In Forecasting, Mini Is Big

A Book Review by David Pearce Snyder

Technology forecaster John Vanston explains why trends that are less than “mega” are very much worth watching.

Minitrends: How Innovators & Entrepreneurs Discover & Profit from Business & Technology Trends by John Vanston, with Carrie Vanston. Technology Futures Inc. 2010. 189 pages. Paperback. $19.95.

Minitrends would have merited an enthusiastic review solely for having introduced a useful new term-of-art for the futurist’s toolbox. But the book offers much more than that. In Minitrends, Technology Futures Inc. chairman John Vanston (writing with TFI’s media and marketing director, Carrie Vanston) has distilled insights and techniques developed over a highly successful 40-year career in technology forecasting into a 189-page do-it-yourself guide to the early identification of those emerging developments that eventually become the “next big things.”

Vanston explicitly offers this guidance for three different levels of users: (1) individuals and group practices, (2) small and medium-sized enterprises, and (3) large firms. This “tracking” of content continues throughout the book, and is, in my experience, a unique (and highly desirable) feature in a book on futures methodology.

The author defines “minitrend” as any trend—technical, social, economic, demographic, legal, etc.—that is just beginning to emerge and that, although not yet acknowledged by the media or the marketplace, has the potential to become nationally significant within two to five years. Eliciting such potentially valuable foresight out of today’s information maelstrom requires considerable self-discipline and commitment, but is an intellectual pursuit well worth the effort.

The book is roughly divided into thirds. The first third describes how minitrends fit into the perceptual frameworks by which futurists view the world and presents a detailed guide to public sources where evidence of minitrends may be gleaned, gauged, and validated.

Vanston’s next three chapters spell out how different types of practitioners can make use of minitrends. Examples of current market-changing developments are offered for each scale of enterprise. Finally, the last four chapters deal with practical steps to take marketplace advantage of minitrends.

While this book is specifically about a futures research methodology, it is also an unabashed business book. The authors’ expressed purpose in writing Minitrends was to enable entrepreneurs at every level of the workplace to take advantage of the foresight that they, themselves, can gather from the “infosphere.”

Throughout the book, Vanston enlivens his narrative with dozens of vignettes from his decades of practice as a tech forecaster. A valuable side benefit of reading Minitrends is discovering the diversity of clientele and assignments that characterizes contemporary applied futuring.

The author reminds us (several times) that the “Minitrend Adventure” is not just a step-wise process; it’s a mind-set that must be maintained at all times, especially now that we are passing through a period of accelerating technical, economic, and demographic change. One minitrend can be trumped by another—or redoubled! The commercial marketplace is complex, volatile, and difficult to anticipate. For this reason, much of the final four chapters of the book deal with selecting specific minitrends for marketplace action, developing an “exploitation scheme,” and putting the scheme into action.

While corporate readers will no doubt be interested in the author’s lucid depiction of the process by which futurists help institutions come to terms with the need for innovation and change, it is the first four chapters that offer the most exciting potential for the future. In those chapters, Minitrends portrays the learnable mind-set of futures research, not on the basis of visionary principles or rigid rules, but in attitudes, in habits of thinking about the world, and in the collective events of daily life that make up the forecastable continuities of human enterprise.

The patterns of thought that Vanston describes, the modalities by which emerging trends manifest themselves, and where to find corroborative information are discussed in such straightforward, jargon-free language that anyone with a college degree could use the first four chapters of Minitrends as a primer for teaching himself or herself to become a competent trend spotter: i.e., applied futurist.

Because the early identification of emergent long-term trends poses such enormous marketplace value, it seems not improbable that traffic in minitrends will become a significant online phenomenon during the next two to five years. I am also prepared to believe that much of that traffic will be generated by freelance futurists who learned their trade by reading this book.

About the Reviewer

David Pearce Snyder is principal of The Snyder Family Enterprise, 8628 Garfield Street, Bethesda, Maryland 20817. Web site www.the-futurist.com. He is also THE FUTURIST magazine’s contributing editor for lifestyles.

Reviewer’s disclosure: I have known John Vanston since 1973, and during the first 15 years of our respective careers, we collaborated on projects for a number of clients. He asked me to assess a pre-publication copy of Minitrends and to provide an “endorsement” to put on the flyleaf of the book. While critiquing the work of a friend and colleague is fraught with awkward possibilities, my review rests entirely on the merits of the book. —DPS