enough ideas worth writing about consistently on my blog helped me to get better at saving and sharing ideas that people cared about. Blogging helped me become a collector of ideas, which is the perfect introduction to the first step in the Haystack Method.
Step 1—Gathering
Gathering is the disciplined act of collecting stories
and ideas from reading, listening and speaking to different sources.
Photo: Sources used for gathering information.
Do you read the same sources of media religiously every day? Or do you skim social media occasionally and sometimes click on the links your connections share to continue reading? Regardless of your media diet, chances are you encounter plenty of interesting stories or ideas. The real question is: Do you have a useful method for saving them? The key to gathering ideas is making a habit of saving interesting things in a way that allows you to find and explore them later.
My method involves always carrying a small passport-sized notebook in my pocket and keeping a folder on my desk to save media clippings and printouts. By the time you read these words, that folder on my desk has changed color and probably already says “2019 Trends” on the outside of it. In my process, I start the clock every January and complete it each December for my annual Non-Obvious Trend Report (see Part II of this book). Thanks to this deliverable, I have a clear starting and ending point for each new round of ideas that I collect.
You don’t need to follow as rigid a calendar timetable as I do, but it is valuable to set a specific time for yourself to review and reflect on what you have gathered in order to uncover the bigger insights (a point we will explore in subsequent steps).
Idea Sources: Where to Gather Ideas
1 Personal conversations at events or meetings
2 Listening to live speakers or TED Talks
3 Entertainment
4 Books
5 Museums
6 Magazines and newspapers
7 Travel!
This list of sources might seem, well, obvious. It’s rarely the sources of information themselves that will lead you toward a perfectly packaged idea or trend. Rather, mastering the art of gathering valuable ideas means training yourself to uncover interesting ideas across multiple sources and become diligent about collecting them.
Tips & Tricks: How to Gather Ideas
Start a Folder. A folder on my desk stores handwritten ideas I find interesting, articles ripped out of magazines and newspapers, printouts of articles from the Internet, brochures from conferences, and the occasional odd object (like a giveaway from a conference or a brochure received in the mail). This folder lets me store things in a central and highly visible way. You might choose to create this folder digitally or with paper. Either way, the important thing is to have a centralized place where you can save ideas for later digestion.
Always Summarize. When you’re collecting ideas on a longer time scale (i.e., across an entire year), it’s easy to forget why a story seemed significant in the first place. To help yourself remember, get into the habit of highlighting a few sentences or writing down a few notes about your thoughts on the idea (usually using a Sharpie pen - which is also suggested in Chapter 2). Later, when you’re going through your gathered ideas, these notes will be useful in recalling what originally sparked your interest.
Seek Concepts, Not Conclusions. As we learned in Chapter 2, a key habit of good curating is the ability to be fickle. In practice, this means not getting too hung up on the need to quantify or understand every idea you save in the moment. Many times, the best thing you can do is to gather something, save it, and then move on to your next task. Perspective comes from taking time and having patience.
Step 2—Aggregating
Aggregating involves taking individual ideas and disconnected thoughts and grouping them together to try and uncover bigger themes.
Photo: Example of aggregating possible trend topics.
After gathering ideas, the next step is to combine the early results of your observation and curiosity with some insights about how ideas might fit together. Using a series of questions can help you do that. Here are a few of my favorites.
Aggregating Questions: How to Group Ideas
1 What broad group or demographic does this story describe?
2 What is the underlying human need or behavior?
3 What makes this story interesting as an example?
4 How is this same phenomenon affecting multiple industries?
5 What qualities or elements make me interested in this story?
At this stage a common trap is to start grouping all the stories from one industry together. Resist the temptation to do that and try aggregating based on insights and human motivations instead.
In this second step, it’s not important to come up with a fancy name for your ideas or even to do extensive research around any one them. Instead, the aim is to start building small clusters of ideas that bring together stories into meaningful clusters.
Tips & Tricks: How to Aggregate Ideas
Focus on Human Needs. Sometimes focusing on a bigger underlying human emotion can help you see the basis of the idea and why it matters. For example, the basic human need for belonging fuels many of the activities people engage in online, from posting social comments to joining online communities. The key is to connect the ideas you have gathered with the basic human needs behind them.
Recognize the Obvious. Along the path to uncovering “non-obvious” insights, there’s some value in recognizing and even embracing the obvious. In a grouping exercise, for example, you can often use the obvious ideas (like multiple stories about new wearable technology products) as a way of bringing things together and later you can work on discovering the non-obvious insights between them.
Follow Your Intuition. When you train yourself to be more observant, you might also find that you start to develop a feeling for stories that are interesting or somehow feel significant—even though you may not be able to describe why. Embrace that intuition and save the story. In later phases of the Haystack Method, you can try to connect this story to a broader idea.
Step 3—Elevating
Elevating involves finding the underlying themes that connect groups of ideas to describe a single, bigger concept.
