The role of trends in changemaking
How can you know for sure that the world needs your idea?
The most impactful changemakers operate at the intersection of what moves them, what the world needs, and their unique superpowers. In the mini-series on purpose, we explored what it means to find your purpose. Now, let’s look at one of the other two factors: identifying what the world needs.
While my purpose has not changed, how I fulfill it has. Whenever I have been able to effectively act on my ideas, it is because they reflected both the world's evolving needs and my — hopefully ever developing — skills, experience, and access (the third prong).
What are megatrends?
Impactful changemakers respond to and leverage global trends. It is as if they were surfing: out in the ocean, attuned to its constant movement, and ready to move when they see what they are looking for. Just like with surfing, the past is a poor predictor of the future.
Image credit: Emiliano Arano
“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.” – William Gibson
If our hindsight is often 20/20, our outlook is murky at best. This is because the future, despite our brains insisting to the contrary, is not a linear extension of the past. How could we think up, and with any reliability, what we have never experienced? And where does that leave us should we wish to understand how the foundation is shifting underneath us, let alone to anticipate the future?
Unsurprisingly, there is no crystal ball: even if we could foretell a particular change, we cannot (perhaps, yet) accurately predict how it will react with the myriad of concurrent developments. What we can do, however, is become aware of trends.
As William Gibson, the man who coined the term “cyberspace,” put it in the 1990s, “the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”[1]
By paying attention, not only can the astute gain insight into what the future may look like, but they can also create ventures uniquely suited for it.
As a changemaker, you should pay particular attention to structural change: the often-understated seismic shifts that are more significant in the long-run than the more visible but superficial variations. To track emerging structural change, we must start with assumptions.
To create BIG bold change, look for outdated assumptions
Our assumptions are a little like afterlife or gravity: their existence does not depend on our beliefs. Whether we are aware of them or not, our assumptions inform how we see the world and the ventures we create. The logical thing would be to constantly challenge our assumptions and to adjust as they change. But alas, this is not a logical world. In fact, many prefer denial to awareness. Without a culture of outlook, we operate under the detested disclaimer, “Rules of the game are subject to change without notice.”
And boy, do they change; overnight and without warning, let alone a comprehensive morning memo outlining any and all potential consequences to you, your community, or your venture.
The most influential assumptions relate to what is possible and acceptable.[2] Such changes send ripples of adjustment through the entire system, recalibrating every facet that had been predicated on that assumption holding true.
To illustrate the power of these assumptions, let’s consider a few examples.
Once people could ascend building levels effortlessly in lifts, high-rises came to define our skylines. Once the U.S. Disability Discrimination Act 1992 made it no longer acceptable to lock people out of public spaces based on their physical mobility, building design and operations followed suit. Deeming Apartheid unacceptable has transformed not just community dynamics but the built environment of South Africa. Concluding that it is no longer acceptable to insulate buildings with asbestos retired some mainstay products just as it birthed many more. Possibility of cheap travel super-charged globalization. And once we understood what was making our buildings sick and how they could actively act on behalf of our well-being without compromising the planet, healthy high-performance buildings came to define best practice.
Assumptions about what is possible and acceptable change our very frame of reference, and that in turn changes our reality.
Change is always obvious in retrospect. It is the ability to spot and leverage it in the moment that determines how impactful a changemaker can be.
What happens if you disregard global trends?
The magnitude of past shifts suggests that the next five — let alone ten — years will likely see us operating in ways we would struggle to imagine today. Just try to remember what you considered unlikely if not impossible just a decade ago, when professions like chief health officer, listening officer, or drone pilot did not yet exist. Now, consider that 2023 saw the first job openings for metaverse storyteller and human-machine matchmaker.
New professions emerge as countless others become obsolete. A catchy soundbite for a book like Change-maker’s Handbook (which I published last year), these shifts represent angst, instability, and even devastation to those who are not able to pivot in time; a tall task, and a reminder of why we need to be thoughtful and kind in pursuing radical change.
Even business models that have brought success in the past may be a liability going forward. The West no longer has first dibs on ideas, and somebody in Mozambique or rural Russia may well be faster and better at leveraging a new trend. The global marketplace has indeed arrived. First-mover advantage is available to anybody, anywhere, and competitive advantage lasts but a blink. Think about the competitive chops that Ukrainian companies have demonstrated in the rapidly evolving work in artificial intelligence.
For a historic example, consider BlackBerry.[3] A Canadian phenomenon when it listed on Nasdaq in 1999, BlackBerry had its peak of $148 per share in June 2008. After Apple, through the advent of the iPhone and apps, made it possible for the user — not the manufacturer — to decide what their phone could do, Blackberry dropped to $10 by August 2013,[4] when New York Times talked of BlackBerry’s “fatal error, of not managing to be the company that figured out where technology was going.”[5] A decade later to the day, BlackBerry’s Nasdaq low on August 22, 2023 was $4.33, with the 52-week low at just $3.17. Let me be clear: while it tells a valuable story, BlackBerry’s stock price does not define or diminish the overall positive impact that BlackBerry has had, including on its community.[6]
BlackBerry’s story is, of course, far from unique. Many of the brands that enjoyed both prominence and prosperity during my childhood and youth are no longer around, with Kodak, Blockbuster, Encyclopedia Britannica, and even the very institution of the Soviet Union among many.
Have you ever looked out of a moving car, train, or plane onto a vehicle next to you and wondered if you were standing still? In today’s environment, any sense of a solid footing is but an illusion created by objects around you falling faster or at the same rate as you.
If it’s not one thing, it will be the other that will change how the world works and what it wants from us. The only choice we have in the matter is whether to wait passively, exposed to the stress and upheaval of crisis, or to open ourselves up to the inevitability of change and to learn — even if that comes with some lungfuls of water — to surf its waves.
You may balk at some of the ideas I present on this topic as much as you resonate with the others. I merely invite you to consider that accepting — blinders off — the need to evolve in response to forces we do not choose, like, or understand may be the least risky thing of all. Perhaps ironically, regaining control may come — just like in surfing — through surrender. Good news: there are indeed whole new, fresh, more relevant ways of interpreting our circumstances, of creating value, and of being in the world.
In upcoming posts, I will set the stage, as I make sense of it, on which ten megatrends are playing out then take you on a 360-degree tour of the global change landscape. Stay tuned. It will be quite a ride!
[1] While there is some argument as to whether that was the first time Gibson said this, he is on record in an interview on NPR on November 30, 1999 (timestamp 11:22).
[2] Social Practice Theory broadly argues that social practices (how we live our lives) are formed of (1) meanings and rules, (2) knowledge, and (3) materials.
[3] Until 2013, it was called Research in Motion.
[4] NASDAQ. https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/bb. Accessed August 22, 2023.
[5] Norris, F. (August 22, 2013). How BlackBerry Handled Past Wealth. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/23/business/economy/how-blackberry-handled-prosperity-past.html. Accessed August 22, 2023.
[6] Howitt, C. (2019). BlackBerry Town: How High Tech Success Has Played Out for Canada's Kitchener-Waterloo. Lorimer.