My first scenario prompt (#Mindcandy) was about electrodes, brains and octopuses. It was February 2023. Swedish researchers had grown electrodes inside living brain tissue using a viscous gel. Not implanted. Not attached. Grown. In the same edition: octopus brain activity mapped for the first time, 3D-printed hearts, liquid electronics, robot window washers.”
The octopus came back in 2026. Distributed intelligence had become an organisational design framework. Fluid. Adaptive. No central command. The metaphor ate reality.
LEGO appeared in a scenario prompt about modular construction. Months later, programmable matter, modular robotics and reconfigurable supply chains were converging into the same idea from different directions. A toy became a design principle for the future of manufacturing.
Ancient wisdom kept showing up uninvited. Ayurvedic medicine surfaced in a prompt about personalised health. Months later, AI researchers were studying indigenous knowledge systems for pattern recognition. The oldest technology we have not mastered turned out to be the mind.
Looking back, the 1,400 prompts trace a clear trajectory:
2023 was about discovery. The signals were strange and scattered. Electrodes in brains. Octopus cognition. Quantum breakthroughs. The dominant note was wonder — look at what is becoming possible.
2024 was about acceleration. AI stopped being a tool and started becoming infrastructure. The signals moved from what is happening in the world to what is enabling the change. Foundation models, synthetic biology, digital twins. The future stopped being theoretical.
2025 was about collision. Agentic AI. Biohybrid robots. Machine customers. Data as the real bottleneck. The signals started combining. Technologies that had been developing in parallel began converging into something none of them were individually.
2026 was the surprise. After three years of scanning emerging technologies, the questions that mattered most for 2026 were not about technology at all. They were about culture, speed and agency. How fast are decisions really made in your organisation? Have you explicitly codified your culture, or is it assumed? How much agency do your people actually have to act?
The scanning had moved from outside-in to inside-out. From technology to infrastructure to people. From “look at this signal” to “look at yourself.”
But it was never about trying to win a forecasting competition
Some signals were weird. Some were uncomfortable. Some looked ridiculous when I posted them. Some became mainstream much faster than expected. Some are still sitting in the long grass, waiting for their moment. That is the nature of weak signals. They do not arrive with a sign saying “strategic priority.” They arrive as curiosities, anomalies, fragments, odd words, obscure papers, strange experiments, science fiction becoming science fact. Some matured quickly. Some faded. Some remain unresolved. Most changed meaning when they collided with other signals.
But the value was not in correctly predicting each signal’s fate. It was in using signals as prompts: connecting developments that appeared unrelated, challenging assumptions and rehearsing decisions before the future became obvious. The future does not arrive in straight lines. The signal is not the answer. It is the prompt.
What signal is your leadership team seeing—but still failing to act on? DM “SIGNAL” and let’s turn it into a strategic question.
