A Horoscope for Humanity

In their April 2015 article on McKinsey & Co.’s website—borrowed from their recent book, No Ordinary Disruption—Richard Dobbs, James Manyika, and Jonathan Woetzel outline four forces that are disrupting the world’s economy, which I have paraphrased below:

1. The shift of business to “emerging markets”—which, just as an aside, is a name that seems to be rather unappreciative of history (a theme I’ll return to in this critique). People have—quite rightfully, in my opinion—started to cringe at labels like “developing” in description of various parts of the world, but few seem to get that worked up over the notion that we have pervasively labeled some of the world’s oldest economies—and, on the whole of history, many of the most robust—as suddenly somehow emerging.

2. The exponentially increased amount and accelerated adoption and availability of technology.

3. Changing demographics—chiefly, aging and declining birth rates.

4. The connectivity of people, goods, and information.

Based on this list, the authors’ key message seems to be that people who hope to navigate the new world order—which has, they argue, been primarily shaped by the four criteria outlined above—need to readjust their understanding. In other words, people need to hone their understanding around the factors driving today’s world, which are critically different than those that were driving yesterday’s.

There is surely merit to the notion that awareness of major economic and social trends is important to success in almost any field, and especially so in business. But there is something to be said for the opposite side of that proverbial coin, and it is a point that I took to be noticeably lacking in the article. Put simply, the patterns that shape human development are impossible to understand in the vacuum of one’s own times. And it would be just as futile to try to make significant impact on the world with a singular focus on current trends as it would to ignore them entirely.

This kind of logic might seem like a commonly accepted truism—“those who cannot remember the past…” and whatnot. Indeed, perhaps the authors would even shrug off such a critique, assuming that a reasonable level of awareness beyond modernity is implicitly required in the world. But I fear that in our ever-more-distracted lives (my suggestion for the lurking fifth factor driving modern society), it is far from a given. And we must actively strive to appreciate the macro-trends of history, which are sometimes far harder to discern than those of the short term, if we hope to operate in an informed way in any context.

One of this week’s other readings, the Global Trends 2030 Report, published in December of 2012 by the National Intelligence Council, centers around an exercise in which the authors explore a variety of alternative future scenarios (beginning on page xii in the summary and explained in more detail in Chapter 3 of the full report). Using both historical perspectives and awareness of modern trends, the authors articulate a variety of different scenarios of social/economic evolution over the coming decades. In the full report, these are explored with some detail related to specific geographies and specific global trends (referred to as game-changers). There is undoubtedly plenty of criticism to be had with the likelihood of any given one of these scenarios (how could there not be, of course, when the task at hand is predicting humanity’s collective future and articulating it in a few pages?), but the exercise seems very useful at a conceptual level. And more than that, it is transferrable.

Although the focus and the scope of the two pieces I have mentioned—the excerpt from Dobbs, Manyika, and Woetzel and the Global Trends report—varied significantly, I suggest that the sort of activity undertaken in the latter report (with the exploration of various potentialities of the future based largely on events of the past) would be useful in the context of the sort of analysis discussed in the former article. When attempting to understand and navigate the modern world, people and organizations, no matter their scale, can and should seek to inform themselves of relatable moments—or points of transition—in history, and articulate a variety of likely scenarios as to how things may evolve.