If there is one thing that hit me harder than anything in 2018, it is just how crazy the world has become.

So what will 2019 bring?

Well, your guess is as good as mine but here are a few ideas to ponder…

1. Changes to the High Street

The High Street as we know it has been in decline now for a few years, but we’re reaching tipping point as for the first time online sales surpass ‘in-person’ sales and high street retailers struggle to compete. So what will we be left with? Traditional retailers will need to be innovative, provide more of an experience and a reason to go there in person in order to beat their online competitors. Expect to see more combi shop/cafes, sharing of premises, up-cycling, second hand and charity shops, service providers and co-ops where brands club together and promote local values.

2. More and Worsening Natural Disasters

With no real urgent action being taken and a very tepid outcome from the UN Climate Change Summit in Katowice, natural disasters will continue to happen with more and more disastrous consequences all around the world. If you thought 2018 was a crazy year for wildfires and flash floods, just wait for 2019. Particularly flooding as the polar ice continues to melt at an alarming rate, pouring unfathomable quantities of water into our seas every day (about 5 billion tonnes every week according to this article). Our politicians will continue to put in place policies aimed to tackle climate change but only as long as they are good for their ratings and popular. Sadly, these policies will have a distinct lack of urgency and come with very cautious and ridiculously unambitious deadlines. No change there then (despite the ever worsening natural disasters happening all around the world).

3. Trump Marches On

I have no idea how he has lasted this long, nor how he got into power in the first place, but I fear that in 2019, Trump will be even more annoying. There will be more ‘nearly got him’ stories and dirt all around him, he will probably say more offensive things and be rude to even more people, but he will continue and tweet his survival as vindication.

4. Brexit Continues to Cause Huge Division and Problems

I don’t want to make any prediction on which way it’s going to go, what kind of Brexit will happen or even if it will, but whatever happens, in every possible outcome, it will continue to dominate the political scene in Europe, have destructive impacts to our economy, way of life and relationships and cause division in the UK and beyond.

5. The Gig Economy Will Evolve

It looks like the Gig economy isn’t going anywhere. It threw up a few surprises and a few legal challenges, but it will evolve and become more accepted. Companies and governments will adapt, learn and have more answers to how the Gig Economy should fit into our way of life. Gig Economy jobs will get less miserable (those that were in the first place – not all Gig Economy jobs are, but you know, the ones that have been in the news)- with a competitive labour market and companies paying more attention to their treatment of on-demand workers. Some CEOs will find innovative ways to make gig economy workers feel as much part of the company as full time employees.

6. You’ll Have Better Access To Your Medical Records

2019 could be the year that you are able to carry around your medical data with you and have it on hand in your smart phone. Apple already announced back in Jan 2018 that it wants to effortlessly make medical records available on the iPhone and this could be the start of a trend where the data is made available across more platforms. Dr. Doug Fridsma, president and CEO of the American Medical Informatics Association makes a very good point: It’s notable that Apple — a company that does everything on its own terms, from operating systems to headphone jacks — is using the international FHIR standards for its Health app.

7. Online will surpass TV

2019 is the year when we will finally spend more time online than watching TV. The lines will finally cross. Media companies in turn will react to this trend increasing and widening the gap, providing more content via the internet to cater for our changing viewing habits. There will also be some innovative producers making programmes which prove there is still a place for scheduled shows (e.g. highly entertaining mini-series with clever cliffhangers such as the recent ‘The Bodyguard’ series) but these will be increasingly in the minority and the overall trend will be towards online and increasingly so.

8. Bye-bye Office

The 9-5 factory model will recede even further into history and the office will become far less important in 2019 as Employers continue to prioritise flexible working arrangements both in terms of time and space. This is for 3 main reasons: 1) Cost 2) Employee Satisfaction and Retention and 3) Improvement in Enabling Tech for remote working.

9. Hello Humanity

From university applications to job applications and everything in-between, applicants will be sought out not just for their qualifications, but also for their humanity, their culture, their soft-skills, their personality. This is for 2 main reasons: 1) continuing arguments about grade-inflation and general mis-trust in our education systems 2) comapnies (and universities) wanting to show a more human side and therefore looking for this in it’s applicants.

10. People Will Be More Stressed

In an ever-changing world where everything becomes possible, we will continue to be able to achieve more, but at the same time we will expect more. the world will seem to be moving at a faster pace and we will get caught up in that. Employers, media and the general public. Add to this increasing access to each other via anonymous platforms such as social media, trolling and everyone having an opinion about everything (even with limited facts) and the stress will increase.

11. Fake Will become Deep Fake

Just like deep learning, fake news will become more sophisticated and weaponised. Layered like money laundering, experts in this area will have significant influence and manage to stay one step ahead of being stopped from their purpose. ‘It doesn’t have to be true, they just have to believe it’.

12. More Diversity in The Workplace – including Neuro-Diversity

Above all else, companies want to remain competitive. They are always looking over their shoulder and watching what their competitors are doing – and any changes that give competitors the edge are soon followed. At the same time, companies often don’t want to be the first to change their long established procedures and practices often despite powerful drivers to do so. So nearly 5 years after they started publishing diversity reports, few companies have really made significant progress in hiring and maintaining a more diverse workforce. They have stuck to their old, long established ways of recruiting. In 2019 this will change, either that or companies will be made to. Companies that don’t change will become irrelevant to workers and customers. As well as a focus on the gender pay gap, there will be a focus in 2019 on the ethnic pay gap. Diversity will also begin to encompass Neurodiversity – the inclusion of people with all sorts of cognitive abilities and patterns, from ADHD and dyslexia to people on the autism spectrum.

13. AI Everywhere

Deep learning will continue to advance and be applied to more and more applications. AI will be more normalised across business and society, in one form or another it may be in every industry and every job. New jobs will be created as a result as well as changing possibilities and roles for humans in our current understanding of our existing jobs. AI skills will become very important in the job market.

14. Fragmentation of the Internet

Cyber-security will be a big deal in 2019 and there will probably be a few more scandals. Differing responses to this threat around the world have already lead to fragmentation of the internet and this will continue in 2019. China already has very tight controls on the internet with several internet-based companies banned in China (so if you’re in China you don’t get the same access to the internet as you would in other parts of the world).
Europe’s global data protection regulation (GDPR) is another example of a response to cyber-security risks which has led some companies to overreact and block their sites to European visitors. Other jurisdictions are following suit and considering data localization laws. The result will be a re-mapping of the internet across different regions and jurisdictions.

15. Something’s Gonna Happen in Space

The Space Race was all the rage a few decades ago but then it went strangely quiet. I predict that in 2019 things are going to start happening up there again. I’m not sure exactly what but there are several developments going on with Space X and Virgin’s programme, there is a kind of race between Musk and Branson already. I predict Virgin will win that one with the first space tourism happening in the next few years. What I do know is that NASA are planning to build a lunar space station enabling humans to be sent from there to and from the lunar surface. Work could potentially start on this in 2019 but their declared goal is to have this finished between 2024 and 2026.

16. Filling Your Tank Will Be A Lottery

In other words, energy prices in 2019 will remain wildly unpredictable and volatile. Maybe even more so than in 2018. One thing I noticed in 2018 is that every time I pulled into a Service Station to refill my car with Petrol, the price of the petrol has been more up and down this year than I can ever remember. I reckon 2019 could be even worse – because fossil fuels are a dwindling commodity and long term mining projects are themselves volatile – plus, the oil market consistently defies people’s attempts at predicting it, much less controlling it.

16. The End of The Combustion Engine?

Not quite. It should be but petrol companies are way too powerful to let that happen next year despite ongoing advances in the electric car market. At the same time however, the prices of greener cars will reduce as sales continue to increase and the cost of manufacture and advances in technology continue to play their part. Petrol and Diesel cars in turn will cling on for as long as they can with manufacturers offering smart modifications such as anti-smog device (reducing fuel consumption) and built-in AI to help you drive greener.

17. The Next Generation Will Be More Caring

Partly due to outrage about what is being done to the world by those in power currently, partly due to not being given a voice in huge decisions such as Brexi, partly due to being able to connect like never before via technology and social media and partly due to being more informed than young people at any other time through history. The next emerging generation will be more caring, more attuned to what’s going on in the world and more anxious to do something about it. For the first time in modern history, there will be 5 generations working side-by-side. The latest of which will enter the workforce in 2019 in meaningful numbers and they will lean in, and lean in hard. They will want to be counted. This will have all kinds of consequences such as companies ethics becoming more important, comapnies and leaders needing to take a position more than ever on various issues (because it will be increasingly expected of them) and Corporate and Social Responsibility becoming increasingly important in small and medium sized companies as well as large corporates. Where companies have previously focused on looking at the rules and the importance of compliance, they will now look more at ethics. “Having a strong set of core values, having a environment in which employees know that their voices will be heard when they have a concern, really goes beyond the ‘Can we?’ of compliance to the ‘Should we?’ of ethics.” (Katie Lawler, chief ethics officer at U.S. Bank since 2017.)

18. Global Tax Reform

There have been a number of outrages and huge companies such as Amazon, Google and Starbucks called out for tax-dodging due to their global footprint and ability to be agile in their reporting and accounting across jurisdictions to legally (if not morally) reduce their tax exposure. This practice sees billions wiped off the Treasury take of many countries and countries in Europe have tried to do something about this. The US has been more resistant not wishing to stifle the growth and success of these major companies most of which have emerged from the US originally. 2019 could be the year that something is finally done about it. The British government plans to introduce a “digital tax” of 2% on tech companies’ British revenue, fighting back against U.S. tech giants that evade taxes by domiciling their profits in Ireland or the Netherlands. The European Union’s attempt at a similar tax just petered out, but India, South Korea, Mexico, Chile and others are all working on the same idea, putting pressure on the OECD to advance on its own promise of global taxation reform. Smarter companies will help shape regulation rather than oppose it.

19. Ding ding – US vs. China

These two global superpowers will go head-to-head in 2019. The recent Huawei scandal was just the start of it. It will be a kind of cold war, fought on the technology front and it will begin in 2019 but it will last several years. This is not a trade war as the two economies are too intrinsically liked, it will be something much more subtle than that. Think cyber-security threats, propoganda, intelligence and counter-intelligence wars etc.
The Chinese have their own systems, AI, internet as do the US. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, warned in September that our online world risked a “bifurcation” into Chinese-led and U.S.-led internets.