For about six months in 2023, people kept forwarding me screenshots of ChatGPT the way you forward a clip of a dog answering the telephone. Look what it said. Isn't that wild? Then everyone laughed, closed the tab, and went back to their real jobs, satisfied that they had glimpsed the future, and it turned out to be a parlor trick.
I laughed too. But underneath the laughter sat a small, ill-mannered feeling I could not put down, the one you get at a beautiful dinner when the whole table is delighted, and you are the only person who can tell that the medium-rare Wagyu tomahawk everyone has been waiting for came out of the kitchen overcooked. Nobody wants to be the guest who sends the beautiful piece of meat back. You look difficult. You spoil the mood. So, most people, very reasonably, decide they must be imagining that the steak is well done.
I have learned, at some expense, to send the steak back.
That winter I made a decision that struck the people who love me as mildly unhinged. I stopped playing with the toy and started building inside it. Not because I had a forecast; I sell strategy, not fortunes. I moved because I trust that ill-mannered feeling more than I trust the mood of the room. The feeling has a name, and it is the first move of reinvention. Sense the shift.
In Issue One, we laid out the whole system, five moves you run on repeat. Today we take the first one apart on its own, because it quietly decides the other four, and because almost nobody is good at it.
Here is the part no one admits at the conference. People who miss a shift rarely miss it for lack of information; they are drowning in the stuff. The cleanest example I know is Kodak. In 1975, a young Kodak engineer named Steven Sasson built the first digital camera, a toaster-sized contraption that recorded images onto a cassette tape, and carried it into his bosses. Their verdict, in his own words, was “that's cute, but don't tell anyone about it.” Kodak did not miss digital photography. Kodak invented it, held it in two hands, and declined it, because film was where the money and the identity lived. That is the pattern, and it is not stupidity. It is self-protection. We rarely fail to notice the future; we decline it, the way investors quietly stop opening their statements when the market falls. The economists Karlsson, Loewenstein, and Seppi gave that habit a name, the ostrich effect, the very human talent for not looking at the thing we least want to see. Sensing, then, is less a matter of eyesight than of nerve.
Now, the honest objection, because there is a good one. If sensing early were simply a virtue, the world would belong to the first movers, and it plainly does not. The marketing scholars Golder and Tellis went back through 500 brands across 50 categories and found that nearly half of all market pioneers fail, and that durable leaders usually arrive years later, after the pioneer has bled itself dry, proving the market exists. Being early is very often indistinguishable from being wrong. So sensing is not an excuse to chase every shiny signal off a cliff. It is something narrower and much harder: the nerve to face the one shift you are motivated to ignore, and the judgment to tell it apart from the ten that are only noise.
So here is how you do it. Four steps, and not one of them is comfortable.
One. Go looking for the thing you are avoiding.
The signal meant for you is almost always the one you keep changing the subject about. You know the topic. It is the one you have filed under “overhyped,” said with a small wave of the hand, usually at dinner, usually to reassure yourself. That wave is the tell. Real noise you forget by morning; the thing you keep swatting away is costing you energy, and things only cost energy when some part of you already suspects they matter. This week, name the change in your field you have been calling overhyped, and write one page on why it might be right. No “but.” The “but” is where you hide.
Two. Leave the center. The edges see it first.
Nothing important has ever been noticed first from the middle of the room. The center is busy defending the center. The novelist William Gibson said it best: “The future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed.” It arrives first at the edges, in pockets, unfairly, long before it reaches the boardroom: in the teenagers, the hobbyists, the slightly odd early adopters your industry considers unserious, the person three fields over who is quietly solving your problem without knowing it is yours. I did not find my footing in AI inside a strategy deck. I found it in the company of people my peers thought were wasting their time. This week, spend one hour somewhere your colleagues would consider beneath them or beside the point. Sensing is a contact sport. You have to go where the future is still rude, unpolished, and happening without permission.
Three. Tell the tremor from the noise.
Not every new thing is the new thing, and if you treat every headline as a five-alarm fire, you will be too exhausted to hear the one that matters. So run everything through one question: does this change what people want, or only how they get it? A slicker checkout button changes the how. It is useful; it is not a shift. A tool that changes what people expect, what they will tolerate, what they believe they are owed- that is a tremor, and tremors are the only thing worth rearranging your life around. This week, take your three loudest “trends” and sort them with that single question. Keep the ones that touch desire. Let the rest go back to being noise.
Four. Move before you are certain.
Certainty is a receipt. It is proof the purchase already happened, and by the time it prints, you are paying retail alongside the whole crowd. The entire advantage of sensing lives in the uncomfortable window when the signal is real but not yet respectable, when acting on it makes you look early, or a little foolish, or both at once. You do not need a bet you can defend to a board. You need a small one you can run while it still feels slightly embarrassing. This week, place one modest wager on the shift you named in step one, something you can finish by Friday that costs you a little pride and no more than a good bottle of wine.
Before you close this, sit with three questions. Answer them the way you would answer a friend who can tell when you are performing.
• What am I calling overhyped a little too quickly, and a little too often?
• Where am I standing in the center of the room when I should be out at the edge?
• What is the smallest brave thing I could do before Friday?
Keep your answers. Come back in a month and run them again. The distance between the two is you, sensing.
I have started my life over more times than my family cares to count, and they have long since stopped asking whether I am sure. I will spare you the résumé; the short version is that every chapter began the same way, with a feeling I could not put down and a table full of people telling me the wine was fine. I think often about something a winemaker in Piedmont once told me: the grape knows the season is turning before the calendar does, and the whole craft is learning to taste that change early, while there is still time to do something about it. Every real turn I have made began exactly there, on the palate, one honest sip ahead of the room, well before I could have defended the decision to anyone sensible. My dogs, my four-legged girls, are the only ones who never once questioned a single pivot. Some weeks I think that is the entire secret. Be a little more like the dogs.
The shift you are half-noticing right now will not wait for you to feel ready. Nothing worthwhile ever does. But ready was never the requirement. Honest is the requirement, plus a little early, plus the willingness to look faintly ridiculous for a season while everyone around you is still forwarding screenshots of the dog on the telephone. That is the whole skill, and it is completely learnable, and it starts this week.
So, one question to carry until next time. What is sitting on your table right now, the thing the whole room keeps praising, that you can already taste is wrong?
Ingrid Reyes, Founder, The Reinvention Project. A publication by Optima IQ™.