Archive for trend watch
Forecasting and trendwatching: when do politicians catch up?
Posted by: | Comments
Hillary Clinton has recently suffered the kind of "blind side hit" that routinely storms through industries and markets.
One hit came from without: Barak Obama. The other came from within. The decision to press Bill Clinton into the breach, after Iowa, proved disastrous. Lecturing the press, making grand and dubious statements, Bill Clinton was a liability from the second week. He was the blind side hit within.
Poor Hilliary. It puts one in mind of the roller derby (one of the homes of the blind side hit). It was as if Barak and Bill skated up on either side of her, lifted her off the track by her elbows, and tossed her over the rail.
On Sunday (February 17), Meet the Press shed some light on this development. According to Tim Russert (the host) and Kate O’Beire, a panelist, the Clinton campaign had persuaded itself of its own inevitability. The Clinton camp believed, as O’Beirne put it, "no one’s in a position to deny this to us." We are told that Hillary Clinton supposed it would "all be over by February 5th."
Now, some say that Clinton harbors imperial presumptions, that she saw the White House as her due, that she was blinded by hubris. This strikes me as unlikely. I think Hillary did what all of us do. She assumed that things were in order…until it was clear that they weren’t. Lots of CEOs have been surprised in just this way. There are always unknown unknowns. Who expects the unexpected? Human beings are good at glib assumptions. Assumptions are in their very nature hard to see. Without vigilance, they are assumed and therefore invisible. Hilliary made the mistake any of us might have made.
Well and good. What about stage 2? What happens when glib assumptions give way to horrified understanding. What happens when we know there’s a spanner in the works, when we have a fix on Obama rising and Bill on a rampage? How quickly and how well does one react?
Obama’s camp appears to have the advantage here. Russert quoted a passage from a recent column by Joe Klein.
If nothing else, a presidential campaign tests a candidate’s ability to think strategically and tactically and to manage a very complex organization. We have three plausible candidates remaining — Obama, Clinton and John McCain — and Obama has proved himself the best executive by far. (Time Magazine, Febrary 25th)
Where the Obama camp is strong, the Clinton camp is weak. Another Meet the Press panelist, Al Hunt, Washington Managing Editor, Bloomberg News, quoted Josh Green in the Atlantic on the "total disarray of the Clinton campaign." Hunt said
David Axelrod and company at the Obama campaign has run rings around the Clinton Campaign. They weren’t prepared for a protracted battle, they weren’t prepared for a money fight, they weren’t prepared for caucuses, they weren’t prepared for a tough alternative. Every smart politician and strategist… comes in with a game plan, but the really good ones are able to adjust, to throw out some stuff, to tweak some stuff, the Stu Spensers, the James Carvilles, these people [the Clinton camp] couldn’t adjust." (emphasis added)
There is no easy out for Hilliary Clinton here. If the campaign is not adjusting quickly, blame must go to the CEO who put the team together. And now there is, as Klein and Hunt say, grounds to doubt Clinton’s worthiness for office. Not to expect dynamism is one thing. Not to equip yourself with the ability to react to it, this is another.
Surely, the political world is as unstable as the industrial one. You think about the numbers of candidates that have "come out of nowhere" (Dean last election, Huckabee this one), the number of times voters have refused to conform to form, the elections that have spun wildly out of control. Glib assumptions are as reckless and uncalled for here as they are in the business world.
Except of course they are punished much more harshly. The cost is not a bad quarter or even a lost job. In some sense, the punishment is extinction. If you fail to spot the blind side hit, you are in danger of ceasing to be a politician. Screw up badly enough, and your career is over. It’s not impossible to make yourself permanently unemployable.
Forecasting, trend watching, scenario planning, damage control contemplation, a willingness to grapple with uncertainty, hiring Piers Fawkes, Steven Postrel, and Andrew Zolli, all of these are standard issue activities for the corporation. And it would appear that politicians have incentives more substantial than the average CEO. When do politicians catch up to their brothers and sisters in the private sector?
References
For the Meet the Press website, and it’s reference to the February 17th show with Tim Russert, Bob Novak, Al Hunt, Kate O’Beirne, Mark Shields, and Margaret Carlson, here.
Last note:
I watched the McLaughlin Group after Meet the Press, and I was impressed that McLaughlin remains a thundering blow hard and, more strikingly and not to be unkind, how much Monica Crowley looks like a Thunderbirds puppet.
I’m just saying
Posted by: | Comments
Fashion:
Paris fashion week: eight days, 90 shows, a cast of thousands, a budget of millions. And how many trends? Er, none, actually. Nada, zero, zilch. … there is no one mood, no single direction to be gleaned from Paris this season. (Jess Cartner-Morley)
Football:
National powerhouses are losing all over the place. The team that’s sitting atop all the polls wasn’t even in the conversation for No. 1 a few weeks ago… Being ranked No. 2 in the country has pretty much become a recipe for defeat. And nobody has any idea who’s going to play for the national championship. (King Kaufman)
Sunspots?
References
Cartner-Morley, Jess. 2007. Fashion for all. Guardian. October 9, 2007. here.
Kaufman, King. 2007. King Kaufman’s Sport Daily. October 23, 2007. here.
Acknowledgments
Suzanne Hader for a fascinating conversation at the Futures of Entertainment conference this weekend.
Microtrends meet Max Headroom
Posted by: | Comments
I had a look at Microtrends, the new book by Mark Penn.
The Proposition:
The world may be getting flatter, in terms of globalization, but it is occupied by 6 billion little bumps who do not have to follow the herd to be heard. No matter how offbeat their choices, they can now find 100,000 people or more who share their taste for deep fried yak on a stick. (xiv)
As someone who made this argument in print 10 years ago, it is a little discouraging to see how little progress we have made.
Penn offers us 75 microtrends, and declines any bigger picture. "The one-size-fits-all approach is dead," he tells us. Fair enough. But does the death of monolithic trends mean that we live in a world consisting only noisy, little, episodic ones?
I guess we should be grateful that Penn is not offering up Chris Anderson’s "long tail" fallacy, the odd idea that because we have ceased to be a mass culture we are now an utterly particulated universe of ones. At least, Penn is prepared to see the world aggregating in groups of 100,000. I mean, that’s something.
My argument: Penn is generalizing, he’s just not generalizing enough. And this is no small problem. We are now looking at a world that so teams with variety, dynamism and innovation that thinking in a useful way about social and cultural worlds is extraordinarily difficult. If we have any intellectual overhead left, let’s for god sake use it. (Max Headroom, not just a highway warning anymore!) If we can generalize, we must generalize. Right?
Well, before we get to the generalizations, a word on the howlers. In the chapter called "Unisexuals," Penn addresses "gender bending," by which he appears to mean the way in which the traditional markers of gender categories have broken down. Men buy skin care treatments. Women lift weights. Men work as nannies. Women drive tractors. That kind of thing.
This is a useful observation, I guess. It is a microtrend. The way our culture defines maleness and femaleness is "under review" and the old boundaries have broken down. But then Penn gives us an extended treatment of transgendered people. And this tells us that he is now entirely out of his depth. For the transgendered are not people who participate in the new approach to gender. No, they so insist on the old approach to gender that they are prepared to go under the knife to acknowledge and preserve it. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just that you can’t talk about gender bending and transgenderists as tokens of the same type. At all.
Oh well. The other problem here is the armchair sociology problem. Penn is a pollster. This means he has bags of quantitative data. This data tell him some astonishing things. They tell him, for instance, that a great many young men list "sniper" as a favorite occupation. Sniper!
Penn duly acknowledges this finding and his astonishment. And then he speculates in the blithe, not very interesting, call-in-the-usual-suspects, turn-crank-till-done, kind of explanation. But never does it occur to me to actually ask respondent what he thinks he’s up to. I mean, this isn’t a laboratory. (Nor is this the winter of positivism that prevailed in the period after World War II.) Those paramecium beneath the microscope have powers of speech. They can tell you why they want to be snipers. Idle speculation (utterly untouched by any knowledge of contemporary culture, in this case, Bones) is unnecessary and, actually, uncalled for.
Ok, I have totally run out of time. This is quite different from merely running out of time. When you have merely run out of time your wife is not ready to kill you for giving your Friday night to the blogosphere. So, let me delay till Monday my attempt to use Penn’s 75 microtrends as a stairway to a few, useful generalizations. While we still can, I mean.
References
McCracken, Grant. 1997. Plenitude. Toronto: Periph.: Fluide.
Penn, Mark J. with E. Kinney Zalesne. 2007. Microtrends. The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes. New York: Twelve.
Trend watching (the meta-trend)
Posted by: | Comments
Let’s hope that the new book on trends is itself a trend.
Mark Penn and Kinney Zalesne have written a book called Microtrends which encourages us to stop waiting for big trends and go looking for little ones.
This represents a new model of trend watching, one that acknowledges how decentered, multiple and various our culture and commerce are.
As Penn says, cultural innovation can come up fast.
By the time a trend hits 1 percent, it is ready to spawn a hit movie, best-selling book, or new political movement.
We are now less like cool hunters, trying to figure out the NEXT NEW THING and more like Silicon Valley venture capitalists decide how to choose between thousands upon thousands of start ups.
Naturally, this makes models more difficult. It was one thing when all we needed was a kind of NORAD or a SETI capable of spotting the next NEW as it reached us from afar. But what we are looking at now is a trend world in which the new comes, like meteors, in "showers."
As a matter of fact, we weren’t all that good at trend watching when it was a matter of picking up single trends. How are we going to manage now that we are being inundated with change? How will we manage when confronted with great clouds of trends. When are we going to cultivate the pattern recognition that this requires.
I think the book by Penn and Zalesne is a good sign. It helps us identify the true object of the trend hunter’s inquiry and the real intellectual challenge we are up against.
What I think it’s missing is some feeling for the cultural tectonics at work in the world. Penn and Zalesne note the following microtrends:
1) Americans over 65 who continue to work (there are 5 million of these),
2) older women dating younger men (there are 3 million of these so called "cougars"),
3) the rise of well educated nannies
4) children who are home schooled (1.1 million, up 30 % in the period 1999 – 2003)
Taken on their face, this looks like a blooming confusion of developments. But, from an anthropological point of view, there are a few cultural ideas that help explain where these changes come from. American ideas of age, gender, education, occupation, individuality, the family, the state, all of these are being reformed and this reformation throws off lots of "surface" changes.
I don’t see enough in Penn and Zalesne that encourages us to seek this higher ground. As it stands, Microtrends is going to frighten the children and it may even stampede the horses. It opens Pandora’s box and shows us the scale of the problem without showing how the problem can be made more tractable. This is the trend within the trend, and it’s a bad one. We have quite enough "sky is falling" rhetoric as it is.
Reference
Carew, Sinead. 2007. Small, offbeat trends can change the world. Reuters.com. September 8, 2007.
Penn, Mark and Kinney Zalesne. 2007. Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes. New York: Twelve.
Acknowledgments
A hat tip for PSFK for letting me know about Microtrends.
Continuity
Thanks for your patience this summer. I used August to work on the manuscript and now have around 25,000 words and a concept to show for my misery. I think I have discovered a new aspect of contemporary culture, one of the "producing stations" of our world, one of those tectonics that create our surface culture, but I could be completely wrong about this. It will be awhile before I know. Thanks again for your patience.
Pattern Installation: trends and trend awareness
Posted by: | Comments
I had lunch with Andrew Zolli, a name now so potent in trend watching
circles that the recipient is obliged to drop it early and often.
Andrew Zolli. Andrew Zolli. Andrew Zolli.
The conversation pin wheeled from topic to topic but we did dwell from time to time on how trend awareness creates value. (This is my rendering of my recollection of my half of the conversation. Andrew may or may not approve what follows.)
It seems to me that trend awareness is mostly about the difference between blinking and nodding. Blinking is what we do on first hearing about something new: email, crunking, or cold fusion, say. That "huh?" moment, the "wha?" moment. No, we haven’t heard about it. We struggle. We’re at sea.
Nodding is what we do when we have prior notice. Email, got it. Crunking, got it. Cold fusion, er. The nod says, "I’m with you. I have a couple of understandings in place. I am prepared to reckon with what follows. Pray proceed." Nodding says that "pattern installation" has taken place. The bearer is not clueless and flatfooted. He or she is now prepared to reckon with novelty. Pattern recognition is now possible.
(There is a totemic thing happened here. If we nod, we are part of the tribe that "get’s it." If we blink, we are one of those clueless strangers to whom the future is going to come as a big, constant, and grueling surprise. (This must be another reason we like Borat. Everyone, even me, qualifies for tribal inclusion more surely than poor old Borat.) And of course a lot of us nod in conversation to conceal the blinking.)
Trend education is mostly about taking the client from blinking to nodding. It doesn’t have to be a lot. Mostly, it begins with a great and powerful act of elimination. All of these endless and confusing possibilities. Those don’t apply here. What you need to know are these few things. The pattern is now installed.
The trouble is that blinking threatens to perpetuate itself. This is what confusion is, the failure to find the templates with which new data can be rendered less confusing. Astonishment is useful in its first moment. It puts the creature on alert. The world has taken leave of our senses, our understandings. After that, it’s a problem. Astonishment can leave us hydro planing as a layer of missteps and confusion build up between us and the world.
Pattern installation isn’t very complicated. We are not giving the client an encyclopedic grounding in the topic. We are merely give them early notice. It’s not really knowledge so much as a right to knowledge, a license for inquiry, a precondition for understanding.
We could compare pattern installation to tourism. One trip to New Orleans is always tremendously better than no trip to New Orleans. And there is a puzzle here. One trip shouldn’t make the difference it does. It’s useful, though, because now we have a place to start. We can know see what would be useful to learn and what would not be useful to learn. We can now identify what assumptions are plausible and which once are to be dispensed with. We can now distinguish between good questions and bad questions. We now know what we need to know. All assumptions are now longer equally plausible. We now have traction.
This is what the grand tour was for. The education of an English child of privilege in the 18th century was incomplete until they had done a little nosing around on the continent. It wasn’t much. But it was vastly, disproportionately better, than no tour. The traveler remained hermetically sealed in a bubble of Englishness, traveling usually a well traveled path with friends and servants. But it cleared away some of the things that compete for wisdom, and it installed a platform for other understandings. The grand tour made an enormous difference. Having seen the low countries actually did make you a better candidate for Parliament.
Trend awareness is about taking the client from no clue to a rough, first acquaintance. It’s not everything. It shouldn’t be everything. This is what confusion is: everything trying to get in. What we need are a few understandings. What we want is a pattern installed.
