Every year brings a familiar set of “must-discuss” topics into executive conversations. Last year’s topics won’t be a surprise –
Data and privacy. IoT, sensors, drones, and digital twins. And, of course, Artificial Intelligence and its implications on the workforce.
Sure, these forces are shaping the next decade and they deserve attention. But this year, something has felt different. These topics have become so ubiquitous, so expected, that leaders often treat them as the strategy rather than the inputs.
In conversation after conversation, we’ve seen executives locked in the same cycle: overwhelmed by noise, misaligned internally, and uncertain about how these trends connect to where their organization is actually trying to go.
This isn’t a failure of leadership. It’s a failure of framing.
Leaders Are Starting in the Wrong Place
Leaders across industries are all wrestling with the same root issues:
They want more control in an increasingly volatile environment, but they haven’t defined their real challenge. They confuse hot trends with strategic direction. They try to plan without a vision. They seek answers from partners who can’t help them think bigger. They don’t connect foresight to strategy.
Many companies, understandably, start with the forces and trends they can see. Data, AI, regulation, connected systems, automation… But starting with technologies leads to incrementalism, not transformation.
Why Strategy Breaks Down
Most organizations approach the future through one of two imperfect lenses:
- Foresight
Surfaces lots of signals, trends – even disruptions – but offers little direction. - Traditional Strategy
Focuses on a deep analysis of what already exists and developing plans to optimize or incrementally improve it.
Both are valuable. Neither is sufficient.
The real leverage point lies in the transition layer between foresight and strategy: translating what could happen into what an organization will become, and then identifying how to get there.
The Trap of Trend-Chasing
Let’s take a closer look at the “dominant topics” of 2025:
1. Data and Privacy
The majority of organizations we talk to are drowning in data but starving for insight. We often find leaders are solely fixated on solving infrastructure, access, and AI-ready pipeline challenges. However, most are rarely pausing to ask: What value are we trying to create? Without that, data becomes an aimless cost center, not a growth engine and organizations end up looking like an unfinished home that is filled with hoarded old newspapers and magazines.
2. IoT, Sensors, Autonomous Drones, and Digital Twins
Cheap, easily installable sensors can immediately provide an organization with a slew of data they’ve never had and digital replicas of physical systems can unlock efficiency, resilience, and predictability. But all too often, these technologies are implemented because they’re impressive and quick, cheap wins, not because they move the organization closer to a preferred future. These technologies matter, but only when aligned to a clear role the organization intends to play in a future marketplace.
3. AI and Workforce Implications
AI has become the anxiety of the year on both sides of the house. Employees have displacement fears and the need for reskilling, while leaders are frantically trying to find the promises of productivity. However, the real challenge of leaders is two-fold: how can they obtain those productivity gains and limit the loss of their workforce to keep humanity within their services and operations? The key is that fear-driven adoption is reactive. Those that utilize value-driven adoption are strategic.
Individually, each of these topics is important. Collectively, they can overwhelm leaders and pull organizations off-course. The problem is not the topics, it’s the starting point.
Start With the House, Then Buy the Furniture
To make this intuitive, we often use a simple analogy:
Imagine buying luxury furniture, high-end appliances, and smart-home systems… before you’ve designed the house they’re going into. Sure, the pieces are impressive, but do they fit? Do they serve the life you want to live? Will you even use them?
Organizations do this all the time. They buy AI solutions, data platforms, automated workflows, and next-gen sensors, but they don’t have a blueprint for how these tools create value. Leaders end up with sophisticated systems that don’t support their goals because they never defined those goals in the first place.
Vision is the blueprint. Technology is the furniture. And strategy is the process of assembling a livable, functional home from both.
Why Leaders Must Dream Bigger in 2026 and Beyond
Underneath all of this is a simple but important truth: Most leaders aren’t dreaming big enough.
Not because they lack imagination, but because they start with constraints instead of possibilities.
When vision leads trend adoption instead of the other way around, everything snaps into place.
- Data becomes insight.
- IoT and autonomous systems become infrastructure.
- AI becomes augmentation.
- Most importantly, all of these technologies now become strategic leverage.
The “boring stuff” becomes the operating system of a more ambitious future.
So, that leaves the real question for every leadership team right now: “What future do we want to define and how will these forces help us get there?”
Start with the blueprint. Design the future deliberately. Then “buy the furniture that fits.”
When leaders take this approach, uncertainty becomes navigable, complexity becomes directional, and the future becomes something they shape.
