BUSINESS FUTURES | 5 But, if these and other indicators were apparent, why did the calamity catch so many economists, policymakers and business leaders by surprise? We believe it was a classic case of not seeing the forest for the trees, a failure to see how the collision and interplay of several individual trends could create an entirely different economic and business environment. Recognizing trends is not the same thing as imagining what might happen when trends intersect. Not that making sense of it all is easy. Indeed, a recurring theme we encounter in our conversations with corporate executives is that despite—or perhaps because of—the exponential increase in the amount of information about trends and the availability of sophisticated quantitative models to analyze them, strategic decision making today is more complex than ever before. To address this decision-making challenge, we propose a new approach: We call it Business Futures. THE WORLD OF REDESIGNING THE IMAGINATION THE AGE OF “TECHNO-POLITICS” LIFE ECONOMY (IN)SECURITY