I’m having a clearout of my office and I keep stumbling on various things. Here’s the cover from someting I did 10 years ago, along with a list of 10 trends for 2010. They seem pretty on the ball for 2020. Someone once said that I’m 10-years ahead of everyone else, which perhaps could be read as meaning that anything I say now can’t be assessed, or isn’t meaningful, until 2030.
I’ve had a bit of an epiphany. I was talking to someone last week about what the future of retail might look like…in 2020. That’s right, how the future will look in 48-months. Such a timescale automatically pulls anyone back into now and the projection of current trends and technologies forward. This is when reality destroys your thinking. I was polite and hopefully helpful but that’s me done. I’m no longer interested in the year after next or anything less than a decade away. As far as possible I am going to stop using trends as an excuse to talk about the future and think about the real future instead. From now in it’s timescales of 2030, 2040 and 2050 .