Think Forward: Conversations with Futurists, Innovators and Big Thinkers
Welcome to the Think Forward podcast where we have conversations with futurists, innovators and big thinkers about what lies ahead. We explore emerging trends on the horizon and what it means to be a futurist.
Think Forward: Conversations with Futurists, Innovators and Big Thinkers
Think Forward Ep 107 - Speculative Futures with Phil Balagtas
Welcome fellow futurists and big thinkers to the Think Forward podcast. My name is Steve and I am a futurist.
Welcome to our seventh episode, where we greet our third official guest, Phil Balagtas. Phil is a designer, futurist and author. He was the founder of the Design Futures Initative, current partner at his design firm, HABITAT and a professor at ELISAVA. He is also formerly of McKinsey and Company which is where we met and we co-founded the Futures Practice which is still thriving today.
In this episode, Phil and I cover a range of topics, including his journey to speculative futures, his founding of the Design Futures Initative, his work as a professor and of course, his new book, Making Futures Work.
Phil's site: www.philbalagtas.com
Phil's book: www.makingfutureswork.com
Steve's site: www.stevenfisher.io
Think Forward Show: www.thinkforwardshow.com
Thank you for joining me on this ongoing journey into the future. Until next time, stay curious, and always think forward.
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🔗 Steve’s Site: www.stevenfisher.io
Thank you for joining me on this ongoing journey into the future. Until next time, stay curious, and always think forward.
Welcome friends and fellow big thinkers in this episode, we will delve into the mind of someone who has not just seen the future, but has been meticulously crafting it. His path has taken him from pre med to graphic design through the rave scene and into the world of speculative design and strategic foresight. His experiences span from nonprofits in Washington, DC to innovation labs in San Francisco, GE and McKinsey. Currently, he's shaping the future by teaching the next generation of design In this episode, he shares his journey, including a pivotal moment in Japan that deepened his understanding of speculative design. We'll explore his new book, Making Futures Work, which blends foresight, design and strategy into a guide for future innovators. He'll explain the critical role of speculative design in navigating uncertainties and his experiences at McKinsey co creating the futures practice. Expect to learn about integrating futures thinking into organizations and the importance of the right language. And advocates for transformative work. His insights will inspire and equip you to start your own journey on the future. It'll be an episode filled with humor, wisdom, practical advice, and a glimpse of what the future could look like if we dared to dream bigger. Welcome to Episode 107, Speculative Futures with Phil Balaktas. Welcome, Phil.
Phil:Thank you. How's it going, Steve?
Steve F:Good to see you, my friend. It's been a long time. Always good to catch up and share with the audience here about you. I'm excited to talk to you today. So let's talk about, let's start with personal journey. So could you tell us about, yourself and your background? Let's start with that. So people don't know you.
Phil:Yeah I've been tossing around this idea of who I am, who am I today, but I can tell you who I've been for a while. I'm a designer. My undergraduate degree is in graphic design and I mean at first I was supposed to be a doctor So I was in pre med for a little bit and I dropped out and became a raver for a little bit And then I went back to school for graphic design and then, I moved to California from DC. I was born and raised in Virginia and After I graduated, I was working in and around the Washington D. C. area, and I got fed up by working for like non profits and government institutions there, and I wanted to do what I thought was more exciting stuff, so I packed up all my things and moved to San Francisco, California in 2007. I worked as a web designer there. I never quite went into print and heard about this thing called user experience and was trying to get a job as a UX designer. I couldn't quite land it. So I went back to school and got my MFA in design in 2009 or 2011 and Was a digital designer for a really long time doing everything from like websites to user interfaces for all kinds of devices from like mobile ipad I did kiosk for a while. I worked for a vending machine company that Did that it was like a robotic vending machine company and they had a little user interface on it So I was a gooey designer graphical user interface designer for a little bit and then I worked for GE and was doing a lot of interface design for large industrial businesses like oil and gas and power plants. And then I made my way into aviation, which I remember we had this common thread where we were both working for aviation for some time. I moved into a design director position for GE digital aviation. So I had started a team there, teaching everyone, teaching them how to use design thinking. Doing some innovation projects, working closely with airlines and then went to McKinsey and where I met you and a lot of other really amazing people. And there was just working across industries as a design director and learning more about strategy and. That's where we built our foresight team together.
Steve F:Yeah.
Phil:Yeah. And then after McKinsey, after the pandemic, I had just a moment of reflection as many people did after that. And I decided I was going to start writing my book, traveled the world for a little bit and thought that I was going to be able to write my book in these exotic places on the beach. And that really wasn't a very practical idea. Which I discovered very quickly and then moved to Barcelona. That's where I am today. I guess I'm still a designer at heart, but I guess I'm also a strategist and a futurist.
Steve F:Yeah. As a futurist, when did you find that spark? You're known for speculative futures. I first came across you giving a talk at Google and, early on with I would say the earlier, Speculative design crew, like Stuart Candy, Jake Dunnigan, yourself, like the, or I would call the early people. And I've been a futurist for a long time. And as a designer, I never knew there was like this kind of. Confluence, there was a thing for that. Where did you come to like speculative design? Like where was that? You're like spark. Where did that come from?
Phil:Yeah. I left that part of the story out. When I decided to go back to school to get my master's.
Steve F:that's my job. I bring it back. So you know,
Phil:I forgot about that part of my life. When I decided to go back to school for my master's, I was really interested in doing a master's just so I, one, I wanted to get a job as a user experience designer, and I didn't really know what design thinking was, or even just how to do it. Basic research and I really want to get smart about one thing And I'd had some friends who were doing their theses and PhDs and I was like, I really want to do that So I found a school in San Francisco called the California College of the Arts and they had a thesis program There was two years long and I knew I wanted to do Something related to the future, but I had a very myopic perspective view, a very sheltered view of what futuring was. Like it was based on what I'd seen in science fiction or read in science fiction and I was just, it was all about like robots and interfaces at that point. Really didn't know much of anything else. So I In the first year, you have this moment to figure out what you want to do. And at the time I was working for this robotic vending machine company and they had a a network in Japan and it was the most successful brand that we had. It was for this like skincare product. And I didn't know what I was going to do for my thesis. And I convinced my company to send me to Japan. To do some research on our vending machine product. And then I said, send me out there to do research. And then I'm going to take two, two weeks off and just roam the country and try to figure out what my thesis was going to be. I was literally just going to walk around like Tokyo. Cause I thought at that time, that's where the future was. And that's what I did. I just went on a walk about, spent a lot of time in Akihabara, electric town, and and a lot of time in train stations and bus stations because our vending machines happened to be there. That's where all the other vending machines were too. And I was I was doing a lot of research at the time. I saw this documentary called objectified and they had interviewed Dunn and Raby in it. And that's the first time I'd seen or heard critical design. And I thought it was just so mind blowing and that it was design, but it was such a weird form of design. I'd never seen before. It made me feel weird. But the concepts that were embedded and how they were looking at the future were pretty profound to me. And I was like, wow, if that's. If I could do something like that would be amazing. It was just, it had a lot of, it had a provocation, a discourse around it. It was just super creative. And so that along with just being in Japan and I had discovered this smart vending machine. That had just appeared when I was there, like it just launched and it was this machine that had a webcam on it, and it was using machine learning to watch people order drinks, and it was mapping them out so that if you were at five o'clock if you were just like, Just look just like every other man that was ordering coffee at that time. It would see just coffee and Just the concept of a machine kind of identifying you and aggregating you into this like category of people Was really profound to me as well and even though I didn't want to come back and say like I didn't want to have a Smart robotic vending machine as my like research project. That was the launch into how could I? Think about the implications of a particular type of technology in the world and push that forward and think about all the other things that could go wrong or well, based on what this thing was doing, the idea of like identity and objectifying People as a number or as like a a personification of something that's what it started. And I just did a bunch of research and experience from there and had found all these other projects from the Braille College of Art were done in Arabia. We're leading the designing interactions program that was launched into the world of futures.
Steve F:So there's two words in your explanation. And I think for people. provocation and implication, right? Those are things that extend out or, you mentioned, honestly, you're, you felt uncomfortable, felt different, like when you reacted to it. And I think that aspect of design, you think about art in general, right? These great artists in their time have provoked and really challenged what the the status quo or the things that you think about and the mental models we build for things. How would you just, how would you just define speculative design for those? Because it's a term many may not have heard before that are listening. How would you define it?
Phil:God, you think that after,
Steve F:no right answer. It's just your interpretation, just like an artist, right?
Phil:yeah, you think after so many years of talking about this, that this question would be easier and easier to explain. But it never is for some reason.
Steve F:I find it gets harder. I could find it gets harder over the years because more gets added into it or the completion it's definition. mutates. That's what I'm
Phil:It's definitely mutated. The term speculative design has grown out of critical design. And when Dun and Raby were first doing their work at the RCA, that was known mostly as critical design. And as their work became critiqued by other people it inherited this speculative and critical design term. And then it shortened into speculative design. So speculative design still refers to this. provocative type of work that was coming out of there where we're this borderline between And I don't know. I don't necessarily like this perspective of it But it was this borderline between art and design or is meant to provoke or to stimulate a conversation about The future at the time is really about alternate futures and radical futures. And it wasn't necessarily designed as something that was meant to be built. It was meant to ask a question about, is this the future that we want or we don't want? And there is a number of really great Designer slash artist that came out of there one that I've one particular artist designer that I've referred to for so many years as Aggie Haynes where she was really interested in manipulating the body and how humans have tried to manipulate the body for a real long time and her project, Transfigurations, which became really a very seminal piece of work for her was around designer babies and how might we design our children if we had the ability to, which we do. And the need to design our children to work longer hours and hotter temperatures due to climate change or to be able to modify their their health needs or whatever it might be through manipulation, through, through surgery, plastic surgery, and now even through modifying DNA. So if we had this. This ability and need would be do it. And she designed a few different children, like fake babies. And this was her project. And it wasn't meant to say this is the future that we want is meant to say is this the future? Is this the future we want? It was not meant to say this is the future that's coming. It's meant to ask, is this the future that we want and just spur a conversation about it so we can think about ethics and moral concerns and policy and the kind of This, the advancement of technology and the biological sciences and medical sciences and those kind of things. And so the speculation of what the future could look like is what kind of became the notable characteristic of speculative and critical design. If that makes any sense.
Steve F:that's a great, no, it's a great definition. It's a great way to explain it to people. Cause I always, when I try and explain it, I always talk about what you don't think of the future will be because it's supposed to provoke the unknown that it's the unknown unknowns. It's like the things you're not thinking, it's where people come together to come out with Different ideas and turn them into known unknowns and also to work backward. Like I, I think in the practical sense, I think of like diabetes management. What is a, what is an insulin pump? What is diabetes management in 2035 look like? What are the devices, what are the things that we would have to do? Is it a bionic pancreas? Is it a, an insulin, embed, is it, and then it lets someone, and this is a practical sense, right? It's like you can think of IDEO's work on grocery carts from oh, wow, I could actually put like the carry carts in the grocery cart and they can like, it's I never thought of that. It's okay, how do we work back from maybe a pilot or a simplified design that takes the speculative into the real? And I always find that's and sometimes it can't, but it just if it just provokes the like you said, it provokes the thought. But it definitely impacts innovation. Yeah. And what people do, and, if you think back to your career what do you think about your interest in innovation? You can be innovative now, but like some, nonprofits usually sometimes constrained by funding as it all is, but how is that kind of innovation angle for you influenced your approach to design? Like how do you weave it in together? Do you work with that?
Phil:Yeah. And I'm glad you gave those examples. Cause that, That I think is the more modern definition of speculative design, that it's not tied so much to just critical, provocative discourse thinking anymore. Now it's like anything you can speculate that's possible and can be more useful. And this is the flag that I've been bearing for quite some time. I, I've always been interested in innovation. It, I didn't really know that's what it was until I got into an actual group that was doing innovation. I was in an R& D group and at GE and we were working with emerging technologies and stuff. And it was great to be in a place where you could think big and about any possibility. And just and sometimes it would actually become real and sometimes not, but as I was just being a designer and just trying to think about future products and services, I was still interested. I wasn't quite formally using futurist thinking in my work because I was too nervous that people wouldn't understand it. And It felt like a like an academic university thing. And it wasn't until I started really experimenting with using the methodologies in a real like design or innovation setting or strategy setting where I start to realize that it could be useful, that speculating about the future doesn't have to be this art project, that it can actually be about anything. And That's where I really start to experiment with it and just bringing, kind of smuggling these methods into these workshops and thinking about the impact, the implications of potential technologies or events and how that, what that means for the near and the longterm future and really found a practical use case. for this thing that was once just like a thought exercise.
Steve F:When, working with you, I think about our work and how we had to integrate it, and I'm often, it often reflects back on my journey as a product builder, product creator. Doing product management. I, even though I've been interested in futures since I was 13 and I was doing futures work, I always called myself like a self futurist. I found it made me a better product person to know the, how to do trends, work, how to do,
Phil:Oh
Steve F:scenarios, but not be like over in this is a futures project because most people can't, I think COVID changed that for a lot of people in terms of the uncertainties, but pure futures, if you will. When you look at the time horizons, I explain it to people now, and I'm curious to get your thoughts on this, is that product owners, product officers are on an 18 month roadmap horizon. They may look at strategy, where the innovation officer is looking three years out, and then the strategy of the futurist is going farther. So so there's a thing that trickles down within that, within the innovation agenda, into the, into the actual like products that make it through the stages in the pipeline. Would you agree that, do you bring in your futures work and not just a straight out pure like futures project, you just bring it into your work in just other ways. How do you, how might, how do you do that?
Phil:I 1000 percent agree. A lot of the case that I try to make with futures work is that it's what we already do inherently. We're already doing it to some capacity. I also try to make the case that futures work doesn't have to be this specialized thing that you only do 10 years out in the future, that it's actually the methodologies and tools or things that could be used for very near future as well. And yeah, I think that anybody can really one, they're probably already doing it, they don't know it, or they're just doing something that they didn't realize there is a tool for it or a methodology around it, but I think that anyone can do it. Can make use of this process for whether it's thinking about, very high level 10 year strategy, five year strategy or product roadmap, or even just near term, like there's so many trends and patterns in the world that are constantly changing very quickly. You can get ahead of these things if you're really just doing the work. All you have to do is have a process and try to try to have some sort of like understanding of how to analyze signals and patterns in the world. And just by having that knowledge, you are that much smarter. Or more depth than your competition might be, if that's what you're, what you're trying to do. But yeah, I think it's very useful. And I think that the, one of the hardest things about features that I've discovered, and one thing that we both discovered at McKinsey was that it's sometimes difficult to sell it because people think it's this this weird science, especially if you've got designers trying to sell this thing, it's this like weird science that either looks Too much like an academic exercise or it's so far in the future or you're using vocabulary that they can't understand, but it's really not that hard.
Steve F:Yeah, and that's a great segue. I was about to jump into our we'll call it our collaborative experiences together You know co creating the futures practice at McKinsey, I've there's a couple of statements I use with a lot of people is that McKinsey's a great firm. There are some some had some, there's some issues and other things we don't have to get into that, but the general purpose of McKinsey is to help clients think creatively and differently in the immediate, like we get paid. I guess I used to say, McKinsey gets paid a lot of money to tell people what to do tomorrow. Not five years from now, not 10 years from now. And a lot of people are like, I'm not even gonna have a job. I don't care. Like I need to fix this quarter. And there's a lot of effectiveness and purpose in that, right? But at the same time, when you build systems for perfection, and then something like COVID comes along and snaps it like a twig and in 45 days, it puts the antennas up for people. Like you have to think, differently. You have to think not just so reactively. And I think that's, to me, the paradigm of futures work is that it helps you think proactively as in terms of what the future becoming the present eventually, what that possible future would be. So yeah, let's, I'm curious cause you are, were the original, you were the, what I would call an organizational futures. You were the original evangelist. And you were trying, you were, getting on the mountaintops, doing the presentations while being billable to clients. And, so tell me about before we had like your journey when you came to McKinsey the thrust of that, did they hire you knowing you were, a design futurist you were into, did they know that big part about you or did that just come?
Phil:I think they, so they like to hire people with very diverse backgrounds who are Olympians and in a lot of different things that they have a lot of passion and goals and other things. So I did, I tell them, told them about my nonprofit and the community that we'd started and some of that other work, but I didn't use it in my interview. process. I basically just had to prove that I knew how to do strategy. And even doing that was, I didn't even know what the hell I was doing. Just showing them some work that I did. I literally, when I didn't know who McKinsey was when I got the call. I had a friend that worked there and he was like, Hey, we do aviation. Come and work for us for a year. Try it out. You can work for some airlines. Okay, cool. I'll try it out. And I walked in and I literally had to Google design strategy. So embarrassing, like a couple of weeks before the first interview, I was like, what is design strategy? And I figured out like, Oh, I've been doing this. So here's the story I'm going to tell. And I guess I told a good enough story, but what a great moment I think for all of us, because we were,
Steve F:Yeah.
Phil:We were able to they had done from my research, I was there for a year, okay, before I actually said, even murmured the word futures to anybody. And I was still doing my public speaking on the side, just doing that stuff and not really talking about it internally. And I really had to do this investigation. And I talk about this also in the book, like you really have to understand your climate and the audience in your organization before you start walking in with this stuff. Because if you just stomp in with I've got this toolkit, and it's going to solve all these problems, and you guys should be doing it because it's awesome. And you're good, you're definitely gonna rub, you could definitely rub some people the wrong way. And we found this out a little bit through our journey. But.
Steve F:We also found great sponsors, in check, but we did find some real wonderful people were partners that, that saw the value because they also saw it could help them build their client relationship. And it could also help them bring in more billable Projects,
Phil:there was a little bit of perfect storm for us to do this. You might've been one of the first people that reached out to me.
Steve F:I think I was, cause I, I joined and I think within like there, you know what it was, sorry for the listening, I'll, I will keep the acronyms away, but there was an organizational meeting of designers. It was a get together. And I met a bunch of other people. It was probably about four months in. And I share this because I think those in organizations should do this. If you have designers, you should have this kind of summit. If the people are all distributed. I met the tribe, like I met other people that were interested in foresight. I'm like, I'm not the only one. And I'm like, for the first time, I felt that I could Do that. And I could do, and I talked to Sarah as Sarah cinnamon, if you're listening, you're awesome. She's you need to meet Phil. And I knew about, I brought your talk and I was like, she put us together. And then you and I started to talk about what a, a practice like this, it doesn't exist. And McKinsey is a wonderful place where it's make your own McKinsey. They're like, they encourage you to create value in that way. So there was this, you have to find the sponsors. You have to find the supporters. You can't just blindly go out. You have to be. Billable, but it was a really great experience because it wasn't just in an organization doing the thing. It was ability to do a lot of different things. And you're right, the perfect storm that was in 2019. And there's this thing in China that was starting to happen. And for me is when it hits Seattle, I'm like, okay yeah, we all moved online. But what it did was, I remember the one project we did the future patient experience, like for client, like that was, huge because people did not know how to react to this. They did not know what the future may be. And it became a perfect storm where all of us started to put together the offering. And I share this with the audience too, cause I want to hear about your journey with this and how you as you, as we started to connect everybody together to make this ragtag team, what did you start to feel? What did you see? What were your experiences during this?
Phil:It started out with Charlie Hertzel, I think. He was He was a senior industrial designer and he was launching this newsletter called tiny trends every two weeks. And him and a couple of other colleagues were just looking at trends, consumer trends. And I think he was really interested in like consumer packaged goods. And, but it was just tiny newsletter and it wasn't really fancy and he would send it out. And I was like, Hey, You do, you're doing trend work. I do this thing called futures. I introduced it to him. I said, why don't we collaborate on a newsletter and do a futures newsletter. And so we did, and it was just like a four or five page newsletter. And we sent it out just to the design team and figured this would be the first audience to it. And we even explained like, why are we doing it, what the process is like, and here's a provocation. And we were looking at digital nomad. And then were, we were trying to figure out like what the future of that concept would be compounded with renting of personal goods and minimal living. And how do you actually what would it be like for someone to move from city to city without having to take all their stuff with them and have your insurance follow you and have like businesses rent stuff to you instead of you having to take stuff with you. So you could just rent things and then leave a city and go to another place and rent your stuff. And that got a lot of attention internally. And then we got asked to do a second one. And then we teamed up with McKinsey global. Research, MGI, McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm. And they had just put out this big report on digital identity. So we were like, why don't we partner with them? We use their data and their research and then do another provocation. And this time we branded it. So it looked like a formal report. And then that got outside of the design team and that started to get noticed. Then at the same time. Contacted me and three other people, two or three other people who had just finished a foresight course also contacted me and was like, Oh no, it was just Lucy, I think.
Steve F:My my present, I had a business case presentation to get it. And then she's cause I met her at that summit and she's can I see it? And she got it. And we all went to we all did it, did the certification at you at Houston that week long one. Yes. And then exactly.
Phil:And then right when the pandemic hit, you guys had we just started talking, we're like, let's do this thing. And we just started to have some downtime and really just mapped out everything we had to do. We're like, okay, we got to put a deck together. We have to have a process. Let's start to create the offering. Let's start to build a team. We start a Slack channel. People start joining the Slack channel and people start getting, I forgot what other activities we had, but a lot of momentum just just took off during pandemic. And then we pulled together a team with some kind of leadership support. We had a partner saying okay to it, but we did it under the radar. And some people got in trouble for it too, which I'm sorry that they did. But we had 30 designers at one point. I remember you, and you did, you even did a training. Remember we did a couple of trainings?
Steve F:I did a lot of training, did a lot of, I, I feel like there was, and this is for good, for people that are listening, that are trying to get futures into their organization, is I find that there's usually three groups. There's the the true believers, as I would say, we, and Lucy, and Kurt, and Sebastian, and and trying to think of his name too, Mike, Charlie. and I'm gonna be embarrassed, but he but the rest of the team was able to have find their, the things that they're good at, and then come together to do all the things collectively. And then that's the true believers. The second layer is, I would call them the futures adjacent. Those are the people that want to be involved in the projects, but they are doing other things like that. It's one of the things that they do. And then there's a third, which I call them futures interested. They're like, they're on, and you set up Slack channels for that. So you could get people that are interested. They want to keep up with things. They want to touch, touch the sun. And feel the warmth of the sun in that way. And I feel those layers and they sometimes they progress, people move toward that, but that's a real way to get people futures literate and futures fluent, and training people to, cause they'll do it in their own work. And if you can bring that into the DNA. And that was two parts where one, we're bringing the DNA into a firm like that. And then you're also trying to bring it into a client that may have, may not have it. And you're trying to, convince them some get it, some don't. But that, that leads into, this book, this amazing book that you've written and Getting the tone out there and I'd love for us to spend the, the time on our, the podcast here and really get people to know about what your journey writing it and it's called making futures work. So talk about the themes and the concepts you explore.
Phil:Yeah, absolutely. I do want to mention one other big learning from building the foresight team and you're right. Like having the collective leadership and having people who really wanted to volunteer and do these different things to, to build the practice. And at the time I didn't want to call it a practice, but that's what was the, what we were doing, we were building a practice basically. And so it took that. It having a core leadership team and also having those different levels of people who are interested and engaged. But I remember when we were trying to brand it and pitch it to other people within the firm, we were like, okay, it's going to be called Foresight by design. That's where to call the offering. We had this deck that outlined
Steve F:designed by force. It was DXF designed by Foresight.
Phil:It was 4 step by design first. And then we started talking to people and they, and we started talking to the strategists, the internal strategists, people who went to school for strategy, the business analysts and all those people. And they, and we started to get pushback because they were threatened by this word strategy. And someone has said this to me a long time ago, they're like, be careful how you use this word inside here because this is what we do and people are gonna get threatened. And we decided to change it to design by foresight. So the design came first and that was, and we were owning it and we just left out the word strategic and that allowed us to get more conversations with people because of how it was positioned on the surface. I think it's a huge learning. Like we had to really understand the vocabulary, align ourselves with the fact that vocabulary that was being used internally and like use that as I don't know, like a Trojan horse and start to get all those conversations with people. And I think that was part of the success, but as well as having a great group of individuals on the team, but also executive leadership. We had partners who were sponsoring us and that we had people who are doing the work, trying out methods. In on projects and to be able to speak to it and saying yes, this stuff works. It's super useful and everyone should be doing it. So that was just another huge learning from that journey.
Steve F:Great. It's a great point. I would just say to that is that you get the people who believe in it, but at the same time, you also have to understand the politics of language, the politics of the organization. You're right. You have to find those, there's those who will be your advocates, but there are those who will be your adversaries.
Phil:Yes,
Steve F:have to be aware of both.
Phil:Absolutely. yeah. super important anything. What?
Steve F:The book, this awesome book.
Phil:Where do I start?
Steve F:Me main themes, like why did you what inspired you? What kind of compelled you. Like I have to, is burning inside Me, must come out of my body onto this Macintosh in front of me.
Phil:a lot of it a lot of it had come from I've been doing so many intro to features talks over the years, the features 101 and people just really really being inspired by it and wanting to know more. And I'd always show this slide of books and there's 10 books on there and included like Dunderabee's book. It had It had some foresight books, some strict foresight books. It had, Amy Webb's book, Signals of Talking. And I never quite had, I could never quite find the book that was at the right level that talked about it in the way that I was talking about it, where I was merging foresight design futures, speculative design fiction, all of that stuff and strategy. And quite in the way that I, that I was, that I'd been talking about it. And I always wish there's, there was one I could just be like, yeah, here, start here. It's this a good starting point for you. And then you can go, you can, graduate and read some of these other really amazing books too. And it's not that those books were like written at such a high level that like, it wasn't for everyone. It just that some of them really, it took you, Yeah, there wasn't a book that was out that I could just give someone as a primer for futures. I felt at least not in the way, not in like the way that I was talking about it and in the stages of the process that I had been talking about it with foresight plus design futures plus strategy. And so I just always wanted to write that book and I never really had the courage to do it. And at the end of, 2020 I decided to and at first I was writing it with I was just trying to understand What kind of book I wanted to write and I wasn't quite sure the level of language I wanted to use I just didn't know what to do I just knew that I wanted it to feel accessible and not be too academic or theoretical or use a bunch of jargon And even though the book does have a lot of like jargon. I, I wanted it to be something that wasn't too hard to understand or explain, which is how I'd been doing my talks for a while, using a lot of analogies and examples and stuff. So that was the book I went to write. And I tried, I didn't know if I wanted to get it published by someone or self publish it. And I started writing and I was just like, I'm just going to try to start writing. And it was so difficult. I tried writing starting in different places and just I knew that I've been doing this for a long time and I just want to get what I was teaching on to paper, basically. And that's that was I knew that I was confident enough that I had a framework that I could put down. But once I started writing it, like putting those things into words and then realizing Oh, I've got to do more research on this thing that I talk about because I want to know the history of it. And it was and then I couldn't just get into the flow. When you're first time writer, I guess for some people, it's just, you can't get into that state, that flow state where you, where things are just coming out of your head. Like I had to think about like how I'm going to say it. Like I was trying to think it, treat it like a design problem. Like, how would I want the experience of this book to be so that it's the most effective? And all of that, and plus my perfectionist brain made it difficult. But that was the emphasis for it.
Steve F:Talked about the challenge part of the writing process, but what are the themes and the concepts that you explore? What are the main things that somebody there's, I would say for the, maybe the future's fluent people, but a lot of people who are maybe just designers and this is an opening, like what, how, what are the themes and concepts you explore? What do you look at?
Phil:Yeah. I do have to give some credit to Lou Rosenfeld, who I worked with for a few months. He was going to publish it on his, on Rosenfeld media for a while. And then he dropped me around the time of the recession, but he helped me really flesh out the table of contents. So thank you. Thank you, Lou. And then after that after that, I went to O'Reilly and they decided to pick it up, but it starts off with kind of a brief history of how we as a species have been futuring, like way back to the first cave paintings and how we have tried to understand the world around us and try to recognize patterns of the world so that we could survive. Whether they be like animal migration patterns or weather patterns or just how we would like navigate the world. And I talk a little bit about maps also and how we've tried to create maps again, all through time to help us navigate into like uncertain waters to try and reach certain goals and then different examples of how people have illustrated the future through science fiction or through just painting and those kind of things. And just that whole first chapter is not necessarily like a history of featuring it is that there are really great examples there, but it's meant to show you that we have been doing this for all our lives. Like the entire existence of our species has been about trying to understand the future and survive and navigate. So it tries to set up these examples of how this is not a new framework. They're just. different tools and labels to things and some processes that'll be more useful for you. But the mindset of understanding the future and trying to predict it and trying to survive in it has been something we've been doing for forever. And then there's probably way too much. It's a thick book. I didn't expect it to be so thick,
Steve F:How many pages is it? Four.
Phil:clocking in at about 400, but the reason it's so thick, the reason it's so thick is because there's lots of pictures in it and there's lots of illustrations of frameworks and lots of stories from the field. So I've, I interviewed like over 20 different people across different organizations from like Lufthansa, IBM, Google and then also small studios. That are either specifically doing futures work or are using the process. And so there's lots of really great stories in there and yeah. And so basically it there's a sort of a primer telling you about the stages and it starts the first stage, which is, which I don't even know if there should be stages or phases or if I should even have had a label to it. But the first. Chapter, the first section, the first few sections is really just about preparing and preparing yourself and your audience for futures work and really trying to understand your audience, the climate, the environment, the problem and all of that before you start to even go into the future, the mindset, getting the futures mindset and all of those kind of principles for free for featuring. And then it goes into strategic foresight and talks about trends and horizon scanning and analyzing and prioritizing trends and then creating scenarios and thinking about world building and just the fundamental pieces of what foresight is. really does. And then then it goes into design futures. So now that you've created and understand the world, potential worlds of the future, how do you visualize or design future products and services or future initiatives through speculative design fiction, or, and science fiction prototyping? These are the three that I'd selected just doing my research and trying to figure out all the different types of design futuring that existed in the world. These are, these happen to be the most, popular, the most, the ones that I ran into the most. Science fiction prototyping, which was really coined by Brian David Johnson. He used to work at Intel. I didn't hear a lot about, but I started hearing more about it in places like Japan for some reason. And it turned out to be significant and specific enough. In the use of science fiction narrative and storytelling to think about the future as opposed to creating an artifact like this is the thing that's going to exist in the future, or this is the scenario. It really makes use of like science fiction narratives, comic books pictures and words, those kind of things to draw out a scenario And then tying it all together in the last chapter, which is strategy. So now that you've envisioned the world ahead of you you've envisioned a potential future product or service and create a North Star out of it. Either something you want to go towards or something you want to avert from. How do you create a strategic roadmap towards that place? And really connecting both short term and midterm goals to this future vision and measuring them and monitoring indicators and measuring success along the way, and really fusing in everything that I've learned around strategy and just kind of design in general by creating minimum viable products and small experiments today, but everything pointed towards that future vision. And then I think in the final chapter, I talk about how to integrate into the, to your organization, which comes a lot from what we learned at McKinsey and from what I've learned from other people who've tried to bring it in to their group, whether you're a consultant or an in house designer. And whether you have a place that's already practicing features or a place that doesn't practice it at all. And you want to introduce it into the system.
Steve F:Did you who did you talk to for the organizational side and when, that's going? Like, where people have, what people have done experiences?
Phil:They're all over the place. Let's see. There's a story from one there's a story from IBM from Michael Kenny and Gabriel Gabriela Campagna, or actually her last name is Lanning now. They started at the IBM Austin office, the design HQ in in Austin. And there's a story about how they were trying to introduce speculative design there. They had found each other at the break room, which had the shared interest and started experimenting with it. And they ended up teaming up with an internal magazine. And then getting the attention of the VP running this large workshop with a bunch of engineers, creating 75 pieces of IP, which ended up going straight into the patent office them being assigned a legal and patent team. And it just talks about their journey of like how they went step by step. And teaming up with different people and then getting this tension of executive leadership and then getting this IP team and that's one of them. There's a there's others of there's a story about GE, how an innovation team was formed for GE transportation the freight industry, the locomotive and freight industry, how they formed a team that created a 10 year roadmap. They did a lot of experimentation. And they really started that. That's one of the best case scenarios where you have a lot of air cover. A team is specifically created for you to practice this stuff, and you're given that responsibility to do that. That big long road map for the company and other things where people have tried to tried to start it and failed and had to course correct just to make it work.
Steve F:So looking at, with the book coming out and, where things for us have gone, since you started and then our journey together at McKinsey, let's look at the next 10 years in the field, like design futures. Where do you think it needs to change or there needs to be a work done? Where do you think things are going?
Phil:I, the thing that I am saying more of these days as I am watching the field evolve, and maybe I'm a little bit biased because I'm a little bit too close to this industry community practice, but I see. This work not becoming like continuing to become this separate practice, the separate field of work. I feel like it's, people are still going to become, be designers and they're still going to be strategists, but it's going to start to fold into everything else that we do. And there might become, there, you're already starting to see more roles out in the world for the design futurist or the speculative designer. Still not that many but there, there's, there are more now than there used to be. But I think that it's going to become part of our toolkit that like, you're not just going to have to be the person who can design the thing for the immediate tomorrow, but you're going to have more of a strategic long term toolkit. And you're going to have to be able to prove or you're going to have that capability to be able to analyze patterns and trends, which will hopefully be augmented by AI. I see a very, I see a more optimistic future of the use of AI and futures work and that we'll just, we're just going to be stronger strategic designers and we'll have a more important role to play in, in, in those kinds of situations.
Steve F:Yeah. Great answer. I agree with you. I think there's a level of futures literacy and democratization of futures thinking. Just like design thinking was democratized a decade for the last, it's just part of your toolkit. It's part of your problem solving that, this is the same as part of your approach. And you're right. There will be people that, what's that?
Phil:no, you're right. And if we look at things like how Design and research has splintered. You've got it used to be like information architecture, human centered design and how that has splintered and specialized into now there's like the design researcher. There's like research ops and design ops. There's probably going to be a future where there's like futures ops as well. And like very specific, like just the trend researcher. There are lots of trend researchers out there today, but there's probably more specialized specializations for that as well. Yeah. But also just like generally for design, I think that it's going to become, part of our primary tool kit also.
Steve F:So if you think about, the length of your career as a designer and even before what is, what's the one thing you've learned? Let's talk about some kind of personal advice, student insights. What would you learn in your career? You wish you knew when you started all this?
Phil:Oh, man. You're going to ask that question. I
Steve F:That's what I
Phil:There's so many. There, there's so many. I'm constantly like nowadays living in Barcelona and doing the thing that I really am passionate about for a living. I have to stop and look around and be like, how did I get here? This is literally, this is really a dream. There, there's some things that I just never thought that I'd be able to do. And I look back and like, how, what would I have told myself in the past? What's the one thing, could I have done something differently in the past to get here faster? Or I don't know, changed myself from getting worried or upset or worrying about anything if I knew this was going to be my future. I think just I've always been in the spot where I'm always, I've felt like I've been alone. Where I felt like I'm the only person who's thinking about this thing or wants this thing and it's, I feel like sometimes it's really hard to get the point across that this is important work. This is meaningful to someone and I might not be able to always explain it correctly or, To the best effectiveness, but it's really important and sometimes I just really want to give up that's what happened after grad school. I gave my my thesis, speech and no one really batted an eye and I felt like I'd failed And I gave up for a few years until I started to decide to start the non profit in the community which was like five years later after I graduated, but I think the one thing is like in all those moments where you feel like you are going to fail or you have failed is to just keep going. If you really believe in something and you might not just be, you might not be great explaining why you believe in it or why it's so important, but if you really still feel in your heart that you believe in something, you should just never give up because in one day it's going to actually, you'll figure it out and it's going to matter and it's going to have impact and you'll, it'll mean something to you at that point.
Steve F:Well said. I think the reflection of time is that time does prove out a lot of things if you just have to keep going and you may be a little bit ahead of your time or People may have to catch up with you, but eventually you can usually be proven, right? And yeah, I think many people listening probably would share that sentiment, but great advice things you've learned so as we you know start to close a few things I like to talk about with people the rapid fires, but let's put our futurist hat on. What are the things like with futurist technology? What do you think? And what do you let's have some fun. So let's do some speculative design thinking. So what's a one piece of futuristic tech that you think will become a reality? What would it be and why?
Phil:I've been trying to think of this question for quite some time and I still feel like it's my, my, my child science fiction persona that's still stuck inside of me. But I think I would love to see a day where teleportation is possible, I and I know that. I don't think I'll ever see it in my lifetime, but I never thought that I'd see flying cars in my lifetime either. And that's going to happen pretty soon or it's happening now, but if not teleporting an object, like not, if not teleporting a human, like in Star Trek's transporters, but like just teleporting an object would be just such an amazing thing to see. If we could do that. And of course, interstellar travel would be amazing too, if there is anything beyond the simulation that we're in right now. But yeah, And there's lots of new ideas of how to travel cheaply and more efficiently through, through the stars with different kinds of engines, like ion engines and solar sails and all that kind of stuff. But there's nothing that has seemed really practical yet, like the the fabled warp engine. The concept of warp drive is, has been thought about for some time and there's a theory out there, but still the amount of power that you need to do that. It's still unimaginable
Steve F:Karabi Drive? If I pronounced that correctly, the Al Karabi Drive that creates The warp bubble? Yeah.
Phil:bubble, which seems like it makes sense. I don't know, but I think there's so much that we just, there's so many unknown unknowns of we are just fish inside of the fish tank. We still don't realize that there's an outside to the fish tank. There's still like things that we can't even imagine that are probably possible that we just have no perception of. And so I guess my answer to that is that thing that I don't know I don't know would be amazing to see. Something that's so surprising that hasn't ever been written in the science fiction books that, or seen on screen or in a book. That's the thing that I would love to be surprised about.
Steve F:I'm often reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's quote, and I'm going to paraphrase it, is when you see something that's technology that's so radical from the future that it looks like magic. Just because you don't understand it. If you showed television to somebody 200 years ago, they'd think there was like, Which is, are many people like you, it's just the technologies of today. You're absolutely Right. So like when you come across a lot as an artist, and you see a lot of different provocations, a lot of different things. What is what are your kind of what's been the most unexpected source of inspiration that's helped you like influenced you? It's unexpected, like the things you wouldn't think of, but it's really influenced your work.
Phil:Recently my students I teach it. I've been teaching at university for four years now. I started back in 2020 teaching undergrad at Tecna Monterey. And then I'm teaching a master's in design innovation program now at Elie Sava university here in Barcelona. And you would think that being a teacher, you're just it's just a one way a one way conversation where you're just teaching people and you're guiding them through a process or a curriculum and you're answering questions and stuff. And yeah, of course you would expect that there'd be some great ideas here and there. But I think it's not about the ideas. Some of the students sometimes come up with, it's just understand, like seeing the way that they think one being surprised by the stuff that they come up with that's an amazing experience to just see someone teach you something, but just like the way that they come to an answer or a perspective or speculation has been really inspiring. And I've used a lot of what I've learned from them. Today. And just the capacity for some of them to really pick up a new tool, like generative AI. Like I had some students last year who just learned mid journey and I forgot what tool they used to animate the generative AI. It's probably runway, but they learned it literally in like weeks and did some amazing work. And just it's just, that, that gives me the courage that I can learn something like that. Like right now that'd be intimidating for me to pick up and run with, but. They, of course, they're in a different, they're in a pressure cooker in a different situation. But yeah, just like the ability for these people to really just grasp a concept and have just a complete breakthrough in thinking has been really inspiring for me.
Steve F:that's great. I know the one question you love to hear is like, how would you want your work? How would you want to be like you're remembered like what the impact because you've already had an amazing impact with students and Soon your book to be out to the masses and you know working with you has been an absolute pleasure and just you know collaborating with someone like you but like when you're looking back and you think about the At times, what would you want to be reminiscing about or be, the impact it had?
Phil:And thank you. It's been amazing working with you as well. Like you again, are one of the people that have really taught me a lot of things too. So thank you so much.
Steve F:very kind of you. I appreciate that, man. You're
Phil:Yeah, the I go, the reason I don't like, I don't really think about it. I don't think about like, when I die, what's going to be the one thing that's most lasting people remember me for? I think
Steve F:I don't even think about, it's about epitaph or death. I think it's about, when you have a change in, you, maybe you're doing something different. You're running out, you have a winery, you're just, but you're reflecting back. You're just reflecting back. On a life well lived and an art and an artist's life, you think about the things that you've touched and the things that have changed, like when you're having that glass of wine and you're in the hills of Barcelona what would what would you like to be thinking about,
Phil:think just through the work that I've been doing, a lot of it has been trying to like, bring, make, making this. Making this work more practical and accessible to people. And if I ever had a vision of what does that mean? Like when it succeeds, it's been like, I want the world to just be like a more creative and beautiful place. Wouldn't it be great to just walk down the street and have like amazing, not from a consumer perspective, but see like, amazing ideas and products and concepts, like really. Come to life like manifested that like things people do are have an intention for the greater good. They understand the impact they're going to have. And so they don't do the stupid things that like our primal primate minds have been doing for a long time, keeping us like, like animals and, I would love to see more visionary work, and I just feel like it would be nice to believe that Oh, I had a small part to play in things. Things changing for the better and that's always going to be about perspective, right? Some people will think, okay, there's always two sides to the coin, but if things like, if this kind of process, and again, I didn't, I'm not, I didn't write any of this process. I've mashed a bunch of things together, but I didn't, I don't claim any property or ownership around any of this stuff. I'm just trying to package it a little bit differently so that people understand it and they can use it. And that, I think that concept would be great, that I'd be able to facilitate something that people could use to do amazing stuff. And that's good enough for me. And I can't really put my finger on the, the very specific outcome, amazing outcome that I want. But if it changes the world in a positive way, and there's some tiny little part that I had facilitating that would be really cool to, to be able
Steve F:I think to coin a word from McKinsey, you're, you synthesize things well, and I think that's the thing is it's in a lot of places, I do the same as, and I think you bring the best of different parts to try and give people a, an easier pathway to learn. So where are you on, In the world and on the socials and work, where can people find you and get more information about your work and the book and yeah, I'll put it on the show notes too, but just if you want to share, that would be great.
Phil:LinkedIn is always a good place to connect with me find me there. I do have my own small consulting practice called Habitat. I know that's a very common name, but it's habitat. design. And that's my consulting practice where I train organizations on futures. And I also do consulting work and actually usher them through the strategy, the strategic thinking towards strategic initiatives and outcomes, that kind of stuff. And those are the big ones. I don't use Twitter or X anymore. I am starting to look at threads but I'm on both of those platforms. You just Google my name. I think I have a pretty unique last name, so I'm pretty easy to find around there. And yeah, right now you can buy the book on Amazon around the world. And I think the other place that O'Reilly doesn't have it for sale on their website, they just use Amazon and ebooks. com. If you have an e reader.
Steve F:That's great. I just want to say thank you for your time and being generous with that today and sharing your process and congratulations on this book. And now it's been a long time coming and I can't wait to dive into it even more and use it because I've already read it, but I want to read it again. Thank you, Phil. Thanks for your time.
Phil:Thanks, Steve. Really appreciate it. Great chat.
Steve F:You too.
