Turn on any cable news channel, and it is easy to see that business and policy decision-makers increasingly find themselves leading through chaos. Just a generation ago, the world appeared more stable, more predictable, linear, and manageable. But since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the bipolar Cold War era, we’ve entered an era of accelerated, interconnected change, which has only intensified in recent years. In some respects, the Cold War brought a certain amount of stability to the world.
However, the acceleration of globalisation and rapid technological change since then has compressed the global space and brought us all closer together. Humanity has become much more entangled. Today, an event on one side of the world can ripple throughout the rest of the world in real time. A few years ago, the COVID-19 global pandemic made this visible to all, impacting everything from public health to economic growth and supply chains. For those who still had any doubt, it showed how the whole world today has become deeply interconnected, where the emergence of the virus in Wuhan, China, led, in just a matter of weeks, to the lockdown of entire economies in Europe, North America, and further afield. Even the most local of businesses found themselves exposed to global events.
If you talk with decision-makers in politics and business about what is urgent on their desks, they will likely give you the sense of constant uncertainty, that they are leading their teams through chaos, where there is that constant back-of-the-mind thought that a new crisis could break out at any moment, requiring them to revise their plans and push in a new direction. The need to be more proactive in dealing with these challenges is something that pops up more often at offside strategy days. The biggest driver in this new norm is a shifting context.