Better is possible: why — and how — business leadership can be renewed

Finland’s growth debate has focused on external conditions: productivity, taxation, labour markets, regulation, and geopolitics. Raise the Bar to Release the Brake, a joint publication by Deloitte and Demos Helsinki, argues that these explanations miss one specific variable that, if recognised and changed, could be catalytic.

The publication takes an analytical shift by zooming in on the micro: companies and how they are led. Weak growth is thus treated less as the core problem and more as a symptom of something deeper: a weakened renewal capacity within organisations. Finnish companies do not lack competence. But many of them have become highly capable at optimising what is already there, rather than renewing themselves amidst changing conditions.

Renewal, in this context, refers to the ability to develop new capabilities, operating models, and directions when existing models no longer produce desired outcomes. Growth is only an indication: it matters because it may reflect whether organisations retain the capacity to renew their mission when markets and policy don’t enforce it.

The publication therefore shifts the discussion from competitiveness alone toward leadership, organisational culture, and the structures that either support or limit renewal.

The brakes holding back renewal

The publication identifies four recurring brakes limiting renewal in Finnish organisations.

1. Low-ambition targets

Several interviewees describe Finnish governance culture as cautious and consensus-oriented. Targets often remain close enough to current capabilities that organisations never need to rethink leadership structures, capabilities, or operating assumptions.

One interviewee states bluntly:

“Nobody had asked for a higher target in a while.”

2. Risk avoidance, not opportunity seeking

Interviewees describe leadership cultures where uncertainty is primarily framed as exposure rather than possibility. Decision-making becomes slow, heavily validated, and dependent on high levels of certainty before action, which ends up mitigating opportunities.

One highlighted formulation captures the imbalance directly:

“Is anyone held responsible for missed opportunities?”

In stable operating environments, these habits often produce reliability and operational excellence. But under conditions of technological, geopolitical, and ecological disruption, the same habits begin to limit renewal capacity.

3. Closing doors on diverse voices

Interviewees argue that homogeneous leadership structures and teams reduce organisations’ ability to identify emerging shifts, weak signals, or opportunities outside familiar business logic.

This also links to Finnish consensus culture. Consensus may create alignment and efficiency, but several interviewees describe situations where it also narrows strategic imagination and discourages disagreement without enough diversity.

One highlighted insight states:

“Spicy dialogue is required to make courageous decisions.”

4. The tendency towards efficiency over renewal

Interviewees describe companies where transformation efforts appear repeatedly as projects, programmes, or temporary initiatives, yet rarely become enduring organisational capabilities.

Many organisations still treat renewal as episodic instead of continuous, even though operating conditions increasingly demand constant adaptation.

The report suggests that many Finnish organisations remain highly capable at maintaining operational quality, but less capable at turning experimentation into new business, strategic flexibility, and long-term renewal simultaneously.

A call to action: how to accelerate renewal

Naming the brakes is the easy part. Releasing them requires boards and executive teams to reorganise how ambition, risk, and responsibility operate inside organisations.

The publication identifies four practical shifts.

1. Raise the bar

When owners don’t, boards and leadership teams need to set targets that the current operating model cannot meet. Without that pressure, organisations continue to refine existing structures rather than develop new capabilities.

Several interviewees describe this as much a governance challenge as a strategic one. Ambition often gets negotiated downward until it feels operationally manageable. Renewal begins when leadership teams resist that tendency.

2. Cultivate courage

Many organisations already know how to manage risk. Fewer know how to organise around possibility before certainty exists. Renewal requires treating opportunity with the same seriousness traditionally given to risk mitigation.

The publication calls on leadership teams to:

• allocate resources toward experimentation,
• shorten decision-making cycles,
• and create room for initiatives that cannot yet be fully validated through existing metrics.

3. Bring in diverse points of view

Renewal requires widening the range of perspectives, especially around culture-shaping decisions. Several interviewees describe how homogeneous, consensus-driven leadership cultures gradually narrow what organisations can imagine.

The publication therefore emphasises the importance of building leadership teams whose options outrun what any single leader could see.

The question is not only representational but also cognitive, professional, and experiential in terms of diversity within governance and strategy processes.

4. Build organisations capable and excited to grasp opportunities

Renewal cannot remain a temporary transformation programme attached to moments of crisis. It needs to become part of how organisations allocate resources, reward initiative, develop talent, and make decisions over time.

The publication repeatedly returns to one practical leadership question underneath all four shifts:

How do organisations remain capable and excited to grasp opportunities even under uncertain conditions?

Renewal beyond the company-level

The publication’s final chapter widens the perspective beyond individual organisations. Renewal capacity is presented as something that compounds across institutions, investment environments, governance systems, and public expectations.

This means organisational renewal shapes more than company-level performance. It also influences:

• investment confidence,
• labour market expectations,
• capability development,
• and broader beliefs about the future.

The publication, therefore, frames renewal as a collective coordination challenge involving companies, public institutions, education systems, investors, and civil society actors.

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For Demos Helsinki, growth is not a sufficient end-goal. Growth alone cannot define societal direction. Growth matters because it can indicate whether societies retain the ability to renew themselves, make commitments, and pursue shared futures under changing conditions. But it is also a very small part of the history of human progress. While it coincides with some of the most radically equalising pages of our history, its limits have always been clear. 

This creates a broader societal question running underneath the publication:

What else, other than growth, can begin to form the glue that holds societies together? “Renewal” may be capable of shifting our resolution away from the thing we are not getting — growth — towards the thing we actually desire: evidence that there is still a possibility for progress. That, indeed, “better” is possible.