Non-Obvious 2018 Edition. Rohit Bhargava

through gathering and aggregating ideas—this is the point where you’ll probably confront the same problem I do every year: there are too many possibilities!

      When I go through my annual exercise of curating trends, the first time I aggregate my ideas into clusters it usually yields between seventy and a hundred possible trend topics. That’s far too many, and a clear sign that there’s more work to be done.

      How do you know what to focus on in order to build out into a trend? The goal in this third step is to try and take a bigger view and connect your smaller clusters of ideas together into larger ones that describe even bigger and potentially more powerful ideas. More than any other step, this is where the breakthroughs and inspiration usually come.

      Elevating Questions: How to Think Bigger About Ideas

      1 What interests me most about these ideas?

      2 What elements could I have missed earlier?

      3 What is the broader theme?

      4 How can I link multiple industries?

      5 Where is the connection between ideas?

      This third step can be the most challenging phase of the Haystack Method, because the process of combining ideas can also lead you to unintentionally make them too broad (and by definition, obvious). Your aim in this step, therefore, should be to elevate an idea to make it bigger and more encompassing of multiple stories without losing its uniqueness.

      For example, when I was producing my 2014 Non-Obvious Trend Report I came across an interesting healthcare startup called GoodRx, which had a tool to help people find the best price for medications. It was simple, useful, and the perfect example of an evolving shift toward empowering patients in healthcare, which I wrote about in my earlier book ePatient 2015.

      At the same time, I was seeing retail stores, such as Macy’s, investing heavily in creating apps to improve their in-store shopping experience and a number of new fashion services, like Rent the Runway, designed to help people save time and money while shopping.

      On the surface, a tool to save on prescriptions, an app for a department store, and an optimized tool for renting dresses don’t seem to have much in common. I had therefore initially grouped them separately. While elevating trends, though, I realized that they all had the underlying intent of helping to optimize a shopping experience in some way.

      I grouped them together as examples of a shared trend which I called Shoptimization. The trend described how technology was helping consumers optimize the process of buying everything from home goods and fashion to medical prescriptions.

      In the next step, I’ll discuss techniques for naming trends (including how I named Shoptimization), but for now my point in sharing that example is to illustrate how elevation can help you make the connections across industries and ideas that may have initially seemed disconnected and meant to fall into different groups.

      The difference between aggregating ideas and elevating them may seem very slight, but there are times when I manage to do both at the same time, since the act of aggregating stories can help to broaden your conclusions about them.

      In the Haystack Method, I choose to present these steps separately because most of the time they do end up as distinct efforts. With practice though, you may get better at condensing these two steps together.

      Tips & Tricks: How to Elevate Your Ideas

      Use Words to Elevate. When you have groups of ideas, sometimes boiling them down to a couple of words to describe them can help you to see the common themes between them. When I was collecting ideas related to entrepreneurship, for example, a word that kept emerging to describe the growing ecosystem of on-demand services for entrepreneurs was “fast.” It was the theme of speed that helped me to bring the pieces together to eventually call that trend “Instant Entrepreneurship.”

      Combine Industry Verticals. Despite my own cautions against aggregating ideas by industry sector, sometimes a trend ends up heavily focused in just one sector. When I see one of these clusters of ideas predominantly focused in one industry, I always try to find another batch of ideas I can combine it with. This often leads to bigger thinking and helps to remove any unintentional industry bias I may have had earlier in the process.

      Follow the Money. With business trends, sometimes the underlying driver of a trend is who will make money from it. Following this trail can sometimes lead you to make connections you might not have considered before. This was exactly how studying a new all- you-can-read ebook subscription service and the growth of cloud-based software led me to write about the trend of “Subscription Commerce” several years ago.

      Step 4—Naming

      Naming is the creative art of finding the right words to describe an elevated idea as a trend in an easily understandable and memorably branded way.

      Photo: Sources used for names and word lists.

      Naming a trend is a little bit like naming a child—you think of every way that the name might unintentionally be dooming your idea to a life of ridicule and then you try to balance that with a name that feels right.

      Naming a trend also involves the choice of sharing a specific point of view in a way that names for kids generally don’t. Great trend names convey meaning with simplicity—and they’re memorable.

      For that reason, this is often my favorite part of the Haystack Method, but also the most creatively challenging. It’s focused on that critical moment when you brand an idea that will either stick in people’s minds as something new and important, or will be immediately forgotten.

      The title for my second book, Likeonomics, came from one of these trend-naming sessions. The concept took off immediately because people understood the idea and the name was just quirky enough to inspire a second look. Finding the right name for an idea can do that.

      An effective title can inspire people. It can help a good idea capture the right peoples’ imaginations and urge them to own and describe it for themselves. Of course, that doesn’t make naming any easier to do.

      In fact, naming a trend can take just as long as any other aspect of defining or researching a trend. In my method, I try many possibilities. I jot down potential names on Post-it notes and compare them side by side. I test them with early readers and clients. Only after doing all of that do I finalize the names for the trends in each of my reports.

      Naming Questions: How to Ensure You Have

       an Effective Trend Name

      1 Is the name not widely used or already well understood?

      2 Is it relatively simple to say out loud in conversation?

      3 Does it make sense without too much additional explanation?

      4 Could you imagine it as the title of a book?

      5 Are you using words that are unique and not cliché?

      6 Does it build upon a topic in an unexpected way?

      So how did 2018’s trend names turn out? The full list is outlined in Part II and the backlist of trend names is included in the Appendix, but here are a few of my favorite trend names from previous reports along with a little of the backstory behind the development and selection of each one:

       Virtual Empathy (2016 + 2018). During a time when virtual reality was a hot topic, the underlying theme behind VR was how it managed to amplify a sense of empathy in anyone who used it. As a result, I paired the term “virtual” with “empathy” instead to create a new way of thinking about the powerful effects of Virtual Reality. In this year’s report (Chapter 12), the Virtual Empathy trend is revisited within a new, broader context, but the name still works.

       Experimedia