Changing times: what organisations can learn from Brexit and the 2016 US presidential election

Last year we referred to Mark Twain’s observation that "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so." At the time of writing no one really thought the UK would vote to leave the EU. On the other side of the pond, not many people thought Donald J. Trump would stand a chance winning the Republican Presidential Nomination, and for sure, he would never, ever in a million years win the presidential election. Of course he wouldn´t. David Cameron knew the Brexit side would never win the vote, and the Republican Party knew The Don would never win the nomination. We all knew. Well, we thought we knew… Now that we know that everyone but Michael Moore were wrong, we need to learn. The only thing we know for sure is that we will make the same mistakes again because learning is not something most organisations are very good at. In chronological order, we start with Brexit.