Yes, that Wendy’s, of fast food burger fame.

Wendy’s released an extended play (EP), Songs to Listen to in a Wendy’s Parking Lot, last week with six pop punk songs that were so catchy that I had to listen to all of them again before I could move on to the next segment of the playlist. This was an out of the blue strategy power play that I would never have anticipated, and I couldn’t wait to learn more post-run.

Let’s rewind.

This all began with Wendy’s sharing an emo-esque photo of Wendy on social media with the simple caption “it was never a phase, album out 9.23.26.” a callback to a classic pop punk trope that listening to this kind of music was just a phase. Within days, the full EP was live on streaming and subsequent posts showed visuals and catchy lyrics from the songs to build hype.

My curiosity got the best of me and I added the EP to my playlist for that weekend’s long run. As a gluten free vegetarian, I can confirm this was already the most attention I’ve paid to Wendy’s in decades.

I’m going to pause here and recommend you take a quick pivot to Spotify to hear one of these tracks first.

An Unexpected Pop Punk EP That Actually Delivers

Kicking off with “She Said She Didn’t Want Fries,” as performed by Wendy’s, Matty Mullins, and Memphis May Fire, the opening track introduces us to a narrator whose girlfriend said she didn’t want fries (which goes on to rhyme with “she lies”) and, as a result, “her meal was incomplete / now her sin is my tragedy.” The next track takes on a rival fast food chain for soft serve ice cream machine failures, affirming that “there’s no happy in your meal there anymore” amidst “golden notch betrayal” and recommended that “getting to the freckled side” will treat you better. There’s even a pop punk ballad, “I Miss the Sunroom,” which speaks to what it’s like when the Frosty cup is empty.

The concept sounds insane, but this is by no means a parody album. Written by established songwriter and producer Matt Squire, whose past collaborators include Sabrina Carpenter, Ariana Grande, Kesha, All Time Low, and Simple Plan, and performed by Wendy’s and a range of established pop punk and metalcore artists, this was an actual investment. What’s notable about this unique moment in time is that generative AI would make it incredibly easy to write and record a set of songs as a quick publicity stunt. The level of investment in talented creators, the deliberate mix of hyper pop punk, slower ballads, and edgy screamo moments (see “My Frosty’s Funeral”), and the clear dedication to the clever word play pop punk is known for and the high energy choruses makes this more than a stunt.

Can Creative Plays Land When Operations Are Struggling?

The EP rollout happened around the same time as a Wendy’s franchisee announced the planned closure of dozens of restaurants after seeking Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. When I was looking to see who else is writing about this album release, the album news was fully eclipsed by the bankruptcy chatter in the news cycle. This brings the question of whether a creative marketing play can actually flourish when the operational landscape is under scrutiny.

The franchisee troubles are not a surprise when looking at which fast food restaurants are most popular in the US today. Wendy’s is losing the fast food race, coming in at fourth overall with the 55+ demographic leading their current customer base and landing at sixth for the 18-34 demographic.

Is this album the gateway to bringing Wendy’s brand awareness to Gen Alpha through catchy beats? Or is it a nostalgia love letter to Millennials who remember listening to the early 2000s peak of pop punk in fast food drive-thrus? Or perhaps a call to Gen Z – old enough to know pop punk but not old enough to have been a Wendy’s regular at the restaurant’s peak? Perhaps all three. The question here is whether there’s still time for Wendy’s to catch back up amidst the franchisee bankruptcy landscape.

An Outlier That Wouldn’t Survive Most Brainstorming Sessions

Sometimes Strategy Stories covers instances of strategic re-entry in one’s established field, such as Hilary Duff’s 2026 comeback in the pop scene, or creative ways to meet a compliance need in an unexpected way, such as Levi’s social media play during the World Cup amidst strict branding requirements. Wendy’s is doing neither here – this play is about entering an industry that has nothing to do with your core product with a free offering on streaming that is delivering equal levels of shock that it occurred in the first place and that it’s actually quite good.

What Wendy’s did here is actually focus on the kind of idea that would get killed off in most brainstorming sessions. In brainstorming, there’s often a push to discard outlier, wild ideas, in favor of options falling in the safer quadrants in the impact to effort matrix. Wendy’s made a brave move here with a high effort ploy with an uncertain, yet-to-be-determined impact. On the impact to effort matrix below, I’d estimate this as a high effort but uncertain level of projected impact – putting this potentially in the orange or green box — but this outlier would be hard to plot with confidence anywhere in the grid.

I’ll be curious to see how this plays out both in the music scene in the short-term as well as in early signals of generational shifts in fast food preferences.

What I can tell you though, as a leading indicator, is that I found myself wondering mid-run whether a Frosty is gluten free…

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About Strategy Stories
Strategy Stories is built on a single belief: the most useful strategic insights don’t always come from inside your industry. Through this platform, Jackie Lavorgna, PhD, SMP shares case studies, analyses, and anecdotes for curious leaders, strategists, innovators, and futurists — spanning readers throughout the United States and across 16+ countries.

Strategy Stories is the insights vertical of Lavorgna Strategy Studio, a consultancy helping leaders, teams, and organizations prepare and plan for the future through strategic planning and strategic foresight.

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It’s hard to believe that Strategy Stories launched 9 months ago with the first installment of a personal goal setting article, the first of a four-part series dedicated to Rethinking New Year Resolution’s with a strategic lens. As the third quarter of the year draws to a close and we look ahead to the fourth quarter – jam-packed with holidays and seasonal shifts – this is the season where time-bound resolutions and goals can start to feel extraneous.

My summer season felt extra busy this year with consulting and teaching travel, speaking events, and avid efforts to maintain a sense of normalcy with dedicated time for family, friends, and hobbies. As my season slowed down in early September, I took some time to reevaluate how the third quarter had actually gone and what’s possible for the fourth quarter. With competing priorities and shifting time zones, I got a little sloppier with tracking and managing my resolutions and had a brief moment of wondering…do I just discard them and restart in January?

Spoiler – I didn’t.

The Home Stretch

I like to think about this last quarter as the time to assess progress and learnings and then 1) evaluate what’s actually possible in the next 3 to 4 months of the year; and 2) identify what to pilot or test out now for 2027 insights.

What have you learned so far?

Taking a pulse check on what you’ve learned so far from 2026 goals is the best place to start planning for the last quarter of the year. This starts with both asking how things are going, as well as whether you are focusing in the right areas. Double loop learning, an educational approach developed by Chris Argyris in 1977, moves the question from “Are we doing things well?” to “Are we still doing the right things?”

Something that has been a key learning for me this year is how strategic foresight resonates differently across audiences. Strategic foresight content drives strong engagement in the Strategy Stories community and performs well as a content focus on both my Substack and LinkedIn. Concurrently, organizational leaders navigating an uncertain external environment are finding long-horizon thinking harder to prioritize given the urgency and volatility of the now. This has prompted me to reconsider how to position foresight within my broader strategic planning and strategy management consulting practice as a lens through which all strategy work is enhanced and strengthened, and made more resilient for a VUCA world.

What’s still possible?

Determining whether to reset or adjust a target for a goal is normal and healthy for realistic goal management, especially when basing the adjustment on learnings so far. Insights from the year can inform a realistic reset of the goal or target, and still drive forward progress and impact through the end of the year.

This is often the time of the year when I’m scrambling to reach my reading goal and trying to calculate how many books I can fit in without missing my total count goal. Sometimes I recalibrate the goal to better reflect the length of books I’m reading, instead of the sum total of individual books. While this isn’t the case this year, this scenario jumps to the forefront when I think about a meaningful goal adjustment based on actual data in play…and what meaningful goal achievement looks like, even if it’s not what was first envisioned. PS - Since I’m ahead of schedule, I recently shared a round-up of my favorite reads for 2026 so far, spanning leadership books, ancient epics, and speculative fiction.

What to pilot now for 2027 insights?

Some goals just don’t play out. Other times, areas of focus may arise during the year that aren’t currently captured in your current goals. Thinking about the last few months of the year as a play space to test, pilot, and try out a new area of focus to inform 2027 goal-setting gives a great head start on planning and launching a new goal with deep insight behind it.

When I started my new chapter last year, I had a creative book idea in mind — a project that sits outside of the strategy and foresight space. I talked about it, thought about it, and ultimately spent 0 hours actually working on it over the course of 2026. Needless to say, the book is not written. As I think about 2027, I’m eager to set a realistic creative writing goal and allocate a meaningful period of time to focus on this project. For the next quarter, I’m going to test out blocking off creative writing time on my calendar and see how this habit evolves before setting a firm goal for 2027. And, congratulations, you are reading this statement and are now my accountability partner for this short-term goal pilot. Thank you for your participation!

Be the First to Know: 2027 Goals

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series on setting realistic and meaningful 2026 goals – from goal-setting to early check-ins and active goal management and adjustment. I’m testing out a different format for this series in 2027 to work with you to bring New Year’s Resolutions to life by identifying goals with intention and clarity, managing and tracking progress, and recalibrating where needed during the year through dedicated goal management templates and customized 1:1 coaching.

This new experience from Lavorgna Strategy Studio is designed for individuals who want a structured, personalized approach to their own strategic goal management. If you’re interested in learning more about this new experience, let me know and you’ll be among the first to hear more later this fall.

As always, thanks for being here and for reading Strategy Stories!

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About Strategy Stories
Strategy Stories is built on a single belief: the most useful strategic insights don’t always come from inside your industry. Through this platform, Jackie Lavorgna, PhD, SMP shares case studies, analyses, and anecdotes for curious leaders, strategists, innovators, and futurists — spanning readers throughout the United States and across 16+ countries.

Strategy Stories is the insights vertical of Lavorgna Strategy Studio, a consultancy helping leaders, teams, and organizations prepare and plan for the future through strategic planning and strategic foresight.

I’m trending ahead on my annual reading goal, and wanted to share an early year in review list with my best books of 2026, so far. Not every book on this list is a strategy text — some are pure escapism, some are ancient epics, some are fantasy and sci fi novels — but all of them shaped my thinking in 2026.

The Classics

Christopher Nolan’s star-studded rendition of The Odyssey became the highest grossing R-rated movie of all time as of August 2026. At a time when technology has never evolved faster and political events yield unprecedented times, the monolith of cultural discourse in summer 2026 was a movie based on a battle entrenched in historical context and poetic myth that allegedly took place around the twelfth century BC and one leader’s very long journey home. With thousands of years of stories spoken and written since then, this plot still managed to dominate the global box office.

Naturally, I had to start the year with a reread of The Iliad and The Odyssey to ensure full preparation for the movie which then brought me to reading The Aeneid for the first time. Three things stuck out to me. First, The Iliad is less of a story about a battle and more of a cautionary tale about what happens when leaders don’t model good leadership, and the impact of ego and hubris on group efficacy. Second, Odysseus isn’t really the best role model in The Odyssey, and I’d even go so far as to say he’s unlikable. I didn’t mind the creative license Nolan took with reshaping this character arc in the film, regardless of the concerns raised by scholars. Lastly, the fall of Troy doesn’t actually happen in The Iliad or The Odyssey, and The Aeneid is a must-read for filling in the gaps.

Strategic Foresight Disguised as Sci Fi

I’ve shared thoughts on the role of “preferred futures” in previous Strategy Stories content and identified Monk and Robot as a duology that gave me new appreciation for preferred futures and that gave me hope for what a world could look like that is focused on holistic environmental sustainability and social harmony and inclusion. A probable future? Perhaps not. But, I firmly believe that we can’t move in a new direction without crafting a vision of what that future state could look like.

When I finished The Mountain in the Sea, I described it as the kind of novel Michael Crichton would write if he was still alive. Crichton heavily influenced my early reading lists and left me awestruck with his ability to take a current political event or emerging technology signal and transform it into a realistic, yet unfathomable story that provoked realistic reactions on what this scenario would yield. Ray Nayler delivers a similar model of storytelling, and prompts you to rethink the meaning of intelligence and consciousness…and what would be true if these are not exclusively human attributes.

Tell Me an Ending asks an uncomfortable question. If you could select a specific memory to erase from your own mind forever, would you? And if you did, would you want to know that you made that choice afterwards? Through a complex web of intertwined characters navigating different stages of memory loss and gain, Jo Harkin confronts the uncomfortable questions and reshapes the perception of identity.

Managing Disability, Loss, and Addiction

Sometimes a fictional narrative about navigating limitations and obstacles is the best case study for considering what adaptive strategy feels like in practice.

I’ve been reading Jim Butcher’s wizard-detective Dresden Files saga for more than a decade, and his latest installment, Twelve Months, did not disappoint. What impressed me most, other than the fact that Butcher continues to deliver on schedule with his publisher, is how artfully he told the story of his protagonist, Harry Dresden, navigating loss and what’s next. Butcher makes you feel like you’ve finally been able to reconnect with an old friend, and are there at the moment you’re most needed.

I reread Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy before reading a standalone book, Best Served Cold, set in the same universe earlier this year. Abercrombie writes exclusively in the fantasy genre, but his ability to tell the story of his characters navigating disability and addiction is unprecedented, and shows a strong understanding of physiology, psychology, and accessibility. There’s no other author that will encourage you to root for an anti-hero character who is their nation’s chief torturer, nor one that manages to incorporate the stages of addiction recovery into a fantasy protagonist’s character arc with such care and compassion.

This recommendation is premature, but I’m most excited for Rebecca Yarros’s Threshing Day release later this month. I started reading The Empyrean series while I was in the process of getting diagnosed with celiac disease (a chronic autoimmune disorder) and severe anemia (a treatable side effect of celiac). I spent those early weeks feeling utterly incapable on a physical level, unable to absorb iron without the assistance of a multi-hour intravenous infusion and unable to eat the “normal” foods everyone in my immediate environment could safely consume. Yarros’s protagonist, Violet Sorrengail, suffers from Ehlers-Danlos syndrome which brings physical challenges to her ability to navigate the strict physical requirements and tests of the war college she attends. I took inspiration from Violet’s focus on building physical strength, finding alternative pathways, and – most critically – preparing to take on the next challenge.

The Business Shelf

I’ve previously shared my affinity for Mel Robbins’s Let Them, but will reiterate here – the thesis is so simple that it’s disarming. Try it out. Let them!

I did a few consulting engagements focused on change management this year and reread John Kotter’s Leading Change as part of my preparation. When I first read Kotter, I focused on the action…how do we get the change done, measured, and proven! What stands out to me the most now, especially working on various strategic initiatives with partners this year, is that the importance of awareness of the need to change – and buy-in on that change – is the showstopper. If you’re not there yet organizationally, focus on that step until you see a meaningful level of readiness.

I actually read Brené Brown’s Strong Ground in late December 2025, but I just couldn’t omit this one from the 2026 list because I didn’t talk about it enough during the holiday season last year. What I loved about this book was her opening thesis about using weightlifting and strength training to build a stronger core to get back to playing pickleball with full mobility. Strong Ground brings a consistent reminder that fortifying and building strength doesn’t come at the peripheral, but is foundational to all other progress.

Cancel Tomorrow’s Plans Before Starting

Lastly, I read three books that were just so good that I’d recommend canceling your plans for the weekend preemptively.

• Parasite: A nonstop sci fi thriller by Darcy Coates about an alien invasion that I just can’t stop thinking about. It’s like Animorphs for adults.

• The Stand: I started this in 2020 and had to abandon it due to the parallels with the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Enough time has passed…and I’m so glad I picked this page-turning, post-apocalyptic story back up. In my experience, only Stephen King and Brandon Sanderson have the ability to make a 1,000+ page book feel so short.

• The Night Agent: There’s nothing supernatural here, but I can assure you that I felt secondhand fatigue from trying to keep up with FBI agent Peter Sutherland through this nonstop political thriller. Netflix’s television show adaptation is great, but Matthew Quirk’s original narrative is truly next level.

In Closing

Most of the books on this list won’t be found in the business section of the bookstore. Strategy Stories is driven by signal scanning, cross-industry insights, and futures thinking, and the most powerful scenario planning and foresight breakthroughs begin with imagining the unimaginable. From ancient epics to dystopian futures and from underdogs to anti-heroes, there’s power to be found in stepping outside of the known environment and imagining something new.

Thanks for reading Strategy Stories by Lavorgna Strategy Studio!

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About Strategy Stories
Strategy Stories is built on a single belief: the most useful strategic insights don’t always come from inside your industry. Through this platform, Jackie Lavorgna, PhD, SMP shares case studies, analyses, and anecdotes for curious leaders, strategists, innovators, and futurists — spanning readers throughout the United States and across 16+ countries.

Strategy Stories is the insights vertical of Lavorgna Strategy Studio, a consultancy helping leaders, teams, and organizations prepare and plan for the future through strategic planning and strategic foresight.

It’s never been easier to carry everything you might need with you in digital format.

But what I’ve found fascinating in recent months is a cluster of signals around the unbundling of apps commonly found on smartphones…

Signal 1: Back to the iPod

My first hint of this signal came from a colleague who had a classic iPod on his desk at the office. I inquired about the device and we had a great discussion about seeking a distraction-free, algorithm-free listening experience of music you actually chose and sequenced with intentionality. As a beginning-to-end album listener even on Spotify, I could see the appeal. Shortly after this conversation, I read about this broader occurrence of iPods re-emerging on eBay with significant buyer momentum bolstered by Gen Z interest.

Why this matters: Fatigue with the abundance and ease of streaming music may be an early indicator of overall technology shifts, at least for a subset of the market. Implications abound for the music streaming industry as well as adjacent industries that are streaming-oriented.

Signal 2: Landline Pods for Kids

I’ve also read a few stories about groups of parents establishing “pods” of landlines to give their kids a way to communicate with each other outside of school without moving right to a smartphone or tablet. Tin Can, a wi-fi connected landline style phone, is a popular brand, while others are going right back to traditional phone numbers connected to existing communication services. Importantly, this model works best when there are multiple kids using landlines to call each other, making this shift more prone to appear in clusters. Through these landline pods, kids stay connected with friends and build communication skills while parents have fewer worries about tech overload.

Why this matters: At first glance, smartphones and tablets as communication devices felt like a possible “one size fits all ages” solution. This cluster of signals around landlines indicates that the innovation market may be broader than previously thought, and a wider array of communication solutions may be needed to meet needs at different ages.

Signal 3: Retro Cameras

A new product that caught my eye on an Instagram ad is a snazzy little camera called Pikko sold by Finch Holm, a family-owned, wellbeing-focused company. Pikko is a miniature camera that offers one-click capture with a retro lens that yields a more nostalgia vibe than a realism capture. Photos are exported through an SD card – with no editing options. The output moves away from the polished, cleaned up photos we’ve gotten accustomed to and brings back memories of the surprising, perhaps blurred, and spontaneous feeling of instant cameras and early digital models. I haven’t seen these in the wild yet, but I’m curious about the user experience.

Why this matters: Technology makes perfection, speed, and precision attainable. This camera speaks to a different aesthetic, and that may be indicative of a broader trend away from polish and towards authentic, gritty, and grounded experiences.

When considered individually, each of these signals shows a choice to opt for an older device, or a new device functioning as an older model would have. They’re all interesting, and enough to make you say “hmm.” Together, these signals, alongside longer term established trends like the re-emergence of instant cameras and revival of record players and increase of vinyl sales, speak to a potential new driver of technology unbundling. We could be on the brink of a broader shift where we pull back from combinatorial devices and tools and step back to appreciate and focus on specific devices and functions with intention.

This cluster becomes even more interesting to consider when you look at established drivers moving in opposing directions. The rate of automation deployment, which hinges on compounding technology capabilities, has a projected compound annual growth rate of nearly 31.9% by 2034. Conversely, the Gen Z/Luddite movement, which opts for no technology at all, regardless of bundling level, has grown from a few pockets in schools to an entire in-person festival in summer 2026.

Three insights for you – regardless of industry:

1. Individual signals are curious, but clusters of signals are where the story lives. If you’re new to signal scanning, check out my recent guide to signal scanning post for an introduction to the process and a downloadable resource guide. The strongest foresight learnings live in the connections between unrelated categories — the common threads that only become visible when signals are considered together.

2. Aesthetic and emotional value can outperform functional performance, and this is a customer choice to pay attention to. We see this all the time in higher ed. A prospective college student may opt for an online university that has a physical campus even if they will never step foot there because there’s a different aesthetic association with that institution. This is always something interesting to watch in the customer decision-making process.

3. Intentionality is a decision. Selecting a different path, device, or process because of a targeted experience or outcome, even when an alternative exists or is built in, suggests the emergence of consumers looking for something specific, or different, even in a time when outputs are abundant. At a time when it’s never been easier to create – as the unprecedented spike in apps being released in 2026 shows us – purpose is still a critical driver to watch.

I’m curious; where have you seen a push to or pull away from technology bundling?

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About Strategy Stories
Strategy Stories is built on a single belief: the most useful strategic insights don’t always come from inside your industry. Through this platform, Jackie Lavorgna, PhD, SMP shares case studies, analyses, and anecdotes for curious leaders, strategists, innovators, and futurists — spanning readers throughout the United States and across 16+ countries.

Strategy Stories is the insights vertical of Lavorgna Strategy Studio, a consultancy helping leaders, teams, and organizations prepare and plan for the future through strategic planning and strategic foresight.

Strategic foresight offers a systematic way to explore and build readiness for possible futures. Preparedness for possible futures and level of influence on desired future scenarios are hard aspects to quantify, which prompts the question – who actually using strategic foresight, and is it working? I dove into this area as part of the preparation for a recent strategic foresight presentation and found a range of interesting studies to share.

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At the surface, this was an offhand comment about personal technology preferences when presenting content.

Under the surface, this was a statement of my strategic focus – and choosing what not to prioritize when designing content. I believe that if the content is all important, I should make sure it’s all visible and not dependent on animation clicks being queued up correctly. By choosing to not utilize in-slide animation, I’m able to present with confidence, knowing that all the content I’ve built will show up exactly when I expect it to…and no copy/paste error or animation pane sequence glitch can stop that.

This is my strategy to avoid distracting variables and wholly focus my attention on what’s most important at that moment: the actual presentation and delivery of content to the audience.

Michael Porter famously described the essence of strategy as “choosing what not to do.”

At that moment, my decision on what not to do was around PowerPoint animations…but the principle transcends presentation software.

I first began thinking about strategic focus when I read Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park*. I was struck by Dr. Ian Malcolm’s clothing style philosophy. Dr. Malcolm’s approach isn’t captured as clearly in the film adaptation, but in the book, he describes a strategic decision he’s made to exclusively wear black and gray clothing. The rationale is that black and gray are suitable colors for any occasion, they always pair well together, and having this ultimate color capsule wardrobe frees up the mind to exclusively think about bigger challenges. In short, this is a statement on what not to focus on, ensuring that the character is able to fully focus on chaos theory (and avoiding dinosaurs).

Dr. Malcolm isn’t alone in this philosophy. Steve Jobs offers the most well-known example in the business world for his decision on what not to focus on.

Steve Jobs famously wore a black turtleneck, jeans, and sneakers each day to maximize convenience and cultivate a signature style. He initially pitched the idea of a company-wide uniform to simplify decision making and create a sense of cohesion, but this wasn’t embraced by the full Apple team. The idea of a broader organizational norm didn’t resonate with his intended participants. However, Jobs’s standardization choice worked well for him as he owned that strategic choice. On an individual level, by eliminating decision fatigue and distractions from his wardrobe, Jobs made a strategic decision on what to focus on – and what to leave set to autopilot – while shaping the future of smart technology.

A recent study on variability in meal choices highlights a similar trend. Researchers found that across countries, people are more likely to eat the same meal every day for breakfast than for lunch and dinner. A standardized breakfast becomes the launchpad for shifting critical focus and attention elsewhere. By simplifying the morning routine with a locked-in choice, busy mornings become manageable, decision fatigue is decreased, and mental focus can be reallocated on the more variable parts of the day.

From PowerPoint features to clothing choices to breakfast meals, identifying which variables require selection and attention, and which can be avoided or standardized within the routine, presents an opportunity to sharpen strategic focus. By choosing where not to allocate your attention, you’re choosing to prioritize your selected strategic direction.

What’s the variable you’ve chosen to stop thinking about so you can focus on what matters most?

Thanks for reading Strategy Stories by Lavorgna Strategy Studio!

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About Strategy Stories
Strategy Stories is built on a single belief: the most useful strategic insights don’t always come from inside your industry. Through this platform, Jackie Lavorgna, PhD, SMP shares case studies, analyses, and anecdotes for curious leaders, strategists, innovators, and futurists — spanning readers throughout the United States and across 16+ countries.

Strategy Stories is the insights vertical of Lavorgna Strategy Studio, a consultancy helping leaders, teams, and organizations prepare and plan for the future through strategic planning and strategic foresight.

*Note: This post includes affiliate links for book recommendations. If you make a purchase through one of the affiliate links, I make a commission at no charge to you.

Signal scanning is a foundational practice in strategic foresight and provides one of the best ways to practice, build, and develop a futurist mindset. Signals of change, which include emerging innovations, local practices, aberrations from established trends, or unexpected disruptions, provide hints and evidence of the future yet to come.

By scanning for signals and cataloging them over time, futurists are able to build an informed picture of possible futures grounded in evidence from today’s reality that goes beyond traditional trends. With these insights in mind, organizations are better positioned to detect disruption early on, challenge existing assumptions, and take action based on possible futures.

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I was 10 years old the first time a book truly shocked me. Most books written for kids and tweens have tidy endings – things get wrapped up, loose ends are tied or swept under the rug, and generally the characters end up happy. The final book of K.A. Applegate’s science fiction series, Animorphs, took all of those norms and flipped them on their heads with a plot twist that 10-year-old Jackie just didn’t see coming.

I was devastated.

Complete shock.

But also, I loved it.

I mulled over the outcome in my head for weeks, trying to determine how Applegate could have landed on this ending. Did she have to get permission from the publisher for such an end? Should I have seen this twist coming? Was there even foreshadowing for the ending? I was flummoxed.

Animorphs came up in a recent conversation I had about book recommendations for late elementary/early middle school readers. I recommended the sci fi series as one of my all time favorite books from that age, packed with strong worldbuilding, relatable young protagonists, and an action-packed alien invasion setting. What I’ve come to realize is that this book represented a critical turning point for me in my reading journey as I came to discover that authors could play with seismic shifts and environmental impacts spanning ecological, technological, and political advancements in the same way that the real world did – and that the ending was, similarly, not actually tidy. The conclusion of the science fiction series represented an “undesirable future” scenario in my opinion given the convergence of trends, events, and plot twists...but one that Applegate had the agency to select and bring forward. The unfathomable was logically consistent in her science fiction setting, even if undesirable.

Strategic foresight practitioners use a framework called the Futures Cone to map the range of possible futures from the most preposterous to the most preferred. From early iterations from researchers in the 1970s at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies to Theunissen’s more recent take on the Futures Cone, the framework considers different versions of the past, cultural histories, and mythologies. These elements intersect at multiple perspectives on the present and culminate in an offering of multiple possible futures, including preposterous, plausible, preferred, probable, possible, and undesirable futures.

Speculative fiction has been exploring this territory for decades. Applying the Futures Cone to speculative fiction doesn't require the scenarios to be literally possible — the value lies in inhabiting fictional scenarios and building the cognitive and emotional capacity to navigate real disruption when that disruption arrives in its own unexpected forms.

If undesirable futures are so unsettling, even in fiction, why seek them out at all? Neurological research offers a compelling answer. Deep immersion in a fictional narrative can catalyze a phenomenon known as narrative transportation which enables the reader to leverage new mindsets or traits through activation of mirror neurons, according to Dubai Future Foundation. As a result, living an undesirable scenario in real life can unearth muscle memory from reading fictional accounts, enabling the reader to leverage those learned instincts from narrative transportation. Modern psychology also tells us that envisioning worst-case scenarios can actually help you prepare for a broader range of possibilities, including developing an action plan for how to tackle the worst if it does come to pass. While Animorphs represents an both undesirable and implausible scenario, there’s clear benefit in resilience and readiness from reading, analyzing, and reflecting on speculative fiction that results in an undesirable future at the end.

The preferred future — another zone within the Futures Cone — gets its turn in Becky Chambers’s Monk and Robot duology, which I finally read earlier this year. I completely missed the first book, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, when it came out in 2022 (a year that I moved, started a new job, began my dissertation, and was wading through the Wheel of Time series). Needless to say, I still couldn’t believe that I had missed a Hugo Award-winning book about a tea expert who becomes friends with a robot while out in the woods. This was truly an iconic premise.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built ended up being one of those books that I read slowly because I kept putting it down to text friends and colleagues, unprompted, and tell them about how captivating this book was. I simply had to spread the word for others who might have been distracted in 2022. The reason for this was simple, and tied right back to the Futures Cone.

Envisioning a world in which robots, responsible for leading production at large for human civilization, gained self-awareness and parted from human society, leaving humans to transform their ways of living or perish, Chambers told a deeply relatable, empathetic story through the framework of a plausible and preferred future scenario. Through Chambers’s story arc for the titular characters, the monk and the robot, the reader understands the technological, societal, and ecological conditions that prompted a need for change and transformation. The reader is then introduced to a nearly unrecognizable human society that includes a range of new urban and rural structures, societal norms, and economic rules. At times, the story sits just at the edge of plausible even in a science fiction setting, but undoubtedly, a preferable future when compared to the risk of devastation hinted at throughout the book if humanity had stayed the course towards self-destruction.

I found myself wondering – does the framing of this narrative as a “best case scenario” following the threat of destruction still make this a worthy, intellectually stimulating read? Was I losing something by not reading a novel that refused to tidy up loose ends or take care of characters in the wake of unexpected danger? As I’ve previously shared on Strategy Stories, I’ve struggled at different points in my life to justify preferring speculative fiction over nonfiction, and at times this level of fantastical imagination seemed to go just a little too far.

But then I realized something critical.

Chambers’s novels made me feel hopeful about the future.

I didn’t feel confident that this was the direction humanity is headed towards…but I found myself taking reassurance that if Chambers could envision this possibility, there was also a scenario in the real world in which the right factors come together to address looming societal challenges (perhaps excluding a robot uprising though).

This is the magic of preferred futures, which is also anchored in psychology and neuroscience research. The preferred future is a consistent inclusion for both Theunissen’s more recent take on the Futures Cone as well as the early iterations of the framework. While the preferred future may feel like an overly Pollyanna-take on possible futures, there is a clear benefit in imagining preferred futures in order to increase the likelihood of making that future possible. Simulations of the future help to build muscle memory, situation evaluation, and refinement of decision making. Discussing the distant future activates different parts of the brain than the near future and envisioning episodic futures at present prompts actual behavior change to move towards desired futures (or away from unpreferred futures).

It’s hard to think of two series more dissimilar than Applegate’s Animorphs and Chambers’s Monk and Robot, but I love thinking of them as two distinct literary points on the possible futures continuum when considering the Futures Cone framework….and two series that offer different lessons for foresight, resilience, and growth.

Animorphs encourages you to cheer for a group of underdogs, kids who are trying to stop an alien invasion without the help of their parental figures. The ending isn’t what you’d expect, but the leadership lessons and growth the characters experience along the way provide a great set of characteristics to take inspiration from.

Monk and Robot invites you into a world where the challenges of today’s society have largely been addressed and the new adventures that take place in a technologically, ecologically, and socially advanced human civilization provoke unprecedented imagination. The premise may not feel close at hand, but leaves you wondering what action you could take today to bring the world a step closer to this future state.

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About Strategy Stories
Strategy Stories is built on a single belief: the most useful strategic insights don’t always come from inside your industry. Through this platform, Jackie Lavorgna, PhD, SMP shares case studies, analyses, and anecdotes for curious leaders, strategists, innovators, and futurists — spanning readers throughout the United States and across 16+ countries.

Strategy Stories is the insights vertical of Lavorgna Strategy Studio, a consultancy helping leaders, teams, and organizations prepare and plan for the future through strategic planning and strategic foresight.

FIFA sponsors such as Adidas, Coca-Cola, and Lenovo receive exclusive rights for presence across broadcasts, digital channels, and stadium advertisement during the 2026 World Cup tournament. For host stadiums that have naming rights for a non-FIFA sponsor, the stadiums have been rebranded as part of tournament preparations in order to remove corporate sponsorship. As a result, some familiar stadiums across the United States, Mexico, and Canada have some unfamiliar names for the tournament. With new names describing their geographic location, such as Boston Stadium instead of Gillette Stadium and Dallas Stadium instead of AT&T Stadium, local fans will still recognize the location but for long distance visitors and tourists, the new localized names will take precedence.

Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, home of the 49ers, is no exception to the rule. For the duration of the World Cup, Levi’s Stadium is known as the San Francisco Bay Area Stadium with a white cloth covering the Levi’s logo on each sign. Levi Strauss & Co, based in San Francisco, is a renowned clothing company known for classic denim jeans and not particularly well known for humor. They easily could have taken on this rule with frustration and dismay, or perhaps considered an expensive investment in FIFA sponsorship.

However, Levi’s chose a different approach.

Levi’s took ownership of this requirement and met it with good spirit by strategically replacing images of the Levi’s logo on their own social accounts with images of the white cloth covering each sign in the stadium.

By replacing their iconic logo with a picture of the white cloth covering the signage, Levi’s made a strategic choice to honor the FIFA regulation but to do so in a way that brought a good sense of humor and leveraged an unexpected visual image as a way to still draw attention to the brand this summer.

Within a week, Gillette Stadium took inspiration from Levi’s and obscured their sign with a covering designed to look like a blob of shaving cream. This might just spark the beginning of a clever signage trend throughout the rest of the tournament.

Levi’s approach brings a critical reminder: strategic opportunity can still exist amidst obstacles. The constraint was identical for every stadium host…what differed was the response.

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About Strategy Stories
Strategy Stories is built on a single belief: the most useful strategic insights don’t always come from inside your industry. Through this platform, Jackie Lavorgna, PhD, SMP shares case studies, analyses, and anecdotes for curious leaders, strategists, innovators, and futurists — spanning readers throughout the United States and across 16+ countries.

Strategy Stories is the insights vertical of Lavorgna Strategy Studio, a consultancy helping leaders, teams, and organizations prepare and plan for the future through strategic planning and strategic foresight.

Signal 1: Spotify’s Prompted Playlists

Spotify released a new feature called Prompted Playlists where listeners can choose from pre-written prompts, with customization options, or write their own new prompts to craft a fresh set of tracks. The section of the app is specifically labeled “Prompted by us, made for you” – highlighting the specific role of generative AI in creating the playlist, leveraging the listener’s Spotify data. What interested me most, other than the AI-first labeling, was how this new feature competes directly with Spotify’s existing, automated playlist generation leveraging listener data to create new playlists across a variety of categories.

Signal 2: NYT Puzzles, Made by Humans (Confirmed)

Within the same week, I received an email from the New York Times (NYT) Games app. As you may know, I love Crossplay so I was quick to open this email to read the latest on NYT Games. With the subject line “The people behind our puzzles,” the email profiled game creators employed at NYT and reminded subscribers that they have access to “over 10,000 puzzles – all made by humans.” Across games such as Wordle, Connections, and Mini Crossword, the potential for leveraging generative AI to reduce manpower needed to produce the daily games is certainly there. Concurrently, at a time when app and game creation has never been easier with vibe coding, NYT took the extra step to affirm that they are continuing to rely on humans to create, curate, and edit new puzzles. What intrigued me most about this email was that NYT proactively contacted subscribers to answer a question they may not have even been asking (“Are Connections categories selected by a human?”).

Two different signals. Two different approaches to leveraging AI. Two very bold statements about the level of AI utilized in their end product to users.

Applied Foresight Exercise: Artifacts from the Future

Building on the analysis underpinning Scenario 2, where human voice and generative AI increase in tandem, from last month’s Golden Rule of AI Content on Strategy Stories, these two signals inspired me to create a set of artifacts from the future. I first learned about the artifacts from the future exercise from Institute for the Future (IFTF) as part of the IFTF Foresight Toolkit.

When building an artifact from the future, you can transform abstract concepts of ideas about what the future may hold into tangible examples of what change could look like in the future. This creates an accessible, shareable artifact that can help others envision possible futures and clarify what kind of future you want to move toward.

What would it look like if these two signals – explicit AI content labeling and human-origin affirmation – became mainstream across a broad array of content, products, and services?

Consider a future where both the human voice and generative AI continue to proliferate in tandem, but perhaps not in harmony, and the implications of these two signals expands into the general market.

I am excited to present Origin Authenticity Badges, an artifact from the future.

Imagine a future where these origin authenticity labels, authenticated by an independent regulation and certification body, are included with products or services you are considering purchasing, similar to certified food labels we see today.

As you envision what this would mean, consider these questions:

• Would this shape your purchasing decision? If so, how?

• Would you find value in this level of transparency? Why or why not?

• What excites you about this possible future? What makes you nervous?

What I didn’t see in this wave of signal scanning was a good medium option, if we consider a Goldilocks approach. This would be an approach that utilized just enough generative AI to meet the user’s needs for customization, speed, etc. while being transparent about the level utilized. The notion of a measured, transparent AI approach is certainly intriguing, and still included in the artifacts from the future set to give balance. That isn’t to say they’re not out there – as futurist and author William Gibson says, “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

About Strategy Stories
Strategy Stories is built on a single belief: the most useful strategic insights don’t always come from inside your industry. Through this platform, Jackie Lavorgna, PhD, SMP shares case studies, analyses, and anecdotes for curious leaders, strategists, innovators, and futurists — spanning readers throughout the United States and across 16+ countries.

Strategy Stories is the insights vertical of Lavorgna Strategy Studio, a consultancy helping leaders, teams, and organizations prepare and plan for the future through strategic planning and strategic foresight.

My first post in this series invited you to rethink the process for setting New Year’s Resolutions. My second post offered a framework for your Q1 personal strategy review. For the third post, as we near the middle of the year, I wanted to take a different approach and give you a deep dive into how one of my resolutions is going.

Resolution: Run a Full Marathon

I ran my first full marathon in Manchester, NH in November 2025. I caught the marathon bug and couldn’t stop talking about signing up for my next one after that. New England winters are not marathon-friendly, however, and I chose to wait until spring to run my second marathon. One of my goals for 2026, under my health focus area, was to run a full marathon in less time than my November marathon.

Selecting the Race

I intentionally kept the marathon goal a bit broad. Recognizing that I was still new to the distance and that marathon difficulty varies greatly across courses depending on the elevation profile, I aimed for “less time” as opposed to a specific time benchmark. I also kept the “which” marathon part vague, understanding that my work and travel schedule varies and there may be some need to be flexible during the year about my commitments.

I registered for the Vermont City Marathon which is held at the end of May. With a lower elevation profile than Manchester but some steeper climbs, I knew these would be similar in difficulty and felt prepared to revisit my training plan template from last fall and jump in.

The Training: An Exercise in Disruption, Regardless of Planning

My fall 2025 marathon training plan is covered in precise lines and check boxes from left to right, up and down.

The spring 2026 plan looks just a little bit different.

I ran into challenges throughout my training including…

• An extra long, snowy winter making it tough to move outside for my long runs

• A broken treadmill at a hotel during a consulting trip

• A lot of days with dreary rain

• An early spring cold I just couldn’t run through, or shake off

• A sudden bout of hip pain during the taper period, the reduced-mileage weeks immediately before a race

Each of these unexpected challenges required 1) a pause to identify the issue; 2) brainstorming of alternative approaches; and 3) executing on the pivot. Once it became clear that winter was staying a bit longer, I identified my max treadmill distance (10 miles) and then committed to driving to a route with better maintained sidewalks and walking paths than the immediate neighborhood for runs that would last longer than 10 miles.

I brought running sneakers to Alaska in the middle of winter during a consulting engagement only to discover that the treadmill in the hotel gym was broken. I resolved to cross-train on the stationary bike instead. I also had quite a few days, including a couple long runs, where I needed to get outside for a run even though it was raining. Dressing well and mentally preparing for being wet, chilly, and uncomfortable carried me through.

Running through a cold or unexpected joint pain is possible, but often not the best approach. When I encountered these health challenges during my training, I took the intentional break and let my body recalibrate before jumping back in. This was a key lesson learned from my fall training plan when I inadvertently pushed through ankle tendon pain for an entire month.

The Race: A Parallel Experience of Disruption, Prepared for By Training

Finally, it was marathon day!

My wonderful family was up early with me that morning, watching the rain fall down. We knew it was going to be a wet day. I joined the pack of runners with ponchos, windbreakers, and shoe covers on, with all knowing this would be a long morning.

Over the course of the next 26.2 miles, I encountered a lot…

• Pouring rain at the start, which eased up about an hour in

• Navigating a muscle spasm in my right leg for the first 8 miles

• Overheating in my soaked running jacket after the rain let up

• Abandoning my jacket around mile 20

• Being cold and soaked (again) when the rain started (again) in the last half hour of my run

Fortunately, I hadn’t trained in perfection. I had navigated obstacles and challenges throughout my training period, and while I hadn’t specifically prepped for these, I had sharpened the mental resilience needed to keep going when literally every element said stop!

I stayed in good spirits about the rain, joking about the weather right up until start time. I eased up early on to assess the muscle spasm, confirming that it was a twitch and not a sharp pain, and carried on. I adjusted my jacket when I needed to, moving my bib to my shirt underneath when the heat became too much, and didn’t get (too) discouraged by how this disrupted my pace. Finally, I maintained a good attitude throughout the rain…especially towards the finish, because there’s nothing more motivating than knowing you’ll get to be somewhere dry soon (ideally with a heat shield blanket). In the end, I knocked off a couple minutes from my first marathon time — not as dramatic a difference as I might have liked, but tangible progress forward amidst a hard training cycle and a challenging weather day.

What made this experience easier was getting to see my family four different times throughout the course, which is a major benefit of a double figure eight loop, and experiencing the amazing energy of the Burlington community. Rain couldn’t keep the local spectators down. From front porch rock bands to families handing out shots of maple syrup in their neighborhoods, the Burlington community brought vibrant energy no matter the weather.

The Learnings

Most critically, I learned three strategic lessons to tackle for my next marathon:

• The best laid plans can still fail on first contact. With an n of 1, my first marathon training plan was followed to near perfection. With an n of 2, my success rate on plan adherence is quite a bit lower. Staying focused on the long-term goal – run a marathon – instead of short-term roadblocks helps maintain momentum when everything feels astray.

• A positive mindset can compete against the most undesirable elements. Think “I get to do this because I’m ready for this!” instead of “I can’t believe I have to run over 20 miles in the pouring rain.”

• Last minute details may feel minor in planning, but can take on a seismic role in execution. For me, that means don’t attach a race bib to an exterior jacket ever again.

In closing, as you think about your goals for 2026, you may be encountering your own version of roadblock and obstacles that just keep disrupting your plans. Keep focused and find ways to pivot and adjust approaches where needed. When you reach the goal, no one is asking what your training plan logbook looked like leading up to the day.

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Coming Soon
In June, Strategy Stories is launching a paid membership tier. Each month, paid members will receive one exclusive piece of curated content, rotating among items such as deeper analyses, downloadable tools, guest perspectives, and signal spotlights designed to go further than the free posts and move from strategic thinking to strategic action. I’ll share more details in the coming weeks.

About Strategy Stories
Strategy Stories is built on a single belief: the most useful strategic insights don’t always come from inside your industry. Through this platform, I share case studies, analyses, and anecdotes written for curious leaders, strategists, innovators, and futurists, spanning an audience across 23+ US states and 16+ countries.

Strategy Stories is the insights vertical of Lavorgna Strategy Studio, a consultancy helping leaders, teams, and organizations prepare and plan for the future through strategic planning and strategic foresight.

Every neighborhood suddenly seemed to have a local brewery opening on the corner. Beer tourism emerged as a new attraction. Breweries became spaces to host a broad array of activities, from plant nights to paint nights.

Craft breweries in the US began an exponential growth curve in 2010, outpacing competitors in the alcohol industry. However, recent data from the Brewers Association shows that curve appears to be plateauing as of 2025.

Concurrently, Gallup reports a sudden reduction in the percentage of Americans using alcoholic beverages overall. The recent decline in the number of Americans drinking, highlighted by a sharp drop from 2024 to 2025 down to 54%, suggests that drop could easily become a steady plummet. In nearly 90 years of tracking this data, 54% overall is already the lowest rate Gallup has ever reported. The decline is primarily driven by younger generations. Since 2023, the reported use of alcohol by US adults ages 18-34 has dropped by 9 percentage points whereas use by adults ages 35-54 has dropped by 10 percentage points. While overall alcohol consumption is declining, that decrease is felt most prominently in the craft beer industry after experiencing so much growth and expansion in recent years.

What’s really happening here?

Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) is a strategy and innovation framework popularized by the Christensen Institute that offers a lens on how people choose to “hire” or “fire” products or services for their given needs, or “jobs” in their life. In this construct, the habits of the present eventually get replaced by the pull of a new idea. Alcoholic beverages, including craft beer, were getting hired to foster social cohesion, aid with unwinding, and demonstrate a distinctive drink of choice. Based on this landscape, we’re firing beer and replacing it with new contenders to do beer’s job. The data points to a broad shift away from alcohol generally, and craft beer, as a premium product with recent high growth, is at the forefront of this headwind.

A Look at the Innovation Landscape

Considering these new alternatives in the context of the Jobs to Be Done framework presents a new perspective on the craft beer landscape and the emergence of both expected and unexpected competitors. The current choice in the present, craft beer, gets reevaluated in the context of the “push” while the anxiety of change is managed, and the new idea pulls the new behavior forward.

• Craft beer, evaluated as risky due to alcohol content, gets replaced by nonalcoholic beer.

• Craft beer, evaluated as overly caloric, gets replaced by hop water.

• Craft beer, evaluated as unhealthy overall, gets replaced by group fitness activities.

All three replacements, or new hires, still have a financial cost associated. This suggests that consumers are not making a financial decision…they’re making a values-oriented decision anchored in health and mindful habits.

Learnings and Insights for Your Industry

Whether you’re in the beverage industry or not, the arrival of new competitors and reevaluation by consumers of the exact job to be done presents key insights and cross-industry learnings.

Monitoring the Environment: Macro environmental trends, such as opening and closure rates of craft breweries and shifts in consumer drinking patterns, offer significant insight for evaluating current state and future strategy. These are the big elephants in the room that can shift or stabilize the entire industry. Just as with strategic planning and strategic foresight, monitoring the major STEEP trends provides ongoing insight to understand your landscape.

Watching for Unexpected Competitors: Entrepreneurs (Tom Holland, an unlikely beverage leader), new products (what even is hop water?), and nontraditional competitors (spin class?!) provide unexpected competition. As the JTBD framework tells us, your replacement may not be your direct competitor…or even a current player in your industry. Expanding your environmental scanning to trends and signals outside of your current industry helps to tackle this challenge and broaden the scope of analysis.

Navigating Disruption: If you happen to be in the craft beer industry, the craft breweries finding success have taken on broader identities to meet new and emerging jobs to be done. My local craft brewery, To Share, has weathered the storm and expanded beverage options (now including nonalcoholic, hop water, and more), offered a broader array of community events, and continued to offer family-friendly amenities such as board games and a giant chalkboard. They were recently named Best Brewery in NH for the second year in a row — a positive sign for the future.

What job is your product or service hired to do, and who's applying for that position from somewhere you're not looking?

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Thanks for reading Strategy Stories!

Coming Soon
In June, Strategy Stories is launching a paid membership tier. Each month, paid members will receive one exclusive piece of curated content, rotating among items such as deeper analyses, downloadable tools, guest perspectives, and signal spotlights designed to go further than the free posts and move from strategic thinking to strategic action. I’ll share more details in the coming weeks.

About Strategy Stories
Strategy Stories is built on a single belief: the most useful strategic insights don’t always come from inside your industry. Through this platform, I share case studies, analyses, and anecdotes written for curious leaders, strategists, innovators, and futurists, spanning an audience across 23+ US states and 16+ countries.

Strategy Stories is the insights vertical of Lavorgna Strategy Studio, a consultancy helping leaders, teams, and organizations prepare and plan for the future through strategic planning and strategic foresight.

Honestly, that sentiment resonated with me.

Especially since launching my business, I’ve been inundated with questions about how and where I’m integrating generative AI into all sorts of areas. Early adopters are sharing their success of inputting mass amounts of data to recreate their human writing voice through AI and create more output than ever before. At the same time, I’m seeing more and more critical commentary about AI-generated content on LinkedIn, Substack, and other forms of traditional and social media. Readers and writers alike are sharing fatigue with tropes now associated with AI – including the poor em dash who went from unsung hero of punctuation to persona non grata seemingly overnight.

The message I’m hearing is 1) Leverage AI as much as you can, as fast as you can, to make as many things as you can better than ever; but also 2) Your human voice, analysis and tone is valuable and should not be substituted by AI outputs for writing to be meaningful and appreciated by readers.

Which one do I pick?

It’s a great question – and one I continue to come back to.

A polarity, or paradox, is “a situation in which opposing forces within a system pull at each other to keep things balanced” (Harvard Business Impact). Examples of polarities include inhaling/exhaling, work/life balance, and liberal/conservative. Ultimately, both poles must be present and the tension will always be there – even when it feels uncomfortable. The Polarity Map, originally created by Barry Johnson, has been used for 50+ years as a way to help leaders navigate interdependent, conflicting pairs that bring natural tension while generating balance.

Recent advances in genAI have resulted in a new polarity for writing:
AI-generated content and authentic human voice & analysis.

In today’s technology setting, both are viable pathways and increasingly in conflict, particularly as genAI gets more and more embedded into digital tools and reader fatigue on AI-generated content grows. A polarity-mapping exercise considers the benefits and drawbacks of each polarity.

AI-generated content offers efficiency, scale, and consistency with clear benefits such as speed from inception to creation, ease of streamlining formatting and writing style across posts, and decreased cognitive load for the writer. However, that same speed and efficiency can lead to generic-feeling outputs, risks of missing key details or overlooking fallacies within the content, and inclusion of “AI flags” indicating the content doesn't have a distinctly human origin. Concurrently, a focus on human voice and analysis takes longer to develop, inconsistencies (intentional or unintentional) emerge across articles, and content is hard to scale without additional resources. However, the human-first content offers nuanced stories, unique to the author, that leverage our human experience while also building trust and credibility with the audience.

Managing Polarities

The polarity map surfaces the tradeoffs to consider and highlights friction points. A 2x2 scenario planning exercise asks what happens when these forces play out at scale and offers another lens to consider what these intersections yield.

Scenario Planning with Polarities

In a world where AI-content tools have reached the point of mass-proliferation, we can’t really envision Scenarios 1 or 3 truly coming to pass. Our human voice is unlikely to truly be “eliminated” but could fade to the background. With this in mind, my actionable insights for navigating this paradox focus on opportunities for the human voice in consideration of Scenarios 2 and 4:

1. Use the amount of AI optimization that you, as a reader, would want to experience when you’re reading others’ content. I think about this as the manifestation of the golden rule for navigating AI content use: produce AI content for others as you would have them produce AI content for you. This is a rule of thumb for estimating how much is too much…and where AI can supplement your work without taking away from the original human intention and voice. For me, article titles are a space where I tend to get stuck and I’ll lean on AI recommendations for coming up with something descriptive yet pithy. Using AI to create a quick illustration (see above!) using my written content also helps me bring a concept to life faster.

2. Leverage AI as a fact-checker, proofreader, assumption review mechanism, or key takeaway analysis – but keep the origin of the piece within your human tone. One of the most useful applications I’ve found for genAI is to share an article draft and ask for an analysis of key takeaways without disclosing my intended thesis as part of the prompt. This helps me mimic the fresh-perspective experience of having someone review an article without actually asking them to take on the cognitive load.

3. Evaluate the why behind AI-usage. If the story isn’t worth the time to begin a draft, perhaps it’s not a story that needs telling today. If I don’t have enough inspiration to start the narrative and get to a strong first draft before needing technology assistance, this tells me that the idea isn’t yet mature enough to build out into an article. If I find myself deprioritizing writing time within my week and needing technology to fill that gap, that tells me that my own capacity-planning is off – and that is a key metric to consider for my planning and prioritization within the business.

Today, these are the next steps that make the most sense to me as I think about my role as a writer during the genAI era and consider how to best utilize emerging technologies without losing my original human intentions within Strategy Stories.

Are you experiencing this polarity? How are you navigating this tension?

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About Strategy Stories
Strategy Stories is the insights vertical of Lavorgna Strategy Studio, a consultancy helping leaders, teams, and organizations prepare and plan for the future through strategic planning and strategic foresight.

Curious how these frameworks translate into practical strategy for your organization? Connect with Jackie Lavorgna, Founder and Principal, to learn more.

Why’s that?

Two main reasons: 1) I’m here to avoid checked baggage fees whenever possible; and 2) Roller bags are vulnerable - you’re relying on the wheels, zipper, and handles to function perfectly, otherwise it’s impossible to carry with ease.

As it turns out, my roller bag barrier points are not unique, and luggage trends and signals today yield an interesting foresight question for considering the future of travel.

Trend: Increasing Baggage Fees Across Airlines

Climbing fuel costs resulting from the ongoing conflict in the Middle East prompted United Airlines, JetBlue, Delta Airlines, and Southwest Airlines to raise checked baggage fees over the last month. With most major airlines increasing fees, this demonstrates a new trend in higher checked bag fees which will be felt by many consumers preparing for summer travel. By increasing the cost of checked bags, customers may not be discouraged by initial price estimates and will have already committed to their travel plans before seeing the checked bag fee at the end of the booking process. Price increases range from $4 to $10 per bag so far – a modest increase – but a dramatic increase for Southwest customers who were accustomed to free checked bags up until last year. While this move may not stop customers from traveling, the increased cost may be enough to make customers question whether they really need to bring that roller bag.

Signal 1: Abandoning Your Roller Bag at the Airport

Travelers in Japan have already been questioning whether the roller bag is needed. Luggage abandonment has become more frequent in Japan as travelers seek to avoid checked bag fees and overweight bag penalties. While this is not yet a widespread, quantitative trend, there are a number of anecdotal stories of travelers abandoning luggage. Sometimes this is directly to avoid fees, and the choice to discard personal or perishable items is weighed by the traveler in the moment. Other times, a faulty or worn out bag becomes easier to discard. The tradeoff is considered: bring the roller bag and the packed items home, or cut the loss and carry home fewer material possessions and avoid the baggage fee. Hotels and airports are left with the challenge of navigating the waste from discarded bags, choosing to auction, give away, or repurpose the bags to avoid depositing them at the landfill.

Signal 2: Reimagining the Roller Bag

With the rising fees and stories of abandoned roller bags in mind, you may be ready to join me in the backpack club.

However, Cotopaxi recently announced a new product that runs counter and provides an alternate look at the future of travel luggage.

Known for adventurous and versatile backpacks, Cotopaxi launched a new roller bag line, Coraza, in late April which takes on the weak points for roller bags: 1) Risk of zippers breaking and leaving the bag wide open; and 2) Risk of wheels or handles breaking and leaving the bag immovable without serious arm strength. Recognizing the challenge of fixing a broken zipper on the go, the Coraza bag instead closes with reinforced latches that snap shut and avoids the zipper risk altogether.

Outside of the design innovation, the Coraza bag comes with a lifetime warranty – which isn’t rare in the luggage industry – but this warranty is designed around sustainability and lowering the amount of bags that end up in landfills. Most luggage companies require you to mail the bag back, or will simply send you a brand new bag while you discard the broken item. However, replacement parts for the Coraza bag’s latches as well as for the swappable and customizable wheels and handle can be shipped directly to the traveler, with installation instructions, keeping the original bag on the road and in use for a longer time. While the bag is designed to be enduring, the starting price at $295 USD anchors the model at the higher end of the rolling luggage industry and risks positioning sustainable goods as a premium, rather than widely accessible, option.

The Conflict

The rising fees trend warns us to avoid bringing a roller bag and risking a checked bag fee at all costs. The first signal suggests for us to evaluate whether we really need to bring that bag/shoes/sweatshirt/snacks home with us…and to consider abandonment. The second signal invites us to consider a long-term commitment to a roller bag with replacement options available for the most vulnerable parts of the bag. These signals are in conflict with each other, and the latter does not correlate with the industry trend.

What makes the Cotopaxi bag an interesting innovation signal is this inherent conflict. Can a sustainable roller bag, priced at the high end of the suitcase industry, find its customer amidst a landscape of higher checked bag fees and emerging habits of abandoning bags? Maybe.

More critically, the Cotopaxi signal embodies a different focus altogether. Building a more sustainable and durable bag is a better choice environmentally, and for consumers who can, and want, to opt in to this approach upholds Cotopaxi’s founding belief that business can be a force for good.

You may or may not be in the midst of planning airline travel, or in the market for a new roller bag. However, this trend and signal intersection offers versatile key takeaways regardless of your industry, or travel plans:

• Monitor Social, Technology, Economic, Environmental, and Political (STEEP) trends to track and anticipate potential unexpected impacts to your strategy, such as political conflict driving an increase in checked bag fees.

• Trends are observed over time and are accompanied by data points. Anecdotes, such as the abandonment of luggage at airports in Japan, are not yet trends…but they represent the initial stories that could converge into long-term, widespread data over time. Keep an eye out for interesting stories that could grow up into big, disruptive trends.

• Thought-provoking innovations arise from questioning unquestionable assumptions. Roller bags close with zippers. Imagine a roller bag without zippers? Seems preposterous, until you remember that zippers are the weakest point of the bag. This is reminiscent of Sanderson’s book with black pages from last year which questioned the assumption that book pages need to be cream-colored.

Conflicting signals or trends are not a sign that you’re doing foresight or innovation research wrong. Rather, identifying areas of contradiction is the start of some of the most interesting analyses, offering an opportunity to challenge your assumptions and consider unexpected convergence points. The most useful foresight work happens in the space where signals conflict and the resolution isn’t yet clear.

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Thanks for reading Strategy Stories by Lavorgna Strategy Studio!

About Strategy Stories
Strategy Stories is the insights vertical of Lavorgna Strategy Studio, a consultancy helping leaders, teams, and organizations prepare and plan for the future through strategic planning and strategic foresight.

Curious how these frameworks translate into practical strategy for your organization? Connect with Jackie Lavorgna, Founder and Principal, to learn more.

A large “Runners Welcome. Walkers Tolerated.” sign went up outside of Nike’s Boston location the week prior to the marathon. Immediate backlash across social media from the running community, concerned about the lack of inclusivity and negative connotation around walking, resulted in the sign being replaced three full days before the event.

As a runner, I understand Nike’s original intent. Running is the focal activity. However, the reason I show up to road races again and again is because of the welcoming environment and sense of community…comprised of Nike’s target audience.

Where Nike missed the mark was not understanding the core values of their running customer base. The running community is notably inclusive…welcoming newcomers to their first race, encouraging old-timers to persist, and supporting anyone in between trying to do their best that day. That includes joggers, walkers, and the growing adoption of “jeffing,” or structured run/walk intervals, which has further expanded access to the sport. These dynamics are central to running’s continued growth, and Nike’s ad, intended to draw attention and attract customers, actually ended up alienating some of the very customers they hoped to bring in. In community-driven categories like running, brands don’t just market to the customer — they participate in the culture, which means reflecting its values rather than attempting to redefine them.

Road race participation has continued to climb in recent years, aided by the low barrier to entry and distribution of events regionally, and Nike has an opportunity to build on their established running brand to be a part of that future growth. However, this cautionary tale highlights the importance of understanding 1) your customer and 2) the values they hold when considering a disparaging joke in a highly visible marketing ad.

Humor in advertising can work wonders and be deeply memorable to the target audience – sometimes even eclipsing focus on the product. However, ensuring that the team discussing a potentially humorous ad includes diverse and inclusive representation can help avoid these kinds of mishaps. In practice, this means pressure-testing creative outputs through the lens of your most values-driven customers — not just your core user, but your most vocal advocates. If a message risks excluding even a small but visible portion of the community, it’s worth revisiting, especially when the spotlight is already on the category — such as during marathon week.

Ultimately, the more that you understand your customers and what they value as a group, the more likely you are to come up with a humorous ad that lands without the cringe factor.

Know your customers.

Know what is important to them.

Know what values they hold.

Design with your customer and their values at the center.

A quick reminder…

I’d love to hear from you as I design the next phase of Strategy Stories. This short (~2 min), anonymous survey asks what’s bringing you to Strategy Stories today and what future offerings would interest you.

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Thanks for reading Strategy Stories by Lavorgna Strategy Studio!

About Strategy Stories
Strategy Stories is the insights vertical of Lavorgna Strategy Studio, a consultancy helping leaders, teams, and organizations prepare and plan for the future through strategic planning and strategic foresight.

Curious how these frameworks translate into practical strategy for your organization? Connect with Jackie Lavorgna, Founder and Principal, to learn more.

I’m grateful for every reader who’s been part of this first chapter. Thank you so much for being here.

I’m excited to now be planning the next wave of Strategy Stories content.

Human-centered design is a core value for how I approach strategy: start with the people you’re designing for. That principle applies here as well.

As I design this next phase, I’d love to hear from you. This short (~2 min), anonymous survey asks what’s bringing you to Strategy Stories today and what future offerings would interest you.

Your answers will directly shape what comes next.

Direct Link: https://forms.gle/4cTHzSdjSndXVYwo7
Survey will remain open until Tuesday, April 28, 2026.

Thank you for sharing your feedback and for being part of the first chapter of Strategy Stories.

About Strategy Stories
Strategy Stories is the insights vertical of Lavorgna Strategy Studio, a consultancy helping leaders, teams, and organizations prepare and plan for the future through strategic planning and strategic foresight.

Curious how these frameworks translate into practical strategy for your organization? Connect with Jackie Lavorgna, Founder and Principal, to learn more.

Robbins’s core message is, upon experiencing undesirable circumstances, to “let them” and refocus your energy and attention on what you can do in this situation. I’ve been mulling it over since finishing the book and found it to be particularly compelling in the context of strategic positioning. The most interesting strategic application of this theory is what happens when organizations stop fighting negative narratives and start using them instead.

There’s an adorable coffeeshop on the seacoast in New Hampshire called Flamingos Coffee Bar. The interior is a chaotic splash of flamingo wallpaper and sugary pink and tropical green accent colors. Many drinks have punchy names, including an entire section dedicated to Taylor Swift.

In September 2024, a customer wrote a review of the coffee shop and described it as “disgustingly pro-women” and affirmed that he would likely not return due to the environment, decor, and overall business model.

The coffee shop’s owner, MacKenzie Logan, could have been horrified and embarrassed by the scathing review. However, what Logan understood in this moment was that from a customer standpoint, she was not just okay, but very comfortable, owning a pink and tropical coffee shop that was identified as “pro-women.” This was, in fact, a customer segment she sought to serve — not to the exclusion of others, but as the clear heart of the brand identity.

Supported by a wave of social media engagement, Logan began using “disgustingly pro-women” as a tagline for the coffee shop. You can now purchase a “disgustingly pro-women” beanie or sweatshirt, with 20% of profits supporting a local nonprofit offering financial assistance to families in need.

Logan owned the narrative, amplified the messaging, and found a way to both monetize the framing as part of the brand and launch a values-aligned initiative through the product line. The sequence of response matters: from her clarity about positioning, acceptance of the narrative, amplification through the right channels with actual current and prospective customers, and reinforcement through alignment with a values-based mission that extends beyond the original moment.

A printout of the infamous review sits in a framed spot on the wall by the register. What could have been a disheartening moment exploded into a customer value proposition and a promise to all who enter that this is a welcoming space for coffee and camaraderie.

We can't always control the environment around us...but we can control how we, as individuals and leaders, choose to react. Sometimes the most strategic thing you can do is exactly what Robbins suggests: let them. Then ask whether they just handed you your best tagline.

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Thanks for reading Strategy Stories by Lavorgna Strategy Studio!

About Strategy Stories
Strategy Stories is the insights vertical of Lavorgna Strategy Studio, a consultancy helping leaders, teams, and organizations prepare and plan for the future through strategic planning and strategic foresight.

Curious how these frameworks translate into practical strategy for your organization? Connect with Jackie Lavorgna, Founder and Principal, to learn more.

Fast forward to my mid-20s, wholly focused on building my professional credibility and a clear career pathway. I set aside speculative fiction from my small talk and focused on my professional development reading. I looked for opportunities to connect scholarly and industry sources. I built credibility through work performance, advanced degrees, and industry credentials.

The Institute for the Future introduced me to the magic of signal scanning, trend monitoring, and scenario planning – and telling stories about the future. Futures that have not yet come to pass, or may never come to pass.

I had an epiphany.

I had been training for this discipline for my entire life…and I didn’t even realize it.

The skills that I had honed from reading fantasy and sci fi were actually the same skills that positioned me for success at strategic foresight work.

How does this show up in fantasy and sci fi novels?

Strategic foresight work requires an openness to complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, and a healthy dose of creativity and imagination. I’ve highlighted six key elements below of how these elements are represented in fantasy and sci fi novels, each accompanied by a favorite book as an example of this element in action.

Complexity

• Meeting a complex range of characters and worldviews that challenge your thinking – and require periodic reassessment as character arcs evolve – as is required in complex stakeholder engagement and management.

• A favorite example: The Way of Kings, the first in a fantasy series by Brandon Sanderson.

Multiple Perspectives

• Experiencing the same events from multiple character viewpoints with different background information and stakes, developing the ability to hold competing perspectives simultaneously which is essential for stakeholder analysis and scenario development.

• A favorite example: Game of Thrones, the first in a fantasy series by George R. R. Martin.

Implications-Mapping

• Extrapolating “what if” from technology developments to imagine new possible systems, processes, and worlds…similar to mapping implications in a signal scanning exercise.

• A favorite example: I, Robot, the first in a sci fi series by Isaac Asimov.

Scenario Planning

• Holding multiple contradictory realities and futures as simultaneously possible across a complex plot line which requires the same cognitive skill required in scenario planning for organizations and mapping potential long-term possibilities through the futures cone.

• A favorite example: Piranesi, a standalone speculative fiction novel by Susanna Clarke.

Black Swan Events

• Experiencing previously unimaginable black swan events that seismically change the understood landscape of the story and growing more comfortable entertaining the unfathomable, and considering risk management and response strategies.

• A favorite example: Parasite, a standalone horror sci fi novel by Darcy Coates.

Systems Thinking

• Engaging in systems thinking to consider a constellation of interrelated elements, from complex magic systems to fictitious political and economic structures to extreme environmental climates that transform ways of living, critical for both extrapolating 2x2 scenario matrices and considering long-term implications of trends.

• A favorite example: The Fifth Season, the first in a fantasy trilogy by N.K. Jemisin.

Once I realized that my lifetime of reading sci fi and fantasy had prepared me for strategic foresight, I began sharing my insights more. I found opportunities to use speculative fiction as a metaphor when considering complex scenarios. I leveraged the storytelling of fiction in facilitations to help participants tell stories about the future. And the best part – I made new friends and strengthened connections from sharing my reading interests with my coworkers.

What I had once tucked away was a foundational strength for strategic foresight as a discipline, and an amazing bridge builder for a dynamic network of futurists and futures thinkers.

What unexpected hobby or interest has shaped how you think professionally?

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Thanks for reading Strategy Stories by Lavorgna Strategy Studio!

About Strategy Stories
Strategy Stories is the insights vertical of Lavorgna Strategy Studio, a consultancy helping leaders, teams, and organizations prepare and plan for the future through strategic planning and strategic foresight.

Curious how these frameworks translate into practical strategy for your organization? Connect with Jackie Lavorgna, Founder and Principal, to learn more.

Luck and strategy often move together. It’s rare to see very low luck paired with very high strategy. High luck often coincides with high strategy – and usually, a victory.

As I consider these analyses, I keep coming back to the relationship between luck and strategy. In both games and organizations, “luck” often shows up as shifts in the external environment. These are factors outside of your direct control that reshape your strategic options.

Is a strategy still good even if luck is bad?

Sometimes you have a great word queued up in Crossplay. Dozens of points are about to be yours. Suddenly, your opponent takes your spot, or plays a word that requires you to move into a defensive position elsewhere on the board. The initial strategy was good, but bad luck requires a strategic pivot based on the new environment. The same holds true for organizational strategy.

Consider a company with a call center that serves customers across the US, but with all employees located on the East Coast. Supporting West Coast customers becomes challenging, often requiring East Coast employees to work irregular schedules, which can create hiring and retention challenges. Imagine that same company opens a call center on the West Coast to better support customers while also providing employees with regular and consistent schedules.

Good strategy? Absolutely.

What about after COVID-19 sent employees home and those same call center workers began taking calls from home…and doing so in different states? Suddenly a physical hub on the opposite coast isn’t quite as critical…and supporting a distributed workforce on the West Coast becomes much more straightforward and resource-efficient. Was the original plan still a good strategy? Yes – this would have been the right strategy, at the right time…up until bad luck shifted the external environmental conditions and presented new, pressing strategy alternatives.

Can luck make a bad strategy look like a good one?

Sometimes strategy falls short. You’re tired and distracted, and the great word plays just aren’t coming. An unexpected opening near a 3W spot presents an opportunity to turn the tide. The initial strategy was lackluster…but fortuitous luck positions you for a possible comeback, though it’ll require sustained strategic thinking after this play. Organizations face a similar dynamic.

Consider a brick-and-mortar retail chain experiencing diminished sales due to digital distribution trends that they didn’t adjust for early on. A sudden surge in investor enthusiasm, buoyed by social media momentum, temporarily boosts the company’s valuation and perceived momentum. While this creates the appearance of renewed viability, it doesn’t address the underlying strategic gap: the delayed shift to digital.

Does this demonstrate that the existing strategy is valid after all? Not quite.

The lack of early action in moving to digital represents a missed opportunity in the external environment. However, the surge presents a lucky opportunity to rebound by financing a necessary strategic pivot. Mistaking luck for strategic validation in this moment risks missing the window for change.

So, strategy or luck? What matters more?

Both examples feature the same luck dynamic: an unexpected environmental shift that either yielded an unexpected opportunity despite poor strategy, or rendered a good strategy less relevant. Good strategy and good strategic responses emerge from consistent and thorough external environmental analysis.

Good strategy doesn't guarantee good outcomes, and good luck doesn't validate weak strategy. What determines which is which is how well you understand the environment you're operating in.

It’s easy to rush past the environmental assessment portion of a strategic planning process and hurry to set the big goals and initiatives…but moving too fast through the environmental scan creates a risk of missing changing conditions. Likewise, once a strategic plan is set, continuing to monitor the market for new developments is essential to keep the strategy agile and relevant.

You can’t control luck, but you can control how prepared you are to respond to shifts in your environment through sound strategy.

…at least that’s what I remind myself when I’m playing Crossplay.

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Thanks for reading Strategy Stories by Lavorgna Strategy Studio!

About Strategy Stories
Strategy Stories is the insights vertical of Lavorgna Strategy Studio, a consultancy helping leaders, teams, and organizations prepare and plan for the future through strategic planning and strategic foresight.

Curious how these frameworks translate into practical strategy for your organization? Connect with Jackie Lavorgna, Founder and Principal, to learn more.