Non-Obvious 2019- How To Predict Trends and Win The Future Page 2

  Part II is the 2018 edition of the Non-Obvious Trend Report, featuring fifteen new ideas that will shape business in the year to come. Each trend features supporting stories and research, as well as an outline for why that trend matters and concrete ideas for how to apply the trend to your own business or career.

  Part III is filled with tips on making trends actionable, including a short description of workshops you can host yourself to bring these trends to life in your organization. In this section, I also discuss the importance of anti-trends and how to use “intersection thinking” to see the patterns between industries and stories.

  Finally, Part IV is a candid review of 105 previously predicted trends from the past seven years along with an honest assessment and rating for how each one performed over time, all sourced from a combination of conversations with industry insiders and a review panel of trusted colleagues.

  You can choose to read this book in the order that it’s presented or you can skip back and forth between trends and techniques. Whether you choose to focus on my predictions for 2018 or jump to the last part to see how previously trends rated, this book can be read in short bursts or all at once.

  Either way, like Asimov, you don’t need to be a speed reader.

  Being a speed understander, however, is a worthy aspiration. It’s my hope that this book will help you get there.

  01

  The NORWEGIAN BILLIONAIRE:

  Why Most Trend Predictions

  Are Spectacularly Useless

  _

  In 1996 Christian Ringnes was a billionaire with a first-world problem—he was running out of space for his favorite collection.

  As one of the richest men in Norway, Ringnes is well known as a flamboyant businessman and art collector whose family started the country’s largest brewery more than a hundred years ago. In his hometown of Oslo, Ringnes owns several restaurants and museums and has donated more than $70 million for the creation of a large sculpture and cultural park, which opened in 2013.

  In his heart, Ringnes is a collector. Over decades he has built one of the largest private collections of art in the world. Yet his real legacy may come from something far more unique: his lifelong obsession with collecting mini liquor bottles.

  This fixation began for Ringnes at the age of seven when he received an unusual present from his father: a half-empty mini liquor bottle. It was this afterthought of a gift that led him on a path toward amassing what is recognized today as the largest independent mini-bottle collection in the world, with more than 52,000 miniature liquor bottles.

  Unfortunately, his decades-long obsession eventually ran into an insurmountable opponent—his late wife, Denise.

  As the now legendary story goes, Denise wasn’t too pleased with the disorganization of having all these bottles around the house. After years of frustration, she offered him an ultimatum: either find something to do with all those bottles or start selling them.

  Like any avid collector, Ringnes couldn’t bear the thought of selling them, so he created a solution based on his wealth and personality.

  He commissioned a museum.[1]

  “To Collect Is Human”

  Today his Mini Bottle Gallery, located in downtown Oslo, is one of the world’s top unique museum destinations, routinely featured in irreverent travel guides and global lists of must-see Scandinavian tourist attractions. Beyond providing a place for Ringnes to store his collection, the gallery, which has a restaurant, is also a popular venue for private events.

  It was here, while in Oslo for a conference dinner that included a tour of the Mini Bottle Gallery, that I got my first personal introduction to Ringnes and his story.

  I have 52,500 different miniature bottles in a museum in Oslo. They’re completely useless. But men, we like collecting. We like having things. That’s human. Once you get fascinated by something, you want it and then you start collecting.

  Christian Ringnes, Founder, The Mini Bottle Gallery

  The museum lived up to its quirky reputation.

  The entrance is a bottle-shaped hallway leading into an open lobby with a champagne waterfall. As you move through over 50 unique installations spanning three floors, each features its own composed soundtrack, customized lighting, and even some unique smells. Like all great museum experiences, the rooms of the Mini Bottle Gallery are carefully curated.

  The mini bottles are grouped into themes ranging from a brothel-inspired Room of Sin with mini bottles from De Wallen (Amsterdam’s red-light district), to a Horror Room featuring liquor bottles with trapped objects such as mice and worms floating inside.

  There’s a Jungle Room, a Room of Famous Persons, and rooms themed around sports, fruits, birds, circus performers, and the occult. There’s even a room featuring the iconic porcelain series of the Delft Blue KLM houses, a series of tiny Dutch rowhouse-shaped liquor bottles given away to passengers by KLM Airlines for more than five decades.

  Across all these rooms, the tour mentions that the gallery typically has more than 12,000 bottles on display. Apart from the scope of the themed rooms, one of the most interesting elements of this story is what the gallery does with the bottles that aren’t on display.

  An Accidental Trend Curator

  Like any other museum, the Mini Bottle Gallery never uses its entire collection. Instead, they only display about 20% of Ringnes’s full collection at any time, and carefully keep the rest in storage. This thoughtful curation adds value to the experience of seeing them.

  Curation is the ultimate method of transforming noise into meaning.

  If you consider the amount of media any of us is exposed to on an average day, the quest to find meaning among the noise is a challenge we all know personally. Navigating information overload requires the same discipline as deciding what bottles to put on display so those that visitors see can tell a better story.

  Without curation, themes would be indecipherable and the experience would be overwhelming, downright noisy.

  It was only on my flight home from Oslo after that event that I realized how important curation had become for my own work.

  Just a few months earlier I’d published the first edition of my Non-Obvious Trend Report, inspired by an idea to publish an article from the many ideas I’d collected over the past year but had never written about. What I was already doing without realizing it was collecting intriguing ideas and saving them in perhaps the most disorganized way possible—by writing them down randomly, printing them or ripping them out of magazines, and then stashing everything in a well-worn folder on my desk.

  In producing that first report, my ambition had been to describe patterns in the stories I had collected that went beyond the typical obvious observations I was always reading online. My goal was to find and develop insights that others either hadn’t yet noticed and that were not getting the attention they warranted.

  To get a different output, sometimes you need a different input.

  On that flight home from Norway, I realized that my accidental method for getting different input—collecting ideas for a year and waiting months before analyzing them—could be the very thing that would set my insights apart and make them truly non-obvious.

  The Non-Obvious Trend Report (my annual list of fifteen trends) was born from this desire to collect underappreciated ideas and connect them into predictions about the future.

  The Underappreciated Side of Data

  Now, if you happen to be an analytical person, this process will hardly seem rigorous enough to be believable. How can collecting ideas and waiting possibly be a recipe for developing genuine insights? What about first-hand research, surveys, and focus groups? What about trend panels and using a global army of trend spotters? What about the data?

  While it’s easy to assume that data means putting numbers into a spreadsheet or referencing some piece of analytics published in a journal—the truth is that data has a forgotten side that has little to do with devising experiments and far more to do with training your powers
of observation.

  When you think about the discipline that goes into scientific research to produce raw data, research can seem like a task only performed by robot-like perfectionists. The truth of scientific research, just like the truth behind many equally complex areas of study, is that experiments aren’t the only way to gather data—nor might they even be the most accurate.

  Trends, like science, aren’t always perfectly measured phenomena that fit neatly into a spreadsheet.

  Discovering trends takes a willingness to combine curiosity with observation and add insight to create valuable ideas that you can then test to ensure they are valid.

  The one thing that I don’t believe describes this method is, ironically, the one term that comes to many people’s minds as soon as the art of predicting the future is mentioned: “trend spotting.” The term itself is a symbol of the biggest myths we tend to believe about those who predict or describe the future.

  Let’s explore these myths and the reasons behind their popularity.

  The 5 Myths of Trend Spotting

  Trend spotting is not the key to predicting the future.

  Unfortunately, the bias toward trend-spotting has created an unreasonable portrait of the type of person who can put the pieces together and anticipate the future. Consider this infuriatingly common definition for what it takes to become a so-called trend spotter:

  To become a trend spotter, someone usually receives extensive education and training in the industry he or she is interested in working for. After receiving a thorough grounding...the trend spotter could start working in company departments which predict trends.[2]

  The assumption that you need to be working in “company departments which predict trends” is just plain idiotic—and wrong.

  I believe anyone can learn the right habits to become better at curating trends and predicting the future for themselves. You just need to develop the right habits and mindset.

  Before we start learning those habits, however, it’s important to tackle the biggest myths surrounding trends and explain why they miss the mark so badly.

  Myth #1 - Trends Are Spotted

  The concept of trend spotting suggests that there are trends simply sitting out there in plain sight ready to be observed and cataloged like avian species for birdwatchers. The reality of trends is far different. Trend spotters typically find individual examples or stories. Calling the multitude of things they spot the same thing as trends is like calling ingredients such as eggs, flour, and sugar the same thing as a cake. You can “spot” ingredients, but trends must be curated from these ingredients to have meaning.

  Myth # 2 - Trends Are Predicted by Industry Experts

  It’s tempting to see industry expertise as a prerequisite to being good at curating trends, but there’s also a predictable drawback: blind spots. The more you know about a topic, the more difficult it becomes to think outside your expertise and broaden your view. There’s no single expertise required to curate trends, but psychologists and business authors have long pointed to this “curse of knowledge” as a common challenge for anyone who builds any type of expertise.[3] To escape it, you need to learn to engage your greater curiosity about the world beyond what you know and learn to better empathize with those who don’t share your same depth of knowledge.

  Myth # 3 - Trends Are Based on “Hard” Data

  When it comes to research, some people rely only on numbers inserted into a spreadsheet as proof and they conveniently forget that there are two methods to conducting research: the quantitative method and the qualitative method. Qualitative research involves using observation and experience to gather mainly verbal data instead of results from experiments. If you are uncovering the perfect pH balance for shampoo, you certainly will want to use quantitative research. For curating trends, you need a mixture of both, as well as the ability to remember that research data can often be less valuable than excellent observation.

  Myth # 4 - Trends only last for a short time

  The line between trends and fads can be tricky. Although some trends seem to spotlight a currently popular story, good ones need to describe something that happens over a span of time. Fads, in comparison, describe an idea that’s popular in the short term but doesn’t last. Great trends do reflect a moment in time, but they also describe more than a fleeting moment.

  Myth # 5 - Trends Are Hopelessly Broad Predictions

  Perhaps no other myth about trends is as fueled by reality as this one. The fact is, we encounter hopelessly broad trend predictions in the media all the time. Therefore, the problem comes in concluding that trends should be broad and all encompassing. Good trends tend to be more of the opposite: They define something that’s concrete and distinct, without being limiting.

  For example, someone once asked me after an event if I had considered the rise of 3D printing as a trend. I replied that I had not, but the “Makers Movement”—which was a well described trend that focused on the human desire to be a creator and make something (which 3D printing certainly enabled)—was a worthwhile trend. The point was, a trend is never a description of something that just exists—like 3D printing.

  Instead, a trend must describe what people do or believe as a result. Once you know that the “Makers Movement” describes the human desire to make something, for example, you can think about how to offer that type of fulfillment to your customers in how they interact with you. IKEA has benefitted from this trend for years—because people often feel a disproportionate emotional connection to furniture they had to work to assemble themselves. Psychologist have dubbed this the “IKEA effect.”

  Now that I’ve shared the most common myths about trend predictions, let’s consider why so many trend predictions involve self-indulgent guesswork or lazy thinking. What exactly makes them so useless?

  To answer this question, let me tell you a little story.

  Why Most Trend Predictions Are Useless

  A few years ago, I picked up the year-end edition of Entrepreneur magazine, which promised to illuminate trends to watch in the coming year. Earlier that same week, a special double issue of BusinessWeek magazine had arrived in the mail making a similar promise.

  It was the end of the year and the trend season was in full swing.

  Just like New Year’s resolutions to lose weight, trend forecasting is popular in December (one of the reasons why each annual edition of Non-Obvious is usually published in December as well). Unfortunately, the side effect of this annual media ritual is an abundance of lazy predictions and vague declarations.

  For entertainment, I collect these year-end trend forecasts and keep them as standing memorials to the volume of pitiful predictions that bombard us as we look to the year ahead.

  Here are a few of the worst-offending, most obvious “trends” I’ve seen. For the sake of kindness, I haven’t tagged them with their sources or authors:

  “It’s all about the visuals.”

  “Streaming video content.”

  “The Year of Drones has arrived. Really.”

  “Content Marketing will continue to be the place to be.”

  “Fantasy Sports”

  “Virtual Reality”

  “Change will be led by smart home technology.”

  Virtual Reality? Really?

  Not to ruin the suspense, but I don’t believe any of these should be described as trends. Some are just random buzzwords or the names of platforms. Others are hopelessly broad, useless, and, yes, obvious.

  None of them fit my trend definition of a unique idea describing the accelerating present.

  Meanwhile, all of us as media consumers read these predictions with varying levels of skepticism. To better understand why, let’s review the four main reasons why most trend predictions fail the believability test.

  Reason # 1 - No Objectivity

  If you sell drones for racing, declaring 2018 the “Year of Racing Drones” is clearly self-serving. Of course, most bias isn’t this easy to spot and objectivity is notorious
ly difficult for any of us. Our biases are based on our expertise and the world we know. This is particularly true in business, where we sometimes need to believe in an industry or brand in order to succeed. The problem is that losing objectivity usually leads to wishful thinking. Just because we want something to be a trend doesn’t make it one.

  Reason #2 - No INSIGHT

  Trends need to do more than repeat common knowledge. For example, saying that “more people will buy upgraded smartphones this year” is obvious—and useless, because it lacks insight. The biggest reason that most trend predictions share these types of obvious ideas is because it’s easier to do so. Lazy thinking is always easier than offering an informed and insightful point of view.

  Great trends are never obvious declarations of fact that most people already know.

  Instead, they share new ideas in insightful ways while also describing the accelerating present.

  Reason # 3 - No Proof

  Sharing a trend without specific examples is like declaring yourself a musician by simply buying a guitar. Unfortunately, many trend predictions similarly coast on the power of a single story or example. Exceptional examples and stories are powerful parts of illustrating why a trend matters. They are necessary elements of proving a trend. Only finding one example and declaring something a trend without more evidence is usually a sign that a so-called trend is based on little more than guesswork.

  RReason #4 - No Application

  Perhaps the most common place where many trend predictions fall short is in the discussion of how to apply them. It’s not enough to think about trends in the context of describing them. The best trend forecasts go further than just describing something that’s happening. They also share insights on what it means and what you can or should do differently as a result of the trend. In other words, trends should be actionable.