Anticipation: Foresee Disruption and Find Opportunity

An integral part of anticipation and becoming anticipatory in your organization oftentimes has to do with catching an opportunity that everyone is either missing or perhaps even ignoring due to the belief that it is not profitable. One way to accomplish this is to simply look where no one else is looking. But how and where you look helps broaden both you and your organization’s anticipatory abilities, and is integral in successfully identifying the Hard Trends shaping your industry, both from the inside and out.

This concept is called the Law of Opposites.

Leveraging the Law of Opposites isn’t just about being contrarian or different just for the sake of being different, nor is it willfully and recklessly going so far outside the box that there remains no sense to your methods. Rather, it’s an effective strategy to uncover different opportunities by identifying innovative ideas that counter what most consider conventional thinking in the moment.

Industries of all sorts are led by organizations that employed the Law of Opposites to great advantage. Here are three examples of companies and industries leveraging the Law of Opposites.

“Ugly” Produce Popularity

When you do your weekly grocery shopping, if you are a fanatic of fruits and vegetables or a…