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 138 - Building Future Thinkers with Peter Hayward
Peter Hayward shares his journey from a problem-solving tax professional to becoming one of the most influential futures educators, training hundreds of futurists and co-creating the renowned FuturePod podcast series.
• Finding foresight in mid-career after experiencing existential questioning about purpose
• Joining Richard Slaughter's first Master of Foresight class before eventually succeeding him
• Understanding foresight as developmental - evolving as human consciousness evolves
• Discovering that people seek futures thinking when they can't yet articulate what they want to become
• Recognizing that organizations don't have futures - only people have futures
• Building organizational foresight by aligning personal purpose with organizational purpose
• Creating a "dance" between delivering immediate value and creating space for longer-term thinking
• Using AI as a tool while maintaining human responsibility for context and moral judgment
• Working with frontline employees who bring sophisticated real-world thinking to futures work
• Grounding all futures work in a clear moral foundation, as Wendell Bell advocated
Reach out if you're interested in being featured on FuturePod - Peter welcomes hearing from people who believe they have something valuable to contribute to futures conversations.
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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.
Coming up on today's show.
SPEAKER_01:If I could sort of encapsulate what I think foresight has been for people who find it, it's been at that pivot point where I don't have a language for what it is I want to become. But I'm I I'm saying it's not that. It's this thing, and you're doing jazz hands, but this is imagination, and that's that's the pull. That's the that's the thing that hooked me, but it's also I think the thing that hooks a lot of people is we're in the process of building a language to talk about future that doesn't exist now.
SPEAKER_03:Welcome to the Think Forward Show. Today, we've got a really special guest, Peter Hayward. He's an internationally respected futures thinker, educator, and the co-creator of FuturePod. If you've ever wondered who's been quietly shaping how we teach futures thinking, that's Peter. He ran the Strategic Foresight Master's program at Swinborne University for over a decade, literally training hundreds of the futurists working today. He's also the mastermind behind FuturePod, which just hit its incredible 200th episode milestone. In this episode, we talk about his fascinating journey from problem solving at the Australian Tax Office to becoming one of the leading voices in the futures education. We dive into this concept of peak people and why individual foresight is just as important as organizational strategy. We explore how a simple decision to try podcasting ended up creating one of the most influential platforms in the futures community. It's a compelling conversation about education, systems thinking, and the heart of building a community around the future. So before we get going, I'd like to ask a small favor for you to like and subscribe if you're watching this on YouTube, and to just subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast player. It really means a lot. All right, let's get started. Peter, welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks, Dave. Great to be here.
SPEAKER_03:Uh many of you in the audience probably know Peter's name from Future Pod, which is one of the best futures podcasts out there. I definitely uh standing on the shoulders of giants building my show, learning from him. Uh but many of you may not know Peter. So uh could you kind of share your journey and how you have uh cross-universe of futures. Yeah, the quick story.
SPEAKER_01:The quick story. Well, look again, I've um like a lot of the people that I've spoken to and you've spoken to, I was a mid-career professional who found foresight in mid-career. If you wind me back to what I was before I found foresight, I was a precocious boomer, um, third child of depression parents who instilled in me hard work and education. I was the first person to go to university in my family when education when they opened up the university system in the 70s. Uh I was trained as an economist accountant. I was encouraged by my parents to go into government. Um I was a classic problem solver and a voracious reader. I crashed um sort of mid you know 40s, where I started to bump into before I knew about the Maslow hierarchy of needs. I think we touched on it in uni, but I started to bump into the actualization purpose stuff without knowing what it was. I went through at least three cycles of what I'm sure we would now call depression. Um it was more what I would describe as, you know, dark night of the soul, but really not that dark. Um just trying to work out what I wanted to be, what yeah, when I grew up, uh, did a lot of development works, um had a, you know, did a bit of work with psychologists. Eventually someone just said to me, Look, I think you're bored. I think you just need to go out there and open yourself up again and start learning stuff and meeting people. And I found at that time I sort of I'd kind of floated into doing futures work. Uh while I was technically trained, I got a bit bored with just being a technician. Got interested in change, why people change, how people changed. And it ever all past took me to the future without knowing what this thing was. And then happenstance, serendipity, I bumped into someone who told me about a course starting up literally twenty miles from where I lived in Melbourne. Uh, the Richard Slaughter was starting the Master of Foresight. And so I was in class one, day one of the beginning of that course, uh, with three other students and Richard Slaughter. It was terrifying. Sitting literally across the desk from a person. And his view was he had he had like 150 books that I that I assume you've read.
SPEAKER_03:Um I've read a few of them. Yeah. I read a lot of a lot of research papers. Yeah, he is quite he was quite prolific. Still is impactful on the street. Still is. Yeah, still coaching.
SPEAKER_01:Anyhow, um, rolling on, finally decided that it was time for me to leave the the government that I'd been in and out of for quite a while. Richard offered me a PhD position, I jumped into it. Richard, of course, was planning to leave the university, and so I became his um succession plan. And I took over the yeah, I took over the running of the Foresight course with Joe Voros's wonderful help. We ran it for another, oh, probably I don't know, 15, 16 years. Um and uh then I left the university and um started FuturePod with a couple of my uh ex-students, uh Rebecca Meat and Mindy Uri. And um yeah, I do still dabble as a practitioner, pracademic, I suppose you'd say, hate writing.
SPEAKER_03:Um pracademic.
SPEAKER_01:Love talking to people like you and started FuturePod probably as a vanity project, seriously, with you know trying to talk to the people that were my heroes, uh, and Rebecca's and Mendy's and everyone else, the other. That's it. Yeah, here I am. FuturePod's now, probably going on for its sixth year, just recorded and published, I think, our 223rd podcast.
SPEAKER_03:Wow, that's impressive. That is most people can't make it to five. You know, no, if you look at it's it's like I wish there was a way just from like if from a glance, like if something was like date, you know, dated. I mean, you don't want to like, you know, delete something, right? But it's like if something is, let's just say hasn't been published six months or a year, right? It's like well, when you look at a lot of pot a lot of shows, like when I was doing research for Think Forward um to bring it back, was yeah, there was a lot of like six or eight episodes of things, or it's you know, people would sputter up, and you definitely have to keep a uh a pace and you definitely have to love doing this, which I do. I mean, I just love I'm a curious person and just talking to people like you and so many others we've had on the show.
SPEAKER_01:I think it was almost an extension of blogging. In other words, I sort of I came out of the blogger sphere through the nineties. And you know, when you were blogging, um the rule was you had to have at least six six things written before you put your first one out because it takes time. And when we released FuturePod, we did 12 in studio interviews before we released number one.
SPEAKER_03:Um That was the same. I I had about eight in the can. Because you need to have a backlog. You do, you absolutely do, because some things get rescheduled, like you and I were supposed to talk a few months ago. You were under the weather, didn't you know, things life life happens, right? Um yeah, it's it's funny that you talk about the blogosphere. Like I started in podcasting in 2006 with like Podcamp. I remember when it first like there's Adam Curry and like, I don't know, five, five to ten others. Like it was so early and nascent, and you saw it rise, and then it was in a dark place for a while, you know, but then I think it's found its footing, especially with long-form conversations, um, you know, media, can't even call it new media anymore, but just the way that you can get information completely democratized. Yeah. And that's been exciting for me. You know, for me, uh evangelizing this space, we all seem to come through it accidentally, uh, but loving future, loving the work and loving the way that I can communicate the future is a deeply important thing for me. And you know, your PhD work, I want to talk about you you studied like individual futures. Like what did you focus on like when you were going through that process? What did you find the PhD work that resonated with you? Like that helped you kind of connect with it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, my PhD was uh an experience.
SPEAKER_03:Uh my my wife has one. I I was the uh I I I I I I tangentially got a T uh uh a P you know dissertation and PhD too. So yeah, I hear I hear you, man.
SPEAKER_01:I think I mean I didn't have long in the university, probably I don't know, 15, 16 years. Um I think I was fortunate that I got in to the PhD things before it really, they really ramped up the professionalism and methodology. Um so I think I was fortunate that I was allowed to kind of just really do it, do what I wanted to do with a low level of supervision. That wouldn't have happened by the time I left the university. Yeah, so what I studied, again, I we we talked about this off camera. I mean, I came out of I learnt I came to higher education out of a certainly uh what you would call a business education focus. I did a lot of training in-house where you taught accountants and lawyers and economists. They are a very, very hard audience to work for. If you're not constantly entertaining them, challenging them, they basically will either pull out a textbook or walk out. And so I was taught to educate adults by what I called edutainment. Is you had to be constantly interesting, you have to be constantly provocative, you had to push them, you had to be open to them challenging you and be able to defend your position, but not defend it like I'm on a pillar and I'm better than you. That just makes you a target. It's more that I have to prove myself as an adversary, a worthy adversary, shit, you know, steel sharpening steel. So that's kind of the way I learned the craft, so to speak, of adult education. When I came to university, I also did a lot of personal development work. Um, just privately. I was I was I was drawn to what you would call consciousness development, um, you know, interior development, theorists like Ken Wilbur and others, they they interested me. I knew bits about them, did a lot of development. So when I came to university, I kind of had this background of personal of you know, doing doing personal work and also this kind of notion of teaching professionals how to push their understanding of things. And so my PhD was in the development of foresight. I I taught in both the MBA course, but I also had this wonderful thing called the Master of Foresight. And so I was able to develop an instrument based on a few theories of developmental psychology, moral development, um, self-development, and values development. And I was able to run an instrument on the first year of the masters of foresight and the first year of the MBA and look at those cohorts as they went through their first year as to what developed. And I had a theory that something was developing. Um I didn't know what it was, and that was that was the PhD. So PhD was looking, and what Richard then asked me to do, because he was my supervisor, Richard wanted it to move from at what point do we start do we at what point does individual development, in other words, I am a you know more conscious, more aware human being, do we pivot into social? In other words, does social development where we s where we move from I language to we language? Does that run on tracks with individual development? Or does individual development can it like become a kind of bulwark or foundation for social foresight? Because that was the thing that Richard was personally interested in. He wrote a paper called From Individual to Social Foresight. That was kind of my thesis was I'm looking at individual development because it was individuals that interested me. Richard was interested in that, but also wanted me to look at and hypothesize how social foresight emerges, because that was the thing that Richard saw we were lacking when when he sort of, you know, and when he continues to do his work, he still sees us lacking this ability to practice social foresight.
SPEAKER_03:How would you say he defines social foresight, like like specifically?
SPEAKER_01:I think it's closer to what you would call wisdom. It's closer to where people are acting in their in their interests, but also in the interest of others, and the others include the generations coming after us. So it's that ability to join the generations up, not just going back in time, but also joining up with the generations going forward. The generations who don't have rights, who aren't even thought of. But it's that in my language, Richard would say it much more eloquently, but I'd talk about a circle of compassion. How how far can you stretch your circle of compassion towards the unborn not here? Can you take your almost paraphrasing, you know, the New Testament, can we extend our circle of compassion to the meek, to the poorest, to the you know, that's yeah, it's remarkable when people can think beyond themselves to include others. And yeah, the development of social foresight, the development of social wisdom uh is certainly I I would say Richard's that's been the one track that Richard's been on and is still on today.
SPEAKER_03:When you talk about individual foresight, if you compare that to personal futures, would they be the same thing or would they be different?
SPEAKER_01:Uh again, my uh I'm always very um barr not embarrassed, but yeah. So what my theory was when I finished up looking at the research, Steve, was that people developed again, I'm a developmentalist, so I look at foresight as an emergent property of developing human consciousness. So the foresight you practice when you are, and I again I'm gonna use the labels that people call I don't like them because they're hierarchical. Well, I'm sorry, I'm gonna go with them. If we talk about people having conventional values, conventional approaches, then there's a conventional form of foresight. Now, if foresight exists along with all the other paraphernalia about thinking, imagining, moral structures, everything. It's not different, it's simply and it's part of. And if we push, if we learn, if we experience our way into post-normal, post-conventional, um then foresight changes. The theorist who was central to my work was Susan Cook Kreuter, who did her work on self-development. And Susan had a beautiful phrase to for describing development generally, and she said from really birth to end, but we have we go through a phase which is like a helix. We step through the stepwise construction of a permanent self, a permanent enduring self. And then when we get to the permanent self, we don't stop. Well, we can, is we then move into the realm of the stepwise deconstruction of the permanent self.
SPEAKER_03:So we spend our life stuff right there, man.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I mean, that's it. I mean, you know, you think of your again, if you can go back to your, you know, you know, when, you know, through the adolescence, you know, you, you know, you know, can I get a job? Will someone love me? Will I be in a relationship? Will I be reliable? You know, can I become a member of my society? Yeah. And so you have all this stuff you've borrowed and learnt about building yourself towards this, I'm going to be this person, which could be, you know, sitting in the corner office, you know, managing 250 people, earning X figure, you know, living in you've got all the extrinsic and extrinsic stuff that you know says, well, this is what I'm going to become, and you move towards it. And then, of course, the funny thing is when you finally get to that point, you're in the office and got the job and got the bank balance and whatever else. Well, the muse, the questioning self, for most people doesn't stop there. And that that pivot point from what in Jane Lovinger and Cook Groyer's model of development, where she talked about the highest level of conventional development, is a structure that she called achiever. It's also very similar to Robert Keegan's work, but then it flips into this deconstruction where you deconstruct your prior self to liberate and emancipate yourself and others. It's a it's a it's a fascinating thing. And and so the story, which I'm going to bore you with and bore your listeners with is when I was sitting in the Master of Foresight orientation or kind of trying to sell the course to prospective students, I'd be standing there, you know, along with the MBA and the Master of Marketing and whatever else, and I'm there, the Master of Foresight. People would walk up to me and say, What's this course about? And I'd tell them. And the funny thing that people were saying to me was they were saying, I don't want to do an MBA. So that's what they'd actually say to me. And they'd say, Well, what's your course? Because I don't want to do an MBA. When you think about it, it's a weird way to buy something. Where you where you go up to the person who's selling something and say, It's not this, is it? The answer is no, it's not. And this idea of talking in not language is what Groyer found when you moved to post-conventional, because you only have the way to describe yourself as you were. What you don't have yet is a language for describing what you want to become. And so you describe yourself as I'm not that on the path to becoming the the I don't know what to say I am. And that that that pivot, if I could sort of encapsulate what I think foresight has been for people who find it, it's been at that pivot point where I don't have a language for what it is I want to become. But I'm I'm saying it's not that, it's this thing, and you're doing jazz hands. But this is imagination, and that's that's the pull. That's the that's the thing that hooked me, but it's also I think the thing that hooks a lot of people is we're in the process of building a language to talk about future that doesn't exist now. I mean, you've done it in your book.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, thank you. But it's it's the language is definitely trying to communicate the language of futures, not the future, but to talk about it in a not so abstract, this is too far, this is far away, we're not gonna, it's not relevant to us. I think the the thing that I and you and I both share is, you know, is organizational foresight application, right? It's like how do you build competency? It's always stupefied me. And I think it goes to the credibility of the futures field and where its focus has been. Like, is it a job or is it a skill set, right? When you look at strategy groups, why they don't go farther out to really understand. Just it somewhere along the lines, and this probably in the 70s or 80s, there was a the politics of this basically made it like almost heretical. And but what's happening now is more organizations are seeing that it has, and you know, Renee, like Warbeck's work on you know tracking uh profitability to organizational capability, organizational foresight capability has been a big uh boon in that way. I mean, when you just what you shared with personal futures, like how do you make these, how do you get these two levels to interact? Like where do you see gaps? Yeah, I know. I'm sorry, it's a big the big sledgehammer question.
SPEAKER_01:It's a big question.
SPEAKER_03:And it is, it is. It's my job. It's my job.
SPEAKER_01:I think again, my trite but serious answer, Steve, is organizations don't have futures. Only people have futures. Only people have futures. So at any particular point, when you're working in an organizational sense, you're not working for the organization, you're working for the people that are the organization. So talking about how do you how do you create organizational foresight, there is there is no such thing as organization for foresight. There are people who are foresightful thinkers. Now, will they share as part of their future path the purpose of the organization? So to me, everything links back to purpose. If you bring people in that are really good thinkers, both cognitively but also have got strong moral basis, social commitment, then if you're going to engage them to what I call we futures, us futures, then you gotta give them some you gotta give them something really, really good to hook into because why should this person work for you? Why should this person share their future journey with the journey you want your organization to go on? They have to become they have to become part of them have to become the organization. And that's how Yeah, I think it yeah. And that's it. But that's hard for organizations if you haven't got a good purpose for the organization.
SPEAKER_03:Well, you know, organizations, interesting to say, like it's not they don't really have anything because it's the people, but it's also called a going, you know, they use the term going concern. It's a question of the viability of it long term, the people that come and the people that go. Yeah, it is not that the it it is made of the people, right? But the people have their own individual uh goals and motivations. It was really about how do you form a competency around this type of skill. But I I I understand what your uh your take is on this. It's interesting.
SPEAKER_01:I think again, our friend Rene Ruhrbeck has done tremendous research in this area and and Rene has studied organizations, and they and certainly there are organizations that have enduring futures capacity. Um that, of course, stems from leadership. Because if you haven't got a leadership that embraces the not here and not now, then you're never going to have foreside. Yeah, you're never gonna have foresight. And it's more than culture, because culture, I'm a little bit of a culture heretic as well.
SPEAKER_03:Culture is Well, it's more of like culture reinforcing it, not individually, but just being part of the DNA of the of it.
SPEAKER_01:Well, again, Andy talks about this. When Andy talked about way, way back, when Andy talked about permission foresighting, I think when you're in a foresight, when you're in an organization delivering foresight in whatever shape or form it is, then you've got you you have to deliver. You have to deliver value, which means by its nature, you're leaning into short-term or measurable outcomes. In other words, you don't promise something in two years, three years, trust me, I'm a doctor. No, no, no. You've got to you've got to actually generate trust in the moment, at the same time buying the kind of credibility that you can stretch it out. But if you're not delivering, which mightn't be very foresightful, it might be very, very tactical. But if you've got a you've got a dance between the tactical, measurability, add value now, to then hold the space to be able to stretch out time, to stretch out the credibility. If you and in successful organizations, they understand that dance. The dance between the here and now, the dance between the not here, not yet, and so corporate memory. So I I it's not surprisingly the organizations that are good at foresight have been good at foresight for a while. So the corporate memory reminds itself that futures and foresight is central to who they are when they work together.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. It's uh very much about embedding it. I've I've talked about this in many ways, and I've heard the term like being stealth futurist. You know, the product work I did, I brought in techniques to be more efficient and more focused and how we looked at it, right? Because that was a still a product, but it was still doing some futures techniques using some of the tools, right? The skill the skills. And then the innovation, which is where I found my sweet spot to your point of like getting something on the radar, making investments, doing things that also allow you to look at a radar from different horizons, is something that speaks the language of that. The pure futures work that I see to my sadly, is it's it's it's like a novelty, right? You have people come in and they do something once a year, and you it's like part of the strategic planning process, and they put a report out and you put it in a drawer. And that's sad. And that's that's uh what I think we can change. I think it started to. I think there's an evolution happening. Um, I think there's easier access. We talked about this on when I was on your show about artificial intelligence and you know, AI-driven foresight. It's not letting AI be your personal futurist, but it is allowing you to have um tools at your disposal that give you the power of many people that you couldn't have had before, which is extremely compelling in that way. If you know how to synthesize and get the information out of it, yeah, it can it can be very powerful for you as a as an individual, getting yourself a you know, a bump in your career, I think is uh worthwhile.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I I'm biased, Steve, because my background of training in total quality management and quality circles meant that I'm biased to pushing foresight to as low a point of the organization as you can. Because it's the people doing the work, not the people sitting in the suites who think they know what the work is. But if you get a chance to do foresight and futures work with people on the line, they're some of the best work you'll ever do. And those are people that are juggling, I'm I'm here for a job, I need a paycheck, I've also got a family, I've also got kids, I've got a partner. They've got people who've got, you know, they're really sophisticated thinkers because they are trying to juggle work as part of a life, as part of a family. And when you give them the tools of foresight, when you get them to sit down and talk about the imagined future, their preferred future, the weight of the past, they they are some of the most powerful conversations you'll have. Obviously, it's a lot about who they are and who they're with and what their point in and what their point in life is. But to me, the experiences I had as a practitioner, yeah, I did the C suite work and I did the big corporate workshops where you sit down. Yeah, I'm that's good. But the work that really floated my boat was. When you got a chance to go in and work with the people on the line and do their futures.
SPEAKER_03:You mentioned before. Sorry, you mentioned before that you had the it was about the action of taking things in the short term, like the now term, if you will. So how do you bridge that gap between futures thinking and the actual kind of change making? Like how do you how do you connect that?
SPEAKER_01:Well again, for me, it's about what's a person motivated by. And as I said, foresight is developmental, in my opinion. In other words, if people if people have short-term needs as the dominant things in their life, then that's what you work on. You practice foresight in the short term because that's where they will, that's where they are. It's the same with decision makers. A person who's got a decision to make, if it's a short-term decision, can you help them? If you can't, leave them alone. If you can, help them. It doesn't matter if it's a six-month decision or three-month decision. The experience of once people once people have a positive experience of something, an enjoyable experience of something, a joyful experience of something. Once something touches their heart as well as their head, then you've actually got a bit more interest to take it out further. If people have a positive experience with foresight, if it's useful for them, if it helps them, if it gives them agency, motivation, creativity, then you that's the beginning of foresight. That's the beginning of teaching people foresight.
SPEAKER_03:Well, what's the one thing you've learned that you wish you knew? Like I'm serious. Because you now have a perspective. Yeah. It's a kind of corny question, but it's like there's a perspective here, especially with how the field has gone from almost kind of, I dare I say, dying in like the mid-2000s, to now it's a robust space that is continuing, you know, real, real futurists, not you know, just calling yourself one on LinkedIn, but but real practitioners, right? Like if you were to be at that point now, what would you what would you wish you could tell yourself? I've got so many, I've got so many things as let it rip. Just let it rip. More than one. The sky's the limit. Go for it, man.
SPEAKER_01:Just as an in-house futurist, when I got when I got the chance to to create a nascent foresight capacity in a large organization, the thing I regret I did was I too quickly moved to large scale. I was too keen to do the big scenario workshop and pull all the people in and you know. And it was it what happened when that I mean, it was, yeah, it worked, we got scenarios, but what we'd burnt up was two years of social capital for little return. And I so I regret that I moved too quickly to build too big rather than continuing to grind away and build the the kind of both capacity and appetite. The two have to go together. If you are an in-house futurist, you have to build appetite for this work. You don't you don't get it. Now, when you're a parachute consultant, you don't have to do as much work on appetite. Because they're paying you, they're bringing you in. What I learned, and what again I'll come back to regrets like Breno Brown, yeah, I do learn from regret, it's a wonderful emotion, is when you are parachuted into an organization, then you are freer to say things that people in the organization cannot say because they stay. So I think if you're a parachute consultant, obviously do your due diligence. But one of the reasons you're probably being brought in is your one of your purposes, apart from delivering outcomes, of course. Or being or being blamed or being blamed after the fact. Yeah. Because you're gonna leave. So you can say things that people and I learnt this, and people, yeah, where they want you to say things, to talk the things that they can't talk about, and they don't want to be the one saying, but you can say it and leave. And uh so those are kind of my as I said, if I was starting again and if I was starting again in 2025, then I would be building a practice around personal and organizational foresight integrated in with generative AI. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So happens I'm doing just that. So excellent advice. And it is. No, but let's talk about it. No, seriously, AI is the panacea in the in the hype cycle. Yeah. But where do you think it's where do you think where do you see its value now? Where do you think its value is over the next say five years? Because it's too far of a lifetime for change in AI.
SPEAKER_01:It's it's going to blow industries up by its nature, because it is going to we are, we've been we've been on a cycle now for the last 20 years where we are to use Toynbee's macro history, we are delegitimizing elites and we will be re-legitimizing new elites. So now I'm not calling AI and an elite, it's not. It's still a tool and will remain a tool in the foreseeable future. But one elite industry that is going to be undone, is being undone as we speak, of course, is education, and particularly, of course, the education that I'm most familiar with, which is higher education, postgraduate education. And if you're an educator and you're not sitting down and designing your curriculum course for students to use AI as part of their learning, assessment, development, everything, I don't know what you're doing. So it's around the relationship we have and the persona we want to create with AI. Because AI is still a construct. We still make it it doesn't form a relationship, it's a mirror to who to how we integrate with it, but it can be engineered to be a specific persona. And once you understand that your job is to author the AI you want, to then form the most constructive relationship with it, it's still your responsibility. It's not the AI's responsibility to be what you want. But if you let it form a relationship, then the way it's been programmed, it'll become this kind of you know, blow smoke up your bum kind of thing that kind of says you're wonderful when really you're not. It's not going to kick you in the bum hard enough unless you tell it to. Um, it's not going to be an adult unless you tell it to be an adult. In other words, you need to take responsibility for the relationship and what do you want it to be, and then you work with that relationship.
SPEAKER_03:Change of mind, because for me, the the biggest the education is one that I see disrupted immensely. The other one is uh consulting, the high-end consulting. I used to work for a very big well the biggest. And uh there's a they're trying to wield it in a way that they can use the resources, but in the end. It's no. It's not gonna be there, I think.
SPEAKER_01:No, and as I said, prompt engineering is the skill that people need to learn in the short term. It's not it's it's not gonna be a long-term career as a prompt engineer.
SPEAKER_03:But you need to be I think it's even disappeared now. I think you're gonna be like an agentic and the agents is the new the new the new thing the kids are talking about doing these days.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell And the second thing the second thing about AI, which I think it's gonna put a lot of pressure on us as human beings, because it's is that the value of AI is you've got to have context knowledge to understand if AI is useful or not. In other words, if you have no context, AI is going to give you terrible information because you're gonna go, that's that's rubbish or that's not right. So the onus is going to be on you to have better contextual knowledge such that you can have the best relationship with AI. Otherwise, it's the blind leading the blind. Now, how do you get context knowledge? Well, that's your responsibility to get broad with what you think you understand. I to me, AI is going to push us to be more polymaths than technical. In other words, we need to be ready to do that.
SPEAKER_03:I've always said the two greatest things of being a futurist are curiosity and being an auto-dietter. Absolutely. And being the constant pursuit of new knowledge. And to your point, where I see one of its there's a couple different points along the way of a traditional like uh futures engagement or project, right? The signals research that is manually done or gathered on, you know, I mean, there's a lot of tools, you know, I don't want to name them, but it's like it's so manual, and you're just limited by what you can find. It's like being able to pull that in and and level it up to a uh review process or a synthesis process to your point. If you have no context, it's gonna hallucinate and tell you crazy stuff. That's right. That's right. And if you don't put in the right formats for a scenario or the right framing of it, it's also gonna give you things that you you know, so there's a boundary in that, and I think that's that to me is where the the opportunity of people are like if you're consulting, is like giving the guardrails into place, right? That's like the career advice I give to people. But you know, when you think about futures, right? Like you talked about AI and and futures thinking. Do you think that someone starting on this now, is there anything that they should avoid? Like we talked about what they should do, we talked about things to like kind of read and consume. What's what's the don't go there because it's not it's it's like some things have had their time. Certain scenario methods are not really it's a more complex world, right? It's like it did its job to kind of bring it into frame. But are there certain things, I'm not just talking about tools, but certain things that you know they should avoid.
SPEAKER_01:Great question, Steve. Not something I've actually thought about specifically. I suppose um I think you touched on one, which is I mean, we've always the way I was taught futures in foresight from Richard Slaughter critic coming out of critical integral, was we looked at yeah, we always looked at trend spotting and that and that idea of trying to grab the future as not being the wrong thing to do. It's a completely understandable, helpful, useful thing for some people, but at the same time it's really, you know, what are you doing? I wonder what AI will do to that. I I I think what you're saying, and I tend to think, I think AI can push, can actually make us much better at that, rather but at some level we don't want to be better at that. We don't want to become I don't think our job is to become better trend spotters. I think AI as a trend spotter is probably better than us in terms of signal and noise, provided the person has the context. I don't think you necessarily context, right? So to me, trend spotting if again, if if if you want to get started, if you want to get paid, if you want to get in the door, then trend spotting is a great way to get your first credibility on the ground. And then you know, hopefully start moving to the really juicy stuff uh around you know the emergent disruptive stuff. Again, um I don't I mean I don't know that there are things I'd say a person shouldn't do, because I I think by its nature we're sitting on this, I think we have to be braver than everyone else. Not because we're better, not because we're braver, but I think our job is to, you know, we have to be out there on the front trying the bleeding edge. We have to be trying this stuff. We have to be seeing what works and what doesn't. If otherwise, who's doing it? If you know, if we're futurists, how can we be sitting inside strategic planning processes, you know, five year yada yada yada? How can we be sitting in that now? And then someone comes along and says, how do we use AI to actually do a strategic plan that's a hundred years out? Then the answer's got to be, well, well, actually, we're trying to do that. Not not because we're trying to do it because we think it'll work, but we've got to be trying to do it to see if it can be done or seeing and I think that's that's my how is it's hard to but we have to be really on the bleeding edge and beyond the bleeding edge to to to actually see what's useful and what's not. We have to break we have to waste our time trying things such that people can come back and say, have we got anything that could do X? And you can go, well we could do this. And once again, you've got to build contextual knowledge from doing stuff.
SPEAKER_03:And I think that the one thing that reminds me from just what you just said is I just did an interview with Seal Kramer. She's uh Kramer, she's in uh in the Netherlands and uh she's a Dutch futurist, and I love her statement, is about I think we need to avoid asking all the right questions because we seem to be kind of framed. She likes she's about asking the wrong questions. So, you know, I think for me, like the in in interviewing you, uh I wanted to ask you about kind of inspiration. Like what's been the most unexpected source of inspiration you've had, you know, you kind of come across, it's influenced foresight, your foresight, your work.
SPEAKER_01:I suppose it's it's it it's an old one, Steve, which is what Wendell Bell said. He said, All futures work is moral.
SPEAKER_03:Wish I could have interviewed him.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, I did the I did I did the remembering Wendell, so that's the best I could do.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Where I had two of his friends and two of his colleagues talked about him. But his point that he put in the second book of Foundation to Future Studies is that all futures work is morally based. And what Wendell said, it is our responsibility to examine and develop a moral basis for the work we do. And that to me is still the thing that we have to have ex we have to have a personal moral basis for our work. So you've got that, and that can be faith-based, but whatever. But this is what this is this is your moral basis. Then there is the work you're asked to do. Now, professionals can manage both. They can manage where they are, and then they can understand the work they're being asked to do. And if there's a conflict, which I think there should be, by its nature of us holding moral bases, we should be in tension with those. Tension's not a bad thing. Tension is that point where we learn about ourselves, we learn about our basis. Is it is it a good enough one for me and us and how far the circle of compassion goes? And you learn about your moral standing, your moral foundation by engaging people who have different moral bases. You don't, you don't just work with people like you, you go and work with people not like you. And I think I still think that we don't, I mean, I didn't do enough as an educator to teach, not to teach a particular moral basis. It's not about this is a good moral basis, you know. No, it's about do you have a basis? Do you know what it is? Do you know what it do you know what its precepts are? Do you know what its foundational axioms are? And I because to me, and and so when I you would have heard it on some of my podcasts, when I when I interview a person who's got a strong philosophical moral basis for their work, I jump in because I love it, because this is a person that I can really push on them. I can push on them, and I did find in my practicing experience, Steve, that people, both practitioners and clients that had a strong faith base were some of the most interesting people to work with. Because they were not uncomfortable with the notion of a moral basis. They were actually literate in the idea. They were also they weren't always comfortable with challenging it, but they at least were literate in what it meant to have a moral basis and everything stemming from a moral basis. That's kind of that's kind of a long answer to that that mightn't even be the answer to the question that you wanted.
SPEAKER_03:No, that's great. I think as as we uh wrap things up, you know, what I kind of want to always ask, you know, people have had uh incredible careers, and yours is continuing to go in gangbusters. Like, when you look back, you know, what do you want the imp we you you know, you talked about Wendell, right? And kind of having that kind of a you know, nice, really nice episode. I listened to that with his colleagues. Like, what kind of impact do you hope you have on the field and just the world?
SPEAKER_01:Um yeah. I I again I'm I'm one of I think I think you make a contribution to be forgotten. I think um it's not it's the contribution that I think you put the thing in place that'll be there and it might be useful in the future. Yeah. Because I th I mean I think, you know, we all turn up, you know, you know, we all end up as compost. Um which is not a bad thing. Yes. I mean I you know, I have I have a lot of interesting conversations with people who want to extend life, and I'm fully understanding the whole the the whole idea of life extension, but I kind of think it's someone who said that change only happens through funerals. And I'm very conscious that the young can be just carriers of the ideas of the old rather than carriers of their own ideas. So I don't I don't think of legacy future pod. I mean the course that I was involved in with Joe and the others who taught in it, if we made a difference, it went forward in those people's lives that we taught. So I'm I'm happy with that. Future pod, if it has value, it's that it's there. That someone can find it and they can hopefully get use from it. Not through me, but through the conversation, through the materials. So I to me it's around building a capacity that could be useful in the future. And who did it, I less fussed about. I don't I don't there's you know, that doesn't matter, I won't be around. So um that that's kind of it.
SPEAKER_03:Oh I look at the content that I do, uh, the show or the books, and it's about a living, it's about a memory, memory record, you know. Nice. Imagine my son being, you know, 20 years from now, he gets to read books that his dad wrote, you know, he gets a little know a little bit more about me and my my take on the world. And I think you're right with the sh with FuturePod, it's it's you know, it's to become that um data bank because there's a lot of people that you know, the conversations, those people will be gone at some point and it'll carry on. So I think it's a wonderful way to have that legacy. So uh, you know, for us, I just want to say thanks for being on. And if people want to find you, obviously FuturePod, I can do that one for you. But where else, uh where else can they find your work?
SPEAKER_01:Um again, probably again, I'm on LinkedIn, again, posting about Future Pod, but again, just reach out to the pod. Um, and if anybody, and and I make this call, I'm is that if anybody thinks they'd like to be on the pod, um then yeah, drop me a line and say, hey, I think I've got something worth saying. There's a fair chance, you know, I'll chat to you. Because as I said, this is really I mean, Future Pod, when I started it, and I and I don't want to use the eye too much. When we started Future Pod, the big thing that we wanted to do was honour the people who'd built the field who were still around. That was that was number one. So it was about interviewing people while I was still above ground so they could put in their own words what it meant, why they did it, how that kind of stuff. Then it became well, why don't we then give a shout out to the people doing work now? And okay, fine. So we'll become a little platform, a little kind of you know, soapbox for people that are currently doing it. And then the third thing that emerged was um could we inspire people to get into it? Yeah. So to me, that's if people you know want to use FuturePod, because it's not mine. It's just something I started with a couple of other people, and I'm happy to keep it going. But FuturePod's there if people think it's useful. I was delighted to have you come on and you approach me, which was the wonderful thing, because and because you approached me, then I've then followed up and and yeah, so so so to me it's about we shouldn't be shy about this. I that's one of the things I think you learn as a people is don't be shy. Don't be shy.
SPEAKER_03:It it's funny you say that before we sign off. The one thing that I learned making um Browncoat's Redemption, uh it's a film, a fan it's a years ago, 15 years now, 15, 16 years. Um I I went from being what if they say no? And it's uh my my co-creator, he's like, Well, what if they say yes?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:And that was because the worst thing they can say is no, but it's like, what if they say yes? It's like you just gotta ask. You just gotta just gotta be out there. Because no one's gonna drag you out there. No one's gonna, you know, tell you to do it. And you know, we're all a community. And there are maybe people here and there that are not as I would say friendly in the community or connected in the community, but generally my teachers are a good bunch of they're a good bunch of people. Yeah, not true.
SPEAKER_01:I agree completely.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. So well, everyone check out Future Pod and find Peter on LinkedIn. He is an amazing and friendly individual, and as you can tell, knowledgeable and uh quite quite a uh quite a deep thinker. So thank you again, Peter. Thanks, Dave. Goodbye.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks for listening to the Think Forward Podcast. You can find us on all the major podcast platforms and at www.thinkforwardshow.com as well as on YouTube under ThinkForward Show. See you next time.
