Two-decades after Stratfor began forecasting the geopolitical trends shaping our world, we now take a giant step forward with the introduction of Stratfor Worldview.
Worldview introduces an innovative, new user experience that compels readers to dig deeper into global affairs with enhanced analyses, living forecasts, interactive graphics, community forums and new global themes and topics that lift the veil on Stratfor’s underlying methodology and allow members to focus on what’s most important to them and their organizations.
To learn more about Stratfor Worldview, we sit down with Stratfor CEO Dave Sikora, Vice President of Global Analysis Reva Goujon, Editor-in-Chief David Judson and Chief Product Officer Ken Maranian in this podcast. We’ll discuss why Worldview is unique, explore what’s new and explain why we believe unbiased analysis and forecasting grounded in the study of geopolitics is more important today than ever before.
Transcript
Ben Sheen [00:00:10] Hello, and thank you for joining us for a special edition of the Stratfor Podcast, a program focused on geopolitics and world affairs from stratfor.com. I'm your host Ben Sheen. We founded Stratfor more than 20 years ago on the idea that transformative world events aren't random, but are in fact predictable. Unraveling the interconnectivity of the international system is at the core of our work as we help professionals, organizations, and the global engaged individuals make sense of an increasingly complex world. Now, two decades after Stratfor began forecasting the geopolitical trends shaping our world, we take a giant leap forward with the introduction of Stratfor Worldview, the next generation Stratfor experience. Worldview introduces an innovative, new user experience that compels readers to dig deeper into global affairs with Enhance Analysis, Living Forecasts, Interactive Graphics, Community Forums, and new Global Themes and Topics that basically lift the veil on Stratfor's underlying methodology, and allow members to focus on what's most important to them and their organizations. To learn more about Stratfor Worldview, we'll sit down with Stratfor CEO Dave Sikora, our Vice President of Global Analysis Reva Goujon, Editor in Chief David Judson, and our Chief Product Officer Ken Maranian in this podcast. We'll discuss why Worldview's unique, and explore what's new, and explain why we believe unbiased analysis and forecasting grounded in the study of geopolitics is more important today than ever before. Thanks for joining us.
Ben Sheen [00:01:46] So, here with me now I have Stratfor CEO Dave Sikora to talk about the launch of Stratfor Worldview. Now Dave, I know we're pretty excited on the product team about this new offering, but as for you personally, what are you most excited about for Worldview?
Dave Sikora [00:02:00] Oh, wow, thanks for having me today Ben, certainly the Worldview launch is the culmination of a nine month journey here at Stratfor. It's really a testament to the great work of our team across all functional areas, product team, content team, publishing. I think I'm most excited that we now have a tremendous platform from which to build Stratfor going forward, it's a fantastic technological platform, and it's a modern way for us to deliver our content and allow our members to engage with the company and engage with the analysts. And it's just truly foundational for us as we look to grow the business.
Ben Sheen [00:02:45] I think that's certainly something that we found as we've been going through Worldview is that there are tremendous opportunities for the individual subscriber, but also for clients, and certainly future business opportunities, and there are many ways in which to interface with Stratfor through Worldview now. Can you tell us a little bit about that please, Dave?
Dave Sikora [00:03:01] I would say specifically on two fronts there's some new technologies in Worldview that we're calling Forums that allow our members to engage not just with Stratfor analysts and writers, but also to engage with other Stratfor members, which is really revolutionary capabilities that we're bringing into the platform. And, the second major area is how we will deliver our content. In some cases, businesses who engage with us ask for our content in a format where they can inject into specific business process flows, and so we've architected Worldview so that we can deliver individual content pieces, or even the whole of Worldview specifically for companies and how they want to integrate it into their specific business process flows.
Ben Sheen [00:03:53] I think certainly this is an exciting change of direction, and it'll give us a lot more flexibility, and to do things we've never really been able to do before. What business outreach opportunities are you most excited for now that we have this fantastic new capability?
Dave Sikora [00:04:06] Obviously, we think that this platform is going to be a great platform for us to expand our individual and professional member base, but I also think that it significantly expands our opportunities within large enterprises and organizations in government and educational institutions, and so I'm really excited about how we're going to be able to leverage this new development and these new investments with large organizations, and with teams and staff out in the field, not just working from our offices here in Austin but having folks who can engage directly with large organizations is something we've never done before, and we're about to embark on that journey here as we launch Worldview.
Ben Sheen [00:04:50] Now Dave, clearly as Stratfor's CEO, you have access to our special sauce, so you know how good it tastes. If you were going to send a message to other CEOs and other executive officers about our unique offering, what would you want to get across to them to let them know how good this is?
Dave Sikora [00:05:05] Well, I would say that if you look around the media landscape right now, you're going to find a gravitational pull either to the left or to the right. In most media, if not all media organizations, when companies are looking to make critical business decisions, they need fact based analysis. And, when you boil down what we do from our specific methodology that's been honed for the last 20 years, we have a unique and differentiated offering that's based on that methodology, where we can really help in the decision support cycle for large organizations, and really provide that fact based analysis that doesn't exist anywhere else in the market.
Ben Sheen [00:05:46] Fantastic, and certainly, we're all looking forward to being able to present this unique new offering now through Worldview. Dave, thank you so much for joining me to talk through Worldview.
Dave Sikora [00:05:56] Ben, it's a pleasure, thank you very much.
Ben Sheen [00:06:04] As we began to build Worldview, one thing was clear. We wanted to open the door, so to speak, into how Stratfor sees the world. That meant finding ways to bring readers deeper into the process, to give them greater insights into our geopolitical methodology, and help them understand the interconnectivity of the global system the same way that our analysts and editors do. One of the ways we did this was by introducing new Global Themes and Topics. To learn more about Worldview's new themes and topics, I sat down to speak with Stratfor Vice President of Global Analysis, Reva Goujon.
Reva Goujon [00:06:35] One of the big things that we were advocating for which came through in the final design is this idea of ensuring that our readers are tied into the core Stratfor narratives that we follow. Unless you came to our office and sat in on one of our analyst meetings, you really wouldn't have a good sense of how everything that we cover, every little piece of information that we publish to the longer, in depth pieces, are all tied to a foundational narrative that we have, and so that's what we're calling the themes and the topics, to make it much easier for the readers to actually track those narratives, those bigger themes. And, most importantly, see how they're evolving, you know? 'Cause every day, you're hit by all these bits of information, it's a lot of noise. How do you filter it out? But how do you take that one statement, you know, from a Venezuelan official, or that one data point out of Kazakhstan and make sense of it? And that's the thing, we want to thread that needle, take that data point and thread it all the way back to this narrative that we have that explains where these trends are playing out over the course of many, many years.
Ben Sheen [00:07:51] These themes have been part of the conversations we have here at Stratfor for years, and connect so much of the analysis we produce. But on the website, readers have generally consumed our analysis organized by a few broad topics rather than by region. How is that changing?
Reva Goujon [00:08:05] Well, you know, it is useful to still be able to look for information, depending on your interests by region, and that is still, of course, a capability that we have. But, we know that the world is extremely interconnected, right, how do you know what is happening in Venezuela without understanding what's happening in the internal Chinese economic system to understand what's the fate of those Chinese loans to Venezuela? How do you look at the Syrian battlefield without understanding the U.S.-Russian negotiation, and Turkey's dialogue with the United States and with Russia? There's so many data points that you have to connect, so many trends that you have to connect, and so that connectivity is a big reason why we want to allow our readers to engage with our content by themes, by topics, so that you're following the story with us.
Ben Sheen [00:08:58] One of the themes Worldview members will now be able to track is Commodities, a cautionary tale. And I think Venezuela's an excellent example because the commodity challenges faced by Venezuela are not confined to their borders.
Reva Goujon [00:09:10] No, and I mean, commodities are one part of the macro economic picture, right? But how do we look at, for example, the strengthening dollar and its impact around the world? You know, so you have to be able to look at these issues from a global lens and see what the reverberations are, who's actually shaping the policy, where the constraints are, and then what are the second order and third order effects. For example, if the U.S. and China are engaged in a trade battle, we have to then understand okay, what does that mean for the U.S.' biggest allies, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, who are extremely vulnerable to that, how does that then play into the internal crisis within each of these countries? So, you know, Japan's reactivation in the region, and it's regional resurgence, South Korea's internal political crisis, and how it's going to play a bigger role within this regional alliance, and so on. So, everything comes back to a deeper theme, and that's what we want to make easier for our readers to very quickly see how those day to day events actually all thread into a much bigger and much more complex picture.
Ben Sheen [00:10:20] So, as people are looking at Worldview for the first time, and let's say they're unfamiliar with our work of providing geopolitical analysis, forecasting, and strategic insight on global trends. What do you feel they need to understand about how Stratfor is different from other organizations they may be familiar with?
Reva Goujon [00:10:36] So, when a lot of people consume news and developments in foreign affairs, typically, you're reading journals and news sites with independent authors, right, with by lined pieces, and a lot of that comes off as stand alone pieces covering a story. From where we sit, nothing exists in a vacuum, right? So, Stratfor has a view of how the world is shaping up. It's a view that is passionately agnostic, you know, we don't take a political bias toward what should happen. What we care about is what will happen. So, applying our geopolitical methodology, we're able to suss out what is going to shape a country's behavior regardless of the personality at the helm, no matter how contentious or controversial that personality is, no matter what ideology is prevailing at the time, just over the course of history, what are those structural constraints that have shaped that country's behavior, and the international system at large. And so, by bringing our readers into this much bigger, you know, wider assessment on how the world works, I think that's going to provide some clarity to allow our readers to make sense of the world the way we do.
Ben Sheen [00:12:00] Thank you for speaking with us today, Reva. Reva Goujon is Vice President of Global Analysis at Stratfor. If you followed Stratfor for any length of time, you'll be familiar with our quarter, annual, and even our decade forecasts for key geopolitical developments around the world. What you may not be familiar with, though, is that all of our analysis tie back into those central forecasts. Worldview introduces the ability for us to make that interconnectivity clear, and for our readers to connect and track key trends like never before using our new Living Forecasts. To learn more about the new Living Forecasts in Stratfor Worldview, and what that means for our work, we spoke with Editor in Chief David Judson. David, how does Stratfor's focus on forecasting global trends set us apart?
David Judson [00:12:52] Stratfor is a forecasting company. We report on the future, on what's going to happen, we report on trends, unlike the conventional media, we don't report on what happened, and we don't report on events. I mean sure, we pay attention to events, but the focus is broad trends. The nature of the architecture of our website and our publication today has really been contoured around the architecture of conventional journalism, distinct reports that don't track back in any concrete way to the forecasts that we do annually and quarterly. Similarly, the forecasts are kind of static documents that pop up once a quarter. The idea is to connect these two, that every analysis we do is derived from and amplifies the forecast that we've made, and the analysis is to elucidate the evolving trends that we've forecast. And we've never been able to do that effectively in a way that's truly coherent to our readers in the way we want, because of the architecture of the website. So, it's a radical new design, but I think it will radically accelerate the understanding of the directionality of a lot of trends in the world, in ways we were not able to capture before.
Ben Sheen [00:14:21] David, I understand that in the new Living Forecasts on Worldview, analyses that relate back to the forecast will be automatically connected for our members, meaning that if they read our annual forecast in January, for instance, they could see a whole new set of related analysis linked within the same forecast if they check back, let's say, in June. What does this mean for the experience of the reader?
David Judson [00:14:41] What the architecture seeks to do is tell an unfolding story. Each trend is a book, and each analysis is a chapter in the book. To date, we haven't really been able to illustrate that, and make that part of a coherent whole. So, I think the goal is here, if we're talking about the disintegration of Europe, or the shift in political trends from right to left or left to right in Latin America or other countries, or the move from multilateral trading relationships to bilateral trading relationships, that being able to see where that trend started and where it is now in the context of a trend will be immediately apparent and transparent to the reader. And, I think that's a fundamental shift. It's not really a shift in the way we forecast, but it is a fundamental shift in the way we share the underlying methodology of our forecasting with our readership.
Ben Sheen [00:15:41] I know I've been part of this process of pulling this all together for some time now, but even I'm excited to share this with our readers for the first time.
David Judson [00:15:48] Yeah, I'm very excited, it's been a long walk to get this up and going, but it is unique, it is not like anything that's been done before. And I think, you know, maybe it's worth kind of expounding on that briefly, that technologies generally iterate from what came before. So, the internal combustion engine of 100 years ago, if you set it aside the engine in a brand new Lexus, it looks a lot different, but you can actually sort of see how this evolved. Some technologies just kind of appear without antecedents, the jet engine is one, lasers another, there's no antecedent. And Stratfor, the idea of publishing using an intelligence model, a forecasting model, is without precedent. And there were no tools, so we borrowed the tools from, you know, an allied and parallel industry and applied them to what we do, and we did okay. But, it was not optimal, and now I think we're going to have the original, unique tools for our product, our work, which is in itself unique and original, and I think marrying 20 years of unique methodology to an appropriate and radically different suite of technologies kind of finally gives us the opportunity to deliver on our promise to our readers, and it's frankly very exciting.
Ben Sheen [00:17:18] David, thank you for joining us today. David Judson is Stratfor's Editor in Chief. One of the key people who make Stratfor Worldview possible is our Chief Product Officer Ken Maranian. Ken, from the subscribers who've been with Stratfor from the beginning, to those who may have just recently discovered us, what can they expect when they visit Worldview for the first time?
Ken Maranian [00:17:48] Yeah, well, it's going to be completely refreshed, it's going to be modern and user friendly. So, the whole experience is going to be much more engaging, and it's going to be much more visually pleasing, right, and I know that our readers are all about the content, right, so visually pleasing is not first on their list, but it's going to look beautiful, let me just say that. But beyond that, it's much, much deeper. The whole process of just finding the content you want and subscribing to those things and getting back to them and understanding how analyses and forecasts connect, and what the importance of a particular event is going to be completely enhanced.
Ben Sheen [00:18:25] I think one of the interesting things about Worldview is its flexibility, especially considering that different members don't all use Stratfor the same way.
Ken Maranian [00:18:33] No, they don't as a matter of fact, we have a lot of individual users who just like to be aware of what's going on globally, and we have a lot of very passionate users about particular regions and sort of areas of the world, we have business users and government users, we have researchers and libraries and students all around the world. How is it, that a user, for example, interested in maybe doing business, let's say, in Europe, or in Africa, can find content that they need, those analysis that give 'em the insights they need to make decisions to avoid risks, sort of find opportunities? That user has a different need than, let's say, a casual reader. A student has a different need than the business person that I mentioned, and through concepts like themes and topics that can be subscribed to and followed through series, each type of user will be able to get to the content and follow the content that they need most.
Ben Sheen [00:19:24] What are a few of the other new features and functionality we're delivering to our members with the launch of Stratfor Worldview?
Ken Maranian [00:19:30] First of all, today we have graphics, and it's charts and graphs typically that help a user understand visually what may be referred to inside of the analysis. One of the things we're introducing with the new product is interactive graphics, so if I have a pie chart that shows the distribution of wealth in a particular country, I can now drill into that pie chart, I can turn bits of the graphic on or off and really get to the understanding that I need. So, it's a much more rich experience, a much more engaging experience. But, another example would be we're launching Communities, Stratfor Communities, which basically is a way for our really impressively knowledgeable user base to come in and be a part of the conversation with us.
Ben Sheen [00:20:15] So, just how important do you think it is to be able to engage with our readers, and form a sense of community?
Ken Maranian [00:20:21] It's very important, I think, because we have such a thoughtful reader base. And, I just think that, you know, leaving their insights kind of behind the scenes, or, you know, kind of off the table, not visible to the broader community of readers is leaving something really valuable. So, it was really important for us to find ways for folks to participate with us in these conversations, which is really exciting, right? 'Cause, as I've mentioned, there's users all over the globe, and they have different perspectives, the usually have additive comments to what's been covered in our analysis, or perhaps different points of view. I just think it makes a much richer, much more interactive time. While you're consuming the content, you can also be a participant in it.
Ben Sheen [00:21:03] And those forums will be open to all our subscribers on Stratfor Worldview. Ken, thanks again for joining us on the podcast. Ken Maranian is Chief Product Officer here at Stratfor. That concludes this special edition of the podcast, marking the launch of Stratfor Worldview, the next generation Stratfor experience. If you've haven't already, be sure to visit us at stratfor.com to learn more about Worldview and how we can help you and your organization make sense of an increasingly complicated world. And, while you're there, you can also learn more about our advisory services, or Stratfor Threat Lens, the first installment in our suite of new enterprise level products. And thank you once again for joining us on the Stratfor podcast, as always, if you have a question or a comment about a podcast, or even an idea for a future episode, let us know. You can read us at 1-512-744-4300, extension 3917, or by email at podcast@stratfor.com. And don't forget to follow us on Twitter @Stratfor. Thanks for listening.
