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
Architecting the Future with Radha Mistry | Think Forward EP 150
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One hundred and fifty episodes in, this is the conversation Think Forward was built for. Radha Mistry leads foresight at Arup, and before that she built a corporate foresight practice from a standing start inside a global design software company that did not know it wanted one. It began with an audit she invented on the spot: a hundred interviews that revealed people all over the organization already sensing the future, separately, in different languages, with no way to bring it together.
From there, we get into why placement within the org chart determines whether foresight feeds into real decisions or dies as a deck, why a good scenario should be interrogated like a financial model rather than received as an answer, and what it takes to rebuild futures fluency across 18,000 people. Radha also shares the signals she is watching right now, including one about where governments are starting to live online that genuinely surprised me.
If you have ever tried to make an organization take the future seriously, this hour is for you.
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This Week's Companion Issue
The companion Future Proof newsletter issue built on this conversation, When Everything is a Signal, lands Thursday. It opens a four-part series called Reading Yourself Like a System.
Read on Substack: https://befutureproof.substack.com/p/when-everything-is-a-signal?r=11ae&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Read on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/future-proof-7303526412311842816/
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Chapters
Timestamps are integrated in the episode.
0:00 Design As Future-Making
2:40 Craft, Childhood, And Learning By Making
10:20 Buildings As Long-Term Future Artifacts
17:05 The Futures We Close Off
23:25 Preferable For Whom, And Why
28:10 How A Foresight Practice Gets Built
35:10 The Workshop That Changed The Plan
41:20 Where Foresight Belongs In The Org
50:05 Scaling Foresight At A Global Firm
58:40 Global Context And Humble Sensemaking
1:05:15 Signals To Watch And Final Takeaways
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About Radha Mistry
Radha Mistry leads the foresight practice at Arup, one of the longest running corporate foresight groups in the world, after building the foresight function at Autodesk from scratch. Her path runs from architecture through narrative environments into futures work.
Connect with Radha: https://www.linkedin.com/in/radha-mistry-63024440/
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Go Deeper
📬 Future Proof, my weekly newsletter on foresight and leadership, here on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/future-proof-7303526412311842816/ and in full on Substack: https://befutureproof.substack.com/
🌐 Join the Future Proof Community for conversations about the future: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/10084416/
📖 SuperShifts, my book on the forces reshaping business and society: https://www.supershiftsbook.com/
👤 My website: https://www.stevenfisher.io/ | My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenfisher/
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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.
Design As Future-Making
SPEAKER_06One of my favorite essays for years now, probably for five or six years now, is called Defuturing the Image of the Future. It's written by Andrew Blauveld. It was published in the Walker Center art, um, like their magazine. The first line of that essay is um every act of design is in itself a small act of future making. And the reason that I love that essay is because one of the things he talks about is that in enabling certain futures, you also have to imagine and envision what futures you start to close off to. And so to me, I think that becomes really, really important in things like this when we imagine a future, for example, where cars are taking over every city, right? And roads are being designed in that manner, and perhaps pedestrians and cyclists are in a second and third tier kind of circulation function across the city. What other future are you shutting yourself down to?
SPEAKER_01Rata, welcome to Think Forward.
SPEAKER_06Thank you. Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_01Oh, very much looking forward to this. Um, this this goes to show you, audience, that if you just reach, you know, you never know. They might say yes. You just reach out to people. That's right. But we know a lot of the same people, but it's just really nice to fellow designers. Rata has just an amazing just your journey is amazing. Like how you have gone through from architecture and narrative writing, you know, storytelling, finding foresight, right? So I think before we get started, one of the things I found really cool, because I I heard your name I knew your name and I knew from Julian. It's like you know, Jimmy Mystery, which I know you're not related to. You might be, but it's I don't know. It means craftsman, which I think is cool. Which basically craftswoman, craftsperson. I mean, you are a person that is about craft. I mean, that is the essence, I think, of you when I think of you. Like you are a true person who pursues craft.
SPEAKER_06Well, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I think um it's definitely the desire to like make or find meaning through making, I think is just inherent to who I am. And I think it's in I think it's in my DNA. I think it's in my blood. I don't think I had to do that.
SPEAKER_00Anybody creative listening to this can be like shakes their heads, listen, they're driving in the car going, uh-huh.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, but it's also in my last name. You know, my my my dad was an architect. Um, he's like he's retired now, but he was a licensed architect. He did urban transportation planning. My grandfather before him was an architect. My great-grandfather,
Craft, Childhood, And Learning By Making
SPEAKER_06as far as I understand, was a builder, like a carpenter. And so I just I just grew up around, even my aunt, like I grew up around um uh around building things, around wanting to do that, you know. And I think early on, for you know, one of my earliest memories um of of having access to design as an intentional thing was like seeing my dad in his workshop in the garage in our house in the suburbs of LA County, um, you know, in the 90s, like and and basically like taking scraps from whatever he was making at the time, which was also a hobby of his to do carpentry on the weekends.
SPEAKER_01I'm trying to imagine you as a little kid picking up wood pieces.
SPEAKER_06I'm just Oh, it was my favorite thing. The smell of wood that had just been cut on like a table saw was like my favorite smell. It was my favorite smell, and it was such a yes, and it was such a but imagine being like 10 years old saying that to somebody and they're like, What are you talking about? You know, like especially in like the suburbs of Los Angeles. What do you mean? Like you're sitting in a w workshop all day, like your dad is, you know. And so, but I you know, I love like taking those scraps and just finding things around the house and like just building things with it and creating my own dream worlds and creating my own kind of like exploring my own imaginaries. And it's not something that we got to do in school all the time because it was very academically kind of oriented, of course. And you know, back in that day, like we didn't have as much of this um this like question-led learning that I think my children are experiencing, which is beautiful, uh, or play-based learning. It was very memorize the thing, get it back out on a test, do really good on that. Um, and that will lead you to college.
SPEAKER_01Yes, that reminds me of my sister and I growing up because my sister was outstanding at memorizing and regurgitating, she would have been an excellent actor. I was horrible. Memorizing script, or she would probably been in theater. But me, no. But I remember, but I learned that's a there's a difference, like I retained. You know, I didn't get the A, but now I love you, Lari. You're probably listening. But she didn't, she's fully admits she doesn't really remember anything from school. It's just kind of in one in in the brain and just dump it out, right? Yeah, I think what's everyone fears the technology issues that could be with addiction to tech or blue screens, and I I get all of that, but there's an there's an aspect to how much do you have to learn? Like, you know, my degree's in accounting, I don't use abacuses anymore, right? It's like we use calculators, we use computers. So it's like, what is the layer in which you train? My son is using VR, he's nine.
SPEAKER_06Amazing.
SPEAKER_01And yes, before I get comments that he shouldn't be that young, guess he, I know he's he's quite mature, but he plays this thing called Gorilla Tag where they all run around. It's like I I'm listening to them, it's like they're on the playground. There's a lot of kids and they're all like gorillas running around trying to tag each other.
SPEAKER_04No way.
SPEAKER_01After an hour, the kid is like he ran like, I don't know, a 10K. He's like exhausted, but he also is doing he's a goalie. He's doing goalie training. He's a snowboard, he can he's a snowboarding game. Like he's trained, he's doing things to practice and interface with it. And I keep thinking about you know how you interface, you know, you're you trained as an architect, how you interface as a designer, and you know, you've evolved the lineage. So when did when did you realize that like the tr you're you're still part of the family tradition? Like when did that evolve? Like when did that you did just realize it's kind of in in what sense?
SPEAKER_06And like when did I realize I wanted to be on the street?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I'm I'm sure you'll be I'm sure you'll have your woodworking hut at some point if you don't already. That's my dream.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, I know.
SPEAKER_01I'm sure you know it's in LA, it's space is limited in LA, but like you know, build that little our garage has my husband's gym set up right now, so I lost that battle. Right. Well, there's the backyard, the rota shed, you can call it the rata shed, and the rota shed will be a woodworking space, right? But then you have the but you've continued that as a builder, right? Yeah. When did when did you see you you've just kind of evolved, like you just kind of evolved the tradition.
SPEAKER_06You know, I've here's the thing is like I have always felt because people ask me, like, if you knew everything you knew about your career today, would you have done architecture school to start that off? And I say without a doubt, yes. Because what that afforded me was that architectural education. And I didn't, and I did it twice. Like I did my B arc and I did my MARC because kind of knowing halfway through that I didn't want to be an architect, but I just really loved that architectural education. And I came away from that understanding how to kind of wrap my head around systems thinking, understanding stakeholder engagement, understanding how to put my put myself in somebody else's shoes and think from a place of empathy. Like all of these tools, I think, are really necessary when you're doing futures work, right? How can I envision how this might affect somebody in any given future? And and one of the kind of key points of framing for myself, and I don't think this happened exactly, I hadn't articulated it. I could feel it as a thing, I could feel it as an emotion in architecture school. And it wasn't until I got out that I could articulate, like, wait a minute, buildings are future artifacts. We are, we are signaling something to people, right? About about values that we have placed in this kind of machine in the ground, about behaviors and norms that we anticipate will continue to be behaviors and norms, about the ways in which we believe the city will evolve around this thing, um, about attitudes towards things like climate change and the impacts of sustainable design. Like all of those things are embedded in these layers within this artifact that you are designing, right? And you can look at the landscape of any city and go back and say, okay, that house has been there for a hundred years. There was no built-in HVAC system. That means that either the world was not that hot and you could use passive cooling mechanisms like opening doors and and um having fans and opening windows and things like that. And maybe the people and maybe architects never anticipated that the world would get that hot a hundred years ago, right? Right. And so it's things like that that that made me realize like I am still using architecture as my primary mechanism to understand how the world is going to evolve. Now, does it include the you know, research around emerging technologies? Does it include research around, you know, that's more from a sociological perspective, maybe a little bit of kind of like armchair anthropology here and there? Yes. But I am still thinking about what the world looks like 20, 30, 50 years out. And sitting in a company like Airup, the really cool thing is I can then build those linkages back. And we have tools like backcasting that I'm sure you're familiar with in our foresight work, that allows us to say, if this is the vision of what we would love to happen, if we want to see cities being more connected to natural landscapes, if we want to see children growing up in urban environments that allow their brains to actually be functioning in a healthy way, what does the what does the built environment have to do now to respond to those future desires?
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_01It makes so a couple things come off of that. One is uh, you know, as futurists, I think the best futurists are also historians, right? Macro macro, I mean history in general, but macro history especially, to larger changes in cycles of and pattern. But as somebody who studied, didn't go as far as you, but studied architecture and
Buildings As Long-Term Future Artifacts
SPEAKER_01has a passion for it. I'm also a his I don't know if I'm a histor uh architecture historian, but I definitely studied the different architects. And you can look at buildings and go, that's a Bauhaus. Yes. Or you know, Frank Lloyd Wright's par prairie style, or you can look at Pay. Like you can look at these, or the brutalist of the 70s growing, like growing up in Baltimore, there's a a library that's like a Guggenheim, but it's brutalist architecture, cold and stark. And I always joke, you can tell like science fiction when it was made when you look at the woman's hairstyles, because they never seem to get there right. They're always the victim of their decade. That's right. And it's the same thing with like when you look at buildings, like you look back, and those styles obviously influence, you know, and it just for example, like the gout Gaudi's uh Sagrada Familia finally finished after 126 years, but it's like you look back and it's like you know, what the styles were that created that artifact of the future. It took 125 years to make that artifact.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, and he was in his 30s when he started that. Isn't that wild?
SPEAKER_01He knew it he knew it would outlive him, right? It's like but you that's a futurist. Yeah, that's a futurist, right? And when you look at his, you know, cantilever, his design. I I was looking, I I I don't know if you've been there. I I went there and they showed like how the the weights and balances like the thing should not be standard. Like you wouldn't think it it should work, but it does. And that's someone who invented a a building style on top of like the structure. And yeah, to your point, like you think about sustainability, like what would it and that's exactly when I think about like Paris. You you talked about like are they gonna have heat? Like when they built like those walk-up apartments in Paris, they didn't have elevators, they kind of stuck them in the middle as like an afterthought, like after the fact, right? Many splits were created in Europe because they couldn't get central air conditioner into old buildings. They just had to put a pipe in and you know, put a put a hang a heat pump off the side of the or the top of the roof. And you're right, it's like how do you create structures and how do you evolve when you design futures, right? It's that's uh and I think that applies to everybody's type of work because it's like when you you have to be thinking what is the impact of your work, not just tomorrow, but like yeah, long term, right?
SPEAKER_06Yeah, and and how will the impact of your work um change, the perceived impact of your work change over time, right? Because what might seem like a great idea, I mean, we talk about this when we talk about like so one of my favorite essays for years now, probably for five or six years now, is called Defuturing the Image of the Future. It's written by Andrew Blauveld. It was published in the Walker Center art, um, like their magazine. And he talks the first line of that essay is um every act of design is in itself a small act of future making. And the reason that I love that essay is because one of the things he talks about is that in enabling certain futures, you also have to imagine and envision what futures you start to close off to. And so to me, I think that becomes really, really important in things like this when we imagine a future, for example, where cars are taking over every city, right? And roads are being designed in that manner, and perhaps pedestrians and cyclists are in a second and third tier kind of circulation function across the city. What other future are you shutting yourself down to? What other futures weren't allowed to kind of come into the mix in that way? And I think what I have found in my work is it's not necessarily a complete like shutting down of those futures. It's saying, is there another path through that? Right. So we're now seeing cities where like the car is not the primary mode of transportation, and folks have really intentionally kind of gone through and said, okay, let's retrofit our roads and reimagine how people and things move through the city so that cars are not at the focus of this thing. But it takes some unlearning to be able to do that. Amsterdam things are.
SPEAKER_01Yeah for bikes. Now you'll get scooters on there that act like jerks and drive like bad men and bad women next to bikes, but they keep them visibly physically separate from car lanes, not just a white line, but it allows for massive amounts of bike traffic, which keep the car traffic. I mean, you live in Los Angeles. I mean, that as someone who's worked on a lot of mobility projects and you know, worked in the air taxi business and looked at especially the new eVootolls, people have to think about you know, LA like Dallas, this Metroplex. People might move across from town parts of town with an air taxi because I've heard people don't date each other if they live in other parts of LA. It's a long distance. It's too far away.
SPEAKER_06It's true. It's like if you're it's like I I guess the analog would be like if you were in like Manhattan versus Brooklyn, right? You're not dating over the bridge. You're just not dating.
SPEAKER_01Oh, even on the even on the island. There my my my wife's uncle lives sorry guys listening. It's like my wife's uncle lives in the village.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01He would never date in like Upper East, Upper West Side. It's like Mars. Yeah. Like it's not even like Brooklyn.
SPEAKER_06It's just And we don't measure by miles, you measure by minutes because miles is not an accurate indicator of how long it's going to take you to get from one part of town to another. So, like we have friends in the valley, and I have friends. I live we live in the middle, like in mid-city in Los Angeles. And I love it because I am equidistant from downtown and the west side Santa Monica. But if anybody is like up in Sherman Oaks or over to the valley, I'm probably going to see them for a year. Yeah, no, I haven't been to Silver Lake in years, and probably years. There you go.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because I my wife's uncle, another another, a different uncle. He they work at Disney and they live in Burbank, right? And it's like we went to go see friend, we went to go see friends over in Santa Monica. It was like we were trying to like cross-country trip.
SPEAKER_06You're making you're road tripping. Yeah. Yeah. Might as well pack a bag. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Well, and it it's like when I think about you talked about buildings of future artifacts. It's also the cities themselves. Like this, it's like what does the layout of the city when you put a building in the ground, and when you think about the future, like how do you the work today you do? Like how do you carry that sensibility in the work you know when you're doing futures work? Like, how do you how does that translate for you?
SPEAKER_06I mean, I think it starts with this idea that there is no blank slate future, right? So we
The Futures We Close Off
SPEAKER_06do have to, you said some of the best futurists are historians, and I take that to heart deeply. So we have to kind of recognize and meet people where they are. What is the landscape of the city? What are their tensions? What are their fears? What are their hopes? And then, you know, what is it that we are trying to bring people towards? Like what is the vision of a preferable future that that folks can kind of galvanize around and want to mobilize around, right? And I think like that work is really hard because it's so hard. One of my old colleagues at Autodesk used to say, you know, if you want to make soup for the world, you're gonna end up with water. And so what ends up happening in right?
SPEAKER_02I love that.
SPEAKER_06And so what ends up happening in that work is there are two questions that I think have really kind of formed the basis of my practice. And one is what do I hope to leave behind and for whom? And then the other one is who is this preferable for? And in both of those things, you are having to consider the notion that like you're not going to please everybody, right? That is that is an impossible task. And as I think in in the work that we do, that is something that we have to kind of reckon with on a pretty regular basis, is that somebody's version of an ideal future is going to be somebody else's version of something that's maybe problematic or maybe hurtful or or you know, something that they have to grieve. In a lot of the work that I'm doing, so much of that is to come in as um a mediator. You know, I'm never, I don't ever come in with this, with this notion of like, this is what I think needs to happen. I'm coming in with a designerly mind and perspective, of course. But I think what that allows is the ability to tap into people's needs and expectations, even the implicit ones that aren't always clearly articulated.
SPEAKER_01Well, when you you came to Autodesk, correct? Before the futures practice. And how talk talk about this kind of transition.
SPEAKER_06Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Did you get the job at for Autodesk for a specific kind of how that because I got the job and then I lost the job, okay?
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_01Because a lot of people wonder, like there, you know, you work, you work, you created and have built not only just work there, but you built like it's some of the best foresight practices in the world. And it's like, you're welcome. And it's just truly sincere. I mean, it's just a sequence.
SPEAKER_06I can't take sole credit for that, but I do appreciate you.
SPEAKER_01No, it's a it's a well, it's two things. It's a standing on shoulders of giants where we take all the techniques and the things that help us, and at the same time, it is a team effort. And that's where the culture and and really creating, you know, solid organizational foresight capability, but you know, it has to start somewhere, right? It's the the the force, the the futures team of one. We didn't exist, like tell share that story because because a lot of people wonder people people know it exists now, but it's like they don't it's like they think it's like, oh, yeah, it's been around. No, not really. Yeah, no.
SPEAKER_06It's it's um, and it's now it's led by this phenomenal woman named um Dr. Aaron Bradner, um, and she is doing a really great job. I just saw them, saw her back in San Francisco a couple weeks ago, and I'm gonna go. Yeah, I want to get her on the show. Oh, yeah. She's amazing. She is absolutely amazing. Um, so brilliant. The funny story is I was first hired to be um the senior evangelist for AR and VR. I was poached from Steel Case, was doing work with Steelcase, looking at the future of work back when we were.
SPEAKER_01I was gonna say, did you work with the futures group? Adjacently, yeah. So we were the the I would call them the human the intelligence. Yeah, they were like the research group. I don't think they were traditionally the futures, but you were doing some serious futures work there though. That that group very serious futures work.
SPEAKER_06I was in the consulting side of it, so we took the research and we applied it out in market, basically.
SPEAKER_02Got it. Okay.
SPEAKER_06And so there were there, you know, there were they were my close collaborators, but I was not um nested squarely in the workspace futures group. But this was when the future of work was a very sexy topic to be, you know, focused on. Um and then Autodesk came calling and they said, we really need somebody who is a strong storyteller who can who can evangelize this technology that we are kind of investing in. And I basically said, like, I don't know anything about AR and VR except for some of the very baseline research that we had been doing about the implications for for work, right? For the workplace. Yep. And they said, Cool, we don't need you to know about AR and VR. You can research that. We need somebody who is a who understands how to tell stories to to various audiences, right? And so I joined, and about 30 days after I joined, the new CEO who had just come into his his role, Andrew, the organization went through a massive reorg. They divested from AR and VR as part of that. So my team got dissolved within a month of my my um hiring date. But in that time, I think I had made like enough. Just going around the organization, that one of the guys there, um, he was a fellow, his name was Mickey McManus. He literally one day like took me and he pushed me into the into the office of the corporate, the VP of um of corporate strategy, and he said, Hey, John, I think you need to meet this woman. And we just started talking. And um, and next thing I knew, he like had created a role for me, basically. And I came on as a creative lead and a storyteller. And what that meant at the time was doing a lot of kind of executive presentations and talks. But what that allowed me to do was to meet with all of these executive leaders across the organization and to understand what their individual points of view were on You had audience.
SPEAKER_01You had a legitimate audience.
SPEAKER_06I had right, exactly.
SPEAKER_01Did you know the term foresight? Did he, did you he know it when he was did you guys did you did you kind of like aha like like no? Okay.
SPEAKER_06So here's what happened. So, you know, I had done, I had been on Arab's Foresight team um in London and then San Francisco. I moved to SEAL case for a couple years. I was doing future of work stuff, but I was kind of finding myself moving further away from foresight, but still had a really deep passion for it. And I believed in the value that foresight could bring to an organization. And so what had happened in this kind of new role where I found myself in corporate strategy, because I had this audience with all these executive leaders, I started to realize
Preferable For Whom, And Why
SPEAKER_06that we didn't have one cohesive point of view on what long-term future was. Now, these people were super brilliant when it came to their industry strategies. They knew what the market looked like, they really had insight into how the market was shifting in a in a kind of near term, but there wasn't any one mechanism kind of coalescing all of their various points of view into like, here is our tenure vision on where we think the world is going and how we fit into that, into that, right? And I think each leader like had an implicit kind of assumption about what was going to happen, but it hadn't been explicitly stated anywhere. So I asked my VP at the time and I was like, hey, can I can I do this thing that I'm making up? It's called a foresight audit. I don't really know what it's gonna, what we're gonna learn from this, but I want to go and I want to interview like a hundred people across the organization, and I want to understand what are they doing to think about futures? Like they might not know specific foresight methodology or have the kind of lexicon at hand, but maybe I can do some kind of mapping to start to get a sense of like, are these behaviors already taking place in the organization? Right. And if they are, then why not create some formalized infrastructure to help um really propel that work forward in a more valuable way? So um we have a mutual Jeremy Carter, who was um who was my thought partner in that work.
SPEAKER_01Shout out Jeremy.
SPEAKER_06And shout out Jeremy, um, a wonderful soul. Um, so he and I, he kind of like went on this ride with me without really knowing what was happening. And I really, really appreciate him for that. Um, because I was just like the weirdo who talked about foresight all the time and nobody knew what it was.
SPEAKER_01And yeah, you would ask Phil, you know, you could ask Phil Phil Belactus when when when I came to McKinsey, he's like, I was the only one talking about his like like now you're not alone anymore. Like, no, sorry.
SPEAKER_06No, and to the point where like it was it became so associated with like me as a person that we had a bell on our team, and every time I said foresight, somebody would ring the bell because it was just called Future Boy, I got called Future Boy at McKinsey.
SPEAKER_01I don't know if that's a really good thing. Like a hazing, I know, probably.
SPEAKER_06But anyway, so so so we put this, you know, so we put this this audit together, and what we found was like we're doing all these things, and we're doing them pretty well. We're just not doing them together, and we don't use the same language to talk about it. And so, you know, we presented those findings to our CTO at the time, and then it made its way to Andrew, to Andrew Anagnoff, the CEO. And yeah, he is a, and I will say this, I don't think science fiction is the only way into foresight. I think it is one of the primary ways into foresight, but it wasn't my first way in. But Andrew's a sci-fi fan, and I was able to kind of like build, you know, that through line between wouldn't it be great to have some kind of a mechanism to like understand where your blind thoughts, blind spots are, foresee these gaps, and essentially have some agency and ownership over what future becomes for your organization, right? Like every CEO I think wants to have that ability in some sense to to kind of make the market, right? Not just kind of chase the market. And like that. And so he asked if if I could run a um a foresight workshop with his executive team with his C-suite. And I did, and um, I almost failed because I went to the world.
SPEAKER_01So tell me about the workshop. So let's talk about the workshop. I'm sure there's a lot of people on list listeners. I know I know for a fact a lot of people do workshops facilitate, you know. So what did you put in it? What what was the was there a fall on your face in the middle of the morning type of moment? Like what what what what was the process?
SPEAKER_06It was a I'm not gonna get out of this what I think I want out, what I think I'm gonna get out of this. It was because the leadership isn't there yet. So what I wanted to get out of it was like an aligned point of view on what this executive leadership team thought future was for them from for 10 years out. And because what I was then hoping to be able to do was to then trickle that down out of the exec team into other parts of the organization and use foresight tools and methodology to say, like, hey, if we have this vision as an organization, here's what it means for you, product development team, here's what it means for you, research, here's what it means for you, marketing, risk management, corporate development, all of those groups, right? What ended up happening was that within the executive team itself, there wasn't consensus on the kind of primary drivers that would be impacting the business or in the direction that they would go in. So you
How A Foresight Practice Gets Built
SPEAKER_06might have one, and I'm giving hypotheticals because I don't want to say exactly what happened in the room, but you might have one person saying, like, you know, I think that an increase in the middle class is going to mean that more people have more money to buy more things. And if people are going to buy more things, then we should be making more things for them to buy. So more people are going to use our tools to do that. But then you have someone who's kind of sitting in in the seat saying, actually, I work in our startup ecosystem and I work in emerging markets, and it's not buying, it's reuse and it's resell. So, so how are we thinking about, you know, kind of retrofit versus versus new consumption?
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_01It sounds like those are scenarios and implications wheels waiting to happen right there.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so what I what I, you know, midway through the workshop, I kind of realized like we're not going to get consensus amongst this group. But what I did realize was what probably needs to happen is another series of workshops where we are together clearly articulating what are kind of what we ended up calling our forces of change, the autodest forces of change, what those were going to be for the organization.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Right. And so coming out of that workshop, what I ended up with was a clear focal question for the group, which was not my original desired output, but I think it was enough to kind of get the ball rolling. And, you know, from that, um, and mind you, this was like a year and a half campaign that I was building. So this is not something that happened overnight. This was me going around being the crazy foresight woman for about 18 months. But what came out of that was the spinning up of the foresight practice out of the corporate strategy team and this this more kind of like formalized infrastructure for the delivery of foresight work with our executive leadership team being our primary audience. And then we had these dotted lines to everyone else. But the team itself was also kind of nested in the office of the CTO, and that was that was by design as well.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's a structure, that's a structural choice. Like, why do you think I want to talk about organizational things? Like, why do you think placement matters so much? Like, what happens if it's in the wrong place? I think we kind of know, but you know, like let's play it out.
SPEAKER_06But yeah, yeah, um, this is a very leading question, but I think we have, you know, I know. So so so here's what I've found. And and I say this, I say this feeling like I think every part of an organization is critical. However, I think foresight work, we have so much trouble already demonstrating the value of what foresight does, right? Yeah. Because so much of it is not quantitatively measured. We don't have these very concrete KPIs that we can go back to and say, oh, we hit that, we hit that, we hit that. It's oftentimes value stories, it's oftentimes qualitative. And so I think what ends up happening is I have seen a lot of foresight functions be set in like a CMO's organization, a Marcom, a business development kind of.
SPEAKER_01Right, because you think of storytelling or narrative, you're thinking marketing copy, right? People naturally grab, I mean, it's not the case, but the natural, we'll call it the new, you know, the the normie, they're gonna think it's communications, right?
SPEAKER_06But this is where I feel, but this is the thing I always say that like this the story, the scenario, that is just the beginning. That is right, that is the tool. You're taking the tool and you're putting it out there and you're not letting people use the tool. And and so for me, like scenarios and narratives, and this was kind of why I went back to grad school and I did my narrative environments degree, because I wanted to understand like how do you take deep narrative theory and leverage it in a way where people see the value in it as a tool of thinking about potential futures, as something in the same way that you would think about a financial model. Like that was the analog I was trying to make, right? And and we look at financial models, which are predictive kind of technologies and tools. Nobody takes a spreadsheet and says, like, well, here it is, this is what you do. They say, How do we run the numbers? How do we shape shift this thing? How do we essentially query the tool to say, like, what is the best outcome here? Right. There's multiple kind of paths forward. And with scenarios and with kind of narrative building, it's that same. It's a prototype of a possible future. If I've done my job well, you should want to interrogate it. You should, it should create a discursive moment, right? It should be something where you're like, I like this, but there's a tension here that I'm not super comfortable with. Let's pull that component out of the scenario and plug something else in and see how it runs. And so, because of that, you know, it was really important to us that the Foresight team was nested within the CTO's organization, because what that enabled then was the scenario was not the end game. The story was not the end game. The end game was an input into an acquisition process, right? Or kind of in an MA kind of format, or like an input into um an industry strategy, strategic intent and realization program, or an input into a product development roadmap.
SPEAKER_01And that's that that's much more quantifiable, right? Because then you're directly impacting the revenue outputs. That's why like I feel like the solutions and the strategy parts, you know, a lot of it used to stop at the scenario, but having that real connection with, you know, feeding the innovation pipeline, feeding the strategy variables, the outcomes that could impact revenue. But like, you know, you I mean, this group has grown so much. I mean, how does it feel to have created something that has out lasted your tenure? Because so many of these practices once that we'll call it the uh the force of nature, which I think would be an apt description of you. Um the force of nature leaves. Oh yeah, you know, I takes one to know one, but it's like when you have when you have that, it dies. It dies a lot, you know.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, and it's you know, how does it feel? I have to well, I will say this. It feels really good, but I have to give credit to like the folks at Autodesk as well, because I think they were willing to receive that, right? And we had very importantly a CEO and other executive leadership who were really supportive of that group. So, like Andrew wanted the Foresight team, he wanted that practice. He came to us often when he had some level of uncertainty that felt quite volatile that he wanted us to explore further.
SPEAKER_01You're like his Rainbow Six, like secret, you know, it was so we were like secret superpower. I mean, you know, of course, you know.
SPEAKER_06And I will say, like, I think Erin is a formidable leader and she has expanded the capabilities of what foresight is inside of Autodesk. I think I had a small part to do with what that team has become now and what that practice has become. But, you know, I think the the organization itself like lends itself culturally to want foresight there, and the practitioners really have a passion for it. And so I think half the battle, and you've probably seen this in the work that you do as well, it's about like
The Workshop That Changed The Plan
SPEAKER_06fluency building and education. Yeah, you know, folks just didn't have the language, they didn't have the language to talk about it. And once they found it, they were like super tapped in.
SPEAKER_01It's championship, usefulness, and fluency. Like you have to have the culture, you have to have people that are supporting it, finding it, they're the people that keep it going, right? Beyond the the actual execution, and then it's people view its usefulness, and then people understand how to speak the language so that they understand the value, right? So now let's talk scale. So this is this is awesome. So you are congratulations, you are in a new role. This this is being taped uh early April. Uh uh, but you uh five days in. Five days in. Um, but you've been there a while. So maybe we can just step back before we kind of like do the drum roll. Yeah. But they're one of and I admire their firm as one as an architectural design leader in the world, but two is because they have one of the best foresight practices and they use it, they wield it not only to communicate the future, but it shows clients it is a self-serving thing because it serves shows the clients that, well, you kind of want us because we're thinking about things that nobody else is.
SPEAKER_06And that's I can future proof the work. Beautiful, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So okay. So you see you left Autodesk, you step into a role. So let's talk about that.
SPEAKER_06This yeah, so I I um I hadn't left Autodesk as yet. Um, Joseph Hargrave, who was the global director of Foresight at the time, he has now stepped into a new role. He heads up all of Arab University globally. Um, and he was one of my earliest mentors actually in Foresight um back in the day. But he knows his stuff he knows his stuff. He knows his stuff.
SPEAKER_01I I don't know if they'll let me talk about my my like why why he made me, he's a read, he's one of the reasons I went and got my, you know, went back to UH.
SPEAKER_06That's amazing.
SPEAKER_01I have to tell him that sometime. But you know, he is definitely he's a wonderful and he knows it's not just about knowing the tools, but he knows how to like he he just knows the full body of it. And and it's a great, I mean, to have a mentor, it's it's great to have somebody like that.
SPEAKER_06And he knows how to talk, he knows how to talk about it in context, right? And I think that's what matters is like you can have the academic kind of like fervor, but if you don't have the language and the storytelling capability, I think foresight can fall flat sometimes. But anyway, so he he had reached out to me like when I I think I had had my daughter maybe six weeks prior. He was like, hey, uh we have this open role. It, you know, the previous um America's leader for foresight had had left a couple years before that. It was the still the height of the pandemic. And he reached out saying, Would you be open to interviewing for this for this position? We've put it out competitively, and it's for the America's region leader for foresight. And I said, Yes, sure. Not really knowing, like maybe comprehending fully what that would entail, and still, in some sense of of Matt Leaf brain fog, I'll say.
SPEAKER_01That's a big yeah, exactly. I mean, like, yeah, the first uh first year. Listen, that's your first child.
SPEAKER_06And it was my first child. It was my first child, right? Yeah, first child's first time. Horrendous. He really got me at my lowest point.
SPEAKER_01You're navigating, like you're failing every day.
SPEAKER_06Everything.
SPEAKER_00There's no sleep. Listen, there's I yeah.
SPEAKER_06I came out of that interview and I had my husband like listening at the door, and I was like, You have to tell me if I am saying grown-up words because I am talking to grown-ups and I need to know that this is legible.
SPEAKER_01That's awesome. Oh my god.
SPEAKER_06It was, you know, and but it was also kind of it felt a little bit like a homecoming as well, because you know, I had been at AirRup previously. It was Air Up was my first experience in foresight. They were the ones that gave me the language, they were the ones that exposed me to the tools and the and the methodology.
SPEAKER_01And so like coming home. You're coming home.
SPEAKER_06It felt like that.
SPEAKER_01It did after you're on a on that journey, walkabout, you know, go to the mountains, meditate for a year in silence.
SPEAKER_06I mean, now you're like, I did some soul searching, you know. Um, and then I and then I kind of and then I came back and um I came into this new role. There wasn't a team, you know, the Americas region specifically, and for context, Airp is a global design and engineering firm. Uh, we have 90 offices, 18,000 people and growing, but it's a London headquartered organization. So the majority of the Foresight team sits quite squarely in London. And in this restructure, we have kind of done away with the regional format in the hopes of encouraging more global ways of working. But at that time, this was like 2021, 2022, it we were still very heavily kind of in these siloed regional contexts. Um, and so I came in as a solo practitioner, basically, um, with the task of you know rebuilding Foresight Fluency. The firm had had a lot of turnover due to the pandemic. I think most organizations had experienced that. Um and so there was a there were principals who had kind of been there for previous versions of the Foresight team. And then there were a lot of new folks who had come in who had no previous kind of exposure to the practice or to the value it can bring to their disciplines in their work on a daily basis. And so, you know, half the battle was rebuilding Foresight fluency across the region. And then the other one was like translating what Foresight could do out in market because we had both an internal remit to work with our leadership and help them think about what Foresight could do for the health, well-being, and and kind of you know, uh ongoing legacy of Airup. But then we also had to go to like our clients and say, hire us because we can future proof your work. You know, we're not just kind of building the work, we're making sure it's going to be around for the next 50 to 100 years or whatever that kind of timeline is.
Where Foresight Belongs In The Org
SPEAKER_06And I think, you know, now we have this really kind of beautiful concept that we're bringing back in that came from our founder of Airup around like total design, which is how do you kind of bring together skills and mindsets and different perspectives and different regional contexts to explore kind of the widest possible, you know, problem area so that you can kind of bring forward the best possible solution, right?
SPEAKER_01So he was talking futurist language, he was talking foresight language without really talking about it. Because that's the beauty of our field is that people from all the different experiences in the walks of life, the kind of futurist they are, like that is what he's just yeah, his philosophy. Do you think that because of that philosophy is why because I I can't think please tell me if are there other foresight or organizations like ARPs in the world, like at other firms?
SPEAKER_06I think there's there are starting to be foresight. So I see what you mean.
SPEAKER_01Well, I think they see what you're doing and the effectiveness of it, and they're probably like, yeah, we probably should do that. And but I'm wondering, like, but that philosophy of his is if that didn't exist, would it foresight be? That's what I wonder. Like that would it, would it be like the DNA that legitimizes it, right?
SPEAKER_06Yeah, I I do think it's ingrained in the culture. I think that when you come to Air Up, you are most definitely kind of buying into this this idea of like being, you know, perpetually curious, wanting to not just do the job, but do it go above and beyond and and think about like what else could we be responding to? Like, is this the right question? Is this the right research question? Is this the right project question? Do I have the right team in place? Do we need to upskill ourselves in some way? Are there new emerging technologies we should be leveraging? Right. It's this constant like wanting to learn and expand, I think, that lends itself to foresight work and to a foresight practice. And I think our, you know, our executive leadership is also very supportive of that. And so we as part of Arup University, we don't just have um like a consulting mandate to to go out and do the work for our clients. We also work very closely with our leadership inside the organization um to to help Arab think about like how do we how do we stick around to make it to our hundredth birthday? What does that look like? What does Arup want to be at that time? You know, we're we're we're coming up on eighty years. Oh, eighty years, okay.
SPEAKER_01So twenty forty six. Yeah. Yeah. Well You know, and and the way the buildings are built. You know, it's for the building for the future, right? But it's also different between different places. I think when in our pre interview, pre-interview call we were talking about like the way you build here in Boston versus Los Angeles, Singapore, Mumbai, Lagos. Like you guys you operate in all those worlds. Like you operate in that. Like how do you think it's relevant? Like foresight. How do you how do you do foresight that's relevant globally without kind of because it's it's a thing when you have to go to 18,000 people, you have such different uh things to make sure that there's connection to do you have other people almost like foresight futurist agents, you know? I can think of layers, right? The core team, the adjacent, and then the kind of the the interested ones that kind of contextually design it, right? Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_06So so we have so the really cool thing about Arab is so the core team, the core foresight group is within Arab University is about plus or minus like 40 people globally. So imagine 40 people being responsible for 18,000 people across the organization, right? Internally. And then we have over 60 disciplines inside of Arab, like engineering and design disciplines. So that means we are having to reimagine um new skills, new approaches, new methodologies, new tools in all of those disciplines and think about how those evolve over time. And that's everything from like digital tools and infrastructure to water, to aviation, to roads and streets, like you name it, we are we have our hands in it. People listening to this podcast have probably walked through, sat through, been in something that Air Up has touched, um, some project around the world, stadiums, roads, whatever, right? And so the the way we do it is we don't always do the same foresight work everywhere for everyone. Um you know, if we kind of like allude back to to that, you know, I think what is quite a perceptive but now overused quote from William Gibson, the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed. We have to reckon with that, yeah, right? Oh, yeah. We have to reckon with that. Um, and and I think part of it is to go back to like you can't make soup for the world. Um, you know, not everybody is kind of ready to hear or ready to kind of meet you where you are at any given future, right? So I would say from a regulatory perspective, you know, the country that you and I sit in currently is not the most advanced when it comes to adopting like sustainability measures and things like that.
SPEAKER_03No, not at all.
SPEAKER_06But we do find a lot of receptivity in parts of Europe. And so that's where we are starting to push some of our work around the principles of like regenerative design and circular economies. It's work we've been doing for for years now, right?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think about the UX field, the UX field like in service design being the journey mapping and all of the optimization, because Europe was very much limited in space and limited in what it needed to optimize. Like service design took off there. It never took off here as a as a discipline. It's the same thing like over there. I think foresight, I see more activity in the Middle East and in Europe and in um Southeast Asia doing for doing like I would say the the pushing the envelope with futures work because they know that they need to. They have the the limit. Yeah, they have lim they they don't have the I don't know, if the the the luxury of uh waste in that way that sometimes is here.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. Yeah, perceived luxury, I would say, like maybe, you know, but perceived luxury, yeah. You know, and and so I think what I have to think about alongside the the rest of the wider team is like how do we how do we take into context, and this goes back to that total design piece, right? Which is like how do we take into context all of these different cultures, all of these different perspectives? And now the great thing is we do have the 90 offices, right? So I can reach out to somebody in like Kuala Lumpur or like Hong Kong or Sydney or whatever it is and say, hey, tell me about what you're doing over there right now. Like how do you think something like this would land, right? Or can I speak to a client who you are currently working with so I can get some in real life, real time kind of data points to pressure test the work.
SPEAKER_01We would do um we would do projects with uh we would do design fiction and we would work with we had local experts at the with McKinsey, we would do we'd have somebody in country to look at like I learned like in Malaysia about we were giving this whole thing about uh in the 2040, like this artist artisans, they would get collect the from the garbage patch, they would collect the plastics and they would turn it into crafter or jewelry or things, but there was a whole name to it, there was a whole tradition to it. I wouldn't have known that. And you have to you have to have those people to give it the texture and the context that someone can see that it's like this is authentic and I should I could I I want to read this, I want to actually you know just understand this, otherwise it just yeah, and it's not about like I hate these terms, like unconscious bias or this or that. Everyone's got bias, everyone's got the experience. Of course, if you are gonna come from what you know, yeah, if you're human, right? It's like but at the same time, if you just acknowledge that, okay, these are your perspectives, let's get that's to me the the thoughtful thing to do is like how do we make it relevant for the people that the real audience that is gonna read it, right?
SPEAKER_06And yeah, just but you said something really key, right? The thoughtful thing to do. Like I think there is so much humility required in the work that we do because and this is why I go back to saying I am I am a humble mediator. I am like the person that connects the dots and sits, you know, sits in the room, sometimes like a fly on the wall, to say, like, what am I hearing? What are the whispers of possible futures that I'm starting to hear, you know, and then be kind of the sense maker. But but it's never my vision. It's never,
Scaling Foresight At A Global Firm
SPEAKER_06I mean, I have my own little side projects, but like if I'm in the work that I'm doing, it's never my vision, right? I have been successful, yes.
SPEAKER_01Speaking of side projects, um I I appreciate you with the segues. Yes. I mean, you have uh also a fellow showrunner. You have a show with Tobias, Tobias, your host, your coach.
SPEAKER_06Tobias Ravel, yes, the great the magnificence.
SPEAKER_01Talk about where that spark, you know.
SPEAKER_07Yeah.
SPEAKER_01This is really cool because we need we need more conversations. We need more shows like this.
SPEAKER_06And it's thank you. Thank you. Great. Um Yeah, so we have um we have a podcast called Future-ish. Um, because we kind of were like, we're not really doing it's not like super futures, but it's future-ish, you know. It's like it's kind of there. Um, and we're not super serious about it, but we're like kind of serious about it, you know. Um Do you think we're serious?
SPEAKER_01Do you think we're serious here? No. We have the whole point is to educate, but we gotta have like, yeah, I'm not no. I mean, if you can't laugh at like the potential peril of the future, then um Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Oh man.
SPEAKER_01You know, I have a whole prepper community that I can put you in touch with if you want to build a bunker.
SPEAKER_06But honestly, then you need a support group, honestly, because this work can be really like mind melding.
SPEAKER_01Oh, absolutely. Especially when you're like when you I mean, we are looking like we're in like the beautiful the the the backyard garage and beautiful mind. I mean, like everything is start, it starts to to you know kind of get to you, but yeah, but I love the I love the name because I want people that on this show that have just different perspectives, different conversations, and I just don't want to just talk to myself. So because that would I could board myself my I'd border my but you have you guys have really interesting banter between each other. We do.
SPEAKER_06It's it's very like sibling rivalry. I mean, you know, it started because it started because um, you know, Tobias and I have both gotten, and and the funny thing is is like he and I both started as graduate researchers when we were doing our master's in London. So he was at the RCA, I was at St. Martin's, um, and we were at an Arab's Foresight team. And then we both kind of left and did our own thing. I went more corporate, he went academia, and then Joseph pulled us back in together at the same time, basically. So he was our design futures leader. He's since kind of moved into another part of the Arab University. He leads our strategy office now, but we came back at the same time through like peer pressure, is what I would call it at this point. But um, but you know, we got to this point where we're like, hey, we're not actually getting to do the the foresight work we love. Like we are advocating for it for our teams. We are facilitating it for other people to do, but we're not getting to do the nitty-gritty like horizon scanning, signal gathering, all of that stuff. Um, and we would send each other signals all the time in WhatsApp. And so um, a couple folks have kind of come to us and said, like, maybe I want to say jokingly, because I can't imagine anyone would seriously say this to us, but they were like, you should start a podcast, it would be really fun. And so Tobias and I just nobody's doing a podcast. No, we're like because there are so many good podcasts. You know how many are active?
SPEAKER_01Well, hold on a second. This one included how many out of like the the couple million podcasts that are out there. Do you know how many are actually active? No, how many? Like 50,000.
SPEAKER_06No way. I thought it was so much more saturated than that.
SPEAKER_01No, I mean the thing is is of terms of real consistent, I mean, it probably could be higher, maybe a hundred thousand, but there's really consistent like shows out of like the million, there's only a fraction of them that are like 50,000 that are really producing. Well, that makes you feel better actually regularly. Yeah, so like that's what I feel like, you know, like Future Pod and your show and my show and Julian's show. Yeah, you know, Julian Bleaker was on the show, so you've got if you're listening, you should totally check that out. But he's got a great um thing he does on he's the you know originator of design fiction, but I think there's some really good and there's the varied conversations.
SPEAKER_06We all do very different shows, yeah, and that's what's awesome. Yeah, and so Tobias and I were basically like, all right, we need to do something because we both felt very blah in moments about we love the work we do. I want to say that. Yeah, I don't want to get in trouble with anyone.
SPEAKER_01Like, no, you are I mean, no, it's it's there's never a question of you loving the war, and that's that's never that's never a question, I wouldn't think.
SPEAKER_06But but we w I wanted to like be talking about signals again, and um yeah, and so we just basically took we were like, how do we take our WhatsApp like chat and put it in a podcast? And so it comes out every two weeks, you know, one of us brings a signal to talk about each episode, and we basically like dissect it and trash talk a little bit and you know try to nice, yeah. No, I've listened to a few of them, yeah. Yeah, yeah, but it is very like sibling sibling rivalry, and then just gonna say that sibling rivalry is exactly, exactly yes. Yeah, it's exactly what it is. And um, this year we're bringing on guests as well. So like every few episodes we'll have some guests. Um we've just started doing that, so um, we're kind of like playing with that format as well. But it's just it's a side project, it's something to keep us excited about futures work.
SPEAKER_01Um it's good you have permission. It's good that you have a company that understands that you're a great voice in the community and to have you be able to talk and share that only benefits them. Yeah, only it only benefits them.
SPEAKER_06You know, and it's and it's just to clarify, like it's not affiliated with Arab in any way.
SPEAKER_01No, and I want that's why I wanted to make sure you had the disclaimer, but still it's like there are places it's like, you know, no mom, no, no. But you know, as you know, as respect for your time, and we're totally gonna have a round two. I know that, but uh this is I want to kind of get a little bit of rapid fire, but I want to get into some could continue the fun, the funness. I don't know, like it's not even a word, the funness of the podcast talk is like some of the things that I don't know, people would call it the interrogation, it's not the interrogation, but I want to talk about like um books, methods, architecture. So, okay, so you talked about like some we talked about some of the things like I've been vibe coding this thing, and I think as a designer, when you get into this world of like you build something, it's so beautiful, and then they kill it. Or I worked at Sapient for a while, I worked at some ad agencies, and it's like you work on these cool things and they just never implement it, right? You give it to the client and it never sees the light of the day. Yeah, like what is their what's a specul what's a speculative piece like a project like you wish had been built? Like what was I worked on personally or that I wish like, uh, yeah, there's somebody where they yeah.
SPEAKER_06If it's a good thing, you know, you know what was cool, and it did end up happening, but like seven years later, was I wish that we had been able to we did these four future scenarios at Autodesk, um, imagining what the world would look like like 10 years out. And I thought that work was super interesting because we were taking emerging technologies that our research labs were actually working on and evolving, um, and then kind of like gaming out those scenarios. And I really wish we were able to kind of like build those out because some of them are really cool. But now what has happened with that is one of the scenarios around um uh the Olympics and the kind of the a city looking back on the Olympics that they successfully delivered that did not deplete this the city. Um, one of my friends who was um doing brand partnerships for Autodesk at the time, she took that scenario and went to the LA 28 Olympics team like years ago. And that was a starting point for a conversation to build a partnership with Autodesk and the LA 28 Olympics. And last year she sent me a big bouquet of flowers randomly, and I was like, why are you sending me this? I haven't I haven't worked at Autodesk in like four years. She's like, I just wanted to thank you because tomorrow there'll be a press release coming out that Autodesk has been named the platform partner for the LA 28 Olympics, and it wouldn't have happened if your project hadn't been created, the Four Futures Project. She was like, This is what I took to that leadership team, and it's something they keep coming back to every single time we talk. So that was amazing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's gonna make they feel good. So you've had some great mentors, like like Joe. Yeah, but you know, any futurist worth their salt has a library that really annoys their significant other that they wonder what that they want. So, but but there's gotta be that one book
Global Context And Humble Sensemaking
SPEAKER_01that rewired like people who've listened to this show probably know the one I'm talking about for me, but what's what's something that kind of like how you think about the future? Like what kind of was like mind-blowing, like you know, sparkly things coming out of the top of your head.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, it wasn't it wasn't a book, and I read a lot, and I have lots of amazing friends who um who have amazing books that I read, but it's that essay, it's that defuturing the image of the future essay. It is that was it was explain that for people.
SPEAKER_01I don't think many people have heard that. That's yeah.
SPEAKER_06So there's this there was an essay in Walker Center magazine by Andrew Blauveld. He wrote it back in 2020, so this is like six years ago now from the time of recording this. And he talks about this idea. First, there's that line that I think I had shared, which was like, every act of design is in itself a small act of future making. And that to me felt so profound. I was like, aha, like I have like this is what I do. Like this is, you know, you talked about that aha moment of like linking back to architecture. That felt really validating in that way. And I have since kind of expanded to say, like, every act of design, of inquiry, of technological advancement, of you know, of building, like that is an act of future making. So so talking about architects making buildings is an act of future making, right? Thinking about um new tools is an act of future making. And so I just love this idea that he has said that um, you know, we are both constrained by the futures we have created, and also we must kind of, you know, work ourselves out of these futures like going to Mars and um and thinking about the world ending, like those are escapist futures, and we're not doing good enough, basically. We need to do better. And it was this, you know, even colony like the colonial dream of like futurism is a is a future, is a scenario that we have worked our way into and we need to kind of re-envision, and we're still working through the kind of outputs of that. So that is something that's an essay that I honestly assign to every single one of my classes when I teach. It's something that frames a lot of my syllabi.
SPEAKER_01You must get a hell, I'm I'm sure you get like an uh give them an essay to kind of evaluate the paper. Like you must get some really interesting responses. Um students.
SPEAKER_06You know what I love about teaching is I will I have like half of the cohort every year is very skeptical. They're like, You're a snake oil salesman. Like that's what you know, salesperson. And then the other half is like super psyched about it, right? And they're like, oh, this is amazing. And usually what happens is I can convert that skeptical half by the end of the semester.
SPEAKER_01And it's amazing. I got a yeah, I got a funny thing just to connect the so I I did a talk at uh a friend that um from grad school who runs the brand center at Virginia Commonwealth VCU. And all these students are doing their masters, they're going into advertising or going, you know, or leveling up their advertising careers. So I did like the future of advertising. I came in and talked about being a design futurist. This is probably like a year or year and a half ago. So over the week, this is early on in the AI tools. So in a weekend, I oh no, I'm sorry, on a Sunday, and I always just I say with you know, Chat GPT, runway, uh 11 lab, I did a couple different tools. I said for the cost of like a hundred dollars in tools, coffee, and my pajamas in six hours. Because I showed this to my friend, yeah, and he's like, I'm like, how much would this have cost? Like, he's like, half a million dollars. He's like, We'd have to get location, craft services, actors, camera, you know, but all all he just rattled it all. He used to run um can. So and he's wow, and I said, Yeah, it took me, you know, and I showed it as like it was a Nike ad of like uh a future shoe, a women's shoe, um called the Nike Glow. It was really really cool looking, had the running and the whole thing. And I showed it to him, and I also showed like other um potential jobs and what I showed in the future of the space. Half of the audience was terrified, and half of the audience was like excited and electric because they're like because think about it, right? You can create concepts and prototype, like you can spec this stuff that you can be an advertising firm and and you could never compete with a big shop, right? Or you could just even communicate to a client. I think that's the the peril of it, and I think what you're talking about like that essay is great. So for signal now, for signals, yeah, uh your your show, what's a signal you're watching that nobody else seems to be paying attention to? I I think this is appropriate. I don't usually ask this question a lot, but apropos because of your show, like yeah, yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_06So there's a there's like I'll bring up two in particular. There one is the the zero G manufacturing, lower earth orbit manufacturing.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Um and that feels I especially for like the fact that I sit in AEC and that I've come from Autodesk where they do product design and manufacturing, I'm not hearing enough people in my network talk about that yet. And I think we need to be. And then the other one, which is like not related to that at all, is so you know, Zoran Mamdani was um elected as mayor of New York City. He came up through, you know, I think initially his popularity was like he was a musician and a rapper, and he's tried a bunch of different things. Recently in Nepal, they just elected their prime minister, who is also a former rapper. Um, and I think there is something here, and I haven't quite figured it out yet. Interesting. So actually, so so Nepal's um Nepal's kind of like journey to electing their new prime minister was really interesting because the overthrow of the government happened through Discord, which I thought was super, super interesting. Yes, and there are I was reading, yes, so we have an episode on this, actually. I would urge you to listen to it. Oh, not because I'm trying to promote, but because I think it's really interesting. Um yeah. And and it happened through it happened through Discord. They organized the movement through Discord and to the point where like signal, not signal or telegram. Wow. And I was risking this. And so there's something there about the language
Signals To Watch And Final Takeaways
SPEAKER_06that we are using to talk about quite conventional government structures, and we are reappropriating that to these virtual realms that I think is super interesting. Now, couple that with um what I think is not necessarily a new, but a recontextualization of like the influencer politician, right? So we've had the Ronald Reagans and the Arnold Schwarzenegger's, but now we have the Zoran Mamdanis and like Nepal Nepal's um new prime minister. And I do think there is a shift happening. I feel like there's this undercurrent of something shifting in the political arena where we are feeling like, you know, there's an inadequacy in how politicians have emerged in the last, I'll say 20 years probably.
SPEAKER_01Look at our, I mean, the matter, I mean. Polarizing figure like Montana, polarizing figure like Trump. Trump's a game show host.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_01I mean he's a real estate developer, but but his show the apprentices with catapult. But it's a populism. It's a populism wave, right? It's it's the outsider, right? Which is very indicative. I'm a gen Xer, so we're always forgotten about when they talk about the oh, the boomers have ruined everything. The millennials are the saviors. And I'm an alder millennial. Right. It's like the Xers, the forgotten children again, the latchkey children.
SPEAKER_06The middle child again.
SPEAKER_01And I'm thinking to myself, like, what about us? I'm like, yeah, we're just gonna come in and fix it. Because also, if you follow generational cycles, yeah, millennials were the they were the greatest generation, they were the ones that fought in Normandy. So we were like Gen Xers were like Eisenhower, like the battlefield commanders, and like the boomers of that gen were like FDR. So if you think about the cycle of it, it's like, yeah, we're just like the forgotten ones. I would offer to you as a signal to look at and I've been um involved in the the space for a while, is is is orbital data centers. Because what's happening, what's happening? The okay, two things. SpaceX bought XAI, which is was the part of Twitter, bought it that is giving them orbital AI capability to now put up data centers and sell because now there's no OSHA, there's no EPA, there's also Sun 24-7, solar, nuclear, all the things you could do. And and it's like the we're gonna have because we have a power issue when it comes to powering all the artificial intelligence. So it's like you're gonna start to see this. Is like to me, yeah, beyond setting people up and like space tourism, this is the first, I think, beyond like mining asteroids, is the real money maker commercialization of it's like the it's like the uh the killer app for commercializing space. Nobody's talking. I mean, Must talked about it, but there are a few companies, but it's you're gonna see it more like how much can we lift? Because I don't have to fight with the town to build a noisy ass data center. Like, sorry, I'll have to beat that one. Right, a noisy data center next door. No, I can just put it 32,000 miles away. And I think that that's a really interesting, like what is going to move off planet?
SPEAKER_06Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01So that's my signal.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, but no, I'm definitely going down that rabbit hole. Thank you for that for sure.
SPEAKER_01You're welcome. My pleasure. Yeah. Um, so for the fun things is we kind of so I never really asked this, but I always love the restart civilization content. You're that kind of person. So, like the books, the music, the objects, like what go with that? Like, what let's let's let's riff on that. What would you bring?
SPEAKER_06Oh man. Um there's so many things. I I'm like, I would be a horror.
SPEAKER_01See, the music lover can't decide. The book lover can't decide.
SPEAKER_06And I'm both of those, and it's horrible. I know. That's why I do it.
SPEAKER_01It's why I'm here for it. I don't know.
SPEAKER_06I have Sade in my background, so I feel like you gotta have some Sade. Um but I'll say for objects, for objects, because I think I will say this forever, never, never. A pen and a notebook.
SPEAKER_03Like There you go.
SPEAKER_06Pen and a notebook. There you go. Write a story, communicate something, share something. That's what you need.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_06Entertainment helps you remember shit when you learn new things, you know. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I want there to be like, you know, there's a book on how to survive the apocalypse. Probably a good one to bring with you. I probably bring like Shakespeare or the Bible or something to give me to give some values. Um and some maybe some comedy. But okay. So the let's let's finish this up. So that taking this whole environmental thing, finish this one. The future of the built and a built environment is what?
SPEAKER_06It's not always new.
SPEAKER_01Love it. That's great.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Rada, thanks for being on the show.
SPEAKER_06Thank you so much. This was really fun. 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 Think Forward Show. See you next time.
