Beginning

I'm setting up this blog, not just for now but for my future life. 12 years running my own firm has left me fulfilled on many levels - and yet not.

I've been a social trends researcher for many years - long enough for some of my earlier predictions to be tested by reality.

In 1997 I predicted that by 2007 we'd be carrying all our books in a single digital reader - while it was the shape of a laptop or a kindle or an iPad, it was way fatter - completely missed the whole move to slim lines.

And I predicted to a postal organisation that the last personal letter would be sent by post in 2017. . . so that one's on track, at least in this country.

Adding it all up I do better than the 20% hit rate that is apparently normal for prediction, but the fact remains that prediction is hard and ultimately silly because most of us just look at a prediction and go - hmmh.

There's probably less than a thousand people in the world that can actually use a prediction properly - to design products or services to come on stream in the future. And most of them don't really need any help.

What my social trends research has left me with is a clear understanding of how people operate. So I've found it increasingly easy to say things like: people aren't like that / this isn't going back to how it was / cycles are usually actually spirals .. and stuff like that.

So I hope to be able to use that skill to help people to ground today's decisions in the realities of human nature.