If you have ever gone mountain biking then you know if you are looking down your front wheel, you aren’t looking out far enough ahead. You’ll be at the obstacle by the time you see it. Many businesses today do just that. They look directly at the marketplace KNOWNS and react to what is immediately happening. Unfortunately it’s often too little, too late and this strategy doesn’t allow you to see around the bend in a constantly changing environment.
A better strategy, just like mountain biking, is to pick a line; get your head up and look ahead 7-10 feet in front of your path. If your company is looking ahead, at GLIMPSES, you are able to more easily see obstructions and changes in the marketplace that will impact your business. Allowing you to move more effectively toward where you want to go and avoid where you don’t.
PINE routinely sees industry trends reports that call out specific themes and presents them as if they are new and you could react to them. However, to us many of these themes are things that the market has already reacted to. What they call trends, we call KNOWNS.
In an effort to stay ahead we believe you have to look for GLIMPSES into the future. PINE uses principles from strategic forecasting like STEEP to create and identify GLIMPSES. We then create design fictions to illustrate how opportunity could be captured by our clients from these KNOWNS and GLIMPSES.
This approach has been successfully applied to much of our client work. It is at the core of our OPPORTUNITY-CENTERED DESIGN where the overlap of Knowns and Glimpses creates future success.
If you would like to learn more about our process, how we view the world or find the KNOWNS, GLIMPSES and opportunities right for your business, please reach out. P.S. And if you like mountain biking, here’s the link to a short highlight reel from the 2019 Red Bull Rampage in Utah.