So far this year I've tallied up around 10 weeks on the road, away from home, family and office—though in some sense everywhere I go is "office". Unlike previous years, the bulk of this travel has been inside the US—Dopplr helpfully tells me that's 22 trips (undercounting) and about 8,100 kgs of carbon. I've been to LA, New York, Charlotte, Chicago, Tampa, Philadelphia, Boston, Houston, Washington, Raleigh, Minneapolis, most of these multiple times. Double that in number of airports, getting to and from.

This amount of roadwear isn't very different from a lot of other working people, but the point of view is. The majority of this travel was driven by qualitative research, mostly ethnographic in nature, to dig for trends and indicators of future consumer lifestyles. My colleagues and I have been in homes, shopping centers, restaurants, the aforementioned airports, gas stations, coffee shops, hotel lobbies, and just about everywhere else, looking and listening for clues that will help clients pick up that crucial thread that leads to new opportunity. Even when not on the clock, people who know me will tell you I'm always watching. I'd like to think we've found plenty along the way.

What's been most striking, though, has been the opportunity to go deeper into the social fabric of a country experiencing something rare (for America): a slow freefall into a new world where many things the last few generations have taken for granted are slipping from view. Work as a sure thing, education as qualification, even the fallback of family and community have all decayed. 2008's Massively Parallel Correction and 2009's weak recovery have faded and a strange stagnation has set in.

Many of the people we interviewed put on a good face—positive outlooks, aspirations, motivations. Kids were fed and clothed, lights were on and homes were emotionally warm, even in the most modest surroundings. All good. What was different than past field tours, though, was what lay just behind these fronts. Many folks seemed to sense that we've broken through into new territory, where "what comes next", for the first time for many, is completely unforeseeable. Cyclical economic downturns of the past eventually promised a return to some level of prosperity, work, and stability. At levels above them in government, religion, and professional work, somebody was still in control, and systems still functioned in these past eras. That sense is missing now. Obama vs Tea Party, the BP oil spill, the rise of new global forces, and a permanently smaller workforce constitution the dreaded "New Normal". System breakdown is setting in.

In his analysis of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russian writer Dmitri Orlov describes five stages of collapse, in order of occurrence: financial, commercial, political, social, and cultural. We've been through versions of financial and commercial collapse already, if you take that as major institutions and frameworks failing to operate as needed (yes, we've managed fairy-dust workarounds of both for now), and political paralysis is certainly here. Now human, social connections are becoming frayed. Families are losing direction as the foundations of employment and education weaken. Real-world social connections are being pulled apart as the macro-social and macro-economic scripts are rewritten. Many people are quietly losing direction.

What's next then? Is it all doom and gloom? Do we end up a collapsed culture? I'm not sure about that yet. Right now, as Orlov points out, or amygdales, the part of the brain responsible where fear is generated, are a bit messed up. We don't quite know where we are. And experts pitching a top-down imposition of resilience aren't helping, as well-intentioned as they may be. I wonder if, as should happen when we are in actual freefall, if our collective nervous systems will light up, kick in, and start to reassert a semblance of social cohesion from the bottom up. We may be post-modern, even post-normal, but we aren't so far removed from our origins as social animals that we have totally lost the programming.

I remember clearly standing in the waiting area for the first flight back East after being stuck in the Bay Area after 9/11. After that week of deep, deep shock and disconnection, I can't remember a time when my fellow humans were more kind, social-minded, and collectively cooperative. That struck me at the time as a deep bio-social reaction. That's resilience. 

Last week while co-teaching a group of students in a futures course at Duke University with Frank Spencer and Venessa Miemis, during a discussion of the future of money and value systems, we began to talk about why new value systems, particularly focused on around social value, are emerging. Alan Rosenblith, director of a new documentary on money, voiced the opinion that these new social value systems being increasingly driven by the scarcity of capital at a time when people need, even want, to work, to rebuild their communities. These new value systems provide a way to satisfy this urge. Maybe that is what is behind the success of social gaming and the artificial economic ecosystems they have created. We farm FarmVille because we can't do the real thing.

So, what's next? We are used to fast action, big upheavals, red vs. blue, zero-sum. We are also awash with people who will give us the recipe for the next big Reboot. One hopeful sign has been the way so-called "underdeveloped" regions have used technology to bootstrap as top-down solutions fail. Maybe we can do that here. I'll be watching to see if it self-develops, slowly but collectively, on a long cycle, looking for weak signals and subtle indicators. Right now, many are just sketching, not yet building. Let's hope we see those signals. If not, then we've truly been re-programmed.

Alongside our global insights work, Changeist has recently launched what we call Innovation Scouting. This mixture of expert panels and science and technology-focused horizon scanning helps identify emerging hotspots for disruptive innovation—opportunity spaces between emerging consumer behaviors and new technologies.

With our Innovation Scouting toolset, we get into the early-stage development thinking of organizations who themselves are reading the landscape, uncovering major trends and weak signals that entrepreneurs, designers, R&D groups, academic institutions, and strategic insights teams are sensing and prototyping around. We call out the drivers behind innovation, important hotspots created by these drivers, and potentially disruptive innovations that could alter the development and competitive landscapes.

Our first Innovation Scouting report results from research conducted around the convergence of consumer electronics and healthcare (to download, see link below). As the report says, our objectives were twofold: to better understand what factors are influencing how this market evolves, and to help our clients focus and sharpen their foresight, strategic planning and innovation approaches as they look to this increasingly important market. We also performed this work to identify which trends to continue exploring with deeper research dives as we follow the evolution of consumer health in the near future.

If you are interested in finding out more about Changeist's Innovation Scouting capabilities or want to request a custom Innovation Scouting study in the market of interest to your organization, contact us here or via the contact channels listed in the brief.

Download Understanding Trends in Consumer Health Device Design: Innovation Hotspots (412k PDF).

A few years ago I created a complex forecast for a client centered on China and how its emerging consumer segments might evolve, particularly regarding technology usage. One of the key themes for the country as a whole looking out 10 years was a gradual shift from a culture and consumer soceity ravenously downloading Western brands, ideas, memes, values and so on to a China that would stand up on its own two feet to project its own version of these to the world—from consumer to confident creator.

Image: Jakob Montrasio/FlickrChinese brands have led the way out, with now well-known names like Haier and Huawei standing alongside Western leaders like Cisco and GE. Behind that has followed the soft influence of Chinese consumers' needs as expressed to the world through exported design—in technology, consumer products, cars etc. The opening of the Beijing auto show led the head of GM Asia in an FT article on the event to say: "The only true global car shows these days are in China." The head of a company co-producing iconic black cabs in China with Geely summed it up, saying ""The Chinese get accused of just copying other people's designs, but this demonstrates their creativity and flair."

The next phase, communication, has now begun. As the Washington Post points out, while Western media contract, Chinese media is expanding to the world at large. While early steps are being made, such as beefing up foreign bureaus of domestic media—or even setting up radio stations in countries such as the US—this strategy is backed by typically deep Chinese pockets and the accompanying long strategic view. Chinese government and companies say they feel mischaracterized and want their country to be better understood by both Western governments and consumers.

This won't happen overnight, but we can expect to see not one but many Chinese "voices" emerge and expand into the media sphere with increasing breadth and depth. The voice of the government will be a strong influencer, but just as Western media moguls such as Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch have pushed their lenses on the world into its far corners, and Gulf oil has funded groups like Al Jazeera to represent and project the "Arab" world view, we can expect to see a Chinese Turner or Murdoch on the horizon soon.

I recently had an opportunity to give a talk to the Filosofic Club of Kiev, Ukraine on a swing through the region. The club is a gathering of intellectual, business and media leaders in the city, and was a great experience. Unlike most standup presentations followed by a Q&A, this event allowed attendees to actiively debate the concepts I presented, and discuss their own models and worldviews. I found it a refreshing learning experience, particularly understanding different views of time and the future in a country where change is often not very far away.

This particular event was held between the presidential primary and a hotly contested run-off between Yulia Tymoshenko and Viktor Yukanovich. Touring the encampments set up to shelter protestors from each party on a cold Sunday night showed that in many places, it isn't just technology that determines the pace of change—in this case, forces in politics, economics and domestic society were a much stronger trigger, and Ukrainians could see two distinct paths before them.

The overall talk focused on recent forecasts of global economic drivers and outcomes, and how these forecasts have not come to pass. Countries like Ukraine are caught between these forecasted futures—one driven by developed countries, and one powered by the BRICs. Increasingly, it looks like Ukraine and other "middle tier" countries will have to build their own, from the bottom up, with innovation at the local level.

I look forward to going back for a longer visit to the country and region. In the meantime, below are slides from the talk.