Thinking Futures - Analytic Methods

Analytic Methods

Input methods generate information, and usually a lot of it. Analytical methods are then used to make sense of that information for the organisation and its context. The question asked here is "what seems to be happening".

Trend Analysis

Trend analysis is a well known analytical tool and can be quantitative and/or qualitative, although good analysis is always contextualised in the environment that has produced the trend. In futures work, trends are not the end game, but one input into the mix that generates strategic thinking.

And trends should be analysed, whenever possible using both hindsight and foresight. Analyse the trend's performance in the past for as long as you want to explore how it might play out into the future - if your future time horizon is 20 years, then explore the trend and its predecessors for 20 years into the past. This will generally avoid the tendency to anchor your thinking about the future on your experience of the present, and you might be able to spot some meta-historical patterns that have the potential to reoccur.

Trend analysis is big business. Faith Popcorn (do a google search because her website is cute but she shares nothing for free) is a 'leader' in the trend field, having published three books and invented some new words like 'trendversation'. What's Next is a website that urges us to 'stay ahead of the future', and publishes some information about trends (but you have to subscribe to get the good stuff). There's also some useful futures links on this site. Trendwatching is a site that takes a different approach to trends, bringing together seemingly divergent trends, and give them new names like "Infolust". For an Australian perspective, explore the site of Annimac Consulting, run by Anni Macbeth, 'trend forecaster and futurist'.

Emerging Issues Analysis

While trend analysis is looking for issues that are about to become mainstream - or indeed which are mainstream - emerging issues analysis seeks to identify trends that have not yet emerged, and may never fully emerge, from the periphery. Here, attention is paid to the weird and the wacky, to the seemingly ridiculous. Equally, issues that are disturbing or provocative should not be dismissed because they do not 'fit' with current management wisdom. Check out the Why Use Futures Approaches? page to see what happens when so called experts dismiss early signs of the emergence of a trend.

Emerging issues are identified through the environmental scanning process, which is why that process needs to focus not only on mainstream trends, but also the periphery. Scanning frameworks need to identify and include the 'blindspots' of an organisation; scanners need to look for issues and trends that can transform current thinking and paradigms.

Most emerging issues will not become trends, but if they do, are likely to have a significant impact on an organisation. In this way, emerging issues are another form of wildcard - both are low probability, high impact events. Both have the potential to change the world overnight.

So, how do you identify an emerging issue? When a particular issue or phenomenon appears on your scanning 'radar' three times, it's probably worth adding it to the list of things you need to monitor for a while to see what comes of it. It's important, therefore, that scanners have a good database in which they an record their scanning 'hits'. You need to be looking beyond the newspapers and websites and journals that everyone knows about; you need to be looking at the work of scientists, artists, radicals, and even mystics.

This diagram demonstrates the life cycle of a trend (based on the work of Graham Molitor). Trudi Lang has written an excellent paper on four futures methodologies, one of which is emerging issues analysis. Her paper explores how emerging issues are identified and framed to allow integration into policy and planning processes.

Forecasting

All analytical methods are, to some degree, forecasting and can be both quantitative or qualitative in approach. As a quantitative approach it has little value beyond the short term future, particularly if the outputs are framed as predictions. A projection, on the other hand, suggests something that is possible rather than certain, although demographic projections are an example of a forecast that seems to hold true over the long term. Quantitative methods include extrapolation and econometric approaches, while megatrends are an example of qualitative forecasting. With any forecasting, there will always be blindspots, but there is danger with quantitative methods because they are extrapolations of the past, rather than explorations of the future. Qualitative approaches are better able to take account of blindspots in their projections, particularly where entirely new paradigms emerge rapidly (eg in technology).

Cross Impact Analysis

Cross impact analysis explicitly explores the impact of events and trends on each other. The events and trends being investigated should be those that have been identified as the ones that are expected to have the most impact on the futures being considered. This is primarily a quantitative technique, but can also be qualitative if done as a group task - rather than having a computer run the analysis, people in the group discuss probability and degree of dependencies. Cross impact analysis is frequently used in conjunction with the Delphi method, and is also used as part of scenario development to explore how future trends and issues might play out over time.