When you have just written a book called STOP PREDICTING, an article in which 29 leaders confess the trends they misjudged, is always going to be interesting.
Which trend did you get wrong?
Fast Company asked members of its Executive Board one question: Which trend did you get wrong? The answers cover a lot of ground. The speed of AI. The belief that technology can fix organisations, when culture comes first. Too much faith in optimisation. Overconfidence that platforms could filter out fake reviews and fake news. Style mattering more than speed. Mobile phone adoption. AI as more than a software problem. The need for nimble, distributed supply chains. AI going beyond automation. Content slop. Overinvesting in fringe benefits. Q-commerce. The human touch in recruitment. Trade shows that refused to die. QR codes. The influencer economy. The importance of meeting in person. Return to office. Education. Thought leadership. Social media. Even music and design.
Twenty-nine confessions. Read them side by side, and three patterns jump out. They are exactly the points I make in my book.
Pattern 1: overestimating and underestimating impact
Almost every miss is a misjudgement of scale or timing, in one direction or the other. Some underestimated. Neural networks, mobile phones, social media, the influencer economy, and the speed at which AI would become part of daily work were all dismissed as too early, too messy, or too unserious. Others overestimated. Q-commerce would go mainstream. Technology would fix broken processes. Perks would build culture. Platforms and regulators would get fake reviews under control.
We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run. The leaders in this article are not careless people. They are smart people doing what humans do. We are simply bad at judging impact.
Pattern 2: AI as an accelerator
AI turns up in roughly a third of the answers, and rarely in the way people expected. It did not simply automate work. It accelerated everything around it. It exposed weak leadership, weak processes, and weak governance faster. It killed commodity content and made a distinct human voice more valuable. It made “faster” cheap, which made style, judgment, and taste the scarce resources.
That is what accelerators do. They amplify whatever is already there, good or bad.
Pattern 3: the pendulum
This is the one I find most fascinating. Action creates reaction. The more AI-generated slop, the more we value a human voice. The more digital our lives become, the more we crave being in the same room, and trade shows and live events come roaring back. Remote work swings to return-to-office mandates, and the pendulum settles on hybrid. Years of optimising for the algorithm produce a hunger for authenticity. Global scale gets hit by disruption, and nimble, local supply chains win. Every trend carries the seeds of its countertrend. Every action creates a reaction.
Stop predicting. Start scanning.
Most predictions are wrong. That is OK. It is about situational awareness. Scan. Mix your signals. Map your assumptions. The fact that 29 executives volunteered their misses in public is itself a signal. Being wrong is becoming respectable. Good. That is where foresight starts.
Which trend did you get wrong? And which pendulum do you see swinging right now? Tell me in the comments.
