Non-Obvious 2017 Edition. Rohit Bhargava
ever involves spotting them sitting neatly inside a so-called stack of “hay” waiting to be discovered.
The Haystack Method describes a process where you first focus on gathering stories and ideas (the hay) and then use them to define a trend (the needle) that gives meaning to them all collectively.
In this method, the work comes from assembling the information and curating it into groupings that make sense. The needle is the insight you apply to this collection of information in order to describe what it means—and to curate information and stories into a definable trend.
Trend curators don’t seek needles, they gather the hay and then create the needle to put into the middle of it.
While that describes the method with metaphors, to truly learn how to do it for yourself, we must go much deeper starting with my personal story of why I created it in the first place.
Why I Started Curating Ideas
The Haystick Method was born from frustration.
In 2004, I was part of a team that was starting one of the first social media–focused practices within a large marketing agency. The idea was that we would help big companies figure out how to use social media.
Back then “social media” mainly referred to blogging since it was before Facebook and Twitter. The real aim of our team was to help brands work with influential bloggers. There was only one problem with this well-intentioned plan—none of us knew very much about blogging.
So, we all did the only thing that seemed logical to do: each of us started blogging for ourselves.
In June of that year I started my “Influential Marketing Blog” with an aim to write about marketing, public relations and advertising strategy. My first post was on the dull topic of optimal screen size for web designers. Within a few days I ran into my first challenge: I had no plan for what to write about next.
How was I going to keep this hastily created blog current with new ideas and stories when I already had a full time day job that didn’t officially involve spending time writing a blog?
I realized I had to become more disciplined about how I collected ideas.
At first my aim was just to find ideas for blog posts, scratched into a notebook or emailed to myself. Then, I included ideas from the many brainstorms I was involved in on a daily basis. Pretty soon I was saving quotes from books, ripping pages out of magazines and generating plenty of blog posts (and client ideas!) based on the ideas I had collected.
These first four years of blogging led to my first book deal with McGraw-Hill. Several years later, the desire to write a blog post about trends based on ideas I had collected across the year led me to publish the first edition of my Non-Obvious Trend Report in 2011.
My point in sharing this story is to illustrate how collecting ideas helped me to get better at saving and sharing ideas that people cared about. I became a collector of ideas—which describes perfectly the first step in the Haystack Method.
Step 1—Gathering
Gathering is the disciplined act of collecting stories and ideas from any interaction you have with people or experiences.
Do you read the same sources of media religiously every day? Or do you skim Twitter occasionally and sometimes follow the links to continue reading? Regardless of your media consumption, chances are you encounter plenty of interesting stories or ideas. The real question is, do you save them?
The key to gathering ideas is making a habit of saving interesting things in a way that allows you to find and explore them later.
My method involves always carrying a small Moleskine notebook in my pocket and keeping a folder on my desk to save media clippings and printouts. By the time you read these words, that folder on my desk has changed color and probably already says “2018 Trends” on the outside of it.
In my process, I start the clock every January and complete it each December for my annual Non-Obvious Trend Report (Part II of this book). Thanks to this deliverable, I have a clear starting and ending point for each new round of ideas that I collect.
You don’t need to follow as rigid of a calendar timetable, but it is valuable to set yourself a specific time when you can go back and reflect on what you have gathered to uncover the bigger insights (a point we will explore in subsequent steps).
| IDEA SOURCES—Where to Gather Ideas |
| Personal conversations at events or meetings (ask lots of questions)Listening to live speakers or TED Talks (write down memorable quotes)Entertainment (TV shows and movies that actually make you think)Books (Nonfiction and fiction)Museums (the more obscure the better!)Magazines and newspapers (as unexpected or outside your realm of knowledge as possible)Travel! (even if it doesn’t seem exotic or far away) |
As you first read this list of sources, they might seem, well, obvious. It is rarely the sources of information themselves that will lead you toward a perfectly packaged idea or trend. Rather, mastering the art of gathering valuable ideas means training yourself to uncover interesting ideas across multiple sources and become diligent about collecting them.
TIPS & TRICKS: How To Gather Ideas
Start a Folder – A folder on my desk stores handwritten ideas, articles ripped out of magazines and newspapers, printouts of articles from the Internet, brochures from conferences and just about any other ideas I find interesting. This folder lets me store things in a central and highly visible way. You might choose to create this folder digitally, or with paper. Either way, the important thing is to have a centralized place where you can save ideas for later digestion.
Always Summarize – When you are collecting ideas on a longer time scale, it is easy to forget why it seemed significant in the first place. To help jog your own memory, get into the habit of highlighting a few sentences, or writing down a few notes about your thoughts on the idea. Later, when you are going through your gathered ideas, these notes will be useful in recalling what originally sparked your interest.
Seek Concepts, Not Conclusions – As we learned in Chapter 2, a key habit of good curating is the ability to be fickle. In practice, this means not getting too hung up on the need to quantify or understand every idea you save in the moment. Many times, the best thing you can do is to gather something, save it, and then move on to the rest of your daily life. Perspective comes from taking time and having patience.
Step 2—Aggregating
Aggregating involves taking individual ideas and disconnected thoughts and grouping them together based on bigger themes.
Once you have been diligently gathering ideas, the next step is to choose a time to go and combine the early results of your observation and curiosity with thoughtful insights about what it means and how it fits together.
When you move from gathering to aggregating, you are taking the first step toward adding bigger insights to stories and ideas. Using a series of questions can help you do that – and here are some of my favorites.
| AGGREGATING QUESTIONS—How to Group Ideas |
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What broad group or demographic does this story describe?What is the underlying human need or behavior that this idea is an example of?What makes this story interesting as an example?How is this same phenomenon affecting multiple |