The Future of Almost Everything, page 23
Take examinations: how absurd to force young people to scribe indelible symbols onto pieces of paper with ink, and to lock them into rooms without access to their digital brains.
In their daily lives now, and in their entire working lives in future, they will be using completely different skills. For a start, work means keyboards, not pen and ink, and people that cannot type are unable to do most office jobs.
The whole basis of education will be questioned. For example, there is the growing irrelevance of memory in many areas of life. What really counts is understanding how to make sense of a constant stream of data, picking out patterns, seeing context, and knowing which sources to trust. The skills that really matter are: rapid search/collate/interpret/analyse/summarise/conclude/decide. Of course we do need memory too, on which we base all our experience, but not in order to regurgitate facts.
Radical change to teaching methods
Classroom teaching has hardly changed in 50 years, apart from the introduction of digital whiteboards and more use of personal computers. The world of the classroom has been completely left behind by young people, who are constantly learning about people, life and current affairs via their ever-present mobile devices. Which of course are one of the first things to irritate a teacher in class, and are often confiscated as a result.
Expect rapid expansion of new learning tools, including short, interactive video clips, designed to fit precisely into the curriculum.
In education, one of the worst crimes has been plagiarism: where a student copies paragraphs from another source. But in business, if an executive has to assemble a report very rapidly, about an area they know little about, the issue is not whether the whole report is original, but whether that report is accurate and useful.
Tougher rules for schooling
Expect a return to single-sex schools in many areas where co-education has resulted in tens of thousands of boys dropping out. Expect persuasive arguments that single-sex education for both sexes means sharper concentration and fewer distractions or showing off, especially with the age of puberty falling to eight or less in some girls.
Expect a complete rethink about punishment and discipline, with the recognition that a no-touch policy isn’t working in many nations. In many schools, the playground culture can be threatening, bullying and even violent, not only to pupils but also to staff. A high percentage of teachers in state-funded schools across the UK, for example, have been threatened with violence or have been attacked on school premises, at one time or another. Expect strident calls for teachers to be able to teach without fear of attack from pupils or parents. Changes will come in small steps, following particularly awful and well-publicised events such as the death of another teacher or the death of a pupil after savage bullying.
Expect tough new sanctions, including greater freedom to suspend or expel pupils for antisocial or violent behaviour. Expect growing expenditure on special needs schools for the most disruptive pupils. Despite the trend to try to integrate the worst behaved with the best behaved, mainstream schools will not be able to risk keeping all their most disruptive pupils, as the emphasis grows on getting results. Expect continued ghettoisation in schools, with people choosing a state school in a ‘nice area’ and then working out which home to buy nearby.
Future of universities – big shift to Asia
University education will be dominated globally by India and China, who will each produce many times more high-quality graduates in many disciplines than the rest of the world put together. Despite this, many of the best Asian students will head for top European or American Universities, to broaden horizons and forge networks.
Lecturers will be judged not just by the intellectual content of their teaching, but also by how they use technology to communicate. People need to taste the future, reach out and touch it with their hands. ‘In-your-face’ experience is worth hundreds of hours of private study. Expect an anti-reaction by a small number of ‘eccentrics’ who will make a deliberate point of not using any technology to present, relying entirely on person-to-person interaction, maybe using flip charts, or non-digitised dry-wipe boards.
Free access to lecture videos – so what are you selling?
All universities will be faced with a huge dilemma – along with every business school. Do they record lectures by professors and other faculty? And, if so, do they place those lectures online for students on the closed university intranet, or make them publicly available on sites like YouTube? And if they do go down this route, will anyone still want to attend the physical lecture?
Universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have recorded lectures for years, giving them away online for free, and others will be forced to follow. I have been doing the same for over a decade, recording entire keynotes wherever I can, and publishing online wherever possible.
Some business school professors fear that their material will be ‘stolen’ or otherwise abused, but experience shows that free online access makes business sense as well as being the ‘right’ thing to do. As a result, we will see astonishing growth in the quality and range of free education, available to the poorest in every nation, so long as they have online access. Of course online publication does put extra pressure on any lecturer who never alters or adapts their material from year to year, so these academics will be forced to adapt.
The above will be a great challenge to providers of distance-learning courses. With this type of course, students are typically given passwords to lectures and online course materials, in exchange for a huge amount of money, for which they get someone to mark essays, a few video tutorials, and perhaps a residential week or two each year.
So what is the answer? As we have seen in previous chapters, people want to breathe the same air, and learn from each other in groups. Group experiences have great power to change people profoundly, especially when a group is together for a year or more of study, with strong emotional bonds. So physical tutorials, workshops, seminars and lectures will continue to be important.
Videos are great for information but useless at transformation. That is why business school professors should feel more relaxed about giving their material away. Students around the world may browse their recorded materials online, but that will not be a full substitute for the disciplines of a shared learning experience in the classroom, during which formal teaching as well as discussion will take place.
Universities and business schools will focus increasingly on personal transformation, interactive learning, rather than groups just listening to experts, and on building educational tribes, to survive.
Education gets longer (and longer, and longer)
Despite the growth of informal online education, most people will spend even more time in formal education by 2030. We have already seen how parents are hot-housing their children from their first year. At the other end, job markets are now so competitive that students are being forced into second or even third degrees, in the hope of standing out in job interviews. In many cases it is also because their first degree turned out to be useless when it came to the workplace.
However, most first, second or even third degrees (including business school MBAs) are very poor substitutes for a year or two in a really stretching business. And as the cost of degrees soars, with less and less government subsidy, more people will question the real value of a degree. A four-year college degree in America now costs up to $160,000, including food and accommodation. But the real cost is more than doubled by the sacrifice of four years’ average earnings. It’s a fine balance, of course, since without the degree they may not be able to find a decent job.
Countries like South Korea and Malaysia will rapidly expand their engineering and biotechnology courses, reflecting strong government commitment to expanding industries in these areas. Numbers of students for courses such as music technology or anthropology will fall in countries like the UK, as more statistics are published showing disastrous employment records for those who opted for such degrees.
Future of consulting, accounting and law firms
There are very few global consulting and accounting firms, and this is already causing big problems for regulators who are unhappy when the same companies are auditing the same accounts for years. We should be worried when auditors are from the same organisation as consultants, when huge companies find members of their international teams involved on both sides of complex deals. It is hardly surprising that so many audits of multinationals have turned out to be so misleading and useless.
Arthur Andersen disappeared almost overnight as a result of the Enron scandal, and it will only take one more such event to create a crisis, because only three global firms would remain. Expect further regulations about companies needing to change their auditors every few years, and more restrictions on potential conflicts of interest.
Auditors will be strictly audited
Auditors will find that they are increasingly held responsible when banks or insurers or other types of company fail spectacularly, soon after being given a clean audit report. It is outrageous that global auditors have been able to walk away without any penalty, from large companies that collapse, only days or weeks after they have been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to vet them for accounting irregularities and hidden financial risks.
Auditors will be called more strictly to account in future for such appalling failures in their own processes, for giving false and dangerous assurances to investors, based on far too narrow a view of the viability and stability of the business. Auditors will no longer be able to hide behind the ‘standards of compliance’ in their audits. They will be expected to probe for the truth, to ask the difficult questions, to place their own reputations (and even existence) on the line in the robust assurances they give.
Big Bang deregulation for law firms
Law firms will also be forced to change radically in some countries like the UK over the next decade, mainly as a result of deregulation, allowing non-legal companies to raise money from markets, to provide legal services. Few so-called global legal firms are structured in the right way to support the future needs of global companies. They are often led by senior partners who are professionally expert, but may be incompetent in a global CEO-type role.
The procedures of large law firms are often very antiquated, and their mind-sets parochial. The most important question for a global law firm to answer is this:
If we were building a large law firm from scratch today, would it look like us? And if not, how can we fix the gap rapidly?
Legal services move to mass-market budget retail
We will continue to need global law firms as clusters of legal experts able to take a view on highly complex issues, particularly across territories. However, expect to see rapid change in how smaller-scale legal services are delivered, with a growing trend to ‘retail legal’ teams, operating out of call centres, shopping malls, and so on, or completely online. Many kinds of standard legal practice can be automated with relative ease – including aspects of employment law, buying and selling property, making a will, divorce proceedings, personal injury claims, and so on. One-off legal advice will also be increasingly offered online, either using chat screens or email correspondence, or in video calls.
At the same time, more countries will follow Australia and the UK in deregulating their legal services. This will allow non-legal firms to offer such services, and teams of legal experts to raise capital in the markets. Over 300 companies registered to provide legal services in the UK in the first 2 years of deregulation, so we will see many new kinds of commercial organisation offering expert legal advice, in a highly efficient, rapid and customer-friendly way, breaking with all the familiar ways of doing things. We will also see more outsourcing of basic legal services by larger legal firms in developed nations, to teams in countries like India.
Law itself will change profoundly over the next two decades, influenced by every trend in this book, but particularly by issues that we will look at in the next two chapters: new politics, governance, activism and ethics.
Future of diversity and innovation – for global insight
To manage in a universal world, we need universal teams, but the reality is that corporations are often too tribal. Most large companies are monocultural: dominated by nationals from the country in which they started.
While this can bring strength – loyalty, team spirit, better communication and faster decisions – it also carries huge risks, particularly in a globalised world. Monocultural leadership is more likely to miss the best investments or partnerships in new territories, more likely to make mistakes in managing country risks. What is more, monocultural teams are very unattractive for people from other nations or regions to join.
Key to innovation will be more diverse teams
Among CEOs of large corporations, 85% say that diversity is the key to innovation. More diverse or universal teams tend to find more ways around problems, more solutions, better alternatives. Diverse teams are better connected across markets and communities, less likely to have blind spots, more able to identify new opportunities, more likely to have a wider range of skills and experience, and more likely to draw highly talented people. Diverse teams are also more likely to understand a broader range of customers. We will also see more open-innovation or crowdsourcing, where teams from diverse companies or communities collaborate widely in problem solving.
Diversity is therefore one of the most important keys to business growth, and one of the least well managed. Most large companies tend to focus (often rather superficially) on gender – to increase numbers of women in senior positions – but are blind to all other aspects of diversity.
More women, ethnic minorities and foreign nationals in senior positions
Gender will certainly matter. In many developed nations like America and the UK, girls outperform boys at school, and women outperform men at university. Most new doctors in many countries are now women. And we see the same in many business schools: most of the best applicants for MBAs are female. Yet few board members are women, and women leave corporations every year in significant numbers. Expect a wide range of measures to change this, some forced by regulation, for example, gender quotas on boards, as are now being imposed on corporations in Germany.
But the focus needs to broaden beyond gender. Take senior management in the UK, for instance, which is almost entirely white, even though a growing percentage of the population is Asian, African, Afro-Caribbean or from other non-white ethnic groups.
Repeated surveys show how many barriers there are for ethnic minorities. These are often caused by entrenched racist attitudes, many of which may be totally subconscious, in ‘decent’, ‘tolerant’ people who would be horrified to think they were in any way biased.
This whole issue will matter more in future, not only as an issue of justice, but also for customer insight and marketing. How can you provide world-class support to a customer group that you do not properly understand? How can you underwrite risks accurately in a community you have never been a part of? Increasing diversity is therefore one of the most important ways for leaders to grow their companies, stimulate innovation, reduce risks and increase customer loyalty.
*
So, then, we have looked at a fast, urban, tribal and universal world. To many people, the picture may seem more or less complete, but two more Faces of the Future remain. A world driven by radical agendas and ideologies, where every decision will be influenced by a rethink about ethics, values, personal motivation and spirituality.
Chapter 5
RADICAL
AS I PREDICTED 20 YEARS AGO, radical, revolutionary forces are sweeping across parts of our world, and will continue to do so for the next 30 years. A cluster of ‘democratic’ revolutions swept away the Soviet Union from 1989 to 1991. For a while, Western governments talked about a peace-dividend as they cut military spending.
The collapse of communism left an ideological vacuum, with no balance to a Western narrative of capitalism, materialism, free speech, human rights and free market thinking. Only one superpower remained, and it became a self-appointed policeman of the world. This helped unleash new radical forces, many of which are resentful of and intensely hostile to America.
Dotcom delusions of an age of global tolerance
A decade later, at the height of the dot-com boom, many technogurus made predictions that global access to the web would make our world more tolerant. It would democratise society, undermine dictators and contribute to global harmony. They forgot the power of tribalism; how the web amplifies radical voices, and how social networks create viral, unstoppable people movements.
They also failed to see that groups like Islamic State would effectively manage to restrict web access in territories they control, broadcast their own terrifying propaganda on social media, torture and kill hostages, discourage journalists from entering the region, and make it almost impossible to know what was really happening in their part of the world. And as we have seen, control of the web is strengthening every day, across entire nations such as China and Russia, now affecting over a third of humankind.
Rise of radical activism and extreme ideologies
For almost two decades I have described the growing impact of radicalised activists and how they would change politics in many nations over the next 20 years. And that is exactly what we have seen. Activists driven by extreme religious ideologies, by hatred for a people or a country, by single issues such as climate change, immigration, animal rights or independence.
So what about the next 20 years? Where will radical forces take us next? What will be the impact on politics or religion or consumer choices? How will your own life be affected?
Radical ideologies will feed future terrorism
Terrorism has always been the radical edge of political activism. As in the past, most terrorist groups will continue to be relatively small, tribal, informal, fragmented, mobile and short-lived. Most will be local rather than globalised, using any means to frighten, sabotage and attack for the sake of a cause, seeing themselves as moral freedom fighters.
In their daily lives now, and in their entire working lives in future, they will be using completely different skills. For a start, work means keyboards, not pen and ink, and people that cannot type are unable to do most office jobs.
The whole basis of education will be questioned. For example, there is the growing irrelevance of memory in many areas of life. What really counts is understanding how to make sense of a constant stream of data, picking out patterns, seeing context, and knowing which sources to trust. The skills that really matter are: rapid search/collate/interpret/analyse/summarise/conclude/decide. Of course we do need memory too, on which we base all our experience, but not in order to regurgitate facts.
Radical change to teaching methods
Classroom teaching has hardly changed in 50 years, apart from the introduction of digital whiteboards and more use of personal computers. The world of the classroom has been completely left behind by young people, who are constantly learning about people, life and current affairs via their ever-present mobile devices. Which of course are one of the first things to irritate a teacher in class, and are often confiscated as a result.
Expect rapid expansion of new learning tools, including short, interactive video clips, designed to fit precisely into the curriculum.
In education, one of the worst crimes has been plagiarism: where a student copies paragraphs from another source. But in business, if an executive has to assemble a report very rapidly, about an area they know little about, the issue is not whether the whole report is original, but whether that report is accurate and useful.
Tougher rules for schooling
Expect a return to single-sex schools in many areas where co-education has resulted in tens of thousands of boys dropping out. Expect persuasive arguments that single-sex education for both sexes means sharper concentration and fewer distractions or showing off, especially with the age of puberty falling to eight or less in some girls.
Expect a complete rethink about punishment and discipline, with the recognition that a no-touch policy isn’t working in many nations. In many schools, the playground culture can be threatening, bullying and even violent, not only to pupils but also to staff. A high percentage of teachers in state-funded schools across the UK, for example, have been threatened with violence or have been attacked on school premises, at one time or another. Expect strident calls for teachers to be able to teach without fear of attack from pupils or parents. Changes will come in small steps, following particularly awful and well-publicised events such as the death of another teacher or the death of a pupil after savage bullying.
Expect tough new sanctions, including greater freedom to suspend or expel pupils for antisocial or violent behaviour. Expect growing expenditure on special needs schools for the most disruptive pupils. Despite the trend to try to integrate the worst behaved with the best behaved, mainstream schools will not be able to risk keeping all their most disruptive pupils, as the emphasis grows on getting results. Expect continued ghettoisation in schools, with people choosing a state school in a ‘nice area’ and then working out which home to buy nearby.
Future of universities – big shift to Asia
University education will be dominated globally by India and China, who will each produce many times more high-quality graduates in many disciplines than the rest of the world put together. Despite this, many of the best Asian students will head for top European or American Universities, to broaden horizons and forge networks.
Lecturers will be judged not just by the intellectual content of their teaching, but also by how they use technology to communicate. People need to taste the future, reach out and touch it with their hands. ‘In-your-face’ experience is worth hundreds of hours of private study. Expect an anti-reaction by a small number of ‘eccentrics’ who will make a deliberate point of not using any technology to present, relying entirely on person-to-person interaction, maybe using flip charts, or non-digitised dry-wipe boards.
Free access to lecture videos – so what are you selling?
All universities will be faced with a huge dilemma – along with every business school. Do they record lectures by professors and other faculty? And, if so, do they place those lectures online for students on the closed university intranet, or make them publicly available on sites like YouTube? And if they do go down this route, will anyone still want to attend the physical lecture?
Universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have recorded lectures for years, giving them away online for free, and others will be forced to follow. I have been doing the same for over a decade, recording entire keynotes wherever I can, and publishing online wherever possible.
Some business school professors fear that their material will be ‘stolen’ or otherwise abused, but experience shows that free online access makes business sense as well as being the ‘right’ thing to do. As a result, we will see astonishing growth in the quality and range of free education, available to the poorest in every nation, so long as they have online access. Of course online publication does put extra pressure on any lecturer who never alters or adapts their material from year to year, so these academics will be forced to adapt.
The above will be a great challenge to providers of distance-learning courses. With this type of course, students are typically given passwords to lectures and online course materials, in exchange for a huge amount of money, for which they get someone to mark essays, a few video tutorials, and perhaps a residential week or two each year.
So what is the answer? As we have seen in previous chapters, people want to breathe the same air, and learn from each other in groups. Group experiences have great power to change people profoundly, especially when a group is together for a year or more of study, with strong emotional bonds. So physical tutorials, workshops, seminars and lectures will continue to be important.
Videos are great for information but useless at transformation. That is why business school professors should feel more relaxed about giving their material away. Students around the world may browse their recorded materials online, but that will not be a full substitute for the disciplines of a shared learning experience in the classroom, during which formal teaching as well as discussion will take place.
Universities and business schools will focus increasingly on personal transformation, interactive learning, rather than groups just listening to experts, and on building educational tribes, to survive.
Education gets longer (and longer, and longer)
Despite the growth of informal online education, most people will spend even more time in formal education by 2030. We have already seen how parents are hot-housing their children from their first year. At the other end, job markets are now so competitive that students are being forced into second or even third degrees, in the hope of standing out in job interviews. In many cases it is also because their first degree turned out to be useless when it came to the workplace.
However, most first, second or even third degrees (including business school MBAs) are very poor substitutes for a year or two in a really stretching business. And as the cost of degrees soars, with less and less government subsidy, more people will question the real value of a degree. A four-year college degree in America now costs up to $160,000, including food and accommodation. But the real cost is more than doubled by the sacrifice of four years’ average earnings. It’s a fine balance, of course, since without the degree they may not be able to find a decent job.
Countries like South Korea and Malaysia will rapidly expand their engineering and biotechnology courses, reflecting strong government commitment to expanding industries in these areas. Numbers of students for courses such as music technology or anthropology will fall in countries like the UK, as more statistics are published showing disastrous employment records for those who opted for such degrees.
Future of consulting, accounting and law firms
There are very few global consulting and accounting firms, and this is already causing big problems for regulators who are unhappy when the same companies are auditing the same accounts for years. We should be worried when auditors are from the same organisation as consultants, when huge companies find members of their international teams involved on both sides of complex deals. It is hardly surprising that so many audits of multinationals have turned out to be so misleading and useless.
Arthur Andersen disappeared almost overnight as a result of the Enron scandal, and it will only take one more such event to create a crisis, because only three global firms would remain. Expect further regulations about companies needing to change their auditors every few years, and more restrictions on potential conflicts of interest.
Auditors will be strictly audited
Auditors will find that they are increasingly held responsible when banks or insurers or other types of company fail spectacularly, soon after being given a clean audit report. It is outrageous that global auditors have been able to walk away without any penalty, from large companies that collapse, only days or weeks after they have been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to vet them for accounting irregularities and hidden financial risks.
Auditors will be called more strictly to account in future for such appalling failures in their own processes, for giving false and dangerous assurances to investors, based on far too narrow a view of the viability and stability of the business. Auditors will no longer be able to hide behind the ‘standards of compliance’ in their audits. They will be expected to probe for the truth, to ask the difficult questions, to place their own reputations (and even existence) on the line in the robust assurances they give.
Big Bang deregulation for law firms
Law firms will also be forced to change radically in some countries like the UK over the next decade, mainly as a result of deregulation, allowing non-legal companies to raise money from markets, to provide legal services. Few so-called global legal firms are structured in the right way to support the future needs of global companies. They are often led by senior partners who are professionally expert, but may be incompetent in a global CEO-type role.
The procedures of large law firms are often very antiquated, and their mind-sets parochial. The most important question for a global law firm to answer is this:
If we were building a large law firm from scratch today, would it look like us? And if not, how can we fix the gap rapidly?
Legal services move to mass-market budget retail
We will continue to need global law firms as clusters of legal experts able to take a view on highly complex issues, particularly across territories. However, expect to see rapid change in how smaller-scale legal services are delivered, with a growing trend to ‘retail legal’ teams, operating out of call centres, shopping malls, and so on, or completely online. Many kinds of standard legal practice can be automated with relative ease – including aspects of employment law, buying and selling property, making a will, divorce proceedings, personal injury claims, and so on. One-off legal advice will also be increasingly offered online, either using chat screens or email correspondence, or in video calls.
At the same time, more countries will follow Australia and the UK in deregulating their legal services. This will allow non-legal firms to offer such services, and teams of legal experts to raise capital in the markets. Over 300 companies registered to provide legal services in the UK in the first 2 years of deregulation, so we will see many new kinds of commercial organisation offering expert legal advice, in a highly efficient, rapid and customer-friendly way, breaking with all the familiar ways of doing things. We will also see more outsourcing of basic legal services by larger legal firms in developed nations, to teams in countries like India.
Law itself will change profoundly over the next two decades, influenced by every trend in this book, but particularly by issues that we will look at in the next two chapters: new politics, governance, activism and ethics.
Future of diversity and innovation – for global insight
To manage in a universal world, we need universal teams, but the reality is that corporations are often too tribal. Most large companies are monocultural: dominated by nationals from the country in which they started.
While this can bring strength – loyalty, team spirit, better communication and faster decisions – it also carries huge risks, particularly in a globalised world. Monocultural leadership is more likely to miss the best investments or partnerships in new territories, more likely to make mistakes in managing country risks. What is more, monocultural teams are very unattractive for people from other nations or regions to join.
Key to innovation will be more diverse teams
Among CEOs of large corporations, 85% say that diversity is the key to innovation. More diverse or universal teams tend to find more ways around problems, more solutions, better alternatives. Diverse teams are better connected across markets and communities, less likely to have blind spots, more able to identify new opportunities, more likely to have a wider range of skills and experience, and more likely to draw highly talented people. Diverse teams are also more likely to understand a broader range of customers. We will also see more open-innovation or crowdsourcing, where teams from diverse companies or communities collaborate widely in problem solving.
Diversity is therefore one of the most important keys to business growth, and one of the least well managed. Most large companies tend to focus (often rather superficially) on gender – to increase numbers of women in senior positions – but are blind to all other aspects of diversity.
More women, ethnic minorities and foreign nationals in senior positions
Gender will certainly matter. In many developed nations like America and the UK, girls outperform boys at school, and women outperform men at university. Most new doctors in many countries are now women. And we see the same in many business schools: most of the best applicants for MBAs are female. Yet few board members are women, and women leave corporations every year in significant numbers. Expect a wide range of measures to change this, some forced by regulation, for example, gender quotas on boards, as are now being imposed on corporations in Germany.
But the focus needs to broaden beyond gender. Take senior management in the UK, for instance, which is almost entirely white, even though a growing percentage of the population is Asian, African, Afro-Caribbean or from other non-white ethnic groups.
Repeated surveys show how many barriers there are for ethnic minorities. These are often caused by entrenched racist attitudes, many of which may be totally subconscious, in ‘decent’, ‘tolerant’ people who would be horrified to think they were in any way biased.
This whole issue will matter more in future, not only as an issue of justice, but also for customer insight and marketing. How can you provide world-class support to a customer group that you do not properly understand? How can you underwrite risks accurately in a community you have never been a part of? Increasing diversity is therefore one of the most important ways for leaders to grow their companies, stimulate innovation, reduce risks and increase customer loyalty.
*
So, then, we have looked at a fast, urban, tribal and universal world. To many people, the picture may seem more or less complete, but two more Faces of the Future remain. A world driven by radical agendas and ideologies, where every decision will be influenced by a rethink about ethics, values, personal motivation and spirituality.
Chapter 5
RADICAL
AS I PREDICTED 20 YEARS AGO, radical, revolutionary forces are sweeping across parts of our world, and will continue to do so for the next 30 years. A cluster of ‘democratic’ revolutions swept away the Soviet Union from 1989 to 1991. For a while, Western governments talked about a peace-dividend as they cut military spending.
The collapse of communism left an ideological vacuum, with no balance to a Western narrative of capitalism, materialism, free speech, human rights and free market thinking. Only one superpower remained, and it became a self-appointed policeman of the world. This helped unleash new radical forces, many of which are resentful of and intensely hostile to America.
Dotcom delusions of an age of global tolerance
A decade later, at the height of the dot-com boom, many technogurus made predictions that global access to the web would make our world more tolerant. It would democratise society, undermine dictators and contribute to global harmony. They forgot the power of tribalism; how the web amplifies radical voices, and how social networks create viral, unstoppable people movements.
They also failed to see that groups like Islamic State would effectively manage to restrict web access in territories they control, broadcast their own terrifying propaganda on social media, torture and kill hostages, discourage journalists from entering the region, and make it almost impossible to know what was really happening in their part of the world. And as we have seen, control of the web is strengthening every day, across entire nations such as China and Russia, now affecting over a third of humankind.
Rise of radical activism and extreme ideologies
For almost two decades I have described the growing impact of radicalised activists and how they would change politics in many nations over the next 20 years. And that is exactly what we have seen. Activists driven by extreme religious ideologies, by hatred for a people or a country, by single issues such as climate change, immigration, animal rights or independence.
So what about the next 20 years? Where will radical forces take us next? What will be the impact on politics or religion or consumer choices? How will your own life be affected?
Radical ideologies will feed future terrorism
Terrorism has always been the radical edge of political activism. As in the past, most terrorist groups will continue to be relatively small, tribal, informal, fragmented, mobile and short-lived. Most will be local rather than globalised, using any means to frighten, sabotage and attack for the sake of a cause, seeing themselves as moral freedom fighters.
