We are in for a very exciting year ahead. 2012 is a year where many competing trends will collide, and through those collisions we will see new pathways emerge.

At the same time, many new trends are forming, some with enough steam to form entirely new movements, others that will run their course and splinter into other emerging ways of doing business.

The “new normal” is quickly becoming the “nothing normal,” and our daily routines, the things we use to maintain our own sanity, will need to morph and change if we hope to stay competitive in the emerging job market and even stay current in our own social circles.

With this in mine, I’d like to take you on a journey into some of the trends I’ll be watching in 2012 as the tectonic plates of change inch their way into new positions. Here is the first half of the 28 major trends to watch in 2012 and beyond.

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In 2008 the entire world was beginning to panic as our global financial systems teetered ever so close to total meltdown. Major banks were either failing or near failure, and the entire house of cards seemed to be one 10-of-Clubs away from becoming a meaningless flat stack in the middle of the table.

There was a growing distrust of banks, Wall Street, and our entire monetary system. We had allowed the wrong powerbrokers to gain control and business and industry were collapsing all around us. Visions of the Great Depression and its soup lines were haunting us, like a reoccurring nightmare, causing us to rethink our every move.

Many ideas were percolating in the background, but for one, the timing was perfect. Indeed, it is during the worst of times that we, as humans, often do our best work.

So it was in this collapsing chaos where people were grasping desperately for even the slightest ray of hope when on November 1st in 2008 a mysterious paper appeared on an obscure cryptography listserv describing details for a new digital currency called bitcoin.

It was from this seemingly innocent birthing chamber that this piece of monetary-replacement technology would begin its three-year rollercoaster journey, a journey with great lessons for our future.

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Warren Buffett owns many things, but so far owning his own country is not one of them.

In 2008 I gave a talk to an audience of 1,200 at the “Leaders in Dubai Business Forum” along with a dozen other global thought leaders that included best-selling writer Tom Peters, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former World Bank President James Wolfensohn, and many more.

Most of the speakers were addressing our depressingly screwed-up economy. I decided to take a different approach and presented my thoughts on emerging new systems for governmental power.

One idea, in particular, raised more than a few eyebrows among the Dubai group: selling islands as autonomous countries.

Dubai had been on the cutting edge of island-building technology, building Palm Island, along with a series of other artificial costal islands, selling them as high-end luxury homes and resort properties.

I suggested that creating new land could lead to the creation of real estate that is unattached and unaffiliated with any existing nationstate or indigenous group — land that could be sold for much more money as an autonomous country. I still see this as a distinct possibility today.

However, looking at the desperate state of countries in Europe today, it may now be cheaper to buy an existing country than to start a new one.

So could Warren Buffett buy Italy, or Greece, or Portugal? The answer may surprise you.

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Imagine walking up to a building and having it recognize you. Not only does it recognize you, but it also makes changes in temperature, lighting, and music to make you feel like you’re at home.

Maybe it’s not a building, but a car, a bicycle, pair of shoes, or a pillow? And each of these objects will somehow adjust themselves to match your body size and shape, and somehow sync up with your needs and personality.

Going a step further, what if the objects around us had more than an ability to make one-time adjustments? What if they could learn from us and grow in their understanding of us over time?

If you think what I’ve described is a long time off, think again. The scenario I just described will soon become a common occurrence because of the interplay between three converging forces – Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) technology, cloud computing, and the processing power of smartphones.

Wearable and implantable sensors are already making serious inroads, and once combined with smartphones and private clouds, we’ll begin to see an entirely new style of living emerge. (Pics and Charts)

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It was roughly two years ago, October 15, 2009, when I got a call from a desperate lady, panicking, as she asked for my help.

Being a futurist, I don’t get many calls from people who urgently need my help. Futurists are rarely first responders.

As she described the situation, telling how a young boy’s life was at stake, and the situation was far too complicated for normal emergency rescue crews, she somehow thought of the DaVinci Institute.

“You work with some of the brightest minds in the world and this situation is going to require a very ingenious solution.” Her voice was dripping with trepidation and fear.

Moments after receiving her call, I turned on the television because the problem she described was quickly unfolding across the nation, gaining national attention, as a six-year old boy named Falcon had somehow gotten trapped inside a small weather balloon that was flying over the Midwest. Yes, this was the legendary balloon-boy incident, gripping the nation in panic and fear until the entire hoax started unraveling.

At the DaVinci Institute, we often tackle complex problems to find solutions. But in today’s world, one of the biggest problems threatening society today is complexity itself. Here’s why.

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When we think about Benjamin Franklin, we instantly think of the author, scientist, inventor, diplomat who signed the U.S. Declaration of Independence and has his face on the one-hundred dollar bill. Ben Franklin was a truly remarkable person, yet he had less than two years of formal education.

I recently came across a study that examined the lives of 755 famous people who either dropped out of grade school or high school. The list included 25 billionaires, 8 U.S. Presidents, 10 Nobel Prize winners, 8 Olympic medal winners, 63 Oscar winners, 55 best-selling authors, and 31 who had been Knighted.

With names like Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, Richard Branson, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Will Rogers, and Joseph Pulitzer, being an academic failure still left you in the company of some incredible luminaries.

Going one step further, adding the names of well-known college dropouts to the list, names like Steve Jobs, Frank Lloyd Wright, Bill Gates, Buckminster Fuller, Larry Ellison, Howard Hughes, Michael Dell, Ted Turner, Paul Allen, Mark Zuckerberg, and virtually every famous actor, actress, and director in Hollywood, and the dropout list becomes a venerable Who’s Who of American culture.

So what are we missing here? On one hand we are being told that the path to success is through academia. Yet, we have literally thousands of examples of wealthy, successful, business leaders, industry icons, and some of our greatest heroes that took a different route.

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Over the past couple years, internet-fueled uprisings in Egypt, Lybia, Syria, and other parts of the world have made Chinese officials very nervous. They have exerted a firm hand in controlling any communications deemed detrimental to the ruling party and have now gone so far as to block any Google searches of the English words “democracy” and “freedom.”

But this kind of conversational scrutiny has proven to be a double-edged sword.

In late July a tragic high-speed train crash occurred in Wenzhou, China. Instantly, Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, became a focal point for information about the accident, letting victim families know the status of their loved ones. At the same time, Weibo became a transparent medium for personal commentary and incendiary speculation about the cause of the accident.

The Communist Party sees a huge threat, and it’s a tough one for them to control.

On one hand, they feel control of the Communist Party is at risk unless they takes firmer steps to stop Internet opinion being shaped by the opposition. But at the same time, the Internet is becoming a very popular medium and a central tool for business and industry.

This is as much a business issue as it is a free-speech issue. So where does China go from here?

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Great lies continue to be propagated

In early 2003 I had a conversation with Dee Hock, founder and former CEO of VISA. At the time we were interested in hiring him to be the keynote speaker at our upcoming Future of Money Summit, an event that would take place in November of that year.

Ten years earlier, in March of 1993, Hock gave a dinner speech at the Santa Fe Institute where he described his unusual organizational theories in managing VISA, describing them as “chaordic” a term that roughly translates into “ordered chaos.”

In 1996 he formed the Chaordic Alliance, later renamed the Chaordic Commons, for the purpose of furthering his notions that businesses can run more effectively when they are based on a “vital set of living beliefs” distributed through an organization, essentially replacing top-down command and control.

As we talked, his powers of persuasion were quite evident as he artfully described his “chaordic” theories, and by the end of the conversation I was a true believer, wanting to become a disciple of this new business gospel.

But as with many things that sound too good to be true the first time you hear them, Hock’s “chaodic” theories that somehow worked within VISA, proved non-reproducible in other settings, and have now largely been abandoned after numerous attempts to implement them in other companies.

As we enter the 2nd decade of the new millennium we find ourselves in a similar quandary trying to separate the fallacies from the promises of what works and what doesn’t on the Internet. With that in mind I’ve put together a list of eight of the founding theories of the Internet that have proved similarly deceptive.

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What if they never existed?

If Steve Jobs had never lived, would we still have the iPhone and iPad today? Similarly, if Walt Disney, George Lucas, and Pete Diamandis had all taken jobs on Wall Street instead of living their lives as true innovators, would we still have Disneyland, Star Wars, and the X-Prize Foundation today?

To put it more succinctly, if the visionary never existed, would we still have the industry?

Certainly, if Edison hadn’t invented the light bulb, someone else would have. In many cases, inventors have lost out on a patent because of mere minutes separating the timestamp on a patent. So the invention was destined to happen regardless of whose name showed up on the patent, right?

Not so fast.

The systems we create help define the kind of people who will naturally rise to the top. And these leaders of innovation have decidedly different approaches for making things work. So what would a new system for innovation look like?

At the DaVinci Institute we have some ideas for a new system brewing, one that will serve as an enabler for a new breed of visionaries. Over the coming weeks I will explain in far more detail, but for now, here is a rough overview:

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It’s amazing how a single newscast can set the world on fire.

The very second Standard & Poor’s announced they had downgraded the U.S. Credit rating, communications systems around the world began to boil. Reaction time was critical and those who could react the quickest were able to position the negative news into something less negative, perhaps even a positive.

Reaction was fast and furious. At the same time, over-reaction was even faster and furiouser. Few people were able to gauge the proper response to the events unfolding.

Our always-on, always-tuned-in society was instantly aware of the crisis, and at the same time, instantly aware that everyone else was instantly aware. There can be no better breeding ground for panic.

In a matter of seconds, Wall Street had become a series of digital flashmobs competing with other digital flashmobs.

We have entered into a new age of hyper-awareness where reaction times have dropped from minutes to seconds, and in the case of computers that make trades based on mathematical models, the time is now measured in milliseconds.

This new level of awareness is still a crudely refined capability that we are only now beginning to understand.

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