Recycle and refresh your business thinking / Dandenong Journal, StarCommunity.com.au
reprinted from a story by Casey Neill in the Dandenong Journal
THE future is all about flexibility, businesses at the SEBN Christmas Industry Breakfast have been told.
“I want you to think of yourselves as a recyclable bottle,” global business futurist Morris Miselowski said at Sandown Racecourse in Springvale on Thursday 3 December.
The morning’s 190 guests donated cash to buy Christmas gifts for those less fortunate, to be distributed through agencies including Dandenong Community Aid and Advice Bureau.
The generosity continued when Simone Hackett from State Schools Relief Fund (SSRF) spoke about how money from the Take a Swing for Charity golf day had supported struggling students.
Golfers raised more than $44,000 at the SEBN event in February, which helped SSRF to dress 679 students at 17 schools within Greater Dandenong in $95,977 worth of clothing this year.
SSRF will also be the recipient of next year’s golf day proceeds, which are scheduled for Monday 22 February at Sandhurst Golf Club.
Mr Miselowski told breakfast guests that some of today’s most successful companies had no assets – driver service Uber owns no cars, accommodation service Airbnb owns no hotels.
He expects this trend towards “using rather than owning” to continue.
Tomorrow’s jobs will include tasks not yet imagined.
Mr Miselowski said everyone would be employing a transhumanist designer within 10 years – a human resources role assigning tasks to humans and robots.
Other roles of the future will include vertical farming and genome specialists, 3D prosthetic engineers and machine linguists.
Accountants and auditors, retail sales assistants and library technicians are among those on the way out, Mr Miselowski said.
He said employing many people in one space from 9am to 5pm weekdays would become anachronistic, and businesses would instead have a small team they could add to when necessary.
Wearable devices will continue to increase in popularity, he said, to the point where in 10 years everybody would be wearing nine devices at any given time.
“The world is increasingly based on data,” he said.
Mr Miselowski said more inanimate objects would be hooked up to interact with and understand humans.
Homes will recognise that their owners are about to arrive and open the garage door, turn on lights and more.
“And next year will be a huge growth year for drones across the planet,” Mr Miselowski said.
But don’t worry: “This is not robots taking over the world.”
“There will still be humans at every touch point.
“At the core we are still humans. We still have need for all the products and services in this room.”
He said today’s tsunami of new technology would calm down in 10 to 20 years.
“We’re seeing so much that is so different,” he said.
Autonomous cars could be a matter of years from dominating roads, dramatically reducing – if not eliminating – road deaths.
Mr Miselowski said they’d also remove the need for driver’s licences and so improve transport accessibility for the disabled, elderly and young.
The more efficient mechanised driving would also be better for environment, he said, and less stressful for commuters.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What are the most important assumptions that established businesses need to challenge in 2026?
The most important established business assumptions to challenge include: ‘our customers will behave the way they always have’ — customer expectations, decision-making processes, and loyalty dynamics have been structurally changed by digital platforms, price transparency, and the comparison capability of mobile devices; ‘our competitors are the companies we’ve always competed with’ — the most threatening competition often comes from outside the traditional industry definition (Airbnb from outside the hotel industry, Uber from outside the taxi industry); ‘our workforce will accept the same employment conditions that previous generations accepted’ — the expectations and priorities of younger workers around purpose, flexibility, wellbeing, and development are genuinely different and ignoring this creates recruitment and retention costs that are real and growing; and ‘our business model is stable enough to plan around’ — the pace of change in regulation, technology, and consumer behaviour means that business models that were stable for decades are now subject to much faster disruption cycles.
Q: What does ‘recycling and refreshing business thinking’ actually mean in practice for an owner-manager?
For an owner-manager, refreshing business thinking in practice means: scheduling regular time to think about the business rather than just in it — a monthly or quarterly review of what is changing in the environment, what customers are saying, what competitors are doing; cultivating relationships outside the industry that bring different perspectives — the most valuable strategic insights often come from people who see your business from the outside, not from inside the industry; being willing to question the oldest and most comfortable assumptions first — the things that ‘everyone knows’ about your industry are often the most outdated and the most worth challenging; and creating a testing habit rather than a planning habit — running small, cheap experiments to discover what actually works rather than planning comprehensively before acting. The most adaptive businesses are not those with the best strategic plans; they are those that learn fastest from what they try.
Q: What is the PTFA™ analysis of why businesses resist refreshing their thinking even when they know they should?
The PTFA™ framework applied to business change resistance reveals: Past Trauma in business thinking comes from the experience of change initiatives that failed, of investments that did not deliver, of advice that proved wrong — each disappointment builds a resistance to new ideas that is emotionally protective but strategically limiting; Future Anxiety about what change will cost (money, time, established relationships, identity as ‘the person who knows this business’) creates inertia that presents itself as prudence; and the combination produces the most common business failure mode: the business that knows it needs to change, intends to change, but never quite starts — until the environment changes faster than the intention. Addressing the PTFA™ dynamic requires acknowledging the legitimate basis of past trauma (not all change advice is good advice) while distinguishing between specific bad experiences and the general principle that adaptation is required.
Q: How can I book Morris Misel for a small business, strategic thinking, or SME leadership keynote?
Contact the booking team at morrismisel.com/event-organisers.
reprinted from a story by Casey Neill in the Dandenong Journal THE future is all about flexibility, businesses at the SEBN Christmas Industry Breakfast have been told. "I want you to think of yourselves as a recyclable bottle," global business futurist Morris Miselowski said at S.
When signals like Recycle and refresh your business thinking / Dandenong emerge, organisations that engage early have the advantage of choosing their response rather than reacting to events. That gap between those who prepared and those who did not is where competitive positioning is actually made or lost.
The most important question is not whether Recycle and refresh your business thinking / Dandenong will matter, but how quickly it will matter in your specific context. Leaders benefit most from mapping the ripple effects early — not just the direct impact but the second and third-order consequences that arrive later and hit harder. That is the practical work of foresight.
