There was a period in the 70s and 80s when businesses went to great lengths to base future plans on detailed forecasts, particularly of sales. More and more mathematical techniques were used in an attempt to pin down a view of the future. These often attempted to predict patterns ten years (or more) ahead. Unfortunately, it proved difficult to pin anything down; “circumstances” changed (all the time!). Even worse, models that worked once didn’t produce the right answers for the second or third times when an event occurred. Eventually it became apparent that the factors that affected sales, costs etc. were more complicated than imagined. Also each time some event occurred, it affected the market, people, customers etc. who modified their response and so didn’t react the same the next time around. The world was just too complex! At this time a new theory was becoming well-known – chaos theory with it’s famous example of the butterfly’s wings affecting the weather. Small, unnoticed changes could cause huge swings in the result of a system. In that case, let’s abandon forecasting and hope for the best. We will get by on a wing and a prayer. Chaos theory did tell us something else though and that is that patterns do exist but not in the way we had expected.