Learning journeys: conducting reconnaissance into the future

Posted by Adam Gordon on Jul 18, 2008 in 2015, 2025, all, foresight tools & methods, horizon scanning, strategic foresight, trend tracking | 1 comment

More on the Media Futures Conference – having yesterday got sidetracked into pushing back at misconceptions about citizen journalism (based on lousy forecast filtering) – now I’m actually getting to what I intended to talk about…

Early in the day, as a warmup I think (but for me this was the juice) there was a “Research in the Real World” section. It started with a presentation by Alex McKie reporting on a tour she made across the UK, where she interviewed people asking them what their “three wishes for the future” were. This was followed by Gill Wildman and Nick Durrant of Plot, who presented interviews where consumers were asked where and how they used media, and what they wanted from it.

The research is anthropological, no more or less than a customized field trip: going out, seeing what people do, and how they live, and what’s important and meaningful to them – and then thinking how one’s own area of interest (e.g. product) fits into this, or could fit into it in the future. That gives some clues as to what people will adopt and/or buy – what the market will “pull”.

The futures field lingo for this type of work is “a learning journey,” a process usually omitted in the helter-skelter of tracking new technology capabilities and other apparently more profitable lines of research. There are some good writeups of future learning journeys: one that comes to mind is “The Moen Story” Johnston, R. & Douglas Bate, J., The Power of Strategy Innovation, Amacom Press, 2003, Chapter 5. Another is “Conduct Reconnaissance into the Future,” Sull, D & Wang Y, Made in China, Chapter 3, HBS Press, 2005. I recently saw that Christus CEO Tom Royer said his medical institution had conducted learning journeys (to Canada and India) as part of its Futures Task Force II scenario building process.

Tuning in
No question this type of research is often tedious. You have everyday people umming and aahing inarticulately and often unimaginatively about their preferences and problems, and hopes for the future. In fact the conference audience were impatient about having been presented with the interviews in raw form. But it is precisely in the careful listening that much about the real future is revealed. It is a vital ingredient in thinking about the future, and reigning in poor forecasts.

In the event, the consumers (in Plot’s terms “the people formerly known as … users”) were revealed as media wise, but often their savvy to screen out the information firehose. Although media types were thinking about the cutting edge, real people were articulating the need to be informed in a way they could manage – not too much or too little – and to be able to trust the news source, and be exposed to stories that move or inspire them.

Learning journeys are a very dependable way to think about the future by checking our industry insider preferences against the preferences of real people out there. Any prediction that makes assumptions about the market without this perspective is heading for failure. But there is a wrinkle, and it is this: market research – even this deep market field trip research which is much better than focus groups – is seldom enough to adequately anticipate the next new thing. It tells us what lab fantasies or executive business model fantasies will not fly. But it doesn’t help us make the jump either. Experience is that consumers want what they already have, maybe a bit better, maybe a bit cheaper. Market research did not see the Walkman. And as as Hal Sperling of Chrysler said: “In all the time we spent developing the Minivan, not once did we have a soccer mom come and ask us for one.”