OD TOOLKIT

Read Change 5: Trends

The American author John Naisbitt has developed a method for gaining an impression of future developments. This is based on a content analysis of a large amount of print media. The news segment of the newspaper is a closed system. For economic reasons the relative amount of space for news (relationship between advertising and news) changes little in the course of time. If a topic is added, something else has to be left out.

By keeping careful track of the new and the omitted topics, we can in a certain sense get a picture of the changing market share of competing social aspects.

Naisbitt's content analysis makes use of a monthly evaluation of 6,000 local newspapers. The shifts he reveals in this manner, he refers to as trends or megatrends.

Trends appear gradually, fads are faster and less long-lasting, they have more to do with fashion. Trends are massive shifts in what is regarded as important by public opinion, regardless of their "objective" importance.

In his book Naisbitt gives impressive examples of the operation of trends. He points out, for instance, that interest in drugs in the news has dropped dramatically in the past ten years, although the problem itself has become progressively greater. In other words, there is no relationship between the attention the topic receives and its objective or "real" importance.

Another example from Naisbitt: in the sixties the "space" for discrimination was filled with worries about racism; in 1969 sexism began to appear in the columns. By 1975 half the space was devoted to racism and half to sexism. From 1977 onwards these topics lost out to increasing concern about discrimination against older people. In the end, two-thirds of the space for discrimination was filled with reports about the problems of "ageism" and the remaining third was shared by racism and sexism. However, as soon as the US Congress raised the age of compulsory retirement in industry from 65 to 70 and abolished the limit for the public sector, stories about age discrimination began to decrease.

Naisbitt wrote Megatrends in 1982 and Megatrends 2000 in 1990. His first book was concerned with the following trends, which, in his view, "shaped the eighties":

From an industrial society to an information society
From imposed technology to technology processing
From a national economy to a world economy
From short term to long term
From centralisation to decentralisation of power
From welfare to self-help
From representational democracy to direct democracy
From hierarchies to networks
From north to south
From limited choice to multiple choice

Megatrends 2000 is about the last ten years prior to the 21st century. In that decade, the "most important trends that affect our lives" are, according to Naisbitt:

The explosive development of the world economy
A renaissance in art
The rise of free market socialism
Global lifestyles and cultural nationalism
The privatisation of the welfare state
The rise of the Pacific Rim countries
The decade of women at the top
The age of biology
The religious revival in the third millennium
The triumph of the individual

The most all-encompassing trend playing a role in social developments in a large part of the world is Naisbitt's number ten, individualisation. Many "sub-trends" derive from this: quality, success, emancipation of the citizen, etc.

It can be useful for an organisation to research which trends are important to its own field of operation. What are the non-trivial developments which can be derived from trends. And to what extent does a development bring opportunity or danger.