Читать книгу Non-Obvious 2018 Edition - Рохит Бхаргава - Страница 58

1 What interests me most about these ideas?

2 What elements could I have missed earlier?

3 What is the broader theme?

4 How can I link multiple industries?

5 Where is the connection between ideas?

This third step can be the most challenging phase of the Haystack Method, because the process of combining ideas can also lead you to unintentionally make them too broad (and by definition, obvious). Your aim in this step, therefore, should be to elevate an idea to make it bigger and more encompassing of multiple stories without losing its uniqueness.

For example, when I was producing my 2014 Non-Obvious Trend Report I came across an interesting healthcare startup called GoodRx, which had a tool to help people find the best price for medications. It was simple, useful, and the perfect example of an evolving shift toward empowering patients in healthcare, which I wrote about in my earlier book ePatient 2015.

At the same time, I was seeing retail stores, such as Macy’s, investing heavily in creating apps to improve their in-store shopping experience and a number of new fashion services, like Rent the Runway, designed to help people save time and money while shopping.

On the surface, a tool to save on prescriptions, an app for a department store, and an optimized tool for renting dresses don’t seem to have much in common. I had therefore initially grouped them separately. While elevating trends, though, I realized that they all had the underlying intent of helping to optimize a shopping experience in some way.

I grouped them together as examples of a shared trend which I called Shoptimization. The trend described how technology was helping consumers optimize the process of buying everything from home goods and fashion to medical prescriptions.

In the next step, I’ll discuss techniques for naming trends (including how I named Shoptimization), but for now my point in sharing that example is to illustrate how elevation can help you make the connections across industries and ideas that may have initially seemed disconnected and meant to fall into different groups.

The difference between aggregating ideas and elevating them may seem very slight, but there are times when I manage to do both at the same time, since the act of aggregating stories can help to broaden your conclusions about them.

In the Haystack Method, I choose to present these steps separately because most of the time they do end up as distinct efforts. With practice though, you may get better at condensing these two steps together.