Most leaders obsess over the “next thing”. The winners obsess over the reaction to the next thing. Every major shift creates a pendulum swing. Action is reaction. A push into the new (speed, automation, scale, convenience). A pull back to what humans missed (trust, craft, nature, meaning, attention). The pendulum of change and your ability to take a position on that pendulum, If you only plan for the push, you get blindsided by the pull.
Two mental models help
- Lego thinking: technologies don’t arrive alone. They combine. AI + sensors + robotics + payments + biology. When the blocks snap together, change goes exponential.
- Exponential thinking: supper accelerated change starting with small steps (put 1 grain of rice on the first square, then double it on every next square (2, 4, 8…). By square 64 you’re at 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 grains on that square alone, and the total across the board is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615grains
Some examples
- What as a response to technology do most of us have on our floors? Wood, we are going back to nature.
- What are the responses to social media and constant distraction? Slow flow and mindfulness.
A practical exercise you can run this week
Pick one trend that matters to your business (AI, automation, regulation, wellness, climate, geopolitics, whatever). Then do this in 30 minutes with your team:
- Name the trend in one sentence.
- Push it to the extreme (assume it becomes cheap, ubiquitous, and normal).
- List what breaks (jobs, attention, trust, identity, privacy, health, meaning, community).
- Identify the counter-reaction (what do customers/staff/society start rejecting? what do they seek instead?).
- Design two experiments: one that rides the push, one that captures the pull.
