ABC Radio Australia – FutureTech Segment – 4 June 2010
Business Futurist | Foresight Strategist
If you’ve read this far, something probably connected.
Maybe it put words to something you’d been sensing but couldn’t quite land. Maybe it made something complicated feel clearer. Maybe it unsettled a position you thought you’d settled.
Good. That’s where this work lives.
Not forecasting. Not scenarios at 2050. Not more noise. What’s already moving. The shifts most organisations can’t yet see, name, or understand the full weight of. What it means. What to do about it while it’s still a possibility, not a problem. Short term and long.
Morris Misel has been doing this for 30 years across 160 industries, with boards, executive teams, and leadership groups in Australia and internationally. More than 2,800 engagements. Over a million people a year through conferences, boardrooms, and media.
If you want more of this thinking while it’s still a signal, not a headline, subscribe to Immediate Futures.
If you want ongoing access to everything I do for clients, packaged for you, with direct access to me, join the Signal Room.
If you’re considering bringing this work into your conference, boardroom, or organisation, enquire here.
Choose Forward.
June 2010 was a pivotal moment. App stores were maturing, cloud computing was shifting from theoretical to practical, and mobile devices were becoming primary. Morris Misel’s segment examined these convergent shifts and what they meant for organisations trying to maintain control in an increasingly distributed, consumer-led technology landscape.
Apps represented a fundamental decentralisation of software distribution. Organisations could no longer control the technology stack. This early signal foreshadowed today’s reality—where employees choose their own tools, shadow IT becomes inevitable, and the boundary between approved and ad-hoc technology dissolves completely.
Cloud services meant organisations no longer owned their infrastructure. This required a mental shift from ownership to access, from control to trust. In 2010, this was revolutionary and frightening. Today it’s baseline, but the same discomfort applies to AI, data governance, and algorithmic decision-making.
Mobile devices blurred the line between office and everywhere else. Work became asynchronous, availability became expected, and location ceased to define work. Leaders who ignored this signal faced retention problems and productivity paradoxes that persist today in hybrid and remote work debates.
The patterns repeat: emerging platforms, worker autonomy outpacing policy, and second-order effects nobody anticipated. Leaders who studied these 2010 shifts recognise today’s AI moment not as unprecedented but as another chapter in the same story—preparation is possible if you understand the pattern early.
