Innovate
Through Chaos

Foreword by Malcolm Gladwell

Over 20 years ago, not long after I joined the staff of The New Yorker magazine, I met a young woman named DeeDee Gordon. She lived in Los Angeles, in a sleek modernist house up in Beachwood Canyon. She drove an immaculate vintage Pontiac Trans Am. She was young and hilarious and brilliant, in a completely unexpected way, and she had a job I’d never heard of before: companies hired her to figure out what was going to happen next.

Like many people, I assumed that next was an unsolvable mystery—that anyone who claimed to be in the business of telling the future was deluded, or worse. But then I followed DeeDee around for a while. I listened to the way she thought, and I soon began to realize that there was a real discipline and art to next: there were principles that could guide the way we thought about the future. I ended up writing an article about DeeDee Gordon and her work, called “The Coolhunt.” It ran in The New Yorker on March 17, 1997, where—unbeknownst to me—it was read by an enterprising young man named Jeremy Gutsche. Gutsche decided to build an entire infrastructure around next, a network of correspondents around the world feeding their observations and predictions into a massive consumer-insight database. Jeremy is kind enough to say that I inspired him—which is, I’m quite sure, a gross exaggeration. But even gross exaggerations are enormously flattering, so here I am, two decades later, returning the favor by introducing you to one of Jeremy’s most ambitious projects to date.

You have in your hands a book about how to “Create the Future.” Before you start, I’d like to offer a few thoughts about how to think about that question. Let me begin with the question of time. A lot of thinking about the future necessarily revolves around the chronology of future events. We can be pretty certain, for example, that one day science will cure dementia, or the internal combustion engine will be no more, or—in our fanciful moments—that human beings will be able to travel instantaneously through space, like they did in old episodes of Star Trek. The unknown is when those things will happen. 10 years? 30 years? Or has it already been figured out, and we just don’t know about it?

I think that question is best answered in parts. The first part is….