The ideas we chase
How trends shape and signal who we are
A few years into my professional life, I began to notice something strange: entire teams, departments, and even entire industries would suddenly adopt a new idea almost overnight. One season it was emotional intelligence; another, grit. Then came mindfulness, followed by design thinking, and then authentic leadership. None of these ideas is inherently bad. In fact, these concepts have merit and many I use in my work as a teacher and consultant. But the pace and pattern of their adoption made me wonder about what was actually happening beneath the surface.
This is when I started paying attention to the ideas we collectively chase. Were these ideas solving real problems? Or were they something else? Perhaps they were social signals, ways for groups to declare values or aspirations, often without deeper change? It turns out these aren't random phenomena.
This pattern of rapid adoption across entire systems fascinated me because it revealed something deeper about how we collectively make sense of change. When I started paying attention to these deeper patterns, I realized that trends aren't just about ideas—they're about how systems signal their values and manage their own evolution.
And they matter, because in a world increasingly shaped by our interlocking social, economic, political, and cultural systems. Understanding how ideas spread tells us something profound about who we are, what we long for, and how change actually happens.
Defining our collective pursuits
For the purposes of this article, I’m not using the word trend in the way it’s often used in pop culture as something fleeting, fashionable, or superficial. That usage flattens what is, at heart, a powerful sociological phenomenon.
Some trends are relatively shallow, such as business buzzwords or TikTok challenges (that’s the pop culture aspect), while others serve as movement signals or cultural currents, reflecting genuine shifts in values or collective consciousness. When I use trend here, I’m talking about the latter. For this article, I define it as a recognizable pattern in the spread of behaviors, ideas, or identities across systems and social networks that can shift values and culture.
Understanding how these different types of change interact—adaptive behaviors, organized movements, and institutional responses—is essential to grasping how our systems evolve or remain stuck.
Trends as social signals
To understand why this matters, we need to examine how ideas actually move through our interconnected systems.
Ideas don’t spread in a vacuum. Innovations follow a social adoption curve from innovators to early adopters to the mainstream1. Consider how 'psychological safety' moved from Edmondson's research on teams into corporate boardrooms2. The concept became both a genuine tool for team effectiveness and a buzzword that organizations use to signal progressive management, sometimes simultaneously within the same company.
But more important than the curve is the mechanism: who adopts an idea, why, and how they’re perceived in a given system.
In systems, ideas spread through both formal and informal networks: through leaders, influencers, rituals, language, and reward structures. A new behavior gains traction because it is useful, of course, but also because it signals something bigger, such as status, alignment, aspiration, even moral virtue.
The concept of Cultural Capital is at work here: the more a person or group is perceived as legitimate or aspirational, the more influence they have in setting what’s considered ‘in’3. This explains why a Stanford MBA's mention of 'design thinking' carries more weight than the same idea from a community college graduate, regardless of the actual merit of their insights.
These dynamics matter because they reveal how trends function less as truth claims and more as systems navigation. We adopt new practices in part because we want to belong. Because we want to be seen as relevant. Because we’re aligning ourselves, whether consciously or not, with the dominant logic of the system we’re in.
When systems absorb trends
Once a trend gains traction, it often gets institutionalized. But institutionalization doesn't always mean transformation. Systems are notoriously adaptive, taking the language of change and using it to reinforce the status quo. Mindfulness, originally a practice of presence and personal liberation, gets repackaged as a productivity hack. Diversity initiatives turn into check-the-box trainings with no power-sharing. 'Agility' becomes a reason to cut staff or change priorities weekly.
This is the paradox: systems adopt trends not to evolve but to stabilize. They integrate new language to maintain legitimacy without shifting underlying power dynamics or purpose. The deeper leverage points in a system, those tied to its goals and paradigms, are the hardest to change4. Most trends operate far above that level, touching only the surface while leaving the core untouched.
But before ideas reach the mainstream systems where we first observe them, they typically emerge somewhere else entirely.
Subcultures are where trends begin
Before an idea becomes a trend, it usually starts in a subculture or smaller group operating at the edges of dominant systems. Subcultures test out new scripts, languages, and values that challenge the mainstream. They serve as incubators for new identities and collective practices.
From queer ball culture to open-source software communities, from punk to urban mutual aid networks, subcultures are where resistance becomes coherence. What makes these groups powerful isn’t just what they do but how they reimagine meaning. They offer a new narrative of what’s valuable, what’s normal, and who belongs.
When these ideas “catch on” beyond their original context, they may become trends. But that transition is fraught. What was once a resistant or alternative practice can be diluted, commercialized, or stripped of its original intent as it enters mainstream systems.
When trends disrupt, and when they don’t
Some trends don’t just offer a new tool or identity, they name an injustice. They call out harm and demand systemic reckoning. These are not mere trends, but movement signals, and sometimes full-blown social movements. And yet, even they are not immune to co-optation.
Take #MeToo. What began as a grassroots campaign by Tarana Burke to support survivors of sexual violence became a global reckoning. It was not just a trend. It was a movement of networked feminist visibility5, one that forced systems to confront their own complicity in silencing and harm. And yet, even #MeToo was pulled into system logic6. Companies issued PR statements. High-profile figures were ousted. But broader systems, legal, corporate, and cultural, remained largely untouched.
Then came the backlash. The rise of the “manosphere”, the online communities steeped in anti-feminist, hypermasculine rhetoric, was not random. I argue it was a systemic response. These groups framed feminist progress as male disempowerment, reasserting dominance through alternative identities that reject equality altogether7. This is not to suggest that we do not have challenges with boys and men falling behind. Yet, I believe this is a highly complex issue that has little to do with perceptions of male disempowerment.
The same pattern played out with Black Lives Matter (BLM). What began as a radical critique of policing and racial capitalism became, in some places, a brand. Meanwhile, anti-CRT laws, DEI rollbacks, and voter suppression showed how systems retaliate. Even as cultural narratives shifted, systemic violence persisted8.
Thinking in systems, this begins to make sense: System transformation requires intervention at the level of goals and paradigms, not just policies or practices9. Most trends, even movements, struggle to reach that depth. But each wave can shift the narrative terrain, making the next disruption more likely to take root.
Living in the feedback loop
Trends don’t just shape systems; they shape us. We absorb them into our behavior, language, aesthetics, and even our sense of self. Systems reproduce themselves through internalization. The narratives we adopt are shaped by social construction. We live inside stories that tell us what matters, who we should be, and how we’re supposed to show up.
But we are not passive. We can reflect. We can resist. We can ask ourselves whether we're adopting an idea because we believe in it or because the system rewards it. We can examine whether a shift serves transformation or protects existing power. We can notice what's being centered in a trend and what's being pushed to the margins.
The trends we adopt don't just change our organizations or communities, they become part of how we see ourselves and perform our roles within different systems. Understandin
g this gives us more agency in choosing which changes to embrace and which to question.
Reflections on the Journey
Writing this has reinforced something I’ve felt for a long time but never quite named: trends aren’t just curiosities. They’re what I define as ‘cultural telemetry,’ or the remote sensors that send us data about the condition and environment of our collective social systems. They show us where the system is open and where it’s closed and defending itself. They offer a window into our collective longings, fears, and negotiations of identity and power.
Understanding how ideas move through systems helps me slow down and think more clearly. Instead of reacting to every new trend, I stop and ask myself: What system is this reinforcing? What pain is it naming? What future is it imagining?
Trends aren’t inherently good or bad. But they’re never neutral.
If we want to live with intention inside our systems, if we want to change them, we need to read the signals with care. We need to listen for what’s underneath. And we need to remember that even in a world driven by speed, reflection remains our first act of resistance.
Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition (New York London Toronto Sydney: Free Press, 2003).
Amy Edmondson, “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams,” Administrative Science Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1999): 350–83, https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Donella H. Meadows, “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,” 1999, https://www.donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Leverage_Points.pdf.
Rosemary Clark-Parsons, ““I See You, I Believe You, I Stand with You": #MeToo and the Performance of Networked Feminist Visibility,” Feminist Media Studies 21, no. 3 (April 3, 2021): 362–80, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1628797.
Sarah Jaffe, “The Collective Power of #MeToo,” Dissent 65, no. 2 (2018): 80–87, https://doi.org/10.1353/dss.2018.0031; Ann Pellegrini, “#MeToo: Before and After,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 19, no. 4 (October 2, 2018): 262–64, https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2018.1531530.
Clotilde de Maricourt and Stephen R. Burrell, “#MeToo or #MenToo? Expressions of Backlash and Masculinity Politics in the #MeToo Era,” The Journal of Men’s Studies 30, no. 1 (March 1, 2022): 49–69, https://doi.org/10.1177/10608265211035794.
Dante Mozie, ““They Killin’ Us for No Reason”: Black Lives Matter, Police Brutality, and Hip-Hop Music—A Quantitative Content Analysis,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 99, no. 3 (September 1, 2022): 826–47, https://doi.org/10.1177/10776990221109803.
Meadows, “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System”; Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008).
It seems to me this is a clarion call to lean heavily on our own agency. It doesn’t mean we don’t hear and listen closely to each other, but we must certainly not believe everything is true for us as individuals. For example, as an aspiring business man I do not have to fall in line with the capitalistic assumption that my business must be as big as other national or international maid services.
Thank you again for these wonderful and deep insights.