Adding insight to foresight

Editor's note: Matt Carmichael is the SVP, head of Ipsos Trends and Foresight Lab headquartered in Paris.

Futurists love to talk about the past. And they love to talk about plausible futures. This article will do both of those things. It will focus more than you might anticipate on horses. But in the end, you should be convinced of two things. One, that in your research, you should think about the future and two, when you think about the future, you need to consider one really key thing that is often left out of conversations about foresight: You need to think about people, their opinions and their values.

Let’s start with some history. There was a piece floating around LinkedIn recently about the weird gauge of train tracks in the U.S. It’s an unusual width: 4 feet, 8.5 inches. It’s great for tying your typical 5-foot-4 damsel to if your goal is to put her in distress but otherwise, it’s odd. Because we have a lot to cover, we’ll skip to the beginning of the story: The track size goes all the way back to the width of Roman chariots, which in turn is based on the width of two ancient horse butts.

So, trains today, and so many things they carry, including industrial parts and components, are also size-constrained by millennia-old horse butts. Crazy, huh?

Confession time: That thing about horse butts is a myth – although one that is maybe 80 years old. But it sounds totally plausible. As mentioned, futurists love to talk about plausible futures but this is an interesting example of a plausible history. The endurance of this pre-social-media-meme myth is interesting because it tells us something about the way you should think about the future: Things don’t change much. Macro forces drive change. And they do so over long swaths of time that are often slow to unfold. 

The point of all this history is that we need to remember as researchers that the future is built on the present, the present is built on the past and the past is built on people. And, well, horses. 

Hint at change

When Ipsos thinks about the future, we look at three main things. First, we consider those tectonic macro forces that unfold over time – things like climate change and demographic shifts. It doesn’t take a futurist to know those forces exist but it’s important to understand how they shape – and are shaped by – other forces. So we also consider signals we see today that hint at change. These could be a patent filing or some new innovation. A news clipping might be a signal. 

Futurists don’t often know exactly what a signal portends but our Spidey sense tells us it hints at something.

Finally, at the heart of it all, is the humans. How are people, markets and society shifting and how are those shifts impacting and impacted by the signals and macro forces? The output of this consideration can either be trends or foresight work. But if your trend work isn’t considering the humans, it’s missing a major component.

Keeping humans at the center has several key benefits. One, it means you’re focused on insight and impacts, not just on new technology, etc. But more importantly, shifts in human opinions and values are something you can measure over time.

Before getting into the value of that process, let’s dispel another myth. That means it’s time to talk about horses again. Henry Ford is oft-quoted as saying that if he’d asked people what they wanted (i.e., done some research), they would have said they wanted faster horses. Turns out that’s a myth too. According to the Harvard Business Review, Ford never actually said that but it’s still a great quote. Someone said it. And it’s often used to show that opinion doesn’t necessarily matter in the innovation space because sometimes people can’t imagine what’s coming. They can’t anticipate or react to something that doesn’t exist.

While that part’s true, people can imagine that they want speed and convenience. Behavioral science tells us that for a change to be accepted it will have to solve a human need. Either a faster horse or an automobile would solve those needs. Since people make up quotes for Henry Ford, here’s perhaps a useful edit: “I helped popularize the automobile because I understood not what people want but what people value.” (Clearly he didn’t say that either.)

When we think about the future, it’s easy to focus on what will be different. But we have to avoid getting too fixated on change. Because the big things don’t really change all that much. Sure, opinions and attitudes change, but our values tend to be pretty consistent. 

Humans are creatures of habit and routine. It’s not that we don’t like new and shiny things. We do. We really do. It’s that those new and shiny things, again, have to fill a need. But inventions need to also hit at the right time, which involves a host of factors, including convenience, that humans value, as well as utility (another thing we value) and affordability (yet another thing humans care a lot about). Finally, they need also to work.

So if things don’t change too much, we don’t even need foresight do we? Au contraire, mon frère. We need foresight to plan for the certain uncertainty. Cuz stuff happens. 

Imagine the territory

How so? Well, when you’re thinking about the future of a topic, try to think of all of the things that could factor into it. Imagine the territory that surrounds the topic. The map, if you will. For instance, the future of sports isn’t just about sports leagues and broadcast rights and the changes to the college landscape as athletes can leverage their names, images and likenesses for financial gain. The future of sports is also about climate change. 

What if a generation of kids spends more time indoors instead of playing football or futball because it’s 120 outside all summer? Will they be sports fans in the same way? What if people get used to the new volumetric video broadcasts of sports like the NBA is already trying out – showing essentially avatars of the real players really playing the game? Will that lead us or accelerate us to “sports” with virtual athletes that we watch in the metaverse?

Or take automated vehicles. They are not just a faster horse but a smarter horse. The future of automated vehicles, for example, is partially about the work engineers and programmers are doing to make the idea technically feasible and the tech is getting there. But it’s also ultimately driven by the belief that people want them, will feel safe being driven by them and won’t feel as if their freedom or privacy is threatened by Big Tech. That’s a tension. 

Will people buy automated cars? Will they give up a perception of freedom, which marketers have for generations had us believe is directly caused by the ability to control your movements by taking hold of the steering wheel? Will lawmakers agree to fund the infrastructure needed, and at what cost financially, and with what as a trade-off in a fixed budget? Today Ipsos data says 42% of Americans have a positive view of self-driving cars but 47% have a negative view. What if that shifts? What if the car manufacturers and the independent organizations that monitor and test vehicle safety convince us that autonomous driving is extraordinarily safer (it is) than if we all drive ourselves? 

There is a plausible scenario where autonomous driving becomes the standard, at least in major cities and areas with the infrastructure to support it. There’s another plausible scenario where the tech evolves but people don’t buy it or won’t fund the infrastructure needed to make the cars function. Chicago is a deeply blue city in an otherwise red state. Will the legislators in Springfield and downstate Illinois vote to fund something they see as benefiting mostly just those Tesla-driving elites in Chicago? You’ve met America, what do you think?

Innovations that are so needed to solve problems like climate change or the labor shortage in long-haul trucking can be held up because…we’re not looking at the future.

Of course things could shape the future that have nothing to do with opinion. Volcanoes can erupt. Meteors can crash into the Earth. Yet, even then, the survivors have to decide what comes next. 

As researchers we can watch the opinion data shift. We can view those shifts as waypoints, showing us which of many potential futures we are steering toward. We can do the qual and the quant work and layer in the social listening and the behavioral science. We can measure the tension shift as well as we try to right the course or accelerate on the path toward our desired outcome. As opinions shift or are swayed one way or another, those movements act as vectors that will steer us toward one plausible future or another. 

The secret sauce 

When you think about it this way, humans, and their opinions, values and behaviors, are the secret sauce of foresight. 

How do you keep humans at the center? Not surprisingly the answer is “research”! But how do you actually do it? A major part of it comes in the design phase. It’s important to capture underlying values as well as opinions and behaviors. You can do this through qual and quant, through surveys and ethnography, through active and passive social listening and online communities. The goal is to understand the human needs and the ways you can fulfil them.

The tensions people feel on topics like these won’t entirely drive the future but they will drive how we respond to it. They are based on opinion. And opinion is sometime intractable, especially in the short term, but is ultimately malleable. Same with behaviors. If they become habits, they can be very hard to change. 

Opinions and behavior change can be accelerated or arrested by disruptions like, say, a global pandemic speeding up the demand curve for delivery or the threat of war helping NATO find renewed purpose and strength.

Tensions can strengthen or relax or release, depending on how opinion shifts. 

Values, on the other hand, are more bedrock. They don’t tend to change over time too much on their own.

Author Phil Tetlock has written that, “Every policy is a prediction.” We make policies with the assumption that they will shape the future in a desired way. The same could be said of all the choices we make in our daily lives. We eat certain foods because of (or despite) a belief that they will help us live longer, healthier lives. We invest and save based on all sorts of factors we assume about our future within the future. We choose our friends, our spouses, where we live and our careers based on what feels correct now and what it means for our personal tomorrow. 

Therefore, we are all futurists to the degree that our opinions impact our personal and the collective future. 

As we think about the future we need to know that it won’t just happen; we have to make it happen. Many don’t get that. But many do and people are right this moment working to shape the future and get others to act in ways that they think will benefit their desired future. That’s true to vastly different extents with everything from marketing to journalism, disinformation to campaign speeches. 

To the extent that communication is about manipulating events, it starts by shaping opinion. People still have to believe in something in order to act a certain way. 

One typical output of foresight work is scenarios of plausible futures. Once you’ve developed several of these, think about how your product will look in those futures. Think about the future jobs to be done. Then think about a research roadmap to get you there – again, keeping humans at the heart. Part of this is about concepts and innovation and making sure those innovations solve for a human need. But part of it is going to be beyond that in terms of the user experience, the marketing and creative and ultimately the customer experience with these future products in these future scenarios. And finally, think about how to measure potential shifts over time as an ongoing system of checks and balances as the world shifts around you as well.

Understanding the relationship 

If you haven’t guessed by now, this use of tension is also a play on words. Opinions upon which we act are often in tension. The actions we take based on those opinions are done so with intention. Imagining potential futures requires understanding the relationship between the tensions in our beliefs and the intentions of our actions. 

And further, if we are to aim for a future we desire personally or for our company or our community, we must do so with intention. We must shift the opinions of those who are in tension with our opinion. Because the people who have other or even opposite opinions are working with intent toward their desired future. 

The future is in tension. 

The future is intention. 

All of this discussion to this point has been about why you need to keep humans at the heart of your foresight. Whether you’re working with a foresight consultant or spinning up your own internal team, if humans (and therefore ongoing, intentional research) aren’t part of the plan, you’re not going to know where you are or where you’re headed.

But why do you need to keep foresight in the center of your research, too? Chuck Klosterman wrote a book you should read. It’s called, “But What if We’re Wrong?” The premise is to look at the present as if it were the past. Imagine, for example, it’s 100 years or 500 years in the future. Think about it in marketing research terms: What’s something that in five or 10 years you’re going to wish you had trending data on? 

That’s a powerful idea and one that was the original premise of What the Future, the monthly foresight magazine from Ipsos. Since the first issue in 2017, the magazine has featured Q&As with the smartest people on any given topic: food, housing, transportation, gender, beauty, vice and more. They would be asked that question about aspirational trending data and then Ipsos would actually field those questions and set a baseline. 

So years before the pandemic caused us all to want everything brought to us, Chris Kempczinski, the now-president and CEO of McDonald’s, was talking about ghost kitchens and delivery. The concept of ghost kitchens was so far off that Ipsos had to add a lot of text to the question stem explaining it. This was long before YouTuber MrBeast spun up a burger chain in 300 markets simultaneously with no physical locations.

And before we were required to shelter in place, Ipsos was talking with IKEA’s Mary Lunghi about smart homes and what she called the “fluidity of living,” in which rooms in our homes would be yoga studios, schools, offices, dining rooms all at the same time or just by moving a bit of furniture around. 

This all is why you need foresight in your research. It gets to that topic of human needs and how to meet them in the future. A standard interview with McDonald’s or IKEA would have been asking about the now or maybe the next quarter or two. But by thinking about the future in the interview, the stories explored more interesting topics for readers and clients. We did so in the context of the needs for convenience and flexibility – and how that might look down the road.

Solve those problems

We need to think about the future. The world is full of big challenges – a climate emergency, threats of world war, pandemics, inequality, inequity, injustice. People, consumers, customers – whatever you want to call the humans – are looking at us as leaders and brands to help solve those problems, especially as the governments around us seem to be failing at the task. 

Humans get that. And they want help. We need to think about the future. Many already do, to some degree. Innovation cycles for some products are measured in years and decades. But most of us don’t think about the future. At least not in any systematic way, not in a way that reaches the level of foresight. And we need to. To solve the big problems and also to solve more immediate challenges. 

However you do it – in-house, with a consultant, with a Magic 8 Ball (no, please don’t do that) – keep marketing research at the heart of your foresight. And keep foresight in mind when you’re planning your research. Because at the end of the day, or at least at the end this article, it all comes down to this one simple point, which also would make a great Henry Ford quote, had he said anything like it: When you imagine tomorrow, you ask better questions today.