(book review) Future Files, by Richard Watson

This book is a major achievement. More than 200 trends and predictions –most of them realistic or at least plausible, a few a bit crazy- blended in a very credible account of where our world and our society -in almost all its facets- is heading.

Okay, here and there you’ll find some wishful thinking, and some of the trends are actually happening now (so it’s not a very big achievement to predict them). Furthermore, while Richard often succeeds in changing the paradigm of certain subjects he discusses, in other you sometimes have the impression he got stuck in the current paradigm, like when he talks about the future of Travel.

Nevertheless, given the sheer amount of trends it covers, and the very enlightening account on how they tie to each other, this provides an extremely lively and interesting read.

I can’t give a full summary without just copying the book (which I’m not allowed to do, obviously). But rather, let me reflect on a number of areas and thoughts that stroke me most:

SOCIETY

Watson paints a somewhat schizophrenic picture of future society, which will in a way polarize in many ways and on the other hand become much more undiversified. Both are perhaps not so contradicting…

1) Polarization will increase, at many levels in society: between globalization and tribalism; between rich and poor (the middle class might evaporate); between the ‘ever connected’ and the ‘opted outs’, between ‘enhanced’ people (augmented reality) and biological ones,

2) ..on the other hand, given the growing level of connections between people, they will increasingly behave the same way, have the same needs etc. Even the differences between generations will fade away as young and old will live in the same virtual world.

It’s one of Watson’s mantra throughout the book (a dangerous one, since easy to interpret negatively), due to all the societal trends people are likely to become more anxious in the future, and will hence be increasingly in search for meaning (see one of my previous posts).

TECHNOLOGY

In my blog I have often stated that, for me, technology in itself is not a trend, but rather a driver or inhibitor of trends. Watson seems to agree with this: ‘…it is technology that will dictate change and will be at the forefront of any paradigm shifts in social attitude and behavior’.


The book provides an interesting account on where current developments in nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and self-replicating machines will lead us, but makes an even more interesting point when it states that a SINGULARITY will be reached when humans will not be able to predict the behavior of the machines they create. Just to stress the importance: ‘singularity’ is the term Stephen Hawkins uses to describe what happened just before the ‘Big Bang’ (in a way, what ignited the Big Bang). I can hardly imagine a more powerful word to use in this context, and indeed, when you think of it: it’s ok for the machines that we build to have emotions, to make decisions etc, just as long as we have programmed them to do so. But if they start reprogramming themselves, this could become a singularity indeed…

POLITICS

Loads of views that stroke me on that topic, but if I had to make a choice:

- ‘City States’ will re-emerge due to a pull to both the regional and the supra-national level. Being a European, living in a country that is tearing itself apart due to regional differences, I can clearly see this happening. Though I realize I might be trapped in my own paradigm here ;-)

- ‘The trend toward tribalism also means that ‘micro-trends’ might become much more important than megatrends’… if this is true (no reason it shouldn’t) it would form another reason why society might develop in many different ways, regardless of globalization and inter-connectedness…

- ‘Families with many children tend to be more conservative. In a generation or two, these children will –mathematically- in a majority, hence will bring a baggage of conservative ideas with them’… interesting thought, though one might hope that children still like to rebel against their parents… the ‘60s revisited?

- It’s probably a sidekick idea from Watson, but quite an appealing one: since Public Sector employees are paid by the government, and it’s the same government that collects the taxes on these wages, why not just make the public sector wages tax-free? It would certainly be much more efficient and save a lot of employees in the finance department…

FINANCE

Another bold statement of Watson, but one that I’ve seen in plenty of other predictions since: ‘by 2050 there will be one global currency’. This might be wishful thinking (I also see loads of advantages to that happening), but ultimately it will depend on how the trend towards ‘Tribalism’ will evolve: it is very likely that it will be stronger than the push for a global currency…

Much of this chapter is spent showing that the importance of the banks will evaporate in the future… Some of its tasks will be taken over by retailers (not only for credit cards, but also loans and investments for which Retailers can certainly provide some better –if not innovative- solutions), while others will increasingly go directly peer-to-peer, such as loans (look for eBay-like lending sites ‘Zopa’ and ‘Prosper’).

What’s for sure is that banking –and in extension the Financial Sector- is facing some major challenges which are not totally due to the recent financial crisis.

RETAIL

According to Watson, in the future there will be 3 types of shoppers (and, hence, shops):

1) For buying the essential, monthly recurrent items: no thrill efficiency shops
2) Purpose buy: people will buy through Internet or other means, but will need to watch and feel the products first, so this will stimulate the emergence of ‘brand showrooms’
3) Slow shopping (‘shopping as an end’): this will have the full thrill experience with loads of investments in customer service, extra’s etc.

…looks quite realistic to me…

On another note: when predicting consumer behavior in the future, Watson as well as other futurists I’ve read assume that future elderly people (including myself) will have the same buying patterns as the elderly today… I have serious doubts on whether this assumption will hold...

HEALTH

The most thought-provoking thought on that topic is the merger between the Banking and Pharma industries. This prediction is a logical extrapolation from the fact that our DNA material is able to predict which diseases we’ll be having in 20-50 years from now (= pharma), on which financial companies can jump to offer saving schemes to pay for treatment of those diseases xx years ahead (= insurance).

…can’t think of any counter-argument to that, it’s definitely going in that direction…

TRAVEL

There might be a couple of ‘zeitgeist’- biased views in that chapter, like the increasing number of holiday destinations that will be influenced by ‘Climate Change’ concerns, but still, this leads to some interesting scenario’s, like ‘home holidays’ (provided that 5D –I meant 5, not 3 !- will become reality) or ‘voluntourism’ (take a holiday for a purpose).

WORK

In a way I’m living the way Watson sees the future of work. Until before the crisis I was what sociologist called a ‘modern nomad’, travelling for my company 4-5 days a week, packed only with my laptop and some clean underwear. I worked from hotels till late at night, did my confcalls from the room before going to my meetings or presentations.

The crisis, and the fact that my company just developed and acquired videoconferencing systems, changed this dramatically. No travel for internal purposes allowed. The pre-crisis 2-3 conference calls a day now have increased to 5-6, and are mostly done from home, which gives me the leisure of doing my groceries in between –when the shop is empty- at the cost of staying till on the phone 9-10pm when I need to get in touch with my American peers.

Do I feel connected with my company? For sure. Am I faithful to my company? Absolutely. However, I could very well conceive that certain specific skills I have developed would be helpful to other companies (in other industries). I could offer my services to these while on holiday, in the weekends, or even take a sabbatical to see whether this might turn into a profitable business. It even gets more blurry: the Blogs that I write are for professional means, in that way that they help me to connect to other people working on similar projects and get ideas from them, but they’re done in my spare time, and on my own account.

I rarely feel ‘at work’, though (or because) I never ‘go to’ or ‘leave’ work. I work when I write my personal Blog, I work when I do groceries (I mostly do this when thinking about a specific work-related problem), but when ‘at work’ I might check the clips from Neil Young’s latest album, or order some novels to read during holiday.

This is pretty close to the ‘location-less’, ‘self-employment’ world of work that Watson is drawing, though he seems to think that this will cause anxiety and stress… To be honest, I live in this world and can witness that stress levels have diminished rather than increased, even though the amount of work I have to do is ever increasing…


As said, my comments above are merely reflections on a small number of trends discussed in this book.

One piece of advice if you read the book –which I’d strongly recommend to do: leave the book aside for a day or so after each chapter, and think about how the developments Watson discusses might impact your life. It is a highly rewarding exercise and will probably prepare you optimally for the likely future…

The future of Magazines

While some people -including myself-  like to think about the future, some others are actually building it, like these gentlemen. They actually have done a very profound analysis about the real added value of a thing as trivial as a magazine, and investigate whether this same added value could be brought through another medium.

This technological solution is certainly a response to a couple of megatrends (increasing mobility, customization, etc), but as is often the case the real adoption curve will depend on whether it serves a real need.

As far as I'm concerned, it does. I'm far from an early adopter in technology, and I'm far from buying any e-Reader to read books (my love of the smell of paper is too profound), but as far as magazines are concerned... I'm reading around 10 of them each month, but could easily imagine how I could end up reading 15 with the solution these guys are developing...

So yes, for this one I'd turn into an early adopter ;-)



Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Faith Popcorn about adapting Brands to consumer trends

I didn’t know Faith Popcorn was still active –I’m one of those who bought her book ‘Clicking’ back in 1996 without ever reading it… Coming across a recent lecture of her at the Ideacity10 conference, I must conclude that her powerful trend watching skills hasn’t diminished a bit, and it adapted quite well to the current world.

In fact it shouldn’t come as a surprise, since she collects all kind if input on trends from thousands of people worldwide, through her website (http://www.faithpopcorn.com/). As an example: one Japanese contact pointed out a very successful small shop in Tokyo. The reason for its success lies in the fact that if a product runs out, the shopkeeper wouldn’t build new supplies. The scarcity of the goods makes customers crazy about them. This is what Faith calls the ‘short line’.

This sounds more like a smart business idea rather than a trend. It might become a trend if a substantial proportion of businesses would adopt the idea. Not likely…

Still, in her lecture Faith points out other trends which clearly are relevant and impactful:

• More informed and (hence) demanding consumers;
• Brain chips;
• Icon toppling (disbelieve and skepticism against ‘stars’ and ‘guru’s’ –though some other trends would contradict this, according to me);
• ‘You are what you share’ (your internet profile, quite an interesting one to develop indeed)

From all this she draws a compelling conclusion: successful marketing and branding nowadays is not so much about messaging and packaging, instead a company needs to get embedded into a (sub-)culture. For instance, every self-respecting creative mind would think ‘Apple’ when buying a laptop (or rather: he wouldn’t think about it at all, he wouldn’t even consider buying another brand).

Easier said than done, but it is worthwhile thinking about it when designing a marketing or branding strategy…

+160 business people assessing which trend will have biggest impact

There is an interesting debate going on on the Linkedin Group ‘Future trend’. Andreas von de Rheydt, a GM at l’Oréal, launched a discussion on ‘Which one is the SINGLE MOST important trend for you which will influence next years’.

A crucial question, to which 320 people responded so far (end of August). Rather than answering with my own vision, I took some time to go through the responses and tried to structure and segment them. After all this is some kind of a free survey, it would be a pity not to draw some conclusions out of it.

So here it goes, I took into account some 160 answers who were clear and directly answering the question:

Clearly technological developments are in most respondent’s mind. This is to be expected, though in a way it is puzzling as well. It is to be expected, since it is undeniably the most visible and impactful trend we experience. But at the same time it is puzzling, since technology (any specific one) is rarely a trend in itself. It can drive, create, bend a trend, but is it a trend in itself?

Anyhow, I’m not going into a semantic debate here. Technology is important, whatever way you look at it. And it probably came up that high in the responses to Andreas’ question since it covers so many aspects: nanotechnologies, augmented reality, social media, 3D, Cloud, Collaboration, … Again, no doubt each one of these developments will have an impact on our lives in the next decade.

The next group of trends which in between 10-15% of the answers mentioned includes:

• sustainability;
• consumer habits;
• geopolitics (shift to East);
• demographics.

No real surprises here, although I must admit that the shifts in Consumer behavior was out of my scope so far (which is why I’m currently reading the excellent ‘The Next Big Thing: Spotting and Forecasting Consumer Trends for Profit

The third group, mentioned by 3-5% of the respondents, offers a more interesting view.

I would have thought that ‘scarcity of resources’ would score much higher on the list, though one could argue that the topic is closely related to the ‘sustainability’ issue.

The ‘e-Learning’ one might be a good example of the bias in such survey, since this was mentioned by people from the education industry (so does that make it a megatrend?).Bytheway, there are other biased topics next on the list: ‘risk aversion’ and ‘cost cutting’ are very likely biased by the ‘zeitgeist’ in which we live, just after a dreadful financial and economic crisis.

But the two most intriguing topics from the third group of trends are definitely the ‘search for meaning’ and ‘increased speed/complexity’. They are interesting since they are not from a ‘material’ but rather from a psychological nature, they relate to how people perceive the world they are living in. Does that make them a megatrend? No, probably not, they are a reflection of the current times. But since these are psychological factors, they might influence ‘real’ trends in a very profound way…

Which brings me to the second reason why they are so interesting: they seem to relate in many ways to a vast number of other trends. The ‘search for meaning’ for instance relates closely to the ‘Sustainability’ trend, but can also be seen as an effect of some geopolitical and demographic trends (power shift to the East/ declining power of the West / elderly people more prone to feelings of fear/ …) and will definitely influence our consumption behavior in the future (another trend).

It’s intriguing to think about the interrelations of the trend. I’ve played around with the thought, combining the thoughts offered by the conversation on LindkedIn with some other thought from ‘professional megatrend watchers’. For the latter part I’ve selected the views of a number of people or companies (Ernst &; Young, McKinsey, IBM, CSIRO, CIFS (Copenhagen Institure for Future Studies, future watcher Richard Watson and Belgium’s top economist Geert Noels). This provides following picture:

But reflecting on my previous thought and how the psychological aspects can weight on trends, I’ve tried to put the ‘Meaning’ at the center, which provides even yet a more intriguing view:

I’m not an adept of any ‘new age’ or esoteric theory, neither am I a very religious guy, but if I’d ever write a book about megatrends and how to use them in corporate strategy (which I intend to do), I think I would use the concept of ‘Meaning’ as a red line across the book…

The view above is work in progress; feel free to leave a comment if you think I’ve missed a link or a ‘node’…