Why I Don’t Ask “What Will Happen in 2026” Anymore

Every January, right on schedule, smart people begin asking the same question.

What will happen this year?

They ask it on panels. They ask it in memos. They ask it in year-end essays that begin with humility and end with confidence. They ask it because it sounds like seriousness. Because it sounds like work.

I used to ask it too.

There is something deeply comforting about the question. It implies that the future is out there, waiting to be discovered by those clever enough to draw trend lines, connect dots, or read the signals. It suggests that with enough intelligence, enough data, enough perspective, we can get ahead of what’s coming.

And if we get ahead of it, we can feel prepared. And if we feel prepared, we can feel right.

Over time, and mostly by accident, I stopped leading with that question. Not because forecasting is useless. It isn’t. Anticipating cost curves, adoption patterns, and second-order effects is part of the work. You can’t judge whether something will scale without some view of what comes next.

What I stopped doing is mistaking the act of forecasting for the act of deciding.

Forecasts are generous. You can be wrong in public and still sound smart, as long as you were wrong thoughtfully. The future, it turns out, is a remarkably forgiving place for bad accountability.

So I replaced the question with a harder one.

What scales fast enough to matter?

Not eventually. Not theoretically. Not if everything goes right.

Fast enough. To matter.

By scale, I don’t mean awareness or ambition. I mean the unglamorous ability to move through real systems at speed...solving large, pervasive economic inefficiencies while creating real business value. I mean solutions that get adopted not because they are celebrated, but because they are cheaper, easier, or simply unavoidable.

I mean solutions that can absorb large amounts of capital without becoming fragile. Solutions where carbon reductions are not an added benefit or a promised outcome, but a direct consequence of how the business works. And solutions that can win on their own merits, without waiting for policy to rescue them.

Once you start asking the question this way, it becomes difficult to stop.

Because “scale” is one of those words everyone uses and almost no one sits with. It gets flattened into abstraction; market size, ambition, potential. But in practice, scale is brutally specific. It lives in cost curves that don’t bend on command. It lives in supply chains that refuse to cooperate. It lives in customers who behave exactly as they always have, despite what the model assumed they would do.

Scale is where good intentions go to be audited.

Most ideas fail here. Not because they are wrong, but because they are slow. Because they require too many things to change at once. Because they depend on coordination where incentives don’t align, patience where capital doesn’t exist, or behaviour shifts that make sense only on slides.

This is why prediction alone is never enough.

A forecast that doesn’t change where capital, time, or attention goes isn’t insight. It’s rehearsal. And a prediction that can’t survive contact with scale isn’t wrong; it’s just incomplete.

It is much easier to talk about what might happen in 2026 than to ask whether something can move from interesting to inevitable before time runs out. Forecasts let us stay above the mess. Scale drags us into it.

And the mess is where the truth lives.

When you ask what scales fast enough to matter, you start noticing things you didn’t notice before. How long “near-term” really is. How often pilots quietly become permanent. How rarely a breakthrough survives first contact with procurement, regulation, or basic human momentum.

You also start noticing how often we confuse visibility with velocity. How something can feel everywhere...on stages, in headlines, in conversations, and still be moving far too slowly to matter when measured against the size of the problem it claims to address.

This isn’t a moral judgment. It’s a physical one.

There is a finite amount of time, a finite amount of capital, and a finite tolerance for complexity in the real world. Scale respects these constraints. Narratives do not.

Once you internalize this, the calendar loses its power. The difference between 2025 and 2026 matters less than the difference between something that compounds and something that stalls. Between something that fits inside existing systems and something that requires the world to reorganize itself first.

The future stops being a date and starts being a rate.

So I no longer ask what will happen next year. I ask something quieter, and far more disruptive.

If this worked perfectly…how fast would it actually matter?

Prediction still has its place, but scale decides whether it mattered.