As the dust settles on an unprecedented week of travel disruption, David Crosbie  considers the effect such events can have on how we plan ahead.

In GfK Roper Reports Worldwide, we ask 30,000 consumers around the world about the issues that concern them most. We ask about recession and unemployment. We ask about crime and lawlessness. We even ask about climate change and global warming. We do not ask about disruption caused by volcanic ash, but that has been at the foremost of millions of people’s minds around the world since last Thursday.

I myself was somewhat preoccupied by it as I scratched my head and wondered how to get back to London after a meeting in Frankfurt that was meant to be a day trip. Having unwittingly flown out on one of the last planes leaving the UK, I was faced with the prospect of taking five trains over three days to make it back to the UK.

This gave me plenty of time to muse on the possible long-term implications of the incident. Particularly if the disruption recurs intermittently, could it make travellers more wary and less reliant on air travel, which has become increasingly cheap and accessible in recent years? Would flying be shunned as an expensive, unreliable and environmentally damaging pursuit? Commentators were quick to point out the effects of previous large-scale eruptions, such as the one that may have precipitated the French Revolution. In the event, most people will probably not easily give up the convenience that they have grown used to lightly. But the important point is that just a couple of weeks ago it would be unthinkable to most people that the skies above Europe could be free from air traffic for days on end.

To me, this incident serves to underline that future scenario planning involves acknowledging that in the next five to ten years things will happen that are completely beyond our wildest imagination. Instead we should take into consideration what kind of things might happen, and plan accordingly. Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was widely pilloried for his explanation of this kind of thing, which warrants repetition in full:

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.”

However, in the business of scenario planning this is exactly the approach to take. GfK Roper Consulting’s TrendKEY global framework of consumer trends provides a model, informed by global consumer insight data, which is designed to help inform a view of the next few years, particularly with regard to shedding light on the things we know we don’t know (or, to add another category to the list, drawing out those things we don’t know we know).

As my illustrious compatriot and national poet Robert Burns once put it in his poem ‘To A Mouse’, “…thou art no thy lane,/ In proving foresight may be vain/ The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley.” While my day trip to Frankfurt proved this sentiment is as valid now as when it was written over 200 years ago, there are many ways in which you can reduce the chances of your future plans going awry, and in a business context, a robust consumer trends product is certainly one of them! 

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Tags: David Crosbie, Forecasting, Gfk Roper Consulting, Roper Pulse Blog, Tourism, Travel