Shift Happens
This week in Davos, the zeitgeist is moving from crisis to resilience
More than 100 international governments and more than 2,500 global business, cultural and humanitarian leaders are gathering in Davos, Switzerland this week to attend the 54th annual World Economic Forum, still the world’s premiere global public-private sector event and one that annually both captures and sets the year’s cultural, business and intellectual zeitgeist.
This year’s attendees— a cohort of top social activists, government policy wonks, climate scientists, AI entrepreneurs and business innovators— will again mostly be spending the week schmoozing, conferencing and networking in the hallways between big-think sessions covering familiar themes. [One plenary panel this year is called “Satellites are Storytellers” and a few other sessions ask well-worn questions that answer themselves. One panel set for later this week asks, “Is Generative AI the Steam Engine of the Fourth Industrial Revolution?”]
WEF may not sound poised for much action, but quite a few attendees this year say conference organizers are being uncharacteristically aggressive in their efforts to encourage more collaborative work among attendees to ease what some in Davos are calling the “perma-crisis” now enveloping all parts of the world in ways large and small. “People, societies and companies are facing the reality of a world in transformation, with tragic violence in the Middle East and deep structural shifts clearly afoot from climate change to artificial intelligence,” one of the pamphlet papers in the WEF welcome folders says.
“…Last year’s buzzwords here were ‘crisis’ and ‘poly-crises.’ This year? The theme is ReBuilding Trust and … we need to instill a measure of collective agency. It is necessary to start restoring trust on three fundamental levels: into the future, within societies and among nations….and to bring the leaders of government, business and civil society together in search of solutions without much further delay,” the pamphlet adds.
Davos conference organizers have at least a few reasons, beyond the metastasizing conflicts in Israel/Gaza and Ukraine this year, to get a little pushy:
This year, autocracy is on the ballot globally. More voters than ever in history—roughly 49% of the global population— will head to the polls this year, in 64 countries. And while 43 nations are expected to hold free and fair elections, 28 don’t meet the conditions required for a democratic vote, and eight of the 10 most populous countries in the world, including India, Mexico and the U.S., are fighting politically-motivated efforts this year to suppress voter participation and discourage free speech. (Source: The Democracy Index of the Economist Intelligence Unit)
Public trust in our global institutions remains very low. The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer released Monday in advance of the WEF conference shows that while public perception of innovation is positive, a majority of respondents believe AI might be mismanaged or outright weaponized, with 59% of respondents saying government regulators, chiefly in Western democracies, lack adequate understanding of emerging technologies to regulate them effectively. Again this year, the only trusted sector in the massive Edelman survey, by 63% of respondents, is Business, scoring ahead of NGOs (59%) and far ahead of Government (51%)—and even farther ahead (no surprise there) of the Media (50%). The 32,000 respondents to Edelman’s 2024 survey based their thinking on the perception of which sector is more competent and ethical, and able to manage change in our social values.
New narratives beyond doom scrolls are needed to help build more trust and convey the urgency of the collaboration needed between policy makers, business leaders, government agencies and cultural strategists to design for resilience. “Society is changing too quickly and not in ways that benefit me,” the Edelman survey shares as one of the sentiments expressed by a majority of its respondents. WEF attendees and leaders locally and globally, its organizers say, need to catch this wave early.
Now+Next is the name I’m giving to a new grad class I’m designing and plan to teach later this year at Columbia to help emerging leaders start working out how to move similarly forward with new rules for rebuilding trust with a bias toward action.
There is, of course, no one-size-fits-all checklist of new tools to share, whether you’re a global leader or a grad student in New York exploring resilience strategies and narratives. I can’t take credit for the name I’m giving the class, as it was inspired by Marshall Ganz, the veteran community organizer who famously teaches three story forms at Harvard’s Kennedy School: a Story of Self (about individual purpose); a Story of Us (about what makes a group of people become a community) and a Story of Now, about how communities, networks and causes share stories and solid core narratives about what they believe, so as to formulate choices and motivate action.
Just after the pandemic, I had Ganz speak to my graduate nonprofit media and management students, and afterwards, we added a new story form to his media mix: A Story of Next. And it stuck. The pandemic, as we know now, shifted everyone’s plans and realities in both small and huge ways, and also inspired creatives, storytellers and social innovators to reload, refresh and reimagine.
Focusing on rebuilding trust and resilience as a goal is a start, but it will take more than encouraging a more adaptive culture in a storm. It will take collaboration across communities to similarly reload, refresh and reimagine what’s possible.
Andrew Zolli, author of the prescient 2012 book, Resilience, is attending this year’s WEF and posted earlier this morning from Davos that “early threats are haunting early conversations here this year … but alongside the whispered trepidation, there are currents of hope, a determination to bolster multilateralism and collaboration, and a bias now toward action.”
He will be joining a session later today focused on ‘AI for a Resilient World: Innovating Social and Economic Transformation” — what he acknowledges is “a dry title for a critical topic exploring how we use these superpower tools to bolster resilience— the ability to persist, recover and even thrive amid disruption, and to help some of the world’s most vulnerable.”
It should be a great conversation. In his 2012 book, Andrew said:
“There are no finish lines here and no silver bullets. Resilience must be continuously refreshed and committed to because there is no single recipe for every circumstance that will come next. We must redesign our institutions, embolden our communities, encourage innovation and experimentation, and support our people in ways that will help them be prepared to cope with surprises and disruptions, even as we work to fend them off.”
A week in Davos won’t make any of this happen, nor quickly, but changing the narrative now about what’s possible, whether by the leaders in Davos this week or by you and us in our own work, will definitely help to get us all moving in the right direction.
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