Twenty years ago, we described the new millennium as one of FUD: fear, uncertainty and doubt. The Turbulent Teens followed – a decade which we forecast would be defined by the rise of dissent, populism, disruption and climate denial. It opened with the Arab Spring and ended with the birth of a deadly new coronavirus in a Wuhan seafood market.
In the interim, we had the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, DIY European terrorism, LGBT+ rights visibility, the rise of the alt-right, the Rohingya massacre, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, President Donald Trump, Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion.
It was also a decade of continuous technological disruption, with rising online commerce at the start, and the dominance of big data and ubiquitous global mega-systems such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Alibaba at its close. We used our phones to get connected and then lost online, wearables to monitor our health, the Cloud and 5G to make us more agile, and the gig economy to become more fluid. We also wrestled with advanced robotics, AI, machine learning, data privacy, mixed-reality interfaces and the right to be forgotten.
Nature, which we had abandoned in so many ways, struck back in so many other ways. From the wildfires in Australia and California to the melting of the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard ‘Doomsday’ seed vault, and finally to the global panic caused by Covid-19, our way of life has been disrupted beyond recognition.
So, is all lost? Can we turn the turbulence around? What comes next?
Rightly, everybody talks about the negatives of the current pandemic. But the positives will be far more reaching and profound. This is a hard, unsettling reset – but it will result in unprecedented and beneficial changes in how ordinary people behave and interact. If businesses aren’t prepared for this, in many ways they deserve to become the casualties of a new paradigm shift in how we broker the way we live, work and play.
After a decade of expansion, we are contracting, regrouping, reconsidering and refocusing. We are judging our brands, our experiences and ourselves in a whole new light. The three macrotrends you are about to discover delve deeply into the death of purpose, the rise of selfishness and our push towards a solitary sensuality that borders on the narcissistic.
Are you ready to transform at pace and reset everything you know in order to make it to 2030?
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