Evolving New Market Stories
If markets are stories, what are tomorrow's stories?
Last month, our CEO at Volans—Louise Kjellerup Roper—commented that some of these posts were too long-form for her taste. Well, with apologies, this one, once again, falls into the same bracket.
And it does so because the theme is central to what I have been trying to achieve with this Rewilding Markets series.
I first read Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero With A Thousand Faces back in the Sixties, at university. Published the year I was born, 1949, it transformed my thinking in the same way that Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions had done a few years previously, when I was at school.
And in that combined spirit, someone I have been in contact for years in the story space is Michael Margolis, founder and chief storyteller at Storied, Inc. Then, first thing on January 26th, I woke up to one of his regular emailed notes on his latest thinking, titled “The S-Curve of Storytelling.” And, as good stories tend to, it set me thinking.
It began—and I quote with his permission (with the inset text spotlighting excerpts of his message):
I was talking with a CEO a few months ago.
He runs a legacy company with decades of history and a strong market position, and after years of effort their digital transformation is finally working. By most external measures, they are winning.
About halfway through our coffee, the energy shifted. He put his mug down and said:
“I finally feel like we’re good at this. I can see the path to victory. But I have this nagging sense that we’re about to get T-boned in five years by AI. Not a collision. An extinction event.”
That line has been stuck in my head.
I hear versions of it all the time. Different industries, different leaders, but the same underlying sensation. The story that got us here worked, sometimes remarkably well, and yet something about the room now feels different.
The question that usually follows is practical.
“How do we fix our messaging?”
But when a leader feels that mix of clarity and unease, it is rarely about the words themselves. What they are sensing has much more to do with trajectory than expression.
It is not a messaging problem. It is a curve problem.
The shape of change
So, what, then, is a “curve problem”? The answer, Michael suggests, is the shape of change.
To understand why a story stops working, you must look at the shape of growth itself.
Most growth does not fail because it stops working. It fails because it works too well, for too long.
Progress tends to start slowly, then something clicks. Adoption accelerates, results compound, and eventually returns flatten. Not because execution broke, but because the system itself begins to saturate.
That pattern has a shape. It is often described as an S-curve.
Clayton Christensen used the S-curve to explain how technologies take hold. Slow adoption. Rapid acceleration. Eventual maturity.
Specifically disruptive technologies that create a new paradigm and replace the old order.
What matters most isn’t the plateau.
It’s that curves overlap.
Companies get into trouble when they keep refining a mature curve while a new one is quietly forming beneath them.
Narratives, in short, have lifecycles. They move, Michael suggests, through three distinct phases:
Phase 1: The Exponential Climb
When a narrative is new, it creates disproportionate value. It differentiates you. It surprises people. The story travels without you having to push it. It reframes the world and opens a door to new possibilities. It creates massive lift and acceleration.Phase 2: The Plateau
Over time, the market absorbs the narrative. It still works, but it no longer amplifies. Competitors sound like you. Buyers understand the category. Growth becomes incremental. You’re spending more energy to get the same result.Phase 3: The Decline
This is the real danger zone. At scale, the math turns against you. What once felt like momentum now feels like resistance. You’re selling into a saturated market with a story calibrated for a smaller world.
The hardest part of leadership, he notes, is not climbing the curve. It is recognizing when you must leave it. Gradually, or suddenly, you find your business “in a phase shift. The old story no longer creates the lift it once did, and the new one is not fully formed yet. That in-between period is uncomfortable, and it is also necessary.”
The question in my mind: Does the sustainability curve now have a curve problem, too? And the answer, I conclude, is that it does.
Jumping between S-curves
Indeed, the plateau and decline stages are where I believe many sustainability organizations now find themselves. And it’s why I have been devoting so much time to developing a new storyline for myself, for Volans and, just maybe, for the sustainability sector more broadly.
So why are the current sustainability narratives no longer cutting through in the way they once did? And how we might we view the answers through the lens of market evolution?
Let’s talk about where sustainability has been (S-curve 1), where it currently finds itself (S-curve 2), and where it may be going next (S-curve 3) as it becomes the dominant operating logic of economies. Note: all three curves have been in play during the first quarter of the 21st century.
The core logic of S-curve 1 has involved minimizing harm, offsetting damage and boosting efficiency. Key tools have included disclosure and compliance, ESG reporting, net-zero targets, and carbon offsets. No question, such measures have helped increase the visibility of some key externalities, established baselines and metrics, and provided entry points for policymakers and capital.
But this S-curve is plateauing because it has focused on responsibility, reduction and efficiency, the first element in the “3R” agenda I laid out in Green Swans and Tickling Sharks. Often, we discover efficiency comes at the expense of resiliency, with our metrics measuring symptoms but not system health, and offsets delaying redesign.
So many of us now find ourselves frantically busy, hunkering down around the first S-curve agenda. As a result, sustainability promises to outpace operational reality, ESG scores diverge from reported outcomes, there is growing skepticism (among other things, about “greenwashing” and “ESG-washing”) and, while climate risks may be acknowledged, we lag badly in terms of system redesign.
As a result, resilience (the second of my “3Rs”) is increasingly center stage. Business leaders are expanding their priorities from lowest cost to lowest regret, from peak efficiency to improved adaptive capacity, and from short-term return to option preservation.
The best of them are now thinking in terms of boosting the redundancy and resilience of their supply chains, of workforce skills and health, and climate-adaptive infrastructures. They are mapping dependencies and creating scenarios to test their robustness under stress. This is S-curve 2.
Which brings us to S-curve 3—and the third of my “3Rs,” regeneration. The key question here is: “How do we restore the system conditions we depend on?” And the new unit of success must be: “Is this system healthier because we are here?”
In this reality, sustainability is no longer a function—it’s becoming the business model and, even more fundamentally, the economic model. The core logic here is different. It assumes that systems must renew the sources of key inputs, not just consume them.
The new mindset acknowledges that value is created by increasing future capacity. And nature becomes a productive partner, not a constraint. over time, business models must shift from linear to circular and, ultimately, to regenerative dynamics. The fact that we may be going backward on some of these, like circularity, does not much impact the longer term trajectories.
But if they are to become market realities, our market narratives must become radically more appealing and influential. So which market stories are now waning—and which are about to come screaming up the relevant S-curves?
Waning market stories
Let’s run through a handful of stories that have reached peaked utility.
1. “Growth equals progress”
The old story was scale brought more users, more throughput and that defined success. But today growth often correlates with fragility, not strength. Marginal gains require disproportionate extraction. And externalities are no longer external—they’re beginning to be priced in (e.g., insurance, labor, geopolitics, climate volatility)
2. “Efficiency is the highest virtue”
The old story was that slack is waste. Inventory was seen as failure. Just-in-time was the goal. And lean systems win. The reality has proven rather different. Supply chains optimized for cost proved brittle under shock. Just-in-time can become just-too-late. And human systems optimized for output are burning out. Efficiency, in short, has often stripped systems of memory, buffers, and recovery pathways.
3. “Convenience will always win”
The old story was that a frictionless service always outpaced more thoughtful competitors. Faster always beat better. But convenience has accumulated invisible costs: health, attention, trust, waste. Consumers increasingly sense that they are trading agency for ease. And regulation is beginning to slow what culture already questions. People want simplicity—but on their terms, not those imposed by platforms.
4. “Digital is dematerialized”
Nice idea, but again the reality is proving rather different. The old story was that
bits replaced atoms. The cloud would be weightless. But the negative impacts—in terms of energy use, water use, rare earths, and labor conditions—are increasingly visible Who wants a gigantic data center built in their neighborhood? The “virtual” economy is turning out leave some very big footprints. Both ecological and political limits are being reached.
5. “Individual choice will fix systemic problems”
The old story, and one which I have also promoted in areas like green consumerism, has been that if consumers care enough, markets will change. The problem is that the various “choice architectures” are stacked, not neutral. And many of us are now exhausted by responsibility without power. This story outsourced governance to shoppers—and it’s failing all around us.
So, which market stories are evolving?
The new market stories that I am tracking are still low down their relevant S-curves. They’re uneven, contested, and often mislabeled. But they are gaining what Michael calls “narrative gravity.”
Again, let’s look at five of these emerging stories.
1. “Resilience is the new ROI”
The emerging story is that the best-performing systems are not those that produce the best ROI (return on investment) until they fail, but those that continue successfully under stress. At the edges, markets are beginning to reward redundancy over razor-thin margins, durability over disposability, and adaptability over optimization. Expect these trends to continue building.
2. “Regeneration spearheads sustainability”
The emerging story is that doing less harm is insufficient. Systems must restore capacity and potential. This story changes the unit of value: from extraction to renewal, from net-zero to net-positive, and from linear supply chains to circular metabolism. Soil, water, and biodiversity are treated as productive assets, business models built around replenishment, not mitigation, and measurement is shifting from outputs to system health
3. “Local matters again”
The emerging story is that distributed beats centralized when volatility is high. This isn’t anti-globalization; it’s multi-scale design, featuring local production and global coordination. It involves re-shoring with a resilience lens, cities and regions acting as innovation units, and infrastructure investment following geography, not just cost.
4. “Businesses are only part of the story—markets determine their priorities”
The story here is that we have spent decades trying to get corporations to behave more responsibility. As even some of the world’s best-known brands have watered down publicly declared commitments, it is clear that politics shape markets, alongside investor and consumer pressures, so we must work out how to transform markets to ensure businesses transform.
5. “Systems choose, individuals respond”
This story is critical. It sees real market power lying in default settings, incentives, and enabling infrastructure. It reframes innovation as choice architecture, not persuasion. Markets compete to make the right behavior effortless.
True, even I find these outcomes highly unlikely given the wider geopolitical and macroeconomic context, but—to paraphrase Martin Luther King—I also see the arc of sustainability bending over time toward much greater resilience and much greater attention being paid to regenerating critical systems whether they are ecological, economic, social or, a growing need, political.
Four new S-curves of disruptive innovation
When I shared a late draft of this post with Michael, he commented:
My instinct is that the next S-curves are less about aspirational sustainability narratives and more about the operating logic of a world relearning constraint, power, and fragility as the post-WWII rules-based order erodes.
What I’m sensing, validated from recent Davos conversations and interviews, is that four S-curves are already forming beneath the surface.
1 - The first is sovereignty as an operating system. Control over food, water, energy, manufacturing, supply chains, and defense is becoming a lowest-regret posture for nations. AI hardware, GPUs, and frontier models are no longer treated as global commons but as contested terrain.
2 - The second is climate tech reframed as sovereign defense. Climate innovation is moving from a values story to a continuity and risk-management story. Adaptation, resilience infrastructure, food systems, water security, and even climate intervention are increasingly discussed as stability tools rather than moral signals.
3 - The third is energy production as compute sovereignty. Energy is becoming the binding constraint that determines AI winners and losers. Data centers are the new factories, and reliable power, grid buildout, nuclear, storage, and permitting are quietly becoming AI competitiveness policy.
4 - The fourth is the dematerialization of fiat currencies and the rise of new money rails. Stablecoins, tokenization, and real-time settlement systems are less about crypto ideology and more about how money moves when speed, resilience, and cross-border functionality matter in a fragmented world.
“What strikes me,” he concluded, “is how these curves resonate across the political spectrum:
“Conservatives tend to read them as sovereignty, security, and strategic independence.
“Liberals tend to read them as climate resilience, infrastructure modernization, systemic risk reduction.
“Centrists tend to read them as productivity, competitiveness, and durable growth.
“Same curves,” he noted, “different entry points.”
And, just maybe, that’s the real takeaway here?
Key elements of the sustainability agenda have shunted into the mainstream—but in doing so, they’ve absorbed new political and cultural meanings. They are now woven into increasingly intense debates about deglobalization and reglobalization, deindustrialization and reindustrialization, degeneration and regeneration.
The future this points to isn’t a single, shared trajectory, but a landscape of many S-curves: many moving in broadly sensible directions, even if at different speeds, and some diverging or veering off entirely.
Which brings to mind that old saying—you may get what you wanted, but it’s not, at least not yet, what you need. So, a key challenge now for systemic changemakers is to help convene and converge those moving in the right direction, to engage the engageable among those who aren’t, and to begin to conjure the sense of momentum and emerging critical mass from which all great social transformations flow.
Thank you, John. It means a great deal to see my work in dialogue with yours. Grateful for how you continue to move us all forward.
Your observation that the next S-curves may be less about aspiration and more about sovereignty, constraint and resilience feels exactly right. The real test now is whether leaders can recognise they are on the wrong curve before the curve recognises them.
Always thought-provoking.