How Does Cecily Sommers Know What You'll Be Doing Next?

How Change Happens

Push participants give Sommers high marks as a perceptive forward thinker who understands what her business audience needs.

“We’re looking for the thing we haven’t heard of yet, and that’s what she’s just the master at identifying and somehow getting into the Twin Cities,” says Kara Wallace, communications manager at Ecolab, the cleaning and sanitation company based in St. Paul. Wallace is a volunteer supporter of Push and was chair of the Minnesota Advertising Federation’s Trend Forum conference when Sommers put on her first program. She wound up asking Sommers afterward if they could merge the two events. (They did.)

Sommers “gets both art and science” says Amy Myers, director of account planning at Minneapolis ad agency Colle & McVoy. So for people in creative fields especially, the expansive range of speakers and topics resonates, she says. “Our positioning is helping clients ‘invent future,’ and what we find is that if you’re not . . . positioning [your business] in terms of broader trends, your positioning can evaporate in six months.”

But there is no crystal ball in Sommers’s office. Just an accumulating “should-read” pile: Foreign Affairs, Wired, Futurist, Fast Company, The New York Review of Books—for the most part, material that’s firmly grounded in the present. Being a futurist isn’t a matter of predicting the future, she says. It’s an exercise in recognizing potentials.

If she relied only on media outlets, no matter how diverse her choices, she’d be prone to the kind of myopia that she complains about in American business. While companies churn endlessly on the habits and needs of the baby boomers and on marketing to the “digital natives” of a younger generation, nobody’s paying attention to “the strategic impact of, you know, over 50 percent of the world’s population lives outside of the industrialized world, and like 50 percent of them are under the age of 25.” What will that mean 10 or 15 years from now for markets, resources, migration, everything? she asks.

So she’s found some ways to broaden her field of vision. She checks on the work of research institutions via their Web sites and learns a lot when she’s hunting on the Internet and in journals for Push speakers. Research that she does for clients is an education. And she says her Friday morning segment on WCCO radio, What’s Up With That?, forces her to “stay up on things.”

“The areas that I look in and keep on top of are nanotechnology, robotics, media and virtual things, gadgets, art, and then laboratories—who’s working on what now.” It’s a science- and tech-heavy blend that she balances with information on market trends.

But when she “looks in” those areas of interest, what is she looking for? To find the clues that matter, she’s developed some filters, especially this one: “If we really want to understand how change happens, where it comes from, and the potentials that we’re seeing, we need to be looking at resources, technology, demographics, and tribalism” in that order, Sommers says. A change in resources will force a change in technologies that will be disseminated based on demographics, and so forth. That’s what all of human history has been about, she says—commanding resources for the benefit of our tribe.

She credits a project that she did for Great River Energy with helping her develop and articulate that model. The Elk River–based cooperative utility hired Sommers in 2004 to write a report on the future of the energy industry. Mostly, though, her work is intuitive. She trusts her gut: “My forte is that I see something, but I’m not the person who can then do all the data.”