Jan 3, 2022
Dear Friend,
First and foremost, let us wish you a wonderful New Year! We hope and wish that 2022 will be a great year for you, your family and your company, and that we (collectively) shed a bunch of the weirdness that was 2021.
On a personal note, you might know that Jane and I live in Boulder, Colorado — and sadly had to witness the terrible Marshall Fire on December 30th. Luckily, we were safe; our house is about 4-5 miles north of the fire, with winds blowing mostly east on the 30th. That being said, we went shopping in the COSTCO which nearly burned down mere hours before the fire broke out, and the neighborhood which got wiped out by the fire is one we drive by on our way to COSTCO.
The whole episode brings home several points for me — from the fragile state of our planet’s ecology to the incredible power of community. Neptune Mountaineering, the local outdoor shop (and Boulder institution), spontaneously set up a collection drive for clothing and supplies and managed to support more than 1,000 people affected by the fire within 24 hours of reaching out to their shopper community. 🤗
With that being said, this week’s edition of our dispatch is a little shorter than usual, as the entire team was on a very well-deserved two-week break.
Practical Futurism
After sharing one of our favorite forecasting report in our last dispatch, the fine folks at Spacecadet repeated their feast from 2019 and brought together pretty much all the trend reports on a single page. Check them out here. We suggest you don’t actually read them all (it might take you all year after all) but instead browse through the ones which catch your eye. And for good measure, we recommend reading some from industries which are far removed from yours. As often you find fascinating new ideas in adjacent, and even unrelated, industries. Happy reading! 🤓
Disrupt Disruption
We frequently hear leaders talk about “transforming their business/organization” — oftentimes using the dreaded words “digital transformation”. Centuries of insights into human psychology, as well as the behavior of groups (of which a company or organization is just one specific form), have taught us an important insight: Crowds can’t be transformed. They can evolve over time, but they cannot be transformed. Transformation solely happens on the level of the individual. Only an individual holds a form — and as such is the only entity which can actually be transformed. Which means that all transformation efforts begin and end with the individual.
Radically yours, take good care, friend!
— Pascal, Mafe and the three Js (Jane, Jeffrey, and Julian)
