The year of the horse
Happy New Year and all that jazz. Welcome to another year of poking bears and kicking sandcastles in The100.
If you didn't already know, 2026 is the year of the horse in the Chinese calendar. Shame it's not a giraffe, but our shorter-necked friend will do.
Trends galore
Lolanda Carvalho, Amy Daroukakis, Ci En Lee and Gonzalo Gregori have compiled more trend reports than you can shake an isotonic-filled Stanley Cup at. Brace yourselves.
Strategy in the Upside Down
As we all read the Times New Roman tea leaves and try to figure out what’s going to happen next, Zoe Scaman has shared 4 methods for working with more clarity and accuracy during uncertainty.
“I’ve started plotting every project across two dimensions: how much freedom I actually have to shape the approach, and how much influence the outcome will have [...] The point isn’t that one quadrant is better. The point is being honest about which one you’re in, so you’re not developing strategies that require agency you don’t have or avoiding bigger swings when you actually have room to make them."
A Cocktail Orange
MichaelAaron Flicker and Richard Shotton of The Consumer Behaviour Lab have a knack for taking the obvious and making it profound. Case in point, the success of Aperol and thinking about social proof more broadly than just “9 out of 10 people would buy again…"
"I think one of the crucial things to their success is they make the consumption of their product visible. Whereas for many drinks, the consumption is invisible [...] you see someone and they're drinking a black drink you don't know whether it's rum and Coke, whiskey and Coke [...] Think about Aperol, the balloon glass, the orange colors [...] when I walk into a bar, and I look around and I see all those balloon glasses, and I see the orange color, it's an implicit recommendation [...] make yourself appear popular, you'll become more popular still."
Reminds me of the iPod headphones back in the day.
The future always comes knocking
In software speak, ‘technical debt’ is the long term consequences of cutting corners to get a quick win. And that same principle can just as easily apply to taking shortcuts during the likes of innovation, strategy and operations. Those low hanging fruits can turn into bad apples.
Nicole Williams has shared how software teams manage the long-term consequences of quick wins and what the rest of us can learn:
“Every shortcut has a cost. When we fail to account for that cost, we’re not just buying time; we’re borrowing from the future. And the future always comes knocking [...] Name It: Be explicit “This is debt.” Label the shortcut and its likely cost. Track It: Maintain a register, backlog, or log of known debts. Visibility prevents denial. Plan for Repayment: Dedicate cycles, budgets, or policy reviews to address it.”
And finally…
Tom Whitwell’s annual list of 52 things he learnt that year is always a treat. And 2025’s list is no different. “During 2024, the bubble tea and ice cream chain Mixue overtook McDonald’s as the world’s largest fast food chain with 47k branches.” Mind. Blown.
The internet really can be a wonderful place. Thank you Mike Fitzgerald for this comparative analysis of two drafts of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The final section, examining how the changes impacted the scene, is properly interesting from a storytelling perspective.
How old is the oldest English that you can understand? Se groond is cald.
Bon weekend,
Fran