Navigating a time of seismic change
For a strategic planner, this has been an intense season. Not just because it’s the time of year when clients are working to get their plans in place, but even more so because extraordinary things are afoot in the external environment that leaders need to factor into their plans.
In considering these trends, we are called on to do multidimensional analysis. We must move beyond simple "awareness" and understand how these drivers collide and their subsequent effects. If you don’t look for interconnections and knock-on effects - how shifts interact, accelerate, and bring on others - you are playing checkers when the game really is three-dimensional chess.
22 drivers of our future
To see what might cause us to retool our plans, let’s first map the moving pieces. Here are 22 big trends that are on my radar. There are more that I’m aware of that I don’t list and there is zero doubt that I missed many more in my environmental scanning. So consider my list to just be your starting point. In any case, the bigger point is that these aren't just isolated events or unfolding processes; they are underlying drivers of our future.
Political and Regulatory
Tariffs: While the Trump administration has aggressively expanded tariffs, growing congressional pushback signals potential constraints or reversals, creating planning uncertainty around supply chain decisions and requiring organizations to maintain strategic flexibility - all while tariff-driven price increases are already reshaping consumer demand patterns and competitive positioning across industries.
Immigration: Changing immigration policies directly impact labor availability, talent pipelines, and demographic trends, with cascading effects on everything from workforce planning to consumer markets.
ICE Enforcement: Immigration and Customs Enforcement's expanded enforcement activities are creating workforce disruptions and compliance challenges while forcing companies to fundamentally rethink how they verify employment eligibility, communicate with workers, and engage with communities, potentially damaging trust and stakeholder relationships in ways that persist long after policy shifts.
Regulatory Risk: The unpredictability of regulatory enforcement - from antitrust to environmental standards to AI governance - combined with the potential for rapid policy reversals creates a volatile compliance landscape where yesterday's approved practice can become tomorrow's liability, demanding unprecedented regulatory agility and scenario planning.
Mid-terms: The 2026 congressional elections will likely shift the balance of power in Washington, affecting everything from regulatory priorities to fiscal policy, making it essential for organizations to prepare for potential policy reversals or accelerations.
Urban Stress: Cities are grappling with commercial real estate vacuums, fiscal pressures, crime concerns, and questions about remote work's permanence. This is compounded by federal immigration enforcement actions that are straining city budgets, disrupting services, and creating conflicts between local and federal authorities that potentially affect everything from location strategies to municipal bond ratings.
Academic Freedom: Intensifying battles over curriculum, research autonomy, DEI programs, and political litmus tests are reshaping higher education's value proposition and threatening universities' ability to attract talent, maintain accreditation, and serve as trusted knowledge producers, with ripple effects for corporate research partnerships and talent pipelines.
Eroding Confidence: Declining trust in institutions, media, and each other is reshaping how organizations communicate, build legitimacy, and maintain social license to operate in an increasingly skeptical environment.
Antisemitism: Rising antisemitism globally affects campus climates, workplace dynamics, and community safety, requiring organizational leaders to consider DEI strategies, security protocols, and stakeholder communications.
Technology and Energy
Energy: The intersection of AI's massive power demands, grid capacity constraints, and the energy transition is creating infrastructure bottlenecks that will define competitive advantage. The binding constraint is increasingly political, not technical. Local opposition to data centers, regulatory demands for self-generation, and companies like Microsoft investing directly in nuclear capacity signal a fundamental shift in how tech infrastructure gets built, while AI's voracious consumption drives up energy costs for everyone else.
AI Scaling Costs: As capital floods into training frontier models - hundreds of billions of dollars - it's creating a crowding-out effect where investment capital becomes scarcer for other sectors, potentially starving promising ventures and reshaping the entire innovation landscape.
AGI: The prospect of artificial general intelligence (AI that can match or exceed human cognitive abilities across virtually any domain) remains uncertain in both timing and character. But leaders need to consider not just incremental automation but fundamental disruptions to labor markets, competitive dynamics, and organizational models, while grappling with whether AGI capability will be concentrated among a few players or widely distributed, what the regulatory response will be, and how to position for a transformation whose timing and nature remain genuinely unknown.
Robots: Humanoid robots and advanced automation are moving from factories into homes and consumer settings - from elderly care companions and domestic assistants to service workers - creating new markets while raising questions about privacy, data security, labor displacement, and the social fabric that strategic planners must address.
Quantum: As quantum computing moves from research to early commercial applications, organizations need to assess both the opportunities (optimization, drug discovery) and threats (cryptographic vulnerability) to their operations.
Space: SpaceX's ambitions for orbital data centers and the proliferation of commercial space players, from launch providers to satellite operator, are transforming space from a government monopoly into a competitive marketplace with implications for computing infrastructure, communications, and strategic assets.
Economic
The 100-Year Bond: Alphabet's issuance of a 100-year bond signals that capital markets view certain tech giants as having achieved government-like permanence, institutional durability that transcends normal business cycles and competitive disruption. For other organizations, this creates a fundamental competitive divide: companies with access to long-term, low-cost capital can pursue patient, capital-intensive strategies in R&D and infrastructure that shorter-term financing simply can't support, essentially creating a two-tier system where a few players operate with sovereign-like advantages.
The Dollar: Questions about the dollar's continued dominance as the global reserve currency - driven by BRICS initiatives and geopolitical fragmentation - could fundamentally alter international finance and trade, forcing companies to rethink treasury management, currency hedging strategies, and where to hold reserves. This could potentially upend the US government's ability to finance deficits at favorable rates, which would impact domestic interest rates, capital costs, and the entire business investment calculus.
Prediction Markets: Platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket are evolving from forecasting tools into hedging instruments for political and policy risks that traditional insurance markets don't cover. Companies are now hedging previously unmanageable business risks, from regulatory outcomes to political events, converting uncertainty into tradable exposure. But ongoing CFTC battles over what contracts are permissible mean this capability could expand dramatically or disappear, depending on how regulators decide.
R&D: The massive capital concentration in AI is coinciding with uncertainty about both corporate R&D sustainability and government research funding - from NSF to NIH - slowing innovation pipelines in pharmaceuticals, materials science, and other fields that depend on patient capital, long development horizons, and public-private research partnerships.
Geopolitical
International Reset: The shifting global order, from US-China relations to new alliances in the Global South, is redrawing the map for international business, requiring fresh assessments of geopolitical risk and opportunity.
Iran. Iran's regional position has weakened with its proxy networks battered, while US naval forces mass at its doorstep and Iran possesses the capacity to build a nuclear weapon. A cornered regime may cross the nuclear threshold or lash out through Strait of Hormuz closure or strikes on Gulf infrastructure. Yet a US military strike that destabilizes the regime could prove worse: a collapsing nuclear-capable state in the world's energy corridor. Business leaders face questions about energy security, shipping reliability, and whether to maintain Middle East operations or plan for scenarios ranging from contained conflict to regional chaos.
Nuclear risks. With the START treaty expired, the question isn't just formal arms control but whether the US and Russia will maintain tacit restraint and communication channels, the erosion of which could destabilize deterrence and increase miscalculation risks. The deeper concern is whether this triggers a nuclear arms race that other powers, particularly China, could join, fundamentally changing the strategic calculus from bilateral nuclear balance to multipolar nuclear competition with far less predictable dynamics.
Trends collide
The real strategic challenge is recognizing how these trends compound. They don't happen in a vacuum; they interact to create new, often unpredictable, realities. Here are five of many, many possibilities.
Consider the Innovation Ecosystem:
AI Scaling Costs soak up venture capital
R&D Uncertainty (federal cuts) starves the "basic research" pipeline
Academic Freedom battles weaken the talent source
Energy Constraints create a physical ceiling on the hardware
This isn't four separate trends. It is a transformed innovation landscape where the rules of who can compete - and what is fundable - are being rewritten. Miss the interconnections, and you miss the need for a strategy to address this possibility.
Similarly, look at Urban Futures:
Urban Stress (real estate vacuums) creates fiscal pressure
ICE Enforcement strains city budgets and creates local-federal conflict
Institutional Confidence declines, affecting location decisions
The result isn't just "cities face challenges" - it's a restructuring of where economic activity happens.
Consider the Infrastructure Bottleneck:
Energy constraints limit data center development
Urban Stress concentrates in legacy infrastructure cities
Space commercialization offers orbital alternatives
Nuclear Risks threaten critical infrastructure via cyber or kinetic attack
The physical layer of the economy , where things can be built, where power is available, what's vulnerable, becomes a binding constraint that reshapes location strategy and creates new arbitrage opportunities.
There could be the Monetary and Fiscal Collision:
The Dollar faces reserve currency challenges
100-Year Bonds signal long-term sovereign-like stability for some
AI Scaling Costs crowd out other investment
Debt levels constrain government response capacity
Capital becomes increasingly bifurcated: ultra-cheap and patient for a few players, increasingly expensive and short-term for everyone else, while government fiscal tools become less reliable for managing economic shocks.
Or consider the possible Workforce Transformation:
Robots move into consumer/home settings, displacing service and care workers
Immigration policies restrict labor supply
AGI accelerates knowledge work automation
Urban Stress makes talent retention harder in traditional hubs
Companies face simultaneous automation of both manual and cognitive work while labor supply tightens and talent concentrates differently. This forces a complete rethink of workforce strategy, not just incremental adjustments.
Trends cascade
Once you see the trends and their interconnections, you must anticipate the Cascade - the downstream knock-on effects that determine long-term success or failure. Here are nine examples of how some of the trends at work today might cascade.
Tariffs Cascade?
First-Order: Direct cost increases and supply chain disruption requiring immediate sourcing decisions.
Second-Order: Tariff-driven price increases reshape consumer demand patterns, forcing product portfolio and market positioning changes.
Third-Order: Congressional pushback creates reversal risk, meaning companies that fully restructured supply chains may have moved too fast, while those that waited may have lost competitive ground - creating lasting strategic divergence based on how leaders read political timing.
Strategic advantage comes from correctly reading the political durability of trade policy, not just optimizing for current conditions.
Quantum Cascade?
First-Order: "Harvest now, decrypt later" attacks motivate immediate cryptographic upgrades despite quantum computers not yet being widely available.
Second-Order: Industries dependent on long-term data security (healthcare, finance, government contractors) face massive infrastructure replacement costs, creating competitive shakeout.
Third-Order: Quantum capability concentrates among a few nations and companies, creating a new dimension of strategic advantage in everything from drug discovery to financial modeling: those without access face permanent capability gaps in optimization-dependent industries.
Strategic advantage belongs to organizations that secure quantum access or partnerships now, before capability becomes fully commoditized or restricted.
Robots Cascade?
First-Order: Labor cost calculations shift, making reshoring economically viable and displacing workers in warehouses and factories.
Second-Order: As robots enter homes for elder care and domestic work, societal expectations about caregiving shift - what was family responsibility becomes consumer purchase, changing both family structures and labor markets.
Third-Order: A generation grows up with robot companions and assistants, fundamentally altering human development, social skills, and expectations about AI interaction, creating consumer behaviors and product requirements that companies not tracking this shift will completely miss.
Strategic advantage comes from understanding how human-robot interaction shapes the next generation of consumers, not just current automation ROI.
Prediction Markets Cascade?
First-Order: Companies gain new hedging tools for political and regulatory risk.
Second-Order: The ability to hedge previously unhedgeable risks changes which strategies are viable: Patient approaches to regulatory uncertainty become feasible when you can hedge the downside.
Third-Order: Prediction markets become leading indicators that move faster than traditional analysis, creating information asymmetries between sophisticated users and those still relying on conventional forecasting - a new form of competitive intelligence advantage.
Strategic advantage flows to organizations that build prediction market literacy into their strategic planning processes, not just use them occasionally.
The Dollar Cascade?
First-Order: Companies adjust treasury operations and hedging strategies as dollar dominance questions grow.
Second-Order: Trade increasingly settles in alternative currencies or bilateral arrangements, forcing companies to maintain multiple currency reserves and navigate fragmented payment systems.
Third-Order: U.S. loses the "exorbitant privilege" of printing the reserve currency, domestic interest rates rise structurally, and the entire business model of cheap dollar-denominated debt unwinds. Companies that built strategies assuming cheap U.S. borrowing face existential refinancing crises.
Strategic advantage belongs to companies that build currency-diversified operations and aren't structurally dependent on dollar privilege.
Energy Cascade?
First-Order: AI data centers face immediate power constraints, limiting where they can be built.
Second-Order: Political opposition to new data centers and self-generation mandates force tech companies into direct energy infrastructure investment, fundamentally changing their business models.
Third-Order: Energy access becomes a primary competitive advantage. Companies with secured power supplies (through nuclear investments, exclusive utility contracts, or geographic arbitrage) can scale AI capabilities while competitors are physically constrained, creating a new dimension of tech monopoly based on energy rather than just technology.
Strategic advantage belongs to organizations treating energy infrastructure as core strategic asset, not overhead.
AGI Cascade?
First-Order: Companies increase AI investment and prepare for automation of knowledge work.
Second-Order: Labor markets begin anticipating displacement, changing talent attraction and retention dynamics even before AGI arrives.
Third-Order: If AGI emerges, competitive dynamics resolve on those with AGI access versus those without. Existing business models, organizational structures, and value propositions become obsolete nearly overnight, rewarding organizations that built flexibility and AGI integration capabilities rather than optimizing current operations.
Strategic advantage goes to leaders who prepare for discontinuous change rather than extrapolating current trends.
Urban Stress Cascade?
First-Order: Commercial real estate values decline, creating fiscal pressure on cities.
Second-Order: City services deteriorate, crime perceptions grow, and talent begins relocating, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of urban decline.
Third-Order: Economic geography fundamentally shifts. Second-tier cities with better fiscal management and quality of life attract talent and investment, while legacy metros that were unquestioned corporate headquarters locations become disadvantaged, forcing a complete rethink of where companies locate operations and how they attract talent.
Strategic advantage comes from early moves to emerging cities before cost advantages disappear and infrastructure becomes strained.
International Reset Cascade?
First-Order: Supply chains fragment along geopolitical lines, requiring regionalization strategies.
Second-Order: Technical standards diverge (U.S./E.U. versus China), forcing companies to maintain parallel product lines and operations.
Third-Order: The global economy fully bifurcates into competing spheres. Companies must choose alignment or accept permanent size limitations from restricted market access, while those that straddle both spheres face constant security scrutiny and potential forced divestiture.
Strategic advantage goes to organizations that commit early to one sphere or successfully navigate neutrality, not those that delay the choice.
Strategy as optionality
The old model of "analyze, choose, and commit" assumes a predictability that no longer exists. Strategy today is about Optionality - the ability to make choices that are reversible and building sensing mechanisms for early warnings.
Continuous scanning: The strategic plan and its annual implementation must be a living document and process; you need to continuously monitor the environment.
Identify trigger points: Decide now what specific events require a pivot. Don't wait for the crisis to make the call.
A portfolio of bets: Resist staking your entire mission on one single outcome.
The world isn't waiting for your next strategy session. Can your plan and process handle the collision of the big drivers of change at work? Or are you just hoping for the best outcome, whistling past the graveyard?
