Non-Obvious 2019- How To Predict Trends and Win The Future Read online

  Always Summarize. When you’re collecting ideas on a longer time scale (i.e., across an entire year), it’s easy to forget why a story seemed significant in the first place. To help yourself remember, get into the habit of highlighting a few sentences or writing down a few notes about your thoughts on the idea (usually using a Sharpie pen - which is also suggested in Chapter 2). Later, when you’re going through your gathered ideas, these notes will be useful in recalling what originally sparked your interest.

  Seek Concepts, Not Conclusions. As we learned in Chapter 2, a key habit of good curating is the ability to be fickle. In practice, this means not getting too hung up on the need to quantify or understand every idea you save in the moment. Many times, the best thing you can do is to gather something, save it, and then move on to your next task. Perspective comes from taking time and having patience.

  Step 2—Aggregating

  Aggregating involves taking individual ideas and disconnected thoughts and grouping them together to try and uncover bigger themes.

  Photo: Example of aggregating possible trend topics.

  After gathering ideas, the next step is to combine the early results of your observation and curiosity with some insights about how ideas might fit together. Using a series of questions can help you do that. Here are a few of my favorites.

  Aggregating Questions:

  How to Group Ideas

  What broad group or demographic does this story describe?

  What is the underlying human need or behavior?

  What makes this story interesting as an example?

  How is this same phenomenon affecting multiple industries?

  What qualities or elements make me interested in this story?

  At this stage a common trap is to start grouping all the stories from one industry together. Resist the temptation to do that and try aggregating based on insights and human motivations instead.

  In this second step, it’s not important to come up with a fancy name for your ideas or even to do extensive research around any one them. Instead, the aim is to start building small clusters of ideas that bring together stories into meaningful clusters.

  Tips & Tricks: How to Aggregate Ideas

  Focus on Human Needs. Sometimes focusing on a bigger underlying human emotion can help you see the basis of the idea and why it matters. For example, the basic human need for belonging fuels many of the activities people engage in online, from posting social comments to joining online communities. The key is to connect the ideas you have gathered with the basic human needs behind them.

  Recognize the Obvious. Along the path to uncovering “non-obvious” insights, there’s some value in recognizing and even embracing the obvious. In a grouping exercise, for example, you can often use the obvious ideas (like multiple stories about new wearable technology products) as a way of bringing things together and later you can work on discovering the non-obvious insights between them.

  Follow Your Intuition. When you train yourself to be more observant, you might also find that you start to develop a feeling for stories that are interesting or somehow feel significant—even though you may not be able to describe why. Embrace that intuition and save the story. In later phases of the Haystack Method, you can try to connect this story to a broader idea.

  Step 3—Elevating

  Elevating involves finding the underlying themes that connect groups of ideas to describe a single, bigger concept.

  Photo: Examples of groups of stories elevated together for a trend.

  If you’ve gone through gathering and aggregating ideas—this is the point where you’ll probably confront the same problem I do every year: there are too many possibilities!

  When I go through my annual exercise of curating trends, the first time I aggregate my ideas into clusters it usually yields between seventy and a hundred possible trend topics. That’s far too many, and a clear sign that there’s more work to be done.

  How do you know what to focus on in order to build out into a trend? The goal in this third step is to try and take a bigger view and connect your smaller clusters of ideas together into larger ones that describe even bigger and potentially more powerful ideas. More than any other step, this is where the breakthroughs and inspiration usually come.

  Elevating Questions:

  How to Think Bigger About Ideas

  What interests me most about these ideas?

  What elements could I have missed earlier?

  What is the broader theme?

  How can I link multiple industries?

  Where is the connection between ideas?

  This third step can be the most challenging phase of the Haystack Method, because the process of combining ideas can also lead you to unintentionally make them too broad (and by definition, obvious). Your aim in this step, therefore, should be to elevate an idea to make it bigger and more encompassing of multiple stories without losing its uniqueness.

  For example, when I was producing my 2014 Non-Obvious Trend Report I came across an interesting healthcare startup called GoodRx, which had a tool to help people find the best price for medications. It was simple, useful, and the perfect example of an evolving shift toward empowering patients in healthcare, which I wrote about in my earlier book ePatient 2015.

  At the same time, I was seeing retail stores, such as Macy’s, investing heavily in creating apps to improve their in-store shopping experience and a number of new fashion services, like Rent the Runway, designed to help people save time and money while shopping.

  On the surface, a tool to save on prescriptions, an app for a department store, and an optimized tool for renting dresses don’t seem to have much in common. I had therefore initially grouped them separately. While elevating trends, though, I realized that they all had the underlying intent of helping to optimize a shopping experience in some way.

  I grouped them together as examples of a shared trend which I called Shoptimization. The trend described how technology was helping consumers optimize the process of buying everything from home goods and fashion to medical prescriptions.

  In the next step, I’ll discuss techniques for naming trends (including how I named Shoptimization), but for now my point in sharing that example is to illustrate how elevation can help you make the connections across industries and ideas that may have initially seemed disconnected and meant to fall into different groups.

  The difference between aggregating ideas and elevating them may seem very slight, but there are times when I manage to do both at the same time, since the act of aggregating stories can help to broaden your conclusions about them.

  In the Haystack Method, I choose to present these steps separately because most of the time they do end up as distinct efforts. With practice though, you may get better at condensing these two steps together.

  Tips & Tricks: How to Elevate Your Ideas

  Use Words to Elevate. When you have groups of ideas, sometimes boiling them down to a couple of words to describe them can help you to see the common themes between them. When I was collecting ideas related to entrepreneurship, for example, a word that kept emerging to describe the growing ecosystem of on-demand services for entrepreneurs was “fast.” It was the theme of speed that helped me to bring the pieces together to eventually call that trend “Instant Entrepreneurship.”

  Combine Industry Verticals. Despite my own cautions against aggregating ideas by industry sector, sometimes a trend ends up heavily focused in just one sector. When I see one of these clusters of ideas predominantly focused in one industry, I always try to find another batch of ideas I can combine it with. This often leads to bigger thinking and helps to remove any unintentional industry bias I may have had earlier in the process.

  Follow the Money. With business trends, sometimes the underlying driver of a trend is who will make money from it. Following this trail can sometimes lead you to make connections you might not have considered before. This was exactly how studying a new all- you-can-read ebook subscription service and th
e growth of cloud-based software led me to write about the trend of “Subscription Commerce” several years ago.

  Step 4—Naming

  Naming is the creative art of finding the right words to describe an elevated idea as a trend in an easily understandable and memorably branded way.

  Photo: Sources used for names and word lists.

  Naming a trend is a little bit like naming a child—you think of every way that the name might unintentionally be dooming your idea to a life of ridicule and then you try to balance that with a name that feels right.

  Naming a trend also involves the choice of sharing a specific point of view in a way that names for kids generally don’t. Great trend names convey meaning with simplicity—and they’re memorable.

  For that reason, this is often my favorite part of the Haystack Method, but also the most creatively challenging. It’s focused on that critical moment when you brand an idea that will either stick in people’s minds as something new and important, or will be immediately forgotten.

  The title for my second book, Likeonomics, came from one of these trend-naming sessions. The concept took off immediately because people understood the idea and the name was just quirky enough to inspire a second look. Finding the right name for an idea can do that.

  An effective title can inspire people. It can help a good idea capture the right peoples’ imaginations and urge them to own and describe it for themselves. Of course, that doesn’t make naming any easier to do.

  In fact, naming a trend can take just as long as any other aspect of defining or researching a trend. In my method, I try many possibilities. I jot down potential names on Post-it notes and compare them side by side. I test them with early readers and clients. Only after doing all of that do I finalize the names for the trends in each of my reports.

  Naming Questions:

  How to Ensure You Have an Effective Trend Name

  Is the name not widely used or already well understood?

  Is it relatively simple to say out loud in conversation?

  Does it make sense without too much additional explanation?

  Could you imagine it as the title of a book?

  Are you using words that are unique and not cliché?

  Does it build upon a topic in an unexpected way?

  So how did 2018’s trend names turn out? The full list is outlined in Part II and the backlist of trend names is included in the Appendix, but here are a few of my favorite trend names from previous reports along with a little of the backstory behind the development and selection of each one:

  Virtual Empathy (2016 + 2018). During a time when virtual reality was a hot topic, the underlying theme behind VR was how it managed to amplify a sense of empathy in anyone who used it. As a result, I paired the term “virtual” with “empathy” instead to create a new way of thinking about the powerful effects of Virtual Reality. In this year’s report (Chapter 12), the Virtual Empathy trend is revisited within a new, broader context, but the name still works.

  Experimedia (2015). The name for this trend came together quite quickly after finding several articles all talking about how social experiments were creating a new category of media stories. Putting “experiment” together with “media” works because the prefix of “experiment” remains unchanged, and a new ending creates a word that engages people’s curiosity while still being clear enough that you could guess the meaning.

  Obsessive Productivity (2014). As the life-hacking movement generated more and more stories of how to make every moment more productive, I started to feel that these tools and advice about helping each of us optimize every moment were bordering on an obsession. The naming of this trend was easy, but to me it worked because it combined a word most people associate as negative (“obsessive”) with one that is usually discussed as a positive (“productivity”). I used the same principle to name “Fierce Femininity” in 2017.

  While there are many ways inspiration can strike as you name your own ideas, the following tips and tricks share a few of the techniques that I tend to use most often in naming and branding the trends in my reports.

  Tips & Tricks: How to Name Your Ideas Powerfully

  Mashup. Mashups take two different words or concepts and put them together in a meaningful way. Likeonomics is a mashup between likeability and economics. Shoptimization is a mashup between shopping and optimization. Using this technique can make an idea immediately memorable and ownable, but can also feel forced and artificial if not done artfully. There is a reason I didn’t call my book Trustonomics. The best mashups are easy to pronounce and are as close to sounding like the original words as possible.

  Alliteration. When naming a brand, this technique is commonly used and the virtues are obvious: think Coca-Cola and Krispy Kreme. The idea of using two words beginning with the same consonant is one I have used for trends such as “Reverse Retail” and “Disruptive Distribution.” Like mashups, it can feel forced if you put two words together that don’t belong, but the technique can lead you toward a great trend name.

  Twist. The technique involves taking a common idea or obvious phrase and inserting a small change to make it different. The name should employ a term that’s already commonly used and then twisted a bit to help it stand out. One of my favorite examples was a trend from 2015 called “Small Data” to counter all the discussion about Big Data. The “Unperfection” trend, which was first published in 2015, used a similar method—just enough of a twist on the actual word “imperfection” to feel new and different.

  Step 5—Proving

  Proving is the final step where you evaluate your ideas, seek out more research where needed and make a case for why an idea describes the accelerating present.

  Photo Credit: Tech.co (Tech Cocktail Sessions DC)

  Though my Haystack Method relies heavily on analyzing stories and ideas that have been published, there is also a consistent thread of conversations, speeches, and interviews that inform the trend spotting process. I’m lucky to be able to speak at fifty or so events every year, and my team and I routinely deliver dozens of workshops at companies in almost every industry.

  The result of these interactions is a consistent stream of ideas as well as the opportunity to interview the visionary keynote speakers I’m sharing the stage with, which allows me to test new trend ideas and approaches with some of these groups before publishing the new trends..

  I believe that trends are curated based on observing behavior, identifying patterns, and assembling the pieces of a puzzle. You can’t make a puzzle by showing someone a piece and surveying them about what they think the rest of the puzzle might be.

  I don’t mean to discount the value of focus groups or surveys as input. The truth is, the more analytical or scientific your stakeholders and audience, the more likely it is you’ll need some of this type of data to support your curated trends. But I’m neither a behavioral psychologist nor a market researcher. There are people who are excellent at this, and I would much rather read that research and have a conversation with them—and then use those insights to inform my curation of trends and help to prove them in this final phase of the Haystack Method.

  The framework my team and I use, and teach our clients to use, to prove ideas is based on a formula of looking at three critical elements: idea, impact, and acceleration.

  Idea. Great trend ideas are unique descriptions of a shift in culture, business, or behavior in a concise enough way to be meaningful without being oversimplified.

  Impact. Impact comes when people start changing behavior or companies start to adapt what they are selling or how they are selling it.

  Acceleration. The last critical element is how quickly a trend is affecting business and consumer behavior and whether that’s likely to grow.

  Since we started publishing our trend research, this is the central filter my team and I have used to measure trend concepts and whether they are provable. To do this, one technique we use is to consistently ask five questions as we finalize our t
rend list.

  Proving Questions:

  How to Quantify a Trend

  Is the trend idea unique enough to stand out?

  Has anyone published research related to this trend idea?

  Is the media starting to uncover examples or focus on it?

  Are there enough examples across industries?

  Is the trend likely to continue into the foreseeable future?

  In your own efforts to curate trends, when you go through this list of questions—it’s possible you’ll find that some of the trend ideas that you’ve curated, analyzed, elevated, and even created names for may not satisfy all these criteria.

  Unfortunately, you have now reached the toughest step in the Haystack Method: leaving behind trends that you cannot prove. Abandoning ideas is brutal—especially after you have become attached to them. It probably won’t help that in this chapter I’ve already advised you to name them before you prove them—which seems logically wrong. You never name something you’re going to leave behind, right?

  Well, as true as that may be, the problem is that you need to name the trends before you can assess its importance. The process of naming helps you understand what a trend is and how you might prove it, but it doesn’t mean you’re finished.