trends

6 ways the future consumer will be different

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Powerful forces are changing how consumers think and act. As we look out over the next 15 years, we can highlight critical shifts that will change the way branding, marketing, producing, advertising, and retailing are done. Winning businesses will reckon with these forces by transforming how they produce, market, and sell their goods. It won’t be enough to just make minor adjustments—we will have to get beyond the low-hanging fruit.

What are the changes? Here are six: 

1. More consumers will be born digital – The next generations of consumers include the tens of millions of today’s children who have lived their lives digitally—most of that time with a mobile phone in their hands. Even before they got a phone, they probably had Xbox, Wii, or Playstation, or a parent’s device.

They were born digital, and are growing up digital. They have habits and expectations on how they want to communicate with people and systems. Their digital lives are social too, with instant connections and inputs from their friends and “friends” being integral to what they do in the marketplace.

The bottom line for business. It’s time to look at the consumer differently, to recognize that the consumer’s interactions with you and your products and services are part of a bigger picture of his or her digital life. You cannot expect to do well with the born-digital consumer if you lag behind their routine expectations from technology and for social-connectedness. Growing up with video and computer games means the digitally-born expect the systems they use to be multi-sensory and interactive—that they can communicate with gestures, not just a keyboard. That they can touch a screen and scroll, zoom, and so on. Why should the systems they find in the marketplace in 2026 be less intuitive, interactive, and lively than their Xbox 360 or Wii?

2. Enjoying continuous digital access – Living a digital life means carrying a mobile device that gives people ubiquitous access to the ‘net. Most well-off people have that and far more have basic mobile communications with at least texting (SMS) capability. And with that is the power of social networking, which changes the dynamics of what people do while connected.

Network access, instant information, and social connections will be part of nearly everything people do. In their consumer lives, they will be essential tools and powerful influencers of what people want and buy. New information tools and channels will submerge traditional media—and advertising, in a cacophony of new, powerful influences.

The bottom line for business. Selling will be about tapping into social networks, harnessing buzz, finding what resonates with specific groups. You will need to find consumers in the cloud—you can’t wait for them to enter your store, whether that’s a brick and mortar building or a website.

Consumers will become even more “brand fickle”—the forces of digital communications, social networks, and the pace of change in the marketplace move them off of long-term brand loyalty. You will be able to win over consumers to your products, but it will be hard to keep them.

3. The focus is shifting to market niches of one (“N = 1”) – The consumer’s interest is in his or her individuality. Consumers have come to focus on themselves and business has supported that. Consumers care about their uniqueness and specific needs, and expect the products and services they use to fit closely to that uniqueness. This value is integral to US Baby Boomer sensibility, and America’s younger generations, steeped in it too, and are even more likely to have the digital tools and habits to do something about it. They won’t just crave it, they will have lived it.

The bottom line for business. The “N = 1” shift results in changed relationships: firm to individual consumer, instead of firm to market niche or mass market. Ultimately, consumers want to have a hand in creating, or at least identifying and fine-tuning the products businesses offer them. The relationship becomes two-way. Each sale will be about showing the consumer you recognize who she is and how your product fits her uniqueness.

4. We’ll be “free range” shopping – Anywhere/anytime network access leads to what I like to call “free-range shopping”. You don’t have to be at a shopping place to buy things, you can do that wherever you are, and increasingly, you want to. One key reason: encountering products out in the world shows them at their truest and best, and that’s probably when you recognize how they might fit your needs.

Because products have a digital life too, it will be possible to take a mobile phone picture and automatically identify the product for purchase. Consumers will embrace this ability, freeing them to find and choose products whenever and wherever they want. And they will be impatient with sellers who don’t make it that easy. Meanwhile, smart speakers add another tool to anywhere (or at least anytime) shopping: voice-command ordering.

The bottom line for business. Since the consumer lives in and wants to shop in the cloud, you will have to make more mobile purchases possible. Brick and mortar stores can continue to offer thorough, immersive experiences that are hard to replace, but convenience and ubiquitous access will often trump the qualities of store shopping. Finding ways to tie the physical with the virtual will pay off, but often brick and mortar stores will be the show-rooms for people who want to touch a product before they buy it. But does having them in the store guarantee that store gets the sale? And where else should your products appear? The answer is, everywhere.

5. We are reconsidering consumption – More consumers show at least some post-materialist values in their consumption and that value will grow. That means that they at least sometimes think, “Why do I want more stuff?” and make choices that are not about having more material goods.

They focus instead on how what they consume improves the quality of their lives. Consumers other values into this too, including interests in the environment and social justice. The “sharing economy” idea, notably seen with urban car, bike, and scooter sharing, shows how quickly not owning things can take hold.

Post-materialist thinking may mean consuming differently, not necessarily less. For example, more people want a new, authentic experience in what they consume, not just the latest product. But that could mean buying more expensive, more authentic, and higher quality things, such as hand-crafted clothing or furniture, or patronizing businesses that add a lot of personalized service and customization to their products.

The bottom line for business. More consumers will want products that offer them something special: greater feelings of safety, wellbeing, a match to their values, authenticity, a new experience, and overall, a product that adds to the quality of their lives. They may look hard at your full value chain, not just the end product. While people will continue to buy mass-produced commodity products—ordinary things that don’t aspire to offer much beyond basic utility, it’s dangerous to assume that changing values won’t matter to consumers for your products. They will.

6. More are greening it up – Soon regulatory and social pressures will meet economic pressures to drive greener lifestyles. People are already subject to local recycling laws and often laws relating to their use of energy and water resources. But higher prices are an even surer way to wake up consumers to the need to conserve, reuse, etc.

The bottom line for business. Though it’s not a majority of consumers who are acting on green values as they consume, plenty are. And sometimes the green option is the choice when two choices are otherwise about equal. At some point a company’s overall profile is a critical brand attribute, and if that profile looks anti-green in the marketplace, that company loses. Sustainable practices will be an integral part of corporate processes and a prominent brand matter. And the sustainability bar is regularly raised, as we gain knowledge and awareness of what matters.

Conclusion: A lot of change is unfolding now and will probably accelerate in the next five to ten years, reshaping the competitive landscape for producers, distributors, and retailers. This is not a time to wait and see—it’s time now for business to game out the possibilities and figure out how to win in the new competitive arena that’s emerging.

Note: part of my work is to lead groups in workshops exploring how the future consumer will shape their businesses. I also present to trade and corporate groups on this and related topics. Contact me for more information: jbmahaffie@leadingfuturists.biz.

Image: Tia Henriksen, via Flickr, CC attribution license.

You make it or you take it–The two things you face when you face the future

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You move, always, into the future. But what future? Well, there are two kinds:

1). The future you can shape. [“You make it”] 

Defining this future is about exploring the changes you can influence and clarifying the outcomes you want. A future you strive for is called a normative future, and there is little reason, across the sweep of change you can influence, not to drive toward the one you want. But too many people don't figure out what they want because they feel subject to, or even victim of the future.  

Your vision of a desired future will focus you on things you have a part in shaping. But defining it has to account for the other kind of future, the future you are subject to.

2). The future you are subject to. [“You take it”] 

This future is in your external context. It is a product of the forces and changes that will happen no matter what you do, or that you have, at best, only a small chance of influencing. To explore this future, you need to understand the forces of change and identify how you can respond to them to better reach the future you want.

This future is tricky, since there is no way to absolutely predict it. You have to stay prepared for a range of possibilities. 

If you don't yet understand the external future, you better get to work now to clarify. Otherwise, you won't have much chance at determining where it it there is the future you can have, or discovering how you will strive for it.

It's an easy trap for people and organizations to think that all they can do is address this second future, to try to just keep up with change. But reversing this, and identifying goals and visions of a desired future, can take you from a sense of being stuck, to a sense of command of your destiny. 

#Consumer4sight no. 7: Citizen of the world

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Slumdog Millionaire opened up Indian pop culture to a much bigger North American audience

Consumers have gone global too. The consumer increasingly is and feels like a citizen of the world, at least as far as media, food, fashion and other consumer tastes are concerned. Globalization means big things for big systems like trade, and everyday things for many consumers. More of us are partaking of products, ideas, trends, and cultural elements from some other part of the world. For example, Bangra music from India blends with American Rap, and shawarmas have become a lunch staple in US towns where the average consumer may not even know what continent they’re from. Technology is enabling this: it’s rendering geography irrelevant or at least differently relevant and giving us instant access to ideas and products from other places.

For more in this series, see #Consumer4sight

The bottom line for business: the consumer wants variety, and the world is now his or her consumption playground. If you don’t help them find new and interesting products and experiences from around our world, someone else will. And Western companies especially need a wake-up call: they are no longer the font of product innovation, nor do they have a guaranteed spot in the pantheon of global brands—new brands and products are emerging from the emerging markets, and that trend will accelerate.

#Consumer4sight — Ideas about the future consumer

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Powerful forces are changing how consumers think and act. As we look out over the next 15 years, we can highlight critical shifts that will change the way branding, marketing, producing, advertising, and retailing are done.

This is a place where I will share ideas about that future consumer. Each idea gets introduced on Twitter, on the @packfutur and @jbmahaffie Twitter streams. They are then be collected here.

Winning businesses will reckon with these change forces by transforming how they produce, market, and sell their goods. It won’t be enough to just make minor adjustments—we will have to get beyond the low-hanging fruit.

Note: A recent post, “A 2021 Shopper’s Path to Purchase” explores some closely related possibilities.

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Reconsidering consumption – More consumers show at least some post-materialist values in their consumption and that value will grow. That means that they at least sometimes think, “Why do I want more stuff?” and make choices that are not about having more material goods.

They focus instead on how what they consume improves the quality of their lives. Consumers other values into this too, including interests in the environment and social justice.

Post-materialist thinking may mean consuming differently, not necessarily less. For example, more people want a new, authentic experience in what they consume, not just the latest product. But that could mean buying more expensive, more authentic, and higher quality things, such as hand-crafted clothing or furniture, or patronizing businesses that add a lot of personalized service and customization to their products.

The bottom line for business. More consumers will want products that offer them something special: greater feelings of safety, wellbeing, a match to their values, authenticity, a new experience, and overall, a product that adds to the quality of their lives. They may look hard at your full value chain, not just the end product. While people will continue to buy mass-produced commodity products—ordinary things that don’t aspire to offer much beyond basic utility, it’s dangerous to assume that changing values won’t matter to consumers for your products. They will.

Image: Chantal Foster, via Flickr Creative Commons Attribution license

Future consumers will be born digital — The next generations of consumers include the tens of millions of today’s children who have lived their lives digitally—most of that time with a mobile phone in their hands. Even before they got a phone, they probably had Xbox, Wii, or Playstation.

They were born digital, and are growing up digital. They have habits and expectations on how they want to communicate with people and systems. They expect information and access 24/7, and from anywhere, to anywhere. Now their digital lives are social too, with instant connections and inputs from their friends and “friends” being integral to what they do in the marketplace.

The bottom line for business. It’s time to look at the consumer differently, to recognize that the consumer’s interactions with you and your products and services are part of a bigger picture of his or her digital life. You cannot expect to do well with the born-digital consumer if you lag behind their routine expectations from technology and for social-connectedness. Growing up with video and computer games means the digitally-born expect the systems they use to be multi-sensory and interactive—that they can communicate with gestures, not just a keyboard. That they can touch a screen and scroll, zoom, and so on. Why should the systems they find in the marketplace in 2026 be less intuitive, interactive, and lively than their Xbox 360 or Wii?

Image: Scott & Elaine van der Chijs, via Flickr, CC attribution license

Market niches of one (“N = 1”) – The consumer’s interest is in his or her individuality. Consumers have come to focus on themselves and business has supported that. Consumers care about their uniqueness and specific needs, and expect the products and services they use to fit closely to that uniqueness. This value is integral to US Baby Boomer sensibility, and America’s younger generations, steeped in it too, and are even more likely to have the digital tools and habits to do something about it. 

The bottom line for business. The “N = 1” shift results in changed relationships: firm to individual consumer, instead of firm to market niche or mass market. Ultimately, consumers want to have a hand in creating, or at least identifying and fine-tuning the products businesses offer them. The relationship becomes two-way. Each sale will be about showing the consumer you recognize who he is and how your product fits his uniqueness.

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Look for more #Consumer4sight ideas here and on Twitter: @packfutur and @jbmahaffie

Note: part of my work is to lead groups in workshops exploring how the future consumer will shape their businesses. I also present to trade and corporate groups on this and related topics. Contact me for more information: jbmahaffie@leadingfuturists.biz.

Foresight illustrated: Choosing how broad a view to take when exploring the future

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One of the core questions to ask when you are going to explore the future is: How broad a look do we need to take? 

Much of the power of foresight is in looking beyond what we routinely pay attention to–we are experts at that–to see what forces and changes are not yet obvious to us, but will be. That is the reason to look a few years out, at least, but it's also the reason to broaden thinking beyond the organization, or community, or system we are part of.

I developed this diagram to help show people how to think about this. The lowest tiers are what responsible people in a company or other organization pay attention to. Those leaders usually have a pretty good grip on what's happening at those levels, though that is not always true.

But change also comes from beyond the system we are part of. The diagram uses as an example, a US-based organization. For that organization, change will come from beyond the region, and beyond the business sector, from elsewhere in the country, and from other parts of the world. 

The answer to "how high should we fly?" in exploring the future, is, higher than you think. I've written previously that All Futures are Global. That holds true for anyone, and using the diagram, you should consider raising some of your focus, and spending some of your time, exploring what's happening at the top, even if you settle for your main focus lower down. The less clear changes, and often the biggest ones, will come from beyond your usual field of view.

For another "Foresight Illustrated" post, see: https://foresightculture.com/2008/04/22/the-mother-of-all-futures-diagrams

See also: "Breaking out of your specialty for better foresight"

Top 10 trends shaping packaging for 2010

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by John Mahaffie and Jennifer Jarratt, Leading Futurists LLC

1. Copenhagen consequences: the push to limit carbon emissions will continue to impact packaging with expanding attention to carbon miles inputs, resources use, and feedstocks. In 2010, manufacturers will begin to talk seriously about carbon sequestration and what they can do, individually and collectively, to promote sequestration as a way to offset carbon from production and consumption of their goods. So far, packaging has plucked the low-hanging fruit of easier lo-carbon adaptations. The next decade will demand bigger changes in processes and systems.

2. Packaging embraces the power of digital printing. Digital printing allows shorter runs, more SKU variation for products and their packaging, and customization, and can save money, reduce inventories, allow more rapid marketing action, and help move products more flexibly. Longer term, DP will overturn conventional approaches. Already printing’s role in produce-on-demand is creating new in-store one-to-one manufacturing in customizable products, such as books, game discs, and ice cream. Look out for even bigger changes as digital printing and production flexes muscle!

3. “Design” is the new creativity-there is new and growing respect for design in packaging strategymaking. But design isn’t just for engineers, important though they are. Design has to “care” and to appeal to all the new attitudes in the marketplace. Design thinking will be applied to creating tools for developing sustainability, as well as in pulling together teams that can apply sustainable design ideas across many product lines. Given these fresh demands, packaging firms may discover shortages of truly innovative designers in the packaging sector.

4. Hybrid is the new strategy: borrowing a “frame” from the auto industry to describe taking the best and/or greenest aspects of two or more packaging staples and combining them into a new and more sustainable package design. This could mean a natural material/plastic combination or a rigid/flexible hybrid, for example. We’ll see more hybrids in the marketplace, and a readiness to try different combinations of materials and processes in packaging. Warning: hybrids can create their own recycling and reuse problems if they don’t “fit” most recycling systems.

5. Shrinking packaging. Packaging (per unit of product) will continue to shrink, as packagers find new ways and reasons to limit package size, thin out walls, and otherwise reduce materials used. We’re approaching a “how-low-can-you-go?” moment for the sector. Packagers must be sure that materials used can be recycled and recovered before they can reach a balance in shrink versus recapture. However, greater producer responsibility for recapture brings its own headaches, not the least of which is establishing a strong market in recovered packaging. It makes sense to build a value chain-wide strategy, to make extended producer responsibility successful. Retailers and their suppliers will continue to battle this one out-er, sorry; collaborate on reaching a solution!

6. Packaging’s value to food and safety intensifies. As food manufacturers continue to process ingredients from global, widely dispersed sources, food safety moves up the public agenda in the United States and around the world. We’ll see smarter labels the consumer can access with her cell phone for information on origins, ingredients, and allergens, for example. This trend works against the consumer’s demand for less packaging. However, if packaging can convince consumers that it ensures greater safety, then….

7. The new frugality cements itself in people’s consciousness-2010 is the year for deciding how much frugality is normal, and what we can afford to do with our incomes. How value-oriented will we be, even as economies strengthen? Will Americans, for example, continue to eat out less, prepare more food at home, and therefore consume more branded, packaged goods? The New Frugality fits with being greener, and with Locavorism (supplying as many needs as possible from local sources) which could lead to new strategies for small-scale, local packaging. Leading packaging equipment producers, or start ups, can conquer the market for scaled-down packaging lines and compact systems usable on farms, and by artisanal producers.

8. More people will become “own-baggers” as cities and communities encourage or require it. For example, on January 1, 2010 the District of Columbia will institute five cents per bag charge for plastic grocery bags. “Own-bagging” will spread beyond grocery into restaurants (Tupperware opportunity?), Costco, DIY, and department stores. For packaging, this could sharpen the focus on waste and recycling, especially for plastics.

9. Composting is gaining traction as an option for municipal waste management, for example with a new requirement for composting food waste in San Francisco, which began October 21, 2009. The new ISO standards for packaging, in development in late 2009 and due in final form in 2012, are expected to include standards for composting and biodegradation, and will likely extend work done under a long-established European Union directive on packaging and packaging waste that directive requires European member states to reduce their landfill inputs to 75% of 1995 levels by 2010, 50% by 2013, and 35% by 2020. These efforts will carry us past the hobby-level interest in composting by home gardeners, and will likely bring a stronger focus on packaging developed for composting in the next few years. Is your packaging compost ready?

10. Keeping up with consumers, other businesses, marketing, and retail in real time will be the challenge of 2010. The real time web is the aggregation of live/streaming content, social network traffic like Twitter and Facebook. Although not real time, retail online is growing increasingly sophisticated, with greater customization, and faster and more efficient price searches, and speedier delivery. While Google measures “authority” by links to an item, now we’re more interested in what’s hot, what’s on the rise, i.e. “trending.” Packaging needs strategies to navigate and populate the web real time, and to talk to customers in ongoing business and consumer conversations about their concerns and needs.

Keep in mind… Innovation and changes in packaging discussed here could be held back if a stalled economy persists in 2010. On the other hand, the poor economy is accelerating some changes, with moves to cost-cutting, and with economic stress falling most strongly on particularly weak parts of the system. This makes the current climate an interesting time for the packaging sector, and an opportunity for some players.

About us: @packfutur’s creators, Jennifer Jarratt and John B. Mahaffie, Leading Futurists, LLC, are joining with PTIS in offering a 2010 multi-sponsor program on the Future of Packaging, open to packaging executives, consumer goods manufacturers, printers, designers, converters, and anyone involved in the packaging sector. Be an active partner in the future of packaging, rather than watching and reacting as the industry changes. See: http://www.futureofpackaging.com/ for more information.

Images: psd and Valentina Powers, via Flickr, cc license, and fresno.gov

Make better decisions now with better foresight

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Let’s presume you have this goal: Make better decisions now as you build strategies for the next 3 to 20 years.

To do that, you need to understand your operating environment. You need to know what is likely, and what is uncertain, and find strategies that are robust for a range of potential futures.
 
Most people have long since internalized the idea that we need to be proactive, not reactive as things change around us. A strategic organization does not simply respond to new situations and pressures as they unfold. It anticipates change, and identifies, sorts among, and emphasizes the new opportunities that change offers. Reaction only tends to reduce the opportunities you can take advantage of.
 
If you want to get this right, foresight needs to be the linchpin of your efforts. Foresight is at once a broadening and deepening process. Its goal is to expand thinking more deeply into the future. But by its nature, it also opens up thinking to a broader range of forces and trends unfolding now. That’s why good foresight can inform today’s actions, as well as your strategies for moving forward. It sharpens your awareness of what’s happening and how it’s meaningful today.
 
How can you get foresight going in your organization? Here is how you can get started:
 
Plan a workshop. A group effort is strongest when that group can get together in real time, and, ideally, in one place, to explore the future and develop new strategic options. An independent facilitator, and, perhaps even better, a futurist to facilitate this workshop could help keep people truly focused on the future. Naturally, I’d be happy to help! 
 
Who comes? Ideally, you should include people representing 1). A range of functions in the organization, and/or a range of stakeholders, 2). People with the right knowledge and access to information and resources to get good strategic thinking done, and take part in implementing new strategies and actions, and 3). The people charged with driving change and strategy, so that they will understand the new thinking you generate, and be ready to implement good new strategies.
 
What goes on? There are plenty of tools, techniques, and facilitation approaches you can reach for for a foresight workshop. But the goal is not to wow people with technique, the goal is to have a serious, in-depth conversation about your future. You need to give the future its due, and clear the air and the agenda for that discussion. Keep it simple and focused, and you’ll get results. That, by itself, is good foresight.
 
You need to expand your horizon, and look at the fullest (nearly always global) context for what your organization does. That means looking not just more deeply into the future, but also more broadly, and sectors, regions, technologies, social spheres, etc. that you don’t normally pay much attention to. Again, it will help to have a fresh view of the external environment, to carry your thinking far enough out into the world and into the future.
 
You should consider having a briefing from someone skilled at shaping an external view for you, and helping you discover how the broad forces and trends at play could shape your interests. A futures briefing is valuable in getting that done. Again, happy to help!
 
Then, have your group share, and collect for everyone to see, the big forces, trends, and issues shaping your future. Don’t worry about which is a force, a trend, or an issue, just collect the big things that matter. Don’t let the list narrow to the usual forces and trends you always talk about. Too often, the groups I work with want to make budgets the central focus. Taking a longer-term view, and a fresh look at opportunities and even new business models, means today’s budget won’t be the whole story. New initiatives, for example, can have new money.
 
You are looking around corners here, looking for things that may not obviously matter now, but could be essential to shaping your future. This discussion shouldn’t get fixated on constraints such as budgets and other lack of resources, or even current regulations. You should carry your thinking, your “what if” discussions, past those obstacles.
 
Prioritize your list of the big forces, trends, and issues, combining similar things, and then have your group vote for the ones will have the biggest impact. Keep encouraging your group not to just vote up the usual suspects: e.g. the price of oil, regulation.
 
Then, spend plenty of time talking about each of the top items, ideally in groups of four to eight people. Your goal is to draw out the implications of the force, issue, or trend for your business. That is how you can bring the focus back in, on strategic possibilities for your business. I have found over the years that in this part of the process, you need to get people to focus on the challenges, but also the opportunities, and the near-term, but also the longer term.
 
Finally, have a whole-group discussion of what you learned through this process. Get the groups to brief everyone on what they discussed and what they concluded from the discussion. It may make sense to have them conclude with implications for action. Capture these ideas for everyone to see, and for later reference. If you can, have some of the chiefs in the room to hear what the group concluded.
 
The group can spend some time decided what to do next, whether that is a list of concrete actions to take, or just a list of ideas you need to research or develop further. More often than not, you will discover through this process that there are things you don’t know and people in and out of the organization you need to talk to, and involve in the discussion. Make a plan to do those things.
 
Identify champions, or, at least, who will take the next steps.
 
What you get. Through this process, your team will come up with insights on what’s happening, and what it means to your organization. You may get to next steps, and you should try to. Otherwise, the effort stays abstract, and may be taken as just an “exercise”.
 
What I’ve just described is a path to organizational foresight. Do this once, and you’ve made a difference in your work. Do it regularly, and you will have built what I like to call a foresight culture. Good luck with this, and, let me know if you could use my help.
 
Image: Victor Chapa, via Flickr, Creative Commons license

Foresight Culture expands to cover futures topics

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For about 18 months, this blog has focused on how to use the tools and techniques of futures research, to improve foresight in organizations. I will continue to publish on that subject. But I have decided to also share my thinking on critical forces, trends, and issues here. So there will be a balance of posts on the "how tos" of foresight and on futures topics. 

Let me know what you think, what you'd like to read more about, and so on, below, where it says "Leave a reply".

The economic crisis and the value of foresight

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Question mark

No, you can’t answer the question, “When will the global economy recover?” That’s the purview of economists, and they don’t know either. The question is leaving people feeling stuck—they don’t know what is going to happen, and don’t know what to do.
 
In the midst of this massive economic crisis, even talented futurists cannot tell you with certainty when and in what ways the global economy will recover. But futures thinking can do a lot to help explain the cascading impacts of the crisis, and the potential changes we will see as the global economy settles down and resumes on a new track.
 
We need foresight, now more than ever. It’s the key to getting unstuck, to turning the question—“what will happen next?” to a statement, “here’s what we will make happen next”.
 
Some of our clients have asked us about near- and long-term trends in light of the current economic situation. They want to know which of the trends will endure the crisis, which could amplify, which might decline, and so on. Much of the thinking that helps answer those questions is about looking at which trends gain strength from the economic shocks, and which may be weakened.
 
The economic crisis will accelerate some trends, and slow others. What will be interesting and often tough, is when the downturn is the final straw for a system, sector, or business, and puts an end to things, perhaps sooner than they might have gone down. The economic strain will kill off some businesses and systems that might otherwise muddle through in good times. Examples are some print media, notably daily newspapers, behemoth cars like the Hummer and H2, and weak retailers like Linens ‘n’ Things and Circuit City.
 
But alongside decline and destruction, there are new motivations, new needs, new possibilities. For example, the economic crisis will raise interest in a number of things: barter, local production, car sharing, used goods markets, reuse/recycling, repair (shoe repair, e.g.), and, when not demanding investment and higher costs, green consumption overall.
 
This swirl of decline and opportunity is where there’s room to make new choices and carve out new, desired futures. We have options and new room to try new things.
 
The tools and skills of foresight can help us explore those options. We can game out scenarios of our future, and open up new thinking about innovations, new business models, potential changes in operations, products lines, and so on. In fact, now is a good time to do those things—so much is in question, and so much is likely to have change forced on it, that we can pick up the old saying “In crisis we find opportunity” and make the challenges we face a tool of positive change. That opportunity demands our best creative, futures thinking. We need to envision, believe in, and build what’s next.
 
 Image: The Ninja Monkey, via Flickr, cc license

Presentism

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Presentism is the tendency people have in studying and writing about history to apply today’s values to a prior time. I always noticed this on the TV Show M*A*S*H, which, to me, blended Vietnam-era sensibilities with a Korean War story line. Presentism is one of the biggest dangers in historical analysis, since it can lead to interpretations of past behavior that are simply wrong.

When we explore the future, we can fall into the same trap. One tendency is to look at a single dimension of change, for example, the commercialization and proliferation of a new technology, holding the rest of the world constant. We get today’s world with a twist. We might, through this, have a view of our world with photovoltaic energy, otherwise unchanged, or our world with $500 per barrell oil, otherwise unchanged. So many other things will have also happened that will shape our values, attitudes, behavior, and what’s happening around us. The world is never “otherwise unchanged.”

Another tendency–which is extremely hard to avoid–is to look at future possibilities with today’s attitudes. Routinely, in my work as a futurist, I hear people say that the next wave of computer and communication technology is cold and impersonal. They say, “where’s the human contact?”. But when that next wave of technology arrives, for example when we got instant messaging and mobile telephony, we found that more people were in touch with others, more of the time.

If we take a “one trend future” approach, our efforts will not be adequate. We are likely to overlook countertrends, amplifying trends, social forces, cultural forces, and so on. The ongoing effort in foresight is to try to understand how the future might shape up against a backdrop of social forces and conditions undergoing constant change. That is hard to do, and is surely a task we can never truly complete. But we have to try.

A frank acknowledgement of our “presentism” in discussions with colleagues, and even to ourselves, can go a long way towards avoiding narrow explorations of the future, and can keep us sharp and attentive to the wide sweep of forces of change we need to pay attention to. So ‘fess up, admit your limitations, then fight your way past them. Don’t be a presentist when you need to be a futurist.

Molecular biologist Deric Bownds, in Deric Bownds’ Mindblog, has written insightfully on this topic. [Link]

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