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trend1. An inclination in a particular direction.

2. A tendency.

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Are you trying to understand your environment better?yes ____ no ____

Would you like to anticipate its evolution?yes ____ no ____

Do you want to leverage trends?yes ____ no ____

Introduction

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Are you trying to better understand your environment?

Would you like to anticipate its evolution?

Would you like to leverage trends?

If you answered yes to all these questions, you’re holding the right book. Understanding Trends will help you better understand your environment, anticipate its evolution and even take part in it.

I thought about it!

Looking for trends is a natural activity: we all try to better understand our environment. You’ve already spotted something new in your life or at your job and saw it as something that could actually changed it.. until it happened. “I thought about it!” This sort of observation and insight is already an effective detection and analysis of what became a trend. It is also retroactive and as such not necessarily useful anymore (when you realized you were right, that trend wasn't new anymore) but still fit the pattern of what is also known as trendspotting: watch something, spot change and think about their implications.

Trends have been a topic for a long time. Fashion, investment trends, technological trends are discussed, studied, analyzed by a wide array of medias, going from the most mainstream to the more specialized. We all want to know what’s next: the next opportunity, the next experience, in which direction our world is heading? But if trends that are already known are heavily discussed, their detection and their analysis at an earlier stage is a much less popular activity.

The lack of know-how on the subject pushes many organizations to borrow from specialized medias, analysts and gurus (or keep staring at competitors that might be doing something new), in order to stay “up to date”. These borrowings often end up influencing their strategy without a good understanding of what is going on. Borrowed insight ends up influencing R&D, new product developments or acquisitions, without necessarily allowing the organization to actually take advantage of the changes that are at stake. Learning to detect and analyze trends will help you avoid these errors by producing your own research, or at least have a more alert view on other people’s work.

Starting out

This book won’t teach you everything. Nor will it tell you what the current hippest trends are, because by the time you read

what was hip as we wrote, it will have become commonplace, disappeared or turned into something else. This book is not a catalog of methodologies either. There are numerous methods for trend detection and analysis, which are often biased or specialized. This book is a practical introduction to some of the themes and methodologies that will allow you to learn and then go out into the world to actually do it. So we’ll focus on how to spot and understand the new, rather than listing the old or lose you in the details of multiple methodologies.

The other goal of this book is to open the way to better trend analysis work. The field has no shortage of useless “research” and content, be it “trend newsletters”, “foresight maps”, “emerging future repots” or even the run of the mill “top 10 trends” that is common in most mainstream business media. As a result, many business folks have fallen victim to fairly useless trendspotters as speakers at corporate events, or paid hefty sums for reports that conclude that cool stuff is cool and that people like cool stuff or that the future looks like some kind of utopia or dystopia that bears a striking resemblance to a science fiction movie.

No wonder, then, that there are so many skeptics, but the shear number of dreadful work being done under the banner of trendspotting should spur you to do it better, not to

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completely discount it. And that’s exactly what we are seeking to do with this book − help you to do it well. We want to show that you don’t have to rely on expensive ‘experts’ because you can do it yourself. All you have to do it to look at trends with critical, interested eyes, and to go from reading the trend analyzes of others to creating your own.

The detection of trends is based on the acceptance of a world that is constantly changing, where change involves opportunities that can’t be detected and understood by staying in your office, specialty, usual way of thinking or information diet. Detecting and understanding trends requires you to keep up with a wide range of evolutions in your environment: its culture, technologies, people, practices, perceptions.. These things might be tangible and well spread, but also emerging and a bit speculative.

This kind of research is sometimes perceived as eccentric for its propensity to highlight things that are unusual and not yet accepted (and also because of the eccentricity of some of the so-called “trendspotters”), but it actually requires an almost scientific approach to gather information, information that will be used as the basis of a creative approach to producing insight. This book is meant to show you how to do that by following a structured approach that will allow you to identify and leverage the trends.

Cool-hunting? Strategic Foresight?

Trend detection and analysis has two extremes: cool-hunting and strategic foresight, which often makes things a bit confusing to newcomers. As academic as this might seem, we are going to clarify things right now.

Trend detection and analysis is often mistaken with cool-hunting, which is the constant search of what is new, cool, hip, fashionable. This is actually a narrow way to look at trends, and often without any sort of analysis. Trend detection and analysis refers more generally to the study of trends and the way they develop and affect society. This include less cool subjects like the way we look after babies, clean floors, stack shelves and hang out in parks.

Strategic foresight is preparing for the future by analyzing an environment and creating multiple scenarios describing possible futures. In practice these scenarios are often about what’s coming in the long term (what will 2050 be is a common subject) and based on large scale evolutions - like geo-political change, environmental change or conflicts. These scenarios are meant to influence strategic thinking and planning (which is then called “scenario planning”), influencing risk analysis, innovation, long-term investment..

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The scale of such approach make it the other extreme of trend detection an analysis.

In practice, trend detection and analysis does not need to be as superficial and short-term as cool-hunting, or as speculative and profound as foresight. A lot of work is done on developing useful and practical views of the next few years (3 to 10 years) without bothering on whether it is cool-hunting or strategic foresight.

Open to anyone

Understanding trends is a major source of insight, and the opportunity for many organization to move out of their ivory tower and cast a new light on what they are doing and what they should be doing. Many historical events couldn’t be imagined by their protagonists. Understanding trends allows you to prepare for these changes and their implications.

This last point might let you think that understanding trends is a cumbersome and complex activity that is only possible in large organization, but it is actually feasible and useful on a small scale, including by entrepreneurs et creatives. The book Business Model Generation puts trends and their analysis as a major source of information to design innovative business models. And if you spend time in the world of startups, you’re probably tired to see the same ideas being recycled over and

over again based on the latest buzzword or fund raising. Understanding trends is a good way to cut through the noise and avoid doing the same thing as your neighbor without necessarily knowing why.

Some sectors are especially sensitive to trends. The technology sector in particular is not the last when it comes to detect and analyze trends (see the works of Bill Joy, Ray Kurzweil, Jan Chipchase and others). The huge echo chamber of specialized medias make it sometimes incredibly difficult to find original ideas. In such context, it is is a competitive advantage to be able to do your own research when developing or investing on a new product or a new service.

This is also true outside of the world of technologies. If housing trends in central Africa aren’t the most discussed, information about these trends is critical to every designer or manufacturer that want to design a product for that market in particular. This is called Design Research, with trends influencing the design of the future, or at least part of it. This book is a good starting point for Design Research, but we will recommend you to check those that were written by Jan Chipchase as well.

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Understanding trends is also helpful for specialists who want to use their skills better. One way or another, many specialists already follow trends in their domain, and the many observations they do only need a slightly more structured approach to become more insightful and productive. A programmer diving into the latest iteration of a piece of software will spot new informations about what became possible, the analysis of which might open the way to new practices and sometimes brand new products.

Whatever your domain and the scale at which you operate, understand trends is a competitive advantage, or at least a way to avoid confusion every time something new seems to disrupt your activity.

Understanding Trends

This book will show you how to start detecting and analyzing trends using common tools and techniques. The first three chapters concentrate on how to approach trends, and the following chapters are dedicated to trend detection and analysis. Learning how to detect and analyze trends often requires a significant effort, so we created infographics and flowcharts to help you visualize the main themes and activities.

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Every CEO or entrepreneur worth their salt loves a good trend. Trends are synonymous with new opportunities, and primarily associated with progress and rising curves, and thus about the possibility of making money or at least looking cool (as long as we’re not behind the trend). These things are positive, but also quite vague, as the same word is used for fashions and large scale historical events. What are trends about exactly? The definition of the word itself helps to clarify a few things:

trend (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trend)

1. An inclination in a particular direction.

2. A tendency.

Trends are actions or forces with an influence on people. Trends are also proposals about the future, that may or may not develop: the word “trend” is itself related to the verbs present, extend, lead and try. Trends are often categorized using various archetypes: “cool” and “mega” trends being the

most prominent. This practice that is so widespread and problematic that we have to discuss it immediately.

The cool

Cool-hunting is seeing trends as cool, intriguing and delightful things, and continuously seeking this restricted range of trends. Cool-hunting is based on our natural tendency to focus on what is obviously “new” and different, and interpret these things as signs of change and the things to comes, or at least something that helps us distinguish ourselves from others.

Food trends are typical of this approach, with our own pleasure as the only angle (otherwise it wouldn’t be cool and intriguing). Cool hunters specialized in food will tell you everything from the latest Japanese luxury pastry, or the latest wine from a really remote country. The problem here is that these things only matter to a tiny - almost infinitesimal - slice of humanity, and the approach will not be relevant to more fundamental trends (like those related to food production).

Chapter 1

Trends

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Cool-hunting is thus focused on the emergence of small ephemeral things, but as popular as it might be, the practice is extremely limited. Trends are not just what is cool and obviously different. Trends can go from the very cool to the distinctly uncool: public space topologies, gardening and yard sales are possible subjects. There is also different sizes of trends, or more precisely, different lengths and amplitudes, which is the subject of the other archetype.

Micro / Macro / Mega / Giga

Trends are often represented as spectacular, sweeping (and often threatening) phenomenons of contemporary history. Mega and giga trends are often discussed in mainstream media like The Economist. The other group of trends is composed of macro and micro trends, which are, generally speaking, much less exposed.

Micro trends are the little things that happen all around us all the time, they are the tiny shifts in everything related to our clothes, food, activities and behavior. Their importance range from something as small as realizing that “tween” boys (between 8 and 14) are starting to use more ‘female’ accessories, such as multicoloured armbands, to a specific kind of smoothie that seems to be booming, to something more pronounced, like protests against invasions of privacy.

Micro trends might stay at this micro-level, but also evolve and aggregate to shape macro trends.

For instance, you might notice a marked increase in business media and networking events and organizations that focus on women’s careers. One way to read this trend would be to assume a future of powerful businesswomen, with career becoming the defining feature of all ambitious women’s lives. Some people would argue that isn’t a microtrend at all, but a macrotrend, and that it should be discussed as such.

Macrotrends are more important than microtrends: more stable, more durable, more widely-known macrotrends affect both our daily lives and society as a whole. For instance, social media turned up as a macrotrend: all of a sudden everyone started talking about it, and without really realizing what had happened, many of us found ourselves spending too much times on these platforms. Macrotrends are “real” in the sense that we identify with them as a concept, and they are widely understood, accepted and discussed.

So Macrotrends are less ephemeral than microtrends, and the macrotrend that we identified from microtrends - that female careers, business networks and economic power will increase - is something that’s been observed and discussed since the 1960s.. could this be a megatrend?

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Megatrends are macrotrends that have grown up and moved out to affect the lives of great swathes of the human race. Megatrends are supposedly the kind of thing that “trend” in a consistent way for decades. Internet and the rise of China fall into that category. And when a megatrend is really, really good, it becomes a gigatrend.

Gigatrends are.. well, to be frank, this is where things get really confusing. Obviously a gigatrend is bigger than a megatrend, but it’s difficult to know exactly what ‘bigger’ means. Some people argue that a gigatrend is a megatrend that goes on for half a century or more. Others define gigatrends as trends that are so general that they affect most areas of human life. In other words, when a macrotrend in a segment of an industry starts affecting the entire industry, it becomes a megatrend, and when it spans several industries and other aspects of society, it becomes a gigatrend. Or something like that..

The common hierarchy of trends is therefore based on their scale and duration while also taking into account their links, combinations and possible evolutions. Approaching trends this way looks almost scientific but also means taking multiple risks.

The first risk is to systematically look for something large and discernible because of the emphasis the trend hierarchy puts on larger trends. And if larger trends are indeed more valuable than smaller and less obvious trends, the risk here is to rule out small trends because they don’t fit on a comprehensive macro level. The problem here is that we might just be skewing our own vision because of the lack of enough evidences of something bigger.

And we might be right. Right after the end of the second world war, looking at the development of the militaro-industrial complex, we might have predicted the Cold War as a gigatrend. But the more we would piece together proofs that supported the Cold War gigatrend, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, the less important other things would seem, like the internet, which was born out of ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency) in 1958. And internet was long judged as a really obscure subject, and then as a fad..

This kind of mistake is rooted and amplified by the ways of thinking of that time, influenced by recent events and then applied to emerging trends and their own evolving perspectives. For example, the influence of the events of the second world war pushing the exercise toward some kind of conflict more than a new way to communicate based on a worldwide network of interconnected machines.

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The problem is also that at this point, the “trend” is so general that there is no clear reason not to call it ‘history’ or ‘contemporary society’ instead. Every gigatrend reaches the point where it appears undifferentiated from any general statement about the world, which mean that studying trends

on that level is the same as studying the obvious, which is not very interesting for anybody.

The best trendspotters, of course, are very good at not doing this. The very best are not those who have remarkable skills of synthesis, but those who can defer synthesis for as long as possible. Rather than looking for some over-arching, easily named and branded framework, they seek things that don’t easily fit into systems, that seem to go against the grain, ‘outliers’. They look not for confirmation, things that fit their view of the future, but for the unfamiliar, the uncomfortable, staying open to new ways of thinking and favoring elements that don’t fit in pre-existing models.

You can learn how to do this. But it’s a dual, and sometimes apparently contradictory, process. On the one hand you have to learn a set of structuring devices through which to think about the future (which is the core of this book). On the other hand, you need to continuously unlearn the processes through which you may - because of your education, your expertise, your preferred megatrends - only see trends that are too comfortable, all this while keeping track of the evolution of your subject and its analysis.

Transition or Transformation

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Obviously, developing a keen sense of trends requires going beyond archetypes of the cool or mega trend. The meaning of a trend, and its potential impact is much more interesting than whether or not it is intriguing or possibly already made history. “The german Airbnb”, “a chip to improve the memory of rats”. What kind of trends are these? One might be cool, the other the beginning of a megatrend, and none of these observations is really helpful.

In Zero to One, Peter Thiel distinguish two types progress: vertical progress, which happen when doing new things, and horizontal progress, which happen when copying things that work. One carry real change, the other just copy something that already exist, maybe with some improvements on the way. Trends that are related to these two types of progress are respectively transformational and transitional.

Transitional trends reflect the switch from one state to another, when an idea that already exist in some way switches to an intermediate state, before switching to another, and so on. It might have been transformational at the very beginning, but it is not anymore. The expansion of a coffee shop chain from one country to another falls into that category, as well as the slight improvement of a product that already exist. In both case, these are linear progress through new iterations that just extend the reach of something or

slightly improve it, without changing the fundamentals of the original idea.

This is nothing new: most of the products that surround us started somewhere else and went through multiple iterations before taking their current shape. A city like Shanghai is incredible, but most of it is nothing original. Shanghai is built on technologies that were first tested in New York: skyscrapers, neon lights, outdoor advertising, mass transit systems, and so on. The rise of this kind of city in China is a transitional trend, bringing something that already existed somewhere else to a place where it didn’t existed yet.

Transitional trends often leave a feeling of deja-vu, or recycling. If a private taxi or bike sharing service using with a geolocalized app just started nearby, you are most likely observing a transitional trend, which is coming from somewhere else. The acceleration of exchanges plays a major role in transitional trends: spend some time in Silicon Valley, observe some new trend, then return to your country to duplicate it, call it an “innovation” and spread it.

Transitional trends carry the marks of intellectual laziness, or at least an incapacity to create something really new, outside of an established, pre-explored model. New product or

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service that become a bit faster, cheaper or more practical have the same limitations.

Transformational trends are associated with more fundamental change - actual disruptions opening new possibilities. Their origin is often not very cool or obvious, but the vertical progress that they bring often seems magical. Vertical progress happens when something that we were not able to do before is all of a sudden possible.

“EU-147” was the codename of the “MPEG 1/2 Layer 2” encoding system, as financed by the European Union. This technology became known as “MP3” and triggered sweeping change in the musical industry. From the transmission of files over the internet in a few milliseconds to the original promise of the iPod to put “a thousand songs in your pocket”, the consequences of this compression format came to redefine an entire industry, opening possibilities that were unthinkable while destroying established models.

Retrospectively, one could have measured the potential of transformation of “EU-147” back in the early 90’s but that would have required getting close to a source of information that was not very attractive and understand what was observed in light of the progress of internet and portable technologies. A daunting but rewarding task.

Knowing these types of trends is the first step to think for yourself. Trend archetypes are useful to filter out informations that are all-too-common. If this article you are reading is focused on cool novelties or mega trends then it will probably not be very useful and you need better sources of informations. Distinguishing transitional and transformational trends is much more useful, but before getting there you will need to learn how to detect trends.

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As we mentioned in the first chapter, going beyond cool-hunting requires taking into account and maybe getting rid of the mental processes and scripts we use to categorise the world. You need to develop new habits, a specific mindset that will allow you to develop an expert view on trends that mater in your activity.

To help the novice do this, we’ve come up with nine commandments. These are nine calls for not doing the first thing that strikes you and jumping to hasty conclusions. Here they are.

1. Adopt a beginner’s mind

2. Move in mysterious ways

3. Beware the peacock

4. Judge not, lest you be judged

5. Count your blessings

6. Depersonalize

7. Look for shifts rather than novelties

8. Spot the combos

9. There’s a reason—find it

1. Adopt a beginner’s mind

Experience is the enemy. Simply by virtue of having lived in a culture for a long time, you’re filled with preconceived notions about the world and overly familiar with cultural scripts, both things that make you look for specific things and ignore others. Even if you’ve only recently escaped your teenage years, you will be fighting at least ten years of cultural programming when you go out and start studying trends. That’s ten years of learning what you should be looking for, learning what’s hot and what’s not, learning how to please others and fit in with the group. That learning acts as a powerful filter.

The best at trend detection and analysis have mastered is the art of unlearning. They’ve adopted a beginner’s mind, which

Chapter 2

How to Approach Trends

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allows them to look at the world as if it is for the first time. It isn’t easy, but you can learn how to do it. Try this exercise. Go to your nearest supermarket. Go down any of the food aisles and start looking at the products. Look at them as though you’ve never seen them before. Pretend the writing is in a language you don’t understand. Pretend you don’t know how to eat them, but must learn in order to survive. Let the strangeness of the modern supermarket envelop you. Once you’ve pondered a cereal box to the point where it seems surreal and alien, think about the way you feel. That is beginner’s mind, where everything is yet to be learned.

Detecting trends depends on the ability to discern the most subtle shifts in culture, society, economy, politics. If you approach these fields encumbered with the baggage of your knowledge and your experience, you will find it almost impossible to sense these shifts. This is because your entire mental apparatus is geared towards rationalizing them with the frameworks you already possess. Beginners notice things that experts ignore, precisely because they lack the honed mental models of the latter. Be the beginner!

2. Move in mysterious ways

You need to hunt far and wide. You can’t just look where everyone else is looking. You need to move not only in the

areas you know, or where you’d expect to pick up new influences, but in places you would never normally go to—and preferably places you barely know exist. Don’t take this too literally though. For some, studying trends is all about the travel. It’s about going to faraway places, collecting influences, and returning home to tell people ‘what they’re all about in X’ (where X is usually a big metropolis). There’s nothing wrong with that, and you can learn a lot through this kind of work, but it is far from all there is to understanding trends.

Understanding trends isn’t all about traveling to hip places. As we pointed out earlier, if you travel in search of novel influences, you need to avoid the places others go. The same holds true for the many people who read the same magazines, follow the same people on Twitter, or fawn over the same TED videos. This is not looking for the different and the emerging; this is seeking comfort in the already legitimized cool. Spend too much time in some places and you will miss other trends which are happening elsewhere and that will complicate your work when you will need to understand what emerged and developed outside of your radar.

The questions become the following: what are your mysterious moves? What spheres can you look in that others

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ignore? How to keep an eye on what’s happening now while at the same time look where things will be happening in the future? Sources that aren’t seriously considered (yet) are often the best: internet, rap music and smartphones where all considered unimportant or niche when they emerged.. before redefining entire industries.

3. Beware the peacock

The peacock here isn’t a real peacock, but rather our natural instinct to look for the flashy, visible things and ignore the less conspicuous ones. Many, many trendspotters become enamoured of peacocks— the cool, shiny things. But that’s a path fraught with danger. For one, if we only look for the most visible things, we will get a very skewed picture of the world. For every ‘peacock’ there are a thousand pigeons—simple, mundane things that don’t stand out. But it’s the pigeons that have the biggest influence on culture and society, not the peacocks. To really understand the world, we need to look at everything that happens in it, not just the things that are easiest to spot.

The second problem with the peacock is that if it’s easy for you to spot, it’s easy for everyone else to spot too. Take Lady Gaga, for instance. She’s brash, loud and wears extreme outfits. A typical peacock. People fall over each other to

crown her the high priestess of cool, simply because it’s so easy to do. She becomes a ‘trendsetter’ not so much because she’s doing anything interesting, but because she’s such an obvious example of ‘difference’. Peacocks are much more related to fads than they are to understanding trends.

The really interesting changes in society and culture tend to start as something far less visible. Take computer gaming. Long dismissed as the preserve of socially inept boys, it slowly, almost imperceptibly, became an accepted part of social life. Any business-class lounge today will be full of men in suits peering into screens—and they’re as likely to be playing Angry Birds as they are to be fiddling with Excel. And that is a change that wasn’t heralded by a peacock. Cue obvious bird joke.

4. Judge not, lest you be judged

Your job is not to find things you like. Your job is to find things that affect people, that draw people in, that in some way become meaningful to people. It’s very easy to look down your nose at trashy TV or tacky fashions, but to do so when trying to detect trends is disastrous. Take Ed Hardy. Alf hates the brand with a passion. He thinks it’s tacky, tasteless, vulgar. When he see it, he reaches for him (imaginary) pistol. But does his personal distaste mean that it is uninteresting as

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a trend? Of course not. On the contrary. The fact that Alf dislikes it so much might actually make it more interesting.

It is best to look for things that are odd, that prompt a ‘Wait, what?’ reaction the first time we see them, but which might also be picked up by a large group. Trends aren’t necessarily things that everyone will like, but the most popular ones will normally speak to a wide swathe of the population. The truly extreme rarely becomes a trend. Instead, it’s the toned down version, or the version that seems just ‘extreme’ enough without really being so (like Ed Hardy).

In other words, you shouldn’t judge whether a trend is good or bad, pretty or ugly, desirable or undesirable. Your job is to look for what’s happening, regardless of what you think about it. In that sense, you should act like a good scientist—careful in data collection, sensitive to bias, paying attention to everything, always critical—and, above all, objective.

5. Count your blessings

Trendspotters often irritate people by talking in an excited manner about that things that are so off-the-wall that they seem completely irrelevant, or things that are so self-evident and well-known that they seem utterly trivial. In other words, trendspotters often have trouble differentiating the

excessively new (which falls into cool-hunting) and the widely-known (as described in The Economist).

Trendspotters are often neophiles: they love novelty and revel in discovering the new new thing. This can count against them, though, when they focus on the next new thing and ignore the evolution of a trend that already exists. Seeing someone wearing a particular kind of hat is not a trend, it’s an observation. Seeing several people wearing the same kind of hat might be the start of a trend, but it could also be just a fad. There is in every trend a moment when there is just enough for it to really spread—in 1958, Morton Grodzins, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, started calling this a ‘tipping point’ (a phrase later re-used by Malcolm Gladwell).

To be sensitive to the possibility of a fad becoming a trend, you need to pay attention to more than the singular occurrence. You need to be able to discern variations and iterations of a theme, and keep count of how common these are becoming. It might be a long time between the first occurrence of something and the point where a few people start getting into it, and then more and more of them. Sometimes things that were once huge trends fall into obscurity and then become trends all over again—look at skateboarding. Sometimes a trend is kept alive in a small

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sphere for a long time before starting to leak out and eventually becoming a global success—consider kettle bells. To be more than a mere collector of fun occurrences, you need to keep a running count of things, and consider the way that trends gain or lose momentum. Count, cross-tabulate, and also be prepared to count off. Sometimes the waning of a trend can tell us more than the rise of a fad.

Avoiding generalisations and generics is a thornier problem. It’s ridiculously easy to just accept something as a megatrend, and then to see signs to support this everywhere. Is this thing truly new and interesting or part of an existing trend? Sometimes it is important to collect more proof of the existence of a trend, but at other times doing so can blind you to other, less obvious things. Part of the art of studying trends is understanding which one you’re engaging with at any given time.

6. Depersonalise

Your role is not to spot things that make you, your employer or your customer more comfortable. We all have a vested interest in the future because, to paraphrase the US inventor Charles Kettering, we’re going to spend the rest of our lives there. What Kettering didn’t state was that it is very easy to try to turn the place where you’ll spend the rest of your life

into something you will find comfortable, pleasant and conductive, while shutting off other less palatable possibilities. Detecting and analyzing trends properly requires to put your preferences aside, and doing so, the idea of finding evidences to support these.

As we write this, one of the big trends that people are focusing on is social media. The technologies of Web 2.0 have combined to persuade a vocal minority that the future of media lies most definitely in collaboration and social networking. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams recently published a book called Macrowikinomics, in which they predict that the problems of healthcare and climate change can be solved in much the same way that Wikipedia revolutionised encyclopaedia production by.

Such claims are predictable. A breed of social media ‘gurus’ has emerged, and they have a vested interest in keeping this specific future going. For them, a future where social media (of whatever form) continues to be the big new thing exciting corporations and the media, feels comfortable, and they are adept at looking specifically for evidence to support it.

This kind of prejudice also happens at another level in your organization: start the conversation about the future and the vast majority of your colleagues will think about their own

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interests and ambitions within the organization. These individual considerations often have nothing in common with the evolution of the environment of the organization. Trends will not take these preferences into account, and therefore incarnate a kind of threat, which motivate the temptation to deviate any consideration about the future. Depersonalising the exercise will make it much more productive, avoiding the trap of fixating on some assumption or personal preference.

7. Look for shifts rather than novelties

How can you tell a fad from a trend? Well, sometimes you can not, as fads can become trends. As we’ve already discussed, the internet was once judged a fad. What you can look for, though, is whether the phenomenon you’re observing represents a shift in the way something is done, or whether it’s a novelty that people are enjoying playing with at the moment. In other words, the specific novelty may be a fad, unless there is a shift in behavior underpinning it.

Take diets, for example. The grapefruit diet was a fad, because although it was a novel way of losing weight, it didn’t really represent a major shift in how we viewed diets. Low-carb diets, on the other hand, marked a distinct shift in how people approach eating to lose weight. Rather than trying to find one specific way to cut calories, dieters started

cutting out carbs instead, often gorging themselves on cheese and bacon.

It is best then to look for differences in behaviors rather than differences in specific products or brands. Not that the latter are completely unimportant— they can, after all, be significant signals that behaviors are changing. But you need to be very careful not to confuse one with the other. Similarly, it’s important to note not only what people say they do, but what they actually do. If you interview people, most will say that they try to consume sustainably, don’t really follow fashion, drink moderately if at all, play very few computer games and never look at porn. What they actually do is likely to be completely different.

The outer manifestations of trends—the products, people’s official statements—are part of the equation, but they only get you so far. To spot true trends, you need to look for the deeper changes, those not connected to one specific thing but that signal a change that can’t or won’t be turned around with another fancy ad campaign.

8. Spot the combos

As we pointed out above, the word ‘trend’ itself is problematic. Trends usually aren’t single things, but compound phenomena— shifts made up of numerous

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smaller changes or new offerings. The trick, here, is to not miss the forest for the trees. In other words, the true hallmark of a trend is not a singular thing that pops up and gets (temporarily) popular, but several things, seemingly separate at first, that are starting to happen, usually in combination.

This means that you need to be aware of the context in which individual ‘spots’ turn up, and to be sensitive to the way that something that might initially seem unique is, in fact, a combination of several different things. Easy enough to say, a little more complicated to do well.

When observing a change, try to break it down to its constituent parts. What different components were needed for this thing to emerge? What capacities, resources and practices are used here? Which groups need to meet and come together for this to be possible? Don’t look just at cool technology or changes in taste, look for those moments when new technology meets new ideas, when the result is adopted by new groups and put to use in new areas.

9. There’s a reason—find it

When observing changes in society, we often behave as if these emerged out of nothing. But as the ancient Greeks had it, ‘ex nihilo nihil’ (nothing comes from nothing). Change is our creation, it is coming from us, not from an alien specie

emerging on some other part of the universe that doesn’t need food or oxygen to live. The reason behind it, even if it’s not strictly rational, is somewhere, and understandable by human beings.

Further, when we spot something that feels new and difficult to understand, we tend to assume that it’s inexplicable and dismiss it with phrases like “Well, that’s teenagers/young mothers/Japanese teenage mothers for you, just hopping on a bandwagon for no reason whatsoever!” But this is our prejudice talking. When we humans see something we can’t immediately understand, we pretend it makes no sense, because that saves us from having to think about it and work it out. We always assume we’re rational ourselves yet are quick to characterize others as totally irrational.

This is intellectually lazy and also dangerous when trying to understand trends. It may be difficult to find but most things do have a rationale behind them—even though that rationale might be culturally defined rather than strictly logical. The good trendspotter doesn’t explain changes away as ‘consumer behavior’, but seeks underlying causes and drivers.

By delving beneath the surface of trends—the area of fads and fashions—you can start to understand the greater sea of

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changes that drive them. And understanding trends shouldn’t be about just the superficial, but about understanding human culture and society. So remember that there is a reason for everything. It may take deep immersion in a culture to find it, but most things are underpinned by some sort of logic and it is your job to find it.

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Understanding trends starts by detecting trends, which takes at least three steps. First, define the type of trend you would like to detect. Then analyze, define and identify the sources of information that you are going to use to detect these trends. Finally, observe these sources to detect trends.

Every attempt to analyze trends should start by formulating the question the trend is supposed to answer. Answers, or fragments of answers, to this question will serve as the basis for the analysis that will follow the detection phase, which itself is aimed at answering the original question, and serve as the basis of new initiatives.

The question needs to be precise. Trying to study all possible trends is the same as trying to study everything: you won’t make much progress or unearth many insights. Looking for a dozen types of trends happening in different contexts will require you to observe hundreds of sources, and as many possible combinations that you will then need to analyze, for a result that will probably not be very relevant.

Formulating the right question is a critical step, allowing you to set the main parameters of your research: the types of trends you are looking for, their context and their timeframe. To achieve that, you need to answer three component question: What? Where? When?

What?

The type of trends depends essentially on the most influential and appropriate aspects of your subject matter. Many aspects can serve as the starting point of a trend analysis in the candy business, like consumer behavior in candy selection, changes in prices of raw materials, or the competitive landscape. Assuming that you are comfortable with the first two, you might decide that the correct question to start detecting and analyzing trends would be something along the lines of: “What are the trends in candy and the way it is consumed today and in the foreseeable future?”

But would this be the right question? It would generate some interesting observations—like, for argument’s sake, the

Chapter 3

How to Detect Trends

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growing popularity of dark chocolate and energy-boosting products among the young, and the rising interest in ‘retro’ candy among adults. But this question might miss important trends, such as kids switching out of candy for healthier alternatives (why would that be impossible?) or adults’ growing preference for more protein-rich snacks. It might also miss the way candy is portrayed in popular culture, the growing importance of ecological factors in young adults’ purchasing decisions. And all because the question was defined too narrowly. You actually need to consider general trends, close to the subject, as much as more or less remote alternative trends.

Depending on when you did the analysis, you may have missed other issues too. If you’d done the exercise ten years ago, would you have looked at trends in dieting? If you had, would you have noticed the growing popularity of diets based on high levels of protein and fat and outlawing processed sugars? And if you were doing this exercise today, would you pay attention to discussions about water conservation? Because water, or the lack of it, is becoming a key trend, and may well affect the production of most food, even the least essential.

Where?

Formulating the question that will serve as the basis for the analysis requires you to think long and hard about the kinds of trends you are really looking for, in conjunction with the contexts in which these will play out. The meaningfulness of trends and the path that they follow significantly changes depending on circumstances and objectives. The rise of low cost airlines doesn’t have the same meaning for teenagers and businessmen who regularly travel first class. You need to be specific, and not limit yourself to the usual areas.

This step is critical. For example, 10 years ago, the software and the mobile industry were evolving in parallel. Both industries shared some technologies and players, but were operating on very different markets. The products had nothing in common, synergies were pretty rare, and market dynamics were completely different. They were two different worlds. But several “external” developments, in neighboring areas, were already carrying the signs of the fusion between the two that happened during the last few years. The rise of online services, Apple, open source projects like Linux, digital distribution, connected applications, mobility, and so on. Observing all these trends, on time, could have helped some mobile phone manufacturers better anticipate the things to come. This is leading us to the final key parameter: timeframes.

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When?

Predicting trends three months ahead shouldn’t be particularly difficult given how slowly society and human beings evolve. You might notice some superficial changes, of course, and the three months in question could be the very period when some phenomenon goes viral and becomes immensely important. But normally the next three months are fairly easy to get a handle on. Predicting a year ahead is more difficult, but far from impossible. You can be fairly sure that most important things today will still be important in a year’s time, although 12 months is more than enough time for a radically different possibility to creep up on you. If you really extend your gaze, you could of course talk about what the world might look like in 30 years, but this kind of timeframe is so far out that making ‘predictions’ becomes more an exercise in storytelling than in presenting real possibilities. The really challenging timeframe is the one that we could call ‘a few years ahead’—far enough away for radical change to occur, and close enough for it to affect us. More threatening than either the very near or very distant future, this is a timeframe that many people unconsciously shy away from. But it is the one that we should pay the most attention to.

But the relevance of different timeframes depends to a large extent on the questions you want to ask. If, for instance,

you’re considering the infrastructure needed to generate and distributing electricity, five years is a very short time perspective. True change occurs much more slowly when complex material infrastructures are involved than in the fast-moving worlds of fashion or currency trading. So for each context within which you’re looking for new trends, you need to consider a) the ‘knowable’ timeframe and b) the timeframe within which things can change dramatically. In some projects we’ve worked on, we’ve found it helpful to delineate at least four or five different timeframes in order to force people out of their comfort zones and get them talking about the different speeds at which the future reaches us.

Key sub-questions

So, as you see, setting up the question is much more complicated than framing a basic query such as: “What will the future of packed lunches look like?” Going from What?, Where? and When?, you should pose, as a very minimum, the following sub-questions.

– What are the general trends we’re interested in?

– What alternative trends can affect our overall business?

– In what context are we interested in these matters?

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– What other contexts could affect the trends we’re looking for?

– Within what timeframes could these things affect us?

Applied to a company selling mobile phones, these questions might play out as follows:

“We’re interested in the types of phones people like buying, so we’re interested in the general trends and fashions in the mobile phone industry. However, we also realize that the way people use their phones is important, so we need to look at more general trends in communication and in what people do when they’re out and about. (Some phone companies came late to the camera-phone party because they didn’t anticipate that the growing interest in photography could affect mobile phones.)

In terms of contexts, we’re primarily interested in how young people act and behave, as they tend to drive a lot of the sales, so we should focus on them. But we want to look at trends in children’s behaviour too, as we think today’s 12-year-olds will be important consumers in four years’ time. Young people are therefore the main context, the other context being the children.

Regarding timeframes, we’ll probably focus on the next 12 months, as we still depend on the phone manufacturers to inform us about what makes and models they might introduce over the coming year. But we should also be thinking a little bit about how consumers and their behaviors might change over the coming three or four years.”

The overarching question might become something like: “What kind of behavior among consumers could affect phone sales over the next four years, and what impact will the next generation of consumers, who aren’t yet our customers, have on the way we do business?” We might split this into two even more focused questions such as: “What are the trends in children’s communication at the moment?” and “What developments are we seeing in the way people use their mobile phones to date or when dating?” (Dating behavior is often a strong cultural driver.)”

So setting up the question involves working through an entire battery of component questions designed to capture sufficient pertinent information. In doing so, you need to strike a balance between the things that are most obviously relevant—those trends you are most accustomed to following— and the things that might affect your field from the outside. It is, in effect, a balance between focus and peripheral vision. Setting up the question is a way of priming the mind for

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scanning, as it is in scanning that we can find hints of things to come. By thinking through both why we choose certain questions and what these questions can blind us to, we can go into scanning with the right mix of confidence and humility.

Scanning

One of the most overused phrases in talking about trends and the future is an offhand remark attributed to the author William Gibson: “The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed.” It’s a neat phrase, and we shouldn’t wonder that futurists and trendspotters love it. With its implication that the only thing you need for knowing the future is a keen sense of sight that facilitates observations today and inferences about tomorrow, it validates a lot of what they do. But the phrase is also deeply misguided, as a lot of the future is very much not here yet, nor even faintly discernible. The notion of ‘black swans’ – events that we were simply unable to imagine, like Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack, and popularized in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan – should have taught us as much. What’s more, the phrase might not even represent what the very smart Mr. Gibson really thinks about the future. His real opinion might be better encapsulated in this oft-repeated but seldom referenced quote: “The future is not Google-able.” Curiously,

this quote crops up far less frequently in the literature about trends than his other one does…

Maybe the phrase is half-right. We can learn much about the future by paying attention to what’s happening today. Whether in the form of trends or potentially world-changing scientific developments, the future is continuously manifesting itself all around us, and curiosity about such daily advances can keep us intellectually alert to current and potential changes. Grant McCracken refers to scanning as ‘noticing’, as in being attuned to the less obvious things, the small, apparently inconsequential matters that might augur a change or signal a new context. McCracken’s term is also helpful in that it highlights the need for a sensitivity to things that goes beyond simply collecting inputs – an ability to switch between the superficial sweeping gaze and a closer focus, or ‘zooming in’, on specific phenomena. So scanning – or even more generally, ‘observing’ – contains two separate elements – wide scanning and deep scanning.

WIDE SCANNING involves taking in, ideally, a broader range of inputs than is considered usual or ‘normal’ for the particular context and/or corporation. It involves the sweeping observation of numerous fields, areas and sources, as well as the quick documentation (in the form of texts,

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pictures or other media) of all the things that might generate partial answers to understand trends.

DEEP SCANNING involves gaining a deeper ethnographic understanding of some specific (and preferably little-known) trending area and thoroughly documenting it. The aim is to gain a deep, if relatively localised, understanding of something specific.

So just as setting up the question involves switching between focus and peripheral vision, scanning involves switching between deep and superficial frames of reference. And note that ‘superficial’ doesn’t mean ‘bad’ here – on the contrary, using both wide and superficial scanning is a key part of the analysis. Skimming enables us to spot things that we might otherwise miss, but you have to augment this with selective deeper investigation, or you’ll only amass a bunch of cursory images. Wide and deep scanning support each other, one giving us a series of quick, new inputs, the other building our understanding of particular trends.

Going places..

Scanning the future generally involves spending time in both familiar and unfamiliar places. You’ll do a lot of it close to home. You’re likely to be interested in what’s happening in your business and your industry, and while you should be

aware of how changes in other fields can affect your business, you can’t ignore your central area of expertise. But you also need to cast your net wider for inputs, insights and ideas. Looking only in their own metaphorical backyard would make the trendspotter a bit like the storied drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost. When a policeman asks him whether he lost them there, the drunk replies: “No, I lost them over there, but the light is better here.” Trends have no respect for where you feel most comfortable looking for them, and widening the net is essential if you are to find anything new. But where do you look?

The easy answer is: “Look in as many places as possible.” This makes sense, since we know that trends can pop up almost anywhere. Taking the blinders off is always good advice, and limiting your scanning to only a few places can easily blind you to exciting new developments. But it’s also a coward’s answer. You have to balance the need to look in as many places as possible with the need to be able to do something with the inputs you gather. Some trend agencies brag about the vast and diverse (by which, presumably, they mean socially, technologically, economically, sexually as well as geographically diverse) armies of people they have ‘spotting’ for them. Springwise boasts “more than 8,000 Springspotters in over 70 countries worldwide,” while Trendhunter.com claims to be “fueled by a global network of

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47,000 members.” These thousands of people generate an impressive stream of ‘spots’, which are highly amusing and fun to follow, but which rarely coalesce into an answer to any one question about the world. So while such services may justifiably claim to scan the whole gamut of potential trends, they do so at the expense of depth and context.

Those of us who don’t have an army of dedicated observers at our beck and call can, of course, use these sorts of services. Also, through the magic of RSS-feeds and email newsletters, anyone can draw on the collective observations of thousands.. With the help of Google and social media, you could even set up your own personalized trend detection network – one part coolhunting.com, one part springwise.com, a dash of The Economist, a few specialized blogs and hey presto! If you don’t mind the great overlap between the different sources of information, this can be a quick and efficient and way to stay attuned to (some aspects of) culture. But you’ll have to do the hard work of ‘noticing’ yourself.

In fact, this sort of approach is a pretty blunt instrument, and you run the distinct risk of being inundated with a mass of largely irrelevant material. For a more personalised trend analysis, you need to pay particular attention to your own area of expertise and the areas adjacent to it. You obviously

already know something about the field you’re working in. This can be a hindrance, as we’ve discussed – your know-how may steer your observation into the areas you feel most comfortable with. But you shouldn’t ignore it completely. Instead, the trick is to see what you can learn from what’s going on at its borders and at the limits of your expertise – areas you might normally ignore or judge irrelevant. Your very knowledge of your field should enable you to identify which areas of it, or close to it, people don’t normally look to for insights, and you should deliberately explore some of these.

But even here, you can’t examine everything. The best approach is to take a good, but not too intense, look at the areas people normally observe in your field, add as many ‘bordering’ fields as you can handle – particularly those that tend to be ignored – and then pick a few others, more or less at random. That last bit might sound weird, but there’s a logic to it. You can’t look at all fields, and no matter how ‘relevant’ the fields you pick, you will inevitably miss things. But a random sample can generate enough ‘strange’ inputs to, at the very least, push you into some interesting directions. Indeed, sometimes ‘random’ is a strategy in itself.

..and then going deep

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In addition to the sweeping, scanning and skimming discussed above, you need to examine some of the changes you notice in more depth. This doesn’t mean simply reading up a little more on a given subject, but getting up close and personal with things that you didn’t really know about. Understanding any form of cultural or social change involves not just knowing it exists, but also having a grasp on how it is used, how people relate to it, what cultural forms arise around it, and so on. Take, for example, the rise of Facebook. Merely being aware of this website (for it is, after all, just a website) back in 2006 would have been unlikely to cause you to change your behavior. If you had scanned it, you might have noticed that it was average-looking yet seemed to attract young users – and that would have been that. But if you had spent a little more time on it, talked to users, looked at what they were doing, you might have started wondering whether this was a new kind of communication, and how things might change if what you saw happening there started to spread.

‘Going deep’ involves immersing yourself in things that might feel odd, even uncomfortable. It involves listening to how people talk, understanding what they think is suitable and unsuitable behavior, realizing how things for the uninitiated can look exactly alike but for those in the know be radically different. Think, for instance, of the way a young adult playing Call of Duty: Black Ops seems to see things you can’t, talks

about things you can’t comprehend, treats things you can’t decipher as highly significant, and laughs at things you don’t understand. They are embedded into a cultural context that is highly meaningful for them, and dismissing that insight as “Kids seem to be playing a lot of war games these days” is an inadequate response to an important emerging trend.

Immersing yourself in a different cultural or social context involves opening your eyes, seeing new things, noticing. This won’t generate the same list of exciting inputs as wide scanning does, but it will give you a more fundamental insight than you’d get from a quick snapshot. It will help you to speculate about other trends, fads and cultural phenomena too. Deep scanning is, in a sense, a way to prime yourself for creating scenarios, as immersing yourself into a new subculture or phenomenon allows you to see what happens when something that is new to you becomes meaningful and contextually valuable. Understanding how young people play COD (only the deeply un-cool refer to it as ‘Call of Duty’) might not be directly relevant for your industry, but the way they engage with it can teach you a lot about how consumer cultures emerge around things you don’t currently understand. You either feel confused and disoriented now, in an environment that you know you can get out of, or you wait until the whole world becomes confusing and disorienting. The choice is yours, but the person who decides to get

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confused today may be the one who is best prepared for meeting tomorrow.

Switching between perspectives (and back again)

In the end, scanning the contemporary is about balancing different ways of looking at the world. You need to look at things that are close by, and those that are far away. You need to pay attention to things that are close to your core business, and be aware of things on the periphery that could become tomorrow’s core. You need to look superficially at many things, and in depth at some things. You need to look at things that excite you, and at those that make no sense to you. In general, you need to get comfortable with doing ‘both/and’, not ‘either/or’. The trending future is a confusing place, and you can’t expect to sort it out with simple, linear models.

If you do all this and manage to collect both an interesting set of inputs and a deeper understanding of the way small changes can lead to greater cultural and/or social changes, you’re well placed to take the next step. This is to take all these new insights to generate scenarios from them.

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So you’ve collected insights, scanned the world, and you are now sitting there surrounded by notes, photos, clippings and articles. You got the parts needed to answer the question. You understand things pretty well, at least up to a certain point. The next step is the analysis.

Depending on the state and the ambition of your project, the analysis phase can be conducted with relatively simple techniques like ranking, grouping, brainstorming and crafting combinations, or the much more complex discipline of scenario planning. Let’s start with the simple techniques.

Ranking Trends

The simplest form of analysis is to just pull out all your documented sightings, go through them to see which are the most important, then call it a day. If you are exceptionally diligent – or work with a big, global team – this can in itself generate some pretty interesting insights. But it’s a restricted way of working, and you run the risk of coming up with just a list of fun things. They may be interesting to read, but won’t

really add to the sum of human knowledge or help you to move forward. As such, ranking is rarely enough by itself and often works best as a step prior to brainstorming, grouping and crafting combinations.

Brainstorming, grouping and crafting combinations

Brainstorming, grouping and crafting combinations are related techniques. Using these techniques together helps you reveal and understand trends on a deeper level. You need to sit down with your observations, preferably in a space where you can spread out and easily take notes (the documentation never ends).

Brainstorming generates ideas on the possible path and evolution of trends. Start thinking about what would happen if the trend you’re looking at was taken a step further, and then another step, and then yet another. Don’t be afraid of going wild with your ideas – your job here is to work with the material and let it generate new ideas for you. If an idea seems laughable or extreme, it probably has some potential.

Chapter 4

How to Analyze Trends

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We have conducted brainstorming sessions where participants discussed seemingly eccentric ideas to make a few jokes, just to see competitors announcing a product based on the very same ideas, a few days after that workshop.

Once you generated ideas, you need to group them. Suggest themes they might fall under and don’t worry about whether these are the best ones. Just start somewhere. Start pinning up the observations you have made under different headings, and think about why you focus on some rather than others. Think about the implications of the development of these trends. What if they could develop more and more (which isa return to brainstorming). This is also the perfect time to create mood boards and storyboards.

Grouping ideas based on their themes and implications will help you identify synergies and craft combinations of ideas or trends, therefore envisioning more possible trends. Take different ideas, at random even, and think about how they could be understood together.

These three techniques are essential to trend analysis. Trends on their own are not very interesting; they are mere snapshots of society. Taken together, as a group of varied but somehow related phenomena, they can tell us a lot about underlying

changes. Taken one by one, they may say very little, but when creatively combined, they may indicate emerging trends or even give us insights into trends yet to come.

The range of analysis covered by this techniques is often intermediate, preceding a return to scanning or a much more advanced form of analysis. In any case, you need to be conscious about the temporary nature of the analysis and the need to constantly re-assess your subject, reconsider what your did and update your analyses.

Scenario Planning

Scenario planning is literally the use of scenarios for strategic planning. Scenario planning is one of the most advanced way to analyze trends. The practice is carrying a near-mythological status and also is seen by many as challenging. This is in large part the result of stories about the successful use of scenarios created by Herman Kahn and his group at the RAND Corporation for the US High Command, and the work of Pierre Wack, Arie de Geus and others at Shell.

Scenario planning is indeed a serious strategic tool, but on a general level, it is just about writing stories about what the future might look like, based current trends. These stories are tools for thinking and reflecting about our own positions, getting to shared understanding of trends and possibilities

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that are meant to influence the strategy of an organisation and its planning.

Herman Kahn essentially wrote highly detailed “what if?” stories, using an imaginary future correspondent to describe a serie of specific situations in a direct and powerful manner. His stories showed how apparently inconsequential choices could turn out to be significant - thereby highlighting the importance of noticing even smaller shifts. Similar methods are sometimes used to demonstrate how external shocks can lay waste to our carefully laid plan, and to show how rapidly and dramatically the corporate landscape can change.

Scenario planning allows us to create more ‘tangible’ pictures of where trends might take us. It’s about moving from the realization that a trend exists to writing the full story of what this might mean – including the way it might affect things, including companies. Scenarios are stories about the future, but they have to be told in such a way that they feel real – or, at least, real enough to make us take them seriously.

Some people take a very purist view of scenario planning, and there’s no better way to wind up a futurist than to try to define the methodology. Each individual or school of thinking has their own very specific idea of what it should involve. For example, some maintain that you can’t do scenario planning

for time periods within the next ten years, while others dictate a set amount of time to be spent in groups discussing underlying assumptions (a bit like group therapy, but less fun). But we’ll happily ignore these people here. You can do and define scenario planning in a number of different ways, but we’re going to describe just one. It may not fit everyone’s idea of scenarios, but it works in this context.

So, anyway…. When getting into scenario planning, you need to consider how what you observe can change the world, and what such a world might look like. The contemporary science fiction writer David Brin, famous for predicting, among other things, citizen reporters, described scenario planning in an interview for BBC News Magazine like this.

“The top method is simply to stay keenly attuned to trends in the laboratories and research centers around the world, taking note of even things that seem impractical or useless. …. You then ask yourself: “What if they found a way to do that thing ten thousand times as quickly/powerfully/well? What if someone weaponized it? Monopolized it? Or commercialized it, enabling millions of people to do this new thing, routinely? What would society look like, if everybody took this new thing for granted?”

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This explanation shows how a scenario is more than a list of observations, and highlights the importance of deep scanning. People commonly confuse scenarios with statements about the future that merely postulate that something has happened – for example: “Scenario A is that China is a dominant power in….” Yaaawn. This is not a scenario; it is only a (fairly feeble) starting point. Real scenario work involves describing an assumed future situation, complete with a sense of how natural this world order will feel to its inhabitants compared to how strange it feels to us today. Just as we must try to understand what playing COD is really like, rather than just stating that kids seem to like playing it, simply listing a few possibilities about the future is not creating scenarios.

Real scenario work involves creating not one but several mutually exclusive futures. The possibilities will inevitably fall into four categories laid out by the “cone of possibilities” (Hancock & Bezold, 1994). The cone itself represent the scope of possibilities, starting from a “now” point, with possibilities extending as we look further in the future. Possible futures then fall into three main categories: the plausible, the probable and the preferable. A coherent set of scenario will fall into these categories, one way or another, with several variations for each. And don’t forget to keep in mind the highly subjective character of each possibilities -

writing scenarios often boils down to pushing current idea of what’s preferable based on the plausible and the preferable, shifting from a potentially dangerous status quo to the most beneficent or least damageable position..

Scenarios also need to be believable. ‘Believable’ here does not equate to ‘convincing’ or ‘realistic’ – both of which are code for ‘telling people what they want to hear’, but rich enough to give us a feel for what it would be like in a world where, for example, the US has gone bankrupt, Europe has become an area of cheap labor, and the axis of power has switched from the northern hemisphere (Washington, London, Berlin, Moscow) to the southern hemisphere (Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, Jakarta). What would this mean for things such as technological development or the prices of raw materials? How might it affect fashion and/or popular culture? Would it change how we look at dating and what we count as a normal family? Would it affect our eating habits or the way we design home furnishings? The point here is not that we should try to forecast every possible ramification of our scenario, but rather that a well-written scenario can force us to think about changes that aren’t obvious, and that it will contain enough detail to make the possible future we’re trying to showcase feel ‘real’. Details such as how the spending habits of women over the age of 50 might change in such a world may seem trivial, but they are important because they

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enrich the scenario with the kind of meaning that elevates it from a mere list of macro-level changes. By thinking through even more esoteric potential changes – the things that might happen when people start taking this new normal for granted – we can imbue our scenarios with life and meaning.

So, to recap, a compelling scenario needs to weave together the major changes that have set up this future world (‘drivers for change’) and the more subtle effects that these have had, into a ‘story’. Some people write it intuitively, drawing on their capacity to imagine worlds and fill them with meaning, but most people prefer a more structured approach. You normally write several scenarios at once, rather than one master scenario, and you might use a number of different techniques and approaches, but most scenario planning exercises are fundamentally the same: start from your observations and then isolate key context(s) and factors that you will use to develop several scenarios that will make most of the analysis.

We set out one structure in this chapter, based on three major steps: creating a framework, generating scenario ideas and writing the scenario themselves.

1. The framework

The first thing you need to do is to set the state by choosing the context within which the scenarios are to play out and

identify the key drivers or change you want to draw on, which, brought together, will form the common framework for the scenario work. This part is important in order to lay down the ‘ground rules’ and to prevent the scenarios from becoming too disparate – it would be ridiculous, for example, to discuss global trade and imminent global war in one, and tastes in instant coffee in another.

1.1 Choose your context(s)

When writing scenarios, you normally start by choosing contexts. You may already have partly done this when you formulated your question for your trend analysis, but it is probably useful to revisit it. What’s the overarching context you’re interested in?

If you’re doing a corporate scenario planning exercise, your immediate response might be the industrial sector you operate in. But this in itself isn’t a very good context – partly because you can’t be really sure what ‘your industry’ might be in ten years’ time. A few short years ago it never occurred to people in the camera industry that their industry involved digitalization, online services, or mobile phones – all of which have become key elements.

So clearly, limiting a scenario context to what you understand as your context today can be dangerous, forcing you to think

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more broadly about it all. If you’re in cars or airlines, for example, your context might be something like ‘how people use transportation’; if you’re in cameras or travel it might be ‘how people record their experiences’; and if you’re in food, retail, or are otherwise interested in the sustainability of human life on earth it might be ‘how food is produced’. A good context is thus one that is open enough to allow for disruptive changes, but still tied to a specific phenomenon or problem.

1.2. Set key drivers

Once the context is set, the next step is to identify the key drivers of the scenarios. This is where your wide scanning comes into play. What new things did you spot emerging from your collected material? What sorts of things drove change, created new business models, new products, new kinds of excitement among the consumers? What new types of customers were emerging, what kinds of social changes seemed to play a part?

Drivers depends on context, so will be very different, for example, in the fields of communications technology and water conservation. Whatever the context, it’s important not to pick your key drivers too quickly. You’ll inevitably think of the obvious ones first – but so would anyone with any insight

into what it is you’re looking at, and what good is a scenario if it is eminently predictable? You should, instead, have conducted your scanning in a way that reveals more subtle changes, which, if widely adopted, might create an entirely new kind of driver.

The events leading up to the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 are pertinent here. Social media and communications technology have long been identified as key drivers for economic development, new kinds of marketing and entrepreneurship. But who might have thought they could carry revolutionary (in the political sense of the word) potential? The popular uprisings in countries such as Egypt and Libya during the first half of 2011 demonstrated clearly how such commonplace technologies could affect geopolitical stability and macroeconomic factors such as oil prices and, by extension, inflation.

So if you ran a scenario-planning exercise in early 2010 on raw material prices and inflation, and identified social media as a key driver, you would have been proved right, however unlikely it might have seemed at the time. Or would it have been the very unlikelihood of this scenario that made it more likely? Key drivers of change come in many forms: the quest for simplicity in Western consumption, rising nationalism in newly-rich economies, aspirational consumption in an

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emerging global middle class, technological change in Africa, food production patterns in a developing Asia, and so on. The key is to pick drivers that correspond to things you’ve noticed in your scanning, but which contain enough different possibilities for change that the scenario-planning exercise is meaningful. You should also try to pick several trends, ideally pointing in different directions and towards different possible futures, in order to stimulate a lively debate.

1.3. Establish framework

Once you’ve established your context and key drivers in a way that you’re satisfied but not too comfortable with, you should combine them into a framework. Establishing frameworks is where the broad strokes of the scenarios start to emerge, and a transition between setting the stage and formulating the scenarios.

Different people like to approach this task in different ways. Some, for example, like to generate large numbers of drivers, and group and collate them into frameworks. Others prefer to spend more time distilling drivers into a few key drivers, which means they have an almost finished framework by the time they reach this point.

A manufacturer of computer accessories wondering about the possible orientations of its product strategy in line with

the unstoppable rise of mobile devices will probably have chosen several key factors related to users and technologies. At this stage, the context and the key factors need to be linked together to form a kind of system, or analysis framework, with dynamics based on the different pieces, sometimes described as “systemic links”. The result could see the rising sales of smartphones stimulating the sales of tablets for consumers who never had a computer, which in turn reduces the sales of computers, the combination of these five factors creating a market for a new type of accessories, with barely anything in common with the past..

The amount of time you devote to establishing this framework will depends on your preferred way of working. A facilitator can sometimes help you with this process, particularly when you’re working in a larger group. But however you go about it, you should emerge from this stage of the exercise with some general guidelines about what defines your scenarios and some general trends that seem to inform them. Quite often, companies leave their scenario work at this point, as they feel the broad strokes they have generated at this stage are sufficient. But their complacency is misplaced: This stage can only generate very general and often quite abstract results that lack any detail or texture. Such ‘scenarios’ won’t challenge anyone.

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2. Brainstorm scenario ideas

The combination of the context(s) and key factors then serve as the basis to develop the scenarios further by start brainstorming ideas for scenario writing. You’ll probably have brainstormed in the earlier stages too, but at this stage you’re brainstorming to populate the framework with content. Once again, your scanning work comes into play. When you brainstorm key drivers you normally focus on finding the things that will affect the world in obvious ways, the phenomena that truly change how we do and think about things. But here you need to assume that some of the key drivers of change are givens, and think about what might happen next. Also at this stage you can make the drivers much more specific. Say, for instance, that you’ve identified global food production as your context and water scarcity as one of its key drivers. A proto-scenario might then be ‘a world where water is expensive, draconian water-conservation laws are the new normal, and beef production has come to a standstill’. It’s not a bad starting point, but it’s still quite vague.

What kind of ideas could you add to make it richer? Well, try the following for size (and then write down 20 of your own):

“Water becomes 20 times more expensive, and, as a result, populist political movements grow stronger. This drives up water prices further still, and as governments try to balance the situation, new and powerful criminal organizations develop around water issues. Drinking beer becomes a symbol of youthful rebellion, as increasingly disillusioned youths start showing off by drinking water-intensive beverages and ignoring conservation regulations. Beef becomes the new single-malt, and MTV shows videos of rappers tucking into huge steaks. Policing water becomes so important that several private ‘water security’ companies are established, creating a booming industry – sometimes closely aligned with the new water mafias. From this you’ll see that while creating the general framework is easy, the real work behind a good scenario involves generating tons of ideas to incorporate in the more detailed final product.”

3. Writing scenarios

The third step concentrate on writing, or more precisely, developing the scenarios in an iterative way in order to make them credible and varied enough to stimulate thinking.

3.1 Pick main scenarios

Once you have both a framework and a wide range of ideas and inputs – from both your scanning and your brainstorming

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– you can start to group these and pick main scenarios. In the previous steps you are likely to have generated several possible scenarios, and the challenge now is to decide which of these to pursue. This means identifying those groupings of frameworks and ideas you feel would generate good, believable, rich and challenging final scenarios.

Normally you should generate between three and seven final scenarios (though Shell’s latest scenario-planning exercise only came up with two). The exact number of scenarios you generate depends on what you want to achieve with the exercise, and its scope, but you need enough alternatives to stimulate thinking, but not so many that people can’t engage thoroughly with each one. And when picking scenarios to develop, think about the capacity of each to bring something novel to the table as well as their cumulative power to give you alternative views on the context you're interested in.

3.2. Draft scenarios

Once you’ve chosen your main scenarios, you then need to start drafting them. This involves a process of writing down and otherwise illustrating the scenario on the basis of the ideas you’ve chosen, and through different types of events (daily, regional, global..) and different points of views, in relation with specific characters and organizations, starting

from a certain point to progress towards another point. You will also need details to better describe the implications of significant changes (macro/mega/giga..) and involve the reader.

Good scenario writing is an acquired skill, requiring both imagination and the ability to convey complex thought through text and image. However, this does not mean that only a few people are capable of doing it. Writing scenarios is actually much easier than other forms of writing because you already have lots of material to work from, and you aren’t constrained by facts. The scenario is supposed to stimulate thought and imagination, rather than be a perfect representation of the future, so your main concern when drafting it is to bring it alive. Good scenarios are like good art – they give us a new perspective on something rather than, necessarily, a better representation of it. So you should focus on ensuring that the details and quirky additions help people to understand the implications of a macro-level change, rather than simply detailing the change itself.

3.3. Extend scenarios

Once you’ve drafted the scenarios, you usually extend them by e.g. getting the group that’s been involved in the exercise to go through them and help you refine them. If you're

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working on your own, you might solicit input from a selection of trusted people, preferably with varied backgrounds. In either case the process is iterative in order to ensure that the scenarios are thought-provoking (but not impenetrable), lively and believable – so that they can shift people’s thinking.

Extending your first draft can also help to ensure that you're not just repeating what others are already saying, and that you've managed to inject new dimensions into people’s understanding of the future. The question to ask your group or other readers is:

Is this a trend or an image of the future you’ve heard before?

Does it surprise/move/bore/excite/provoke you?

Simulating the effect of trends

Having developed your scenarios, you should by now (depending on the time frame you’ve chosen) have a pretty advanced trend analysis. This ought to provide a strong foundation that a corporation, an organization, or you personally, can build on. But the way the stakeholders are going to engage with your scenarios is going to have a strong impact on their ability to convey change and help decision making. A story written on paper isn’t always enough, and often feels a bit dry, which often motivates the production of

engaging videos, which are easy to share. The problem with this kind of material is that is often becomes a bit anecdotical. “Look at this video of our products in 2023.. interesting, right?”

Beyond the abstract report and the simplistic video, it is possible to bring your scenarios into the reality, by creating a (partial) simulation of it, allowing the stakeholders to experiment change and really feel what it means. This approach inherits from transmedia storytelling, theatre, modern art installations, movies, industrial design, and sometimes video games.. We talk about “design futures” which could be described as designs of the futures: all sort of designs physical an materials, reflecting the things to come. Design futures are implemented in essentially two ways: design fictions and experiential futures.

Design fictions brings in the present an object or a service of the future, in the shape of a model or a prototype, to help the target audience feel the implications of change. Design fictions are focused on objects and their sense, showcasing them in a way that is close to how movie props are used to describe the future, like the proto-tablets of 2001: A Space Odyssey or the interactive user interfaces of Minority Report. Science fiction movies are a major source of design fictions. Bruce Sterling, one of the major spearhead of design fictions

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describe them as “not a type of fiction but a type of design”, connecting the study of trends and the design of new products or services.

Experiential futures can be described as experiences of the futures, meant to bring a scenario to life with its places, situations and artifacts, to help the audience better feel its implications. What would happen if a french company bought McDonald’s and turned it into something more french? A relevant installation could bring a texan restaurant with a menu now influenced by french culture.. an idea that isn’t so remote from reality. Another possibility is the release of specific artifacts, objects that already exist but in their future iteration, and release them into the current environment without warning, just to see how people react. In the wake of the Tunisian revolution of 2010-2011, the local advertising agency eMemac Ogilvy Partner transformed the 16th of February, 2011, into a large happening meant to showcase a positive idea of the future in a period of troubles. The agency distributed a newspaper dedicated to June 16th, 2014, supported by a dedicated website, videos and a social media campaign in order to stimulate the debate about what should happen next.

Standing at the cross of fiction and reality, this kind of simulation enables more immersive and interactive

experiences, but this approach only works if your scenarios are rich and structured enough. The resulting experience will be less linear and much more interactive but require solid foundations, with enough coherence and detailed to be credible, trigger reactions and have a lasting influence.

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Let’s assume you have managed to put together a set of scenarios, and feel that the exercise was pretty successful. Everyone loved it, the scenarios generated a lot of discussion, and a good time was had by all. Everyone went home and felt more enlightened. Is that it? Are you finished? No.

The key issue when studying trends is, of course, obsolescence. In today’s society, a trend that might have seemed terribly exciting half a year ago may well be outdated now. And things can sometimes move even faster than that: We’ve both mentioned things in interviews that seemed cool at the time, only to realize that they’d become a little trite by the time the magazine was published! You can never assume that a trend analysis in ‘finished’. At best you can capture a fleeting glimpse of what the possibilities look like right now, and use this as a start for other things. These other things might include, say, a strategy discussion among your top managers or colleagues; a brainstorming session about potential new products or services; a new round of trend analysis focusing on some aspect of the earlier report; or a

frank discussion about which business areas you might want to get out of in the near future.

So trend analysis and scenario planning is not an end in itself. Sometimes people do regard scenarios, trend reports, mood-boards, rooms filled with Post It-notes and so on, as inherently worthwhile. They call them ‘inspirations’ or ‘important reminders’ or some other equally fluffy term – a terminology which seems to relegate them to mere decoration rather than making them part of how an individual or organization finds their focus, direction and strategy.

Stopping here makes it impossible to fully exploit the potential of trend analysis. You shouldn’t treat this as a ‘fun’ exercise, but as a serious attempt to determine the extent to which your organization might already be hurtling down a one-way street towards obsolescence, and to shake management out of its comfort zone. A strategic approach would involve asking questions such as the following.

Chapter 5

Don't Stop There

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– Are we looking at the consumers we know, or the consumers that matter?

– Could a sudden change in political or social climate radically change one or more sources of our competitive advantage?

– Are we doing what we know how to do, or the things that the market is increasingly asking for?

– Are we interested in this new thing (for example, social media, open innovation, green strategies) because it represents a disruptive shift, or because we think it sounds cool, hip and edgy?

– What counts as a trend around here, anyway?

Regardless of what specific questions you ask, one thing is obvious: in order to create a trend analysis that will contribute something more profound to the organization than one more colorful report on the library shelves, you have to remain constantly vigilant and be prepared to continuously scrutinize and improve upon your work.

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Conclusion

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Now that you know how to detect and understand trends, what are you going to do with it? Because now you know how to do it. Congratulations. As we pointed out at the beginning, there is no exam or qualification. And, in actual fact, you knew even before you started reading this – it’s just that you’re hopefully a slightly better one by now. But that doesn’t mean much. You can detect trends, and you can think about trends, but so what? The important thing is what you do with your knowledge and skills, not the knowledge and skills themselves.

Just going through the motions – along the lines we’ve described in the book or using some method of your own – can of course be fun. And maybe that’s all you wanted to do – have some fun with trends. Nothing wrong with that, but studying trends can be so much more. If you apply it to serious, tricky problems, it can help you see new solutions, different approaches, alternative perspectives. A doctor who understand trends might devise new protocols or new clinical practices based on its insight. An entrepreneur might find an under-served need or consumer group. A social innovator might find a way to change society. This is what understanding trends should be about. Novelties and fads are fun and interesting, but trends should enable more than that: it has the capacity to make us more aware of what we can achieve as a culture, and can make us more attuned to the complexities of modern society.

So perhaps a better question than “What are you going to do with it?” might be “Will you let your understanding of trends change you?” As we indicated early on, the easiest thing in the world is to look for the trends everyone else is already talking about or the trends you’d most like to find. This isn’t understanding trends, not really. But it’s an easy trap to fall into, and one that should be avoided. If you can adopt a beginner’s mind, look at things without pre-judging them, and see the world in all its strangeness, understanding trends can help you to develop as a human being. Rather than seeing it as collecting fun impulses, we can see it as a way to challenge our world-view and our preconceived notions – like some kind of shock therapy!

In the end, it comes down to going out into the world and meeting it head on. Taking it in as it is, rather than as you might wish it to be. Allowing it to change you, your outlook, your way of being and living. The trendspotter is not out there to make the world more like him or her, but to celebrate the rich variety of oddities they encounter. Understanding trends can make you better at your job, because it can show you new paths forward. It can also make you a better person, because it can reveal all sorts of different ways to live and work and love. Understanding trends can give you much. The question is: What will you give back?

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About the Authors

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Alf Rehn

Alf is a management professor, an internationally recognized business thinker (or something), an author and a speaker. He is currently holding the Chair of Management and Organization at Åbo Akademi University in Finland, was earlier the SSES Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, and has in addition taught at universities all over the globe.

alfrehn.com @alfrehn

Magnus Lindkvist

Magnus is a trendspotter and futurist based in Zurich, Switzerland. Magnus spend his time travelling the world sharing his vision of mega trends, scenarios about the future and the eternal enigmas of innovation and creativity. Magnus is the author of Everything We know Is Wrong : The Trendspotter's Handbook andThe Attack of the Unexpected.

magnuslindkvist.com @trendymagnus

Luc Byhet

Luc is a product management expert working for the tech industry and sharing his time between France and Switzerland. Luc focuses on helping companies define, design and build new products. After reading the first edition of Trendspotting, Luc decided to add infographics, flowcharts to make it more straightforward, which resulted in the current version of the book.

luc-byhet.com @lucbyhet

Before starting your own researches, you need to get familiar with a few tools. There is only three types of tools: documentation, archive and presentation. These can all be used at different scales, from a large scale operation with a lot of people and a lot of travelling, to an individual operation. Whatever your situation is, you can achieve a lot with a few things. Let’s start with documentation.

Documentation

You are going to observe a lot of things and you will need to document them in a way that is almost scientific. This will be useful to present your finding, but also because the human memory is fallible. You need notes and images about what you are observing as well as the context. For example if you find a toy that you think indicates a shift in how children approach technology, will you remember the details of the box? The setting it was sold in? What did it stand next to? How kids were approaching it? How much did it cost? What did comparable toys cost? Keeping track of these things is impossible without proper documentation, which is the reason

why most people who track trend professionally are obsessive documenters.

The notebook is a crucial tool to document trends. No matter how comfortable you are with a smartphone, there are a many situations where it is easier to scribble down a note or make a quick sketch on paper than it is to enter it into an app. You need several notebooks and several pens, then you need to stick them in every jacket and coat you own, so you will find yourself with one whenever you need one. A voice recorder can also be useful to take quick impressions when observing the world or record something you are observing.

The other essential documentation tool is the camera. New insights need top images. The choice of camera is very personal. Some are happy with the camera in their phone, while others carry around professional DSLRs and multiple lenses. “Real” cameras have their advantages, but whatever setup you choose, make sure it is something that you are happy to carry with you and use often. This actually applies to all the documentation tools: you never know when you might

Appendix

Trend Detection Tools

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stumble across something really remarkable,and you’ll be annoyed if you’re unable to document it.

Archive

It’s one thing to produce documentation but quite another to have this documentation in a form that enables you to access it and use it. You need an archive, because the greatest note in the world isn’t worth much if you can’t find it when you want it. A large part of trend detection and analysis happens by observing things in the field and then producing insights based on what was observed. To that end, it is critical to have a system to facilitate the organization, access and combination of the elements you collected.

There are many modern alternatives to the big archival cabinet. One key tool is the scanner. Alf uses a small, wireless scanner - a Doxie Go (http://www.getdoxie.com) and feed into it everything he gathers. The reason is simple: digital archives are much easier to keep, maintain and tag. So we take everything - handwritten notes, pamphlets, flyers, ads, pages out of magazines, and run it through the scanner to produce images and PDFs that go into a digital-note archive service.

As an archival system, digital systems like Evernote are hard to beat. You could quibble about exactly which system is the

best, but the choice really comes down to the one you feel most comfortable with. Most of them offer the same key benefits - tagging, indexing, creating multiple ‘stacks’ of material - but it’s worth trying out several to find out the one you like the best, then put all your material into it and tag everything.

Using a large number of tags will help you make things specific and avoid the trap of losing things because you used generic labels (like ‘fashion’ or ‘interesting’). An array of tags for trends detected in a bar might include things like ‘girl’, ‘fashion’, ‘accessory’, ‘pink’, ‘retro’, ‘hipster’, ‘gender-bending’, ‘moustache’, ‘London’, ‘club’, ‘clubbing’, ‘re-use’ and ‘fad’. Using many tags will help materials turn up in numerous searches, which creates the possibility of serendipitous find. For example, a silly accessory might turn up next to a note on changing work behaviors and trigger an idea about ‘work as play’.

Internet

It’s difficult to imagine what contemporary trend detection and analysis would look like in an unwired world because the internet yields an almost infinite amount of readily available material. Early trend detection and analysis took a lot of

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travel, but today you can achieve almost as much just by being connected.

For us, the most important tool here is not Facebook or Twitter (too much random noise) but the awesomeness that is RSS (Really Simple Syndication). By curating a good list of relevant RSS-feeds with Netnewswire, Feedly or another RSS aggregator, we can follow a few dozen key blogs and magazines in a simple, easy to scan fashion, saving us endless hours of painstaking trawling. To this comes a few curated magazines/apps, and obviously the websites of some key magazines, as well as a discussion group or two.

Twitter and other social medias are important too, of course, and we do keep up with various forms of social media. Social media are particularly helpful when you’re working on well-defined projects, allowing you to chase down specialized Twitter feeds or Facebook groups.

But don’t get too comfortable with online trend detection. If it’s easy for you, it’s easy for everyone else too. If it’s online, and particularly if it’s popular, you need to think seriously about what you’re doing with it. Millions of people follow Boing Boing: what makes that thing you saw there special? Also, trends as depicted online tends to become self-fulfilling. As different sites start picking up on and re-posting each

other’s ideas, the effect becomes one of a trend echo chamber, where the importance of any individual trend can easily be exaggerated.

One last thing: it can make you lazy. Yes, it’s easy, and it can give you tons of information in a very condensed format. But that can lull you into a false sense of security where you think that because you follow some hip blogs, you’ve got it all figured out. And you haven’t. None of us have.

(re)Presentation

You might think that only those who sell their insights to corporations need to produce presentations, but we’re not taking here about ‘presenting to someone’. Analysing trends requires you to employ different techniques to represent your findings, if only to yourself. Trends evolves rapidly: emerging, evolving and disappearing sometimes very rapidly. One of the best way to make sense of a trend is to capture your findings in a presentation with a coherent structure and narrative.

A classic way to do this is to use a variation of what the fashion and design industry calls ‘mood boards’. Wikipedia defines a mood board as “a type of poster design that may consist of images, text and samples of objects in a composition of the choice of the mood board creator.” And that pretty much sums it up. Rather than just stacking your

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observations in piles and leafing through them, you take a large piece of paper, or a section of a whiteboard, or something similar, and start pinning your collected materials onto it. Don’t worry too much about consistency—the point of a mood board is to capture your intuition and stimulate creative discussions (even if they are monologues) about trends. Give your mood boards evocative names, and see what emerges when you throw things together. In this sense, presentation is simply a form of analysis.

A similar technique is to take your observations and use them to create storyboards. A storyboard is similar to a mood board, but functions in a more narrative fashion. Instead of just trying to convey a feeling, a storyboard might, for instance, present your material through telling the story of a typical person going through the motions of a normal day. Some of your observations might relate to the way people use mobile phones during their morning commute; others might be concerned with how people try to impress each other in a bar. By using a storyboard you can connect trends to a timeline and to different contexts, something that can enable you and others to see interesting new things. Does a trend look different in the morning than in the evening? Is the trend different for the old person going to the park than for the young professional grabbing a coffee? Will different cultures have the same stories?

For some, trend detection and analysis always ends up as a slideshow. PowerPoint, Keynote and similar technologies are great for presenting trends, but not without shortcomings. You shouldn’t become too dependent on this though. A slideshow may be a simple and well-understood way of showing things off, but it can also force your ideas too quickly into a linear logic that is inherent to a slideshow. We would advocate starting out with different kinds of analysis and presentation, only resorting to the slideshow at a fairly advanced stage in the process.

We’d also like to add a few words on naming, i.e. the arcane art of labelling trends. This is sometimes perceived as a highly important part of the process, and some spend an inordinate amount of time trying to come up with witty new monikers. They seem to think that new trends demand a new language, and that giving their trend a name makes people see it differently, thus expanding their horizons. Sometimes it works wonderfully like with ‘cocooning’ or ‘prosumers’, but there are also cases where the new terms become a tad embarrassing—did we for instance need the term ‘dormandise’ (dormant+merchandise, as dreamt up by the clever people at trendwatching.com in 2003)?

We would advise saving the neologisms for later—and then using them only if you’re convinced that your new trend really

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justifies a new name. If you spend more time trying to come up with a cute name than figuring out what’s really going on, you’re not helping anyone.

There are situations, however, where a well thought-out new word can change people’s perspective, such as when you need to convince people that two previously unrelated terms (think bacon and dieting) really might go together. So take a sanity test: are you trying to be funny or cute with this new word, or are you trying to change how people think? Making people smile is not the same as making them see the world in a new light.

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