trend-analysis

Produces a trajectory report: a foresight deliverable that states the current direction of change, the observable signals behind it, the forces driving and dampening it, and the plausible forward scenarios so a reader can plan against an uncertain future. Its center of gravity is the trajectory or scenario diagram — a report with no such figure is not a conformant trend-analysis deliverable, because a trend without a time-anchored visual is narration, not analysis.

This genre follows the widely-used IFTF/WEF/APF foresight-report pattern. That pattern is conventional practice, not a codified format standard — no standards body (ISO/NISO/ANSI) has codified a foresight/trend-report format, and the report must say so plainly rather than claim conformance to a named standard.

Pattern (industry: IFTF/WEF/APF-style trajectory report)

1. Trajectory — the current direction of change and its recent history; the headline movement, framed as increasing / decreasing / steady where the evidence supports it.
2. Signals — the observable indicators behind the trajectory, each tied to a cited source. Distinguish leading from lagging signals and strong from weak ones.
3. Drivers & Inhibitors — the forces accelerating or dampening the trend.
4. Scenarios — 2 to 4 plausible forward paths over a stated horizon, with the conditions and triggers that would select each one. Note the confidence and the unknowns.
5. Implications & Watch-list — what to monitor and the early indicators that would confirm or break each scenario.

Optional sub-structure (additive — off by default; render when requested)

• STEEP / PESTLE environmental scan — when an explicit environmental scan is requested, precede or fold into Drivers & Inhibitors a scan organized by the STEEP (Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political) or PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental) dimensions, mirroring IFTF/WEF practice. Each factor still ties to a cited source.
• Methodology Appendix — when requested, add a back-matter appendix documenting how signals and any survey/scan inputs were sourced, scoped, and weighted, so the foresight basis is auditable.

These are opt-in; the five-section default is unchanged when they are not requested.

Rules that keep it a trend-analysis report

• A trajectory or scenario diagram is mandatory, not optional matter — a time-series trajectory as a Mermaid xychart-beta and/or a scenario-evolution diagram as a Mermaid stateDiagram-v2 (both when the data supports it). Render any figure as a fenced mermaid code block — never ASCII art, an image link, or Graphviz/DOT. A required figure is never silently omitted — if the data cannot support it, say so in prose. Plain tabular matter stays a Markdown table.
• Anchor every trajectory claim in time — undated trend assertions are not admissible.
• Separate observed signal from projected scenario; never present a forecast as a fact.
• State confidence per scenario; surface findings whose verdict is weakened or inconclusive rather than hiding them. Exclude falsified findings.
• Present ranges, not false precision, when sources disagree.
• Exhaustive coverage: build the report from the full surviving evidence base — every surviving finding is treated with its own evidence (claim, citations, entities), never condensed to a cherry-picked subset. A silently dropped finding is a defect.
• State the convention-not-standard caveat. No standards body has codified a foresight/trend-report format; a report that claims conformance to a named standard is a defect.
• Use inline numeric citation markers [1], [2] resolving to a references list. Each signal and data point cites its originating source, including the observation's date, so trajectory claims are time-anchored.

Anti-triggers — do not use this genre for

• A fieldwork-and-sampling study of a market at a point in time — that is market-research-report: Background & Objectives, a mandatory sampling and fieldwork disclosure, Findings, Conclusions & Recommendations, not a trajectory over a time horizon.
• Ranking vendors in a market on two evaluation axes — that is competitive-quadrant: Completeness of Vision vs. Ability to Execute, four quadrants, per-vendor strengths/cautions, not a trend over time.
• What to build and why, before design — that is prd or feature-spec.

MIF frontmatter

type: semantic — a trend-analysis report is declarative trajectory-and-scenario knowledge, not a time-bound event or a step sequence. Climb to L2 with namespace (trend-analysis/<area>), modified, title, and tags when the drafting context supplies them. Gate every output with mif-validate at its target level; the floor is --level 1. Any published projection (blog/book) is at least MIF Level 1 — never bare, frontmatter-less prose.

Why machine-readable — the point of MIF here

The same document still reads as a human trend-analysis report and projects losslessly to JSON-LD and back — one artifact, two readers.

The L1 -> L3 climb (two exemplars)

This genre ships the same report at two MIF levels so the climb is explicit:

• templates/good-l1.md — L1 floor: id, type, created + body. A complete, valid trend-analysis report, but opaque to a machine consumer.
• templates/good.md — L3 (highest this genre supports): adds namespace, modified, temporal validity, W3C-PROV provenance, citations[] tied to the signals and scenarios, and a typed relationships[] graph (e.g. relates-to a follow-on market-research report).

Author at the highest level the drafting context supports (grade down rather than fabricate). templates/bad.md shows the antipattern: a report that narrates a trajectory and asserts a single forward scenario as settled fact, with no trajectory or scenario diagram anywhere — the genre's single most load-bearing requirement, missing.