At this time of the year, the media tends to constipate itself with retrospectives and forecasts. Most of them these days tend to be shaped into lists, because that’s how the Internet likes these things. That is all perfectly natural and we are free to make our own mind up which of these features are meaningful and which are the cookie cutter products of the permanently unimaginative. No footballpundit was ever fired for stringing together clichés rather than talking and no marketing person has ever lost theirjob for publishing a list of Ten Trends. One thing all of these lists seem to share is an assumption that many of the ideas they reflect are new. That’s understandable. Nobody wants to think that what they consider to be on trend has all been seen before. The young people currently roaming around with wedge haircuts and ripped jeans won’t thank you for telling them they are 80s throwbacks.
All those end of year workplace trends lists? We’ve been there before