5. The Trend Management Toolkit, by Anne Lise Kjaer (2014)
This book from longtime futurist and speaker Kjaer offers a somewhat academic description of methodologies used for predicting trends, and is therefore a tougher read than some of the other recommended books in this section. The section on creating and using a Trend Atlas and trend mapping is the most useful element in the book, and is the “toolkit” alluded to in the title. This technique is one which has been borrowed, adapted, and leveraged by many other experts and companies and is worth reading from the original source.
What Else To Read...
Every year, my team and I receive dozens of books to review, and we purchase dozens more on our own. All of these provide sources of input for the coming year’s trend research, but they also are featured in an annual book awards program released every December called the “Non-Obvious Book Awards.”
Fifteen shortlist winners and five gold-medal category winners are featured and presented every year in December to coincide with the release of this book. You can see the full list of previous winners along with all the newest winners for the 2017 calendar year online:
www.nonobviousbook.com/resources
15 Websites to Bookmark
This collection of online resources is a just a fraction of the 100+ sources of news that I subscribe to via RSS and use every week to source ideas both for my weekly newsletter, as well as for this annual book of trends. Below you will find some of my favorite sites, along with a quick one sentence description for each. You can also see this full list and click the links directly at www.nonobviousbook.com/resources.
Trendwatching (www.trendwatching.com) This is hands-down the most useful trend and forecasting resource online featuring insights curated from a network of thousands of spotters all over the world.
PSFK (www.psfk.com) A collection of smart daily blog posts and sometimes sponsored research reports on the future of big topics such as retail and healthcare.
Cool Hunting (www.coolhunting.com) This site has just enough stories to spark new ideas that make wading through the crowded and haphazard site design worthwhile.
Monocle (www.monocle.com) While this is best consumed as a print magazine, the site features plenty of non-U.S. examples and will help you learn not only about the business world, but also about lifestyle, culture, and much more.
Springwise (www.springwise.com) This is a subscription-based site, so the best information is only available to subscribers, but the collection of stories is valuable and worth paying for.
Verve (www.verve.com) The quick takes and daily blog posts on this site are worth reading to keep up with current news.
Business Insider (www.businessinsider.com) A prolific site that publishes business articles constantly and quickly.
Gerd Leonhard (www.futuristgerd.com/blog) The personal blog of a futurist whose work is consistently useful and insightful.
The Future Hunters (www.thefuturehunters.com) Most of their research is presented and discussed in quarterly meetings for clients only, but there’s a useful collection of terms and recent white papers available on the site for free.
Trend Hunter (www.trendhunter.com) A dictionary for interesting stories from around the world shared by a small army of idea spotters. This is a useful resource to find ideas.
Shelly Palmer (www.shellypalmer.com/blog) This weekly blog from technology expert Shelly Palmer is thoughtful, well-written and offers a new take on the role of technology in our world that will make you think.
JWTIntelligence (www.jwtintelligence.com) While every agency and consulting group tries to create “thought leadership,” this collection of insights from JWT is forward-looking, well-researched, and worth bookmarking.
The Guardian (www.theguardian.com) The only mainstream news source to make my list, I always appreciate the combination of strong reporting and global view they present.
Slideshare (www.slideshare.com) This site is filled with deep, insightful presentations and a good amount of useless garbage. Still, the sheer volume of all of it means you may find some interesting ideas, and even the odd internal corporate document that probably shouldn’t have been shared publicly.
Cool Hunter (www.thecoolhunter.net) A collection of neatly organized posts on topics from “Amazing Places” to “Architecture.”
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Anti-trends
The Flip Side of Trends
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“There are trivial truths and there are great truths.
The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false.
The opposite of a great truth is also true”
NIELS BOHR, Nobel Prize–Winning Physicist
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From the end of September until the beginning of November, the Piedmont region of Italy is one of the most popular foodie destinations in the world for two reasons. The first is the famous Barolo wines, which are produced from the native Nebbiolo grape, and the second comes in October, when the town of Alba hosts its annual White Truffle Fair.
Truffles are a favorite decadent ingredient for top chefs, and white truffles are the rarest—sometimes costing as much as $2,000 per pound. Truffles from Alba are often described by chefs as “sublime” and “unlike anything else in the world.” The Barolo wines, too, are considered Italy’s best, called the “King of Wines” for centuries.
Yet, as amazing as these two Piedmont region delicacies are, there is one critical problem the region can’t control: because they require opposite kinds of weather, they are never at their relative prime at the same time.
Truffles are best after a wet summer, while a dry and hot summer is optimal for grapes. As a result, summer cannot be equally good for both wine and truffles. In any given year, one will always be better.
Flip Thinking and Anti-Trends
In this book I have shared a process for uncovering trends that affect the world around us along with advice on how to use them to power your business and career. Perhaps while reading one of these trends you thought of an example that seemed to do the exact opposite of what the trend was describing.
It’s easy to think that finding an outlier to a trend would make it less valuable—similar to the truffles and wine.
Just like Piedmont’s delicacies, though, there is often an opposing force that balances out trends, and it comes from people and companies that see what everyone else is doing and choose to do the opposite.
Sometimes, we hear it called “flip thinking,” a term used most popularly by author Dan Pink. In one instance, he used it to describe a teacher who “flipped” the classroom by assigning math lectures via YouTube video as homework and doing the problems together in class. (An idea I also explored in Chapter 11).[6]
Flip thinking will always be present, and for every trend someone will usually find an example of the exact opposite. These are anti-trends and they can come up often. This is not a flaw in the art of curating trends, but it would be natural to wonder: If we have invested all this work into curating and describing trends, how can we be sure they matter when it seems so easy to find examples of the opposite?
Breaking Trends
Trends are not like mathematical theories. They are describing a behavior or occurrence that is accelerating and will matter more and more, but they are not unbreakable rules of culture or behavior. There will always be outliers.
The point of curating trends is to see what others don’t and to predict a future that can inspire new thinking. There is an interesting opportunity, though, that arises from being able to use this technique of “flip thinking.”
Understanding trends not only empowers you to use them positively, but also to intentionally break them and do the opposite when it’s an appropriate way to stand out.
Pablo Picasso famously declared that each of us should aim to “learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist.”
The clown in an ice-skating show, for example, often needs to be the most talented in order to execute fake jumps and falls whil
e still remaining under control. Similarly, your ability to know the trends may give you the insight you need to bend or break them strategically.
This is, after all, a book about thinking in new and different ways. Taking a trend and aiming to embrace its opposite certainly qualifies.
OV E R V I E W:
How to Read These Past Trend Reports
“The events of the past can be made to prove anything if they are arranged in a suitable pattern.”
— A. J. P. TAYLOR, Historian
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There was a moment several years ago when I was on stage after having just presented a talk about trends and how to predict the future when a skeptical gentleman stood up to ask me a question. “It must be easy,” he started “to publish your trend report when you get to change them every year. How do you know whether any of them were actually right?”
His question was a fair one. After all, there is plenty of evidence to suggest the experts routinely miss predictions and are often just plain wrong. What makes my method or the past trends my team and I have curated any different? The only truthful way to answer that is to take a look backward.
In this section, you’ll see a candid review of every one of my previously predicted trends from the past eight years of the Non-Obvious Trend Report. While some of the original
descriptions have been edited for space considerations, none of the intentions or meanings have been updated or revisited since the trend was first published.
Each trend is accompanied by a “Trend Longevity Rating” which aims to measure how much the trend as originally described still applies or will have value in 2019. Predictably, the more recent trends fared better than the older trends–but the process of going backward and taking an honest look at past research was illuminating.
In assessing these trends, the aim was to treat them in as unbiased a way as possible. Where one did not accelerate as predicted, I did my best to admit that openly. It is, of course, nearly impossible to grade yourself in isolation–so I have also gathered the feedback from thousands of professionals who have listened to me share my “Haystack Method” and the trends that resulted from it in keynotes and workshops around the world.
I took notes as they participated in workshops trying to apply these trends to their own businesses, and recorded some of their probing questions about each trend.
In addition, I made it a habit within our team to also save new stories and examples of trends that we had already published—so we could see just how many more relevant examples would come up since it was originally curated. This story gathering is also what helped decide which five of the previous trends to revisit in this new edition.
If there is anything that has helped this curated list of trends get better year after year, it is this annual ritual of reviewing, grading and critiquing past trends. We learn from our mistakes as much as we celebrate our successes.
As I shared early in this book, the beautiful thing about trends is that new trends don’t replace old ones. Rather, they all present an evolving view of the world and individual “non-obvious” trends either become more obvious (and commonly understood) over time, or they fail to accelerate and sometimes fade away.
Either way, the best-case usage for trends is as a spark for new ideas and as an instigator for innovation.
I hope you enjoy this look backward at past years of the Non-Obvious Trend Report.
The 2011 Non-Obvious Trend Report Overview
Original Publication Date: January 2, 2011
Original Format: Visual Presentation Only
Full Book: www.nonobviousbook.com/2011
THE BACKSTORY
This first edition of the Non-Obvious Trend Report was inspired by five years of blogging. I released it exclusively in a visual presentation format and heavily featured marketing and social media trends that I had written about throughout 2010. The trends were far more limited in scope than later editions of the trend report and featured less description and less actionable advice. They were also not separated into subcategories, but instead presented as a full list of 15 marketing and social media trends that mattered. Each trend featured a short description, a few example stories and some quick tips for brands on how to use the lessons in the report to power their marketing strategy.
RETROSPECTIVE: HOW ACCURATE WAS THIS REPORT?
The report was one of the first to predict the rise in importance of content marketing through curation and also predicted the rapid growth of realtime customer service through social media. It analyzed the increasing number of marketing campaigns featuring employees as a sign of corporate humanity, and introduced the idea of how social media was making unreachable celebrities more connected and approachable. Overall, there were relatively few big misses or trends that completely imploded or reversed themselves. The biggest idea from the report was undoubtedly the first trend Likeonomics, which ultimately inspired me to write a book of the same name (released in 2012) to build the idea out further.
NOTE – There were no icons for trends in this report, and so the individual trend longevity ratings for this year are not included in this section. You can still see the full assessments by visiting the URL at the top of this page.
The 2012 Non-Obvious Trend Report Overview
Original Publication Date: January 2, 2012
Original Format: Visual Presentation Only
Full Book: www.nonobviousbook.com/2012
THE BACKSTORY
This second year of the trend report featured a broader look at business beyond marketing and brought together the worlds of corporate marketing, charitable causes, the marketing of death and more. Like the first report, it was only released exclusively in visual presentation format online. This report tackled the sensitive yet emerging field of the digital afterlife of loved ones who have passed on, as well as the rising sense of social loneliness that people felt. In contrast to my 2011 report, the theme of this report moved a little further away from marketing campaigns and took a more human tone as many of the trends featured cultural or consumer-based trends instead of those inspired by what brand marketers were already doing.
RETROSPECTIVE: HOW ACCURATE WAS THIS REPORT?
The 2012 report had a few big hits and several big misses. The overall trends that centered on the growth of humanity in companies and consumers worked out well. This report was one of the first to explore the potential of big data to impact everything from optimizing supply chain logistics to measuring and quantifying every aspect of our lives. On the flip side, the trends that made bigger bets on well named but overly quirky niche concepts like Pointillist Filmmaking or Social Artivism did not quantifiably catch fire, either in adoption or in the behaviors they described.
NOTE – There were no icons for trends in this report, and so the individual trend longevity ratings for this year are not included in this section. You can still see the full assessments by visiting the URL at the top of this page.
The 2013 Non-Obvious Trend Report Overview
Original Publication Date: December 10, 2012
Original Format: eBook + Visual Presentation
Full Book: www.nonobviousbook.com/2013
THE BACKSTORY
In the third year of producing the trend report, the level of detail exploded as my full report went from about 20 pages to over 100. The report featured more examples, more analysis-and 3 bonus trends – which are available online. While this edition of the Trend Report did not originally use the five categories, for alignment I retroactively applied the five categories to the trends.
The report was still delivered primarily in a visual presentation format, but this year there was an accompanying ebook available for sale on Amazon for the first time featuring not only the trends, but also suggestions on how to put them into action.
Thanks to the online audience built from the first two editions, this third edition ebook was an immediate best seller on Amazon, remaining the number-one book in the market research catego
ry for eight straight weeks after launch and was viewed more than 200,000 times online. The clean visuals, level of detail and growing reputation for the annual report also resulted in plenty of sharing and comments online.
RETROSPECTIVE: HOW ACCURATE WAS THIS REPORT?
Developing the trends for 2013 was a more deliberate process requiring more research and a higher standard of proof before including any particular trend in the report. Topics featured in the 2013 report included the future of print publishing, the rise of women in business, authenticity in the banking sector, hyper-local commerce and the evolution of the travel industry.
2013 Culture & Consumer Behavior Trends
What’s the Trend?
A wealth of new online content and new social networks inspire people of all ages to feel more optimistic about getting older.
Trend Longevity Rating B+
This trend was important enough for me to select and bring back in my 2016 report – but as I shared in the rating for this trend from that year, the sense of optimism about what will be achievable in life has remained for the older population but over the past year it was tempered by increasing fears about the macro future of things like the environment, politics, the economy and security.
Non-Obvious 2019- How To Predict Trends and Win The Future Page 20