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. MindCandy Club turns this into a repeatable leadership rhythm to sense early, decide fast, and keep your options open.
Today’s prompt: the LEGO smart brick
People who follow me know I’m obsessed with technology abstraction – and what it does to an organisation’s ability to innovate and respond. It started with low-code/no-code and “playing LEGO” with software. Now AI lets you “speak software”. Next you will speak genetics, robotics, biology, materials, and more. Complexity is being wrapped into simple, modular building blocks.
The LEGO Smart Brick is a perfect symbol of this direction: intelligence, sensing and interaction embedded into a standard unit that clicks into everything else. That’s what’s coming for most technologies: smart, composable bricks you can combine without needing to understand the underlying complexity.
For leaders, this cuts both ways. Abstraction massively speeds up experimentation and product cycles. But it also means your competitors can reconfigure faster than ever. The question is not if this hits your industry – it’s whether your organisation is ready to “build with bricks” instead of custom-building everything from scratch.
The CEO question
Where in your business should you already be “playing LEGO” – modular, recombinable and abstracted away from technical complexity – and what is the first process, product or capability you will redesign as a smart brick?
Other 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/
Cotton fabric generates electricity from humidity; powers LEDs, devices from sweat, moisture
Scientists have showcased that cotton can work as a power source and harvest electricity from humidity. Scientists have now demonstrated a way to transform ordinary cotton fabric into a self-sustaining electricity generator that operates day and night by drawing energy from moisture in the air.
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/cotton-fabric-generates-electricity-from-humidity
New MRI technique enables real-time, artifact-free control of magnetic microrobots
Magnetic microrobots are considered a promising tool for minimally invasive medical procedures, including targeted drug delivery, precision therapies, and theranostic interventions.
https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/real-time-mri-navigation-magnetic-microrobots
AI-generated sensors open new paths for early cancer detection
Nanoparticles coated with molecular sensors could be used to develop at-home tests for many types of cancer.
https://news.mit.edu/2026/ai-generated-sensors-open-new-paths-early-cancer-detection-0106
The Bio-Tech Revolution: How Synthetic Biology and AI Are Transforming Healthcare by 2030
What happens when code meets cells?
https://www.burrus.com/intelligent-health-ai-genomics-synthetic-biology-future-medicine/
Want To See The Future In 2026? Create A Futures Team
A Futures Team is not a think tank. It is a community of learning. It expands a leader’s intelligence by expanding their relationships, as leaders become their best selves through the company they keep. If a competitor existed six years from now with all our strengths but none of our constraints, how would they outperform us?
https://chiefexecutive.net/want-to-see-the-future-in-2026-create-a-futures-team
Sony Patent Would Unleash AI ‘Ghosts’ to Beat Games for You When They Get Too Hard
Maybe one day, we’ll get an AI that can watch the movies for us. There is something there that I cannot put my finger on, but I think this is very relevant.
The 30 Best Pieces of Company Building Advice We Heard in 2025
Boots on the grounds, recruitment, hearts and minds, ego, reverse demo, personal growth, fractional executives, understanding technology, behaviour, follow the money, the hard part first, memify, pioneer, wolf time, the screenshot test, design, AI, story telling, emotion, memorability, personality, founder resilience and asking yourself: does this align with my my view of the world in the future.
