Mar 09
13
Seeing Into The Near Future
(graphic generated using Wordle)
The thing that everyone wants these days is to get a glimpse of “what happens next”.
The ability to see into the near future is almost priceless. In these days of a GFC (Global Financial Crisis) trying to get on the right side of the trade is more of an imperative than ever, and getting the timing right is getting harder to do.
It actually isn’t that hard to spot a trend when you think about it. Trends are frankly, pretty obvious to pick. What is difficult is to predict the inflection point with accuracy. This is the moment when a critical mass of people who have been supporting a prevailing wisdom get religion and give up their positions jumping to the other side of the equation, effectively creating a “run”.
I picked trends in the music business for years and found it fascinating to watch as others couldn’t see things coming that seemed pretty obvious to me. I remember at one time talking to the program director of one of the major radio networks in Australia who couldn’t see the impact that music video was having on consumer purchases. He was so caught up in dealing with the problems within the finite ecosystem of radio that he missed what was happening in the larger ecosystem of electronic media.
He was fighting to keep his ratings position based on the premise that people would listen to rock music tomorrow because the had done yesterday. I asked him if he had kids. He said he did. I asked him what medium his children used to find out about new music. He told me that his kids got all their music knowledge from TV. I said to him, “So can’t you see – that is your future market. Your kids are the demographic that is going to influence the charts next year and the year after. That is where the trend line goes. Your ratings will decline if you stay with your current strategy…. He still didn’t get it. And his ratings didn’t improve, regardless of the promotions and the tweaking of the format, and the change in the personalities on the stations…
Trends often take years to manifest in a really visible form, by which time they become impossible to change, their momentum is so great. Having the confidence to make decisions that have significant consequences based on scant information takes a lot of guts, because it is also easy to get it wrong.
Right now there are some very big trend lines in society that have significant bearing on a lot of businesses. For instance it is pretty easy to see that the GFC is almost certainly going to get worse before it gets better. But what steps can we take to get ahead of the curve, to analyse what that means for our own industries and communities?
In order to get a better understanding of how to deal with trends and where the inflection point is likely to be, I think it is helpful to consider the meme that drives a trend, and the velocity at which it travels.
Fortunately the Internet provides us with a fantastic early warning system that enables early identification of trend memes. Unfortunately there are so many threads of stories that it is almost impossible to figure what is relevant for any specific business.
One of the best trend forecasters in the business is Gerald Celente who runs the Trends Institute. He forecast the GFC and is very bullish about gold bullion at the moment. He believes that the financial meltdown is going to lead to societal failure in Western economies – a very bleak outlook indeed.
I believe that there are some key trends that anyone who is smart is going to have to get out in front of regardless of their business. And though the prognosis is not great, the potential for using the insights into what is about to happen are going to be great for those who avail themselves of the knowledge.
Some of the trends can be identified by a failure to act as much as by the momentum of the meme itself.
So for instance the fact that the Obama administration has not been able to fill in the key administrative positions in the finance portfolio under Timothy Geitner is an unfortunate indication of early failure. By itself it might not be critical. However, when you take this together with the further fact that a number of other key appointments have failed to materialize with one of them recently claiming that the pro-Israel lobby had made it impossible for him to go forward, you have to consider that the Obama administration may be in trouble already.
At the same time there are so many people from the financial arena who are now decrying the bail out of Wall Street as being bad policy, you have to wonder how it will be possible to climb out of the mess at all.
Other key trends that have been growing in intensity for some time are the continuing arguments for and against Climate Change and Peak Oil. Regardless of whether either is true or not, both of these memes increase the level of uncertainty within society. Uncertainty leads people to distrust and lose confidence in government and established brands. This leads to a heightened level of nervousness amongst people generally. That in turn leads to people becoming radicalised along ethnic and religious lines.
Because America is still an extremely open society we tend to see news stories emerging that should give an indication of what is in store for us in that country, perhaps more than in other places. Here are a few of the stories that indicate more significant trends:
In Florida there is a backlog of 95,000 applications for concealed weapons permits and there is a shortage of ammunition across the country…
Farmers in the US are getting concerned about the power that Monsanto has over the food chain, in particular whether recently enacted laws will effectively prohibit the growing of organic crops entirely….
Meanwhile Jim Rogers, one of the canniest investors in the market, has come out and said that the US government should let AIG fail as it will shorten the amount of pain that everyone will have to experience….
The Wall Street Journal reports about how a respected doctor falsified research data that led to the legalization of a number of pharmaceuticals that are now in the marketplace.
Sir Gus O'Donnell, Britain's most senior civil servant, came out saying how it is impossible to do business with the White House when there is no one to talk to in the administration.
Marine Scientists are revealing that ocean fishing stocks are depleting at a dangerous rate…
And the so called War On Drugs that has had no impact on the global drug trade is about to be renewed, when the strategy has been proven to not just be worthless, but to actually increase the problem…
What all these stories together indicate is that society has good reason to doubt a good deal of the motives of the corporations whose influence shapes government policy.
Trust is damaged if not totally broken.
That is leading to two kinds of societies emerging in the near future. On the one hand, survivalists. These could be individuals and they could be corporations. On the other hand there are what I would call 'resilient communities' – again these could be people acting together or businesses.
Resilient Systems require tools that enable them to function. Some of these are available now, and some need to be created. And some of the tools may run totally contrary to what government and corporate interests deem to be acceptable.
One of the key tools that I believe is going to prove to be useful is the continuing use of P2P to ensure that the Internet becomes self healing and utterly resilient in the future. We need to ensure that information can flow regardless of trauma caused by power outages locally or in some remote place where a key communications node is located.
We also need to ensure that there are information resources located within communities that will help people transition into delivering local food security. We are so used to the concept of just in time delivery that we run the risk of taking for granted supply chain security. We shouldn't.
I would be interested to hear from people who believe that they have insights into what trends are emerging and how to address change at a local community level.