Automating research is easy. Knowing when not to? That requires discipline. People are already being paid to fix things that were vibe-coded. How long until they’re being paid to fix AI-driven research?

The research firms selling you certainty are lying to you. They’re fine with you making a suboptimal decision, as long as you feel confident making it. They’re happy to make you so afraid of being wrong that you stop noticing what they’re taking from you: Your own capacity.

Over the past four weeks, we've had the chance to sit down with dozens of young people from across Canada and the U.S., listening closely to their stories. What’s clear to us through this work is that there’s a wide and growing gap between the lived reality of young people, and how brands - especially in categories like financial services - show up in their lives.

When you study the edges, you don’t just see the future sooner, you learn more about the present too. It’s as much about this quarter as it is about the future.

Thinking like a casting director means resisting the urge to chase a representative sample, and instead assembling a cast that holds the contradictions of the culture you’re trying to understand.

Waffle House is oddly future-proof. But your brand probably isn’t. Most brands are eventually forced to modernize. But that change often feels less like progress - More like betrayal. Navigating it requires strategic discipline.

We respond to the decline in conscientiousness story from the Financial Times. Our POV: The laziest, least interesting conclusion here is that young people no longer give a f*ck.

The loudest voices aren’t the most representative, but they are the most powerful. Why the loud minority is a signal to design for, right from the start.

Traditional research firms talk a big game about cultural relevancy - then they fall back on the same tired vendors and panels full of professional respondents. Here are the 23 signals we use to find people who shape culture online.

The more emotionally distant someone is from what you’re researching, the more likely they are to give you surface level answers.

We’re really excited to finally share the first research drop from Faster Horses, exploring where cocktail culture is headed, and the power of obsession-driven research & recruitment.

Why Cross-Impact Analysis is the thing missing from your front-end innovation initiatives, and how it can help you avoid winding up with lacklustre product and service concepts.

Futures and innovation teams are resource constrained, but their ability to generate interesting ideas worthy of exploration isn’t. Why an external concept manager might be exactly what your team needs.

If the goal is to zig while others are zagging, trends are only a part of the puzzle. Otherwise? Total zagfest.