Why I Love/Hate Trend Reports

I just want to be able to actually use them....

‘tis the season right? Trend reports are pouring out from every corner. Do you have a fav? I’m geek enough to have poured over Mary Meeker’s report every year. I seem to remember last year, that someone created a site that aggregated all the reports coming into full bloom at this time. (and thanks to Jennifer Davis - here’s the link to that site) I suppose we could write a GPT or an agent that would go out, find trend reports, summarize them and the collate the reports into some uber-trend distillation. Here’s my question, and I ask it honestly as someone deeply interested in looking both down the road and around corners, but what’s the point?

I had a friend and mentor tell me one time that I needed to write a book - not because anyone would read it, but so I could put “author” on my bio and it would become sort of a calling card. (Yeah, I’m still working on it - me and GRRM). My first thought about trend reports is something along those same lines. I think a lot of the consulting firms produce trend reports as a way to strut their intellectual stuff so to speak. They’re calling cards for the next time one of their consultants walk into a client’s office. Same probably goes for a lot of people working in strategic foresight or futures work. They always look very nice and are usually written well. I want to be clear, I’m not running down anyone or org producing these reports - I think they have value but probably in the way I’m thinking of.

At a former role, one of these industry-specific trend reports came out and I thought it was fairly relevant to our current work. I tried in vain to get some sort of group stood up to be essentially a study group for the report. Everyone could take a section, read it carefully, summarize its content and relate it back to the mission and then we’d have some actionable work. Couldn’t do it. Lots of reasons were given - we’re in the middle of our fiscal year anyway and we haven’t started planning for next year - so we’re all kind of busy and this doesn’t really fit. Or we don’t really have the skill set to go through this kind of data. So that’s one of my issues with trend reports - not with the report itself but with the lack of any kind of organizational structure that will take in data like a trend report, distill it and route the relevant pieces to the right parties. I want to dive into that point for a bit.

What would that structure look like? What would that role look like for that point person? (asking for a friend I swear) There’s a larger question about how external info gets into an org and how it gets shared but let’s go back to the role. Marketing typically plays a role at looking at external data but they have a focus on sources that are relevant to marketing so they might not be paying attention to things which might impact say the technical environment. What other groups typically have people looking at external data? If you’re in retail space like Amazon, you probably have people looking at pricing data. I have this feeling though that its probably not until the Sr Manager/Director level that the programmatic review of external data could become part of your job. Further down than that and you’re just busy doing the work. Does that make sense though? Think about it - by the time someone gets to that level in the org, they’ve been there a while. That might mean they have a deeper understanding of the work of the org and more nuanced appreciation for what might be important to the org but are there downsides? I’d argue that when someone has been on the inside that long, they might also have put on some blinders to what’s going on on the outside. New hires at all levels, can often have a fresher perspective - one that hasn’t yet been burdened by legacy thinking. Now those aren’t value judgements, just observations. So maybe the best way to construct this role would be to create a pair - an longtime or tenured member and a new person. I’d argue they’d have to be on similar levels for one’s voice not to drown out the others.

So now we have scouts looking at and gathering external data. Keep in mind, this isn’t just reading for reading’s sake - this is actively scouting for data that could impact the future of the company or present new possibilities. Now the scouts find information, where does it go? Will we need to think of something what I met in the Pentagon? Let’s see the quickest way to explain this is that there is a section of the Joint Staff called J2 - their focus is joint intelligence. I wonder if there could be some kind of corollary in the org. An org that takes the data from the scouts and disseminates it to the right people/teams. They could provide a filtering function but could also have a wide enough view that they could see orthogonal connections or the adjacent possible when it lights up.

Let’s see - scouts, intel distro org, what else do we need? We need calendars or planning structures that not only allow us to take in this kind of data but to value it and have the authority to take action on it. That probably means we need to stretch planning horizons to say 3 years out. We’d also need to estimate the scope of the potential new idea - that means we’ll need some kind of stage-gate process to vet and evaluate the ideas. Sounds like a lot of work doesn’t it? What’s the likelihood that all this investment pays off? I’d say part of that answer depends on what industry/vertical you’re in. I’m wondering if anyone out there has come across or worked in any org that has a structure like this even if its just parts? Or is that what consultants are for? Make sense of the wider world and then bring solutions in? Just wondering if this isn’t one of the activities that AI/agents couldn’t take on?