Stop reading the news. Start reading the signals.
It’s very easy to read the news and get irritated.
In the aiport yesterday a screen with Sky News playing caught my eye. It scrolled between 3 headlines where the key words were War, War and Crisis. (Ukraine, Iran and Housing for context).
All headlines telling us why we should be worried.
We consume it, form opinions about it, argue about it, and especially in online forums raise our voices about it.
I’ve been reflecting this week on a better lens to notice the news.
Like this lens: What does this tell me about what happens next, and what should I do differently as a result?
A navigator does not study the forecast so they can have an opinion about the weather. They study it because it informs what weather to prepare for.
I was reminded of this by a BBC report this week on robotics in China.
The eye-catching stuff is easy to spot. Humanoid robots boxing, sprinting and marching at the World Humanoid Games. Science fiction a few years ago.
What caught my attention was the bigger shifts that are happening behind it.
More than two million robots now work in China's factories. They weld, paint, lift and assemble. Some are being built to build other robots. More than half the world's industrial robots are now made in China. And alongside all of it, the country is opening vocational colleges to train young people to work with these machines.
That is the real story. What are the shifts that are happening and then asking the question “what can I do differently” because of the bigger shifts happening in the world.
I have seen the same thing closer to home. Just this week I’ve invested in a company building a platform around SEN (special education needs) for schools. It supports both teachers planning lessons and the team responsible for SEN by using AI to absorb the broad range of needs across a class and to design lesson plans to make sure all the needs are covered.
Think about what that makes possible. We have always known children learn differently. The constraint has been one teacher, thirty children and a finite number of hours. Technology changes that equation.
This is where I think the most interesting opportunities lie. Not in the dramatic moment when a whole job vanishes or a machine does something astonishing. In the thousands of quieter moments when we suddenly have a better way of doing something we have done for years.
A task that took three hours takes twenty minutes. Something prohibitively expensive becomes affordable. Something that could only be personalised for a handful of people can now be personalised for thousands.
Those are signals. We need to get better at reading them.
Because the point of noticing change is not to be better informed. It is to make better predictions about what comes next, and better decisions about what we do now.
So when I look at China's robots, the question is not whether I think robots are good or bad. It is what that scale of investment tells us about manufacturing, skills and work over the next decade.
When I look at AI in education, the question is not whether it is exciting or frightening. It is what can now be done that could not be done before.
And then the question that matters most. What am I going to do about it?
A skill to learn. An experiment to run. Something to invest in. A way of working that no longer makes sense. An opportunity sitting quietly in front of me that I had not noticed.
There will always be plenty in the news to get irritated about. Irritation is not a strategy.
Just like the forecast, the information only becomes useful when we do something different with it.
It’s the difference between absorbing the news for entertainment vs absorbing the news to scan for signals about what you can do differently.
Three experiments to try this week
2 minutes. Take the last headline that irritated you. Write three lines underneath it: what is changing, what might that make possible, and what should I do differently because of it. That is the whole exercise. Do it once, and you will notice how different it feels from having an opinion.
5 minutes. Pick one task you do every week that takes an hour or more. Ask a colleague, or an AI tool, whether there is a faster way to do it. You do not have to change anything yet. Just find out what is now possible that was not possible a year ago.
10 minutes. Write down the three biggest changes you have noticed in your industry this year. Under each one, write a single prediction for 2027 and a single action you could take this month. Then put the three actions in your diary. Signals are only useful once they change what you do next.
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