Trendwatch for 2018

I’ve long looked to the future (as evidenced by this #throwback college photo). But alas, while none of us can predict the future, we can try to be ready for it. With change becoming faster and more disruptive, this requires getting better at seeing emerging trends earlier and imagining how they will impact you. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been so taken with the concept of emergence where patterns self-organize out of seeming chaos (think flocks of birds suddenly turning together all at once). With technology and globalization creating so many new intersections, we’re seeing more new things emerge in just about every part of life, faster and more often.

My advice: be aware of early connections and patterns, especially if they seem to conflict with what you know. If it's weird and new, move towards it and seek to understand it.

New technology is cool, but more important is how people will change their behavior in response to it.

Here are a few of the behavioral trends that I’m watching for in 2018:

• Volatility will continue to be the new normal. Every week, even every day, will bring a new challenge out of “some unexpected corner of the sky,” as J.G. Ballard said. How to adapt? Keep schedules flexible to give you time to react to important incoming data, pick your areas of expertise and rely on others to have theirs. You can’t know, do everything or be everywhere. You can only give yourself time to learn about new things as they come up, be ready to teach others when change affects what you know and be ready to listen to others when change affects what they know.
• Quality, distraction-free time is the ultimate luxury. Taking it, sometimes at the expense of other tasks, has been a growing countertrend to our culture of distraction. It has surprising strength as a way to cope with volatility. It's about more than digital detox and mindfulness. It's about being able to competently cope. At work and home, we’ll be increasingly less tolerant of people and activities that waste our time, and more empowered to take back our time, so we can deal with the things we really need. For businesses, this is a services and UX gold mine.
• For marketers, we’re getting better at reaching people in terms of their interests or psychographics. Next is state-of-mind segmentation – consideration of your consumer along a spectrum of interests. More data feedback loops between consumers and companies make this easier to determine, and make way for a wider array of possible outcomes, exclusive experiences and communities “powered by” brands.
• The race is on to find the right balance of physical meets digital. Digital-first companies are increasingly grappling with the physics of scale. And there are still whole industries, like insurance, energy and manufacturing, that aren't even close to being fully digitized yet. Leaders of transformation will become increasingly important to help move company cultures quickly to this physical-digital intersection.