I feel the year has properly begun.

The decorations are down.
The inbox is back.
Meetings are back to back again.

And somewhere between the first catch ups and the first decisions of the year, most of us are asking the same quiet question:

What actually matters now?
Or next?

I love this stretch of January. The noise of December has passed, but the year has not yet hardened into habit. It is one of the few moments when reflection and forward motion briefly coexist.

In Part One, we started with attention. Not prediction, but where you choose to look.

In Part Four [LINK], we explored atmospheric sensing, the silent cues your body registers before your mind has words for them.

Today we go one step further.

We look at micro signals. The tiny behavioural hints that reveal emerging patterns long before anyone names the shift or the trend. Small cues that, over time, shape decisions, products, organisations and culture.

These are not forecasts. They are the early signs that tell you where the ground is already moving.

The real question is not whether you notice them.

It is whether you choose to act.

The Brain Behind the Scenes

Neuroscience helps explain why micro-signals matter. When the brain is at rest, whether you are lying on the sofa, staring out of the window or wandering without purpose, it enters a pattern called the sharp wave ripple. These are fast, coordinated bursts of activity that allow the brain to replay, reorganise and integrate past experiences. Without these ripples, intuitive judgment would not exist.

What makes sharp wave ripples remarkable is that they do not merely consolidate what you already know. They help your brain simulate what you might need next. They link distant memories, reveal hidden associations and stitch information together in ways your conscious mind cannot access. It is the backstage crew preparing insights long before they arrive on stage.

Even more fascinating is the discovery of opportunistic assimilation. If you have a problem you haven’t solved yet, that “unsolvedness” reshapes the landscape of your mind. The brain begins to quietly recruit new information into the old problem without your permission or awareness. You read something incidental, overhear a comment, scroll past a headline,and suddenly, hours or days later, or even years later, the solution appears as if from nowhere. But it didn’t come from nowhere. It came from the quiet hours. 

A beautiful example of this appeared recently in a letter to The Times by Professor Michael Baum. He recalled watching the first production of Arcadia in 1993 when a line in the first act sparked an intuitive leap that transformed his scientific understanding of breast cancer: “If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell.” This insight helped shape his hypothesis that by the time breast cancer is detected, cancer cells may already be present elsewhere. His work on chemotherapy after surgery has contributed to a profound rise in survival rates.

A tiny line in a play. A seismic shift in medical practice. This is the power of subtle cues.

Why Micro-Signals Matter for Businesses

Micro-signals prove that big behavioural shifts begin quietly, through tiny repeated actions, subtle experiments and barely there habits. Leaders who learn to notice these whispers can sense whole markets moving before competitors realise anything has changed.

We see this pattern everywhere in technology.

At Spotify, early behaviour showed that people gravitated toward personalised recommendations rather than curated playlists. It was a micro-signal. A small behavioural lean. Spotify followed it, amplified it and changed the future of audio discovery. As  Co-President, CPO & CTO Gustav Söderström said, “When your predictions are accurate enough, you should rethink your entire business model around machine learning.”

At Future Platforms, the team saw something similar with the Domino’s Pizza Tracker. Customers repeatedly phoned stores to ask where their pizza was. A micro-signal. A small behaviour repeated millions of times. Instead of treating it as noise, we treated it as information. The result was a shift from opaque waiting to a transparent, reassuring journey, right up to the moment the pizza arrived. A tiny signal became a paradigm change.

Micro-signals reveal emotional needs long before customers realise. Their power lies in being early indicators of needs that are not yet articulated but present.

Three Micro-Signals Shaping 2026

These are the micro-signals that have flipped from unconscious to conscious in my mind as 2025 draws to a close:

Photographing Outfits as Identity Curation

A teenager takes a photo of their outfit every morning. They do not post them. They are tracking themselves. Hundreds of images stored privately. This is identity rehearsal. A personal archive of self exploration. The signal is clear: consumers are not searching for products, they are searching for identity cues. Leaders who notice this will design tools that support style evolution, not just conversion funnels.

QR Scanning as an Unconscious Expectation

Someone picks up a beautiful product and instinctively looks for a QR code. When there is none, they feel oddly unsettled. QR scanning has become muscle memory. The shift is from “some products have codes” to “why does this one not?” Transparency is no longer an add on. It is a trust contract.

Checking Bank Balances for Emotional Regulation

A person opens their banking app, checks their balance, closes it. Hours later, they do it again. Nothing has changed. The behaviour is emotional, not informational. A way of managing uncertainty, anchoring control. The micro-signal: finance products must support emotional reassurance, not just display data. Micro-moments of calm. Emotional UX for an anxious economy.

Micro-signals of the Year That Was, Intentions for the One to Come

Micro signals only matter if you do something with them.

Most leaders notice more than they admit.

In Part Four [LINK], we explored how the body often detects the edge before the mind catches up.
The heart rate shift.
The breath change.
The moment physiology registers risk or opportunity before rational analysis has a chance.

This is what the best traders understood long before dashboards caught up. Their bodies registered risk first, but their advantage came from confidence. From choosing to move rather than waiting for permission from the data.

And there are millions of external cues to notice too:

• the hesitation in a meeting
• the product people keep ignoring
• the behaviour that repeats quietly across contexts

The real edge is not noticing these signals.
It is acting on them before the evidence feels complete.

Your intuition is already at work.
The question is whether, and how, you let it influence decisions early enough to matter.

In the next part of the series, we will explore how intuition and AI work together in practice. Not as rivals, but as complementary systems. And why the leaders who thrive in 2026 will be the ones who use intuition to govern where intelligence is applied, not just to validate what already exists.

Till then, notice what you are already sensing.
And decide whether this is the year you act on it.