2024 trends: get ready & get critical.
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, whether it’s from a consultancy like McKinsey, a marketing agency like Contagious, future insights from IPSOS, trends from Trend Hunter … 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.
A couple of weeks ago, I was on a long plane flight and decided to re-read a few trend reports from last year, predicting what 2023 would be like. When I got to Trend #21 of Wunderman Thompson’s always-fun Future 100 report, I felt more than a little uneasy.
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“Deepsea Tourism” isn’t a new idea; privatization of extreme adventures, under the sea or in space, is something we’ll continue to see in the future. The trend spotlight isn’t wrong. The signal that was used to represent the trend, OceanGate and its hungry CEO Stockton Rush, is also not wrong. What makes it an uneasy read, especially now, is the way it is reported - “this trend is interesting because people are venturing into the unknown to get once in a lifetime travel experiences”. That's it. No mention of the numerous risks and consequences. No critique from experts or pressure tests from contrarians. Isn't a part of the expectation of trends is that they show you what you otherwise wouldn't see?
It’s an interesting, shallow, ‘hot take’ and not much more.
Your job (non-foresight person) isn’t to make sense of these reports. And you shouldn't ignore them; any good foresight practitioner will encourage you to stay observational, curious and read more. But you don't have to do so passively.
You can apply your own simple model of critique as you’re reading them. One way is to take the elements of human reasoning (that are inherent in every idea and therefore in every simple, well ordered, trend) and flip them around:
1. What question is this trend answering and is it the right question?
2. Whose point of view is this? Who is it representing?
3. What assumption is it making (about people, businesses, systems)?
4. What consequences and implications are not mentioned?
5. And bonus … Why am I excited about this idea? What might that mean for my objectivity?
Matt Klein says trend reports are our way of organizing chaos. He’s been analyzing trend reports, turning them into meta trend analyses (trends about trends) for the last five years, with what he calls “mindfulness”.
"These reports are self-fulfilling prophecies. We report on trends that already exist, and create a future centering these trends," says Matt Klein.
Part of the problem is us: when you open a new trend report you are probably scanning quickly for a short numbered list, wrapped in beautiful high-tech imagery, with quirky self-reverential names like "Hauling Freedom", "Health Reimagined", "The World in Flux", "Speaking in Tik Tok" (all actual 2023 trends names).
What trend reports do really well is get people excited about the future with minimal investment required.
But they should not be designed to give you a simple yes/no answer. They should not be subjectively pushing one preferred future. They shouldn’t be all positive, like every trend will turn into a business opportunity. They shouldn’t be the end of your thinking but the beginning spark of more thinking.
Not applying critical thinking when writing these reports is one fault you can’t control. Not applying your own critical thinking when reading them is on you.
But if you do nothing else, please do not run these reports through AI because you don’t have time to read them; you will be dumbing down what is already dumbed down. Data and the organization of it plays an important role in foresight but it will never supersede critical thinking.
Listen to Matt Klein’s episode on Thinking:
