Futures Forecasting: Joining The Dots
I’m a design futurist and trend forecaster with more than 13 years’ experience in innovation consulting and futures research. I believe that the skill and art of futures thinking should be accessible and available to everyone, because the more futures thinkers there are in the world, the better our collective futures will be.
This is the second in a series of articles that aim to explain some key ideas and learnings from my work. I particularly hope it will be useful to trend forecasting students and early-career researchers. If you have comments or suggestions, please get in touch!
Trend forecasting revolves around finding patterns across very broad swathes of research, assembling and analysing those patterns, and projecting that synthesised information into the future, along whatever time horizon you are working to (anywhere from six months to 10+ years). The core skill here is joining the dots — or to use another phrase that is common in the industry, finding ‘the red thread’ that connects ideas and examples together into one coherent and inspiring narrative of change.
This is an intuitive process and is one of the key elements of trend forecasting that makes it an art. That said, it’s also a skill that can be strengthened and exercised through practise, like any other.
Here are some of the main ways to approach the research, synthesis and insight creation stages of trend forecasting and innovation research.
- Look across industries: trends emerge across product sectors and an idea that reshapes one area of design is likely to have an impact on another area too. Macro trends, such as generational shifts or environmental changes over the long-term, will affect every industry. Some sectors have logical relationships with another: trends in food and drink often quickly spread to beauty, for example, as the two areas have synergies in sensory experience (flavour translates to scent, and ingredients and textures are crucial to both areas). Other sectors have perhaps less obvious connections: kids’ toys inspire pet products; nail polish informs automotive finishes. Any industries that are shaped by self-expression (interiors, automotive, technology) will be influenced by movements in fashion, while fashion is still highly influenced by youth culture. Many influences are circular. As a general rule, the more examples there are across sectors and industries, the stronger the trend.
- Find the interconnections: trend forecasters work with a lot of visual mapping and organising tools to lay out and rearrange their thinking. Most of the time, this is a fancy way to say whiteboards and sticky notes (real or virtual). Once you start organising research into clusters of ideas, the examples will naturally start to come together and bounce off each other, leading to more ideas and more realisations. Previously unconnected ideas or examples will suddenly have threads growing between them. These interconnections move the research from being raw reams of links and key words, and will start to web out into a narrative.
- Project out to second order effects: using the initial research and the interconnections that have started to emerge, forecasters can then project the ideas they are seeing out to their initial and then second order effects — and beyond. This is where a trend becomes a forecast, because your analysis moves from real-time explanation into future implications. For example, an effect of the pandemic was that people started working from home more. This would clearly lead to increased sales in home office furniture and equipment in the short term as people upgraded their work-from-home setups or invested in them for the first time. But it was also likely to lead to an increasing need for health and wellness products for home-based workers, related to reducing the impacts of screen strain on eyes, and to massaging sore muscles that have stayed in place (at a keyboard, on a chair) for too long.
- Identify the sustainability issues: environmental implications are crucial to factor in, for any trend or movement, and will have significant impacts to account for, as well as creating knock-on effects. For example, the boom in electric vehicle production, battery storage and other renewables-related products is going to place great strain on natural reserves of minerals such as lithium and cobalt. It has already contributed to human rights abuses and environmental destruction, and is likely to lead to new and evolving geopolitical challenges, as these materials are concentrated in certain areas worldwide. At the same time, R&D into scientific breakthroughs and technologies that reduce reliance on these materials will significantly increase as governments and businesses look for alternatives that they can scale up.
- Focus on the time horizon: many trend forecasts fall short of being actionable because they are not targeted precisely enough to their time horizon. Humans tend to overestimate how much change can happen in the short-term, and underestimate how much change will happen in the long-term, because we’re bad at understanding compound progress. Think realistically about the transformations in technology or society that can happen in the timeframe you are looking at. If multiple scenarios are possible depending on political action such as regulation, or other difficult-to-foresee factors such as a major economic or public health event, it’s possible to split a forecast into several possible futures in order to explore each one fully.
- Open up possibilities: trend forecasting always has to balance the probable with the possible and the preferable. The best futures forecasts manage all three, making space for awe and inspiration while also being tangible and actionable enough to use. Our task is to encourage different and more expansive thinking about futures, focusing on opening up the possibilities — think “yes and” rather than “no but” (a technique borrowed from improvisational theatre). There is a misconception that trend forecasting can only encourage copying and foster homogeneity, causing everything to look the same across cultures, countries, companies and creative sectors. It can be guilty of this. The strongest futures forecasting avoids the trap of derivative inspiration and diminishing creative returns, instead making space for original thinking and ethical, expanded choices within a broader trend or an emerging area of innovation.
Read the first article in this series, Futures Forecasting: Process & Purpose.
If you enjoyed this article, you can find more of my work at www.sarahhousley.com and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
