TIMING — Is the prospective solution readily available and potentially scalable? If the tools and/or tech required are still developing, where are they on the learning curve of innovation? Telemedicine was ready to blow up when COVID hit because the tech required had been widely available for years. On the other hand and despite the many optimistic projections, VR seems—once again—to have not been *quite* ready for the moment.
INSIGHT — What are the enabling contextual conditions that would need to change for this solution to become the right fit for the targeted problem? What else needs to be true for this signal to reach full strength? Try to identify what we like to call the “gestalt” of the tipping point, when something that has been a curiosity becomes undeniable. Think through the STEEPS
dimensions: What are the S
cientific and T
echnological breakthroughs still required? What needs to be true about the E
nvironmental and E
conomic context or future impacts for this possibility to be realized? What P
olitical and S
ocial conditions need to change? If you’re watching weak signals in heavily regulated environments (healthcare, biotech, financial services), these questions are particularly critical.
FREQUENCY — How often do we encounter the problem? If a permanent change to a remote work policy affords my staff two hours each day that they previously lost to commuting in the SF Bay Area, you can bet that they’ll be ready for that solution to become a lasting feature the work environment.
DENSITY — _How long/deep is our engagement with the problem? _Sticking with remote work here: Employees transitioning to digital-distributed arrangements suddenly found themselves working much longer stretches from home. Solutions promising quick optimization of the home office (to say nothing of the Zoom shirt) were bound to spring up.
FRICTION — _How much pain do we experience with the problem? _If the experience of no-solution is sufficiently severe, barriers to development and adoption can prove more porous or fall away entirely. We see this in the hurried application of AI tools to COVID treatment research and the wild acceleration of data and research findings shared pre-publication in the medical and science communities. Or, to illustrate with a counterfactual: In the soft dystopia of COVID-world social distancing, video conferencing and TikTok were enough to help us fill the void left by reduced human contact; in a full-on, harder dystopian scenario…well, we might all be driven to embrace VR after all.
If the timing is right or nearly so, and you can see the convergence of enabling conditions, then your weakly signaled solution has a much stronger chance of becoming a viable product or bankable trend—particularly if it addresses a problem or need that registers highly in terms of frequency-density-friction.
Using this intuitive framework in your assessment of how present signals suggest possible futures, you’ll be better able to leverage contextual information and market data to identify real opportunities and reliable timeframes for action.
And while your foresight won’t hit 20/20, your view of what’s still to come in 2020 should be significantly clearer.
radically yours,
Jeffrey and the be radical team
P.S. Interested in exploring how this applies to your organization and your products & services? Find out how be radical can help you. Simply hit reply to this email, tell us a bit about yourself and the opportunity/challenge you face, and we will be in touch.
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