Beating the Global Odds: Successful Decision-making in a Confused and Troubled World

A Quick Tour of This Book (and Why I’m Emphasizing the Renaissance of Scenario Planning)

I’ll admit it’s not enough to note that people and organizations are highly frazzled from the bumps, tumbles, growing complexity, and general overload of the past few years. Tell me something I don’t know, you say? In Chapter 1, however, before we can decide what to do about it, we need to unpack the whole story a bit more. As we’ll see, help is actually on the way, including from such (unlikely?) places as Santa Fe and Oxford.

In the two chapters that follow, I will take you on a series of visits to other sides of the complexity coin, including the ever-shorter half-life of everything, the increasingly messy and incapacitated politics of most countries, and the way in which our over-complex world has driven many ordinary people either to a state of angry populism or to just tuning out entirely. These trends are all closely connected and self-reinforcing in a negative way. To top it off, many of our brightest business minds have been given strong incentives to game the system, creating no lasting value and even off-loading risks and losses onto society at large. If this is capitalism, Adam Smith would find it unrecognizable.

So you might think, “Let’s just wait until the smoke clears and the economy bounces back fully before committing ourselves to any definitive course of action.” That might be an instinctive reaction to today’s chaotic mixed signals, but I will advocate that inaction or staying ...