Visualising the Future with the Magic Roundabout™ Schematic

Introduction

Predicting future outcomes is crucial in the ever-evolving landscape of technology and market trends. Traditional models often fail to provide predictive value, especially during rapid change. The Magic Roundabout™ schematic is designed to address this need by providing a comprehensive visual tool for analysing and predicting technology and market trends.

The Challenge

Creating accurate models to predict technology and market trends is inherently difficult, mainly when trends are in a state of flux. Leaders need tools that offer insights into hidden patterns and biases, enabling them to make informed decisions and motivate action.

Existing Tools

While traditional tools like SWOT analysis and the Gartner Hype Cycle are helpful, they often reinforce existing biases and fail to provide a broad perspective. The Magic Roundabout schematic overcomes these limitations by integrating multiple analytical frameworks.

A New Perspective

The Magic Roundabout™ schematic was developed to help organisations recognise and adapt to significant technical and market shifts, such as the growing importance of sustainability in IT purchase decisions. By enabling the analysis of various factors that might not be typically included in a tech trend or market analysis, including political, economic, and ethical dimensions, this tool helps identify and address cognitive biases, blind spots, and where marketing rhetoric is disconnected from business development and market priorities.

Categorization and Watchlist Items

The schematic uses a range of categories to analyse the forces impacting a business. Methodologies such as Porter’s Five Forces, PEST, and the MECE principle can all be integrated to provide a holistic view. For example, a PESTLE analysis can reveal the impact of disruptive changes across different categories, helping organisations like NetApp to challenge long-held assumptions.

Unlike other two-dimensional systems of visualising data, each identified trend (watchlist item) can be a member of multiple categories, each having a level of impact or horizon unique to that category. This allows for a multi-dimensional analysis of the data while still preserving a simple and visually appealing representation of the dataset that can be constructed with widely available toolsets such as Microsoft Excel.

Measuring Impact

To assess the relative importance of different factors, the construction of the Magic Roundabout schematic allows for the use of any quantitative scale, including hard financial data or other well-understood metrics applicable across the problem domain or source dataset. In the absence of an objective metric, we recommend a five-point scale to measure opinions relating to impact or importance. This qualitative metric ensures that speculative data is treated with appropriate caution while maintaining transparency in assumptions.

The five-point scale could be structured as follows:

1. Very Low Impact

2. Low Impact

3. Medium Impact

4. High Impact

5. Very High Impact

This approach can harmonise data from existing analyst reports, providing an intuitive and easily understood way of creating quality from a set of quantity ranges or a quantifiable metric from a purely qualitative estimate. This qualitative metric ensures that speculative data is treated with appropriate caution while maintaining transparency in assumptions.

Time Horizons

Predicting time to impact or exactly when a technology is likely to be impactful is at best uncertain with the negative consequences of being too early to market being as great, if not greater than being late, which at least has the potential advantage of leveraging the fast follower model. Trends also tend to follow an s-curve adoption which makes adoption and time impact at an organisational and market subset highly dependent on the ability to adapt to change.

As a result, the schematic also incorporates McKinsey’s Three Horizons model to determine the level of investment and management approach needed for different trends.

Rather than focusing on timelines, the McKinsey model helps organizations prepare for future impacts by focusing on the kinds of leadership actions should be taken today. This horizon model also maps neatly onto the Gartner “Transform, Grow, Run” model.

To aid in identification of which horizon a given trend (watchlist item) falls into, the respondent can be asked “what do you know about this trend”

• “I have comprehensive knowledge / this is part of my core business” = “Known Knowns” = Horizon 1 / Run

• “I know enough to extract significant value, but there’s still things I need to get a handle on” = “Known Unknowns” = Horizon 2 / Grow

• “I know enough to be dangerous” = “Unknown Unknowns” = Horizon 3 / Transform

While a three horizon model provides simplicity and power, the magic roundabout could also accommodate other time based segmentation across more than three categories such as Current Quarter, Current Year, Next year, 2+ years, 5+ years, however unless there was sufficient rigor in the predictions against these timeframes, they could easily lead to a false sense of security that nothing needs to be done, or that dealing with that will be someone else’s problem by the time it becomes important at which point it may be too late to execute even a fast follower strategy.

The Magic Roundabout Schematic

The Magic Roundabout™ schematic combines these categories, watchlist items, impact scores, and time horizons into a visually appealing sunburst diagram. This tool is available to every user of the Microsoft Office suite and can be easily adapted to various needs.

Example Dataset

A simplified Excel spreadsheet table is used to create the schematic:

Category	Horizon 1	Horizon 2	Horizon 3	Importance
AI	.	.	AI based Inside-sales	3
AI	.	Content Creation		3
AI	Website Chatbots			3
Cloud	.	.	Serverless + PaaS	4
Cloud	.	Containerisation		3
Cloud	Lift & Shift			3
CyberSecurity	.	.	Exfiltration detection and prevention	3
CyberSecurity	.	Immutable Snapshots + Logical Airgap		3
CyberSecurity	Traditional Backup			3
Sustainability	.	.	Dynamic Rebalancing to Cloud	3
Sustainability	.	Sustainability Reporting		3
Sustainability	HDD to Flash			3
Flash	.	.	PLC	3
Flash	.	QLC		3
Flash	High performance flash			3

Reweighting this data based on perceived impact from different personas or parts of an organisation, or even across different organisations can provide a different perspective for example the dataset used above might have significantly different importance weightings depending on different roles and personas.

Category	Horizon 1	Horizon 2	Horizon 3	Importance
AI	.	.	AI based Inside-sales	2
AI	.	Content Creation		4
AI	Website Chatbots			3
Cloud	.	.	Serverless + PaaS	2
Cloud	.	Containerisation		1
Cloud	Lift & Shift			2
CyberSecurity	.	.	Exfiltration detection and prevention	5
CyberSecurity	.	Immutable Snapshots + Logical Airgap		4
CyberSecurity	Traditional Backup			3
Sustainability	.	.	Dynamic Rebalancing to Cloud	2
Sustainability	.	Sustainability Reporting		4
Sustainability	HDD to Flash			2
Flash	.	.	PLC	2
Flash	.	QLC		1
Flash	High performance flash			3

By comparing the two graphics it becomes immediately apparent that cybersecurity and future threats are perceived by the second persona as far more impactful overall than cloud and consumption based economic models. By averaging these scores across different personas, companies and market segments, trends can be identified that differ across geographies and job roles, allowing for a more tailored go-to-market response.

This methodology has also been used with more objective information to perform an analysis of total addressable market categorised by NetApp’s go to market priorities which surfaced up some unexpected insights as seen in the following graphic.

The resulting diagrams provides a clear visualization of trends and their relative importance, helping organizations navigate the complexities of market dynamics.

Conclusion

The Magic Roundabout™ schematic is a powerful tool for business consulting in the field of technology. By offering a comprehensive, visual method for analyzing market trends, it enables better decision-making and strategic planning.