What’s worse than reading one bad trend report? Reading 100 of them. It’s that time of year again. As we inch towards the last quarter of the year a flurry of trend reports will hit our news feeds and inboxes. It’s not just the exclusive privilege of those of us in foresight and futures who get to spend hours trawling through these, everyone one of us is sent one trend report or another. Anyone and everyone can have a perspective of what is likely to be influential in 2024.

The problem isn’t a lack of perspective, the problem is homogenization of perspectives. And the lack of complex, critical thinking applied to it.

Perhaps without forethought, planning and preparation, all of that goes out the window. If you don’t communicate your personal brand in the way you set out for it come across, what does it matter how you set out to position it? Some things need to be filtered and some things must stay private.

We see what’s familiar as better, more important and more ‘true’. That’s not surprising as it’s a fairly known human behavior. But I do wonder if in business it’s more intentional than that. It’s not that we are just too busy to venture into it, or it’s too expensive to research, or it’s too complex to understand … it’s that we don’t want to. Because we don’t really care. We believe it’s less important because it’s less familiar.

Meet the human being, we are flawed, we are imperfect. We aspire to be and do better, but, you know, not all the time, and not with everyone, and not with every thing. We are complicated.

Our interest in the darkness that lies within human being is very much linked with what we do in our day jobs; however they come, we work hard to really see people. Flaws, contradictions, hypocrisy and all.

Music stimulates parts of our brain, it engages our physical body, it can alter our moods. It is even said that music is at the center of what it means to be human. It’s an interesting claim considering that we often talk about humans as being visual creatures without perhaps exploring how other senses influence what we ‘see’. But it’s perhaps most interesting because of how little we consider, research or leverage music in the consumer good space.