Trends & Emerging Issues

Giving trends a context is crucial – futures are the white space between the trends

“I can feel a redefined sense of human nature, echoing through our new social communities with their paradoxical juxtapositions of friendships, interactions and relational behaviors created and nurtured out of immediacy.”

- Derek Woodgate

Trends are a tool – a stimulus for futurethink. That’s not to say, they are of minor importance, but they are a guide, not the answer. Whether you follow Matathia’s and Salzman’s Next, or you have faith in Popcorn, trend-tracking and projections are an essential start point for understanding future macro and micro influencers. However, it’s what you do with them that counts.

In giving credence to the view from Reality Hacking -”Using someone else’s power does not increase your own“, we have developed our own TrendBank in collaboration with our associate, Future Cat. It not only takes account of every trend you can find out there, but those that we have developed and refined from our own Frontline Panels, trendsight community and tracking processes.

The TrendBank is updated regularly, but tracking is a continuous process. They are a mixture of global influencers, future consumer behavioral trends, emerging markets, industries & players and developments in anything from the marketplace, to legislation and technology.

We have a separate Youth Futures trend-tracking program. This is because the trends are more difficult to galvanize, come and go quicker and are stimulated by unlikely triggers.

We are one of the original collaborators with Shaping the Future in London.