There are some gray swans standing in the road to 2020

Executive Viewpoints-Vehicle Development Insights from Industry: Off-Highway 2020 and Beyond-There are some gray swans standing in the road to 2020.

Human beings have a very strong tendency to visualize the future as a near-linear projection of the present and recent past. This approach works well most of the time, at least until it encounters a so-called “Black Swan” event that sends society careening off on an entirely different path.

As popularized in a recent international best-seller and defined in various modern reference books, a Black Swan is “a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations.” I am not prescient, so Black Swans are as much a surprise to me as to anyone and I am not going to attempt to predict what or when the next one may be.