Practicing the Future: How Small, Human Stories Redefine Business as Usual

So… why do you want to go back to school, Brittany? Why a PhD?

I looked down at my notes.
I paused.
I sighed.

Because… I don’t know. I am a white woman. I am fully aware of my privilege. And every year the fissures in this world have become more obvious to me. School shootings. War. Genocide. Systemic oppression. Yelling into the void about what’s broken doesn’t feel like enough anymore. I want to build frameworks and policies and practices that actually sustain life and liberation.

The words tumbled out and landed heavy in the air.
And then came the second voice — the one inside my own head — rolling its eyes. (Yes, the voice inside my head is capable of rolling its eyes.)
Really, Brittany? You sound like you’re pitching a movie nobody asked for. Too big, too earnest, too much. 

But, as cliché and “utopian idealism” as it sounds: I meant it. I can’t unknow what I know. 

And that’s how I found myself on a call this week exploring a PhD in Transformative Social Change.

And then I remembered: we don’t have to wait for a PhD or a policy or permission. The future is already being practiced (in small, human-scale ways) if we know where to look.

These past few days, my network served up two juicy reminders—not spun by an algorithm, but by the human resources that surround me on the daily.

The first came from Chika Uwazie, a business strategist and co-founder of Afropolitan who highlights founders and operators across Africa. Her updates consistently land me in stories of real, grounded innovation—companies not following Silicon Valley scripts.

Like M-PESA.

Silicon Valley scoffed when it launched: money transfers by text message, on flip phones, for people without bank accounts? But the problem was real. In Kenya, families were literally sending cash home on buses with strangers. M-PESA made it possible to send money safely in seconds—and today, it processes more money annually than PayPal.

It reminded me that when we solve real problems—not “how do I get my groceries delivered faster?” problems, but the kind where the alternative is risk, harm, or exclusion—and when we center humans rather than profit, change happens. Not theoretical change. Actual change. 

Our dominant system rewards convenience, speed, and scale. It rarely celebrates solutions that center safety, dignity, or joy. Which is why these smaller, messier stories matter: they prove transformation doesn’t always announce itself with headlines—it often shows up in practice, at human scale.

The second reminder came closer to home.

A couple of weeks ago, on a networking call, I met a coach. We connected on Facebook, I resonated with a few of her posts, and then, out of nowhere this past weekend, she announced: 

Hey, I’m doing a 30-day social media reset. Comment if you want to join.

I assumed it was some kind of funnel. I figured if I commented, I’d get the DM and the link to buy. But instead, when I messaged her, she just sent me a link to a Telegram group. Not a checkout page or a pitch. Just: come in, let’s do this together.

And then she showed up. Every single day. Teaching. Responding to comments. Reviewing 54 bios one by one. Just… pouring out generosity.

At one point I wrote back: I’m mind-blown you’re doing this for so many people. It feels like generosity as strategy, but also like it’s coming from desire, not depletion. Thank you.

She replied: This is fun for me. My business runs on recurring revenue, so I can’t tell you how little I worked this year. Now I get to play. I can help people with their businesses with my eyes closed.

I reread her message. Again. And again. And if I’m honest… I was disoriented. Because the business world I’ve lived in for most of my career is optimized for profit, performance, the next launch. This was optimized for joy. For people. For the sheer delight of giving away what you’re good at.

It has me reevaluating everything. And that’s a good thing. I promised myself I would build out loud, so I’m sharing this before I have anything clean to say about it. Just the questions I’m sitting with. 

What does it mean to truly center people instead of performance? To create from desire instead of desperation? To let generosity be the strategy?

When we do that, we’re already practicing the future.

Both reminders, one from halfway across the world, one from inside a Telegram chat on my phone, point to the same thing:

The future isn’t just something we speculate about in think pieces or whisper about on calls. 

It’s already here, in fragments. A fintech company solving for safety instead of convenience. A coach leading from desire instead of burnout. Neither of them perfect. Neither of them polished for Harvard Business Review. But both of them proof.

And it makes me wonder: 

What if the problem isn’t that we don’t know how to do business differently—what if the problem is that we don’t believe the small, human-sized stories count as evidence?

The dominant system has trained us to only recognize transformation if it’s attached to exponential profit, Silicon Valley headlines, or a founder myth. But the most radical shifts I’ve seen this year haven’t been wrapped in that packaging. They’ve been messy, generous, sometimes unscalable moments that re-centered people over performance.

So that’s what I’m sitting with this week.
Not answers, because answers are final. Instead, I’m sitting with questions.

What if we treated these everyday proofs as enough?
What if we stopped waiting for the perfect model and just practiced differently where we are?
What if generosity really is generative?

Because otherwise, critique keeps us stuck in the old story. But building, even imperfectly, lets us try on the new one.

xo,
Brittany

P.S. If you’re ready to move from critique to practice, that’s what I built the Studio Sessions for: two hours of deep pattern recognition to find the small, human shifts already happening in your business—and design for the generous future they point toward—not just the profit. Visit here if you’re curious.