Why signals?
Most of what passes for forecasting is the consensus view restated with better vocabulary. Structural signals are something else. They are the forces already in motion beneath the surface of what most people are tracking. When enough of them point in the same direction, we can see where things are going before the outcome has a name. I read those signals.
The move that makes this different from scenario planning or prediction is a single question: how might that happen? It traces the causal sequence, estimates the timeline, and says: if this, then roughly when. The roughly matters. Being roughly right about the direction has turned out to be far more useful than being precisely wrong about the outcome.
Two thoughtmodels sit underneath the work. Hari maps causal chains backward from anticipated outcomes to find the timeline. It asks: when does this arrive? Meru works the other direction, scanning the present for convergences between apparently unrelated signals to find what outcome is being assembled. The clock and the telescope. Between them, they locate the structural shape of change before it has a consensus narrative.
Before this, I spent seventeen years as a strategic coach and executive. That work is still alive in everything I do. The coaching taught me to hold complexity without collapsing it, to listen for what someone is not yet saying, and to trust that the person in the room usually knows more than they think they do. All of that shows up in the analysis. The signal reading is the coaching applied to systems rather than people.
If there is one thing I would want a skeptic to understand before dismissing the approach, it is this: the intellectual honesty requirement is structural. Every report includes the strongest case against, the named assumptions, and the specific conditions that would change the assessment. When the signal vector shifts, the analysis shifts with it. This is what makes it possible to hold long-term structural views in a culture addicted to quarterly thinking.
The conclusion underneath all of it is wildly optimistic. Most of our fears about what's coming are really fears about each other. Clarity removes a lot of fear and helps us see possibility. The structural forces in motion are assembling something. We're early enough to participate in building it (I write about this monthly on The Expansion Effect).