What opportunities

Someone once remarked to me that in challenge we find opportunity.

This has rung true as I’ve built a career around helping organisations and individuals to cut through complexity and build things that make a difference, be that strategies, organisations, cultures, platforms, products, or whatever else might be required.

I’ve been fortunate to benefit from being in the right place at the right time, sometimes I found myself there and other times I navigated myself there as part of a broader strategy.

Today we face an unprecedented number of challenges at a level not seen by many alive today.

All of which makes strategic scenario planning a depressing task right now. Especially as it’s becoming harder to see what I would term positive opportunities inside the chaos that is likely to come.

There is a significant difference between working toward an organisation’s survival, something I’ve done a number of times, and planning for choices that respond to a world context that is unimaginable for most of us privileged westerners today.

I am holding out hope that the planetary corrections that are coming, if we are to believe the clear signals we see today, are not already baked in through past actions and that we can come together as a global society - despite the trend being toward the opposite - to make a better future.

This is the true opportunity and perhaps the catalysts are coming as consumers start to feel the pain where it hurts them most, in their pockets, as costs skyrocket and as fuel shortages hurt companies where it hurts them most, in their bottom line. Perhaps they will turn away from reliance on unpredictable supplies of dirty fuels and reduced consumption will slow warming of an increasingly hot planet.

Distrust in governments might lead to more trust among people, which might make us closer rather than more divided.

A crash in the bubble that is AI, better regulation of tech as has happened with food, medicine, finance, transportation, would inevitably - if it can be achieved globally - improve outcomes for us all.

The opportunities are for us to solve problems, rather than create new ones.