Our point here is not to add another concise distillation to this already concise and distilled book. Rather, it is to point out the assistance that Structural Dynamic can bring to even as crisp a presentation as Penn's. Structural Dynamics seeks to identify the persistent, core elements of a system and then to use that analysis to generate a range of alternative futures. Penn does an excellent job of laying out these ingredients for the microtrends he examines, but he does not do so in a graphic way that allows the reader to hold his entire argument in mind, nor does he make much an attempt to demonstrate the linkages between the trends he studies.
In every section, Penn pulls together data from a number of sources to support his assertion that a relatively unnoticed group of people are exhibiting a behavior that has aggregated into a social phenomenon. Lets take "Pet Parents" as an example. More and more people in childless households are giving extremely VIP treatment to their pets. The first class jogging pet stoller at right is available "just for pets" for a mere $169.99 (including shipping) is one of a myriad of goods and services (think health insurance) for pets that were basically
So far, so good: Something's happening here/what it is ain't exactly clear, but then the situation comes into shaper relief via the microtrend analysis. That analysis then opens up a raft of possibilities that one might not have thought of previously, e.g., the burgeoning employment opportunities emerging in all things pet.
However, the linkages between the elements of the pet parent system aren't really apparent with Penn's approach and that's where Structural Dynamics comes in.
Here's a picture of the factors that Microtrends offers in its thinking about pet parents, modified by the addition of one element that creates a systemic look at the phenomenon.
Many factors are creating childless households, such as increased
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This comment about the power of pet rights advocates allows us to make a summary point: just as in every other system, each element affects the whole. If pet insurance rates fall drastically because life insurance companies become convinced that something furry or reptilian or winged is going to help people live longer under all sorts of conditions and, therefore, make the pet owners better insurance risks, one could expect more spikes in pet ownership and pet parenting. If, on the other hand, pets become associated with law suits and higher and higher veterinarian malpractice insurance rates leading vets to perform fewer and fewer procedures intended to extend the lives of animals and charging higher and higher rates for whatever they do in fact do, pet pampering is likely to suffer.
Microtrends is a great read, and we would like it to have gone farther. A systems analysis, such as the one we've developed here, would have made it more powerful. By the time the reader gets to the end of each section, he or she is likely to have a hard time remembering all of the ingredients of the argument that have been presented. A Structural Dynamic approach pulls the information together.
Penn worries about social fragmentation. Graphically illustrating the linkages between the various trends identified and pointing out the prospects for high leverage interventions that would touch the many interacting components identified in these 75 stories might have pointed toward transcendent, macro factors that may reduce the the tensions that arise when individuals and small groups pursue their specific interests. If interest groups are only passionately disintegrated, a "tragedy of the commons" with all of its attendant hostility and conflict is virtually guaranteed.
The expansion of the rights, power and individuation of women, which is a big part of the Pet Parent picture, seems to be showing up across cultures, nation states, and economic strata. Women may be microtrending in all sorts of directions, but they are macrotrending toward having a greater influence in all matters. Perhaps a whole raft of microtrends are differing manifestations of this one larger phenomenon.
At the moment, the book's celebration of microtrends seems to only be adding to the shattering of social cohesiveness it laments.