Episode 17: Growth Is Not the Only Goal

We are constantly told that growth equals success.

That scaling is progress.

That innovation means moving faster, bigger, and further no matter the cost.

But what if growth itself has become the problem?

In this episode of Builders of the Broken Bazaar, Dr Tabish Zaman is joined by Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjørkskov, Founder of No Objectives, to challenge one of the most deeply embedded assumptions in entrepreneurship, innovation, and design.

This is not a conversation about sustainability as a checkbox.

It is not about green growth or better metrics.

It is a conversation about repair.

Drawing on Kasper’s work in post-growth design, systems change, and collective action, the episode explores what happens when innovation stops chasing expansion and starts taking responsibility for the harm it leaves behind.

Together, they discuss:

• Why climate collapse and social collapse are the same design failure

• How optimisation without empathy leads to extraction, not progress

• Why growth has replaced meaning and what that has cost us

• How systems are designed to concentrate power rather than distribute care

• Why sustainability is an outcome, not a process

• What regenerative design requires in a world already in overshoot

• Why collective action matters more than individual heroics

• How innovation should be measured by restoration, not valuation

🎙 “Not all innovation builds. Some of it repairs.”

This episode challenges founders, designers, policymakers, and anyone working inside systems that claim to create value while quietly producing harm.

Because if growth is not the goal, we are forced to ask a harder question:

What are we actually building for and who does it serve?

Host: Dr Tabish Zaman

Guest: Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjørkskov (Founder, No Objectives)