I keep coming back to the way they dressed.

In 1926, when John Logie Baird demonstrated what he called a televisor, the people who turned up didn’t wander in casually. They didn’t assume they already knew what they were about to see. They didn’t half-watch while thinking about something else.

They wore formal morning suits. Top hats. The full weight of occasion.

That detail says more about the time than the technology.

Innovation was rare. New ideas were unusual. If you were invited to see something no one had seen before, you showed up properly. You paid attention. You treated it with a certain reverence because it might matter.

What they saw, by today’s standards, was almost nothing.

Thirty lines of moving image. Black and white. Mechanical. Hand-cranked. Barely recognisable as what we now call television.

And yet it was enough to fill a room with expectation.

A Tuesday conversation that triggered a bigger thought

This thought didn’t start as an article. It started, as it often does, in conversation.

Each Tuesday, I speak with Phil Whelan on Radio 3 in Hong Kong. We’ve been doing this, in one form or another, for over two decades, going back to our early days on ABC radio in Australia. Same rhythm. Same curiosity. Different decades.

This particular week, Phil mentioned almost in passing that it was the 100th anniversary of the world’s first television broadcast.

That was it. That was the hook.

As Phil does, he asked a deceptively simple question along the lines of:
“Did anyone have any idea what they were starting?”

It’s the kind of question that sounds light on radio, but doesn’t really leave you alone afterwards.

“Radio with pictures” and nothing more

One of the things that came up on air, and that stayed with me, was just how modest Baird’s ambition actually was.

He didn’t think he’d invented a world-changing medium. He wasn’t trying to reshape families, politics or advertising. He wasn’t predicting futures.

He thought he’d made radio with pictures.

That was it.

And even then, it took a very long time for television to become ordinary. Close to fifty years before it was something most households thought they should probably own.

Half a century for something extraordinary to become mundane.

As Phil observed during the segment, that long adoption curve feels almost unthinkable now. Today, something can go from obscure to ubiquitous before we’ve even named it properly.

During those decades, television quietly changed how families gathered, how authority was presented, how wars were experienced, how children learned what the world looked like.

None of that was planned. It emerged.

The pattern Phil and I keep circling back to

This is where the conversation drifted, as it often does.

We weren’t trying to draw lessons. We were noticing a pattern that keeps repeating, regardless of the era.

Most inventions are created to solve a very specific problem.
Very few stay politely inside that problem.

Once they leave the lab, the workshop or the demonstration room, they meet humans. And humans adapt. Quickly. Creatively. Sometimes carelessly.

That’s when the real story begins.

On air, we touched on a few familiar examples.

Splitting the atom was about understanding matter and energy.
It didn’t take long before it became about weapons, deterrence and a background anxiety that sat with an entire generation.

Plastic was invented to replace scarce materials like ivory.
It solved that problem brilliantly. It also found its way into oceans, food chains and eventually into us.

Antibiotics transformed medicine and saved millions of lives.
They also taught our bodies to resist them, because of how enthusiastically and casually we used them.

Credit cards were meant to make paying easier.
They quietly altered our relationship with money, patience and entitlement.

Social media was meant to connect friends.
As Phil put it, it didn’t invent misinformation, but it certainly gave it reach, speed and momentum.

None of these outcomes required bad intent.

They just required scale.

This is what I refer to as Ripple Effects. Not as a framework, but as a habit of noticing what shows up after the applause.

Inventors aren’t futurists, and that’s not a criticism

Another thread Phil pulled on during the segment was this idea that inventors aren’t futurists.

That’s not a flaw. It’s the point.

Anyone who’s worked closely with researchers or engineers knows how focused they have to be. When someone is solving a hard technical problem, the world narrows. Everything outside that challenge fades away.

That intensity is often why breakthroughs happen at all.

But it also means very few inventors are thinking about what happens once millions of people start using their creation in ways they never imagined.

Baird wasn’t a futurist.
He was trying to make images move.

And at the time, even that was wildly ambitious.

Why this matters for leaders now

This is where the conversation stopped being historical and started feeling uncomfortably current.

Today, we don’t just adopt inventions faster. We decide faster. Often on thinner inputs. Increasingly through intermediaries.

We rely on summaries instead of substance.
We outsource first-pass judgement.
We confuse speed with clarity.

On radio, this came up in the context of AI, but it applies much more broadly.

When decisions are made on compressed interpretations, second- and third-order ripple effects are easily missed. Confidence can rise while understanding quietly drops.

This isn’t about being anti-technology. It’s about being honest about how thinking itself is changing.

Future Leadership: Signals, Shifts and the Decisions That Shape Tomorrow

From showing up to sending scouts

Back in 1926, people dressed up to attend invention.

Today, we rarely show up at all.

Our thinking windows are small. Between ten and two. Between meetings. Between notifications.

And increasingly, we don’t even attend ourselves.

We send our AI scout ahead.

Watch it. Summarise it. Explain it. Report back quickly.

As I said on air, I understand why. There’s too much arriving, too fast, from too many directions.

But I do wonder what gets lost when we outsource not just analysis, but presence. Not just effort, but curiosity.

Immediate Futures: three questions I keep coming back to

This is where Immediate Futures thinking comes in. Not as prediction. Not as hype. But as orientation.

Whenever something genuinely new appears, these are the three questions I keep returning to, whether I’m talking to a board, a classroom or a radio audience.

Immediate Future 1: What problem was this actually trying to solve?

Write the original brief in one sentence before you discuss impact or opportunity.

Immediate Future 2: What behaviours will this quietly normalise?

Not features. Habits. What will people start doing without thinking once this becomes ordinary?

Immediate Future 3: What are we no longer doing because of it?

Every invention adds something. It also subtracts something. Name what you’ll actively protect.

These questions slow thinking just enough to improve decision quality.

Dressing up for what might matter

That image from 1926 still lingers.

A room full of people dressed formally to watch thirty lines of moving image. Not because they knew what it would become, but because they respected the possibility that it might matter.

We don’t really do that anymore.

We move fast. We delegate attention. We assume we’ll catch up later.

Maybe that’s the most important ripple effect to notice.

Not what innovation is doing to the world, but what our relationship with innovation is doing to the way we think, decide and lead.

We don’t need to slow technology down.

But we might need to reclaim a little of that posture.
Attention. Curiosity. Presence.

Choose Forward.

If this article resonates, this is the work I do with leadership teams, boards and industry groups.
I help organisations slow thinking down just enough to improve decision quality, map the ripple effects of change, and prepare for what’s arriving next without relying on hype or prediction.

If you’d like me to brief your executive team, run a Ripple Effects or Immediate Futures session, or keynote this conversation for your audience, get in touch via morrismisel.com.

Listen to the full radio conversation (18 minutes 10 seconds)

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