In February 2023, I started publishing a daily scenario prompt. One signal. One question. Every day.
Three and a half years later, the archive had taught me twelve lessons I did not expect. Most of what I predicted was wrong. That turned out to be the point.
Here is what stuck.
1. No single signal matters. Necrobots mean nothing. Brain cells playing Pong mean nothing. But necrobots plus organoid intelligence plus fungi computing plus programmable biology — that is a pattern. Combination is everything. The LEGO principle: every technology is a brick. The value is never the brick. It is what you build when you connect bricks nobody thought belonged together.
2. Every technology follows an abstraction curve. The endpoint is always democratisation. Coding went from machine language to drag-and-drop. Biology is following the same curve. So is AI. The pattern is universal and it only moves in one direction.
3. The dead are working, the living are computing, and the boundary does not hold. Dead spiders repurposed as robotic grippers. Brain cells in a dish learning to play Pong. Biology is becoming a computing platform. The boundary between alive and dead, natural and engineered, is dissolving.
4. Consciousness is strategic infrastructure. Not a lifestyle choice. The consciousness thread appeared in one edition out of every eight. Meditation, embodied cognition, ancient wisdom augmented by AI. The most persistent signal in the archive, and the one most business readers wanted to ignore.
5. Science fiction is the best scenario planning tool we have. Blade Runner asked the question about synthetic identity in 1982. Most leadership teams still have not answered it. Fiction rehearses the future before the spreadsheet can describe it.
6. Hold the doom and the abundance simultaneously. The pendulum never stops. Every technology carries both. The leadership teams that pick a side — utopian or dystopian — get blindsided by the swing. Hold both. That is the discipline.
7. The model is not the moat. Context is. Intelligence is a commodity. The accumulated operational knowledge — the service history, the asset relationships, the workflow logic, the institutional memory — that is what no model can replicate. Context rots when you neglect it.
8. Your data is always worse than you think. Assume your AI has food poisoning. That is your data quality. Every organisation overestimates its data readiness. The audit comes first. Always.
9. Organisational design eats everything. Culture eats strategy. Something eats culture. The way you structure reporting lines, decision rights, information flows, and incentive structures is the container that shapes everything inside it. The org chart is the strategy.
10. The gentle singularity is already here. No rupture. No threshold. A slow, continuous shift in who is doing the thinking. It arrived through workflow updates and vendor emails. It smells like coffee and looks like a normal day at work.
11. You are the upgrade. Not the AI. Not the infrastructure. Not the org chart. The only non-commoditisable asset is the quality of the human operating the technology. Attention, judgment, embodied awareness, philosophical resilience. Train for it the way an athlete trains.
12. AI is chicken feed to what is coming next. The bio-economy changes what we are. Programmable biology. Gene prompting. Hackable cells. AI changed how we process information. Biology changes the processor itself.
These twelve lessons came from paying attention every day for three and a half years. The methodology is simple. The discipline is not. The archive did not teach me what will happen next. It taught me how change behaves.
Signals combine. Technologies abstract. Boundaries dissolve. Data decays. Organisations resist. Narratives shape action. Humans remain the upgrade. Biology is moving from metaphor to platform. Context beats generic intelligence. And the future rarely arrives as a shock. It arrives as a normal day that no longer works the way yesterday did.
The upcoming book is called I Was 80% Wrong. The 20% that was right changed how I think about strategy, leadership, and what it means to be human in the age of AI.
That is the work I do with leadership teams. Future fitness coaching — building the muscle to sense, decide, and act before certainty arrives.
