In The Fourth Turning, William Strauss and Neil Howe make the case that history repeats itself through a cycle of about 80 to 100 years, which itself consists of four seasons (turnings). The fourth turning is called Crisis. When the book was published in 1997, the authors suggested we were approaching the Fourth Turning.

In The Changing World Order, legendary investor Ray Dalio “examines history’s most turbulent economic and political periods to reveal why the times ahead will likely be radically different from those we’ve experienced in our lifetimes.” He argues that some of the changes coming to our society have happened before, but never during our lifetime.

What these two books have in common is that they identify potential changes coming to our society as a result of repeating patterns that stretch longer than the duration of any individual’s career. Thus, it’s quite possible to be a seasoned 60 year-old leader who has never encountered the type of changes and dynamics now coming at us.

I’m not telling you that either book is correct; I’m simply suggesting that you will never see a long cycle change coming unless you are studying and watching for such cycles.

You also won’t see changes coming as a result of disruptive technologies unless you make an effort to understand in significant detail such technologies. To cite one example, many people predicted that society’s adoption of social media would grow, but few correctly predicted that it would magnify negative voices more than positive ones.

With technology, the details matter. Do you know why Instagram was designed so that the app loads new posts when you swipe down with your finger? The designers copied the addictive effect of a slot machine. “Here’s the unfortunate truth,” wrote Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. “Several billion people have a slot machine in their pocket. When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we have received. When we swipe down our finger to scroll the Instagram feed, we’re playing a slot machine to see what photo comes next.”

If you were the CEO of a magazine publishing company in 2010, it would have been very hard to see that over the coming decade your organization’s survival would be threatened by new digital outlets designing human psychology into every element of their operations.

Bottom line: We all need to look harder—much harder—to see and respond to vitally important changes coming.