Now Trending: Wasted Opportunities
Lots of folks spot emerging trends, but are you making them work for you?
I want to tell you a success story.
Five years ago, when Uber, AirBnB, and Handy emerged as examples of companies who didn’t own or employ the products and services they were selling, our team invited the leading expert on the sharing economy, Rachel Botsman, to speak at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This was part of our What’s Next Health speaker series and our goal was for her to help us all think through the health implications of this emerging trend.
Rachel shared with us the key features of a market that is ripe for a sharing solution and we took some time to try to anticipate the future of health by considering the impacts of this trend in the context of change we were seeing coming from other sectors. We wondered what the effects of workers detaching from traditional cleaning and catering companies to work through on demand platforms might be for a range of generations from Gen Z to Baby Boomers. We thought through how emerging GPS location-based technology might be used to monitor workers.
Our thought experiments led us to envision a plausible future with increased disparities in career success between people of different races and between people of different ages and tech savvy. We reached the conclusion that it was possible that more low wage workers may find their location and activities monitored in ways that they didn’t understand or appreciate, and we predicted that unstable employment and irregular work schedules would increase child care challenges for many. This could negatively affect the early development of kids without substantial family or financial support systems.
We looked at our Foundation’s mission: to build a Culture of Health where all people have a fair and just opportunity to pursue good health, and adjusted our current strategies to reflect our insights from these probable, plausible and possible scenarios.
We then embarked on several efforts to prevent increasing health inequity:
- Through our business work, we supported the development of measures to signal to millennial consumers — who say on surveys that they care about responsible business practices — how companies’ policies positively or negatively affect the health of employees.
- We funded the creation of the Good Work Code to provide guidance to start-ups that wanted to do good and avoid creating unintended inequities.
- We advocated for policies that provided support for new child care options and we funded the development of pioneering new models of affordable, flexible child care.
- We used our leaders’ voices to join the myriad of others discussing the rise of the sharing economy — and focused the attention of Americans on the health implications of this fast moving trend.
In this way, we removed speed bumps and prevented them from becoming roadblocks on this particular path to a Culture of Health.
Sounds great, right? I told you it was a success story.
Unfortunately, it isn’t a true story. Most of what you just read didn’t happen.
Rachel did visit us. We did have some follow up conversations and solicited some ideas about how the sharing economy might lead to innovations in health and healthcare. We did explore the health impacts of the Gig Economy through a funding opportunity last year, as it was picking up speed. Some of the other efforts I described were successful. But we didn’t look into the future far enough or soon enough to be able to prevent the vast majority of inequities driven by the on demand economy.
Trending Down
The role of the Foundation’s Pioneer team is to first identify and then harness or mitigate emerging trends that may lead us towards or away from a Culture of Health. We have learned so much from our past efforts using grants to explore the implications of the maker movement, citizen science and biophilic design for health.
We also consider it our role “to anticipate the future” — to help the Foundation prepare for what’s ahead so that we can craft resilient strategies and have lasting impact five-to-ten years from now. Our role is to prevent having to look back and wonder: “Why didn’t we see this trend coming?”
In fairness, no one on my team charged with anticipating the future is a futurist— that’s an actual career that requires a degree or certification. Pioneer team members have backgrounds in economics, business, public health, biology, journalism and medicine which allows us to fluidly look across many fields to identify trends that could impact our Foundation’s efforts to build a Culture of Health.
Our role is to prevent having to look back and wonder: “Why didn’t we see this trend coming?”
Yet, we knew we were lacking important expertise and could use the assistance of a professional futurist and so we engaged Amy Webb, a founder of the Future Today Institute.
Trending Up
Amy spends most of her time working with Fortune 500 companies, helping them understand emerging technological trends and what they might mean for their business lines. She helps companies not be surprised by futures. She does this by identifying signals at the fringes and applying a well developed Foresight methodology that connects the dots of related signals. This can help organizations understand important trends that might determine the future of X, Y or Z. Amy’s company then helps organizations create probable, plausible, possible and preferred scenarios that help convince decision makers they should act on or pay attention to these trends.
You might say that Amy helps predict the future — more accurately, as a quantitative futurist, she assigns probabilities to possible futures.
Amy came to the Foundation to share with us her methods and perspective, which are also described in her book “The Signals are Talking.” Over the past eight months, we have been experimenting with and adapting these concepts and tools to help us operationalize our role in anticipating the future and to prioritize our discovery, exploration and networking efforts.
In fairness, no one on my team charged with anticipating the future is a futurist — that’s an actual career that requires a degree or certification.
Amy and her colleagues have developed several tools that we found helpful to identify and prioritize those trends that require our immediate attention vs. those we should just keep an eye on and monitor.
In our role, it is our responsibility to work with colleagues to understand which trends will probably, plausibly and possibly impact our likelihood of success with improving health equity in the short and long term and then setting out to learn more about what might be the best way to harness or mitigate these trends.
Now Trending
Every December and January, “trends to watch” lists are a dime a dozen in Medium. We have found these general lists helpful for our work and have even compiled and shared our own. But the reality is that trendwatching is neither a spectator nor individual sport. Their true value comes through our ability to learn together what these trends mean to our work. In addition to deciding which trends to watch, we must ask ourselves, “what should we do now before these trends affect our work?”
As I am writing this piece, we are in the middle of sifting through signals Amy helped us identify to elevate trends we think are important for our future work to build a Culture of Health. The next step for us will be to work with our colleagues across the Foundation to design a plan to help us learn about and influence that future. Our hope is that next year, rather sharing a made-up, imaginary story of our success told in wishful hindsight, we will instead share actual stories how how a new approach to “trend doing” helped pave the way toward a Culture of Health.
As always, I’m interested in hearing from you. How does your organization anticipate the future? How do you identify important trends and how does this knowledge inform your work? Have you operationalized trend work to be more action oriented? In other words, how have you moved from trend-spotting to trend-doing?
Share your thoughts in the comments below.
