Getting to the right question is more than half the battle. Amidst a bevy of predictions that start off the year, most of them seem to be answers to questions that may be the most popular but not necessarily relevant or useful.

For example, it’s easy to say that marketing will go more mobile and social in 2007 based on obvious advances in social and mobile technologies but does that really mean people will opt-in to socially recommended advertising on their mobile devices?

Or is it likely that they will just trust their own opinions because in times of constant change, it’s the easiest and most reliable thing to do? If the latter is more likely, then shouldn’t the mobile apps be based on personal opinion validation rather than network recommendation? See what I mean about asking the right questions?

Thinking about the future is a constant for us, especially when the rules we thought were true have suddenly been challenged. It seems that if we can just keep up with the rate of change, we’ll have the advantage, but could it be that keeping up with change is more about identifying what is constant rather than what is changing?

For me, that constant is trying to better understand why people do what they do.