South Africa: The Considered Art of Trying to Predict 2022’s Trends Before They Are Seen As Inevitable

What will be the big events and trends for the new year that deserve serious consideration, but are right alongside any black swans that can overturn those predictions?

‘Prediction is difficult, especially about the future” is the famous observation about life attributed to everyone from physicist Neils Bohr and Mark Twain to baseball’s king of malapropisms, Yogi Berra. But black swan events can also crop up and confound us. As those recede into the past and we see them in our rear view mirror, they eventually are judged as the inevitable outcomes of what has gone before and intriguingly we begin accepting them as part of the historical landscape.

The challenge is how to see trends in such a way that we can understand the antecedents – before they are seen as inevitable. This, then, is the political and economic analogue of what psychologist William James famously described as the “booming, buzzing confusion” of sensations that assail a newborn child.

Clem Sunter, the South African scenario planner, explained his methodology for developing scenarios about the future as follows. His team used a roster of triggers and red flags to help weigh alternatives and provide those “heads ups” about problematic developments…