PESTLE - Drivers of Change

So let's look at where trends come from. What is the source of this disruption? And I'm going to move through this particular part. I'm not going to spend too much time in here because this is part of one of my online courses, and we go into it a lot deeper. But a lot of the changes, the disruptions that happen in our world come from the PESTLE drivers of change. And PESTLE is an acronym, and we'll go through each one of those. And there's lots of other acronyms you could look at. Some people call it STEEP or STEEPLE, or there's other versions of it. But this is a good way to look at it. We get changes that come from politics when there is a new election. Nigeria's just had an election, and a big question was like, where is the country going to be headed after this election? Who's going to come in? Which government, which party is going to win? And because of that, there could be differences and different policies and laws and things coming out of the political situation, and we experience that all around the world. So you've got political drivers of change. You've got economic drivers of change. When there's a recession, when there's news of a recession, when people talk about a recession, they start treating money differently. When there's a boom, then there's more money available. Um, when there is, you know, COVID and everybody's on lockdown and people aren't spending their money the same way, COVID had an effect, but the actual money has an effect on what can happen. And whenever we look at a country to work out how successful it is, the thing that we're looking at is their— um, I've just kind of forgot the phrase— um, GDP. Um, and so how much are they actually producing? Uh, what is, what is the economic value of that country? That is how we judge other countries, as opposed to other things like the Happiness Index. So if we look at, you know, the most successful countries, we'll think about the ones that are earning the most money. If we think about the happiest countries, we'll be talking about Finland. So there are different ways of valuing things, but we very often just refer to the economics. But there are these social changes as well, how we as society express values, express how we relate to each other. And this can encompass for us at the moment all of the conversations that have been had around gender and gender diversity and women's rights. All of these issues are issues that are reflected in society, in our values. Then obviously we have technology. Somebody comes up with a new technology, somebody launches the latest version of a really powerful artificial intelligence chatbot, and the whole world starts shaking in their boots because this technology is disrupting us. This technology is already today, 2 months after, you know, one of the latest versions was launched, is already putting people out of work. And the artificial intelligence technologies that are available are really shaking us in a very, very fundamental way. It's not just a fad. It's not just something we're hearing about. This is a powerful trend that is changing the direction of business and of society. Then we have legislation. That's the L. And legislation is really interesting because what you see here is very often changes start with technology, not necessarily start with technology, but technology is the kind of visual way we see that something has changed. So you have this technological change and then society jumps on it. So, you know, everybody's going, oh, this is how I can use it to express what is important to me. Then people are going, how do I make money out of this technology? Technology, and then the government starts going, oh, our voters are upset, so we need to do something. And then the lawmakers come in and they start trying to make laws, and a lot of those laws are very often, we're not doing this, stop, we— this is bad. And, and there's this cultural lag between the technological innovation and how government and legislation responds, and it's not always— it's not always helpful. For example, artificial intelligence, ChatGPT-4, um, 3 and 4, etc., and Italy goes and bans it. They just say no, in our country, in our borders, we're not using these things. Um, Italy also apparently banned, um, Amazon Alexa, and they banned Microsoft Azure AI, and they banned IBM's Watson. So all Italy is doing is saying we don't know what is going on, we're scared, we won't do this. And it means that the people in that country are being left behind in terms of an understanding and learning to make a response to the technological change, because the government, the politics, and the legislation have just shut it down. So you see all of these different changes and drivers respond in different ways. And then, of course, we also have kind of the environment. There are environmental changes. So, for example, COVID could have been an environmental change. We could put it under that category. There's a virus, it affects the whole world, it's a pandemic, it has this huge effect on everything. Literally how we've expressed business, how we've expressed values, how we've expressed women's rights, anybody's kinds of rights, families, everything has been challenged and changed because of that reaction to COVID. Here in South Africa, we've had very serious droughts, we've had very serious floods, and we also have— although this is probably a bit of a technology thing— we also have load shedding, as we've expressed. And while that is a technology, that the production, the generation of power is a technology, there are lots of ways we could be responding in terms of the environment which we're missing out on. So there are lots of ways how these things could engage together. So, PESTLE drivers of change, if you're just trying to say, I see something happening, I see this change is coming, where does it come from? You can try and draw it back there. What I'm hoping you will start to do is not just look at something in isolation, but try and see the history of it. Where did it come from? Because that might teach you to start identifying things earlier or finding ways to respond in ways that are more helpful for you or for your clients.