1. Globalization and Regionalization
The world is more interdependent through the economy, trade, and marketing because of ease of access through travel or internet. While keeping national culture and local options, nations (or regions or cultures that are dispersed among many locations) become part of the world as a whole and thus require world-wide efforts at governance, treaties and collaborations.

2. Personalization and Collaboration
Increasingly people will want both personal service (rather than generic relationships) and ways of obtaining products or services that are unique to the person requesting it. At the same time, there is a need to work together to address common issues/problems. This changes the relationship of the organization to the individual, as employee or as customer.

3. Sustainability
Sustainability is likely to be the next defining era (like technology defines our current era). It is pervasive through all driving force topics and is generally defined as doing something today with the long term perspective in mind so you are able to continue doing it a long time without burdening future generations. Topical examples include strategic planning, workforce development, life long learning, health, security, infrastructure, spending/investment, building/maintenance, and organizational behavior (including ethics and quality).

4. Complexity and Simplicity
Everything is getting more complex, with more choices, and people look for simplicity. Some solutions are indeed simple, and some new technologies can take the complexity and hide it, so the solution appears simple. Both simplicity and complexity are likely to be guidelines for the future.

5. New Approaches and Tools.
There are many new possibilities for addressing all the driving force categories, and we have a new toolbox of devices to help do this, with many more tools and approaches yet to be discovered. Dealing with the unfamiliar is both exciting and worrisome and different people and institutions deal with the change in different ways. Conflicts in these different approaches to new possibilities will exist and need to be worked out. Often the solutions will be ‘hybrids’ where you have some of the older ways and some of the newer, each bring it’s particular strengths to the solution.