I’ve long used a pendulum framework for scanning: push a trend to its extreme, then ask what counter-reaction it produces. Globalisation produces deglobalisation. Efficiency produces burnout. The pendulum never stops — it swings, and organisations that build strategy around one extreme get caught when it reverses.
There is more than one
Most leaders assume there’s only one pendulum, doom on one end, abundance on the other, and that the job is to guess which way the world tips. That’s the trap I named in “AI, utopia or Skynet?” There isn’t one pendulum. There are many, swinging at once, on different axes. AI is hollowing out professional categories — real, documented, happening now. AI is also making intelligence cheap and available to anyone with imagination — also real, also happening now. Two different pendulums, not two ends of the same one. Neither waits for the other to finish its arc.
Hold the tension
The leader who sees only the first is paralysed. The one who sees only the second is naive. The one who tracks both can say, in the same breath: our industry may not exist in ten years, and here’s how we build the most extraordinary company in the world during those ten years. That’s productive tension.
Meaning against meaninglessness
Not every swing is about markets. A 2025 signal — Nietzsche in the age of AI — asked where meaning comes from when AI can do the knowledge work that once gave people purpose. That’s a doom no cybersecurity report captures: purpose failure, not system failure. Meaning against meaninglessness is a pendulum too, and no dashboard tracks it.
Hibernate
Which is why strategic hibernation matters — the discipline of deliberate stillness. At the extreme of any swing, the worst decisions get made. The best ones happen in the transition, when the pendulum passes through the centre, and the signal is clearest.
Take a swing
Take your current strategy. Ask what happens if this trend accelerates, then ask the harder question: what swings back? Where is your organisation positioned right now — and are you ready for the swing? Next: strategic hibernation, or action?
Need help with pendulum thinking? DM me “PENDULUM”.
