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It’d Be a Mega-Mistake Not to Consider the Pandemic’s Megatrends

We’re All Tired, But Don’t Skip This!

We get it! We’re all fatigued with Zoom meetings, virtual happy hours, working until all hours of the night. It’s easy to just close the curtains and roll into tomorrow.

But the world has shifted in almost every way. Not considering the resulting megatrends would be a mega-mistake. If your strategic plan doesn’t consider megatrends brought on by the pandemic, we recommend revisiting your plan to adjust for your organization’s sustainability and success.

Recap: What are Megatrends?

Megatrends are macroeconomic and geopolitical forces that shape our global economy and political environment. They are the world’s biggest challenges, shifts, and opportunities that actually have very broad and deep impact.

Completing an analysis of the megatrends in your competitive, customer, and supply chain environments provides a bird’s-eye-view of what opportunities are present (that weren’t a year ago) or what threats need to be mitigated that weren’t on your radar at the beginning of 2020.

One helpful tool to use to identify megatrends is a PESTLE analysis, which is essentially a deeper dive into the external analysis portion of a SWOT.

Identify megatrends from the last year in these categories:

Why Does This Matter Right Now?

There are almost never changes in the global economy, workforce, or environment that touch every industry, business, and non-profit simultaneously. The Pandemic is a global, broad-reaching event unlike any other, and there will be winners and, unfortunately, losers.

Bottom line: capitalizing on or mitigating these megatrends could be the difference between your organization thriving or surviving. We’ve all been dealt a bad hand that’s largely out of our control. Now it’s about really looking at those cards and making the most out of the play.

What’s also inherently unique about this moment is megatrends are really easy to spot. Most often, these trends aren’t obvious without deep market analysis and intuition. Because they’re so slow-moving or in isolated pockets, we can’t always readily see them; but not this go-round.

You’d have to be living in a cave without internet, your mobile phone or any people to miss the megatrends we’ve all seen in the past 13 months. The pandemic has made these shifts as clear as day, which means you have no excuse to not consider and act on them!

Examples of Megatrends In-Play

It only took us about 10 minutes to brainstorm a few of the megatrends impacting some of our clients and their industries.

A few examples of megatrends:

Don’t Fret if You Already Have a Plan!

If you already have a plan, we aren’t recommending throwing it away just because you didn’t look at megatrends during planning.

What you do need to do is conduct your own PESTLE, then work through your goals and initiatives and note how/whether each improves your position against what’s happening in your market. Besides, it’s Q2, and you should be updating your OKRs or goals and initiatives now for the next 3 to 6 months.

Here’s what that might look like:

Up Next: A Guide to Identify and Act on Your Megatrends

In our next newsletter, we’ll guide you through identifying your industry megatrends and how you can act on them. Don’t worry, we’ll provide recommendations to incorporate them deeper into your existing plan, too!

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