Moving Forward in the Never Normal - Live from the Nordic Business Forum 2025

What does it mean to move forward in a world where disruption has become the baseline? Recorded at Nordic Business Forum 2025 in Helsinki, this special episode of Matters of Consequence explores that question with keynote speakers, business leaders, researchers, and innovators from across the event.The main guests are Dr. Howard Yu, LEGO Professor of Management and Innovation at IMD Business School and recipient of the Thinkers50 Strategy Award, and Peter Hinssen, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, lecturer, and five-time author on innovation, leadership, and digital transformation.Howard Yu explains why future-ready companies reject the trade-off between short-term performance and long-term transformation. The strongest companies do not simply balance the two. They excel at both. Identify the few capabilities that strengthen both horizons and pursue them with discipline. Budgets are not strategies. Strategy requires choices, trade-offs, and the ability to scale what matters.Peter Hinssen adds a perspective through his concept of the “never normal”, a world of continuous disruption where stability can no longer be taken for granted. He argues that resilience is not about bouncing back, but about bouncing forward. Using Microsoft’s reinvention under Satya Nadella as an example, Hinssen explores how companies can let go of “yesterwork”, the routines and processes that once delivered results but now hold them back. Leadership in this environment requires curiosity, experimentation, foresight, and the ability to learn at scale.The episode also brings in perspectives from across Nordic Business Forum. Riina Bhatia, Research Scientist at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, discusses planetary boundaries and why economic success must be measured through well-being, education, health, and resource use, not GDP alone.Atte Jääskeläinen, President of the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, argues that progress begins with an honest understanding of where Finland stands today. Juha Mattsson, Former CEO of Futures Platform, explains why foresight and signal detection only create value when leaders act before certainty arrives.Sara Makkonen, Commercialisation Associate at Aircohol, calls on leaders and policymakers to give emerging technologies the space to develop, experiment, and occasionally fail. Tarja Koski, Senior Sustainability Manager at Finnair, reflects on the challenge of decarbonising aviation and why progress in hard-to-abate industries requires incremental action and broad collaboration.Why listen?Learn why Howard Yu believes companies must perform and transform at the same time.Explore Peter Hinssen’s concept of the never normal and the need to bounce forward.Understand how foresight, AI, modular organisations, and scalable learning support reinvention.Hear perspectives from Sitra, Futures Platform, Aircohol, Finnair, and VTT.Consider why moving forward requires new definitions of business success and societal well-being.Together, these voices show that moving forward is not about restoring stability or accelerating blindly. It requires clarity of priorities, the courage to dismantle what no longer serves, and the discipline to invest in what matters next.Originally released as an episode of The Future of Sustainability, Season 1.Keywords: Howard Yu, Peter Hinssen, Nordic Business Forum 2025, Nordic Business Forum Helsinki, IMD Business School, Thinkers50, future-ready companies, future readiness, never normal, corporate reinvention, business transformation, strategic foresight, scenario thinking, artificial intelligence, AI strategy, modular organisations, digital transformation, innovation leadership, perform and transform, scalable learning, yesterwork, Satya Nadella, Microsoft, Sitra, Atte Jääskeläinen, Futures Platform, Juha Mattsson, Aircohol, Sara Makkonen, Finnair, Tarja Koski, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Riina Bhatia, planetary boundaries, sustainable aviation, Matters of Consequence podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.