Transcript: The futures framework

Transcript

What could the future look like? And is your organisation ready to navigate the risks and opportunities that lie ahead?

The COVID-19 pandemic took the world by surprise. While recent events have shown the difficulty of predicting the future, it’s critical to try to understand the signals that show us where disruption might come from.

Through analysis of different datasets, we’ve set out four potential visions of the future. Each has radically different implications for your long-term strategic planning and your organisation’s survival.

So what does our first scenario look like?

Rise of the Machines is where the game changing stuff that’s getting cooked up in labs and visionary minds of our planet slowly become mainstream. This includes everything from driverless vehicles to quantum computing. These technological breakthroughs have kept our world connected and moving through the most dramatic pandemic in living history, but can also have serious impacts for businesses.

Our second scenario is Global Rationing and it’s characterized by consolidation. In this world of consolidation we’ll see both winners and losers. As smaller organisations struggle, this provides opportunities for the bigger players to swoop in and buy up the competition. We are already seeing the big getting bigger, with tech giants reporting record breaking revenues and profits. But the risk of concentrating knowledge and power is that our ability and speed to innovate will subsequently slow down.

What does the third scenario, Survival of the Fittest look like? This is where we start to see some of the other global trends taking effect. We have the collision of climate change, ecosystem collapse, urbanisation, demographic changes and worsening inequality.

Another risk we see is the feedback loop, a doom spiral between automation and job loss and protectionist policies that create more barriers to trade, that promote more net job loss. The pandemic has only made that worse.

Layer these all together and you can see that there are some big potential structural challenges and threats to some of the free trade, open borders, open movements of goods and services which we’re already starting to see.

But there’s a fourth scenario. We call it Local Hero which we believe is the most credible and the one we are placing our bets on. We see so much evidence of a highly innovative yet decentralised world, where low cost, intuitive technologies are being picked up and utilised at speed, and are being repurposed in ways never seen before.

The essence of these new technologies is to be free, distributable and shareable. While we are not there yet, the barriers to owning them, to understanding them and creating value from them are dropping and so these technologies are becoming more accessible to the masses.

Kentaro Toyama said “technology isn't the answer, it's the amplifier of intent.” We’ve got a generational choice ahead of us with what we do with this new suite of technologies.

This is where finance, and business leaders have got a critical role to play, because what our inventors and innovators need is the platform, the capital, the market, and the skills to turn risk into opportunity, and scale up their ideas.

We believe there is an upbeat scenario. It requires bold action to rethink our approach to risk and opportunity. And a new commitment to work together to find innovative solutions to our biggest challenges.

This will enable us to create sustainable growth that delivers value and a positive future for all of society.