In June last year The World Today carried an article – ‘The Lost Art of Leadership’ – on how government and corporate leaders were failing to cope with an increasingly unpredictable world. The authors, Nik Gowing and Chris Langdon, opened with the almost unthinkable ideas that Britain might vote to leave the European Union and Donald Trump could be sitting in the Oval Office.
Both those events came true, and Britain and the EU are now faced with a challenge that few policy-makers had taken seriously. So what has been learned in recent months about overcoming the barriers to effective foresight − groupthink, institutional conformity, risk aversion and short-termism – which Gowing and Langdon identified?
