Geopolitical, regulatory, and societal changes are making the world more uncertain for companies. Strategic Foresight – a method to envision different futures, assess business and stakeholder impact and define corresponding strategies – helps companies navigate this new uncertainty. By envisioning different futures and facilitating a deeper understanding of societal and political shifts, and their impacts on businesses, regulatory environments, and changing stakeholder expectations, Strategic Foresight serves three purposes:
Inform strategy
Increase resilience
Enhance reputation
The focus lies on understanding how geopolitical, societal and regulatory shifts can impact your business and reputation – and on identifying the right strategies to engage your stakeholders. Geopolitical, societal, and regulatory changes are now shaping the business environment more than at any time since the end of the Cold War.
These three interrelated trends have become a prime concern for companies and together are elevating business uncertainty to new levels.
In the first two decades after the end of the Cold War, businesses could count on governments to promote an ever-freer flow of goods, services, capital, and technologies, creating an environment that facilitated the deep integration of the global economy. Now, however, geopolitics are back on stage. Globalization is not dead, but it is being rewired, and many of the rules and assumptions that businesses took for granted when planning for the future no longer apply. Governments everywhere are now more willing to prioritize national and economic security over the interests of their companies, creating new costs and other obstacles to doing business while opening up new opportunities as well. This shift is now forcing this generation of corporate leaders to understand and integrate geopolitical logic into their strategic planning and stakeholder engagement strategies more than ever before.
But geopolitics are not alone in creating uncertainty for businesses. Companies must also navigate fundamental societal and regulatory changes that go hand in hand with the new geopolitical paradigm. The return of geopolitics means that in the regulatory space, government interventions into the business world are on the rise. At the societal level, we are seeing a shift towards more polarization, and populist movements are growing across markets.
Securing insights to assess the impact of key geopolitical, regulatory, and societal trends for your business.
How will these shifts impact your business? What challenges do they pose not just to strategic decision-makers but to communicators as well?
Geopolitical competition increases planning uncertainty and creates investment, supply chain and reputational risks.
Regulatory shifts are creating new obstacles to doing business and increasing compliance and legal costs, yet they are also creating new opportunities.
Societal trends such as polarization and populism are creating a diversity of stakeholder expectations that pose new challenges for communicators.
Stakeholders now expect corporate leaders to understand these shifts, mitigate the risks and seize the opportunities that they offer. To meet these expectations, companies need to envision alternative futures, assess their impact, and adjust their strategies.
Strategic Foresight can help you translate trends into impacts and enable better decision making in times of uncertainty.
At FGS Global, we focus on how geopolitical, regulatory, and societal trends will impact your business environment – and what these changes could mean for your stakeholders and their expectations towards you.
This approach can be taken in a variety of sectors to support strategic decision-makers, communicators, and public affairs professionals identify reputational, regulatory, or operational implications and design effective strategies to address them.
We used Strategic Foresight to:
Support a leading European energy provider identify and prepare for those global geopolitical trends that will most likely impact its business in the coming decade.
Work with a Fortune-500 multinational IT company understand and mitigate the specific regulatory risks it faced as result of the intensifying US-China rivalry.
Support a global OEM to assess their strategic environment and identify potential areas for differentiation.
Conduct a reputational and geopolitical risk analysis for a major European sports franchise to highlight those geo-political trends that will impact its global marketing & business development efforts and its reputation in its home market.
Our team of policy experts has decades of government and consulting experience on geopolitics, regulation, and strategic planning. We combine geopolitical and regulatory expertise, a corporate and capital markets perspective and our firm’s unique insights into stakeholder perception and reputation with strategic foresight methodology to help companies navigate uncertainty.
You can’t predict the future. But with Strategic Foresight, we can help you prepare for alternative futures and enable better decision-making and stakeholder engagement in times of uncertainty.
