"Know that the future whispers before it shouts. Listen now." - Futurist Jim Carroll
Futurist Jim Carroll is writing his end-of-2025 / introduction-to-2026 series, 26 Principles for 2026. You can follow along at 2026.jimcarroll.com. He welcomes your comments.
We are three days into resetting your mindset for 2026. You understand the speed of change (Temporal Literacy), you’ve started clearing the deadwood (Self-Pruning), and you’re building the courage to act without perfect clarity (Ambiguity Tolerance).
Too busy to read? Here's today's post in chalkboard form!
Now, you need a radar system! One that allows you to do a better job of understanding what comes next, and what you need to know about it, long before you have to do anything about it! Way back in 2007, I wrote about the idea of this when I outlined my 'Trends & Innovation' Model.' Right there, at the top of this iterative loop, is the 'radar'. It's what you do to find the signals through the noise.
I'll come back to this in a moment - for now, keep the idea in mind.
Here's how things have changed with the model. In a linear world, change happened slowly enough that you could afford to be reactive. You could wait until a trend became obvious, analyze it, and then adapt. In an exponential world, by the time a trend is obvious, it's usually too late to leverage it.
That means if you are reading about a disruptive technology on the front page of a mainstream business site, the exponential opportunity phase is likely already over. You are now in the reactive phase, playing catch-up against those who saw it coming three years ago. And that's why the idea of Anticipatory Intelligence has become so important in 2026 - you need to work harder to stay ahead of the trends that might impact you, before the trends actually impact.
This is a problem for most folks. The mistake most professionals make is that they are so obsessed with managing the present—the daily fires, the quarterly results, the immediate emails—that they never lift their heads to scan the horizon. They are driving a 200-mph Ferrari while staring intently at the dashboard indicators, oblivious to the cliff approaching up ahead.
To lead in 2026, you need to shift from being reactive to being anticipatory. The discipline for this is Anticipatory Intelligence.
How I Scan the Horizon: My Personal Methodology
People often ask me, "How do you see these things coming?" It’s not a crystal ball; it’s a rigorous, disciplined process of intelligence gathering. I don't just wait for news and trends to find me; I find the news and trends.
Here are ten specific things I do to build my own Anticipatory Intelligence, that might give you some inspiration as you focus on building/rebuilding your own.
I've been doing some sort of 'online research' since 1984 (that's not a typo), and so I've got some honed skills. In addition, the very nature of my job (keynotes for global organizations specific to industries) forces me to stay on top of and do deep research on various specific trends. Add to this the fact that I get to talk to a lot of CEOs and senior leadership executives about the trends they are worried about - which gives me even more insight into the trends we all should worry about!
So what do I do? I aggregate a vast array of information using digital tools, deliberately focusing on specialized trade publications and "fringe" media to identify innovations before they reach the mainstream. I track global conference agendas to see which topics are moving to center stage.
And then on top of this, the very act of writing forces me to connect the dots and categorize changes by their speed and impact. Ultimately, this structured method allows me to distinguish between slow-moving megatrends and the "weak signals" that serve as early warnings for major future shifts. Every once in a while, I clarify my thinking into a trends or innovation series, such as the recent 30 Megatrends series I wrote for this Daily Inspiration.
And now comes AI! I'm working fast to integrate AI research into my workflow to digest vast amounts of information, summarize lengthy reports, and help me spot patterns across large datasets that I couldn't possibly process manually. I; 've become a huge fan of Google's set of AI tools, particularly Notebook LLM.
I subscribe to the idea of what I often write about - just-in-time knowledge. I know how to get the right knowledge at the right time for the right purpose in order to learn the right thing at the right time.
This isn't just academic for me; it's my job. But in 2026, it will need to become part of your job.
1. The Exponential Mindset
That's why you need to develop, hone, and enhance your skill of Anticipatory Intelligence.
It's deciding that you need an active, continuous discipline of looking beyond your immediate short-term world and outside your current industry silo to identify the "weak signals" of change that might spark something bigger. It is the practice of spotting emerging technologies, shifting societal behaviors, and converging trends on the 3-to-5-year horizon before they become mainstream disruptions.
It’s about building a personal early-warning system to gather intelligence on the future.
It's about building your own Trends Radar.
2. The Linear Trap
To start to do this better, ask yourself if you are guilty of "Dashboard Myopia." This is the mental trap that keeps your gaze fixed on the present while the future runs you over.
- The tyranny of the moment: You spend 99% of your time reacting to immediate demands (emails, meetings, crises) and 0% of your time proactively scanning for future shifts. You are too busy mopping the floor to turn off the faucet.
- Industry insularity: You are stuck inside your own narrow world and rarely look outside it. You only read what everyone else in your industry reads; you only attend your own industry conferences; you only listen to the same old experts saying the same old thing. This creates a massive blind spot, as almost all disruptive change now comes from outside your industry (e.g., automaking disrupted by tech companies; finance disrupted by crypto/blockchain).
- Dismissing the "fringe": You ignore early-stage technologies or trends because they look like "toys," are too expensive, or serve a niche market today. You don't follow the weird and unique people who are inventing a very different future from the one we know (which is the focus of my still-upcoming book, Being Unique). You fail to apply exponential thinking to imagine what they will look like in three years when they are 10x better and 10x cheaper.
- Looking back always: You navigate your career or business looking in the rearview mirror, obsessed with lagging indicators like past performance reports, rather than leading indicators of future shifts.
Think about this - what is it you are doing day-by-day that causes you to lose sight of what will come one day, but sooner?
3. The Exponential Edge
When you master Anticipatory Intelligence, you stop being surprised by the future and start leveraging it. You gain:
- lead time to get ready: The single most valuable commodity in an exponential world is time to prepare. Seeing a trend early gives you the runway to run small experiments, build new skills, and formulate a strategy before the panic sets in.
- The ability to get in front of the trend: Instead of reacting to change inflicted upon you, you can position yourself to ride the wave. You shift from being a panicked "fast follower" to a prepared "first mover."
- The ability to link disparate trends: By scanning outside your silo, you begin to see how disparate trends—for example, how developments in AI might converge with biotech and an aging workforce—create massive, unseen opportunities that linear thinkers miss.
4. The Immediate Pivot
You cannot build intelligence if your head is buried in your inbox.
You must intentionally build the infrastructure for looking outward. You need to take your version 1 of the Trends & Innovation Model and take it to version 5.
Here are your immediate actions:
- Build Your "Fringe Network": Right now, identify and follow three newsletters, podcasts, or thought leaders that have absolutely nothing to do with your current job but are at the bleeding edge of technology, science, or culture. (e.g., If you are in finance, follow a synthetic biology feed).
- Schedule "Radar Time": Protect 30 minutes on your calendar every Friday morning. Treat this time as sacred as a client meeting. Use it solely for reviewing your new fringe sources and asking, "What if this scales?"
- Get to a different conference! Don't go to the same old event - sign up for a new one in an entirely different field!
- Follow more stuff. Get out on Substack. Medium, Reddit, or elsewhere, to find and follow newsletters and reports that will take you beyond your world. Get into learning more, even if it seems irrelevant.
- The "Weak Signal" Audit: Identify one weird, confusing, or seemingly silly thing you see happening in the market or society right now. Instead of dismissing it, spend 15 minutes researching it with the assumption: "This is an early signal of a major future trend. What does that trend look like in 2029?"
In effect, you need to build yourself a 2026 version of your radar!
My biggest bit of advice? Sign up for a Pro account from Claude, ChatGPT, or Google Gemini, and immediately learn how to use their 'deep research' tools to change your entire methodology of doing Internet searches.
Going to Google and typing in a search phrase is for yesterday; doing a deep dive via Gemini 3.0 will take you into a world of deep insight that you never knew existed. And yes, you need to do this to learn how to separate the accurate from the inaccurate.
Futurist Jim Carroll believes that developing his ability to do effective online research in the mid-1980s is one of the key skills that has allowed him to chase the unique career that he has!