Why the humanities are a method for moving forward with confidence
By Mads Holme and Katy Osborn
Across industries, leaders are facing a familiar disorientation. “It feels like Covid 2.0,” a CEO recently revealed to us. That sentiment is backed by data: the VIX index spiked to pandemic-era levels in early April, while according to the Financial Times, “the US Federal Reserve’s April Beige Book mentioned the word “uncertainty” 80 times – more than during the Covid pandemic.”
In recent interviews ReD Associates has conducted with global clients, senior executives are voicing a familiar concern: the future feels unreadable. As Cees de Jong, chairman of Novonesis told us, “We need to think much more in scenarios... in being ready to address the unknown or the unexpected.”
Yet while many organisations scramble to react to the immediate impacts of tariffs, AI, environmental challenges, political volatility, few are scanning the deeper and longer term societal shifts these forces may be prompting, which could have major implications on companies and industries. This is where the anthropologist’s lens offers a decisive strategic advantage.
The Power of Deep Structures
At ReD Associates, we study what social scientists call “deep structures” – the foundational patterns of meaning and behavior that organise human experience across contexts. These aren’t preferences or trends – they’re the frameworks people use to make sense of the world and organise their lives.
Deep structures typically evolve gradually, providing stability even as surface behaviors change. But during periods of significant disruption – what we call "punctuated equilibriums" – these structures can shift dramatically, creating both profound challenges and extraordinary opportunities.
For CEOs looking for a clear path ahead, these deep structures are where they can both assess risk and identify opportunity. Maersk CEO Vincent Clerc recently described one of the hardest parts of leadership today as discerning between market noise and meaningful signals. As ReD co-founder Mikkel Rasmussen highlighted back in 2020, deep structures provide not just focus in a chaotic global picture, but a method for moving forward with confidence.
Below, we explore nine deep structures we believe leaders should be paying attention to.
Nine Deep Structures in Flux
1.
Values & Priorities
How we determine what matters
What we're observing: Our research reveals an emerging pragmatism reshaping value hierarchies. People are prioritising mental wellbeing over engaging with distressing news, even when directly impacted. With AI, many acknowledge existential risks while simultaneously embracing these tools out of immediate utility.
Questions for leaders to consider: How might your offerings help customers navigate complex value trade-offs? How can your brand foster meaningful attention allocation and self-expression in an overwhelmed world?
2.
Safety & Security
How we navigate risk and trust
What we're observing: Geopolitical tensions are reshaping how people and organisations think about security at multiple levels. We're seeing a shift from globalised trust to strategic self-reliance while security concerns are becoming increasingly multi-dimensional – encompassing digital, economic, and social – leading to new patterns of collaboration and more dynamic alliance structures.
Questions for leaders to consider: How might your supply chains and partnerships need to evolve in a fragmented world? How can your organisation help customers navigate multiple dimensions of security without sacrificing opportunity?
3.
Public vs Private
How we manage boundaries
What we're observing: Traditional lines between public and private are blurring. People readily share sensitive information with AI tools – data they would guard from human strangers. Companies that have built business models on traditional privacy exchanges will find both challenges and opportunities as these norms evolve.
Questions for leaders to consider: How might your customer experience evolve as privacy becomes more contextual? What new forms of value might emerge as the privacy-for-convenience exchange is renegotiated?
4.
Sense of Scale
How we experience proximity and relevance
What we're observing: As global systems grow increasingly complex, we're documenting a psychological retreat to the local alongside AI-enabled hyperindividualisation. This paradoxical combination will fundamentally reshape how businesses build and communicate value.
Questions for leaders to consider: How do you build brands that can scale globally while adapting to both local contexts and individual preferences? How will you maintain coherent meaning across divergent experiences, particularly within large organisations?
5.
Finding Belonging
How we connect with others
What we're observing: AI is rewriting connection norms in profound ways. Our research indicates a rapidly decreasing stigma around AI relationships – with people discovering unique advantages like judgment-free interaction and perfect recall of personal details. This creates a paradoxical effect: potentially increasing isolation while offering compelling alternatives that many find satisfying.
Questions for leaders to consider: How might your brand help people navigate these new connection landscapes? What new business opportunities around connection might emerge as AI reshapes our understanding of belonging?
6.
Rituals & Routines
How we structure time and meaning
What we're observing: We're witnessing temporal acceleration resembling what sociologists studying China's development called "compressed modernisation" – where transformations that once took generations now occur in months. This temporal acceleration will likely compress product adoption cycles, challenge traditional cohort models, and shift our very experience of time.
Questions for leaders to consider: How might your growth strategy evolve if adoption cycles continue to compress? How can you help customers find moments of meaning in an accelerating world?
7.
Authority & Expertise
How we validate knowledge
What we're observing: As information abundance makes discerning what matters more difficult, we're seeing a return to embodied knowledge and tacit understanding. Traditional credentials are losing value as AI replicates their associated knowledge, while direct experience gains new significance as a marker of genuine human expertise. Meanwhile we're seeing a growing premium on authentic relationship-building – and by extension signifiers like relatability or authenticity – as a way to ration one’s trust and attention. Gen AI chatbots are capitalising on this shift, building context-enabled, human-like relationships with users to quickly become critical thought partners in their knowledge journeys.
Questions for leaders to consider: How might your organisation validate and signal expertise in an AI-abundant world? How can you harness tacit knowledge that can't be easily replicated by machines? How might ways of building and sustaining trust be modified?
8.
Pathways & Discovery
How we navigate choices and find our way
What we're observing: Generative AI is poised to fundamentally transform how people discover, get inspired, and make choices. Traditional search-based navigation is rapidly giving way to conversational discovery that collapses previously distinct phases of the consumer journey. But as algorithmic curation becomes more sophisticated, people may increasingly treasure moments of genuine surprise and the distinctive texture of human judgment. This tension between efficiency and serendipity will no doubt create new challenges and opportunities in how brands guide discovery.
Questions for leaders to consider: How might your discovery experience evolve as navigation shifts from search to conversation? What happens when AI becomes both the primary channel and interpreter of your brand's value proposition?
9.
Temporal Orientation
How we relate to past and future
What we're observing: The acceleration of change is creating new tensions between preservation and progress. People and brands are simultaneously seeking both anchoring traditions and radical reinvention, creating a temporal paradox in decision-making. Organisations that once planned in years now navigate multiple time horizons simultaneously, while individuals increasingly seek timeless experiences amid rapid change.
Questions for leaders to consider: How might your offerings bridge the gap between heritage and innovation? How can your strategy accommodate multiple time horizons?
Building Strategy In Sync With Deep Structures
Understanding and mapping these shifting deep structures – as opposed to reacting to the noise – provides a strategic advantage that goes beyond reactive planning. It allows for anticipatory positioning that meets emerging human needs before they're fully articulated, and positions organisations as trusted partners in navigating a transformed world.
The most successful organisations will:
Map the Shifts: Get beyond surface level data and insights, to understand how these structures and others are evolving in your key markets and contexts
Spot the Gaps: Identify threats and untapped opportunities created by these structural shifts
Rethink Where to Play and How to Win: Develop products that respond to deeper reorganisations of meaning
Build for Adaptation: Create organisational structures flexible enough to evolve as these deep structures continue to shift
As a US-based CEO speaking around the time of the financial crisis warned: “With the financial crisis we started to see a turning point,” he said, “but we saw it only as a financial crisis, not as a consumer crisis. We saw the signs of change but in the boardroom we simply didn’t believe them.”
By embracing the anthropological lens, leaders gain the ability to see beyond immediate disruptions to the fundamental reorganisations of meaning that will define tomorrow's opportunities. To navigate an increasingly complex and unpredictable world, the humanities provide a method for moving forward with confidence.