—but the purpose or function of business is something bigger. The purpose of your business (the horizon) is formulated as an inquiry, not as a purpose statement. Orienting toward something we do not yet know calls in the evolutionary impulse and sparks development toward the full potential of a system.

Acting from alignment

Once we know which direction we’re headed, we must align to take the first step. Business 3.0 is vocation, not merely work. Aligning all parts of a business—the people, the technology, the investors—with the function you’re aiming to fulfil, as well as with the needs and limits of the planet, is the magic. A vocation is something that fulfills you; it is not merely accepting the terms of employment nor fulfilling a specific role. It’s bigger than that.

This is a high bar. It rests on a worldview shift. While we are not proposing that we make work the meaning of life for everyone we are proposing that meaning is an emergent property of life. To feel meaning each of us is invited to be clear about what we are here to do. It is an invitation to level the relationship: you are hiring your employer as much as she is hiring you. It is an invitation to spend your time and attention on something you find worth doing. Embark on an exploration that personally fuels you, feeds your curiosity, and regenerates you—instead of the current extraction and slow burnout that as many as 80% of people experience (according to Gallup). Part of that is earning currency so you can make a living, but there is more to it.

Towards resilience

These two subtle but fundamental adjustments create resilience. This sets up the business to direct all its attention toward its exploration and value creation. To do that, we need many roles and perspectives; we need team coherence. Moving in an uncertain world is not about playing the odds or maximizing expected value—uncertainty demands a different way of moving. The Cynefin framework, firmly grounded in complexity science, proposes that the most effective strategy in a complex world is to probe, sense, and respond.

Experimentation is familiar to most entrepreneurs. How to build the sensory organs—the clarity and engagement so that any node of your organization has the capacity and agency to act in coherence—is less trivial. Cultivating organization-wide responsibility (response-ability) requires new approaches to leadership and teams. Multi-sensory practices for sensemaking that go beyond pure cognitive/propositional knowledge are essential. Contextual understanding is critical in living systems. Living systems are informed by their context; there is no such thing as best practice—our strategy is emergent (or dependent) and grounded in the context, heading towards the horizon we’re moving toward. This is effectiveness, not efficiency. Action capacity is critical, but actions is more than getting things done. Building experience of what works, acting responsibly on incomplete information, discovering ways of orienting yourself in uncertain terrain and being sensitive to the context you are working in will be some of the most critical capacities in teams going forward. Trust, coherence, dialogue, holding complexity or paradox, and a host of other skills are critical to empower people to take action.

Orienting business beyond the business itself

Business 3.0 is not about doing everything in a completely new way. It is, however, about reframing the function of business. This is not about doing good things; it is about responding to the world we are in and building the thriving businesses of tomorrow as well as a world we’re longing to be part of. Business 3.0 reorients the focus from the business itself doing well to a larger web of relationships—relationships with employees, investors, and customers, as well as with raw materials, institutions, society, and ultimately the planet. Business 3.0 asks: How can we transform business to create a future we want for our kids? Because unless business is regenerative—creating conditions conducive to life—there will be no more business. And that’s really bad for business.

Summing up: 3 steps and a new posture

Articulate the horizon. Preferably as an inquiry, a question that you will continue to explore.

Articulate principles for how you intend to conduct yourself to move towards this horizon.

Align your entire business: people, business model, resources etc. towards this inquiry and the principles you’ve set.

Respond to what your actions generates in the world. This requires you to listen and learn as you progress. It is not about executing the plan it is about moving towards the horizon.

The shift is subtle but important: the function of business is as a vehicle for exploration, not a vehicle for extraction. Think of the organisation as an organism built to probe, sense and respond to it’s surrounding.

Organisations in Business 3.0 are concerned with creating conditions conducive to life because that is how you maximise value in the long term. Material success in this paradigm, and most importantly: beyond, is another consequence of that alignment - but it’s not what it’s about.

Business 3.0: Paths Forward

Business 3.0 is an umbrella term that we coined. It already has a long lineage. The invitation is to reimagine business based on a complex or entangled worldview.

What we are proposing are tried and tested practices developed over the past few decades. What’s new is their increased relevance because of the times we are living in. Business 3.0 is intimately related to and a continuation of the field of regenerative business. It is an exploration, documentation, and development of strategies, structures, and ways of working. Business 3.0 is an evolution - not a critique of business. We believe that business is and will be a force in the ongoing transformation and transition.

Business 3.0 is an invitation to rediscover and reorient the function of business to align with the world (context) it is acting in. We need to incorporate and operationalize the development and knowledge in the sciences into business. Here are some of the highest-leverage vectors we are currently exploring as we deepen and develop this body of knowledge:

Strategy: Supporting senior leadership to reimagine strategy in an entangled VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) and BANI (brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible) world. Based on emergence, complexity, and living systems.
Corporate structures: Reimagining corporate structures that allow for new ways of collaborating and orienting companies and teams toward value creation or regeneration (not extraction).
Funding: Reimagining funding vehicles and instruments suitable for a complex, uncertain, and entangled world.
Ownership/Stewardship: Relating to corporate structures as well as investment. Orienting toward resilience and ecosystem building, and graduating from ownership (which implies dominion) toward stewardship (which implies care). This integrates personal, inner work with how we show up in the world.
Leadership: Supporting leaders and teams to deal with high-uncertainty contexts. Building capacity for coherence, alignment, and high performance when plans and goals no longer work.
Governance: Governance that is informed by context. Moving away from control and domination toward designing self-organizing companies. (These can, but do not have to, rely on decentralization.)

What’s Next?

We are creating alliances and building out the ecosystem of practitioners. We are looking for allies to amplify the movement. Business 3.0 is open source. Our ambition is to gather and reveal the work that is already being done—the challenges to the status quo or business as usual that are already successful or sprouting. The work is not about ownership; this is about stewarding and amplifying what is already here. What is already healthy.

We are currently writing papers and conducting roundtables. We are also interviewing CEOs and investors about how they think about resilience. We will gather practitioners in this field for conferences, events, and retreats. If you want to get involved, reach out.

Grateful to Nils von Heijne, Nicole Ayres and Joseph Logan for reading and enriching this text.