“When looking at the future, the ‘what’ is far more predictable than the ‘when’. And the ‘how’ will always feel different than predicted,” said Thomas Frey, a Senior Futurist of the US-based Da Vinci Institute. Today, let’s take a look at trends and related concepts. Here are four tips on how you can get a hold on the future if you set out to discover the fields of tomorrow’s growth in a strategy innovation project.

1. Map out relevant future trends for your business

A trend is a general direction in which something is developing or changing. For example, current trends that are relevant for businesses are social networks, the sustainability movement, increasing health consciousness, CSR, war for talent, technological convergence into (one) mobile device, RFID, online dating, hybrid cars, and many, many others.

Once you have identified relevant trends that are likely to affect your industry or category in the coming years, visualize your findings in a Trend Map. Thereby, a timeline for the next 1-2 decades represents your map’s horizontal axis — which also indicates that you need to date each trend (by adding a likely start and end date). On the vertical axis, distinguish between different trend categories. At THINKERGY, we use the acronym PESTEMPO to separate trends into political, economic, social, technological, environmental, market- (and customer-) related, pipeline- (and competitor-) related, and other trends.

2. Decide on possible megatrends

After you have listed all relevant trends for your business, analyze your findings in order to identify the underlying megatrends in your Trend Map. A megatrend is a large-scale change in circumstances; a major trend or movement. During the past 20 years, IT, the Internet and related networks as well as globalization were the key megatrends that have been driving change. In the next 20 years, other trends have the potential to develop into a megatrend: global warming, the rise of China, major demographic shifts, the innovation economy, urbanization and move to coasts, biotechnology, nanotechnology, among others. Do you know what megatrends will shape the business world and your industry in the coming 20 years?

3. Try to identify possible discontinuities

A discontinuity can be defined as a lack of continuity, regularity or sequence; a break or gap; a distinct break in physical continuity or sequence in time. Here are some well-known examples of discontinuities that hit the business world in the past decades: special events such as the Y2K-bug; major economic crises such as the Asian Economic Crisis, the bursting Dot-Com Bubble, or the current Sub-Prime Financial Crisis; terrorist attacks such as 9/11 or the recent Mumbai attacks; wars and civil wars such as the Iraq war; major political shifts like the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the Islamic Revolution in Iran; natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake in China’s Sichuan province, or the Tsunami catastrophe; major epidemics like SARS or the bird flu threat. Other examples of possible discontinuities are major industry changes (e.g., deregulations, privatizations, nationalizations, or disruptive innovations).

Compared to trends, discontinuities are more difficult to predict in many cases. Nevertheless, you can find expert opinions on likely probabilities for a large number of possible discontinuities (e.g., according to scientists, California has more than a 99% chance of having a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake within the next 30 years), and some possible discontinuities are known well in advance (just think of the introduction of the EURO in 1999). Whatever the case may be: Decide on the most important discontinuities that may affect your business, and include them in your Trend Map.

4. Disregard fashions, fads and hypes

If you create a Trend and Discontinuities Map for a Strategy Innovation exercise, then disregard fashions, fads and hypes, as these have only a relatively short lifetime (of ca. 1-2 years) and low to moderate significance if viewed from a big picture perspective:

• A fashion is a popular trend, esp. in styles of dress and ornament or manners of behavior. Examples of former and recent fashions are white-collared business shirts and leather ties in the 1980s, tattoos and piercings at the turn of the millennium, and more recently gladiator sandals.

• In contrast, a fad can be defined as an intense and widely shared enthusiasm for something, esp. one that is short-lived and without basis in the object’s qualities. Over the past years, the business world saw many management fads come and go; popular concepts like Benchmarking, Six Sigma, Strategy Maps or most recently Blue Ocean Strategy were mindlessly embraced and in vogue for some time before being replaced by the next craze.

• Finally, hypes are created by extravagant or intensive publicity or promotion — just think of Boy Bands, Tamagotchi, Rubik’s Cube, Sudoku, or the Harry Potter-mania.

Fashions, fads and hypes might be relevant and useful in more short-lived operative innovation projects (such as “how to create exciting new ice cream products and promotional activities for kids?”) that are targeted for launch within the next 1-2 years. However, they don’t add much significance and relevance in a Strategy Innovation project when your aim is to sow the seeds for your firm’s future strategic growth.

Conclusion: “When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened,” noted John M. Richardson, Jr. Which category do you and your firm intend to belong to?

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2009. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 7 May 2009.