Trend #10 – No Trend

My final trend for 2011 is that there is no trend. There are certain uncertainties,
but beyond this it’s impossible to see what lies ahead. Is the Euro finished? Will Portugal go the same way as Ireland and Greece? Is China heading for a fall? Who can say?

One thing I would say is that is we appear to have entered a phase where technology is acting as an accelerant to a number of trends. For example, cascading failure can be a feature of highly complex systems. Many things are now so finely engineered that there are no tolerances. Moreover, connectivity means that if one element fails (or is attacked) whole parts of the system can come crashing down. Hopefully, the view ahead will clear sometime in 2011, but until then all one can say with any degree of certainty is the future is a riddle wrapped up in a mystery inside an enigma.