Dr Hari Mann
April 8, 2026
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There are economic indicators we take seriously because they arrive dressed for the part: charts, quarterly data, technical language and a suitably grave tone. Then there are the indicators that turn up in trainers, holding a lead, with a cockapoo tugging impatiently at the other end. Both, it turns out, can tell you something useful. The trick is knowing how to listen.
I recently heard about a dog walker who may be a shrewder reader of market conditions than half the commentators currently filling column inches. He runs a decent-sized business and, through the shifting pattern of bookings, cancellations and awkward doorstep conversations, has developed a surprisingly sharp feel for the economy in real time.
Demand rose with the return-to-office push. Then it softened. Since October, some clients have canceled after redundancies. Others have quietly downgraded from full-day care to a single walk – the canine equivalent of switching to store label. And there has been a noticeable rise in last-minute bookings from owners who seem to be spending more time than usual attending interviews, or staring at their phones waiting for calls that may or may not come.
This is not, I appreciate, what most people picture when they think of macroeconomic analysis. But that is rather the point. By the time a shift in confidence shows up in official data, it has often been living in people’s behavior for weeks, sometimes months.
Nobody holds a press conference to announce they are suddenly nervous about their job. They just quietly cancel the dog walker.
This is what economists would call soft data: the behavioral and sentiment signals that often move before the harder numbers do. And once you start looking for it, it is everywhere. The black cab driver who notices corporate travel thinning out before the earnings calls do. The bartender who can tell you, with some precision, whether Thursday night feels like a recovery or a wake. The recruiter who knows the market has turned before the unemployment figures catch up. The estate agent watching office enquiries stall. The supermarket buyer seeing the steady migration from branded goods to store label as households begin making small, careful adjustments that add up to something bigger. Each of them, in their own way, is sitting on a leading indicator. They are just not usually invited to present at the board meeting.
Perhaps they should be. Not literally, although it would make for a more interesting agenda. The point is that in ambiguous periods – when the economy is neither dramatically collapsing nor convincingly recovering, and the signals are mixed enough to support almost any conclusion you reached before looking at them – formal data alone will not save you.
What often separates leaders who call it right from those who call it confidently wrong is proximity: staying close enough to the texture of real life to notice what is shifting before it has been tidied into a slide.
The structural risk of seniority, of course, is that proximity becomes a casualty of success. The more senior you are, the more your view of the world arrives filtered, aggregated and helpfully summarized by people doing their best to tell you what they think you need to know. This is not anyone’s fault. It is simply how organizations work. But it does mean that by the time something reaches the dashboard, it has already passed through several rounds of editing and the market, frustratingly, did not wait for the final draft.
The answer is not to throw out the analysts and replace them with dog walkers or cab drivers, tempting as that may occasionally sound. It is to complement rigor with attentiveness: a genuine, recurring habit of unscripted conversation with customers, frontline teams and whoever in your world has the least mediated view of what is actually going on. Not the choreographed listening tour, where everyone says the right things and nothing useful is learned. The real thing: asking honest questions, staying curious, and being willing to hear answers that do not fit neatly into the current narrative.
It sounds straightforward. In practice, it is one of the harder disciplines for a senior leader to maintain.
The dog walker will not replace your forecasting model. But in periods of genuine uncertainty, when the data is lagging and the signals are murky, they might just be the first person to tell you something true. In which case, the least you can do is ask.
How to stay ahead of the trends
1. Beware of data lags: Stay close to your customers and frontline teams, as they will be the first to notice signals of real-time market shifts.
2. Stay curious: Ask honest questions and be willing to hear answers that do not fit neatly into your expected narrative.
3. Complement rigor with attentiveness: Broaden the indicators you pay attention to and expand your circle of advisors for an unfiltered perspective.
Meet the expert
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Dr Hari Mann
Dean of Faculty at Hult Ashridge Executive Education
As the Dean at Hult Ashridge, Hari brings over a decade of experience in academia and business. His main interests are in strategy, innovation and entrepreneurship. His research looks at how businesses develop the culture, environment, and infrastructure to foster innovation and entrepreneurial activities.
At Ashridge, Hari has been the MBA and Executive MBA director, and more recently the director of Product Solutions. His research currently involves how financial organization lead and innovate, and how purpose matters in increasing company profits.
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