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“I promised opportunity knocking,” Magnus Lindkivst told the London Business Forum (LBF). But first, the Swedish futurist explained, he must challenge the way we think about and view the future.

“If you think about our culture today, it’s really based on the now,” Lindkvist began. We often fall into the trap of only thinking of trends as those things that are currently in fashion, “the short term fads, trendy things that are here today and gone tomorrow.” These are not, Lindkvist insists, the trends which require our focus if our aim is to build a sustainable and long lasting business.

The slow trends, what might also be called “Mega Trends or Giga Trends”, are harder to identify. It’s time intensive, he admitted. They’re certainly not obvious as we only tend to notice things when they’re about to disappear, he argued.

Homicide rates, for example, are at their lowest level in history. Yet, this may come as a surprise to most of us as such incidents occupy today’s headlines. If this were the 1200s, Lindkivst told the audience, a couple of you wouldn’t leave the event because you would have been killed and, he joked, “it would have been a very successful London Business Forum!”

It’s often “when things are on the wane,” Lindkvist explained, that we notice them and this triggers innovation. The mousetrap, for example, wasn’t invented when mice were a persistent menace in our homes but when the problem was less acute. Similarly, the modern razor came into being when beards were going out of fashion.

These are slow shifts that we don’t always see coming because, Lindkvist told the LBF, “the brain has trouble keeping up with slow shifts.” It is vital that in business we learn to recognise what is slowly changing around us because their eventual impact can be huge: “something shifted slowly in the competitive environment and all of a sudden that company, that product wasn’t competitive anymore.”

Longer life expectancy is a long term trend that we have all seen coming, said Lindkvist. However, we must identify the opportunities that this trend will present and seize them. We are seeing the creation of a new life period like “childhood” and “teenager”, he argued. The World Health Organisation estimates that the average life expectancy in the next century will be 120. What was once considered old age will be something entirely different, said Lindkvist, “It might be the best period in time of your life!”

Something else that we cannot ignore, of course, is technology. Lindkvist revealed that technology is “one of the most frequently used conference topics these days.” Too often, he suggested, we focus on “temporary manifestations of technology.” The most consistent technological trend is what Lindkvist calls, “IKEAfication – What was expensive becomes cheaper, more accessible.”

The flat screen TV illustrates this perfectly. In the beginning this new technology was expensive and unaffordable to most people but now flat screen TVs are universally accessible. Technology, suggested Lindkvist, “bypasses the wisdom that when demand increases, prices go up.”

“We keep on cramming what used to be expensive inside mobile phones,” Lindkvist pointed out. Twenty to thirty years after its invention, when the mobile is common place, is when we begin to see a change in behavioural patterns. The lines between the digital and real worlds have become blurred thanks to the mobile phone, he continued. The consumer’s access to the digital world is now in their pocket and this has created a new type of business, what Lindkvist calls “impulse entrepreneurship.”

There is a lot of potential in impulse, Lindkvist told the LBF: “A lot of industries will be transformed merely by the impulse.” How about impulse insurance? He depicted someone stood at the top of a black ski slope in The Alps who needs insurance for the next 30 seconds, why not have that available to them on their phone at the click of a button? “Why don’t we have impulse saving?” he asked. People only need that “nudge” that Richard Thaler talks about in his book of the same name to act, Lindkvist said.

Another opportunity for business is what Lindkvist calls “the bumblebee model of doing business, [where] you sort of fly around and cross pollinate things.” Going against the conventional business thinking Lindkvist argued, “The world isn’t particularly global.” He revealed that only about five per cent of telephone calls cross an international boundary. It is still the case that “some things that are available in San Diego are not available in Stockholm [and] some things that are available in Stockholm are not available elsewhere,” he emphasised. Lindkvist advocated “business copying and pasting.” Why not take a successful idea from one place and implement it somewhere else? He asked.

One of the more worrying statistics Lindkvist revealed was from a Dutch study concerning the average lifespan of a company. “When you think company, think woodpecker,” said Lindkvist. They have the same lifespan – 12.5 years.

Companies, he argued, are not good at thinking long term and identifying the shifts that will bring about change. “Should we only be good at the now?” Lindkvist asked the LBF. There are five things that every company needs to live longer, he concluded, which are:

1. Long viewing – hunt for clues
2. Blending ideas
3. Experimentation
4. Recycle failures
5. Patience

In challenging times, it is sometimes easier to focus on just getting through the now but sustainable companies invest time and money looking forwards. Long term shifts do, by their very definition, take time but if we can see them coming and act accordingly that is where your company can find the competitive advantage.