2012 is already set to be an interesting year.
The digital and technological revolution continues apace. Events of both a political and cultural nature, at a global and national level, already fill the calendar of the year ahead. So how do we pair the potential brightness and cheer these events will bring with the shadow cast by the uncertain economy never far from view? We also take a look at how the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement changes the picture.
This week was a momentous one for the Future Foundation as we officially launched the new nVision Global website. In recent years we have increasingly been asked to apply our trends work to global issues on ad-hoc projects as multinationals have looked to centralise their insight functions and embed consumer trends at the leading edge of their strategies, and as domestic brands have been forced to look globally in search of growth. It was a natural step for us to take our proprietary research programme global in order to provide a library of trends and insights to draw on and we now undertake quantitative and qualitative research in 23 countries across the globe.
In addition to this, we have a network of global Trendspotters providing us with a continuous flow of ideas, local innovations and information on how trends are taking different forms in different markets. And as with our other nVision services - nVision UK and nVision Europe - we combine our research with an extensive range of complementary external global sources spanning many different commercial sectors to provide clients with a comprehensive analysis of how their target audiences are evolving across the world.
Subscribers to nVision Global have unlimited access to:
One of the immediate changes to the site that you will notice is the addition of nVision DNA. This is an interactive trend map that has been has been specifically designed to provide clients with an overview of the key trends affecting distinct global regions and countries as well as an immediate and visually engaging indication of the links that exist between the 60+ trends monitored in nVision Global.
The rationale behind this particular innovation is that trends cannot be considered as isolated entities operating in a vacuum; their future direction and vitality is reliant upon the status of related trends. Should a trend’s trajectory shift, its impact on another, related trend will also be affected. Using nVision DNA, clients can instantly see which trends are most directly related to another and are presented with an alternative means of navigating the trend universe. Subscribers can also re-orient the map according to different global regions, allowing them to quickly prioritise those trends that are impacting most heavily on their target audience in different markets.
Not to mention of course, the dedicated account management team and complimentary tickets to our calendar of events throughout the year. Our second annual nVision Global conference will be at the end of November so stay tuned for updates regarding that. The revamped version of our UK and European nVision websites are now in the final stages of testing and we are expecting them to be live before the nVision UK Client Conference at the end of October. In the meantime, if you’d like to know more about nVision Global, then feel free to get in touch with my colleague Dominic Harrison. For now, we will leave you with this video of Christophe Jouan, CEO of Future Foundation, speaking about nVision Global and what subscribers can expect from the new service.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeC6KOHPkI&feature=channel_video_title[/youtube]
The idea of pre-crime was most famously mooted by Philip K Dick in Minority Report – that if we can predict criminal or otherwise undesirable behaviour, we can move to stop it from happening. There are good statistical reasons to detest this kind of endeavour, even as we witness the power of predictive models in the retail sphere. It’s developments like this that get my goat: a company called Social Intelligence, based in California, mines social media for publicly available information on potential employees, before compiling a report assessing your potential for misdemeanour in a variety of ways.
Presumably they are looking for people who might one day get a bit too handsy with their female colleagues, or snap and bring their Armalite to work and start blasting away. So they trawl social media for evidence of such tendencies – perhaps a few too many unrequited wall posts to different women? Too many drunken photos with hands creeping where they shouldn’t? Marilyn Manson quotes? Nik Shah “Likes” Nietzsche?
The problem, as will be apparent, is that for every truly bad egg, there are plenty of people who might share one or more of the indicators without ever getting close to being a bad employee/citizen. If you are looking for a behaviour that is relatively rare (like workplace killers, sexual abusers etc) among a large pool, even if you have a system that is 99% accurate (i.e. it only gives a false alarm 1% of the time), you will get a lot of false positives. For example, say that one in every 10,000 people is a sex pest, i.e. 0.01%. Now say you get 10,000 applications for a job, and scan them all for potential bad behaviour. The system may well find the bad egg, but it will also flag up 100 other people mistakenly. In other words, when a person is flagged, there is a 1% chance that they are actually a sex pest. Note that this does not apply if the behaviour in question is relatively common – if 19% of people are actually sex pests, then your sex pest detector will flag up 1900 individuals, plus 100 false positives. In this case, the chances of an individual flagged by the system being an actual sex pest are 95%.
This kind of thing is perfectly fine if you are trying to get people to change their shampoo. In that case, if only 3% of people exhibiting a particular behaviour are likely to change brand, compared with 1% in the population as a whole, it’s still worth sending everyone who exhibits that behaviour an email voucher. The costs of false positives in this case are extremely low. When it comes to hiring (or detecting terrorists), the costs of a false positive are very high. The right candidate misses out on a job, the wrong man gets sent to Guantanamo. Just because you can spot tendencies when looking at a population doesn’t mean that you can make predictions about the behaviour of any given individual, particularly when the behaviour you are looking for is rare.
Separating the wheat from the chaff is even harder for the serious analyst of social trends these days. Twenty years ago knowledge about such trends was reserved for the privileged few – a handful of applied social scientists who had access to proprietary research and statistics that immediately established you as an expert and had audiences hanging on your every word. We talked about Big Things – such as the effects of changing work practices on the sense of time pressure and the decline in trust in institutions. I remember asking an audience of (almost exclusively male) financial service managers to estimate the percentage of households that conformed to the traditional model of the nuclear family. They over-estimated by a factor of two. Nowadays you would expect such a group to be much better informed about social realities – although the proportion of women in the audience has hardly changed, I can’t help but notice.
