Training gets a Boost

Training gets a Boost – We anticipate a number of publicly funded initiatives to support training and retraining from developed economy governments. The goals will be to try to reduce welfare costs, cut or prevent unemployment and speed the economic recovery. Where elections are due, these may be seen as politically motivated acts.

Embracing Complexity

The finance crisis has helped us understand that our world is increasingly made up of highly complex interconnected and adaptive systems whose behaviour is difficult to model or predict. Governments and businesses will increasingly start to embrace complexity thinking to help understand and plan for the world we now operate in. The real breakthrough will come when we start to teach our children about complexity and how to make decisions in an uncertain world with imperfect information.

Public Unity

Public Unity - Private Retrenchment –The G20 members will continue to talk boldly in public about collective global action and open markets. In practice, nationalistic attitudes will abound. This will result in more protectionist trade policy, greater competition to attract inward investment, a biasa for awarding of government contracts to local suppliers and a tougher immigration stance.

New Rules of Engagement

New Rules of Engagement – The failure to reach any serious binding global agreements on climate change at the COP-15 Summit in Copenhagen in December 2009 could herald the end of an era on global agreements. Increasing attention will be paid to finding new models for reaching consensus that don’t require leaders and administrators to fly around the world desperately seeking to configure a deal which then gets ignored in practice.

New Routes to Change

New Routes to Change – The range of challenges facing developed and developing economies grows ever more rapidly – as does the outpouring of ideas from every corner on how to fix them. Many governments seem almost clueless as to how to make progress on multiple fronts and how to harness a diverse range of inputs. Despite the scale of the challenges, many are still reluctant to ‘think the unthinkable’ on issue as diverse as effective governance for the 21st healthcare funding, banking regulation and environmental protection. Increasingly we will see foundations and independent initiatives funding such ‘clean sheet thinking’ projects – enabling them to sit outside the political process and consider a wider range of options than most governments would dare to. The results will then be used to facilitate public debate and influence governments from the top down and ‘outside in’.