The Future Will Be Grown, Not Built

The future is unlikely to be designed and built. It will be grown.

As the year closes, this idea has kept surfacing – partly because I want it to be true, and partly because it keeps turning up in what I’m reading, in conversations and in the ether.

I had these two pieces open – one a working paper on Rewilding Civic Life (drawing lessons from the UK’s Big Local experiment) and the other an essay on systems transformation moving from “big pushes” to “a thousand small shifts”.

Big Local is a story about what happens when you protect space long enough for people to act together, get things wrong, learn, and try again. And with real power and a long horizon, and without demanding that everything justify itself on a quarterly reporting framework.

Kattel zooms out to say that this is what development looks like now because the systems that matter shift through the accumulation of many small experiments that change the relationships inside and between systems. Less architect and more gardener.

Either I’m trapped in a well-curated filter bubble, or there’s a slightly eerie coherence in what a lot of people are independently noticing. I genuinely don’t know which.

But if the future is grown rather than built, it changes what we should reward. It changes what leadership looks like. And it changes what philanthropy is for; less “funding the solution”, more “funding the conditions”.

If that’s even roughly right, what kind of leadership do we need, and what should funders stop doing so that the growing can actually happen?

PS: There’s also the work on relational state capacity, which argues that what we call “capacity” is incomplete without relationships. That a society’s ability to act depends not just on institutions or infrastructure, but also on the texture of everyday interactions between citizens and those who act in the name of the state.

And evidence from rural communities showing that trust, agency, and belonging don’t grow primarily through dialogue (even dialogue across difference) but when people do things together that matter. Action seems to create the relational surplus that trust later draws from.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 22 December 2025. View original →