in this story?
At this stage it is important to remember that industries or categories don’t matter for grouping. When sorting, don’t fall into the “obvious” trap of putting all the financial services examples together or putting every story related to Facebook together.
Aggregating involves sorting ideas based on insights and human motivations, not industries or demographics.
For example, when I was preparing my 2012 Non-Obvious Trend Report, I collected marketing stories of new campaign strategies from three different companies, Domino’s Pizza, Ally Bank (an online consumer bank) and Aviva (world’s sixth largest insurance provider). The industries across these examples ranged from banking to food services to insurance.
The shared lesson behind each of their efforts though was how companies were finding new ways to avoid being faceless and find their humanity, so I aggregated them together in a group and wrote on an index card “companies being more human.”
In this second step, it is not important to come up with a fancy name or even to do extensive research around any stories. Instead, you want to start building small clusters of ideas which bring together disconnected concepts into broader groups to be analyzed later.
TIPS & TRICKS: How To Aggregate Ideas
Focus on Human Needs – Sometimes focusing on a bigger underlying human emotion can help you see the basis of the example and why it matters. For example, the basic human need for belonging fuels many of the activities people engage in online, from posting social comments to joining online communities. The more you are able to connect the ideas you have gathered with the basic human needs behind them—the more easily you can start to aggregate ideas.
Recognize the Obvious – Along the path to uncovering “Non-Obvious” insights, there is some value in recognizing and even embracing the obvious. In a grouping exercise for example, you can often use the obvious ideas (like multiple stories about new wearable technology products) as a way of bringing things together and work later on discovering the Non-Obvious insights in between them.
Follow Your Intuition – When you train yourself to be more observant, you might also find that you start to develop a feeling for stories that somehow feel significant or fit together even though you may not be able to describe why. Embrace that intuition when it tries to surface a connection between ideas without the words to describe it. In later phases, you can think further about connecting these pieces into a more thoughtful trend concept.
Step 3—Elevating
Elevating means thinking bigger about the underlying themes that connect groups of ideas to describe a single broader concept.
If you have gone through gathering and aggregating ideas—this is the point where you will 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 all of my ideas it usually yields between 70 and 100 possible trend topics. That is a sign that there is more work to be done.
So, in this third step, the aim is to take a bigger view and connect groups of ideas together into something that could eventually describe a trend.
| ELEVATING QUESTIONS—How to Think Bigger about Ideas |
| What interests me most about these ideas?What elements could I have missed earlier?What is below the surface?What is the bigger picture?Where is the connection between ideas? |
This can be the most challenging phase of the Haystack Method as combining ideas can also lead you to unintentionally make them too broad (and obvious). Your aim in this step therefore must be elevating an idea to make it bigger and more encompassing of multiple examples.
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 like Macy’s investing heavily in creating apps to improve their in-store shopping experience, and a suite 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 a crowdsourced 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 all of them had the underlying intent of helping to optimize a shopping experience in some way. I put them together and ultimately called the trend Shoptimization, to describe how technology was helping consumers optimize the process of buying everything from fashion to medical prescriptions.
In the next step, we will talk about techniques for naming trends (and the backstory behind the term Virtual Empathy), but for now my point in sharing that example is that elevation is the step in the Haystack Method where you can start to make the connections across industries and ideas that may have initially seemed disconnected and fallen into different groups.
I realize the difference between aggregating ideas and elevating them may seem very slight. In fact, there are times when I manage to do both at the same time because the act of aggregating stories together may help you to broaden your conclusions about them.
In the Haystack Method, I chose to still 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 Aggregated 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 my 2014 report, for example, a word that kept emerging was “fast” to describe the growing ecosystem of on-demand services for entrepreneurs. 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 particular 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 when first aggregating ideas together.
Follow the Money – With business trends, sometimes the underlying driver of a particular trend is focused on revenue generation for the businesses using 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 my 2014 Non-Obvious Trend of Subscription Commerce. Both were examples of brands transforming their business models to rely on subscriptions (a trend that has continued to grow in the past year with recent big investments from both Unilever and Proctor & Gamble in subscription businesses).
Step 4—Naming
Naming trends involves describing an elevated idea in an easily understandable and memorably branded way.
Naming trends is a bit like naming a child—you