1 What other ‘uncertainties’ might have been considered beyond the two finally considered here (use the headings of political, economic, social, technological, ecological and legal)?In the first months of the covid-19 crisis, as businesses around the world were coping with sales collapses and emergency moves online, Deloitte and Salesforce used scenarios to explore how the pandemic could accelerate or redirect social and economic change over the next three to five years. They chose this period because organisations’

immediate reactions were likely to impact their future opportunities in whatever the ‘next normal’ would be after the crisis.

First of all, the Deloitte/Salesforce team identified 24 key uncertainties regarding the future, under the headings of the medical nature of the disease itself, social impacts, technological aspects, the economy, the environment and politics.

From these, they finally identified two fundamental but independent sources of uncertainty for the future: the overall severity of the pandemic and the level of collaboration within and between countries. The range of outcomes they considered for the disease itself ranged from a quick decline to a second-wave even fiercer than the first. For the level of collaboration, they contrasted coordinated responses, for example discipline on social distancing, with weak and divided responses, for example failure by governments to share information and resources.