Global Literacy Part 3: Creating Local Strategies for Global Changes
By Victoria Crockford
27 January 2026
Just one quiet night.
Halfway through a two-hour game of the 2013 board game, Pandemic, with my son, I picked up a trump card. The ability to have one quiet night where cities didn't get infected, outbreaks didn't intensify, and precious direct flight actions didn't need to be used.
For a kid and a Mum who entered school age during the COVID-19 pandemic, the whole game was surreal to say the least. Reflecting on the surreal global events of the last 6 months, I chuckled darkly about my precious card. What would we give for one quiet, geopolitical earthquake-free news cycle?
But, as the latest World Economic Forum Global Risk Report outlines – no such luck.
While 2025 saw more resilience in the global economy than expected, the generalised erosion of trust continues, and concerns about armed conflict and nuclear war top the list of immediate concerns.
Also consolidating is environmental concern. It is very difficult to experience the year of floods and fires that 2025 represented in Australasia and not feel in a much more tangible way that climate change is here and now.
The short and long-term outlooks in the Global Risk Report confirmed general alarm at the potential for catastrophe.
Are strategies even worth it anymore?
It is like fire alarms are sounding all around us. How can organisations take big bets on the future in this context? How can we hope to understand stakeholders and their potential actions enough to implement engagement plans? What about audiences? What do people even believe?
The temptation when facing volatility is to either freeze or to double down on rigid five-year plans that create the illusion of control. Neither serves organisations well. The former means ceding ground to more adaptive competitors. The latter means investing heavily in strategies that may be obsolete before the ink dries.
The organisations we work with that are thriving aren't those with the most elaborate strategies – they're those with the capacity to sense change early and adapt direction while maintaining strategic intent. What's needed is navigational leadership: understanding where you're headed, staying true to values and purposes, while remaining genuinely responsive to shifting conditions.
And strategic communications isn't just supporting this capability – it is this capability.
We need to understand global conversations to make sense of local change
This is where global literacy becomes important.
Social media has overtaken traditional news as the primary information source. When Joe Rogan discusses energy policy or housing crises to 20% of American adults in a single week,2 those conversations reach New Zealand audiences instantly. When international outlets frame climate action or indigenous rights, those narratives shape domestic expectations – sometimes before we’ve fully realised their impact.
What stakeholders believe about your sector is increasingly shaped by global conversations you're not part of.
Communications professionals with global literacy provide a type of navigational leadership in your organisation that helps you with when to tack and when to hold steady (we’re not sailors, but bear with us). They can help translate the global to the local by supporting teams with:
Early signal detection of international developments that will impact your operating environment. How will your customers or constituents respond to supply chain disruption if escalation of conflict in the Middle East cuts off key shipping routes?
Stakeholder intelligence that maps how global narratives are reshaping local expectations. The erosion of the liberal world order and the rise of authoritarianism. How are voters in local elections responding?
Strategic interpretation that translates complex global dynamics into implications for your specific organisation. Oil in Venezuela and the “sale” of Greenland. What are the policy implications for the energy sector in New Zealand?
Helping you build your navigational capability
Having navigated high-stakes environments across the Middle East and now specialising in New Zealand's housing, energy, and technology sectors, we bring specific capability: interpreting global signals and translating them into adaptive strategy.
Helping you see around corners. We maintain active monitoring of international and national developments and flag early what they mean for your sector.
Navigational approaches to leadership. In New Zealand's multicultural and "we're related" environment where relationships persist across contexts, we help organisations build adaptive engagement approaches – frameworks that can adapt to changing conditions and honour trust building and strong relationships.
Senior capability that plugs into strategy formation, not just implementation. We help leadership stress-test assumptions against plausible developments.
We can’t guarantee the outcome of one quiet night. But we can provide some peace of mind that you have a team on your side, reading the risk reports, fingers to the winds of change, supporting your ability to adapt.
References
Newman, N. et al. (2025, June 17). Overview and key findings of the 2025 Digital News Report. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford. https://www.digitalnewsreport.org
Ellis, G. (2025, September). News deserts: Local journalism at risk. Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures, University of Auckland.
World Economic Forum. (2026). Global Risks Report 2026. https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2026
Baron, M. (2023, March 24). We want objective judges and doctors. Why not journalists, too? The Washington Post.
Rosen, J. (2003, September 18). The view from nowhere. PressThink. https://pressthink.org/2003/09/the-view-from-nowhere/
AUT Centre for Journalism, Media and Democracy. (2025, April 14). Trust in the news report 2025. Auckland University of Technology.