Non-Obvious Trends
The Haystack Method
The Haystack Method is the trend curation model that was first introduced in the bestselling book Non-Obvious and has been used by thousands of professionals around the world to develop insights and win the future.
The Haystack Method describes a process where you first focus on gathering stories and ideas (the hay) and then use them to define a trend (the needle), which gives meaning to them all collectively.
The Steps
The method has five key steps which are outlined below.
- Gathering. Gathering is the disciplined act of collecting stories and ideas from reading, listening and speaking to different sources.
- Aggregating. Aggregating involves taking individual ideas and disconnected thoughts and grouping them together to try and uncover bigger themes.
- Elevating. Elevating involves finding the underlying themes that connect groups of ideas to describe a single, bigger concept.
- Naming. Naming is the creative art of finding the right words to describe an elevated idea as a trend in an easily understandable and memorably branded way.
- Proving. Proving is the final step where you evaluate your ideas, seek out more research where needed and make a case for why an idea describes the accelerating present.
Where It Comes From
The Haystack Method was built from a unique habit to scan and curate new ideas from many different media sources. It became the secret behind one of the most popular and bestselling trend series in the world that was read or shared by over a million readers across a decade from 2010 to 2020. The method combines a process for scanning and curating fascinating ideas along with a step by step approach for building bigger ideas from those elements.
