The Editor's Post: Switch on the lights: impact shines at Impact Week in Malmö

Julie Pybus 21st November 2025

Facts and stats aren't enough: the systemic change that we’re all seeking has not yet happened. How can we change our approach? Delegates embark on a different type of journey at the Impact Week conference to find out.

The phone rings at Sofia’s empty desk. Someone answers and puts it on loudspeaker. We hear a woman’s voice, the tone spine-chillingly desperate: “Hello…Sofia, is that you?”

The line crackles, the voice breaks with emotion: “I’m about to tell you the most important story of your life,” she says. “Your story…my story.”

Sofia’s computer screen flashes with images of raging wildfires, lurid-coloured broken plastic waste, lines of dangling pale pink factory farmed chicken carcasses, and other discomfiting scenes.

It takes something special to cut through the usual businesslike facades we adopt when we attend international impact finance conferences, but yesterday a handful of delegates at Impact Europe’s Impact Week (full report of the event in a very chilly Malmo, Sweden here) discreetly wiped away tears as they took part in what was billed as an “immersive journey through economic transformation”, created by Sally, a ‘futures lab’ at Nordic design agency EY Doberman (part of global business consultancy EY).

I’m not going to give any spoilers here, but the aim of the experience and the discussion that followed was to transport us to what life in 2045 could be like in a highly developed country like Sweden – and it was terrifying. It became very clear that it’s a very near future, one that many of us will be living through and during which some of our children could be coming of age.

We all know the theory: that we are rapidly breaking through the planet’s ecological limits, while the global economy endlessly expands and continues to extract resources that can never be replaced. And that’s why, isn’t it, we are at international conferences like this, to seek out solutions with our peers?

Yet in spite of all the inspiring plenaries, in-depth panel discussions and focused break-out sessions, the systemic change that we’re all seeking has not yet happened. Facts and stats presented in endless reports don’t make much impact either. So, Kristoffer Lundholm of Sally tells us, this hard-hitting storytelling approach is a different way to engage people. “We can send out the best reports, but they don’t make a difference,” he says. “As humans, stories are what we base our decisions upon.”

He adds: “If we’re going to reflect on how we can develop the economy, we have to be able to reflect on its problems. It's only when you recognise a problem that you can solve it. At the same time, it’s only when you can imagine something else that you can build it.”

Impact Week 2025 Sally immersive experience Often people feel powerless in the face of these fears, but, Lundholm points out, “solutions are available to us now. We don’t need to wait for collapse”. Ideas were in the story that was told and, as part of the experience, more were displayed on posters around the participants. It’s time to start at least experimenting with new approaches in our own organisations and lives, Lundholm and his colleague Mikael Widoff Arman, emphasise.

They end on a positive note. For decades we’ve treated the economy like gravity, “invisible, inevitable and untouchable. But it’s not. It’s made of human decisions – and it can be redesigned”.

Experiences like this will not replace traditional conferences, reports and analyses, but they can act as a complement – another way to inspire change. As the 45 minutes of immersion into our potential near future drew to a close, snow began to fall, the sky darkened and cheerful Christmas lights were illuminated outside the conference centre in the Nordic post-industrial city. It’s a city that is confidently looking forward to a bright future: it champions its youthful population, diversity and sustainability, aligning itself with other impact-focused cities across the continent, as my colleague Anna points out in her dispatch from the Hague this week. Yet, another, much darker future really could become reality if we don’t listen to what the earth is telling us.