Jeremy Gutsche has built his career around finding out what’s cool before it’s cool. He is an innovation expert, founder and chief trend hunter of TrendHunter.com, award-winning author and the 2013 NRPA Congress and Exposition keynote speaker. What started out as a project to help him decide what career path he’d like to follow led to the creation of a website that boasts more than 40 million views per month and a business built around inspiring new and successful business ideas.

In a time when park and recreation agencies are fighting to keep their share of funding, the ability to exploit trends and chaos is more important than ever. Well aware of the challenges that park and recreation professionals face, Gutsche has structured his keynote to help park and rec pros use chaos to create opportunity, create a culture of innovation, utilize trend-spotting and communicate infectiously.

What did you think your career would be before you started trend hunting?
I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but my problem was I couldn’t actually figure out what I wanted to do. Every career I ever chose was really just to expose myself to different ideas. So I started Trend Hunter as a place where people could come to share their business ideas. At the time, I was running a business line at Capital One, but when I would come home in the wee hours of the morning, I would start working on this website. People from around the world were submitting ideas, and I was hoping that one of them would inspire my future venture. But once it started taking off, I never actually needed to pick. So the fun thing is that now, I can just help other people find their ideas, and that’s really what we specialize in.

What can you tell us about the keynote you’ll deliver to the NRPA membership in October?
Well, I’m going to be diving into a couple of different areas. We’re going to talk a little bit about how chaos creates opportunity and how changing times actually create new consumer needs. In parks and rec, there are some interesting trends that have us thinking about reconnecting with our families in times of uncertainty and the vacations and life experiences that we want to have. We’ll also get into building a culture of innovation within your team so that people are trying new things, suggesting ideas and experimenting. We’ll talk about trend-spotting, where I’ll show you how to actually find the new opportunities that are out there. And then, finally, we’ll talk about infectious communication — how you communicate in a way that makes your ideas stick. It’ll be fun and high-energy, with lots of cool little case studies too.

What experience do you have working with the park and recreation field?
I’ve worked with almost every field in some sense (300 clients in the last four years). So a lot of that has included recreation and tourism — both at the country level and with different sport and leisure brands. I grew up outside of the city in rural Alberta and did ski racing on the weekends, which took me into the mountains. I’ve always been an outdoorsy person and for me, the fun part is that this overlaps with some of the client work we’ve done. [Recreation is a] personal passion and just how I think of myself as individual.

What are some trends you’re seeing that may affect the field of parks and recreation?
We did research following the recession, when it was darker probably in 2008 or 2009, and one of the things that happened from people going through that period is that they started really thinking about what would be important for them and why. It used to be that everything was career, career, career, but then as people (the Boomers) started approaching retirement, they think, “Hey, what’s really important in life?” Over the last three to five years, people started reprioritizing. The areas that started getting more interest included pursuing life to its fullest (which isn’t just about your career), ensuring that you have enough time with your family and travel. We now have a consumer psyche where people are more interested in trying new things or types of adventure that they never had. All three interests overlap with what happens in the world of parks and rec. And in the current economic times, a park is more affordable anyway than some of the other opportunities out there. So people ask, “Do I want to have a nicer new car or connect with my family and do something that takes us outdoors?”

What suggestions do you have for park and recreation professionals who want to reinvent their communities’ expectations as they work to get more children outdoors?
One of the changes with the consumer and young-person psyche is the amount to which the reward system has shifted toward their peers. Kids post an image to Facebook or Instagram, and their measure of success is a certain amount of “likes.” And they feel like a failure if they don’t reach that certain number of likes. So you have a weird, different system where the reward they get is a social connectivity experience. There’s an element where wanting to get people outdoors is fighting the trend of a childhood spent indoors, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s fighting a childhood social media experience, because that’s a reward system that will not change. Think about how you play into the actual use of social media — is it geocaching where people are doing treasure hunts that are GPS-driven? Is it actually embedding social media into a park experience with different types of adventures — finding certain things, collecting certain things? It could be an experience with their friends. It’s not entirely an outright crisis, and sometimes what you are trying to do is find out how you can integrate with one or two of the trends.

What trends have you seen that offer innovative and effective new ways for park and recreation professionals to reach community members?
It’s going to be about social media. And an interesting opportunity for parks and rec is not just to think of social media as Facebook and Twitter, but to realize that you have this boom that has never really happened before where now everyone is a photographer with their phone. One of the trends that goes along with that is “humble bragging” — where when someone achieves something, they like to share that conquest with their friends. People want to do these extreme challenges, but almost for the sole purpose of being able to share that photo on Facebook or Instagram to get their friends to see what they’ve done. I want to share that picture of me getting to the top of the mountain because one, I’m trying to share my epic new Instagram photos and two, I want to do some “humble bragging,” meaning I want to share my adventure because my conquest is actually pretty cool. For a teenager, those two motivations are more important in some sense than just going out to spend a day in the park or a day climbing a mountain.
The highest importance they get is that they got to share something epic. And if you start thinking about it that way, it’s like “Well, wait a minute, parks and rec actually offers an extraordinary plethora of opportunities to do just that.”

Can you tell us about a memory from your favorite park or rec center?
I’ve been to Las Vegas probably 15 times to speak. I don’t gamble and find it tough to walk into a 60-story pyramid in the middle of the desert and wonder how they made it. But what I love about that area is that I always pair it with an adventure to a park that’s on the outside of Vegas. My favorite adventure was just exploring Death Valley’s hidden little ghost towns that are way off the beaten trail out in the middle of nowhere. Just the sense of adventure and being in the wilderness, but connected somehow to the past of these ghost towns was, for me, one of my favorite adventures in a park ever.


Interview by Roxanne Sutton, NRPA’s Marketing and Communications Specialist.