We have a few fig trees: hard workers which deliver three harvests a year.
In Springtime, some figs have already grown before the leaves come out.
How can it be?
More important: what does it tell us?
We at VALIMET, Inc. manufacture Aluminum Alloy powders for highly specialized applications. We read a business management tip in this peculiar ‘Fig-thing’. Solid and yet agile organizations need a combination of core work and sentinel work.
Some resources are rooted in the company’s grounds and some need to explore the environment around it, capturing trends before they’re evident. Ultimate goal: communicating to the team upcoming demands before they’re even formulated by the Market.
Not a trivial job. It requires identifying indicators of change, distinguishing signals from noise, interpreting them in their specific context.
Jay Miseli‘s think tank, Red Thread X, shortlisted a talk by Joanna Lepore and Sarah Owen at SXSW 2025:
“Futures Thinking: how to spot signals vs. noise”.
Very informative.
It turns out that Joanna’s company is called “Foresight Inside Group” – FIG: it makes perfect sense to us.