Sudden change

Recent events should have dramatically challenged our ideas about how change occurs: we'd like to imagine that slow and steady is the typical pattern, but reality again and again confounds this.

One year ago, few in the apparel business saw the end of the Crocs shoes phenomenon; few the return of hostilities between Russia and the West; few the recent chaos on the markets.

Part of this lack of foresight is our cognitive bias towards how things are - we don't want to see change; another that we find it extremely hard to embrace the complexity that underpins things - complexity that results largely from interacting and copying agents, rather than a machine - and the unpredictability that comes with that complexity.

Every dog has its day; every empire will eventually fall. Are we seeing - as this piece suggests - the end of American domination of business and politics? Or, if not, when the change does come (as it must) how do you think it will come? What will it feel like and how will we know?