Non-Obvious 2018 Edition

How To Predict Trends And Win The Future

Rohit Bhargava

• Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
• ISBN:
  9781940858524
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

Wall Street Journal Best Seller (2015 Edition)
Winner: Nonfiction Book Awards Gold Medal (2018 Edition)
Finalist: Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize (2018 Edition)
Winner: Axiom Business Theory Silver Medal (2017 Edition)
Official Selection: Gary's Book Club at CES (2017 Edition)
TOP 50 ALL AMAZON KINDLE BOOKS (2015 Edition)

What secrets can a 400-year-old Turkish cymbal maker and an Icelandic hot tub etiquette video teach you about the power of storytelling? How do Michelin-ranked food stalls in Singapore and the decline of Swiss watches force all luxury brands to rethink their business models? What insights can the world's quietest place and a clothing dye produced by former tobacco farmers reveal about serving enlightened consumers?

The answers to these questions may not be all that obvious. And that's exactly the point. For the past eight years, innovation expert Rohit Bhargava and his team have predicted 15 "Non-Obvious" trends each year. In this book, get a sneak peek at the proven methods exclusively taught to thousands of executives at leading brands, organizations and governments to develop unexpected solutions to critical problems. The power of non-obvious thinking can help you see what others miss, grow your business and make a bigger impact in the world.

In this all-new eighth edition, discover what more than a million readers already have: how to use the power of non-obvious thinking to grow your business and make a bigger impact in the world.

In total, the Non-Obvious 2018 Edition features 15 all-new trends across 5 categories including Culture & Consumer Behavior, Marketing & Social Media, Media & Education, Technology & Design plus Economics & Entrepreneurship. The book also features a detailed section with a review and rating for more than 100 previously predicted trends – with longevity ratings for each.

As with the original version, this new edition of Non-Obvious also delves into the curation process the author has used for years to build his Trend Reports and takes readers behind the scenes of trend curation (much to the delight of past readers who have been asking about this for years), and show them the methodology they can use to predict the future for themselves.

1

The NORWEGIAN BILLIONAIRE:
Why Most Trend Predictions
Are Spectacularly Useless

_

In 1996 Christian Ringnes was a billionaire with a first-world problem—he was running out of space for his favorite collection.

As one of the richest men in Norway, Ringnes is well known as a flamboyant businessman and art collector whose family started the country’s largest brewery more than a hundred years ago. In his hometown of Oslo, Ringnes owns several restaurants and museums and has donated more than $70 million for the creation of a large sculpture and cultural park, which opened in 2013.

In his heart, Ringnes is a collector. Over decades he has built one of the largest private collections of art in the world. Yet his real legacy may come from something far more unique: his lifelong obsession with collecting mini liquor bottles.

This fixation began for Ringnes at the age of seven when he received an unusual present from his father: a half-empty mini liquor bottle. It was this afterthought of a gift that led him on a path toward amassing what is recognized today as the largest independent mini-bottle collection in the world, with more than 52,000 miniature liquor bottles.

Unfortunately, his decades-long obsession eventually ran into an insurmountable opponent—his late wife, Denise.

As the now legendary story goes, Denise wasn’t too pleased with the disorganization of having all these bottles around the house. After years of frustration, she offered him an ultimatum: either find something to do with all those bottles or start selling them.

Like any avid collector, Ringnes couldn’t bear the thought of selling them, so he created a solution based on his wealth and personality.

He commissioned a museum.¹

“To Collect Is Human”

Today his Mini Bottle Gallery, located in downtown Oslo, is one of the world’s top unique museum destinations, routinely featured in irreverent travel guides and global lists of must-see Scandinavian tourist attractions. Beyond providing a place for Ringnes to store his collection, the gallery, which has a restaurant, is also a popular venue for private events.

It was here, while in Oslo for a conference dinner that included a tour of the Mini Bottle Gallery, that I got my first personal introduction to Ringnes and his story.

I have 52,500 different miniature bottles in a museum in Oslo. They’re completely useless. But men, we like collecting. We like having things. That’s human. Once you get fascinated by something, you want it and then you start collecting.
Christian Ringnes, Founder, The Mini Bottle Gallery

The museum lived up to its quirky reputation.

The entrance is a bottle-shaped hallway leading into an open lobby with a champagne waterfall. As you move through over 50 unique installations spanning three floors, each features its own composed soundtrack, customized lighting, and even some unique smells. Like all great museum experiences, the rooms of the Mini Bottle Gallery are carefully curated.

The mini bottles are grouped into themes ranging from a brothel-inspired Room of Sin with mini bottles from De Wallen (Amsterdam’s red-light district), to a Horror Room featuring liquor bottles with trapped objects such as mice and worms floating inside.

There’s a Jungle Room, a Room of Famous Persons, and rooms themed around sports, fruits, birds, circus performers, and the occult. There’s even a room featuring the iconic porcelain series of the Delft Blue KLM houses, a series of tiny Dutch rowhouse-shaped liquor bottles given away to passengers by KLM Airlines for more than five decades.

Across all these rooms, the tour mentions that the gallery typically has more than 12,000 bottles on display. Apart from the scope of the themed rooms, one of the most interesting elements of this story is what the gallery does with the bottles that aren’t on display.

An Accidental Trend Curator

Like any other museum, the Mini Bottle Gallery never uses its entire collection. Instead, they only display about 20% of Ringnes’s full collection at any time, and carefully keep the rest in storage. This thoughtful curation adds value to the experience of seeing them.

Curation is the ultimate method of transforming noise into meaning.

If you consider the amount of media any of us is exposed to on an average day, the quest to find meaning among the noise is a challenge we all know personally. Navigating information overload requires the same discipline as deciding what bottles to put on display so those that visitors see can tell a better story.

Without curation, themes would be indecipherable and the experience would be overwhelming, downright noisy.

It was only on my flight home from Oslo after that event that I realized how important curation had become for my own work.

Just a few months earlier I’d published the first edition of my Non-Obvious Trend Report, inspired by an idea to publish an article from the many ideas I’d collected over the past year but had never written about. What I was already doing without realizing it was collecting intriguing ideas and saving them in perhaps the most disorganized way possible—by writing them down randomly, printing them or ripping them out of magazines, and then stashing everything in a well-worn folder on my desk.

In producing that first report, my ambition had been to describe patterns in the stories I had collected that went beyond the typical obvious observations I was always reading online. My goal was to find and develop insights that others either hadn’t yet noticed and that were not getting the attention they warranted.

To get a different output, sometimes you need a different input.

On that flight home from Norway, I realized that my accidental method for getting different input—collecting ideas for a year and waiting months before analyzing them—could be the very thing that would set my insights apart and make them truly non-obvious.

The Non-Obvious Trend Report (my annual list of fifteen trends) was born from this desire to collect underappreciated ideas and connect them into predictions about the future.

The Underappreciated Side of Data

Now, if you happen to be an analytical person, this process will hardly seem rigorous enough to be believable. How can collecting ideas and waiting possibly be a recipe for developing genuine insights? What about first-hand research, surveys, and focus groups? What about trend panels and using a global army of trend spotters? What about the data?

While it’s easy to assume that data means putting numbers into a spreadsheet or referencing some piece of analytics published in a journal—the truth is that data has a forgotten side that has little to do with devising experiments and far more to do with training your powers of observation.

When you think about the discipline that goes into scientific research to produce raw data, research can seem like a task only performed by robot-like perfectionists. The truth of scientific research, just like the truth behind many equally complex areas of study, is that experiments aren’t the only way to gather data—nor might they even be the most accurate.

Trends, like science, aren’t always perfectly measured phenomena that fit neatly into a spreadsheet without bias. Discovering trends takes a willingness to combine curiosity with observation and add insight to create valuable ideas that you can then test to ensure they are valid.

The one thing that I don’t believe describes this method is, ironically, the one term that comes to many people’s minds as soon as the art of predicting the future is mentioned: “trend spotting.” The term itself is a symbol of the biggest myths we tend to believe about those who predict or describe the future.

Let’s explore these myths and the reasons behind their popularity.

The 5 Myths of Trend Spotting

Trend spotting is not the key to predicting the future.

Unfortunately, the bias toward trend-spotting has created an unreasonable portrait of the type of person who can put the pieces together and anticipate the future. Consider this infuriatingly common definition for what it takes to become a so-called trend spotter:

To become a trend spotter, someone usually receives extensive education and training in the industry he or she is interested in working for. After receiving a thorough grounding...the trend spotter could start working in company departments which predict trends.²

The assumption that you need to be working in “company departments which predict trends” is just plain idiotic—and wrong.

I believe anyone can learn the right habits to become better at curating trends and predicting the future for themselves. You just need to develop the right habits and mindset.

Before we start learning those habits, however, it’s important to tackle the biggest myths surrounding trends and explain why they miss the mark so badly.

Myth #1 - Trends Are Spotted

The concept of trend spotting suggests that there are trends simply sitting out there in plain sight ready to be observed and cataloged like avian species for birdwatchers. The reality of trends is far different. Trend spotters typically find individual examples or stories. Calling the multitude of things they spot the same thing as trends is like calling ingredients such as eggs, flour, and sugar the same thing as a cake. You can “spot” ingredients, but trends must be curated from these ingredients to have meaning.

Myth # 2 - Trends Are Predicted by Industry Experts

It’s tempting to see industry expertise as a prerequisite to being good at curating trends, but there’s also a predictable drawback: blind spots. The more you know about a topic, the more difficult it becomes to think outside your expertise and broaden your view. There’s no single expertise required to curate trends, but psychologists and business authors have long pointed to this “curse of knowledge” as a common challenge for anyone who builds any type of expertise.³ To escape it, you need to learn to engage your greater curiosity about the world beyond what you know and learn to better empathize with those who don’t share your same depth of knowledge.

Myth # 3 - Trends Are Based on “Hard” Data

When it comes to research, some people rely only on numbers inserted into a spreadsheet as proof and they conveniently forget that there are two methods to conducting research: the quantitative method and the qualitative method. Qualitative research involves using observation and experience to gather mainly verbal data instead of results from experiments. If you are uncovering the perfect pH balance for shampoo, you certainly will want to use quantitative research. For curating trends, you need a mixture of both, as well as the ability to remember that research data can often be less valuable than excellent observation.

Myth # 4 - Trends only last for a short time

The line between trends and fads can be tricky. Although some trends seem to spotlight a currently popular story, good ones need to describe something that happens over a span of time. Fads, in comparison, describe an idea that’s popular in the short term but doesn’t last. Great trends do reflect a moment in time, but they also describe more than a fleeting moment.

Myth # 5 - Trends Are Hopelessly Broad Predictions

Perhaps no other myth about trends is as fueled by reality as this one. The fact is, we encounter hopelessly broad trend predictions in the media all the time. Therefore, the problem comes in concluding that trends should be broad and all encompassing. Good trends tend to be more of the opposite: They define something that’s concrete and distinct, without being limiting.

For example, someone once asked me after an event if I had considered the rise of 3D printing as a trend. I replied that I had not, but the “Makers Movement”—which was a well described trend that focused on the human desire to be a creator and make something (which 3D printing certainly enabled)—was a worthwhile trend. The point was, a trend is never a description of something that just exists—like 3D printing.

Instead, a trend must describe what people do or believe as a result. Once you know that the “Makers Movement” describes the human desire to make something, for example, you can think about how to offer that type of fulfillment to your customers in how they interact with you. IKEA has benefitted from this trend for years—because people of...