A backward look at post-COVID scenarios demonstrates how susceptible we can be to the fascinations of the moment.
Exactly five years ago as the world was still emerging from its Covid lockdown I wrote an essay called “The post-COVID future is hostile to prediction.” Recently I read it again to see if I still agreed with myself.
Yeah, I still agree with myself.
What prompted the original essay was the stream of predictions being made at the time about the ways Covid had changed our lives permanently. Offices, big cities, watching movies with strangers, handshakes—all were considered vectors of disease. Logically they had to be over.
Had you bet your business on the durability of those phenomena you would have lost your shirt.
In November 2020 our understandable hypersensitivity to the Covid virus convinced many people that the situation in front of us was here to stay. It seems most of the predictions of what would changed permanently have proven wrong. In retrospect were clearly driven by the concerns of the moment.
If one thing has persisted since 2020 it is a shared acknowledgement that systems we assumed were stable can not only change but change with dizzying speed. FSG’s scenario consultants have a much easier time now making this argument to clients than we did before Covid.
Before Covid we—all of us—wanted to believe there was a stable foundation to the world, and that it could be managed. Now we have accommodated ourselves to enduring volatility and uncertainty. For strategic planners the “near term” feels nearer now than it has ever been.
Beware the fascinations of the moment
In moments of stress strategic planning may fall victim to a herd mentality. We may find ourselves thinking what everyone else is thinking because everyone else is thinking it.
In 2025, are we once again over warping our perspective on the things that have our attention right now in the same way we did with Covid? Five years from now will we look back and realize that what we were calling “strategic foresight” missed what really was changing for good, so absorbed were we by our current fascinations?
In 2025, for example, political volatility and broken precedents are the norm, not just in the United States but around the world. To give another example, disruptive artificial intelligence is our preoccupation just as Covid was in 2020.
It may be that we will look back and see how the political tumult of this moment contained the seeds of a more lasting counterreaction rooted in the desire of most people for healthy stability. Or maybe AI turns out to be just another useful technology and not a monster that eats the world.
It is not hard imagining a scenario, for example, in which power-hungry AI data centers drive developments in cheap energy, which will support the desire for healthy stability. That sort interplay happens all the time and is far from predictable.
As we sit here today these scenarios may seem unlikely. But so did so much else about the past five years that, in retrospect, we see now was inevitable.
Predictions—even scary predictions—may give us the false comfort of believing we can manage uncertainty and know the future. We do not know the future.
Whatever the future brings, will our minds be flexible and ready? What is your forecast for that?
Thoughtful essay. It’s definitely true that our present preoccupations frequently blind us to the fact that situations change — because of counter-actions or because societally we adjust to disruptions. This reminds me also of the traumatic and confusing post-9/11 environment when supposedly “everything has changed.” Clearly not everything changed, as big a crisis at the time that it was. But some disruptions DO have a truly transformative impact. (AI could be one.) The challenge is to avoid binary bias — all good or bad, or all disruptive or steady state. Change often contains both truly disruptive elements for some sectors and more manageable elements for others. I believe this is how we’ll look back on the AI era.
I agree with your observation about the binary reflex in most predictions: the future will be this or that.
The past reveals itself to us as a collection of nuanced collisions. We can’t know the future the way we know the past, of course. But we can take the lesson that our forecasts should be developed with a rigorous imagination, rooted in data, not our in our preoccupations of the moment.
Except that there’s no data on the future!
Excellent point… there needs to be thought beyond data. Data always comes from some sort of algorithm. Any predictive algorithm is at best an oversimplification. It will always be wrong. The only way to truly capture the full variability of plausible outcomes is to imagine entirely different algorithms.
Herbert Stein’s Law states that “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” This principle implies that trends or situations that are unsustainable will eventually come to an end without the need for intervention. Stein formulated this law to highlight the inevitability of change in economic conditions. It serves as a reminder that certain behavior patterns cannot persist indefinitely.
Herb, being an economist was not someone one went to for comfort. And though the “stop” was certain the actual nature of the “stop” most certainly was not. Kevin’s reminiscence and insight are more nuanced than Herb’s but equally sage. The future is rarely more the same.
What would Herbert Stein say about the contemporary threats to liberal economics? That they will run out of steam, and that we’ll return to a status quo ante? Or is it that liberal economics itself has run its course? I guess we’re searching for the nature of the “stop” you refer to.
Stein had a faith that markets—however we employ that term—eventually get it right. The hard part is knowing how long eventually will take. It may be messy along the way. Perhaps that’s the job for organizations: to surg the messiness and be ready to make the most of it.
This is spot on, especially the observation that we are much more likely to consider mass instability post-COVID than before, even if it’s not enduring instability. We live in a world of plasticity; when stretched/bent, systems don’t snap back to exactly the way they were, especially when bent severely. After 9/11, we didn’t stop traveling by air or going to large public events, but the way we did certainly changed. We didn’t stop going to the office or shaking hands after COVID, but Zoom, remote work, and the Obama fist bump found a tipping point of acceptance. When analyzing future trends or impacts I think it’s important to consider the types of things with heavy ballast that will draw the system back towards stability (e.g., the human need for social interaction). We do this not with the assumption they’ll forever be the same, but that they will be the canvas that receives a new coat of paint. We just need to explore what colors they get painted.
Many decades ago I was doing international travel forecasting for AMEX based on economic data. In the historic data there was a terrorist event at a European airport in Vienna ((I believe). This event resulted in a significant fall in international travel. My analysis showed that it took about six months for the travel.vilume to return to level that my economic data was suggesting was normal. Based on that I always assumed that the memory of the American public was six months at best.
Your comment is making me think that, as much as our forecast of dramatic change may be off, our recollections of the past may be equally lacking in nuance.
If we were to teleport someone from September 10, 2001 or from March 2019 to our present I wonder if they would be surprised at the differences to which we have simply adapted ourselves. Because adaptation is what humans do.
As Robert Frost observed, “The past is made simple by the loss of detail.”
A timely and provocative piece. I shall echo what my co-commentators have said. It underscores the danger of considering trends in isolation, rather than considering their second- or third-order effects and that their major effects are likely only realized when there are cross impacts with others. But Covid was unique in that it provided for everyone virtually everywhere a real loss of control, and an enforced quite lengthy period of reflection and in many cases a reevaluation of their lives. Think how often you hear people in various institutions saying “Oh yeah, that started with Covid and hasn’t been the same since”.
Agreed. I would only add how hard it can be to get people to imagine the impact, or multiple impacts, of those second- or third-order effects.
The idea that the collisions and combinations of (seemingly) unrelated phenomena beyond the current operating environment can be considered with rigor can be a hard sell. That is not because they can be predicted. It is because the work of considering their meaning for the organization readies the management team for opportunities it never imagined.
Covid was certainly unique. But so were other events in history that made people say “Things will never be the same” after this.
Sometimes that was true. More often, I suspect, the really durable changes—maybe as you are suggesting—were slower to evolve and were only evident with the passing of times. And probably did not unfold in the ways people living through a great upheaval predicted.
Great piece. Interesting to think about what the top preoccupations of various eras were in their own moments. In the 1960s, “the population bomb” was going to doom India to eternal poverty. The Cold War was an unquestionable fact of life until the very end of the 1980s. In the 2000s, the U.S. “debt bomb” was going to destroy the United States. And climate change has been, until recently, the preoccupation of thought leaders. Now India is seen as having an advantage over China due to its growing population and China’s shrinking one; the Cold War disappeared without a shot fired; debt has grown and grown, with little noticeable effect on the U.S.’s relative standing so far; and even with the effects of climate change more and more inescapable, very little is actually being done to forestall it. AI seems to be the new flavor of the month. We badly need multiple scenarios for AI based on a full spread of potential outcomes, not just “bad” and “good,” but along the lines of “constructively transformative,” “destructively transformative,” “business as usual,” and “bubble” – with some scenarios including elements of each. China’s “inevitable” rise could use scenarios as well – a very insightful column by a China expert last month cast some doubt on that prospect (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/13/opinion/china-politics-social-public-mood.html). Maybe most important, we need to be identifying critical drivers and dimensions of the future that we have hitherto ignored. And “old” determinants of change – debt, climate, cold war, population – can sometimes come back to bite us.
Your post makes me think we are suffering from a collective form of SADD — Strategic Attention Deficit Disorder. I wholly agree that those “old” forces for change that we worried about 10, 20 or more years ago could come back to haunt us. In fact, I’m sure of it. Risks around climate, debt and population (both increase and decline, depending) are not going away.
I like this comment a lot. It offers the bones of a structured process for thinking about the dynamics of our world that can feel big to us that we cannot think about them clearly. And certainly not in combination with other large events that will, inescapably, collide.
I especially like your suggestion that just because we stop thinking about something all the time does not mean it has gone away. The meanings of the examples you offer are independent of the attention we give them.
Actually, no, what I just said is untrue. If we interact with a change driver we may alter its nature. The “debt bomb” scare of the 1990s that you mention might be a good example.
This is something scenario planning is good: Surfacing big drivers of change we may not be looking at. In doing that perhaps we harness them to our ends. Or maybe just duck them.
So, if uncertainty remains with us, what, if anything, is enduring? The seven deadly sins are no doubt candidates, especially Greed, sadly. As are their counterparts such as altruism, compassion, empathy, trust – most of which are actually more powerful motivators, but often less reliably present. I would add another suggested by a true renaissance man, “Bud” Baldwin – the search for human freedom. Although, unlike much of today’s take on “freedom,” Bud’s version was very much of the Enlightenment – That seeking your own “good” has one absolutely constraint: you may not harm another nor hinder another person’s search for freedom.
In partial answer to Pat Marren’s question of what determinants to study in an effort to define scenario conditions and manage system uncertainties – Perhaps we should look to those factors that enhance or constrain greed or altruism, or especially freedom of action? That sounds daunting to me, but I think the effort to manage future uncertainties and ambiguities is, indeed, becoming more challenging. And, because it is, Kevin is right about how alluring simple “predictions” become.
When we immerse clients in a scenario world we always remind them to bear in mind the constants of human nature—all the ones you name and a few others. Falling in love, worrying about the safety of our kids, dreaming our ambitions. We are minding them that our choices are not solely a function of our economics or geographies. The logic of believing that they are is illusory.
Even if they are not necessarily rational our enduring human natures are drivers of change. They are, as you argue, dependable features of every present.
Interesting things happen when our not-necessarily-rational nature engages with big, blinding moments like Covid. Whether out of self-defense or foolish hope our emotions flood our prefrontal cortex, distorting our perception of facts.
I offer in evidence the predicted end of handshakes being made five years ago. I have shaken three hands already this morning and it is barely ten a.m. Try and stop me.
This is a really helpful thread. I would love Kevin’s thoughts on what role nostalgia might be playing around the things that didn’t change or “rebounded” – did nostalgia contribute to a reset? Nostaligia certainly carries downsides.
Kevin’s predictions and reflections may also be a form of social physics (Alex Pentland), the desire of humans to seek community to advance ideas and change. Despite the intense isolation imposed by COVID, it is not the natural human state (at least for the moment).
As Tom and the FSG know, I have also been fascinated by the field of Cliodynamics and the writings of Peter Turchin about the cycles (“secular trends”) societies have experienced for centuries. He has suggested we are experiencing a disintegrative crisis phase, partly due to the forces Tom Thomas notes. For example, in this phase per Turchin, there are higher numbers of elites with factionalization and conflict; high corruption; and high income inequality.
I am intrigued by the idea of nostalgia in this context.
Nostalgia has its etymological root in the ancient Greek word “algos,” which means pain. Even those old Greeks felt pain at the experience of change—maybe not because alteration from the past is, necessarily, bad. But because the alteration is simply different from what we know. Most of us resist that. I have worked with enough client teams to know the truth of this.
I take your point about the isolation produced by Covid. I wonder, though, if a tendency to resist change in preference for a world we already know (even if the more familiar world stinks) is not encouraged more by group emotions than by solitary ones. I honestly don’t know the answer. But I think it’s the second.