Lead by prediction
One day a little girl was watching her mother cook, and she asked her mom why she cut the end off of her pot roast. She said she didn’t know and that her mother had always done that, so they asked the little girl’s grandmother why she cut the end off of her pot roast. The grandmother said that her mother had always done it, so the trio asked the great-grandmother as to her reasons, and she said that her pan was too small for her pot roast, so she had to cut the end off.
“We do that too much, …” Lunenfeld says. “People look at rules as, ‘This is just the way it’s always been.’ I think studying anthropology and cultures over time, really not too much is permanent, and there aren’t too many things that are completely immovable, so it’s always nice to remind yourself that one person can come up with an idea that can radically change the world.”
When you — or your trends group — find an idea, he says you have to take a risk and lead by prediction, which is the next key to fostering change.
“The power of prediction is pretty underestimated,” he says. “If you’re facing a challenge, and you’re laying out a vision and saying, ‘This is where we will be or this issue is happening now, but in three months, this won’t be happening because of X, Y and Z,’ once you lay out a bold mission, people will naturally march to that. They want to. It works the same way in reverse, so if negativity is breeding, people tend to quickly spiral in that direction, as well. Leading by prediction is a refreshing way to overcome that challenge.”
To do this, take notice of what’s happening around you.
“One [key] is being able to look outside the walls of this company at what’s going on in the industry and the world and looking at the trends [that] the trends group is bringing forward and peeling that back for meaning,” he says.
Good examples right now are social networking sites, such as Facebook an
d Twitter. Look at these sites on a more macro level to predict how they have been used, how they’re changing, how they’re changing lives and how they’ll be used in the future.
“Pull that out and lead that out as a prediction and say, ‘This will continue to grow, or this will continue to shift, or this trend will morph into X, Y and Z,’” Lunenfeld says. “It’s about industry trends and translating the outside world for the company and vice versa — taking what’s going on in this company and giving that story to our clients and the rest of the industry. It’s not being afraid to look at the indicators and make a prediction of where things will go because nobody wants to work with a partner who’s afraid to make a prediction and make a bet on something.”
You can’t be afraid to be wrong either, so plan for that scenario.
“You try to manage all the risk,” he says. “There’s a big difference between mistake and risk. Risk is something that you plan for, you know what the scenarios and outcomes are, and you have a plan of attack if something goes wrong. If you launch a campaign or roll out a product or service and something goes wrong, you should have been able to predict, ‘These are the ways we [could] go wrong.’ Otherwise, it’s just a mistake.”
Risks are often undervalued but will grow your business.
“We ask our employees this a lot, ‘What’s the biggest risk you’ve ever taken in your life, and how much of that has turned out to be a disaster, and how much of that has turned out to be something that has grown you?’” he says. “It’s always the biggest risks in life that have grown people, and it’s the same way as a company.”
