What you don’t see can hurt you! Many businesses that once led their industries failed, not because they lacked resources or execution ability, but because they ignored or misread key trends.
This article is part of our series, Where Are Your Growth Blind Spots?, where we explore the often-overlooked barriers that hinder growth. Drawing from Vibrance’s Growth Orienteering strategic approach, we aim to help leaders uncover hidden obstacles and unlock their organisation’s full growth potential.
In this article, we focus on the trend-spotting blind spot, a critical challenge that arises when organisations fail to monitor, identify, or act on emerging trends in their external environment. Whether it’s shifting consumer preferences, technological breakthroughs, or regulatory changes, companies that don’t actively scan for emerging signals risk falling behind in rapidly changing markets, leaving themselves vulnerable to disruption and missed opportunities.
The Trend-spotting Blind Spot
With market conditions changing so rapidly, staying disconnected from the external environment is a significant risk for leaders. Yet, this disconnection is all too common. Leaders’ time and energy are often consumed by internal demands: endless meeting requests, project updates, crisis management, and the relentless pressure to hit quarterly objectives. With only so many hours in the day, scanning the outside world for emerging threats and opportunities often takes a backseat.
Poor trend-spotting often manifests as:
• Failing to identify or act on emerging trends in the business environment or shifts in customer behaviour.
• Basing strategic priorities on outdated or incomplete data.
When organisations fall into this blind spot, the consequences can be severe. They risk being blindsided by disruptive competitors, missing critical market shifts, and making strategic decisions that fail to account for the future. In contrast, organisations that excel in trend-spotting can anticipate change, adapt their strategies proactively, and seize significant growth opportunities.
The Business Model Environment Scan : A Tool to Spot Emerging Threats and Opportunities
The Business Model Environment Scan, introduced in Business Model Generation by Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur in 2010, provides a practical framework for addressing the trend-spotting blind spot. This tool helps leadership teams look beyond their organisation and assess key external forces shaping their business environment.
The framework encourages leaders to analyse:
• Market Forces: Shifts in customer preferences, behaviour, and demographics.
• Industry Forces: Competitors, suppliers, and emerging entrants.
• Key Trends: Societal, technological, and regulatory developments.
• Macro-Economic Forces: Global and regional economic conditions affecting the organisation.
At Vibrance, we use the Business Model Environment Scan extensively in our Growth Orienteering work with clients. To further enhance its effectiveness, we leverage an AI agent that scans and analyses emerging trends across industries, helping leadership teams gain a more exhaustive perspective on key external forces. This combination of a tool and AI-powered insights not only creates a rapid snapshot of the threats and opportunities facing an organisation but also fosters alignment across leadership teams. Unlike narrower tools that focus solely on consumer trends, this approach provides a holistic, regularly updated view, enabling leaders to spot critical shifts before it’s too late.
Case Study: Unilever's Sustainability-Focused Strategy
When Paul Polman became CEO of Unilever in 2009, he recognised that the consumer goods industry was undergoing a profound transformation. Rising concerns about environmental sustainability, social equity, and ethical business practices were reshaping consumer expectations. Polman understood that to maintain relevance and drive growth, Unilever needed to align its strategy with these emerging trends.
Polman launched the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan in 2010, embedding sustainability into the company’s core business strategy. This bold initiative set ambitious targets to halve the company’s environmental footprint, improve the health and well-being of over one billion people, and enhance the livelihoods of millions in its supply chain, all while doubling revenue.
This strategy was not just a response to societal shifts but also a calculated move to future-proof the business. Polman leveraged trend-spotting to identify sustainability as a key driver of consumer loyalty, brand differentiation, and long-term profitability. By acting early on this trend, Unilever positioned itself as a leader in sustainable business practices, unlocking significant growth opportunities in markets increasingly driven by purpose-driven consumers.
Impact on Revenue Growth
So-called market experts predicted that this strategy would be a drag on financial performance and diminish Unilever’s competitiveness. But the opposite happened, and the results were remarkable. As Polman put it:
“During my 10-year tenure, Unilever consistently delivered top and bottom-line growth – outperforming its peers and the market – recording a 300% shareholder return.”
Between 2009 and 2019, under Paul Polman’s leadership, Unilever’s annual revenue grew from €39.8 billion to €51.98 billion, resulting in a CAGR of 2.7% despite challenging market conditions.
In the same period, Nestlé’s revenue and Procter & Gamble revenue decreased by -0.1% and -1.3% respectively.
Overcoming the Trend-Spotting Blind Spot
The trend-spotting blind spot is one of the most critical obstacles to sustained growth. When organisations fail to identify or act on key trends, they risk stagnation, disruption, and irrelevance in the face of rapidly changing markets.
Every organisation aiming to build long-term resilience must double down on environmental scanning as a core part of its strategic process. Leaders should assess all key trends, market forces, macro-economic conditions, and industry dynamics regularly to identify both threats and opportunities.
How well is your organisation scanning the environment for change? Are you seeing the key trends shaping your industry, or are you at risk of falling into the trend-spotting blind spot? The sooner you look outward, the more prepared you’ll be to anticipate and respond to the changes ahead.
One final thought: there’s a recent trend that will impact every organisation on the planet, but in our strategy work we see way too many organisations that are not yet aware of the full threats and opportunities it creates... Hint: it’s made of a 2-letter acronym.
How well is it informing your future strategy?
About Fred
Executive advisor on strategy and innovation. Co-author of The Invincible Company, a guide to building resilience in organisations through corporate innovation. The book was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Strategy Award in 2021.
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