trend spotting

Foresight tip: Scan the scanners

by

Environmental scanning (also known as horizon scanning) is part of anticipating the future. It's done by systematically gathering information about current and changing conditions. Good foresight requires environmental scanning for understanding emerging change.

Scanning is a lot of work, but other people already do it for you. Being efficient means scanning the scanners.

How do you scan the scanners?
Find the bloggers, news sites, podcasts, etc. that cover the range of news and information you need to monitor. Online sources, including tons of free ones, do this work well. You can fine-tune what you look at to tap well-curated sources.

My interests flop all over the place, and I find value in a rich mix of places. It's an ever-changing landscape of sources, but some I find valuable these days are: Reddit Futurology, PSFK, Slinking Toward Retirement, Boing Boing, and various of my savvy friends' twitter feeds. 

My colleagues are scanners who curate insights with a focus on the Future of Packaging on Twitter at @packfutur, and on the future of work at @50PlusatWork on Twitter and the Future of Work on Facebook.

Your best strategy is to find a manageable set of sources. "Automate" your monitoring by subscribing to email newsletters, using social media, or RSS feeds. That means information will flow to you. You won't have to remember to check multiple sources.

Keep fine-tuning your set of sources. Ditch anything that wastes your time. Add sources when you have a particular focus or project. 

One caution. You can be too tailored in your strategy. Allow in some variety, alternative views, and serendipity. You will make discoveries that way, instead of allowing confirmation bias to get ahold of you.

Environmental scanning – Special page

by

I’ve been working for some time on a piece Environmental scanning in which I lay out thinking and advice on how to do effective, collaborative environmental scanning (aka horizon scanning) using the tools of the digital world. This work, which I expect to update from time to time, is long enough that I’ve given it its own page on ForesightCulture.com. Click here to see it, or look for the "eScanning 2.0" tab at the top of any ForesightCulture page. 

Please let me know what you think.

Word cloud courtesy of Wordle.net

A rock becomes a bear, and a bear becomes a rock

by

Black bear, AlaskaLinda Lieberman is a U.S. National Park Service ranger with years of experience interpreting nature for National Park visitors. This Summer, we met her in Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska, and she led us on a glacier cruise where we saw lots of wildlife, including a grizzly bear and her cubs, foraging on the rocky beaches for mussels and other delicacies.

Linda told us that she’s learned from park visitors over the years that the rock you are staring at can become a bear, and perhaps just as often, the bear you’ve spotted becomes a rock.

Humans are superbly evolved for pattern recognition, but we mix into that skill a tendency to see what we expect to see, and sometimes what we want to see. When my family and I are park tourists, we want to see bears—we have years of experience with rocks becoming bears and bears becoming rocks.
Jerome Groopman is a physician and writer who has made a study of how doctors make diagnoses and decisions, exploring his own clinical experience and the luterature of heuristics. Heuristics is a complicated word for how we figure things out, including the patterns and "rules of thumb" we use.
In his book How Doctors Think (2007) Groopman examined our pattern mis-recognition tendencies in the context of doctors making diagnoses. In their frenetic world, they have to make quick diagnoses, and they often get it wrong.
Here are the main ways Groopman says doctors get it wrong. I’ve paralleled what Groopman observes with the parallel errors we can make in exploring the future:

Representativeness—Letting what is most typically true influence what you see and don’t see, e.g. the symptoms commonly associated with a problem will always be there

In futures:

  • Assuming a different culture, group, organization, or person will do what we would in the same circumstances
  • Missing discontinuities-clues to potential sudden shifts and breaks in patterns hidden from us by what seem like the much clearer evidence of familiar patterns
  • Assuming a change you’ve observed is representative of what’s going on, because it’s part of your life or experience, e.g. “everybody is composting household food waste” 

Availability—Being influenced by the patients recently seen, e.g. the last five cases had the flu, so this one must also

In futures:

  • Assuming that history repeats itself
  • Using a narrow worldview to interpret the unknown—“people won’t like that”
  • “We tried that already”—something I think is similar to this idea didn’t work before, so it won’t work this time
  • Straight line trend extrapolation—the trend will continue because of the past record, with do sharp breaks, changes of directions, and so on

Affective error—Making decisions based on what the doctor wishes is true, affected often by an emotional sense, e.g. the patient reminds me of me, the patient is a young healthy guy, and can’t be all that si 

In futures:

  • The thing I know and care about (change in my lifestyle, e.g.) is typical and represents the bigger picture future
  • Wishful thinking, everything will work out ok
  • Our product/technology is the future—because we love it, it must be the best fit for the situation and the best choice for the future
Jerome Groopman's How Doctors Think
Doctors, at least in the U.S. clinical settings, and more legitimately on the field of battle and emergency rooms anywhere, have to make decisions very, very quickly. People engaged in foresight have, and ought to take, the luxury of time to really think about things, catch themselves in these thinking errors, and, if possible, get closer to the truth. I wrote about our speed of decisionmaking in a closely parallel post, Don’t blink.
In exploring the future, we’re prone to each of these sources of error. Perhaps no one’s life is immediately at stake, but the cost of error can still be high, especially in missed opportunities, and in mis-timing an action that counts on a change in the marketplace.
We need to keep reminding ourselves of our human capacity for misinterpreting what we’re seeing, assuming continuity, finding what we’re looking for, and, especially, for wishful thinking.
Follow by Email
Instagram