In 2046, will you still be relevant?

Humanizing business is more relevant than ever

This year, we mark 20 years of Humanizing Business. When we started focusing on people, meaning, and relationships, it was often seen as “soft” and not essential to business results. I still remember walking into meeting rooms, introducing ourselves as Business Humanizers, and being met with the look that said: Wait… is that even a job? Efficiency, performance, and structure dominated. Standing for a human-first logic required persistence.

That tension shaped us. It taught us to stay true to our belief while remaining agile to the world around us. Over the past two decades, we’ve developed new methodologies, worked remotely long before it was common, and engaged with new technologies as they emerged. In that time, we’ve supported over 900 brands and companies across 75 countries and did one-on-one immersions with more than 3,500 people. Always in the service of growing people to grow business.

So this anniversary isn’t about looking back. It’s about relevance. We’re committing to the next 20 years of humanizing business. Are you clear on what will keep your organization relevant in 2046?

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The 2016 throwback isn’t nostalgia, it’s a signal

Have you also been scrolling through your 2016 photos lately? Suddenly, everyone is. The internet is calling it “2026 is the new 2016”, and it’s not just a private nostalgia spiral, it’s a collective one. TikTok searches for “2016” reportedly spiked +452% in early January, alongside a flood of throwback edits and “2016 aesthetic” videos.

2016 wasn’t a perfect year (far from it), but online it still felt lower-stakes: grainy iPhone photos, oversaturated filters, peace signs, and the sense that you were posting to people, not performing for an invisible jury. Even mainstream coverage of the trend keeps returning to the same texture: the “fun” internet, the shared references, the pre-doomscroll mood.

A big part of it is probably platform fatigue. In 2016, your feed was still closer to a social layer, more relationship-driven than reaction-driven. Now, so much of what we see is optimized for attention: outrage, comparison, “content,” and constant self-branding.

And there’s another layer: 2016 sits right before the decade that reshaped everything: pandemic years, a more fragmented culture, and now the blur between real and “made with AI”. So the throwback functions like a tiny reset. Not because we want the exact outfits or filters back, but because we miss what they represented: a more human internet.

So the point isn’t to recreate 2016. It’s to borrow what it gave us:

• A little more play

• A little more presence

• And permission to show up as we are, messy, unpolished, and real.

That craving doesn’t appear in a vacuum. It’s a response to where we are now.

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The next decade won’t reward the same kind of brands

We are living through a peak anxiety moment. In times like these, reassurance sells and nostalgia comforts. Many brands have learned to design for that emotional state. Yet, anxiety does not define an era forever.

If you listen to Mark Carney’s speech at Davos, you can hear an early signal of a shift toward confidence and trust. Not optimism, and not a promise of stability. Almost the opposite: a direct acknowledgement of rupture, limits, and tension, paired with calm belief in agency and responsibility. A clear-eyed sense of where we are, and what that demands. This is the era we are moving into.

As confidence returns, identity becomes more pronounced: people get clearer on who they are, where they come from, and what they stand for, expressing it more loudly and deliberately. For brands today, the biggest risk is continuing to design for reassurance and comfort in a world that is shifting toward conviction and agency. The next era will reward brands that can stand steadily in tension, credible and transparent, human enough to say: this is where we are.

Tomorrow, in the webinar “The Human Take on Our Future,” Benoit Beaufils and Thaïs Gyurcsó will explore these shifts in more depth, and what they mean for leaders and brands shaping the next decade, not just the current mood. If you are curious where this leaves your organisation, join us tomorrow.