"Your imagination is a machine that turns the whispers of tomorrow into the roar of today's opportunity!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
Tomorrow is talking to you.
Are you listening?
It's like a radio that picks up tomorrow's signals before they become today's strategies.
The way I will often share this idea from the stage is that the future is constantly whispering to us. The trick is learning to listen—and then actually doing something about what you hear. Sometimes you need your imagination to help you do that.
In that way, I've discovered that the best stories aren't just good entertainment. They're like amplifiers for those faint signals we might otherwise miss. Here's how to turn each whisper into real movement: by understanding what those whispers are telling you. I'll do that by sharing a few client stories - the signal that the future was whispering and what it means for action.
#1 : Signal: I worked with a trucking company client that had a lightbulb moment during my keynote—their trucks weren't just machines anymore. With all the connectivity and smart diagnostics, the real value was in keeping things running and learning from the data. It's called predictive diagnostics, and it's a game changer for many industries.
- Decision: They started thinking of "uptime" as their actual product, building their offers and pricing around keeping things running smoothly, not just selling more trucks.
#2 Signal: One of my clients embraced "Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast" as their new way of working and stopped getting stuck waiting for the perfect plan. They challenged themselves by focusing on the concept of agility - that is, how to become a 'fast team.'
- Decision: They funded small, quick experiments that have clear rules about when to grow them or kill them. They made speed a core part of their DNA.
#3 Signal: During an AI keynote, one leadership team took my advice to heart about becoming an "AI-first organization." They challenged themselves to disrupt their own business before someone else did it for them - they imagined that their industry would look entirely different in just a few years.
- Decision: They challenged themselves to try to adapt the use of AI in everything they do, making this decision months before the widely publicized decision by Shopify and other organizations to do the same thing.
#4 Signal: A global operations client discovered something powerful during our session: the people on the front lines see opportunities that leadership completely misses, especially around customer service and logistics.
- Decision: They worked hard to create a direct line from their frontline team to key members of their leadership team, and committed to acting on one small idea every single week.
#5 Signal: During a strategy offsite I facilitated, someone named the problem perfectly - they were in the midst of what I call the "Acceleration Gap." The world outside was changing faster than their internal decision-making could keep up.
- Decision: They focused on building a collaborative sharing methodology - based on simple weekly reports - to track how fast things are moving, and to speed up their planning cycles.
# 6 Signal: A retail brand that engaged me for an AI keynote realized that in a world flooded with AI-generated content, being authentic and transparent about where things come from was becoming a real competitive advantage.
- Decision: They decided to create clear standards for authenticity across everything: their content, product claims, and even how they talk about hiring.
#7 Signal: An industry client at a conference I spoke at showed how working in the open, through standards groups and shared pilot projects, gave them a much earlier view of what's coming than closed-door meetings ever could.
- Decision: They directed their development teams to spend more time participating where the future is actually being built. joining more standards bodies, open trials, and cross-industry working groups.
#8 Signal: During a public sector transformation workshop I led, I watched one specific, well-told story move an entire room from uncertainty to clear action. The story? It involved StarKist and the $200 million revenue boost that a simple switch to resealable plastic pouches led to!
- Decision: They began to make storytelling a regular part of how they turned observations into decisions. I heard later that many meetings often began with the phrase from my keynote: "What's your tin can?" Don't let good anecdotes just stay anecdotes
The thing about the signals that are being sent to your imagination is that they make the whispers impossible to ignore, and help you to get moving forward.
You don't need a massive strategy document. You need clear signals that lead to easy decisions. Then you take what works and scale it fast.
The future is talking to you.
Make sure you're ready to listen—and act.
By the way, I used Gamma.app to turn this post into a great little PDF - access it here!
The future is telling us we can accelerate our imagination in ways that we might have never previously imagined!
Futurist Jim Carroll spends his days listening to signals.