Step inside The Intuitive Advantage, a ten-part look at how intuition, AI, brand and experience are set to reshape 2026. This week, Future Platforms CEO and MAD//Fest host Livia Bernardini turns her attention to the tiny shifts your body notices before any dashboard settles. The early patterns that pull at you long before the evidence takes a view. These are your red flags and your green lights.

December always gives me a little more room to think. Hopefully it does the same for you because this feels like the right moment to move from ideas into practice.

Last Monday in Part Two we explored why that first instinct can be so hard to trust, not because it is unreliable but because it is so easily confused with conditioning, fear and old stories that feel like certainty.

This week we turn our attention to the tiny shifts your body notices before any dashboard settles. The early patterns that pull at you long before the evidence takes a view. These are your red flags and your green lights.

Direct experience has shown me how powerful these signals can be. I have seen what unfolds when I listen to my gut and the timing meets me, and I have also seen what happens when the signs suggest waiting and I am not ready to hear them.

When Your Gut Knows the Floor Is About to Collapse

Your brain does not wait for metrics. It processes far more information than your conscious mind can track. Subconscious pattern recognition fires before language. 

The classic example from psychologist Gary Klein is quite telling. A fire lieutenant entered what appeared to be a safe house, a straightforward kitchen fire in a single family, one storey home. Yet something felt wrong. The fire was not behaving as it should. He ordered his crew out. Seconds later, the floor collapsed.

At first he wondered if something supernatural had protected them, but the truth was simpler and far more instructive. The fire was burning in the basement. The room was too quiet. The heat felt stronger than the flames suggested. His body had registered the pattern long before his conscious mind understood it.

How Subconscious Pattern Recognition Works

Your intuitive system is not mystical. It is mechanical. Your brain constantly scans for what repeats and what deviates. 

What does all this have to do with brand, product and customer behaviour in 2026? Everything. The subconscious signals your mind picks up long before consumers can articulate what they feel are exactly the ones your teams need to be noticing.

Green lights are alignment: a theme emerges across contexts.

Eco:Drive for Fiat began as a hunch. I sensed that if you gave people a simple way to understand their environmental impact in real time, they would use it. They would save petrol too at a moment when every litre mattered. The idea worked because it met a real human need.

It went on to win a Grand Prix at Cannes Lions, a CNET Award and a Gold at the Clios before being rolled out in seventeen markets. The point is not the trophies. The point is that intuition came first, the timing was right and success followed.

Red flags are dissonance: something does not fit the expected pattern.

I remember sitting in a meeting about Opnuu, my peer-to-peer fashion lending marketplace, with a very well-known VC. He went through my pitch: no fault in the model or the execution. Exceptionally positive closed beta results. Still, something bothered him.

“There is no directly comparable peer-to-peer fashion platform in the US,” he said.

At the time I was absolutely steaming, convinced he was being painfully narrow in his thinking. I mistook his comment for pure territory bias. Americans were already using Airbnb, TaskRabbit and Bag Borrow or Steal without blinking. Surely Europe was ready for something similar. 

He was trying to tell me something else. If the US, usually ahead of Europe in peer-to-peer adoption, had not produced a similar model yet, the market might simply not be ready. ByRotation eventually proved the instinct was sound. But I was almost a decade too early. I did not look hard enough at the market readiness signals probably because I did not want to know the answer.

This is the other truth about intuition. Sometimes it sees the world as it will be, not as it is, but timing determines who wins.

The Signals That Matter for 2026

So what are the patterns that tickle my intuition this year?  

Discovery is shifting to vision and voice

The micro-behaviours are already here. People point their phones at a lamp in a shop.
Screenshot outfits and use image search to find the exact jacket they want.
Speak into their phones when their hands are full.

Before discovery becomes fully multimodal, you notice it in these small acts. People want to search with images, sound and gestures, not only words. The pattern is clear long before the market declares it.

Social is becoming the full commerce funnel

Teenagers now buy things without ever leaving TikTok, and some parents do too. Instagram checkout is normalising single-step purchasing. Creators are turning product demos into live conversion moments.

The pattern is tiny at first, but look at the direction. We are moving from “social for awareness” to “social is the purchase journey”. I am keeping an eye open for fluid and phygital high streets, shopping assistants delivering in-store experience only to convert via social channels later. 

Guided journeys are replacing the endless scroll

People are fed up with 847 options, with fatigue becoming a commercial risk. Micro-behaviours show this frustration before the metrics do: People searching “best of” instead of browsing. Users abandoning journeys after two scrolls. 

That is why journey choreography beats catalogue browsing: the pattern is not “people want choice”. It is “people want direction”. But will they trust you to curate their experience for them?

How A Lecture With Julian Gomez Turned Instinct Into A Framework

A few months ago I was invited by Julian Gomez to guest lecture at Hult International Business School. As EMEA CMO for Unilever’s Beauty & Wellbeing division, Julian delivered a standout turnaround driven by strategy and creativity. He is one of the most impressive marketing and business leaders I know. 

Preparing for that lecture forced me to articulate something I had been using unconsciously for years: a simple decision making grid for intuition. Not to replace data, but to put intuition back in its rightful place as a leadership tool. 

The Intuition Decision Making Grid

Gut says yes, data says yes
Proceed. This is alignment. Enjoy these moments. They are rare.

Gut says no, data says no
Do not proceed. This is clarity. Celebrate the time, the budget and the arguments saved.

Gut says no, data says yes
Pause. This is where bias hides. Ask what emotion is sitting underneath the resistance. Is this instinct or conditioning? A genuine signal or an old story?
Strong willed leaders who are good storytellers often go wrong here. They can convince themselves against the data and take teams and Boards with them.

Gut says yes, data says no
Also bias... unless there is no data yet.


If there is no data because there are no real precedents, you may be in the innovation zone. This is the bold territory where Airbnb and Netflix are born or, inside a large organisation, the place where new propositions begin. It requires discipline: validate fast, look for disconfirming evidence, and understand why your instinct fired in the first place.

This grid works because it is simple. It gives intuition a place to stand. It creates a shared language for something we all feel but rarely name. 

What's next?

This series began with a simple truth: you cannot predict the future, but you can choose where to look. Next Monday in Part Four we will step into the world of silent cues that move people and markets before anyone names the shift.

So here is a thought to carry into your week.

If your dashboards went dark, what would your intuition notice first?

And what has it already been trying to tell you?

Till next week.