Being Curious in 2026
The Best Reports on the year ahead
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Friends,
Last year, for the first time, I watched people become less sure of themselves the more they used the tools designed to help them. A year ago, I shared Being Curious in 2025, a simple act of curation. Trends that stayed with me. No predictions. Just signals I didn’t want to lose. I’m doing it again, but curiosity has changed shape over the last 12 months.
Information is no longer scarce. Anyone can generate summaries, confident opinions, and endless lists. What has become scarce is judgement: the ability to act on incomplete information, to know what deserves attention and what to ignore, and to be accountable for choices you can’t fully explain.
That’s where curiosity now does its real work.
I don’t read trend pieces to predict the future. I read them to stay oriented. The most useful writing doesn’t tell you what will happen. It helps you notice where things feel awkward, where systems strain, where behaviour rubs against technology or incentives in uncomfortable ways.
For each piece I include, I ask three questions:
Does it reveal a constraint being removed?
Does it show behaviour changing before institutions notice?
Did it make me revise a belief, or at least weaken my certainty?
If a piece didn’t change my thinking, I left it out.
This year, the same friction appeared across very different domains:
People using AI daily, yet feeling less confident in their own judgement. Decision surfaces being outsourced to defaults, feeds, and recommendation systems, until the reasons for choices disappear entirely. Organisations investing heavily in transformation while behaviour barely shifts. Strategy accelerates, but the execution feels uncomfortable and work hesitates. None of this looks dramatic. That’s why it matters. When something feels smooth, it usually reinforces what already exists. When something feels clumsy, inefficient, or emotionally charged, change is often underway.
History makes this easier to see. Consider what happened when incumbents asked the wrong question.
In the 1970s, US steel was dominated by firms like Bethlehem Steel. Vast blast-furnace operations built for scale, precision, and high-grade output. Then Nucor started doing something that looked unimpressive: recycling scrap metal in electric arc furnaces to produce low-quality rebar. By incumbent standards, this wasn’t serious steelmaking. The output was inferior. The margins were thin. The customers were unglamorous. Executives noticed Nucor and decided it wasn’t worth worrying about.
That was the mistake.
They asked whether the new thing was as good as what they already made. They should have asked why customers were willing to accept something worse. What Nucor had removed was easy to miss: capital requirements dropped sharply, plants moved closer to customers, iteration sped up, incentives aligned directly with productivity. Over time, quality improved while costs stayed low. Nucor moved from rebar into structural steel, then sheet steel, then markets once considered untouchable.
Bethlehem Steel filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Nucor is now the largest steel producer in the United States by market capitalisation.
Nothing sudden happened. The industry drifted past its old leaders.
The executives who missed this weren’t careless. They were experienced and analytical. Their failure wasn’t a lack of data. It was a lack of inquiry.
Incumbents compared quality. Curiosity would have compared constraints removed.
What constraint has been lifted? Who is adopting this, and why? What behaviour is changing, even if the product looks inferior? These questions matter more than forecasts. They reveal pressure building before anything breaks.
Trends show us change before it demands a response. Long before industries collapse or skills decay, behaviour starts to bend. People tolerate awkward tools, accept lower quality, adjust habits in small ways, and explain away discomfort. Trend reading is the discipline of noticing those early shifts and taking them seriously.
At the individual level, this changes something fundamental: the moment you stop asking why you made a choice, you’ve outsourced your confidence along with your decision.
Every year I also curate my best 50 themes to watch. This is the eighth year. But halfway through this year’s review, I couldn’t shake a thought: someone could just ask any LLM for this list. So I tried. The result was too bland to even be useful.
That should have reassured me. It didn’t. Because while I was putting the list together, I got tunnel vision. I ended up with three versions of the same theme. I thought they were all good. I didn’t have the cognitive capacity to remember I’d already seen them until I did the final review.
I’m not immune to the pattern I’m describing. None of us are.
My list is not the best list. It’s a singular view. That’s the point. Everyone needs their own. It’s why I do this, and why I send you to the original sources rather than summarising them into oblivion. You could conceivably skim the best 200 pieces yourself if you wanted to.
But no one has time these days. I joke that I just about have enough time to eat and shower. That’s the trade. I spend the hours so you don’t have to. But what I can’t do is tell you what to notice. That part is yours.
The pieces below earned their place by lingering. Some unsettled me. Some clarified something I’d sensed but not named. A few forced me to revise an opinion I held too confidently.
Read across domains. Notice where people hesitate. And when something feels inefficient or uncomfortable, do not look away. That friction is the only signal left that an algorithm cannot replicate. That’s being curious in 2026.
These are the reports worth checking out - Worth forwarding to friends and family with a curious mind. Or to those you want to be curious!
The List of Best Reports on 2026
15 Scenarios That Could Stun the World in 2026 - Politico
50 Emerging Themes That Will Shape Work, Technology, and Society in 2026 - Rahim Hirji
The 26 Most Important Ideas For 2026 - Derek Thompson
Seven Big Predictions For Tech in 2026 - Alex Kantrowitz
10 Predictions for Life in 2026 - NYT
12 Predictions for 2026 - Tomasz Tunguz
2026 Predictions - Scott Galloway
Tech That Will Change Your Life in 2026 - WSJ
Tom Standage’s ten trends to watch in 2026 - The Economist
The GDrive with 180+ Trend Reports - collated by Amy Daroukakis et al
10 Breakthrough Technologies - MIT Technology Review
Your comprehensive guide to digital in 2026 - We are Social
What Will Happen In 2026 - Fred Wilson
12 Outlooks for the Future: 2026+ - Scott Belsky
The next big thing in 2026 will be - Nikhil Basu Trivedi
Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2026 - Gartner
26 things we think will happen in 2026 - Vox
a16z Big Ideas - 2026 - a16z
Pinterest Predicts 2026 - Pinterest
13 Tech Predictions for 2026 - The Pourquoi Pas
Tech Trends 2026 - Deloitte
The Global Risks Report 2026 - WEF
Top 10 global risks to watch in 2026 - Everbridge
Tech Predictions for 2026 - BDO
Trending 2026 The Adaptation Advantage - Foresight Factory
10 Big Predictions for 2026 - Spyglass (MG Siegler)
People On Reddit Are Predicting The Biggest Events Of 2026, And Now I’m A Little Scared - Buzzfeed
Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,
PS. If your organisation is grappling with how AI is reshaping work and leadership, I speak and advise on this.
Rahim Hirji Author, SuperSkills (2026) | Keynote Speaker | Advisor
Building human capability for the AI era.
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Brilliant framing on how judgement becomes the real bottleneck when info generation is free. The Nucor example really nails it because it shows that incumbets dunno they're asking the wrong question until way too late. I've been noticing the same pattern in how my team uses AI tools now, confidnece drops even as output volume spikes, which feels super counterintuitive but tracks with what you're saying about outsourcing decisions.