Non-Obvious 2018 Edition. Rohit Bhargava

      There’s a Jungle Room, a Room of Famous Persons, and rooms themed around sports, fruits, birds, circus performers, and the occult. There’s even a room featuring the iconic porcelain series of the Delft Blue KLM houses, a series of tiny Dutch rowhouse-shaped liquor bottles given away to passengers by KLM Airlines for more than five decades.

      Across all these rooms, the tour mentions that the gallery typically has more than 12,000 bottles on display. Apart from the scope of the themed rooms, one of the most interesting elements of this story is what the gallery does with the bottles that aren’t on display.

      An Accidental Trend Curator

      Like any other museum, the Mini Bottle Gallery never uses its entire collection. Instead, they only display about 20% of Ringnes’s full collection at any time, and carefully keep the rest in storage. This thoughtful curation adds value to the experience of seeing them.

      Curation is the ultimate method of transforming noise into meaning.

      If you consider the amount of media any of us is exposed to on an average day, the quest to find meaning among the noise is a challenge we all know personally. Navigating information overload requires the same discipline as deciding what bottles to put on display so those that visitors see can tell a better story.

      Without curation, themes would be indecipherable and the experience would be overwhelming, downright noisy.

      It was only on my flight home from Oslo after that event that I realized how important curation had become for my own work.

      Just a few months earlier I’d published the first edition of my Non-Obvious Trend Report, inspired by an idea to publish an article from the many ideas I’d collected over the past year but had never written about. What I was already doing without realizing it was collecting intriguing ideas and saving them in perhaps the most disorganized way possible—by writing them down randomly, printing them or ripping them out of magazines, and then stashing everything in a well-worn folder on my desk.

      In producing that first report, my ambition had been to describe patterns in the stories I had collected that went beyond the typical obvious observations I was always reading online. My goal was to find and develop insights that others either hadn’t yet noticed and that were not getting the attention they warranted.

      To get a different output, sometimes you need a different input.

      On that flight home from Norway, I realized that my accidental method for getting different input—collecting ideas for a year and waiting months before analyzing them—could be the very thing that would set my insights apart and make them truly non-obvious.

      The Non-Obvious Trend Report (my annual list of fifteen trends) was born from this desire to collect underappreciated ideas and connect them into predictions about the future.

      The Underappreciated Side of Data

      Now, if you happen to be an analytical person, this process will hardly seem rigorous enough to be believable. How can collecting ideas and waiting possibly be a recipe for developing genuine insights? What about first-hand research, surveys, and focus groups? What about trend panels and using a global army of trend spotters? What about the data?

      While it’s easy to assume that data means putting numbers into a spreadsheet or referencing some piece of analytics published in a journal—the truth is that data has a forgotten side that has little to do with devising experiments and far more to do with training your powers of observation.

      When you think about the discipline that goes into scientific research to produce raw data, research can seem like a task only performed by robot-like perfectionists. The truth of scientific research, just like the truth behind many equally complex areas of study, is that experiments aren’t the only way to gather data—nor might they even be the most accurate.

      Trends, like science, aren’t always perfectly measured phenomena that fit neatly into a spreadsheet without bias. Discovering trends takes a willingness to combine curiosity with observation and add insight to create valuable ideas that you can then test to ensure they are valid.

      The one thing that I don’t believe describes this method is, ironically, the one term that comes to many people’s minds as soon as the art of predicting the future is mentioned: “trend spotting.” The term itself is a symbol of the biggest myths we tend to believe about those who predict or describe the future.

      Let’s explore these myths and the reasons behind their popularity.

      The 5 Myths of Trend Spotting

      Trend spotting is not the key to predicting the future.

      Unfortunately, the bias toward trend-spotting has created an unreasonable portrait of the type of person who can put the pieces together and anticipate the future. Consider this infuriatingly common definition for what it takes to become a so-called trend spotter:

      To become a trend spotter, someone usually receives extensive education and training in the industry he or she is interested in working for. After receiving a thorough grounding...the trend spotter could start working in company departments which predict trends.²

      The assumption that you need to be working in “company departments which predict trends” is just plain idiotic—and wrong.

      I believe anyone can learn the right habits to become better at curating trends and predicting the future for themselves. You just need to develop the right habits and mindset.

      Before we start learning those habits, however, it’s important to tackle the biggest myths surrounding trends and explain why they miss the mark so badly.

      Myth #1 - Trends Are Spotted

      The concept of trend spotting suggests that there are trends simply sitting out there in plain sight ready to be observed and cataloged like avian species for birdwatchers. The reality of trends is far different. Trend spotters typically find individual examples or stories. Calling the multitude of things they spot the same thing as trends is like calling ingredients such as eggs, flour, and sugar the same thing as a cake. You can “spot” ingredients, but trends must be curated from these ingredients to have meaning.

      Myth # 2 - Trends Are Predicted by Industry Experts

      It’s tempting to see industry expertise as a prerequisite to being good at curating trends, but there’s also a predictable drawback: blind spots. The more you know about a topic, the more difficult it becomes to think outside your expertise and broaden your view. There’s no single expertise required to curate trends, but psychologists and business authors have long pointed to this “curse of knowledge” as a common challenge for anyone who builds any type of expertise.³ To escape it, you need to learn to engage your greater curiosity about the world beyond what you know and learn to better empathize with those who don’t share your same depth of knowledge.

      Myth # 3 - Trends Are Based on “Hard” Data

      When it comes to research, some people rely only on numbers inserted into a spreadsheet as proof and they conveniently forget that there are two methods to conducting research: the quantitative method and the qualitative method. Qualitative research involves using observation and experience to gather mainly verbal data instead of results from experiments. If you are uncovering the perfect pH balance for shampoo, you certainly will want to use quantitative research. For curating trends, you need a mixture of both, as well as the ability to remember that research data can often be less valuable than excellent observation.