What keeps me up at night? Two strategists reply

This article is brought to you thanks to the collaboration of The European Sting with the World Economic Forum. Author: Karen Karniol-Tambour, Head of Investment Research, Bridgewater Associates Daria Krivonos, CEO, Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies

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Nearly 300 of the world’s leading strategy executives and futurists are meeting at the World Economic Forum’s Industry Strategy Meeting. This is part of our mission to drive multistakeholder collaboration to tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges. We caught up with two strategists attending the meeting to ask: what keeps them up at night?

Karen Karniol-Tambour, Head of Investment Research, Bridgewater Associates

Our core societal role as an investment industry is to help people save, but there is a growing savings crisis in many countries. Savings mechanisms that rely on individuals’ decision making are increasingly common, relying on individuals to choose to save rather than to spend from a young age, and to choose how to invest their savings. But we haven’t made commensurate investments in helping people with these difficult choices, and with this shift we lose the benefits that come from pooling risk across individuals.

I think that Australia and Canada are great examples of doing it right – government-mandated so saving is automatic, managed by professionals with little political pressure, and pooling risk across people and generations.

Daria Krivonos, CEO of Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies (CIFS)

We live in a time of upheaval. The world is undergoing a period of disruptive change, and many of the conditions and norms we have long taken for granted are challenged. CIFS sees four threats to the global status quo that we refer to as ‘Crumbling Pillars’ – a global backslide from democratic institutions and values, the end of Western technological dominance, Western-led globalization, and accelerating environmental change. Strategists and decision-makers often significantly underrate the risk of collapse from complex systems (markets, economies, nation states, institutions, global supply chains) undergoing rapid paradigm shifts. The world is more fragile than we think.