Cyclic developments
When looking at trends from a time perspective, they can be grouped as follows:
- Structural trends: these are very long term, linear developments. The increasing use of self-made tools by creatures on earth is an example of such a trend. But not only what we consciously do can be a structural trend: the evolution of humans and animals is another example of the growth of the universe. These are such long term trends that we consider them to be constant factors in our own lives, and in some hundreds of generations before us. Even so, in a fast changing environment it is good to keep an eye on these structural trends, as they predict the behavior of people very precisely.
- Cyclic trends: these are developments which appear, disappear, and then return. The cycles of these can vary between a couple of years, and hundred of years. Fashion is typically cyclic, but also societal movements, or the way in which people work together, can be cyclic. For example in marketing we now see that the way of working together is starting to resemble the way we did that before the industrialization at the end of the 19th century. Only totally different again.
- Incidental trends: these trends that appear once, and then disappear. This can be the enormous popularity of a certain artist, a company’s well-prepared viral marketing campaign, or a new form of clubbing. For this kind of trends you need little hooks in society. Sensors which notice what is happening in the world. For companies, governments and non-governmental organizations it can be very interesting to combine long term insights with short term trends. They then can directly adapt their activities, without losing sight of the long term developments.
I myself mainly focus at structural and cyclic trends, while for specific trends I like to connect these two. Because of societal or environmental limits for example, some aspects of humaninty don’t get the chance to develop. If however later these limits are removed, humans start behaving in a more natural way. Example: humans by nature are not economical et all. The monkey is not a hamster. We rather enjoy the things handed to us at the very moment. But he who lives in an environment of scarcity, has his rational survival instinct rule, and makes decisions to save something for worse times. When scarcity disappears after a couple of generations, humans slowly start to behave in a way that better fits their nature. This takes a while though: behavioral changes generally take a couple of generations. There are many examples of this kind of developments, and they can be found at this web log as well as in the book ook volop te vinden.
