About Metatrends
As the first decade of the 21st century comes to a close it’s clear that there are profound changes underway in the systems that govern and condition our lives. ONE of the MOST significant surely is that what people think, believe and intend, is OUT THERE, on the web.
Never before have we had the opportunity to discover people from such a vast repository. The World Wide Web offers an opportunity to uncover where people’s ideas and sentiments are headed and what they think about their changing lives. Never before have we had instant access to 8 billion pages worth of thoughts, ideas, or belief.
The METATREND is a way of dealing with the web’s data stream. Metatrends are, we hope, shorthand for understanding change – as perceived by many millions of people.
If you imagine…. in a recent study we dealt with 20,000 opinions expressed not in response to a questionnaire but voluntarily and spontaneously in response to issues of the day. We didn’t need to preselect the people who made those comments – the people selected their moment to engage in a public debate.
They are responding to big ideas about brands and about politics. In this case the big idea is that the world will resurface from recession deeply changed, and it involves understanding what recession means to future levels of trust between people and business. There is a trend towards distrust – or at least that is the assumption. What we explore in this situation are the real dynamics of people’s ideas – the trend in how people are thinking is what we call a Metatrend.
It encapsulates how people think and provides a signal to how they might act. What we also try to do with Metatredns is udnerstand the emerging ideas landscape – the ideas that might make a difference to how people think, ideas around which people are beginning to congregate.
A Metatrend is a trend that is parsed through the prism of web opinion and attitude.
What we present is a first approach to seeing trends through the eyes of people who routinely blog, comment, tweet and search the web.
Why bother? Apart from the desirability of understanding large-scale opinion, in a parallel project The Conversation Group is witnessing increased interest in ideas such as creative destruction and system renewal, indications that people are seeking a new description for their experience and aspirations.
That search should be central to the business planning of any company. It represents a changing mindset, and a new approach to production and marketing of products, services and ideas.
In this blog we have our first go at defining that change and grouping mahor dieas about how the world is reshaping. It’s an ongoing project. Eventually we hope the project will help leaders, corporate and political, to create the policies and products that respond to what people are seeking.
You can see a full version of our first thoughts here in a brief paper written by Haydn and Ted Shelton, founding partner at TCG.
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