Are hard trends the secret of predicting your future?

What would happen if you could predict the future? What would you do if you could see around corners? Why do some organizations seem to have repeated success in seizing new opportunities? What hard trends should you include in your future planning?

Daniel Burrus has been successfully predicting the future for over 30 years. What does he know that you don’t? He believes that he can help you take advantage of key trends to build a more successful business. In his book, Flash Foresight, he shares his system for successfully predicting the future. He’s been accurate in his predictions over 90% the past 30 years.

You can learn to emulate Dan’s success. It’s a repeatable process once you understand several key concepts that change how you look at your business. He believes the foundation of building a successful business strategy is understanding hard trends.

What are hard trends?  Hard trends are trends that are definitely going to happen.  Sounds simple, doesn’t it? it’s very easy to see many trends as hard trends. Especially today where we have access to so much information to support the different trends that we see.

Every day another report or book comes out that predicts the future. This is all well and good, but many of their ideas are based on short term thinking and analysis. Add to this that people have agendas and you can see a formula for failure. Dan’s system is designed to help you leverage these ideas while helping you create certainty in how you make choices in the future.

What we need to do is identify hard trends accurately. The key trends that are going to happen, no matter what changes occur in your markets. Daniel Burrus believes that once we identify hard trends, we gain the ability to see the predictable future. Seeing and understanding the predictable future can provide your business with a competitive advantage.

Dan sees three key hard trend categories as critical to your future success. Let’s see if you agree. They seem so simple, but understanding what they are changes the way you see and interact with your key stakeholders. Once understood, you can begin to transform your life and business forever.

The first hard trend is technology. Everywhere you look people are talking about how technology is going to change your life. It’s not that we don’t see technology. Its that many of us are intimidated by its potential applications. How can we accurately predict what technology will do for our teams?

The second hard trend is demographics.  What do we know with certainty about people? How do demographic trends impact the way you do business? What demographic trends are going to happen? How can you develop new products and services that leverage demographic hard trends to help make your business a market leader?

The final hard trend is regulatory. There’s an old joke there are only two certainties in life; death and taxes. As long as there has been government, there has been regulations. There are many organizations working very hard to defeat death. The more sophisticated our society has become, the more regulations we must deal with. What if you could use regulations to help build an advantage for your organization?

What if we could make regulations our partner in future growth and opportunities? How can you leverage government regulations into a competitive advantage in your markets?

If these three hard trends are a certainty and everyone must deal with them, how do we create an advantage for your business? How do you use these hard trends to create a better business and life?

Next week I’ll begin sharing how to apply these hard trends to create a better business. If you would like to know more before next week, you can grab a copy of Flash Foresight at Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

Want to learn more about Daniel Burrus’ approach to business transformation? You might also enjoy his blog this week, Change and Transformation—Know the Difference

See you next week.