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.