Hello, and welcome to prediction season. If your appetite for soothsaying hasn’t yet been sated, here is a collection of about 100 predictions for 2023 from everyone from Accenture to the Zukunftsinstitut.

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THREE OF OUR FAVORITE PREDICTIONS

1. Because we’re ready for the next big thing. Scott Belsky, chief product officer for Adobe’s Creative Cloud, forecasts nine implications of emerging tech. Some are pretty wild.

‍2. Because it’s what we do most days. Chris Herd posted a fascinating tweet thread about the future of work, with an internal logic that makes us believe he’s right. It all starts with companies wanting to save money on office leases…

‍3. Because it’s January and we need a spot of color. Viva Magenta will be the color of the year, according to Pantone. Does saying it make it so? Think pink, everyone.At their best, predictions help make sense of change. At their worst, they can lead everyone astray.

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WHAT'S THE BEST WAY TO USE PREDICTIONS?

As a panopticon. Posts and reports about the future are handy for assessing the landscape of trends that may be relevant to your business.

‍As a way to form hypotheses. Go ahead, identify opportunities based on predictions. But apply a little discipline by asking yourself what has to be true for the opportunity to come to fruition.

‍As a way to identify points of uncertainty. Predictions are opinions. Yes, they may reference data, but the whole point is to prognosticate about stuff where data does not supply an answer. Predictions, therefore, are a great way to capture the drivers of scenario-building.

At some point, predictions meet reality. Too often the transition is abrupt. A big bet on grocery delivery or AI toothbrushes or NFTs goes south. In other cases, fear of failure means predictions aren’t acted upon and opportunities are missed.
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Spark No. 9 operates in that liminal space between prediction and reality. We validate predictions—hypotheses, as we like to call them—on a small (but statistically valid) scale. We iterate to find what works. The result: confidence about moving forward.

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DID YOU PREDICT THIS?

The Harvard Business Review recently published a piece we wrote. It’s a good (and short!) explanation of how we are reinventing market research.

‍“Validating Product-Market Fit in the Real World” is about connecting prediction to reality. Have a read. Share it with others.

Thank you!

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