,As we struggle in many nations with Covid-19 and begin in some more advanced societies with the slow recovery from the Covid 19 pandemic, we have to look at what our nations have gravitated to and look for what has changed and how we adapt to the enormous changes that have taken place. In the book “We Got Mojo” published a few years ago I made it clear that in our world there is one group of things that drive our world and I call them Megatrends. These drive commerce, investments, job creation, and education of future leaders. Megatrends, can be defined as global, sustained macro-economic forces of development that impact business, the economy, society, culture and personal lives thereby defining our future world and its ever increasing pace of change. Megatrends are the hurricanes that shape and reshape our road to growth. Surviving Covid-19 has brought us one of these hurricanes, probably the most powerful one in most of our life times. Humanity’s well being and literally our survival depends on how we listen to this hurricane.

Here is my list of megatrends especially for those nations that are now in the later stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. For those still in its midst the only megatrend at this time must be “survival”.

Ten of the Post Pandemic Megatrends

1. The speed of change will continue to increase, disrupting life in its wake. As the speed of change increases, the emphasis will be less on owning assets and more on the use of these assets.
2. ESG is expected to be a major driving force in all business heretofore. ESG, of course stands for integrating into all businesses to focus on sound Environmental Protection, a Socially responsible approach to enterprise management and an open and progressive set of Governance practices. This will create a clear opportunity for businesses involved in the betterment of our planet, and create more open opportunities for many people left behind in prior business cycles.
3. Of course one of the hot megatrends especially in the more advanced nations will be an increasing focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and communications to ensure improved human to human, human to machine and machine to machine connectivity. More and more networks will have to be created and must be robust, agile and sufficiently fast to drive communications, industrialization, entertainment, drug discovery, drones, driverless vehicles, machine learning, and basically all aspects of our lives. They will serve to run our human infrastructure.
4. Recycling, and reuse will come alive as we continually focus on extending the lives of all products with an ever growing drive to eliminating waste in all production and product-use cycles.
5. Clean fuels and electricity availability, will help the world’s living and working conditions to improve. The world needs to increase its focus on reducing carbon emissions in total and at the same time ensuring efficiency of power transmission and modernization of all facets of power delivery.
6. The pandemic has brought into focus the importance of health, healthy living, healthy eating, exercise , the importance of leisure and wellness to leading a balance life.
7. AI and IoT will lead to new drug discoveries, new vaccination technologies and the production of a myriad of new drugs. AI and IoT will also play a key role in leisure activities especially in the more advanced societies.
8. Dealing with information in the vast quantities thrown at us every day and sorting out what is disinformation will be ever more difficult.
9. Changes of the current educational system to a more effective and efficient educational system that teaches people to think and analyze different points of view will present great opportunities for development of new tools and approaches. Education needs to become balanced, cost effective, flexible, relevant and as human as possible. We need to create approaches to education that do not create enormous intergenerational debt, debt to the nation and debt to individuals.
10. We all need to deal with polarization. Various groups in the world have a mission to create polarization to their advantage. Individuals and governments need to understand and listen to various different point of views and explain decisions made to the various groups with care and empathy.

These megatrends literally affect all of our day to day living, including capital investments, social priorities, legislative actions and everything humans are involve with. Let’s understand them and use this understand not for self advantage but to ensure our earth continues to be a better place for everyone to inhabit, care and enjoy. Those of us who authored “We Got Mojo!” certainly have used these and continue to do so as our Life Mantra.