Impact report Futurists said they had warned about a pandemic for years, but the vague warnings they gave were all too easy to ignore attention. The other solution, which I saw working well in a big client organisation, is to have a small, but senior, team reporting directly to the chief executive. This also seems to get the attention of the rest of the senior management team. In 2019, while still with Kantar, Curry with Julie Kollman co-wrote a report, published by MRS, on using intelligence capital to drive business growth. As such, he has clear views on the interplay between foresight and insight. Youre looking for signs of change and, obviously, good insight is part of that. In particular, good insight will pick up shifts in attitudes and values. It should also notice evidence of pain points and, as long as youre looking beyond your customer data for insight, leading-edge behaviours that are expressions of values shifts and pain points. But the broader point here is that youre looking for patterns. These consumer insights are almost always connected with other changes in the environment and this is a good thing, because it gives you more confidence that the change youre seeing isnt just a data blip or a fad. Nick Chiarelli, UK practice lead, Ipsos Trends and Foresight, observes that he is old enough to recall a time before we had insights, or at least didnt brand them as such: the days when we were market researchers, pure and simple. Then, Chiarelli notes: We got rebadged to consumer insights. Nothing much really changed lazy researchers, or those reacting to limited or unimaginative briefs, provided raw numbers, but most were always looking for something more in the patterns. I worked in mainstream market research before getting my start in the world of trends, so, to me, this is all somewhat of a continuum. Chiarelli believes any good insight has some element of future thinking within it meaning it shouldnt just hold for today, but for some amount of time into the future, too. The distinction he makes is that insights attempt to provide some kind of truth, while foresights must recognise the inherent instability and unpredictability of the world of tomorrow. The further ahead a foresight seeks to look, the more unstable it becomes. Trends are about taking the world of today and pushing it as far out as can be done before it starts to break down looking present-forward, in Chiarellis words. How far it can be pushed depends on the kind of foresight. For example, foresights based on demographic trends are more solid and easier to push further. Its harder to do this with those based on social change. Ipsos tends to avoid positioning its work as being about making predictions, says Chiarelli. Yes, with short-term trends, its clients are concerned with how they can act over the next one, two or three years, so plenty of work is done on what trends might look like over that time what kind of disruptions might pull the rug out from under these trends and how they might 24 Impact ISSUE 43 2023_pp22-29_Report.indd 24 18/09/2023 12:06