The Scanning Process

Trend watching is much like a surfer reading a breaking wave. Initially the long rollers that signal the building of a wave are almost imperceptible and over the horizon, but as they accelerate and reach land the wave begins to build and the surfer can increasingly see which ones are worth riding. Surfers ride the wave until just before it crashes, slows down, dissipates its energy and returns to the sea. S-curves can be of short, medium or long duration and with varying amplitudes and directional shifts, just like waves. 

Sigmoid or S-curves (See Figure 24) are used in trend watching and foresight to visualize growth and declination curves of scan hits. Skilled trend watchers and organizations see the growth early, prepare ahead of time and ride the wave knowing it won't last forever and that they will need to look for the next 'big one' early. 

Figure 33 shows a classic S-curve of Insights extracted from the Shaping Tomorrow database based on lagging and coincident scan hits. In this example the rising concerns regarding dramatic climate change are evident. 

Figure 32: Time-series with Comparisons

Trend extrapolations can also show curves projected into the future using ETA (estimated time of arrival) on the x axis and hence show leading indicator directional shifts before they occur. Figure 1 proved to be a good predictor of the then coming recession before 2007 using this combination of lagging, co-incident, and leading indicators visualized as an S-curve.