What’s Next: Top Trends

As part of the Bookends scenario project looking at the environments public libraries might have to contend with in the year 2030, Oliver Freeman and myself have come up with a set of playing cards to help individual libraries test the resilience of their current strategy.What I especially love about these cards is that they deal with worlds that are made up of a combination of trends that can sometimes be contradictory.

Each player is dealt seven cards and must then collect one card from each of the seven different suits (ideas, nature, society, politics, economy, culture and technology). The order of play is based on rummy. Each player picks one car from the pack and throws one away. The first player to get a full set across all seven suits wins and the rest of the players then have to use this imaginary world to create an adaptive strategy. If anyone wants a set of cards they will be available from the State Library in due course.

I’ve just been talking with NUS Services (the commercial arm of the National Students Union essentially) about scenario planning and we spent a few minutes (literally) speculating about future scenarios. Here’s an amalgamation of a few suggestions, which I don’t think is too far off. If I get a chance I’ll try to flesh this out a little over the next few weeks.

If you are unfamiliar with scenario planning each axis represents a critical uncertainty (a trend whose direction is unclear at this stage). In this case one axis is built around a general societal attitude while the other is built around how education (learning) and information (anything) is delivered. At the moment the dominant attitude is individualism and education/information is slowly shifting towards the digital and remote.