#418 – January 5, 2026

Navigating in an Age of Acceleration

Hello, fellow strategists!  2026 is already asking more of us — faster decisions, clearer priorities, and better judgment about what truly matters. In this edition, we explore what to hold onto, what to change, and what to let go as we navigate an age of acceleration. Along the way, we share hard-won productivity insights, practical ways to use AI to enrich (not replace) our thinking, and a framework for connecting creative design to real business impact. Enjoy!

 

Quick Takes

What to Hold, Change or Let Go in 2026

What to Hold:

Jim Murphy, author of Inner Excellence, asks a provocative question at the end of each year — one that flips the usual reflection script and challenges how we think about purpose and progress:  What good reason do you have to not change every single thing in your life?

For some parts of life, the answer comes easily. You don’t hesitate to defend why you’d keep them just as they are. They give you energy, meaning, or a sense of belonging. But elsewhere, the reasoning gets fuzzy. You may notice how much effort something takes compared to what it gives back, and that imbalance can be a quiet signal that change is overdue. If you had to make the case for keeping everything exactly as it is, where would your justifications be compelling, and where would they unravel?

What to Change:

Vishen Lakhiani, founder of Mindvalley, frames the question somewhat differently:  If you continue living exactly like this, where will your life be in five years?  Sit with that question for a moment and you may notice where your life feels settled — and where it feels more like drifting on autopilot.

What to Let Go: 

A related idea comes from Sahil Bloom’s Curiosity Chronicle, where he shares an old fable about snaring a monkey. A villager drills a small hole in a coconut and places food inside, just wide enough for an open hand, not a clenched fist. The monkey grabs the food and stubbornly refuses to let it go, choosing instead to remain stuck in the coconut.

As Bloom notes, the monkey isn’t locked in by the coconut — it is trapped by what it won’t release. He closes with a Japanese saying worth carrying into 2026:  “If you get on the wrong train, get off at the nearest station. The longer you wait, the more expensive the return trip.”

 

Key Themes in 30 Years of Productivity Advice

We had such a good response to ideas from Daniel Pink in October, here’s a link to his YouTube video: Give Me 12 Minutes and I’ll Give You 30 Years of Productivity Advice. In brief, those key points of advice are:

• Be ruthless about doing less.
• Protect your golden hours (i.e. your best times for deep, focused work).
• Systematize the small stuff (and batch it).
• Track your progress (which motivates and builds momentum).
• Build consistency instead of intensity and habits instead of heroics.
• Take strategic breaks (to improve peak performance).

 

Ask AI to Do More than Summarize

On his MarTech AI Substack, Charlie Hills looks at connections between marketing and AI. Recently he made a case for ways we can better use AI to amplify our own best thinking, including prompts to extract strategic insights, identify leverage points as force multipliers, and filter information for specific roles like marketer, founder or analyst. Here are some others you may not have considered:

• Surface Hidden Assumptions: “Reveal the unstated assumptions or blind spots shaping this argument – and what changes if they’re wrong.” AI becomes your devil’s advocate.
• Compare Opposing Views: “Map this idea against two competing perspectives. Show where they align, where they differ, and which context fits each.” AI becomes your debate moderator.
• Build a Reusable Model: “Extract the repeatable framework hidden in this text. Label each stage, its input, and output.” AI becomes your systems architect.
• Extract Contrarian Takeaways: “Find insights that would challenge smart peers — still credible, but unexpected. Write each as a sharp one-liner.” AI becomes your thought provocateur.
• Turn Information Into Action: “Translate this into a 5-step plan with clear owners, quick wins, and measurable results.” AI becomes your project manager.

 

8020Info Drill-Down

Navigating in the Age of Acceleration

Futurist Robert B. Tucker argues that we are living through an inflection point — one where political, technological, social, and environmental forces are converging and accelerating in a transition from one era to the next.

As you look ahead to 2026, how are you strengthening your future preparedness with the mindsets, skillsets, and toolsets needed to anticipate what’s coming and take action with confidence?

In Build a Better Future, he outlines seven key mindsets to help leaders navigate rapid change, disruption, and uncertainty:

Looking Ahead:

• The Preparedness Mindset:  Preparedness begins with imagining what could plausibly go wrong — or right. Tucker recommends scenario planning: identify three major disruptions relevant to your sector, consider their likely direction and trajectory, and assess the implications, risks, and opportunities of each. From there, develop a proactive response for every scenario.
• The Anticipatory Mindset:  “Superforecasters”, Tucker notes, treat their views as hypotheses to be tested, not beliefs to be defended. This mindset breaks big uncertainties into smaller questions, considers base rates, updates assumptions, and weighs probabilities. One practical step: bring your team together periodically to share observations on emerging signals and insights.
• The Futurist Mindset:  This mindset is less about prediction and more about perception. It sharpens your ability to notice the faint early signals of emerging trends and shifting conditions. Paying attention before change becomes obvious (Strategic Foresight) gives you greater freedom to pivot when the moment arrives.
• The Long View Mindset:  The present rarely makes sense without the past. Long-term patterns, cycles, and precedents continue to shape today’s events, in part because human nature changes far less than we think. Drawing lessons from history can help us anticipate what may lie ahead.

Responding to Acceleration:

• The Adaptability Mindset:  As Charles Darwin famously observed, it’s not the strongest or smartest who survive, but the most adaptable. That means you must be generating innovative ideas that create value and then bringing them to life. Consider conducting a “change audit” to identify practices or processes that have become rigid or outdated, and then deliberately increase flexibility, resilience, and experimentation.
• The Human Agency Mindset:  This perspective emphasizes choice, intention, and responsibility. Left unchecked, convenience and automated systems can quietly make decisions for us. Tucker argues that the deepest form of agency lies in the power of choosing how to think. Where can you strengthen agency, ownership, and decision-making capability across your team?
• The Visionary Mindset:  Visionary leadership requires sustained attention to the future — tracking trends, spotting opportunity, and mobilizing others around a compelling direction. As Warren Bennis famously said, “Managers do things right; leaders do the right things.”

 

For Your Reading List:  Connecting Design and Business

In Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, Douglas Davis argues that great design is a business solution, not just a “pretty face”. He translates the language of design into a structured framework for solving business problems, bridging the gap between creative execution and organizational strategy. While emphasizing the need for alignment with outcomes and a grounding in data, Davis’s roadmap reframes design as an objective, measurable asset that connects visual ideas to real impact and an organization’s broader mission.

 

Closing Thought:  On Estimating Opportunities

“Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.”  — Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.

 

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AI Disclosure: This newsletter was hand-crafted and personally curated. In addition to using online research tools, the author made some use of Gemini Pro and ChatGPT for polishing the prose and headings.