Futurist Amy Webb: Trends are not enough

**Amy Webb** (0:04)
So, if my 80-year-old young father-in-law is no longer going to Google on a Google phone to search for things, I think that tells us that the world is changing. There's also the fact that OpenAI at this stage is accumulating debt to a degree I don't think any of us have ever seen before.

**Jeff Berman** (0:25)
I don't know about you, but the world is changing so fast, from AI to global politics and beyond, it can feel impossible to keep up. But futurist Amy Webb says, merely following trends is not enough. It's insufficient to stay at top of whatever is just around the corner. What matters now is understanding something much more complex, something she calls convergences.

**Amy Webb** (0:50)
So, the result of the convergence is something that is net new, that hasn't existed before. They're also the kind of things that, like, leaders just miss. They miss because they are distracted by the shiny. And by the time that they realize that this shift has happened, it's typically too late.

**Jeff Berman** (1:14)
This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host this week on the show, Amy Webb. She's an author, a futurist, and CEO of the Future Today Strategy Group. She's also a bit of a rock star at South by Southwest. But last week, for the first time in nearly 20 years, she didn't release a new trend report. In fact, she held a funeral for it, the Grim Reaper's Cloak and All. It's a bold act of creative destruction. Let's find out why she did it. Amy Webb, welcome back to Masters of Scale. Thank you.

**Amy Webb** (1:50)
That was my favorite show that I did last year. Was that last year? I don't even remember.

**Jeff Berman** (1:55)
I think it was last year. It feels like last year. Time is a flat circle now. Podcast hosts are not supposed to have favorites, Amy, but I have to confess, I'm really thrilled to have you back. I'm especially excited to have you back because for nearly two decades you have published a Trends Report that you have decided to no longer continue publishing.

**Amy Webb** (2:17)
That's right. We have killed our baby as it were. Would you want me to tell you why?

**Jeff Berman** (2:21)
I want to hear why.

**Amy Webb** (2:23)
Everybody who's probably listening to this is either a leader or on track to be a leader in some kind of organization. Undoubtedly, you have noticed that sometimes organizations stay on the same path when it's pretty clear that that path is going nowhere.
And the world around them is changing. And what they need to do is either adapt to that change or reinvent for that change. Because that change is inevitable. There were so many fundamental changes happening that it seemed inevitable that those changes would coalesce and sort of form new things. And it reminded me of Josef Schumpeter. And then I found this book, which I read, it's actually part two of a much bigger tome. It's Capitalism, Can Capitalism Survive? It was written in the 40s, so it's heavy. But the third chapter is called The Process of Creative Destruction. Basically what he describes is, through this convergence of different forces, typically technology focused, but others as well, the old structures are destroyed and something new hits and exists in its place. That is always happening in some way, but it's really intensified over the past few years in our case as an organization. It just did not make sense to continue publishing a gigantic static report. Honestly, last year was a grand finale. We published a thousand page report. We knew at that point that that was going to be the last one. But because the world is changing so fast that as soon as a static report is published, it's basically, it's not, you know, on trends, it's like not relevant anymore. So we killed it and we are replacing it with something else. We're still tracking trends. But as we've been telling people forever, these sort of trends alone, they are not enough. And it was time for us to take the brave step of destroying the thing that we're probably the most famous for and start fresh. I've said for years and years like the trends alone aren't enough. And if you follow just that in a vacuum and don't think about how does economics play a role, geopolitics, misinformation, people's thoughts and hopes and whatever, if you don't take all of those other things into consideration, you're watching the evolution of a technology that is divorced from how that technology shows up in the world. The heart and soul...