Think Forward: Conversations with Futurists, Innovators and Big Thinkers

Think Forward EP 133 - Hope Engineering with Nik Badminton

• Season 1 • Episode 133

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Nicholas Badminton brings a refreshingly grounded yet visionary perspective to futures work, sharing his journey from growing up around a slaughterhouse to delivering over 450 keynotes worldwide as a renowned futurist. His approach focuses on breaking dominant narratives, finding overlooked implications, and helping organizations build futures fluency through practical, integrated methods that drive meaningful transformation.

• Began his futurist journey when his father gave him "The Usborne Book of the Future" at age eight
• Accidentally became known as a futurist after building a reputation for writing about humanity and technology
• Developed a modular keynote approach that connects global megatrends to industry-specific futures
• Created events like Future Camp and Dark Futures to explore cutting-edge thinking in collaborative settings
• Focuses on "hope engineering" - combining possibility thinking with futures work and positive psychology
• Advocates for simple, practical futures thinking that can be integrated into daily organizational operations
• Emphasizes human creativity over AI in futures work, noting AI's inability to connect weak signals creatively
• Worked with major organizations on futures projects that informed multi-billion dollar investments
• Helps organizations develop internal futures capability by mentoring staff and integrating foresight practices
• Values working with children and young people to develop futures thinking abilities early

Connect with Nicholas at futurist.com or find him on LinkedIn to learn more about his work in futures thinking.

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Thank you for joining me on this ongoing journey into the future. Until next time, stay curious, and always think forward.

Nik:

Coming up on today's show and I'm about pushing the boundaries, you know, and it gets me in trouble. It really gets me in trouble, like not, not, you know, not pulling the party line and not believing the dominant narratives. In fact, I'm teaching people and a lot of the coaching and stuff that I do, and then what I do, working with clients, is how to break the dominant narratives into pieces and then finding what's in the gaps. Right, what are we not considering? What are those implications in the organization?

Steve:

Welcome to the Think Forward Show. I'm your host, steve Fisher, and today we're joined by renowned futuristist, nicholas Badminton. With over 450 keynotes under his belt and a unique background that includes growing up around a slaughterhouse, nick brings a refreshingly grounded yet visionary perspective to futures work, From hope engineering to organizational psychology and even the future of chocolate. We'll dive into how Nick connects these seemingly disparate dots to help leaders navigate uncertainty with optimism. So get ready to explore what it truly means to build futures fluency in a world hungry for meaningful transformation. Welcome to episode 133, hope Engineering with Nicholas Badman. Nick, welcome to the show.

Steve:

Yeah, thanks for having me steve so, uh, we always kind of start I I know you from your work um you and I've just gotten to know each other a lot uh with uh your your recent work on some like the hope engineering space. But your journey's really awesome and I'd love for your people to to know about how you kind of we always talk about the accidental entry into futures. You know kind of how that happened, so how did you kind of get into this space?

Nik:

So it's kind of really interesting. It's kind of quietly purposeful but absolutely accidental in terms of being called a futurist right. So I mean, when I was eight years old, my dad bought me this book called the usborne book of the future and sort of ignited my, my interest in technology and science fiction in the uk, where I grew up and I left the uk in 2008 to move to canada but when I grew up in the uk, there was lots of tv shows, um, called like tomorrow's world or whatever that would be looking or future tech, and really really quite you know, quite a sort of a, an academic or r&d based level of of consideration of what comes next. So it was always there. And then science fiction whatever university I did applied psychology, computing I wanted to do something that was very forward looking. You know I wasn't thinking about foresight or futures or anything like that, but it was always about, you know, future proofing my career in a way. Right, so what's gonna, what's gonna be the big things that happen in in like 10, 20, 30 years? And you know, I thought human computer interaction um, you know, you know how the internet was evolving. Organizational psychology and something that people weren't really talking about artificial intelligence, uh, and it was like genetic algorithms, uh, single layer neural networks and some of that theory like way back in the day and I sort of my my final year's thesis on, uh, odd, some sub-symbolic grammar grammar check using single-layer neural networks. So it was like linguistics as well. So I sort of did that and entered my career doing data and analytics, building large-scale targeting databases for sort of marketing and other various spooky things as well, and I sort of ended up moving to Canada, moving into the advertising world, focusing on consumer Around.

Nik:

About that time a great friend of mine moved from Berlin to Vancouver and I hadn't seen him in a few years, but he was a designer for Nokia and he was playing around with early versions of virtual reality and stuff that Parmalaki and people were playing around with the dev kits and whatever and literally like building vr headsets out of old ski goggles and uh and smartphones, right. So we started playing around with that. And then I, you know, out in the back of advertising I was getting terribly bored of this short-range strategic thinking and kind of very sort of boring executional marketing projects and I started building out keynotes. So I started doing keynotes. I started just at local colleges and universities in Vancouver where I was living and doing TV and radio and I was getting a reputation for like writing for like the Huffington Post and Forbes and the such like, just talking about the future of humanity and technology. And then this guy I know, boris, he introduced me to someone as a futurist at a drinks evening and I was like that's bizarre. And he was like no, no, no, no, that's what you do, right? And sort of tongue in cheek sort of thing. And I sort of went back and I sort of looked at it a little bit more and I was okay, well, whatever, I'm gonna throw it onto linkedin.

Nik:

And then there's a lot of people. A lot of people were like, come on, like, and anyway, what was really interesting is, over time, as I started, I was doing signal scanning, I was doing on scenario exploration, I was running events. I ran an event called cyborg camp with amber case and my friend Karis ran another event. From now, I did something called Future Camp for three years and Future Camp was like an unconference, so for two days people would get together and do demonstrations, have open discussions, have debates there's some keynotes in there as well about everything from you know biohacking all the way through to the future of music or whatever. And yeah, it sort of stuck over time and really focused.

Nik:

And uh, and my next door neighbor ran a speaker agency, funnily enough, and he said, can you talk about the future of agriculture? I, I'm like, sure I can. I grew up in an agricultural background. I worked in dairy farms and my father ran a slaughterhouse and he was like, oh, this is perfect. And so my sort of speaking career sort of kicked off. I've done 450 keynotes since then and so I really really focused on building it out. And here I am today with lots of different friends and opportunities to really formalize this. And this is, I feel, a career that I've been meant for since that age of eight years old when I got that book, the Book of the Future, because I'm stimulated, I'm interested, it's creative, it's analytical, it's right brain, left brain, it's everything. And it's the right level of, you know, it's right brain, left brain, it's it's everything. And, uh, it's the right level of interaction with clients as well 450 keynotes.

Steve:

So is there any? That is quite a body of work there. Um, it's almost like a ted talk of of keynotes. You could give a ted talk on 450 keynotes. Which, what? What have you when you first started doing those? What were the stumbles, what was the oh wow, I wish I knew that. Like that is because a lot of people, including myself, you know, you speak it and that is, you know the lessons learned in something like that, like you're talking to your you know kind of past self. Right, it's like even just anybody out there as you coach like to to get to that type of level, yeah, where do you when you start? Where, what have you learned? I mean, that's a lot, a lot of things you can learn yeah, for sure it's kind of interesting.

Nik:

The last job I had before I quit for time to be a futurist, I was running, uh, a two-sided marketplace, a gig gig economy, um cunning in north america called freelancercom and um the you know ceo matt had gone through the stanford programs and whatever the he'd been featured in uh, pete diamandis's bold book and a number, a number of different things. It was really great. There's a really great company. Matt's uh wicked, smart and the team were really good and driven and we're very much about creating awareness and getting adoption of your views on this platform.

Nik:

Anyway, that aside the presentation formats that he used and that we we ultimately used as well and obviously I I riffed on that where we're of a format that was that was very sort of easy to understand and kind of epic in its way. You know, the whole sort of um setting up the picture and talking about how to, how to build together. And I built that on top of a foundation of having done a lot of speaker training and a lot of presentation training when I was management consultant, when I worked, worked in advertising and the such like. So I sort of ended up at this point of being really really you know compelling at putting together keynotes that can get people thinking, and obviously it's evolved over the last 10 or so years of professional speaking and now you know I've got really sharp sort of keynotes. They're very much based on, you know, research and signal scanning and trends and talking about scenarios, and then you know making them come to life with stories, right do you look at the storytelling nature of it?

Steve:

I keep thinking of like books, like slideology, that kind of also, uh, dissect, you know so, like ted talks or certain really effective presentations in terms of there's not just this act, one, two, three, there's a certain set of narrative and jumps, and you know, almost like tension builds. And you know, and going them through, have you kind of learned those kind of structures through the time that seem to work for you in your storytelling?

Nik:

Yeah, I mean there's a lot of different theories. You know, the beginning, middle and end being the simplistic thing, right. But you know I learned a model called the Kipper model Okay, a little fish head model when I was in a management consultant role. You know, you get the hook and you say what you're going to say and the three things that matter and the proof points and the three proof points under the proof points, and then you summarize and then you sell it through and, um, my, you know it's evolved to be something in and of its own right, very much around. You know, I've got a foundational story at the beginning. So, for example, last week I was, I worked with the world intellectual property organization, so I told, told the story, uh, and I always.

Nik:

The story is about history and and it roots itself in where we are today. So, from big ideas and how they came to be, um, and what the effects were of those ideas and how it proves that futures thinking is really valuable. So a whip pro or white pro, I should say we, uh, we explored the history of the hyperloop and the bicycle. In fact, the history of the hyperloop predates the bicycle. Um to like 1799 to vacuum tube based. Uh yeah, railways. Um back in the uk, I think it it was George Medhurst and Isambard Kingdom, brunel, and then the bicycle was about 1830.

Steve:

So around 1830. You do vacuum tube subways in the 18th century, the late 18th century. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nik:

So I dig deep, right, and I dig deep. Yeah, that's great. The people are like what you know? It's that aha moment, it's to sit up and pay attention and then you sort of ask the question so, hands up, who rides bicycles? Hands up, who's been in a commercial hyperloop? Like no one right? Hands up, who rides bicycles? There's over a billion bikes in the world. A lot of people have got more than one bike and discuss, right. So it's like that. When I talk about technology, I talk about Douglas Engelbart designing the mouse and desktop, publishing, hypertext, linking network, computing, modems, a whole number of things, and how Xerox kind of riffed on that idea, didn't find the value of that until a young entrepreneur called Steve Jobs came in and gave them a small amount of stock to be able to use all of their ideas. Apple is a nearly $3 trillion company and now Xerox is about $1.1 billion company.

Steve:

It's still around. I was going to say the brand. Is it still around?

Nik:

Exactly, exactly. Anyway, these bets and these gambles that we make on our future With my keynote I sort of anchor it in that idea and then I always start off in global mega trends. That sets the tone and really, you know, frames the dynamics of the bigger world and typically what I found over the years, because I, you know, I do focus on tech a lot. I go into, you know, growth of data, ai tech, and I've been talking about that for like the 15 years. I've jumped on the bandwagon as well. I've got some various things. But then you go into different trend areas privacy and security, sustainability, whatever industry people are in, whether it's transportation or finance or insurance or whatever, and build it up. And so, out of the over 450 keynotes I've done, they've all been customized to a certain extent and now they're modular. There's lots of different modules.

Nik:

I was just writing a keynote this morning for some patent lawyers and they just want to go deep on the craziest things that are going to be coming next. So it's a very different kind of keynote. It's all about the most absolutely mind-bending you know, novel, novel computing, neuromorphic computing, you get into connectomes and and protein folding, a whole bunch of different stuff. So I sort of got to go down and, over the last sort of you know, 10 to 15 years of doing this, I've just collected all of these signals and all of these tracks and and, and.

Nik:

What's nice is that you know our beautiful humans brains, uh, create these connections between everything. I think that's the superpower of being a futurist. It's like suddenly you can connect these strange worlds that don't seem to be connected to, to create stories, and I always like to give an example like this. So self-driving vehicles, self-driving vehicles, self-driving vehicles, if they hit a certain critical mass, will mean that there'll be few, if not zero, accidents on the road, so people won't be dying. So those people won't be available to give healthy organs for organ donation. So then you'll have to grow organs in pigs, like human pig chimeras at scale by the people that grow the food for us today. And then what do you do with the bacon that's left over?

Steve:

For those listening, you're not a big futurist. He's describing what's called an implications wheel where you take first, second, third order. But I love what you did is you just went like. Instead of the traditional like, oh, there's going to be no more accidents or we'll have a better economy, less pollution, you go to pigs. That's awesome. Like you go like. And I think the real gift that we've been blessed with as futurists is that we, like you said you talk about the synapses we get. Our job is we get them close enough so people can make the connection. You know, as a lot of times it's so far apart, people just can't get there. And I think the skillset that we hone through whatever types of methods we use like you know, I'll do like design, fiction pieces, you do keynotes, like we, we help them get close enough so that they can start to connect with it in in the, in the mode that they learn.

Nik:

I think that's um, that's great, that's a, that's a great example but it also comes from the fact that I'd you know, I'd I'd spoken in uh health and wellness contexts and I'd spoken at swine conventions people that raised pigs for that's great.

Steve:

Yeah, and I love a swine convention hires a futurist. It's just like you know.

Nik:

Yeah I great that's vision, right? I'll be honest, don't don't love the industry of uh, of how pigs are raised. It's very strange and it's kind of, yeah, it's not, yeah, it's not for the faint of heart, to be honest that's that is true.

Steve:

You said your father had a slaughterhouse.

Nik:

You grew you he ran a slaughterhouse in england. I grew up in a 4 000 person village and, yeah, um, every two weeks they'd empty the blood tanks and it would, uh, it would smell for about four, four miles around the village.

Steve:

Wow, heavy, those heavy, pungent summers, you know well, you know and it's interesting, you know you had talked about what's um about in our conversations about organizational psychology, what the brain does. I think about the, the. What does the village think? I think about the village like, what does that do to the village? But you know, when you talk about um, like the keynotes are a key keynote, a key part of your work and how you communicate you know you've done a lot in organizational psychology exploring that, like how has that influenced how you approach force, like how you advise leaders, how you approach foresight?

Nik:

yeah, yeah, because it's it's an interesting angle yeah, you know, when I entered the workforce in like 96, 97 and uh, over the first sort of five or six years you really get attuned into how organizations worked. And then, when I moved from software into like management consultancy, you sort of get this sixth sense of of where to look in an organization for. You know the best things that are going to motivate, you know the finding of information to motivate change. And what's really interesting is you very quickly realize that even if an organization is deeply structured, it's always at the very grassroots level where most of the impact can be felt. But most of the solutions exist as well. And as you go up the organization there are just people looking for answers that find all of the information obfuscated by the overall bureaucracy of what's going on. So it's interesting. I mean I follow all these work trends of the flat organization Interesting. I mean you know I follow all these work trends of, like you know the flat organization, you know no one should be more than like three people away from the CEO or whatever. Or you know holacracy, where you've got amoebas of R and D cells. Uh, you know self-governing and and you know report up operationally with profit and R and D budgets and whatever. They go off and do their things. But there's a truth about all of this is that there has to be a simplicity to what you teach in an organization for for change to happen.

Nik:

So one of the greatest stories that I have was I was brought into a large airline and I was focused on business information management, and so it was about data cleansing, data management, the application of that and the building of large analytical infrastructures and whatever. And they were hemorrhaging money. They didn't know what to do, they didn't have a handle. They. They just didn't know what they didn't know. And day one I sat down with the executive and he goes okay, biggest problem, we've got, we've got a development team, we've got we've got the test team and they can never get things fixed quickly and they go through five, six, seven, eight rounds of changes before they fix something or they they can actually deploy something. It's just taking, you know, 10 times the amount of time that we needed to do. It's. It's costing us a lot of money.

Nik:

And I sat down and you sort of sit there and you're okay. Let's look at the situation. It's like okay, where, where? Where is your team? Where? Where's the development teams that I'd like to see them and it's like, okay, they're just in a building down the road. It's like, okay, that's fine. He goes okay, um, the test team sat with them. He goes, no, no, no, they're in a different building about four miles away. And I was like, okay, whilst we do this investigation, can we co-locate the teams and see what happens? And then just like just like.

Nik:

They're like organizationally siloed, they're like physically siloed away from me and we put them in the same room and things became like 10 times better. Wow, um, and it's. It's interesting and you know, it was moments like that that made me realize that we don't have to be over engineered or smart or suddenly come up with new metrics of frameworks and stick them to the wall and say here we go. It's like the rewriting of job, of job descriptions in a union-based organization, or putting people into the same room or whatever. And the same thing applies to sort of sitting in an organization or working with someone and mentoring them.

Nik:

To be a futurist in residence, it's like what's the one or two questions you can ask when you're planning a project that just helps people shift. That idea of like this has gotten implications in five, 10 plus years. You know how can we just implement that and, in addition, you know how can we then run activities that feed bigger thinking strategically from a fore bit outside of the, the range of time in which projects and programs exist, which starts gender people to think about futures work. And I always say you know everyone can start off in the morning looking at one particular signal and thinking about you know what if that was to affect your business, and doing that very simplistically at 15 minutes every day, even a lunch time or whatever, it's going to start to really build that, that muscle, to to think about futures ahead of us well and it's.

Steve:

It's also not making futures and foresight work a specific, like one time only action, like we do an activity and then we report. It goes on a desk where it's got to be integrated into the organization. Which kind of brings me to a lot of the work around like being a futurist in residence helping organizations build like a competency, like where we've kind of covered that kind of organizational psychology, getting the, the thinking process, and but what do you find? Is there, like let's start with this how do you coach them to become futurists in their own context? You talked about kind of the finding the signals, connecting the weak signals, and but is there like a, you know, kind of a set, like now set process, but a, a method in which you kind of like like to kind of walk them through like the maturity, their kind of journey as as well, because a lot of them have to. There are sometimes the futurist team of one right, they have to get into the culture. So how do you, how do you, how do you approach that?

Nik:

yeah, so so I've been approached and I've been really lucky over the last few years to have been approached by various organizations, but there's a couple of examples. I won't name the organization specifically, but a big tech company approaches me in 2019, and they were looking globally at resiliency and understanding how they could look after their 150,000-plus employees and what were going to be some of the most impactful signals and trends and if they were going to move into certain countries and regions, what they'd have to consider, and so it was a really good project. So I worked very closely with the individual that was put on the project and that meant we worked together. You know we chatted a couple of times a week. We would co-author the reports. I would teach them the fundamentals and basics of how to think about signal scanning and and trends identification. We work through this together.

Nik:

I'm like the, the, the og, human co-pilot right, uh, and I think that's really important in an organization to like bring these people in and and you know there's a couple of in the last three or four years, a couple of people that become incredibly good friends, that have gone on to do, you know, masters in foresight courses or certifications or whatever? Um, because you know it's it got ingrained in their organizations. I'm also working, or have been working, with an engineering company. I think we've done like 10 projects together and now they kind of use me as a bit of an accelerant for their thinking around signals and trends. So very-.

Nik:

Well, the external advisor, the external expert to bring in to kind of help validate, yeah, that's good yeah it's good Because I've done so much scanning work with so many different clients around the world that I bring this really weird perspective and these areas that they're not even thinking about and we oftentimes dive into the scenarios as well. So, yeah, I mean, over time, you know, and the engineering client, I taught their executives how to write design fiction or you know, speculative fiction. I know the design fiction. People get all funny about this.

Steve:

um I uh, yeah, we could have a debate on that one for that design free spec fiction isn't design fiction. So I work, but let's move on oh no, I I look at it as an umbrella of things, but there's, there's prototyping, there's design, for, yeah, there's, there's a, there's a whole. You could, you could be like rolled out.

Nik:

Yeah, hey, and I love the design fiction front, so big love to them. Um, but like, um, all of the things, and literally everything from like signals analysis into full strategic foresight, into storytelling, writing, spec fiction stories, all the way through to just like signals and scaling projects. And you just realize, and this organization now has got that deeply integrated in their design part of their organization. So design and and a great friend of mine is in there she's doing a master's in foresight at houston. She gets it, she really gets it, and she pushes me and I push her. It's a really great relationship as well. And then she brings other people on for the me and I push her. It's a really great relationship as well. And then she brings other people on for the ride.

Nik:

But I'll be honest, steve, yeah some of your organizations do four side projects and then just like throw it on the shelf or do a little execution, do nothing with it.

Nik:

Some organizations really step forward and, and really, you know, adopt this idea and we, you know I think we're just prior to this recording we're talking about Rene Rolbeck and what Rolbeck and Kuhn did in terms of, you know, validating that.

Nik:

You know organizations have got vigilance, they're more futures ready and more profitable, they've got higher rates of growth, larger market capitalization and it's like there are organizations that really step forward. What's interesting is the large tech company that I worked with back in the day, um. They ended up using part of what I did and what we worked with together to inform, like a multi-billion dollar investment in africa, um. And then the engineering company I work with it's informed, very deep policy shaping reports and new areas, new business lines that they were going into, and it really does activate and that's what's really valuable about future thinking. The organizations that really do step forward and do it, um, and and commit to it and commit to like embedding it in their organization. They're all doing really well and they're all doing better than their competitors, are being prepared for what comes next I think that you, you, you hit upon a couple key things.

Steve:

You know renee's work right, or just, uh, his interviews, just as an episode, previous episode. His work helped me as I worked on building McKinsey's futures team with a number of other awesome people. We had to get the short there's. There's other thinkers. It's kind of like you see the people who are futures interested or, you know, I would call them the true believers. Then there's the futures interested and then there's the people who are have to be there, kind of like they have to be connected to it. They don't, they have to be convinced and they're more short-term thinkers. They have a different set of goals, objectives, things that they're rewarded for and things that they have to do. So how do you get them on board? Right? And your point a lot of times it's that one off and it goes on a shelf. But getting the point a lot of times it's that one off and it goes on a shelf, but getting the, I find the pathways to it through innovation, organizations, through different kinds of product work. You can. It's not just about individually having futures as a function, which is important, but it has to be pervasive in the way people think it has to be a way how they use the tools to do the different kinds of work in the organization. And you, you mentioned um, you know with with renee's work. I talked with him how you can kind of I think they're doing more research and he can right listen to that episode you can cover with him. But they cover just kind of european. It was very small population but it's important as a longitudinal study and he's trying to expand that and there's a lot more data around it. But it does give people more confidence and it has to be not just the person. I just think about other types of things people evangelize in an organization, but having that network and you've always emphasized making futures accessible.

Steve:

You know, I think the one thing that's really been interesting, you know, reading your book facing our futures. It was a great book. If you all haven't read it, you know Shay had to get it at the end. It's a great, great book. You talk about hope theory and the concept of of like in your work. What is that? Cause? It's's because there's a. It's a different, because a lot of people think the future as collapse, transformation. They think of very strict archetypes. They think of um, radical change. Sometimes the future means like we have to do radical things, but there's a there's an underlying messaging in the way you you look at this, because you kind of I would love for you to share that with people that don't understand, don't know about it yeah.

Nik:

So I mean, in facing our future is very much about, you know, looking at positive and dystopian trajectories. Right, and I mentioned the word uh, you know, I call myself a hope engineer. At the beginning of the book, right, page one. And then I'm actually now writing another book which is more like deeper, on the idea of of hope theory, um, being able to combine with possibility thinking and future thinking, positive psychology that actually leads us to a new mindset and a state of mind when undertaking work, right, projects, programs, initiatives, larger initiatives, and I'm trying to write something that's really light and easy and something that's sort of a kickstarter for the mind rather than being a fairly heavy sort of like. Here's a really in-depth, uh, you know, method and framework which is, you know, facing our futures definitely got a little bit more of that um, and futures work can sort of disappear into its own sort of, you know, a million kinds of cones and wheels and whatever, right, and I'm trying to. There are many cones and wheels in our world.

Nik:

There are many cones in our world and I think, because I'm not academically taught with futures, I'm sort of trying to think about this as something very practical, even like you know what the questions that you ask yourself. But, like you know, I started looking at hope and hope theory and Charles Charles Snyder, and you know it really is about setting goals, goals, looking at pathways forward and then creating agency for change. And no one's really spoken this. There's very few people in the world that even written papers about the intersection of hope theory and futures work. So I'm sort of diving into that.

Nik:

It's really interesting trying to decode what that means and how it can be used practically, because people think hope is quite a hokey concept. Right, it's really interesting, uh, sort of work working on that as a, as a concept. So really, you know, whilst I sort of formulate that, you know it's the idea that we are, we're making plans, we are examining the future, we are getting ready, we're setting the goals, we're giving agency, and there's there's some of these things that, like modern businesses, don't do. So I think it's really important to think about that and that's sort of a book that hopefully is going to be coming out in 2026 um, I'll be first to buy it there, brother.

Steve:

Uh, I mean that's, I will absolutely be. I'm right there, man, because I, you know, I keep thinking about um. You know, two things come to mind and I've mentioned this in the past. There's a study done on of fiction works around the future, around dystopian, utopian. There's kind of a two-by-two Probably.

Steve:

I'm a former McKinsey consultant, probably because we love our two-by-twos, but they looked at like you know, kind of plausible, non-plausible, utopian, dystopian, and a majority of fiction was plausible, but dystopian, very, there's like little, if any. If it is, is plausible and utopian, you're kind of like you're positive in that way. There's a bunch of things that are kind of not plausible. Star trek is in that one, ut, utob, there's a few. But I think about the mindset. I've read a lot of prepper fiction like a lot of post-apocalyptic. There's almost like this car crash kind of thing. You almost kind of want to watch it from afar, you want to watch the disaster. I mean there are tough reads, like the Road. There are some really hardcore books, you know, if you to read that, but it's like there should be more hopeful things about humanity, which is kind of gets me. You talked about that and, yeah, I, I think there's a real opportunity for fiction writers to look upon the world. As you know, a new morning, you know a type of I. I think there's a need for that. I think people want that. Um, so I think you're really you're really touching on something and it kind of leads me into.

Steve:

You talked about human agency. We talk about organizations. The big honking word of that Gen AI term. Is it what it's doing? I see it changing the field. I see it helping the field and I don't see it hurting the field. But I see it, I don't see it hurting the field, but I see it, you know, giving people more. Um, if you do the signals work right, if you do all the human work right, can you use it in that way? And I think it's. I'm sure it comes up a lot in your talks, but it's like you know, does that? You know, does it help the hope theory? Does it help people think, yeah, I don't know it doesn't. What does it do for human agency? You know, what are your thoughts on that?

Nik:

so I'm constantly uh reading, uh about. You know some of the effects. You know we're two, three years into a lot of the generative ai stuff, sort of like people using it at scale and, uh, you know what was it. It can make you more productive. You can get more stuff done you. You get it done more quickly, but you've got less critical thinking, less diversity of thought.

Steve:

Right, we're listening, this is being taped. You know, the mid-February of 2025. Deep Seek is a couple weeks into scaring the heck out of everyone. But if you, if you look, there's an art thing I posted on LinkedIn. There's like 1300 things that deep seek won't talk about, like Taiwan, right, it's like there are things like. It's like remember, ai is written by the humans, it's taught by the humans. So what does that do?

Nik:

I mean, I've followed like ai for like 30 or something years and then seeing this huge like oh my god.

Nik:

And every, every an explosion yeah, a great, a great future friend of mine, raminess, is up here in canada. He went to do a talk a couple of weeks ago and, uh, and he was saying, you know, his, his client confided in him. It was like you know, it's like an agent sent them 75 names of people that could talk about ai and it was like you know, 95% of the people there don't have any background in doing anything beyond like using like chat, gpt, claude or whatever right, and it's like they're deep consideration. I anyway I won't unpack. Uh, it's another sort of episode for us to get into the for far as for far too, in terms of deep, there's something I call the 20% idea principle.

Nik:

20% of our work can be easily undertaken by these generative AI platforms and I think that it could be that I'm stuck for some ideas. Throw some concepts in, give me some directions. You know the 20% Kickstarter scenarios and and a lot of them are really not that great and they're not that creative and they they can't connect things in really novel ways. So, you know, we can frame it and I think, with futures work, you know there's lots of people out there saying I've built a platform that that you know supercharges your, your future scenarios. It's like, yeah, but people end up with really average, like non-dynamic, restrictive ideas of scenarios. What comes next? Because it's based on this limited thinking that that exists within llm, right, whereas this conversation earlier on, the conversation about, you know, from self-driving cars to eating human pig, chimera, bacon.

Steve:

Yeah, Connection between weak signals. I mean, that is that right. An AI can't make that leap.

Nik:

Exactly.

Steve:

Do that as humans right.

Nik:

The weak signals. Yeah, it hasn't been written right. The second order effects haven't been written Algorithm.

Steve:

There's no algorithm for that.

Nik:

The LLM is a mirror and that's okay, but it's not a creative platform for change. Now there's a ton of people that will be out there saying I'm wrong or whatever it's like. Show me something that's truly unique in terms of the way that something thinks, versus something that can just produce, something that can get a tick in the box and we can carry on with our daily work. Right, and I'm about pushing the boundaries, you know, and it gets me in trouble. It really gets me in trouble, Like not you know, not pulling the party line and not believing the dominant narratives. In fact, I'm teaching people and a lot of the coaching and stuff that I do and what I do working with clients is how to break the dominant narratives into pieces and then finding what's in the gaps, right. What are we not considering? What are those implications in the organization?

Steve:

Well, you also talk about the implications of with, with ai, when you talk about weak signals and the connections with them. Yeah, I think about where. Here's where it can be useful. Um, there's an interview we did a number of episodes ago with um christian moroth, who runs itonics, and we talked a lot about, you know, the innovation process using you know he's, he's got one of those kinds of platforms that does that you know, and paulo's got orion they're trying to do. But it's like, if he has a, he's a phd in this, in the ai, and he's looking at it from what is human. What is ai like? What can we use? Like, where are the parts that require all the brain versus somehow, like the, the front end of, like, defining the project, getting the things together? Then, because a lot of signals, research, if you can ask it to scrape and pull the things, it can do a lot of that and it can find things. But you still have to synthesize and I think that's that's where we get into like to your like, if it's scenarios are scenarios, but if it doesn't have enough to it, then it's just going to give you what you put into it and that's again it's. It's not enough. I, I keep thinking back to Jim Dater's um, one of his tenants, of if it's not crazy enough, you're not actually doing your job Like, if it's not really like far-fetched. I also think of Arthur C Clarke. It's like, you know, science, something that is far more advanced to a civilization, looks like magic, like if we took a television back 200 years ago they would think it was some like witchcraft. Right, it's just so we're not thinking that's that's what we do, wait, that's what they look for us, but some people may reject it. But at the same time, the provocation, it's the point of it. And you know, I want to, I want to kind of switch to some fun things as well, because you have, you've done, you've done a lot of different projects. Um, you know, I one of them that I I love and I know you could talk about as much as you you'd like to. But, um, but, the future of chocolate, like those are the kind of things like people were like, wow, the future of chocolate? Well, no, I think about you know what I think comes to my mind immediately 3d printers, 3d printing, chocolate, right, yeah, um, where do you source? Because I did, we made chocolate. My wife and I did a. We were in peru and we did like a 3D printing chocolate. Right, yeah, where do you source? Because I did, we made chocolate. My wife and I did a. We were in Peru and we did like a workshop where we actually made our own chocolate from the bean and all that. So you get to learn where it's sourced.

Steve:

So there's ethical sourcing, sustainability. There's, you know, cool technology like things you could never make. I remember never make. I remember watching the netflix show that guy who is french and he does this amazing like sculptures with chocolate. But it's like, what was the like? How did it come about? Like anything it uncovered for you like what was it? What was it like? Oh my gosh, this is like wild right, what do you?

Nik:

oh, yeah, so it's interesting. I can't share specifics of exactly what I found out, but but it wasn't. It wasn't about, like um, it wasn't about the creation of product, and this is what I remind people. It's not about a tangible thing. It's a lot more around the principles and the operations, about the sustainability and the accountability behind the entire industry. So you'd go into, like you know, was it? Ghana is probably not going to be able to to grow cacao by 2050 to 2080, right? So where? Yeah, because of climate, it's not so. So where do you? Where do you get chocolate? Where do you grow? What do you do? Do you consider other methods of cellular production of cocoa? You know, do you get chocolate? Where do you grow it? What do you do? Do you consider other methods of cellular production of cocoa? Do you consider the price and the dynamics on the market? What chocolate is as a cultural artifact? I mean, if you go back and look at the Second World War, chocolate in England was like gold, right? You?

Steve:

know the world's guys had their chocolate bars when they would go to europe and give it to the kids.

Nik:

I mean, that was yeah but it was like people didn't have it right. So I mean there's a lot of elements. It's like how does the commute? How does the global community work? What does it mean when, when we've got such a shortage that all of the big players have to play together and they have to work together to create something that's sustainable, and you know they can share the technologies and the idea. So that was it. It was.

Nik:

It was a much bigger exercise in understanding that the, the changes in the dynamics of the, the industry, uh, as a whole, versus like how to 3d print a chocolate. In fact, we we never in that project looked at 3D printing of chocolates because it wasn't of any interest, because, as a signal, it was something that had already been worked through and wasn't particularly interesting in the scheme of things. It gets interesting if you 3D print a chocolate and you build that from cellular protein and cellular production of the base goods and whatever, and then you upscale operational facilities, yada, yada, yada, right Precision, fermentation and a number of other things. So I mean I always approach projects by asking the questions like what is the ecosystem, what are the cultural effects? What are the organizational, operational effects of change coming? You know what are the signals that feed into that, and when you take like three to five signals and you put them through the sausage machine and start asking, you know operationally, ethically, ethically, you know from a policy perspective, from a partnership in an industry, in a market perspective, what happens. That's, that's really good futures work and I think that that's, you know, the modeling that we have to do, rather than like, imagine a world where all of our forks are made out of chocolate, so that when we finish eating using the fork, we can eat the fork, which is cool as well, which is cool as well and is a part of futures work, and speculative products and whatever, but it's not exactly the big value for organizations are how does this change our strategic perspective on the world? And how do we make better decisions today to prepare for what's coming? Because change is coming right.

Nik:

I always say the change. You know change is inevitable. You either change or change happens to you, and I remind that um of my clients every time I sit down with them. Um, yeah, and interestingly, I just did a project on global naval operations and the arctic and and you know that's, that's big and it and it's not, and it's everything from the, the ecological environment aspect, the, the, the outdated military or naval aspect, of the new technologies and new players that are coming in, the dynamics of workforce and aging and training, and you know, location and military partnerships, and it's, it's like this is what we do, um, and, and I think that you know what does the futurist do? And people think that we just like come up with crazy ideas of like you know late, lazy guns and, uh, you know cars, and it's not, it's we're practical. You know we're practical when we do the work right yeah, and I've.

Steve:

When I explain to people like where a futurist kind of lives is, you think of traditional, like not even tech organizations, but just organizations in general. You have product, you have innovation and you have kind of the strategy, the futures, and I look at product as dealing with 12 to 18 months. They're dealing with the root, but they they needed to, they, all of them need this in different ways. Innovation is looking at three years out because they have to manage most people. You think of innovation to your point. I dealt with a lot of innovation or I built a lot of innovation organizations and it's everyone thinks you're just making fun things in the back room and it's like no, you're actually managing a portfolio, like you're managing a startup, like you're a VC, you've got to make bets, you've got to make investments and they make it through or they don't. Just like you know, when you're coming up with just from the idea, not everything goes through. And it's the same thing with futures. There's an information level. You can do traditional strategy, traditional quote, unquote, but that's a lot of forecasting work, lot of forecasting work. It's a lot of, I would say, narrow band, narrow term, near-term types of work, and strategy is where futurists can inform the strategy function and go more than 3, 10, 20, whatever the rate of changes right. And then it's like I can inform. I can do those types of exercises in my innovation work and I can also do it for the prioritization of my products.

Steve:

And I think your point is doing new venture creation, new business models. Yeah, futures work is to provoke the mind to think differently, but it also is there to inform those who are doing the work to help them stay competitive, stay ahead, but with reasonable navigate the uncertainty of the future ahead, but with with reasonable navigate the uncertainty of of the future. And I think that's I mean I I find that very when you see it kind of trickle in and people's light, like the light bulbs go off and they see the value in that. That that's for me rewarding. What is, what is the most rewarding parts for you? Like, what do you, what is, what kind of gives you those smile on your face as you're working with clients?

Nik:

You're like, yes, like they got it, or what is it for you that gives you that? I mean, when you give, when you give presentations, keynotes and a lot of work you do online and whatever you see these people and they there's something, just like something has clicked. And when something clicks and it takes us down a down, down a route that they've never explored before and they end up with something that that's a level of you know, signals and trends and insights. You know, when we look at like the positive, um, challenging effects or whatever and they've got this, and it's like, oh, we need, we need to take this more seriously, we need to consider this more. More importantly, in the scheme things I mean, you talked about portfolios and innovation. Being three years, like I went with this big tech company, which was like applying future thinking to your portfolio. If you look at 100 initiatives, are you going to have a place in the futures that we've explored? And you can tick it. It's like, yes, yes, yes, no, that's going to. Can tick it. It's like, yes, yes, yes, no, that's going to be outdated. It's like, okay, if that's going to be outdated, what needs to come next? What can we put in place today and it's like, oh, and then you're suddenly backcasting and then that's a really important part of what you do, right? So I think? I think that that's really important. So the backcasting element, where you go from, you know, in 20 years time, back 10 years, back five years, back three years, and then you can basically start to see the leaps that are needed and the gaps. Now, where don't we have the technology or where do we have the technology that is in early stages of being development?

Nik:

I, I was literally going down this route of neuromorphic biological computing earlier today. I was doing some research, and then you look at DNA as a storage device and then it's like crikey, the world is the matrix. But then it's interesting to think about all of these things and where we're going to stumble, where, where we're going to stumble and where we're going to be able to um go forward. In fact, for um, for facing our futures. There's an entire chat.

Nik:

It's the lost chapter. I think it's actually on futuristcom um and it was a. It was a story about a girl called jacasta who, who became implicated in in a in a backstreet um communicated in in a in a backstreet um deal for data where her body was the? Uh, was the storage device? Oh nice, my publisher didn't like it in the middle of a sort of a non-fiction book, anyway, whatever. Um, and it's kind of interesting when we start to do these things and then start to play and and see how clients start to draw the lines as well, and oftentimes, I'll be honest, steve, there's a lot of clients that are so stuck in their quarterly targets, yearly targets, that they get enthused briefly and then they just go back to their work and then I mean, this is what's happened in silicon valley or whatever. Basically all of the companies have cancelled their, their big futures projects. It's all about profit. It's all about how many people we can lay off this month to hit our profit targets.

Steve:

Um, you know it's uh, it's crazy wonder if you know you have mentioned I want to go come back to a few things, especially futurescom. But you mentioned future camp and you know, you and I both are, you know, know amber well, and she's, she's wonderful and she helps you. Like we're gonna give her a call, shout out, so she uh listen. But I love amber, amber. I met amber.

Steve:

She came to nomdex as a student, grad student, as a cyborg, uh, anthropology, it was just great. It was just great. It was just the humans, it was just she was just so left of center, which is what I just love so much. And I do wonder if there's room again for doing those types of events, I think. I think people are sufficiently like, um, wondering what the future, like the uncertainty Cause I, I think of COVID and the work I did during that with organizations to kind of rethink processes, rethink systems because of of a pandemic or just something that completely throws it at the center. I I do wonder if that is something that you know how we can bring the community together, but I don't know. I mean, I do you think there there's room for that again?

Nik:

I'm around an event called dark futures for for six years. Eventually it was, uh, it was in toronto, toronto, vancouver, san francisco, um, jp morgan gave me their their event space in san francisco to run. I was going to do it in new york.

Nik:

I had a really cool and it was the idea that you could have like five talks, 15 minutes to talk about the hidden systems and the dark futures and, um, and now the world, it it's like the world's been turned up to a volume of 15 and everything, sharp relief, and you can see all the badness and the goodness and everyone's out of the shadows and so the event's kind of dead. And it's like you talked about gnome decks and there's like bar camp and I based yeah, you can't base up and it's like could you build these underground interesting edgy counter counterculture festivals? It's almost like there is no counterculture anymore because people are okay with weirdness out out in the open. But it's not really weirdness, it's just normality. You're, like you know, really framed in a completely different way, right, and you know, really framed in a completely different way, right, and you know, I used to go to xox over fest down in um, down in portland, and yeah, it's like it was well go south by.

Steve:

When it was font font geeks and web designers in 2004, it was like it was like 2500 of your closest web nerd friends and now it's like you know well, it's a completely different world. But I've been going, you know, and I I went two years ago and even that event itself it's. I think it's also generational because I think, uh, you know I'm a big strauss and howe person like generational. If you look at generational theory, look at, look at the, the period I mean I, you know the 2005, 2006, like pod camp, bar camp, all those, those were millennials at a certain age, you know, when there's, and they're community driven, they're peer driven.

Steve:

The generation of that age now is not that they're much more conservative, they're much more. I think they've been through so much with COVID, with so much systemic change, change especially here in the states or across europe, maybe just in the western, and I know there's a lot of listeners in other parts and there's been a lot of change all over the world. So I think, to your point, there's a maybe a different kind. That should be a different kind, but I, I, maybe it's time has passed, maybe it cyclically will come again, I don't know, but um, yeah, it was the gen Xers that built these events right, and I think that's really good.

Steve:

I'm of that generation. I'm a Gen Xer.

Nik:

And so I don't want to get too. You know, gen Xers are better than millennials Gen Xers were just… More of just motivation, right?

Steve:

Gen Xers are nomads. Right, we're the kind of fixer. There's a different set of motivations, a different set of upbringing. Yeah, no, no, there's no us versus them. It was more of the timing of it and the generational era, or the era of the ages of people. That's all. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get yeah, indeed.

Nik:

so I you know, yeah, you know I, I miss it, and and covid covid shot, shot it all dead like and and because it was such an alternative crew of people, and people are allowed to be immune, deficient or worried about infection, or, like you know, I'm an extrovert and introvert. I just want to be left alone. I'm going to go for a nap after this talk.

Steve:

Get all that energy out, brother, just get it all out and go for a nap. Yeah, yeah, all that energy out, brother, just get it all out, go for a nap, yeah, yeah.

Nik:

So this is kind of how it is right, like we don't necessarily want to get out and covid sort of killed that spirit somewhat. Um, I mean, it's like south by southwest, you know, is bruce sterling even involved anymore? Right, and it's like you know. But bruce sterling's and end addresses were like it. But you've got people like douglas rushkoff that are going to be there this year and whatever you know, maybe they give the mantle to him. In fact they should, because douglas rushkoff is awesome. And if, if the listeners have never read anything by douglas rushkoff, go and listen to team human, his podcast, and, uh, read his book called siberia life in the trenches of hyperspace from like 1994. Um, the real, like the beginning. It was like dmt and vr, terence mckenna journal and, yeah, the early doors of the internet and hackers you know, pure mathematicians are going to change the world.

Steve:

It's a beautiful thing yeah, I do, yeah, no, no, and I know we're um, I want to. We're kind of up on um time for the, for the show, and we're going to have. I know we'll have a part two, definitely Um, but you know, I think it was we kind of get some com you. You know, you, glenn heimster, you kind of you've been a steward in that. You've kind of taken that there on. Is this mantle? There's so much body of work there, you know, and it's like you look back at that like what continues to inspire you and like what is, what does that mean for you?

Nik:

you know, looking at the edges and looking at the people doing doing the work without any praise, without any recognition, with very little funding, that's really pushing forward thinking in whole new ways. You know, still looking for the people in the caraculture and that excites me. Um, it does excite me. I mean, I I traveling around and you know, I sort of I'm in rooms with like associations and organizations and it really excites me to meet people that come out up to me afterwards and like have conversations about what they've done. I mean, um, I did a keynote on the future of agriculture and this, uh, this 80 year old woman came up to me, this large uh cell phone, smart smartphone she was like 80 or something like that and she goes look, I can control.

Nik:

Uh, you know, I've got internet things and controllers on my grain, on my grain feeder, and she was showing me how she controls it and it's like it makes you realize that the world's a lot closer than than maybe we're led to think, that more people are actually sort of on the same sort of trajectory of understanding what comes next. I mean how important that is. You know, you still got a lot of people that are knuckle draggers. They're like sort of laugh and like, oh you know, we just want to, just want to, you know, just cause chaos and whatever. But I think that's a minority. So when I, when I travel around and I meet people, people are stoked. I, I did a when I did the UN, wipro, ypro keynote, ypo keynote it was my last slide was a picture drawn by an Indian kid on the future of transportation and he'd imagined like that there would be T-Rexes that you would ride and control with your brain.

Steve:

That's pure play there. That's awesome.

Nik:

It's pure play, future right and that. That. That makes me excited and everyone in the room was smiling and it's like that's what we want. I sent it to my kid who's four and a half, and he was like whoa, you know, it's like this, is it? This is what we do. It's like you know, and you know we can talk about working with kids to do futures work as well, because that's really important yeah, I mean the, the teaching children.

Steve:

I mean, if the futures fluency is not just the adults, I mean there's, there's always two, there's two courses. I think that should be taught in high school futures thinking and personal finance, how to, how to you know budget and pay. You know, you know the real world, how much the real world costs and paying off. You know dealing with all that. But that's right. But also thinking about a better world. Yeah, right, completely. I mean I, I've, I've worked with um, you know the uh teach the future organization and that you know that is one of of the I would think one of the most important organizations in our space. What do you let's talk about that and teaching kids, like, do you ever have a chance to teach kids the future? Do you ever have the chance, or what do you think about that?

Nik:

I did when I was living in vancouver. I used to go and do lectures a lot. I've done a little bit in toronto as well. I'm going to you know universities, you know people in their like late teens, early 20s, and that's still a good age to chat to people about. Have I gone into schools to do it? You know I did about this time last year. I was in a school situation where kids were like 15 to 18. And that was really interesting. The kids are like almost shocked, you know, but it was almost like a permission for them to really think differently about how the world works, right. So so I do get an opportunity, but not as often as I'd like to do.

Steve:

Yeah, A lot of. I mean schools have a tendency to teach to the middle, so and and kind of pushes out the real edge thinking. So I think having that, that kind of space to do that, is wonderful.

Nik:

It's why school didn't work for me, steve, but as soon as I got to university, it was a rush.

Steve:

Yeah, no same. For me it was always what I wanted to do. So I think I always like to kind of wrap with the legacy question. I think we're both dads. We both have young, young kids. It's like what, when you think about the body of your work and you're thinking about looking back, like what, what impact do you? Hope you it has? Like what do you when you look back at a life well lived, you know?

Nik:

what do you I want? I want to have world. I want to influence people that change the world like a very big level. You know, like being in Geneva in rooms full of people, the director general I did a prerecord for a keynote, the UN, european commission, and it was all about your transportation, that every minister from every country around europe and beyond is in a room talking about it like having that level of impact. You know, that's what, that's what I want. You know, making big structural investments of multi-billion dollars and places of change.

Nik:

I, I sort of I'm part of a speaker's network and, uh, and, and there was like you know what's your 10 year plan and you'd see everyone else. I'd like to earn this much money and my 10 year plan is to get an invite to speak at the Bilderberg convention, which is you're in a room with every western leader in a Chatham House scenario, a room with every western leader in in a chamhau scenario, and and there are things that are shared and discussed and worked through together that fundamentally changes how the world works structurally, culturally, um, societally, economically, technologically. That's it. I'm in the game for the, I'm in the game for the big fish, right, um, and? And I love everything else as well, but I'm here for that. That's why I'm here. I was in Geneva last week. That's why I'll continue to travel and I'll go to meetings and speak to interesting people that others may not want to speak to, right, because these are the people that have got the power to change the world right, absolutely.

Steve:

Yeah, this has been a great conversation, so people want to find you, which is many. There's a few good places.

Nik:

I've heard the word futurist in the internet and I'm there on page one because I bought futuristcom so you can talk to Nick Badminton. I'm all over the internet, all over YouTube, whatever, but yeah, you can go to Nminton I'm all over the internet, all over youtube, whatever.

Nik:

But yeah, you can go n-i-k, not n-i-k-o-l-i-s, it's you can do. Nicholas at futuristcom, contact me through that website. Um, linkedin, I'm incredibly busy on linkedin. It's always been a good platform for discussion. Let's hope it continues to be that way. And uh, yeah, I'm easy to find like reach out, let let's work together.

Steve:

That's great, nick. Thanks for being on the show. Well, we're definitely going to have more too. Thanks a lot.

Nik:

Yeah, it is dude, take care, bye-bye.

Steve:

Thanks for listening to the Think Forward podcast.

Nik:

You can find us on all the major podcast platforms and at wwwthinkforwardshowcom, as well as on YouTube under Think Forward Show. See you next.

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