The advantage isn’t prediction. It’s how fast your team can notice change and respond.
Pick one mindcandy prompt below. Discuss it. Decide your moves.
Do you want you a repeatable operating rhythm to sense signals early, decide priorities faster, and act with real strategic options? See how this works here.
Today’s prompts: Scenarios, strategic foresight, predictive forecasting, and organisational thinking
Most organisations are still confusing forecasting with foresight. Forecasting extrapolates the past.
Foresight prepares you for multiple plausible futures. Four scenarios now dominate serious future-of-work and AI thinking:
- Supercharged progress – productivity explodes, inequality widens
- The age of displacement – jobs, roles, and identities break faster than they reform
- The co-pilot economy – humans and machines work in tight partnership
- Stalled progress – regulation, distrust, and capability gaps slow everything down
High-performing companies don’t pick one scenario. They build strategic optionality across all four. What they do differently:
- Track weak signals, not just KPIs
- Combine data with human sense-making
- Treat risk as a source of upside, not just downside
- Run foresight continuously, not as an annual offsite
Traditional forecasting fails because the environment is no longer linear, stable, or decomposable.
Agility without foresight is just fast reaction. And here’s the uncomfortable bit:
Leaders who mastered operational complexity are now expected to navigate ambiguity, interdependence, and second-order effects. Many can’t. Not because they’re stupid — but because their thinking model is obsolete.
The business owner question
Which of your core decisions would collapse if the future doesn’t behave the way your forecast assumes?All prompts:
My latest book about books about AI: You are the upgrade
Data, acceleration, and the future of intelligence: Lessons from 25 core books (and links to 114 other books) about AI, technology abstraction, and consciousness.
https://www.ronimmink.com/product/a-book-about-books-about-ai/
New self-healing artificial ‘pain nerves’ could give humanoid robots human-like reflexes
Researchers have developed a novel soft, jelly-like electronic “pain nerve”.These “nerves,” the researchers explain, can feel pressure at different intensities, not just on and off. What’s more, the nerves appear to become more sensitive once they’ve been “injured.” Over time, as they “heal,” the nerves also calm and become less sensitive.
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/self-healing-artificial-pain-nerves
The Cyberdeck: How Personal Computing Enters VR
William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer describes jacking into “the consensual hallucination” of “the matrix” with a “custom cyberspace deck” projecting one’s “disembodied consciousness” there. The hardware necessary to spend time in VR is a “cyberspace deck” seen “banging against” the hip of the main character.
https://www.uploadvr.com/cyber-deck/
AI is eroding leadership credibility, survey shows
The skills that leaders will most need in the AI era – empathy and authentic communication – are the ones most threatened when AI begins to mediate core managerial interactions
https://www.raconteur.net/talent-culture/ai-is-eroding-leadership-credibility
Here are four ways AI and talent trends could reshape jobs by 2030
Four scenarios: supercharged progress, the age of displacement, co-pilot economy, and stalled progress
What Companies that Excel at Strategic Foresight Do Differently
Companies that excel at strategic foresight are able to systematically track both predictable future events and true unknowns across short- and long-term horizons. Based on a survey of 500 organizations, firms with more advanced foresight capabilities report a meaningful performance edge, driven by data-forward methods, continuous signal detection, and an explicit focus on potential upsides to risks—not just downsides.
https://hbr.org/2026/01/what-companies-that-excel-at-strategic-foresight-do-differently
Predictive forecasting for accurate agility
Traditional forecasting methods are not sufficient for today’s dynamic environment
Kawasaki’s four-legged robot-horse vehicle is going into production
What was announced as a 2050 pipe dream by Kawasaki, the company’s hydrogen-powered, four-hooved, all-terrain robot horse vehicle Corleo is actually going into production and is now expected to be commercially available decades earlier – with the first model to debut in just four years
https://futurism.com/robots-and-machines/kawasaki-robot-horse-production
Can organisational thinking keep up with the future?
Leaders who grew up mastering operational complexity are now expected to navigate ambiguous, interconnected, VUCA environments (characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) – and many can struggle.
https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/organisational-thinking-future/
Top 6 digital transformation trends to look for in 2026
Multi agent systems, vertical AI, AI-native platform architecture, cloud and edge intelligence, preemptive cybersecurity and physical AI begins to blur the digital.
https://etedge-insights.com/technology/top-6-digital-transformation-trends-to-look-for-in-2026/
In 2026, Climate Change Is No Longer A Theoretical Risk
Climate risk is now a planning variable, not a forecast uncertainty. In 2026, climate change is no longer a theoretical risk. It is a measurable, compounding stress on the systems that underpin your business model.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dianneplummer/2026/01/12/in-2026-climate-change-is-no-longer-a-theoretical-risk/
