Hundred-Year Thinking
What if your great-great-grandchildren could sue you?
What if every quarterly decision, every policy pivot, every executive bonus had to be justified not to markets, but to descendants bearing your name? Would you still make the same choices?
We all know short-term thinking is crippling us. Every boardroom, parliament, and editorial page acknowledges it. Yet we keep choosing it anyway – bound to incentive structures that reward the immediate over the enduring.
What if we redesigned those incentives to reward the long view instead?
The Incentive Trap
Step inside any boardroom, and you’ll witness a peculiar form of institutional schizophrenia. CEOs are expected to be long-term visionaries while being judged on short-term performance.
A leader who invests in decarbonisation, R&D, or workforce development might generate extraordinary value over a decade. But if those investments dent quarterly earnings, punishment can be swift. Stock prices fall. Activist investors agitate. The board starts asking different questions.
Meanwhile, executives who slash investment to meet interim targets are often rewarded. The consequences – lost innovation, institutional fragility, broken trust – surface only after they’ve moved on and incentives have reset.
Even our most sophisticated corporate risk management approaches are failing, as shown by the shrinking lifespans of the firms they’re built to protect. In 1965, S&P 500 companies lasted 33 years on average. Today, just 14.
This is not a leadership failure. It’s a design problem.
As economist Daron Acemoglu has shown, when institutions reward value extraction over value creation, even well-intentioned actors behave predictably. Change the incentives, and behaviour changes with them.
What’s needed isn’t better people, but better rules: governance that privileges resilience over short-term returns, metrics that internalise long-term costs, and legal structures that reward – not penalise – stewardship.
Temporal Colonialism
The structural problem extends beyond corporate boardrooms. We’ve disenfranchised those most affected by our decisions: the unborn. They cannot vote, lobby, or threaten electoral outcomes. They are ideal victims of temporal colonialism – taxation without representation stretched across decades.
Consider Australia’s housing crisis – just 400 dwellings per 1,000 people, among the lowest in the developed world. We’ve built a system that enriches older generations while locking out the young. The 2023 Intergenerational Report made the remedy clear: major housing and tax reform. Yet no treasurer in two decades has been brave enough to act.
The reason is structural, not personal. Politicians respond to what we reward: the comforting fiction that choices come without cost, someone else will pay, and the future can be endlessly deferred.
This creates a feedback loop. Leaders learn that vision costs votes, so they trade reform for easy wins. We criticise them for lacking courage while rewarding the behaviour we claim to oppose. In democracies, incentives shape outcomes as surely as in markets.
Wisdom Inherited
The solution isn’t locked in future innovation. It lies in institutional memory we’ve already inherited.
For 65,000 years, Indigenous Australians sustained complex societies across an entire continent. Their advantage wasn’t technological, but institutional: decision-making systems built for continuity. When communities depend on the same water sources, soil systems, and seasonal patterns across centuries, depleting them for short-term gain becomes irrational. You optimise for renewal rather than extraction.
The core insight – that today’s choices shape tomorrow’s resources – is more urgent than ever. As business strategist Rebecca Henderson would recognise, this is sustainable competitive advantage writ large: the art of creating value while protecting the conditions that make it possible.
I write this as someone deeply grateful to call Australia home. My family came here as part of the great migrant story – among the 51% of Australians born overseas or to an overseas-born parent, the highest share of any major nation. We were given the chance to grow, to contribute, and to belong. That experience shaped how I see this country: a place where diversity is not just a statistic, but a quiet triumph of institutional design.
That success rests on a double inheritance: institutions that have made Australia one of the most stable, prosperous, and socially cohesive societies on Earth.
First, parliamentary democracy elevated by the common law – an evolving framework that protects rights, distributes power, and resolves conflict without violence. Second, the custodianship of the world’s oldest continuous culture: Indigenous knowledge rooted in ecological care, collective decision-making, and accountability across generations.
Yet we often treat these institutional gifts as awkward heirlooms – apologising for our Westminster legacy while failing to absorb the Indigenous wisdom that could complete our civilisational project.
Civil rights leader Charles Perkins understood Australia’s opportunity better than most. “My expectation of a good Australia is when White people would be proud,” he said, “when they realise that Aboriginal culture… is all there waiting for us all. White people can inherit… 60,000 years of culture, and all they have to do is reach out and ask for it.”
The generosity of that invitation – offered despite dispossession – remains striking. It wasn’t just a gesture of goodwill, but an offer to address challenges that many modern democracies find difficult to resolve: long-range feedback loops, embedded accountability, and an explicit connection between land, people, and time.
No civilisation has a monopoly on wisdom. But different systems excel at different things. The Nordics built high-trust governance. The Swiss perfected federalism. Singapore mastered technocracy. Australia’s inheritance is rarer still: the marriage of democracy’s most successful tradition with humanity’s oldest system of sustainable governance.
Fewer than one in ten people now live in a full democracy. Australia is one of them. That status owes less to invention than to inheritance. The advantage lies not in designing something new, but in putting to work what history has already placed in our hands.
Seven Generations
The hallmarks of institutional failure are now hard to miss – rising climate risk, degraded ecosystems, generational inequality, looming job erosion from AI, and a political class incapable of visionary thinking. These are not separate crises. They stem from the same flaw: systems that treat the future as someone else’s problem.
Examples already exist: constitutional requirements for intergenerational impact assessments, commissioners for future generations (as Wales created in 2015), and tax incentives for patient capital. What’s missing is the political will to implement them systematically.
Institutional reform too often waits for crisis. It shouldn’t. The case is no longer theoretical but measurable and overdue.
Australia is unusually well-placed to lead. Its democratic institutions remain among the world’s most stable. It also inherits governance traditions grounded in long-horizon thinking – from Indigenous custodianship to one of the world’s first constitutional democracies. The tools exist. The wisdom endures. What remains is to build institutions worthy of the ancestors we hope to become.
As philosopher Roman Krznaric has argued, treating future generations as stakeholders in today’s decisions is not utopian—it is a moral reckoning with time. His call for cathedral thinking invites us to build with the humility and foresight of those who may never see the result, but shape it nonetheless.
Luke Heilbuth is CEO of sustainability strategy consultancy BWD Strategic, and a former Australian diplomat. Connect with Luke on LinkedIn or at luke@bwdstrategic.com