On 22 February 2023, I published a scenario prompt containing 3D-printed batteries, low-code AI, GPS tag darts, nuclear fusion and killer robots. No single signal told me much on its own. What mattered was the sentence underneath them: technology abstraction means everyone plays LEGO with technologies.
Technology abstraction means everyone plays LEGO with technologies
Technologies were becoming modular, accessible and increasingly easy to combine. You would no longer need to understand every component, write every line of code or wait for permission. You could describe what you wanted, connect the available pieces and build.
The myth of the killer trend
Over the next three years, that metaphor kept returning. Low-code platforms became more powerful. Natural language became a programming interface. AI agents started acting rather than merely answering. Biology became increasingly programmable. The individual signals were interesting, but the combination was strategically important.
The business world remains addicted to the killer trend: the one technology that will change everything. AI, blockchain, quantum computing or the metaverse. But disruption rarely comes from one technology. It comes from technologies, behaviours, regulations, business models and customer expectations colliding.
AI combined with citizen development could enable tiny teams to build companies that once required hundreds of employees. Biomimicry combined with gene editing and additive manufacturing could create products that are grown rather than assembled. Climate pressure combined with deglobalisation and circular economics could reshape entire supply chains.
These are not predictions. They are thought experiments designed to expose assumptions before reality does.
Why specialists miss it
Your AI lead isn’t reading about brain organoids. Your data architect isn’t tracking synthetic biology. Each person is excellent within their vertical and blind to what happens when it collides with three others. That collision — not any single technology — is where the next disruption comes from.
Four habits worth building
- Scan broadly. Not just your industry — nature, geopolitics, art, gaming. The signal that disrupts you won’t come from your trade journal.
- Hold several threads at once. This is the hard part. Fragmented attention means you see signals individually and miss the combination.
- Ask the combination question. Take any two signals and ask what happens if they converge. Most of the time, nothing. Occasionally, everything.
- Try to do this daily — even five minutes. Convergence doesn’t wait for your planning cycle.
This isn’t something you can hand to an AI. I’ve tried; it produces trendslop — generic and detached from context. The combination question needs human judgement and the kind of contextual awareness that only comes from sustained attention. No single signal matters. Combination is everything. And the only way to see it coming is to keep scanning — broadly, daily, imaginatively — until two threads that were running in parallel suddenly cross.
It starts with tomorrow morning’s scan.
