Henry Coutinho-Mason is a ‘reluctant futurist’, award-winning social entrepreneur, and author (with Rohit Bhargava) of “The Future Normal: How We Will Live, Work and Thrive in the Next Decade.” Previously, he was the Managing Director of Trendwatching.
I start all of these conversations with the same question that I borrowed from a friend of mine. She lives in Hudson. I just saw her yesterday. She's an oral historian and she uses this question to help people tell their story. But it's such a strong question that I always over-explain it. You know what I mean? And so I want you to know that before I ask it, you can answer or not answer any way that you want. Really, you're in total control. And the question is, where do you come from?
Yeah, it is a great question, because of course, there's the superficial geographical answer, which for me is I come from essentially about an hour northeast of London in the countryside very typical, similar to I guess where you are in upstate New York as I understand it, a couple of hours outside of the hub of the US just a little bit outside of London.
And then I think in terms of the geography, but also in terms of my family I feel very blessed. As I get a bit older, I realize I just had this kind of very stable upbringing and I don't want to do my parents a disservice because I now realize how special this is, but boring in a great way, right?
It was just a kind of very idyllic childhood where everything was pretty stable. I went to school, we had some pretty solid friends. My dad was working in London. My mom was at home a lot when I was younger. And I was thinking I was reading a great piece by Freya India, writing on Jonathan Haidt's blog.
And she has this amazing word, which as you don't publish the recording, I've now lost the exact word of it so I can look up. Anemoia, I can't pronounce that, but I'll send it to you, which is nostalgia for a time or place one has never known. And she's talking about how Gen Z are so nostalgic for a pre-smartphone, pre-social media drenched world.
Which of course is ironic because they never had that, right? So in some senses I look back on my childhood as having this really fortunate, right? We had my memory, like everyone's childhood, right? Or everyone of a certain age, lots of time, lots of space playing outside in the countryside is great.
But then I guess there's also a kind of, And reading a lot of your interviewees, also understanding how that ties to what you're doing now, right? Where are you from? The implication of that is, and how have you got here?
And I think, now I'm immersed in this world of futures, future trends, and what's changing. And so when I was preparing for this conversation. I was thinking about this.
So often people who kind of embrace uncertainty often come from a place of stability. That's not always the way, but there's often a kind of rejection if you don't know, rejection is maybe too strong a word, but there's a kind of a railing against what you have. It's a universal human truism that no one wants what their parents' music, popular culture.
So yeah, as I said now I feel like. Wherever I come from, wherever I ended up is, as I said, in this world of thinking about the future and what's next and constantly, as I said wrestling with uncertainty and I it just struck me when I was, as I said, when I was thinking about this conversation, that probably those foundations or maybe those foundations that I had were quite important in where I've ended up today because, as One of the comments that I often get, I do a lot of speaking and that's my main role is as a keynote speaker and very much one of my positioning is the perpetual optimist, right?
Trying to tell the positive side of these stories and people often come up to me afterwards and say wow, it's especially about AI, which is obviously a huge focus at the moment. It's really interesting and refreshing to hear this other side, this more positive side of some of these changes.
But the question often people ask is like, how do you do that? Like, how do you know? It's a very, I hadn't realized it, but increasingly I hadn't maybe internalized it, but increasingly I realized that I probably am much more optimistic than most people.
And I feel very privileged and I feel that a large part of that probably stems from the stability that I had growing up. And so it's often. Steve Jobs, his favorite famous line, right? You can only join the dots looking back. And so it was a really great question because it got me reflecting on, on, some of these early experiences.
Yeah, I watched, as I mentioned, I watched one of your talks and it's one of those things where you feel like, and we'll talk about this more, but where you start talking about change and I go, Oh, of course he's like standing. This is a conversation about just the unbelievable change. And how do you keep your feet underneath you and know what to do when you're just surrounded by change all the time? And that seems, it feels like a little bit what you're talking about now that your boring childhood put you in a pretty good position to feel okay in the midst of a lot of change. Does that feel fair?
I think so, yeah. And, it's, I don't know you will have spoken to far more people with a far greater diversity of experience than me, because I'm sure I'm sure you can also make the equal case that if you've grown up in extreme turbulence and constant change, you can equally be very comfortable with that.
And we hear so much about immigrant founders being very comfortable with startup life because they've experienced this. And I think that's one of the things that fascinates me about what I do. And it’s one of the reasons why I think we're having this conversation. We both know humans are storytellers and we need stories. We're incredibly adept at crafting stories where stories perhaps don't even exist. Narrative is our superpower, right? So our drug and our superpower.
What's fascinating to me though is again the moment that we're in today, a lot of what I do at the moment is questioning both where things are going, but how we will respond. And I think one of the - I posted about this a few weeks ago - we keep on being surprised at the things that we thought were irrevocably human, that computers seem to be able to do. If not to this equivalent level of humans, but in some cases even better and faster, right?
And creativity and art and all of these things. And so I just think, we are both obsessed with humanity, right? And how we make meaning. How we exist, how we navigate through the world. And it just feels to me like this is one of the most interesting absolute generational moments in this question.
Even more I would say, than the first wave of digital and the internet, which was very much efficiency and doing stuff on a bigger scale, a far more efficient scale, Amazon, right? There's not a lot of humanity in there. In fact, the exact opposite, right? You think of those waves, I suppose social media had an element of it rewiring how we connect with people.
We're definitely not starting from zero, but it feels like this is really challenging to us. A lot of those questions and that's the other thing I love about doing what I do. And again, why we're speaking and why I enjoyed our initial conversation so much. This just feels like a great moment to be asking questions and a really challenging moment if you're trying to give concrete answers.
Because the truth is no one knows. And I guess the other thing that you flagged in our first conversation is this notion of being a reluctant futurist. And I think that's the kind of position which. Of course, there's a little bit of trying to attract attention or at least curiosity over what does that mean?
But I also think it's a mantle that kind of, I feel sits much more comfortably on me than just being claiming I'm a futurist, which I always found very challenging.
Yeah, I want to unpack that because I think those are big words like the futurist and trend. I'm sure you must encounter different ideas about what those things mean and the expectations that they generate. I want to talk about those in a bit, but I want to hear more about where you came from as a, in the middle of your boring childhood. Do you have, did you have, do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up? Did you have an idea of what adult Henry would be doing?
Yeah this is the fascinating thing because, I always said my my, my career Yeah, I studied politics and international relations at university. So I was figuring out like, I was always fascinated by this question, like, how do things work?
Like, how do we work? How do systems work? How does the world work? And then I went to become an economist. Accountant, which is this kind of bizarre, but in the UK, it's less uncommon to go from that kind of social science background into accountancy. I think in the US it's a much, much clearer career path.
You study accounting and then you become an accountant. Whereas in the UK, certainly the grad schemes or they did when I was doing them were much more open to people with these unconventional backgrounds, history and politics and English and stuff like that. These useless degrees.
We're now finding out they're more useful, right? Because it's critical thinking. And then I ended up really by a complete accident of history working with this Dutch guy, Reinier Evers who was the founder of Trendwatching. And I, it was the great financial crisis and KPMG where I was working at the time, they had a kind of furlough scheme before the furlough scheme existed which was obviously awesome if you're 26 and had zero responsibilities, right?
I was like you'll keep my job open and give me three months off, like a sabbatical aged 26. This is incredible. My entire outgoings were a shared room in a shared house in London. So it was very easy. And I ended up, and again, saw this job ad for a senior strategist of this kind of little, Dutch company.
It was one of my favorite newsletters. I'd read it all my way through university and I was applying for a job ad for a senior strategist and I had some time. So I did this. What I didn't realize at the time was this ludicrously overblown job application. I basically wrote a mini trend report.
It was like five trends with some images and thoughts because I just loved it. And essentially you're not senior and you're not a strategist. You're exactly, you take none of the boxes, but you've clearly put so much time into this job application. I feel guilty. And I feel I should meet you for coffee at the very least so I can dismiss you and without feeling too guilty and and I sweet talked him round and I was setting up a nonprofit at the time as well.
When he said, Oh, look, you're not really, you're still not really what I'm looking for, but clearly you're very, you're young, you're enthusiastic, maybe you can do a bit of freelance writing on the side. And I parlayed that slightly incredibly parlayed that into ending up we moved the head office from the Netherlands to London and he was incredibly generous essentially let me take over the company and grow it.
And we worked together for 10 years. And it was just the most incredible adventure. And I feel very lucky. But it was only about a few, probably a few years into this role where I had this memory resurface of so I grew up on the Essex, which is kinda like the Jersey Shore of London or New Jersey, so just outside.
But I grew up on the border of Essex and Suffolk and just near Ipswich was the headquarters of British Telecom BT at the time. And I had this memory resurface. We had someone come and it was like a local big employer right near, near my school. And so they had this guy come and give a talk of I must've been eight or nine and he was the kind of British Telecom's futurist.
I don't remember anything. I just don't remember too much about the talk, but I had this memory resurfaced of me, eight year old me sitting there thinking, This is a pretty cool gig, right? This guy sits there thinking about the future and what might happen and gets to talk to people about it.
And this is, I guess in the late eighties, very early nineties he was probably talking about mobile phones or something and I don't remember the details. It wasn't really the technology that captivated me and I'm sure he was an engineer, right? Would have been a very kind of technical futurist, but I was just something.
Something resurfaced in me decades later, where I, as I said, resurfaced this memory of maybe there was something innate that I always thought was interesting. And again, it just makes me smile. You never know where you will end up or and I think tightly designed careers.
You know you can push out your natural curiosity, right? And that's
You mentioned that you'd been receiving the you were receiving the trend you were on this you were a subscriber to the trend watching Newsletter well as an accountant or what was the where did the what was your first?
Yeah, I was just a student, right? And you remember back in the kind of the early days of blogging it was when you stumbled across these things. I guess like social media today, right? You would find these things and sign up. And it was just very, it was incredibly well written.
I always used to laugh at Reinier. He's a Dutch guy who writes in immeasurably better English than 99 percent of English, native English speakers and writers. It was just very interesting. What was, what do you think was going on? What did, what, it just seems so interesting, unique in that you were an accountant at that time?
I wasn't, I was studying politics at the time. So I think I can't remember exactly when I signed up, maybe around the time I was transitioning from politics. I get as in studying politics and international relations. To accounting back in the day, this was the time when kind of Ted first started coming onto the scene that was like the early days of the big ideas being examined online, or certainly it was the early days for me, right?
When I was coming into this world of being a kind of a prosumer partially it was just consuming it for my own interest. And partially it was like, Where does this sit in, how might this help me? When I was at university, I had a little side business with some friends running club nights, as you do when you're a student.
And we, when I was, I remember when I was there, when we started the business, We used to pay people to stand outside the five libraries on campus and to hand out physical flyers, right? And then Facebook launched in the UK kind of at universities, right?
In my final year. And I I remember overnight It changed our business model because this was the kind of early self-serve text ads, but it went from us spending whatever it was, a few hundred pounds on giving students who didn't really care and half and would bunk off and go and smoke weed.
We used to have to drive around to check they were standing where they said they were standing and hadn't just dumped them all in the bin. And suddenly we were like, wow, here's a platform where like everyone is on this thing. We can target it. Of course, back then it was just only, I don't think you could speak to people from other universities.
So it was like ultra targeted. But we would put out an offer to quote this code on the door to get a free drink or whatever it was. And it was like overnight, even in that small moment, it changed completely the way we operated. It was this tiny business. But it was so I guess.
You're thinking about being an entrepreneur, even if I wasn't, I'm going to be a student, but then I went to join this grad scheme, you're just aware that it was whatever it was, 2006, 2007, everything a bit like the current moment, right? Everything was in flux and hoovering up information about how is this changing?
How might the world change? What are going to be some of the opportunities that to me just feels like a very natural thing to want to do. I'm always amazed when people don't, when people are like, how do you read all this stuff? I'm like, how do you not read this stuff? This is going to affect us.
So yeah. So tell me a little bit about where you are now and what you're doing now? There was, I want to return to talking about trend watching, but Where are you now? And what are you up to?
Yeah. So I left the trend watching business in the pandemic and it's a pretty difficult time for many businesses and it was time for a change there.
And I ended up by complete accident writing a book with this amazing guy, Rohit Bhargava who's based in Washington DC. And we'd met at an event in New York in like October, 2019, I think, or October, November, right? So just a few months before the pandemic and after I left, I took some time off.
I had a young son and my wife's a doctor. So she was on the frontline of a pandemic. And so I took basically six months, pretty much completely off looking after him the first deep dark lockdown and was coming out of that. And just calling people. People calling people I knew right to catch up like if we'd known I would have given you a call like hey what's happening I've been out the game for a few months like everything's changing and Rohit you know I didn't have a particular plan I don't think but I came off that call with Rohit having agreed to write a book with him he was hey you know I was looking at what to do next he was like you've got a bit of time maybe we can write a book together and so I think we laughed you know so many of the you know just like getting into the trend watching business.
It was very opportunistic, right? It was like an opportunity presented itself. Fortunately, I was able to take advantage of it. Yeah, we wrote here, I wrote this book called The Future Normal, How We'll Live, Work and Thrive in the Next Decade? And that was just a really fun exploration of some of it and it's 30 short chapters, each based around a what if question.
And each chapter profiles what we call a featured instigator. So it could be a startup or an individual Maverick entrepreneur or a little organization that is doing something today, which feels like it's from a future a little bit but asking the question, what would it look like if this became normal?
And we call it. The executive airport book it's not 350 pages exploring a big idea that goes ultra deep into it. The big idea, if you like, is that. These instigators, individual innovations Martin Lindstrom has a great quote about small data, these ideas are very small in terms of numbers qualitative data points can really be powerful signals of future important trends, right?
So that's kind of a big idea if you like. But it's. It's not a dense book in that sense. It's an executive airport book because it's just meant to be dipped into and bring things that may be bubbling up on your, the edges of your radar as an executive kind of saying, Oh, okay, now I see how this stuff that's happening over there might be relevant to me.
It could impact my business tomorrow. So it was a very fun book to write because we just got to basically hang out with and meet and talk to people building the future, essentially, and hear their views on it. Yeah, that sounds like a lot of fun.
So that was amazing. We launched it on the main stage at South by Southwest last year, that was an incredible experience that felt like really the world is open for business again. I think it was the first year back, but there might've been a slightly smaller one the year before, but we're fully back to it then.
And since then I've been doing a lot of speaking, it's been very fortunate and especially. We put the book to bed in December. I think it was literally January the 3rd, 2023. So we basically had about a month after ChatGPT came out to finish the book.
So we people always say, did you write the book with the help of AI? And I say, no, actually we'd written 95 percent of it. It was amazing even in its early stage back then it was amazing in helping get feedback and review and stress testing some of the book we fed all the chapters in but even then it was pretty obvious how much this was going to change things.
And so obviously as you can imagine since the book came out, there's been a huge focus on thinking about and talking about AI and how it will change things. And somewhat ironically, and we touched on it in the early answers that kind of, I felt like a real imposter when I first started talking. I had a few clients and one of 'em said can you talk about AI? I thought, God, I don't really know anything about AI. How am I gonna do this? And then I realized that we had a model, we had a technological presentation when we were at trend watching merging tech and so we'd rolled crypto, we'd rolled the Metaverse through this Oh, really?
Through this model that basically said it was New World, Same Humans was the title of a presentation. And it was let's. Let's not focus too much on the technology because that's still very nascent, and we don't know exactly where it will head. But actually, there's a way of looking at emerging technologies that says, what are the core customer needs and wants of the people that you're interacting with your customers and your employees.
And how will this technology change from, right? So we as I said, we'd looked at the metaverse and said, look, really, we don't know where this is going, but it's really, this feels to us like it's really a question about identity and about status and community. So let's look at those if those are important and actually if those human needs are not important to you, then maybe it suggests that the metaverse is not super relevant to you right now.
It's only going to be relevant if those are core things that you do for your customers. And so really that's been my kind of judo move with thinking about AI is to say, look I'm not an AI guy, right? I'm not going to stand here and promise to you that I know where the future of AI is going.
I don't actually think that even the AI people know where it's going. So it's been quite useful, all the infighting with the AI community because it's allowed me to prove that point, right? Like that even the people closest to it don't know where it's going. Yeah. But as I say to my clients, I don't think that actually matters, right?
Because yeah, we can have philosophical conversations about existential risk, right? But very interesting over a glass of wine. But what you need to know as a business leader is how do I prepare my organization for this and how should I be thinking about this? And how should I get my team thinking about this?
How do we equip ourselves? And as I said it's on the one hand, it sounds almost so blindingly obvious. But sometimes I think the biggest, best and biggest ideas are common sense, right? And it's to focus on the things that won't change the things that haven't changed in the last 20 years and that probably still won't change in the next 20 years.
So if you're a bank you're really in the business of trust, security, and there's going to be some convenience and customer experience. If you're a fashion company, you're in the business of identity and status and community and and so hopefully some sustainability, as well and so there's these. This is quite obvious and well known, hopefully within your organization, things that you should be focusing on and getting alignment on those and then constantly then asking the question, and then it becomes much easier to say, how is AI enabling us to do those better and faster and cheaper and all the things we know.
The Future Normal with Henry Coutinho-Mason
But it means you're not sitting there with a blank slate going, how the hell do I keep up with this? And we've all seen those slightly ridiculous examples of in the crypto boom of a Long Island or the long, the iced tea company that renamed itself to a blockchain company did you see that the kind of blockchain iced tea company and suddenly made hundreds of millions on the stock market he's and we laugh about them, but that I think is how businesses approach these emerging technologies. It's wait, or let's just jump on it.
And this is one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you because this idea of trend can be very malformed. Do you know what I mean? And people can think, oh, if something's happening in a, we like that. That seems so maybe just to get back to first principles.
What is a trend for you and how do you, what does it mean to be paying attention to trend and how do you do it for people? I feel like I was always trend adjacent, but I didn't always really understand what people like you would be talking about or how they do it? What do they mean when they say trend? So can you unpack it for me? Cause I love how you talk about it and you make it. And in listening to you, I realized how similar we are. You know what I mean? That you're orienting leadership to needs. You know what I mean? Yeah, but I'd love to hear you just baseline, trend 101. What does it mean?
It's so funny because I always used to introduce my talks on as a trend watching by saying it's the best and worst name for a company ever. Because as you said that when you say the word trend, depending on who your audience is. They will have a completely different expectation in their head, right?
Because there's, if you're talking to a social media marketer, they're thinking one thing, right? What's trending on TikTok, right? Or what's putting hashtags, if you speak to an economist, they're thinking of something else, right? If you're speaking to a CEO, they might be thinking much more kind of McKinsey global trends, right?
So it could be economic, it could be demographic, like it is just a kind of Oh, In a way, a kind of hollow word, right? Not a hollow word, but a word that takes on many meanings And so we used to try and narrow it down by saying consumer trends, but even then is it consumer trends, spending consumer trend music, Hue and Gallup and all of these things an Ipsos, is it market research for us? It was all about as if it's a new way of surfing and existing basic need one or desire, right? That was our kind of our definition. And to your point, About where we overlap. Yeah, it is around uncovering new behaviors and new forms of meaning, right?
New expectations is a word that we used to use a lot, right? What do people expect? What will people expect from you tomorrow? That was our way of again, anchoring and embasing basic human needs and wants was our attempt to get it away from fads, right? Which is, which was always the question that we were asked, what's the difference between a trend and a fad?
And I get it because I think, even more so today, actually there is definitely a two speed world we live in, right? There's the kind of, as you said, social media trend circus, right? You have to jump on! Can you, are you creating ads that respond in moments to something that's happened, right?
And there's a whole strata. And look, it's proven that's true. That is a way to have short term success, right? You can pump out whatever it is, products or campaigns and jump on it. And there's a whole subset of the market who will blow hot to that, right? And then move on to the next thing.
There's also the kind of yeah, as I said, the much slower lane. Which is, where things take years, if not decades, to fully manifest themselves. We're still seeing innovative business models coming out of the mobile space so I think trends move faster and slower at the same time.
I'm happy. I posted at the end of last year. I've spent nearly 15 years writing an annual trend report, right? It's the kind of, it's the currency du jour, right? It's what we do, right? And I realized there was this, you might've seen it, there's this kind of Google drive that goes around every, for the last couple of years.
And these, this group of advertising strategists collect and I think this year it was like 190 trend reports, right? Every automotive company does one, every airline, every agency. see in the world, does it? And I was laughing with Matt Klein, who's the, I think it's the head of trends at Reddit you might've come across him.
He's got a great great blog as well. And I was laughing with him cause we both feel like we've done similar stuff this year. I didn't publish one this year cause I was like, it just feels completely meaningless now. And instead I found much more. interest. Maybe I'm just jaded, right? Old and jaded, but as I said there's only so many times you can cut the same cake in different ways.
Why is it the same cake?
Because it's the big trends he had a piece in his, he does this amazing kind of meta analysis of all the trend reports. And I think one of the things he did was like, I can't remember exactly, but could you tell whether a line is written in 2018 or 2024?
And I think I don't know if he did it or if he asked a bunch of people to do it, but basically the answer was like, it was monkeys throwing darts at the dartboard, right? Essentially, you can't, because the big trends, sustainability, mobility, connectivity - they don't change that quickly, right?
If I think about some of the things that we wrote there's always fuel on the fire and they burn brighter in some sectors than others, some categories and others, some parts of the world things move. But, there are different emphases in different years of course. The last few years, especially in the U.S. you've seen the kind of the anti woke, the rise of anti woke politically, of course, there are definite trends. But again, like, when you're looking at emerging signals and looking into niches, as I would say, niches, as you would say there, there were, there was. The same thing was happening in 2018, right? In 2016, it was probably smaller and it was in different pockets. But for people who exist on the margins, we've probably been writing about similar stuff for a long time, right?
So for me, the place I'm in at the moment, it's much more interesting to ask questions, right? Because I think, and this gets back also to, taking it full circle, why I call myself often a reluctant futurist because I, part of it is, a fear of making overblown predictions about the future, because I think it's it's everyone's cliche to say there's not one future there's multiple futures, etc. But it's also to try and invoke that question of why you're a reluctant futurist from my clients. And then I can say, because I don't want you to just look to me for the answers, right? Because creating the future is a contact sport, right? And you need to be prepared to get in there and be doing it for yourself.
And actually the utility of what I do is if it helps inspire action and again, that's a cliche in our industry but it's like all the best cliches, it's true. Yeah. So the future shouldn't be something that you just read about and think, Oh, that's nice. Then it's a kind of intellectual masturbation. It should be much more active. What do I do with it? If I'm a CPG brand or a finance brand, a healthcare brand, how am I going to change what I'm doing today to take advantage of this trend, this change. And so questions, and especially questions that are sparked by real world initiatives, innovations is why I love what I do. Because, the guys at Ipsos or Kantar and all of these market research firms and Gallup they have they go off and they do huge amounts of data and they're very good at what they do, but we have a different unit of analysis, right? Yours is the conversation, mine is the innovation. But for me, there's something so much more provocative and accessible and interesting about coming with that qualitative insight. If it's data, you always get into conversations about where the data has come from and is it going to scale and yada, yada. Yeah. Whereas if you put someone for you, as I say, with a conversation for me with an innovation, if it's okay here's three things we've seen in the world, maybe from a different part of the world, maybe from a different demographic, maybe from a different industry in the adjacent industry, but now I've shown you that we're having a conversation around, might be AI, might be customer experience, might be around brand but what do you think now?
Like, how does this change our expectations and our assumptions? No one, in nearly 15 years, I've never met anyone who doesn't have a point of view. They can be the CFO, they can be the CTO, they can be very technical, they can say they don't know anything about brand, about innovation, about whatever, right? But if you show them real world examples, and say these guys are doing things pretty differently, aren't they? What do you think? Could you do that? Even if it's in the rejection of those, they, everyone always has a point of view, right? And you get a comp you get a conversation or amongst stakeholders, amongst decision makers going in a way that I feel is much richer and is much more.
Open minded is much more opportunity focused than if you just bring data. So I think it's fascinating. I really love doing what I'm doing and it's, I feel incredibly lucky.
Yeah. I was going to ask you, what is the joy in what you're doing? Like when you, what's the, what's your favorite part? What do you love about what you do?
It's when someone comes up and says You've helped me see the world differently. There's, you've helped me crystallize something or you've given me a new way of seeing the world that I'm now going to take back in my day today and feel more confident, more empowered about the future.
That's exciting. That's really exciting, right? To have the ability to change people's worldview, especially at the moment. I always say, we feel overwhelmed, we're constantly hit with this kind of truism, which I'm not even sure if it is a truism because there are lots of points in history where you could make the same case. The world's moving faster than ever, right? But this is the sense that we have is we're all slightly drowning. We're all like, how do we keep up? And being able to keep up. Help people go, okay, but that's up there. The river is very frothy, but actually I can stand in the current - if this isn't torturing my analogy, right? I can stand in the river and feel my feet are on slightly more stable ground. And I know what to look for. That's pretty cool. That's a huge privilege, right? And so there's that. And then the other thing I've always loved working in a b2b space. Because, Trendwatching was 30 people. Right now, I'm independent, or I have a couple of collaborators, Rohit and this amazing girl Natalia here in the UK, where we're doing this AI thing. Working in ultra small teams, but I love the B2B space where you work with often huge companies, right? The Unilevers of this world or whoever the Mastercards, right? Who touch literally billions of people every day. And I'm not saying I always see the direct impact, but it's cool and it's very inspiring when you work with people who you know have real power and influence to shape the world that we live in.
And I always say that's one of the reasons why I feel so passionately about being optimistic. To take the conversation full circle, we hear so much about the dystopian future that is inevitably around the corner. If Hollywood and the mass media would have anything like the world is going to be a miserable place. I saw a great tweet the other day, “There’s no business book ever where it's, “I woke up, I had an idea, everything was fine.” That's not the way the world works, but it's also not interesting to us. So I get why the kind of dystopian future occupies so much of our mental headspace. And as I say, the media, news media and Hollywood kind of media. But as I say, if that is the only future we imagine, then that's the one we'll create. And that is a crying shame. Of course, I'm not naive. There are like an infinite number of bad use cases and they are bad, shocking, etc. And they're not helpful with us climate wise with a psychologically wise for teens, etc. But there is also, there's always a good use case for these technologies as well, right? A use case that makes the world. fairer, cleaner, healthier. And so I think it's really important that people in positions of power are aware of those positive use cases. And we tell those stories and we celebrate them because we need more of them.
Yeah. I have a few questions packed into one. One is what is the proper use of trend in this moment now, the AI. It occurred to me when you mentioned a date, January 2023. You placed ChatGPT on the calendar. I realized that I hadn't done that yet in my own mind. I know now that 2006-7 is when social media arrived, and marked a beginning of an era. So I hadn't put ChatGPT on my calendar yet.
One of the things I love about how you talk about trends is that it's the expectation. I'm stealing all your language and playing it back to you. That we live in the expectation economy. Yeah. It's not futurism. It's that futurism, properly applied, is a now-ism, right? So what My fundamental issue with AI has been that there's been no context given to generative AI, right? They just didn't position it in any way. And so the question of expectations has been left untended in a way and this is all the confusion.
It's almost the structure of the conversation. Nobody took responsibility for setting any expectations about it. Maybe the people who are responsible don't know what those expectations are. And so how do you make decisions when even the hope of expectation isn't really there in a way I feel like with the internet, maybe.
There, there was, there were constraints. You could have a conversation about what it was. Now I'm meandering away. So what's the proper role of trend in this space? And how do you think about expectations when it all feels so confused and unclear?
No, I love it. And I think it's a really important point. And I saw your interchange online actually with I forget who it was but I saw your comment about this kind of expectation mismanagement and it was,
What do you make of that?
Yeah. A hundred percent think, I think you're entirely right. And the chat interface was very confusing to people because it was almost a Google search box. And if you remember like Ask Jeeves, that was almost how search was initially positioned, right? But it wasn't, the technology wasn't there. So then, it then parlayed into this like one shot, right?
Like we'll give you 10 blue links because actually we can't quite answer your question. But probably you. We'll get close enough in those 10. And then we got conditioned to just go for the first one. And then we got as you said, it came into GPT. So I think we're still figuring it out.
And you're entirely right. I think some of that will be because, and again I'm not an AI person, but my understanding is it's like, there's a whole constituency of them, in the AI community who whether they're Doomerists or doomsday cult or it's going to save the world.
They almost don't care because they're looking three steps ahead and they're like, it doesn't matter what the human interface is because very soon we'll overcome Madden. It'll just be like so I do think that is part of it actually. That, that they almost we're just the messy middle that they don't, they want to get past.
Yeah. So I think that's possibly part of it. And that's actually one of the things You know, to bring it back to something that I'm working on at the moment. So with this illustrator Natalia, I started working with her about a year ago, cause we were at an event and we were talking about how funny it was that we were both humans, right?
We were really very focused on the human side of this. And she was an illustrator and I'm obviously giving presentations and we were just telling him, we were like, so funny, all we're doing is AI stuff, right? So we're doing as outsiders, this is fascinating to us. And then we thought maybe there's an opportunity to collaborate.
And we. Try and make this topic much more accessible, because that was our superpowers doing that through word, through drawing, drawing some visuals. And mine was through words and stories. And so we did these little illustrated guides to AI and the innovation opportunities, and that was fun.
And then we've, in the last few months. I was having dinner with a guy who I've spoken for in Vegas, right? In the U.S. He runs a U.S. events business and he was talking about posts coming out of a pandemic, all of the clients he was like, I like the content that you've got but what my clients really want is why live and why together this is what we've got to answer for for, At events these days, right?
It's not enough to just have something that you could watch as a TED talk, right? That doesn't cut the mustard anymore. And one of the big trends that I've been talking about, and one of the big themes that I'm focused on is what I think is one of the big unexplored implications of AI, which is around how it will unlock what I've been calling crowd powered creativity.
And that's not to say. that everyone's going to be a designer and everyone's going to be a musician. And I think, again, this is the big myth when it comes to AI is it takes things from zero to 10 and you just need to press a button and you get this output. I think that's entirely wrong.And I think like many people it's a tool rather than a finished product. So I think professionals using these tools will always outperform people that just come and type in a prompt and take the first thing that they answer. Because it's experts, expertise and taste that's really going to be the differentiator.
What we've done is created this little web app that we can use in presentation. I'll present some trends and then say to people, let's actually explore this idea in real time and ask you to visualize the future of your industry, right? Or your category or whatever it is, right? Your job potentially. And let's doodle them and draw them and then we'll use it literally on paper, right? So it's a very analog exercise and give people one minute and they drew stick people, right? And it's super basic. And then we use AI to turn these doodles into professional grade, kind of high quality images, right? And the reason why I digress and talk about this is because when you talk about expectation, this idea that it's an answer machine, which is what so many people have in their head, right? And it's, as you say, the expectation that we transfer from Google, and from computers in general. Excel is an answer machine for numbers, right? You have to program it, but fundamentally it's an answer machine. And I think why we're using that is because it gives people a very visceral experience, but it can also be a creative partner.
And I say the reason, one of the reasons why we choose doodles is because everyone thinks they can't draw. Yeah, as I say, most people would say there are fairly bad to moderate visual communicators. Especially in business, right? Of course, if you're a professional artist, but like you ask a room full of business people, Are you a good visual communicator? And most people get a bit embarrassed. And the reason why we use it is because again, it's not that you are pushed out of the process, right? It's not that AI can come up with every idea but it can help you express your ideas in new ways, and help you give you skills that you didn't have yesterday.
We were doing a session the other day and someone drew a, we're asking people to draw a job of the future and someone drew a robot stylist. And it instantly made the stylist a woman. Someone else had drawn a coffee shop where they have robot baristas. We were talking about the role of humans in, in customer service. And a sommelier, it went to an old white guy, and it must've been picking up that word.
Getting into things visually is, for me, it's more about an exploration and a jumping off point, a creative sparring partner, or however you want to phrase it. For me, that's a very interesting use case around generative AI and how we bring new languages of creativity and new inputs to the table. Whether that's people who felt excluded from the corporate innovation happens in PowerPoint slides today, right? That's a very narrow reductive medium. It could be that some people prefer drawing, but also. When you draw, you share different ideas, right?
So it's about increasing the diversity of both people and ideas and creative voices. There was a great quote, and I can't remember who said it. We need to find the use cases where this kind of hallucination is a feature, not a bug. Yeah, and it's those it's going, in a long winded rambling way of going back to your original comment, what are the expectations? And a number of people have observed this, right? AI is bad at all the things we think computers are good at. Yes. Calculation factfulness, right? And good at all the things we think humans are good at kind of creativity and connections, et cetera.
So, you're totally right. It is fundamentally. How do we recalibrate a generation of digital expectations is interesting, exciting, but also challenging in equal measures.
I guess I'm curious. I always have this narcissistic question, which is what's the role and you mentioned small data. What is the role of qualitative or of small data in your, you use the word signals to talk about how you learn and how you research. I just love to hear you talk about research and how you. You're sitting there. How does one research detect trends? How do you do what you do? Yeah, so for me, it's Five minutes left, please, Henry.
No for me, it's very simple, and I'd actually love to flip that question back at you as we get to. This probably came out of writing a newsletter. So we had a daily newsletter that went out depending on which list we were using, but anywhere from 50 to 100,000 people each day, and from globally and different roles. And so the question that I always used to ask You know, the team and the writers of stuff when they were putting stuff forward is could you, okay, maybe we won't hit everyone on that list every single day. But like, when something, when we're going to push something into someone's inbox, could they call their team or their client into a meeting and have a 20 minute discussion about this?
That's fundamentally the question that I'm always asking is like, when I've read this, could I'm British, right? Could I sit in the pub with a kind of a friend of mine or a bit of business contact and say, what does this mean? What does this mean for people?
What does this mean for society? What does this mean for businesses? What does this mean for organizations? Could be governments, could be nonprofits, right? How are we going to do something differently? tomorrow because of what we've read and thought about and discussed, right? That's essentially the bar, right? Is this enough to spark a conversation? Now, of course and actually, you know what, going back to, that's what I have found ChatGPT incredible for, right? And I was sitting with someone the other day, I'd, I used to love those conversations, right? When we were part of a team, we used to have eight or 10 analysts and it was a couple in New York based in the U.S., a couple in Singapore dotted around Europe, like one in Nigeria for a couple of years.
And so we would have a Slack channel where it was that we were literally having that conversation basically every day. And you just get so much out of that. And I was talking to someone, I was like, I don't know if I could have, Stayed independent for as long if ChatGPT hadn't come around, right?
For me. It's a relatively new experience. I had 10 years with that team, and that feedback. Because now ChatGPT performs that role for me, so I don't get it to do my writing. But it's a sparring partner and actually going back to Matt Klein he had a great in my like custom instructions, right? You can load the backstory that you want to give it.
So I have two, two things. So I created my own little trend analyst GPT bot, right? And I loaded my books in as PDF. And I said this is my body of writing, like use that to help me think about, so I'm going to drop a news story and a press release. And I want you to help me think about this, right?
And actually, I almost use it as the anti prompt. So like, when I say what should I think about this new healthcare innovation or whatever, right? The stuff it comes back with first that's the obvious stuff, right? The world's gonna get more personalized technology's gonna be everywhere I know I can't write about that because that's obvious, right?
So it almost pushes me, like, how do I go further? And then Matt Klein has a great thing, which is called the overlooked framework, which is like kind of seven or eight questions about what's the dark side of this innovation. What's the unexplored side? And I'll share it with you afterwards, but it's really cool.
And again, you can just free load that into ChatGPT and get it to constantly explore that. So it's like the, it's like the team that you never knew you had. It's very cool.
Yeah, that's amazing. I love the notion of an overlooked framework. I feel like that really sparked my curiosity. And hearing you talk about your, how you're using ChatGPT is also really inspiring too.
I'm a little bit behind you and playing around, but I can see where that would be really powerful. Listen, we're right up at the end of the hour. I So I really, it's been wonderful to connect with you in this sort of the magic of the ether in this world that we live in. So thank you very much.
And it's just been a real pleasure listening to you talk about what you do. And yeah, thank you so much
Thank you so much. I'm Peter. Honestly, I'm a huge fan of your newsletter. So I love it. So thank you. It's an incredible honor to be talking with you.Bye.
