The first thing that struck me when I went looking for a PESTE analysis of the current era was the Political had been replaced with the Geopolitical, which surely must be the G from globalization. Whatever I may think of DavosMan, you can be sure he knows his global risks in 2023 and his GESTE. Data was collected from “over 1,200 experts across academia, business, government, the international community and civil society.” in late 2022. This chart is useful, because you can work with what’s considered high risk in the 2 year horizon and in the 10 year horizon.
It is true that the WEF people didn’t ask the 1200 experts what they thought the risks were, instead they were given a curated list to sort according to impact. That explains some of the choices on this list and some of the phraseology. However, it is still worth noting that regardless of the jurisdiction and its own domestic politics, risks such as the failure to deal with climate change still managed to make it to the top half of the list in the short term, and moved up rapidly to head the list in the longer term.
We would be out of step with the times if our design strategies and innovation plans were not recognizably cognizant of these dominant risks.
….things in the rear view mirror maybe closer than you think….
Up here in Finland, the top 4 issues on the 10 year horizon are already incorporated in design strategies and product development planning at this moment, with many organizations having made this shift in perspective more than 5 years ago, some as long ago as 2010. This influenced my recent choice of classes at Aalto University, where as a doctoral student in the engineering school (part-time) I could sample classes from the Creative Sustainability program in the Arts as well as environment-related issues from the perspective of the Architecture program and the department of the Built Environment (engineering). My immersion took place alongside young people less than half my age so I was able to simultaneously pick up a good sense of the way they were approaching their own futures in the years when mine would be over.
These so-called “consumers of the future” do NOT want to consume. That much is clear. And, it was not just a Finland only trend, or a Nordic bubble – the European Union’s Erasmus program means we can have only 5 native Finns in some of my classes – the rest could be from all over the EU, especially Italy, Portugal, Germany and Spain.
I’ve been playing around in Tumblr among young creative people like writers, designers, artists, et al to see how far this mindset extends geographically. It varies in the ‘developing countries’ but has been coming across clearly from the highly industrialized, ‘wealthier’ nations of the world.
At this point, I will stop here because as I write this out I realize its just an intuitive perception at this moment, not yet backed up by any datapoints, patterns, citations, or trends. But its something I will have to flesh out since one cannot design anything for the future if one is only catering to the past.
