Two Trends to Understand the World Today

Now, what happens as a futurist is at this time of the year, people start to contact futurists, or in December, and say, what are the predictions for this year? What is going to happen? And it's always very frustrating to me because nothing you say is going to be meaningful for everybody, just like Nostradamus's predictions could be interpreted for so many different experiences. So some of the predictions could be that the winds of change will blow. I mean, that could be really, you know, weather patterns or metaphorical. Some people will wear jackets and others will just embrace the breeze. Another prediction could be that unexpected connections will form. Maybe on LinkedIn you find the love of your life, or maybe you discover someone else who likes to eat pineapple and pizza. Financial markets will fluctuate. They'll go up and down, and people will still talk about Bitcoin being the salvation or the ruin of our economies. Technology, a new technology will rise. It'll be great. It'll solve all of our problems, but most of us won't understand how it works at all. Something old will become new again. Vinyl records, afternoon power naps. All of these predictions are very vague because we're just looking at the surface level of them. We're not understanding what it is they're trying to communicate. And trend reports are a waste of time. And I know as I said that, I put out a little video and I was worried about all the colleagues of mine who actually spend a lot of money and effort putting out really, really good trend reports. But the problem with the trend report is that people will read it and just like those vague predictions, will try and say, if this is the trend, then this is how the world will be in my part of the world. And that's nonsense. Because everything is dependent on context. It is absolutely paramount. Years ago, and because we have so many people in South Africa, I'll share this version. Years ago, when I was teaching people how to use social media, I did a circuit around Durban, Joburg, Cape Town, sometimes Bloemfontein by invitation only. And I discovered after a while a pattern of how people in those different parts of South Africa responded to social media. So in Johannesburg, they would say, we want to know about this platform and we want to know how to use it for this outcome. And we would go and we would have an agenda and we would learn that. In Durban, they were saying, what is Twitter? What is LinkedIn? How does this work? Okay, I'm sorry, Durban. And in Cape Town, they were going like, hey man, you know, what can we do with this? You know, what does it open up in terms of opportunities and connections? And it's the same platforms, but the approach approach was so incredibly different. And I make that a very vague, you know, Durban, Joburg, Cape Town, but obviously within each of those places there are other people in their own context that were approaching social media in different ways. So it's really important that if you look at any trend report that you learn to read it and understand it and interpret it in terms of the work that you're doing and the context that you are in. Something that is designed for North America does not automatically translate to Africa, does not automatically translate to Asia. So we need to be able to read this in context. So having said all of that, I'm going to tell you my 2 trends that I believe apply everywhere. But what they are are kind of foundational ways of looking at the other trends. I'm always fascinated to find the foundation, the meta issue, the the thing that underlies and defines the space that we're in. And I think I found it in these 2 trends. The first one is this tension between scarcity and abundance. Beg your pardon. Scarcity and abundance. So much of our world is made up with this tension. Entire economies rely on this tension. Marketing relies on this tension. And when you go online onto Google and you search for mindset, you will find these 2 mindsets come up as like almost 98% of the results only talk about these 2 mindsets: an abundant, flexible, open mindset that sees opportunities and is open to learning and change, and a scarcity, closed, fixed, rigid mindset that might be fearful or anxious and can't do anything in terms of change. Everything is difficult and rigid. Those are very broad definitions of the two, and there are many other mindsets beyond these two, but I think they work really well to be able to intersect with another approach, which is the tension between binary and fluid. So binary is yes, no, right, wrong, black, white, legal, illegal. There's a very clear definition between the two. Our computers are run on binary code. It's ones and zeros, and everything happens in terms of those ones and zeros. Fluid, on the other hand, is fluid. It changes, it moves, it's that there's nuances, it's different from moment to moment. It's that old Zen saying that a man does not step into the same river twice because he's a different man and it's a different river because the water has moved. And if we look at those 2 kind of tensions, the binary option or the fluid option, we can then interpret a lot of the things we see. You can see somebody who is in a difficult, anxious place for whatever reason, and they get kind of really focused on themselves, a bit of a survival mode, kind of mindset and approach to life, and they, they want very clear answers— yes, no, right, wrong. They do not want to debate, whereas others can be fluid. A heartbreaking example of this for me was when we were in COVID times, right at the beginning when we were still trying to work out what this means, and the school that my daughters were in, they had a WhatsApp group and they were communicating in this group about what they would— what could be happening. And the headmaster was explaining that the school is having a conversation. It was a private school, so they're talking to the governing body as well to work this out, and they're talking to the Department of Education to understand what the government of South Africa is instructing the schools to do. All these conversations are happening. We will be kept up to date, and information will be provided as soon as it is known. And there's some questions and debates and parents kind of suggesting things. And one mother who must have repeated 3 times I just, I need to know. I want to know the facts. Tell me what is going to happen. And she was so insistent that the headmaster shut down the group so that it was just admin-only posting because the parents were getting out of hand. And I looked at that woman and I thought, she is in an absolute panic because she can't respond to things. She is so fearful that she just has to have this absolute definite answer. even though it's just been explained that there are so many factors, it's not possible. So it's important to see those kind of tensions, but let's see how they work together in context. So we got these 2 trends. We go to the top binary to fluid and then scarcity to abundance, and they create 4 different scenarios, 4 different sectors here. So at the binary scarcity, we've got fewer options, fewer resources, you know, very specific definitions of what we can or cannot do, and we're going to call that section structured shortfalls. If we're looking at binary but there's an abundance of resources, then it's predictable plenty. Down at the bottom, we got this fluid scarcity space, and we called it the uncharted edge. So things could be changing, but we got limited resources and options. And then the everflow is where we have a fluid approach to life and there is an abundance. We're not going to spend any time looking deeply at those actual specific definitions and scenarios, but I want to explain this kind of context in terms of a couple of examples. The first one is artificial intelligence, and I have created a video about this. It's on LinkedIn and other places so that you can have a look and just run through it again if you want to. But this example just shows us when we talk about artificial intelligence and somebody says, what is the future of AI? Will AI impact my job? Will I lose my job? Is it good for the economy or bad for the economy? There's so much context there, you cannot answer that question with any kind of integrity. So when we look at AI and we're talking to people or people who are in this experience of a binary scarcity world for whatever reason, they're saying AI will widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots. It'll make humans obsolete. There's a whole lot of concerns about AI making decisions that are black or white, and it might be wrong, you know, their decisions. So it's not, it's not clear. If we're talking in the scarcity fluid space, then we're saying AI will erode private, personal privacy, and we can't control it. It creates a scarcity of trust in a world already condemned to deepfakes and disinformation. It'll stretch creativity, but only for the privileged few. In the binary abundance space, we're saying, yes, AI will, you know, be more efficient, but at the cost of humans. It'll create solutions, it'll mass-produce innovation, but it's all kind of bland and the same. But people looking at what is possible with artificial intelligence with an abundance mindset and a fluid approach to life are looking for that everflow, that creativity. It will unlock infinite possibilities for human creativity. It can tailor our experiences individually for everybody, and it can maybe even redefine identity itself. There's a lot of really interesting work around that. So when we look at this, please remember any conversation we're having, we're seeing it in a context, and it's not the trend. That is the important thing. It really does depend on how this looks in these different scenarios. Let's have another look more specifically now at a specific business function and one or two trends. Let's see what happens. So we've got a choice going here. So we're going to look at Human resources with a tech trend of AI governance and a social trend of wellness, wellness in the workplace. What does this look like? We need to be able to read the trends that people are talking about. Wellness in the workplace is very important. AI governance of all things HR, we got all these tools and platforms, and if you're not incorporating them, you're going to have a problem. But what does it really look like depending on the context of your company, your department, the size of your company, where it is located in the world, what are the legislations and the political temperament of that place that you are located. All of that plays into these trends. So now we're looking at human resources, we're looking at wellness, and we're looking at AI governance. What can they look like for us? So up at our top left corner, binary and scarcity, we're saying it is constrained. It is rule-bound. There are limited resources and very rigid structures. AI can only do strict compliance-driven policies. The tools are used minimally, and wellness programs are narrowly defined and resource-light. So they're saying, yes, we know wellness is important. So here is a token for the yogurt bar, or, you know, hummus at lunch. If we now look at human resources wellness in the scarcity fluid space, we're now talking a bit more about adaptability and flexibility, but still with limited constraints. So we're using AI tools creatively, but in a limited way. So we're not just letting them loose on everything. Wellness programs are— they're customized to individual people, but there's still a very limited range of what is possible. Um, now let's move on to AI governance and wellness and binary and abundance space. And now we've got extensive use of AI systems, but with rigid oversight and binary decision-making frameworks. So we're still not trusting AI to do things. We're making sure that it can only operate within this particular set of parameters. There's lots and lots of different wellness programs, but they're standardized. You know, you can choose from this list of programs. There's an abundance of options, but they're measured in binary terms. So here's a wellness initiative. Have you done it or not? If you've done it, yes. If you haven't, then go and do it so we can tick it off because it's that kind of binary option. But if you now move to a space of fluid and abundance, now we're looking at a flexible, innovative approach. To wellness in the workplace using AI. So AI is integrated holistically. There are governance policies that can kind of govern what AI is doing, but in a dynamic fashion. So if you get certain results that you can kind of tailor it back, this is working in a space of a company with a lot more employees where they need to be able to respond to so many different kinds of needs. So there's comprehensive and flexible wellness programs, abundance of resources, and because of the AI governance and integration, they can be personalized for people. So you can have certain kinds of time off or working from home or daycare options or diet options or anything else where you can really help to personalize your response to individual people without it being a huge constraint and effort on the, on the HR department because it can be governed by flexible and trusted AI systems. Let's see what this looks like in real life. So our first example is Amazon right up here in the binary scarcity segment. There's some really good stories about how these things go wrong, but in this case, Amazon applied an AI tool to go through CVs that were submitted to the human resource department for recruitment. And all these CVs come in, everybody wants to work for Amazon. Amazon's all around the world. So how do we manage all these CVs? So they applied an AI program. This AI program was defined— all AI programs, all technology, all computer systems are defined by humans, and depending on how they see the world, that is how that AI is going to respond. So this AI was designed with bias. Integrated into the system. So it automatically rejected almost every woman's application because it didn't fit into the bias of how it was defined in the first place to satisfy the needs of the men who were working in AI in Amazon. So the governance of that AI program really kind of destroyed the, the opportunity for any woman to work there. So that is a kind of example we want to look at of how this can go wrong if we are not flexible with our approaches. Google, on the other hand, it's a binary option, but there's an abundance of perks and things that are available to people who work for Google. So lots of perks, there's an abundance of opportunities, but they're all very binary. They're not personalized. There's a menu you can choose off the menu, but you can't substitute anything. That is what it looks like for Google. Patagonia, on the other hand, and I'm not sure how many people know about Patagonia— beg your pardon. Patagonia is a company that designs clothing and products for people who are going out into the wild, who are hiking, who do all those kind of adventure sports. Their entire company is based on sustainability and like a circular economy. If you have a Patagonia product and it is broken or torn, then they're going— you can bring it back into the company to be repaired. They don't want you to just throw it away like fast fashion and buy something new. So it has to be brought back into the cycle. So Patagonia has that approach to their products, to their profit sharing, to everything else. And in terms of Their combination here of AI and, and wellness. Thank you. Patagonia has small-scale options in terms of wellness options for, for their, their teams, their people, but they are incredibly personalized. So because it's a smaller company and because they are so committed to this connection, that they will take the time to personalize all of those options. And then Microsoft, on the other hand, huge company, many different kind of employee wellness initiatives and programs that they have. But it's AI-driven with the insights that AI has on the employee set, and it can be flexible and personalized. So here you can see that the combination of using AI and wellness and 4 different examples of how it plays out. I now have to have a sip of water. I don't know who else, um, speaks on this call, but we need to warm up our voices in January before we start speaking. All right, so that was looking at, at those 2 options. Let's see if we can find another one where we can see how this plays out. And what do we have? Marketing automation inclusive culture. So anybody in marketing, let's see how this might play out for you. We're going to look at this intersection again. So here's marketing. We're looking at an inclusive culture. So where this applies in the world, because it doesn't apply everywhere, where the culture of the company and maybe even the legislation of the country require there to be inclusivity in terms of the people that we're dealing with and the marketplace we're dealing with, We need to understand this, and we want to automate it because in order for our companies to grow and scale and for us to be able to do more things, we want to use automation. What does it look like when we pull them together? So binary scarcity is structured shortfall. We're looking at limited resources, rigid rule-bound approaches. Marketing automation is used sparingly, focused on repetitive repetitive tasks, scheduling or sending emails, and inclusivity efforts are surface level, compliance driven. We have to do this, so we'll do this. But there's a scarcity mindset there, and when there's a scarcity mindset, people normally want to take care of people like themselves. They're not open to including other people where it might take them a bit of effort to be able to engage with that. And this is in terms of marketing, but it can reflect the culture of the company as well. So you can't have marketing on the outside and the company inside having a different mindset. So it is going to be driven from that company culture. So let's look at scarcity and fluid. We're now a little bit more flexible in terms of automation. Automation is used creatively to maximize efficiency, but the focus is on small-scale, high-impact options, and inclusivity is approached authentically. With targeted efforts to engage with people, but it's still not really a large-scale effort. Let's look at binary and abundance. Now we've got a structured approach. It takes advantage of many more opportunities. There's an abundance of opportunities to reach out there, but the automation is across various campaigns, but it relies heavily on predefined templates, so it's not flexible and dynamic. It can't respond to what is happening. As as we could when we get to the abundance fluid space. Now we're looking at flexible, innovative approaches to marketing supported by abundant resources and this mindset of being able to reach more people. Inclusivity is embedded in every part of marketing, all the way from strategy and messaging to the team that is composed in the, in the marketing department, partnerships with other brands and products and sponsorship and things like that. Campaigns are hyper localized. The context is so important. What you're going to market to Durban will be different from what you'll market to Cape Town. And it is co-created with communities from those spaces. And when marketing gets to a space of co-creation, it can get really messy and difficult, but it can create some incredibly valuable marketing campaigns. All right, for those of you in the marketing field, I'm sure you've got a few things in mind, but let's give an example of how this went wrong. There is an infamous story now of how Pepsi got a marketing campaign wrong with Kendall Jenner. Kendall Jenner is one of the Kardashians. I thought I could get away with never using a Kardashian in my presentation, but I've just failed. In this particular Pepsi ad, it shows her in a photo shoot, and then she sees police lined up, and she breaks away from her photo shoot, and she takes a Pepsi to the cops, to give it to them because we all want to, you know, share and be inclusive and embrace everything. But it was seen by everybody in the market as being inauthentic, as being contrived, superficial, and this whole rigid approach of I can just give a Pepsi to a person and life will be better, and that did not go down well. So that approach, that mindset has really— I mean, that campaign is now, you know, a business school example for how things can go wrong. There's are lots of examples like that where the assumption is that this will translate into different audiences, or the idea that is in my mind is in everybody else's mind. And that often comes from the fact that the entire marketing team is of one, one mind. It's the same set of people, and that there isn't any diversity in the team, so they can't recognize or be warned that they're about to be incredibly culturally insensitive. The Coke marketing campaign, Share a Coke, was really good. Binary options, so very limited in terms of what was about to happen, but an abundance of it. And this one was where Coke had names on the bottles or the cans, so you could share a Coke. And people would go into the shops and they would look through all the different bottles and try and find ones with their names on. I went to the V&A the waterfront, and there was a long queue of people outside this big Coke caravan, and they were walking in there saying what their names were, or them and their loved ones, and walking out with a set of Coke cans with their names on it. So not very flexible in terms of being able to do that, but the option was put your name on a can of Coke. There wasn't anything else in terms of that binary option, but it was abundant, and it was also localized. Because the names of cans that you would see in South Africa would be different kinds of names than you would see in Spain, for example. So a really good example of that, that marketing response. And in terms of automation, it's automated enough in order to be able to print these names out, but not beyond that. Ben and Jerry's is a very interesting example from a company in the United States of America. They, they create ice creams. Really great. Flavors, apparently. And they're really an interesting example for a number of reasons about the culture of how this company comes, you know, was created, how they treat their people, how they market to outsiders, and how they use their profits. So it's a really very conscious company in terms of what they're trying to achieve. They have very— it's not as big, obviously, as Pepsi and Coke. It has been bought out by a company, but there are arguments there as well, apparently. So they don't have a huge marketing campaign, but they will make their campaigns hyper-localized. So they will do a marketing campaign in one city that will be different from how they would do it in another city, and they focus on those specific small audiences. And then Nike, a lovely example, fluid and abundant. They had something called the Dream Crazy campaign, and Nike is, you know, great for a number of different reasons, but this campaign was more about partnering with certain people and being able to kind of create products and brands and stories that their users, the people who wear Nike products, would engage with. What is interesting about a lot of these is that the political context or temperature of the country also plays. So if Nike chooses to work with a particular person who then represents something to one segment of the market, they're automatically going to lose another part of the market. And that is the essence of what we're supposed to be looking at with these various options. In the chat box, and I haven't been keeping an eye on that, but if you have any examples, I would love to have a look and see how those examples apply when we have a moment to chat later on. So do share examples if you have any. Okay, so we've seen how these different segments come together. There is a presentation that I do for companies where we look at this in terms of these 2 trends, the 4 scenarios, and 5 specific recommendation areas that a company can look at. But I'm going to talk to you now about 3 recommendations, and after that, we'll have a bit of a conversation, see what we've drawn out of this. So there's 3 recommendations that we need to look at. One is to get clear on your values, your company values, know the psychographics of your market, and develop your futures literacy. So let's look at those in a bit of detail. Looking at values and mission statement and purpose statement is a relatively new business management tool, you know, as in a couple of decades. And when companies look at that, very often it is kind of a marketing campaign, or somebody comes in, an internal, external consultant comes in and says, we need to help you to understand your core values so that you can, you know, frame it nicely in your reception and you can put it on your branding and marketing. And it's never, it very often isn't fully integrated into the company. It's a set of values that are kind of named up at the top. And why it is important where it is used well is that it can really redefine how a company operates. So before we looked at these things in the past, businesses were in business to do business. It was about the bottom line profit. It was about, you know, having, you know, a good product that makes money and employs people and the shareholders get the profits. The more we've looked at business developing over the last couple of decades, We're getting now more conscious companies, conscious capitalism, conscious consumption, where people are saying, I want to work for a company where the values of that company reflect mine. I don't want to work for a company where I might be put into a situation where my ethics will be tested, or, you know, I might be held up on some kind of charges. I want to work for a company that creates products that are good for people, not a company that just creates widgets to make profit. So every time there's a new upgrade on a cell phone, we're just creating more waste rather than like Patagonia creating something that when it goes wrong can be returned and repaired or can be returned to be given to somebody else when that person buys a new product. So these core values have become more important for companies that are more conscious about how they work, but they're now going to be essential. It is essential for us as individuals to understand our values when we're working with a company or within a company. It's essential for that company to understand what their values are and what they stand for or not. If we don't, we run the risk of running campaigns or employing people or doing things in the, the product development department or anything else like that, that is going to run foul of the pervading temperature or value set of the country that we're in. There's an example that is very recent going out on social media at the moment where Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook has taken down or done away with the team of people who fact-check claims that are on Facebook. So if you're on Facebook and you see somebody say that the Earth is flat, you can press a button and somebody will go and look, and then they'll put a little warning comment there. He's done away with that department. X and Elon Musk did away with that department ages ago to put automation in and to allow the community to define what is true or right or wrong or believable or unbelievable. Facebook was always kind of running against that kind of thing. Facebook Facebook wanted the freedom to be able to do certain things with their products around the world, and now there are governments coming up with the government set of political values, and Facebook is deciding to comply with the values that are in America at the moment rather than standing alone and talking about what they believe in. So instead of having people there fact-check and, and point out that somebody's post is incorrect. They're allowing the community to do that. So now it's a community context, not a set of objective values. It's more subjective, and people can start to say things on Facebook that are not true, and the algorithms will keep delivering that up to that kind of audience. So automated artificial intelligence algorithms delivering to you the content that you already believe in, and if anybody else, you know, disagrees with that, And they're going to be in a different set of algorithms. So Facebook have changed the way that they approach business to fall in line with the way America is being run at the moment. And that is going to happen in a lot of different places. There are companies that are having to change their marketing stance. They're rolling back diversity, equity, and inclusion plans. They are not allowing certain kind of medical claims. Because the government in that state or in that country no longer believes in that. And if they want to be successful as a company in that place, they have to change their values or fall in line with what is happening. So when we look at this in terms of our business or our context, we have to decide, is this a value where I can be flexible? It's not an essential thing to me. Or is this part of my core identity that I can't work with a company that behaves this way? And a company needs to decide, can we be flexible with, with these values and approaches, or can we change them? You know, can we roll them back so that we can stay successful or have our headquarters in this state or country in this part of the world? Or are we going to stand on our values and risk losing a huge amount of marketplace, getting negative press and PR? How are we going to do that? So really understanding our core values and deciding how are we going to respond, and that's what scenario planning is about. How are we going to respond if we're going to get kickback because of these values? So when you look at using a particular person as a brand spokesperson and that person turns out to be a trans person, are you going to stand by that person because they align with your values or not? And that's the kind of decision we need to be making about our businesses. At whatever size they are. So those are core values. The second thing we need to get really clear on is not demographics, but psychographics. So demographics have been very important, especially in terms of marketing, obviously, where we want to see, you know, what age are the— in our marketplace, the people who buy our products, you know, how old are they? What gender are they? Where are they in the world? What level of education? What is their lifestyle measurement? in terms of income, and then we design marketing plans based on those demographics. Those demographics don't really work anymore. Much, most of it's attributed to the fact that we're online, so we can actually, you know, market all over the world. So there's lots of different markets and different kinds of demographics. But what is more important now are the psychographics. It's not who is the person, but how does this person think? What is important to them? What what is kind of at the base of their behavior? How are they going to respond? And then there's a kind of an emotional resonance with our marketing or our recruitment of people or how we develop products or how we do anything internally in terms of strategy in a company. Those psychographics become really important. And when you look at psychographics, you could very easily find a 20-year-old young woman in the same category as a 70-year-old man because they think the same way, they approach life the same way, they have the same set of values. So those psychographics become a lot more important. And that's when we're looking at that abundance-scarcity mindset and the binary and fluid. How are the people thinking about the world, about engaging with our company according to those standards, not just the traditional ones we've looked at? And then the last one is that we need to learn, all of us, how to think like a futurist. I know Afsaneh has done the Future Study course at Stellenbosch Business School, and very often when people talk to futurists, they say, oh, you know, I don't have time to go and study and get a qualification. I don't have time for that. But we don't need to. We are all natural futurists. Everyone has looked at 2025 and thought, I wonder what I can achieve in this year. What can I— what is my resolution? What is on my bingo card? What am I hoping to experience this year? If we've thought about our education, our children's education, our retirement, we are all futurists. We're natural futurists, but we can become better futurists when we start to learn to read and understand and interpret the world around us and the information we're receiving rather than just waiting for somebody to name one or two trends that apply to our field and then see how we can go and apply those. So it's really important that we learn to think like a futurist. So those are the 3 recommendations. I know those are a little challenging, but you, you can sit down today and get a little bit clearer on your values. And if you need a values exercise, let me know and I'll send you one. But knowing what your values are is really important in terms of the work that you're doing. But for companies, it's essential because they're going to, they're going to have repercussions against values no matter where they stand on the spectrum, and they need to have that conversation before it becomes a PR disaster or a marketing disaster. Knowing the psychographics of your market is important. How are you going to go about that? How, you know, The old avatars that we used to create, you know, that was like this man, this woman, those are redundant. Let's find new ways to create the avatar of our perfect client or partner. And then develop your futures literacy. Learn to think like a futurist. Look at this set of ideas today and start to interpret. Look at the marketing campaigns that you're seeing. Look at the content on LinkedIn or on social media and interpret that in terms of this binary fluid scarcity abundance approaches. I do have a document of the intersection of those as a matrix, and I will send that to everybody who's registered so you can have a look at that later on. There is some more information at the moment on my website under the 2 Trends page, and what I'm going to be doing is like that little exercise earlier is interpreting and explaining these concepts in terms of those different business functions. But in the meantime, if any of you would like to have a conversation with me about this and explore what it could look like, I'd be very happy to have a conversation. It's as we talk with each other and learn how we're all seeing the future that we come together to define a closer, better future. Futures are co-created, and it's only in conversations that we learn how to develop thinking that is fit for the future.