Where Tappin and Cave take the hard, investigative route to arrive at their key trends, Richard Watson takes a more theoretical approach. Over recent years he has developed a technique he calls "trend mapping". The idea is to pull together the implications of a number of key trends and thus map out a clearer idea of what the future might look like.

The five key trends of the title by themselves seem a little obvious. He picks an ageing society; a power shift to the east; greater global connectivity; technology and in particular the so-called GRIN technologies (genetics, robotics, the internet and nanotechnology); and the environment. This much most of us already know. Watson himself quotes Woody Allen's line about the future being "like the present, only longer".

But things get interesting once Watson unravels the effects of the combined trends. There is an amusing "extinction timeline" for the next 50 years, where he nails his colours to the mast in predicting the ideas destined for the scrap-heap. The bad news is that peace and quiet is on the timeline; the good news is that it's not scheduled to go until about 2038. 

Nicholas Brealey Publishing