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
Dancing With Uncertainty: Leading and Following the Future with Tanja Schindler | EP 153
Tanja Schindler was a competitive Latin dancer at twelve and the family member who set up every television, a split between creative and technical that would define her career. She trained as an electrical engineer, worked the shift from traditional lighting to LED at Osram, and got asked the question every futurist eventually hears, what comes next, before she had ever heard the word foresight. She taught herself scenario planning on spreadsheets, then left Germany to study under Peter Hayward and Joseph Voros at Swinburne's Foresight Institute in Australia, built on Richard Slaughter's original work.
Her core reframe changed how I think about why so much foresight training fails to change behavior. You can teach someone the steps, the trend scans, the scenario decks, and they will still freeze at the edge of the dance floor because nobody taught them to feel the music, to hold uncertainty in the body rather than a spreadsheet. She describes an EU Commission workshop where fifty participants rebuilt five destroyed planets and pitched back a single message to ground control: please do not come; we do not want you to destroy what we built here. She walks through backcasting with her version of the futures triangle, stress-testing a preferred future against collapse and transformation scenarios, and names two weak signals worth watching, teenagers eating pudding with a fork under a bridge because they are starving for social space, and the rise of micro retirement, where young workers refuse to wait until sixty-five to actually live.
If you have ever handed your team a framework, a beautifully built process, a set of steps, and then watched them stand at the edge of the floor unable to move, this hour is for you.
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This Week's Companion Issue
Future Proof Issue 55: The Steps Are Not the Dance. This issue takes Tanja's distinction into the personal register: what it feels like to have every framework memorized and still freeze when the music changes.
Read on Substack: https://befutureproof.substack.com/p/the-steps-are-not-the-dance
Read on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/future-proof-7303526412311842816/
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Chapters
0:00 Creativity Beyond AI
0:23 Welcome And Tanja's Origin Story
2:02 Dance Meets Engineering And Disruption
6:40 Discovering Strategic Foresight In Practice
10:50 Learning To Dance With Uncertainty
14:35 Stories That Reframe The Future
20:55 Building Hope And Shared Agency
26:20 Mindset Training And Leadership Lessons
31:40 Running Futures Workshops That Actually Work
37:10 Rebuilding Planets For Citizen Participation
43:30 Backcasting And Stress Testing Decisions
49:50 Weak Signals And New Life Patterns
52:10 Advice, Legacy, And Where To Find Her
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About Tanja Schindler
Tanja Schindler is the Foresight Lead for Kaufland, bringing an interdisciplinary, philosophy-not-department approach to foresight. She started as an electrical engineer at Siemens and Osram before training under Peter Hayward and Joseph Voros at Swinburne's Foresight Institute in Australia, and later served as Vice Chair of the Association of Professional Futurists. A former competitive dancer, she teaches leaders to feel the rhythm of uncertainty instead of memorizing its steps.
Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanjaschindler/
Kaufland: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kaufland-deutschland/home/
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Go Deeper
📬 Future Proof, my newsletter on foresight and leadership: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/future-proof-7303526412311842816 | Substack: https://befutureproof.substack.com/
🌐 Future Proof Community: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/10084416
📖 SuperShifts: https://www.supershiftsbook.com/
👤 https://www.stevenfisher.io/ | https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenfisher/
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Where in your work right now do you know every step but still cannot feel the music? Tell me in the comments.
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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.
Creativity Beyond AI
SPEAKER_01I feel like what people don't see it's it's not that people are not uh protective, especially where less purposeful work probably get automated by AI and others. So if we only use AI we're just copying the past. And I don't think that probably all decisions we made at the past in humanity are still present were that good. We need to get more creative and we need to challenge AI.
Welcome And Tanya’s Origin Story
SPEAKER_00Tanya, welcome to Think Forward.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much, Stephen. Glad to be here.
SPEAKER_00Oh, my pleasure. Uh it's been a long time overdue. Uh you know, we uh had a lot of talk about a lot of things we find in common, which we'll get into in the in the episode. Uh love um your approach to uh futures work and innovation. Uh I think the best thing to do is just kind of talk about that kind of exploration journey. You know, I I think for me you just you have such a great with your dance, you know, dancing and uncertainty. So let's let's talk about uh where it all began for you.
SPEAKER_01Sure. Um I guess uh the dancing connects it all because I somehow started to be uh a young dancer when I was twelve. I was um doing uh tournaments for letting dancing, so I was always a very creative person. But I'm also a little bit of a nerd, so uh we moved a lot, so I always was the one who actually set up the television and everything. So when I was 16, 18, I had my major in school already in physics, and then I was like, well, I really want to do something with electronics, I guess, because I kind of grew up fixing that. Um so I did an engineering studies, I was business and engineering with electrical engineering, uh, very nerdy, and I really missed somehow the creative part. So I guess I put everything in the PowerPoint presentations that we had to do. And uh consultant in training.
SPEAKER_00You're a consult you're a consultant and you didn't even know it.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. And then back then I still was uh working, doing my studies for Zeeman, so this was also quite engineering work, project management. But I was lucky
Dance Meets Engineering And Disruption
SPEAKER_01that in 2010, when I finished, I was able to switch to the former subsidiary, now the separate, which was Osrim or Sylvania, so light bulbs and lighting. And uh this was in 2010, and this was super interesting because it was exactly the transition from traditional light to LED lighting. And it reminds me a lot with the current wave that we have in automotive from traditional engine to electric engine and how the markets shift and change. And we had the same, so a lot of um, of course, cheap and faster developments from Asia, and then to see how the market here developed. So, long story short, after being a product manager there, I went to strategy and I got the question that I think most futurists have heard: Tanya, what will come next? What is the next technology change, a surprise in the future to get? So I did a little bit more research and I came across foresight. And I'm like, wow, there's actually a discipline where you can study and explore the future. So, how do we get that? And so I started to kind of self teaching myself uh scenarios, scenario, planning very heavily on access sheets and still very traditional on uh doing trends and cross-impact analysis and morphological boxes, two by two matrix, everything for that. And we did on autonomous driving to see do we still need head beams and lighting for automotive if we have that. And this was my start for foresight. I fell in love and um I decided to leave Osram after a year and then move all the way to Australia and did my masters of strategic foresight there. And then somehow it circled back that I felt like this creative feeling that you have and this anticipation somehow that you use when you're dancing and you're improvising, it's a little bit of feeling that you need when you work with futures.
SPEAKER_00How so? How do you find that to be? Where do you intersect with that?
SPEAKER_01Well, first things first is that uh with the future we don't have any data. So we really need to imagine different futures. But there's always two angles to how we approach the future, right? So one is from the present. So we used to have present data like trends and and studies to see how could that extrapolate into the future. And then we have uh our tools and where future literacy, of course, more goes into imagining different alternative futures and more get the pull from the future to where we want to go. And then there's this little bit in the between where we we're stuck between the push and the pull, where we actually need to make decisions in uncertainty because we don't know. And exactly for those decisions, I think it's very handy to do um, yeah, to compare it to dancing. Because I always tell people if I give you the steps for a foresight method to explore trend management or scenario planning, it's similar as I would give you the steps to a dance. But then if I push you just with the steps onto the dance floor, you probably still can't dance and you feel awkward and you can't feel the music and the rhythm. And a little bit with the music is like the future. So if I tell you how to do trend management and scenarios, but then you still don't know exactly how to hold that uncertainty and to make decisions and to explore different futures until you get a little bit of this anticipation feeling of this curiosity to explore. And that's why it's almost like dancing with the future, dancing with the music. Because you're a really good dancer, you can anticipate and you feel the drop and you kind of explore different things and you improvise. And I feel with the future it's the same. You need to kind of dance, you need to explore, sometimes you need to give and sometimes you need to pull until you can make better decisions that then inform uh the present about future explorations.
SPEAKER_00So what is uh speaking of dance, so you I'm when we pre-call you learn I'm a Lindy Hopp and swing formerly uh dance dancer. So that is obviously got its own set of dances, certain things you could do to improvise. What do you think is the most uh rigid type of dancing and the most improvisational type of dancing?
SPEAKER_01I think there's a difference between uh social dance and for example tournament dance. So when I started the tournament, actually we had a full routine and it was always the same. So I knew exactly what uh which step to come and my partner didn't actually need to lead because I already knew where we were going. But then I started, when I moved to Australia, I did start sal salsa. And uh social dance is the most interesting thing because you don't even need to speak the language of the person you're dancing with, but you both can dance and can improvise. And this is where you really kinda need to have need the different figures and you need to need the steps, but then it's improvising and following the lead of the future of your dance partner. And I think with the future it's actually exactly the same. Sometimes we need to lead and to follow the future, and sometimes
Discovering Strategic Foresight In Practice
SPEAKER_01you need to take over and lead, uh, so there can also be a switch and a lead and a follower to do that. So I think it's really comparing this social dance and not sure what's coming and improvising uh compared to maybe how you have fixed routines independently from that. Although in general, I'd say that more like standard Bolum dance, like a walls or a tango, and probably um more in a frame and less improvised than maybe some of the Latin dances.
SPEAKER_00You talked about stories and the things that you find through futures. So what you said that stories are what fascinated you the most through this? Like what were the things that what were the ones that fascinated you through like that first experience doing this kind of work?
SPEAKER_01Um I feel like these narratives that we change how we perceive the future are so strong. Um I did a workshop when it was uh still in Australia and we did it with the Aboriginal community, and of course they felt a little bit very um depressed and held back from all the experience that they had in their past, and it's almost felt that they really don't know which stories still to tell their children in the world where they grow up. So we really shifted the whole narrative from maybe the victims of suppressing um from the Western culture into that they are the wisdom keepers and they actually know how to do wildfires, how to keep the land, and they have a very strong position. It's more like that the white people living out there don't know the knowledge yet, or even that the communication they could have with them, and this really empowered this. So I feel like shifting the narratives of the futures that we want to go and telling this either in stories or in pictures or anything else, so that we are drawn to that. Um, because I feel humans uh especially we're so drawn to the risk and to try to avoid futures, so we want to know what the future is to we can prepare for it. Um and I really want to shift that narrative into what is the future that we want to live in, what is the future that we want to create, play, um, live in, and then kind of backcasting towards what are decisions that we need today. And the best thing about it is as well that if you imagine better futures, you're more likely in the present to see what we call those little pockets of hope, those those pushes, those trends that you need to invest in to actually make your future kind of uh more giving that future more energy or more decision to that may come true, knowing that probably not all aspects of any future will come true. But it's really the way where you base your decisions on needs to have the fixed star of the future that you want to create.
SPEAKER_00They're afraid to even talk about it? I wonder it's like let it happen to them and then react. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I feel so. Um I feel there's a lot of um fear from the future. We also try to shift to get how we get hope and joy for that. And most I do a keynote, I start with the polar game to really get the audience into where they stand. Do they see the future optimistic or pessimistic? And do they feel they have agency to change things or just no, we need to rave the ride the wave because there's anyways, no chance to do that. And it's interesting to really see different conferences, different rooms, how they um react and position themselves, and especially also uh with different companies and backgrounds. And unfortunately, I feel that sometimes the younger generations have less hope these days, uh, whereas I think we as a millennium we're very still hopeful and idealistic into change. But I hope we can also change that in a way that we give back this agency of what are the futures that we want to create and do so. And I feel the best how you do that is to really bring diverse people, diverse ages, backgrounds, uh, gender, um, languages, countries together and to think about the future together that you can't see or explore alone.
SPEAKER_00So you mentioned Australia, Aboriginal. So you m you went there. You went there for a reason. You went to Swyborne when you got a master's of strategic foresight. And for those who don't know, there's a few programs around the world. One's University of Houston. Uh I attended that one. Um and uh you did the
Learning To Dance With Uncertainty
SPEAKER_00one with Peter Hayward and uh Richard Slaughter, correct? Is that the one in Swybord?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so it's uh Swinburne uh University of Technology, and it's the Foresight Institute that was founded by Richard Slaughter, and um basically uh Peter Hayward and Joseph Rose were back then students of Richard Slaughter. Um and he retired, so I was then a student of uh Peter Hayward and Joseph Ruris, so they got trained by Richard Slaughter.
SPEAKER_00Carrying on the legacy, which is awesome. So he he also you told me he could really teach you more because you you're very self-taught, which a lot of future a lot of people in the space are, obviously. So there's a massive amount of uh autodidact, like self-learning, you know, pursuit of that. But he said he could help you kind of loosen up on what it's actually for, which I find that knowing Peter, that's a great term. So shout out to you, Peter, if you're listening, I'm sure. You know, you listen to the show. So, what did he mean by that? What how did you sh what did it do for the practi your the practice and the way you you approach foresight?
SPEAKER_01I think it's exactly what I've what we're comparison with the dance for is I had all the steps, but I didn't have the mindset. So my mindset was still very German engineering, because I kind of maybe suppressed my my dancing, my creative part back then, because I thought, oh, it needs to be in analysis and it needs to be in a tech company. So when I came to Australia, as I said, he said, Oh, you've done so much on scenario planning, we need to broaden your horizon of different thinking. So this is why the Foresight Master there, it's really almost philosophical where you go into is this reality, is this a table? How can you know that this is a table? How can we explore this? How can we uh see the world from different uh perspectives? What if I would be male? What if I were young and old? We had an empty chair, which was always for the uh next generation, what would they think about the decisions that we do? So I think it was really broadening up that thing about how to see different shapes of the future and challenging uh perspectives. And I think also a lot on the leadership style. I also did an MBA, um, but I lost a lot of leadership also in the Foresight Masters, and I feel compared to Germany, there's also an Australian, it's probably more the Anglican way that that is ahead. Um, that is as a leader, you need to understand what your values are and where you stand for, so that you can challenge yourself, but also help and other people to um where to lead and not from running with the flag, but more by supporting from beneath uh in a team what what other people's need. And in Germany, I feel um people are a lot in management positions because of their expertise, but not necessarily of their um human or leadership skills. Um and this is where a lot of effects are the leadership, yes, uh totally.
SPEAKER_00I think many people listening have had m bosses like that, and they can think about leadership teams. And yeah, I think foresight is should be a key part of any kind of MBA. I mean, I I you know it's if they have leadership courses, you know, coursework, you have leadership workshops, but uh more are starting to do foresight as a as a thinking model, just like design thinking and futures thinking, just because it's a different way of approaching a solution or possible solutions, if you will. But you know, you're you're German and obviously in Australia, different cultures, different work mount model, like you know, approaches to work. And you came back to Germany and what was that like for you kind of coming back and building a practice, like building your own freelance practice back in back in home, back at home?
SPEAKER_01Well, I first came back and worked for uh a software company again, where we're still going back to be very strategically about foresight in a way how you uh map trends and how you proceed that, but that's still a lot about being, I don't
Stories That Reframe The Future
SPEAKER_01know, in a small boom in front of a computer and trying to solve uh foresight and and trying trends. And I felt I really missed the conversations and the friction that happens if people are in a room talking about it. Um, so after a few years I left this because I really enjoyed the futures work with people, and I even changed my approach from because normally you do trend work or you even build scenarios in a workshop with your clients, and I flipped the script and said I bring in scenarios that I was finding quite generate generative in a way that they could be used for multiple industries, but they have specific different angles on how the business world may change. So I brought this and then um I asked the their clients to be uh bring in diverse teams, so everyone from HR, from RD, from uh purchasing, from uh their leadership till um really wherever they could get. Um and then we split them in small teams and they had to explore those futures. And I asked them, how's your customer look like? What would they do? What is the data live in your customer back then? Uh, what's your contact still with your customer? What would you sell? Uh, how would you survive in this world? What would be struggles? What would be opportunities? So I really brought them in a conversation with multiple uh questions and sheets, and they really had to explore the future. I gave them an input of how to look different at the future and bringing the inner child and be playful and be uh curious. Um and then that, and it's interesting because especially the RD and the engineers to look at the beginning and they sit like this and they're like, oh, what are we doing? And it's like uh so out of the out of their box. But then those are normally those who get their inner child and their playfulness, and then they're back in their engineering playing Lego and building worlds. Um, and it's super interesting to see that shift, and especially then also seeing how the HR person is talking and thinking compared to uh a person from the engineering or compared to uh from Beagle. Um and most companies really don't have that interdisciplinary exchange that much, especially on the topic or in the future, although those expertise especially is needed. And so I really did explorative vision workshops about four different futures, four different groups they had to share. And then we tried to come up with a preferred future and to say, okay, with all those chances and opportunities, what are the things that would you like to keep or would even like um to make it happen?
SPEAKER_00So one of the things you said when you came back, you worked with the EU commission on participatory futures. I love this idea. Like you took a workshop, you had 50 people in it, I think. 50 more than 50. You sent them to rebuild a planet they they destroyed. It's kind of that it's what happened like you say, getting people in a room, what happened in that kind of space? Because I would love for people to try this at their, you know, if they have this the let's just say they have a space to do it, right? What what did what happened?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, this was exactly then when the pandemic hit and there were no workshops or no wishing workshops with companies uh anymore. Uh I was lucky to be uh still as a as a consultant for the U Commission, and they really looked into to see how can we give citizens participation? And they wanted to get feedback on the European Green Deal back then, especially. So we really thought, okay, how can we get people in the room? And people were really excited to connect because everyone was so disconnected in the real world. So we had 50 people, uh, we split them in small groups, breakout rooms with different facilitators, and we told them a story. And the story was that we kind of overused resources on planet Earth and it got destroyed, and they are now on a mission with five teams to explore five different planets and to see what is on this planet and how um humanity may survive there, or which culture and what else uh there would be. And those five planets we shifted a little bit with the Green Deal topics, and one was about fire and energy, and one was about biodiversity, one was about the oceans. And then we did small things. We we almost did like a reverse CLA where they asked them about what is kind of your experience there, your feelings, your emotion, your metaphor, and then the world building, and then to see what you see really on top. Um, and we really asked what are the resources, they had to send back a postcard from that planet uh to Earth to say what was their first impression. And then they really had to build a society and um what we resources, what is maybe produced or not, and what are people doing on this planet? And then the interesting part at the very end was they had to pitch back to ground control to say, should humans actually come and live on this planet? And everyone pitched, and their phrase was at the end, but please, please, humans don't come. We don't want you to destroy the planet that we created. Um, because they really stepped out of just the tech-driven futures. There was technology, but it was kind of for resolving and as a tool. And they really thought about how we want to live as a society and how the societies there would may react. And this was so nice to see that there's still this striving for humanity to connect and to rebuild society. Although I feel like these days with technology we're quite disconnected, although we're connected. Um, so I think we just need to give people more space to not thinking about just tech futures, but really think about how we want to live in the future.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean the tech is sometimes seems to override the the uh the thought process, especially it's so things are moving much faster now. But you know, you talked about backcasting, and for those who don't know backcasting, it's kind of reverse roadmapping, taking something from the future, working back, and how to start from today. But you you you take a a bit of a different approach. Like you don't ask like what do you want, right? You talk to me about how you work about the destination, right? It's it's kind of it's pretty ambitious. So how how do you you like you you take the preferred futures and you kind of work this so walk walk us through that because that's I think I think it's a really interesting approach.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so as I said, when we have those uh flipping back to those four scenarios that we had, which um are also not scenarios that are necessarily fig picturing all parts of the world and normally shape them in a way that they highlight a specific issue. So one is maybe a heavy tech-driven world, another one is about society reconnecting,
Building Hope And Shared Agency
SPEAKER_01whether one focus on nature. So you have those complex issues of those worlds and you can't tackle them all, so you almost give different people to focus on different things. And then you bring it back, and easily you normally do that is with a futures triangle. If you want to do it longer, you do it with a three horizon, the adaptive version from Andrew Curry and Billy, I think, is uh the second person working on that. And you start with what are the pieces of the future that you want and how we can recollect that? So, what did you explore in this future, or did you maybe even work out um as a solution that you really liked? So we really re picturing from middle little puzzle pieces uh this preferred future. Um and then we start, though, also to look at what is the competencies and the skills of the uh organization already. So that's almost the push of the of the present to say what do we actually have that we can reach that future, just really broad first as a brainstorming. And then it is the interesting part which most organizations need to do to even to kind of map out the futures what do we need to let go? So what is holding us back? Um Um normally it's always about, oh, that's historically grown, there's processes, there's systems, there's maybe a language that is used in the organization. But a lot of things, at least in Germany, it's about processes that kind of um hold them back on that. Yeah, and then you use those image of the future. Um, and really like in road mapping, you think about all those different departments that are on the table and think, okay, if you want to be there in in 2030, what must have happened in 2028? Um or now, since we're actually already in 26, I would probably jump further in those 10 years ahead and you're in um 20 uh 36. So what happens in uh 2038 uh four. Um why are we doing this exactly as you say? Road mapping sometimes feels especially in the future overwhelming because you're here when the future is there and it seems miles away and you can't reach it. You just see every blockhead and blockage. Um, how yeah, you not get there. So instead of this, we really try to move back from the future and thinking what must have happened before and before and before. That being said, especially in business, is people uh they ask me a lot, yeah, but that's a preferred future, right? That's super utopian or sometimes like this. And I'm like, yes, but that is exactly leading to a future that you won't create. And all scenarios, the ones that I brought, the preferred future, will never be reachable and is as uh unlikely as all the others. So what also is not the point is that we only focus on our preferred future and we never do any stress test with any other alternatives. But every decision that you make today should somehow lead and prosper into that future that we want to create. Of course, it can also be used then uh to challenge. That's the other part. So once you have your roadmap and you did that and your preferred future, then you come up with uh four more scenarios, maybe more industry scenarios. Um, and then you stress test that roadmap against, okay, what would happen in all those different worlds? Um you can use um Jim Dator's framework with archetypes, what is with the business collapse, what if it transforms, what if we have limited resources, and how would we act then? And then you can stress test your options and your roadmap against that by saying, um, okay, how robust is my decision in all those different scenarios? And what are maybe pinpoints that I need to look out for, those signals and those trends that appear that challenge my own future, my preferred future, and may lead to something I want to avoid. Um but this really helps to create this map and those trigger points that you actually know where you need to look out for, for the good and the bad, um, to be aware of. Because these days there are so many trends and signals, how should we look through them? And we can only focus if we actually know which trend signals would benefit our future that we want to create, and what are the triggers we want to avoid? And if they happen, were there still decisions or changes in my strategy that I can do to better adapt to other futures, or to return back more onto the pathway that leads into the preferred future? So it's a lot of mind gaming, um, I would say, and thought processes of alternative futures. It's not about finding this one future to prepare for, but more being able to uh keep making decisions because you thought about all the different options that could appear, at least a few. There's 300 million thousand that we probably cannot imagine. But the more the imagine, the less you are surprised, and the more you're able to act and react fast.
SPEAKER_00So how okay, so interesting, because you know, data, a lot of these are tools if people don't know them, they're they're essentially archetyped or modeled two by two type of uh structural environments, like a collapse or a transformation. But I was curious in your work, do you ever consider that there's no kind of single future, but like a spectrum of them? Like it's like one person's transformation is another person's collapse. Like I always use the AI example. Um, you know, it's like AI for me at first was like, oh, you know, the design space is like collapsing, but it's honestly transformational, just like but it's very rapid, so it's it's hard harder to adjust. But looking at the people that inhabit that, right, when you do this type of work. So you could you consider that that a the case? People that exist in that kind of spectrum.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's the first rules that we do. Um, first to say there's always multiple
Mindset Training And Leadership Lessons
SPEAKER_01scenarios and alternative futures. So even if you and you work out our preferred, as I mentioned, you should always challenge against others. Uh, but also every scenario and how I write them, they should have some some hope, some fear, some challenges and some anchors in the present. So exactly that, for example, a completely AI future probably has a lot of benefits also for humanity, but it has also a bit of risks. And I think to always show that there's no good and bad, and it's in between, and it's a lot about probably our ethical decisions of how we use technology in that case, the the in which way it actually can turn out, the one way or the other. Um, so I really, really stress tests to say there is not one future, there's multiple ones, and one future can mean different things uh for the person uh perceiving it. One future is one uh positive and for the other person one negative. But in general, it's about finding those sweet spots and those things to still action in those worlds who still show us different possible outcomes of futures that we may fearful and may hopeful for.
SPEAKER_00It looks like the f for those of if you can hear it, if the police are it's like the future's police are here. Um so let's go back to the dancing metaphor and and and the you remember in dancing, you can kind of lead or follow, right? So you said with the future you can make the same choice. And organizations, I think you said this before, is like they're neither leading nor they're following, right? They're kind of at the edge of the dance floor. Trying to remember the steps, the music change. Yeah, it's like so how do you teach how do you teach them to get off out of the the audience and onto the floor, if you if to to use a to use a dancing metaphor, right?
SPEAKER_01They're really trying to shift into taking the future responsibility for organizations. I mean, a lot of times people struggle these days, and especially finding skilled workers, and it will be even harder with the next generation, and if they don't have a purpose. And I don't mean a purpose, we earn money, a purpose of what are they actually doing to make the world better, and what is their uh part in shifting towards a future we want to live in. And this is necessarily something I do because uh I really believe Forsat has three implications. And one is you can build a robust strategy, but also the strategy that leads you in the future you create. It can help you about innovation, finding sweet spots for product services, if especially if you think about customers in the future and how they explore scenarios. And the third one is about transformation and especially transformation, your employees from being fearful in the future and probably less productive because um there's no uh motivation to it, and being really hopeful for the future because they can see what this organization actually contributes to that. Um, and an example is in in Germany we have this big debate there currently where our chancellor said we all need to work more, we're not productive anymore. And I don't think that this is yet.
SPEAKER_00Sure is not productive. Yeah, okay. That's a that I that I find surprising.
SPEAKER_01You see the perception on that. But I feel like what people don't see, it's it's not that people are not uh productive, as I think there is the motivation missing because there uh is this this image for the future we want to perceive. It's not there, it's like every party that we have, they're kind of blaming a little bit what the others are not doing, but none of them really is shaping a future they want to create. And same for for organizations. So I really stress this organization to come to what is the future you could create, what is your role in that, and how can your employees really find and identify themselves with that? And this really gives empowerment and productivity for that, um, and not doing more rules or forcing people to work more by the hour because you can sip your coffee at home or in the office and waste time whenever you want if you don't see purpose in your work. And I feel this is really where we need to shift from, especially where less purposeful work probably gets automated by AI and others, um, to see how we can actually find those sweet spots and getting human connection and creativity back so that we uh as a humanity solve the big problems together with AI. No worries about that. But I feel if we only use AI, we're just copying the past. And I don't think that probably all decisions we made at the past in humanity and still present were that good. So in order to come to a better future, we really need to get more creative and we need to challenge AI. Um and we need to use AI, but with some human creative input of what we want to make better and how we really want to live better together.
SPEAKER_00Well, and let's kind of shift from the organization to the futurists themselves. So you were the actually the APF chair. So for those that don't know the organization, it's the Association of Professional uh Futurists. It's been around for about almost 25 years now. Uh and it has a different place within the kind of futures organization's uh spectrum. It definitely focuses on the I would say a lot of the individual professional, you know, whether it be a consultant or within an org. It doesn't tell me if I'm wrong, it doesn't really do a lot with specifically corporate foresight as an organization, you know, in terms of that, but you were vice chair for three years and you ran it. You you you've seen a lot. You've seen the inside, you know, setting the standards. What do you think the profession is, you know,
Running Futures Workshops That Actually Work
SPEAKER_00going to look like? What and what have what do they still haven't figured out yet?
SPEAKER_01I feel like um as you said, it's a lot of um practitioners uh basing in the APF um want to focus. Uh I think one is exactly that, and they they started when they left um after being chair, they really focus on getting more connection to the corporate world in a way that you need to solve some business issues and you need to get relevant to them to have impact because this is also why I got back from a little bit excourse where I uh worked with children to get futures as a topic into schools, but then I shifted back working with organizations because I really think there's also big impact and they probably have more impact on politics that they seem or know um to shifting this. So as futurists, I think what we're currently missing is especially after creating those images and those futures, how do we really get this into decision making and making sure that uh leaders in the organizations are actually can use this for making their decisions better because they know where it's leads for, what the impact on us. And I feel this transition really shifted um in the in the past couple of years. And there's of course always the tension and being explorative and normative scenarios, or are we doing um the preferred future? Are we doing the preparedness on this? And I feel the whole spectrum is good there, and it's good that we have different uh practitioners focusing on those different things. I still think we need to get better on communicating that. And I feel that's where design thinking had the advantage. There are so many designers. And although futurists are really creative, I feel sometimes we are not the best of handling over or getting the message through the noise. Uh, luckily or unluckily, because of the uncertain world, I feel there's more need and more um demand for uh handling uncertainty and question that. So I see really the demand going up for futurists. But yeah, I really feel we need to find those sweet spots where actually strategic foresight sits from imagining those creative futures and then bringing this back so people can make better decisions in the organizations.
SPEAKER_00Do you think we need to standardize on things like uh job responsibilities, positions so it makes it easier to hire and scale and work and also m letting people move between feelings sometimes about that.
SPEAKER_01Because yeah, sometimes as a futurist, we're very opposed, especially for like just trend forecasters who saying, or I'm on the big stage and I tell you how the world is. On the other hand, I need to say they're really good at their marketing. Uh it's probably also because they're promising something that people want, they're telling them the future. But I feel sometimes they're way more prominent than uh the traditional futurists. And then as a traditional futurist, though, I would say it'd be good to maybe say, you know the difference and you know the steps and the mindset. So that's I don't think you should just, if you do some um credentials not just on the tools, there should definitely be this other part that's the futurist that you really have your mindset. But it shouldn't limit yourself on how you use methods, because I hack methods all the time, depending on the audience and others, just to see what works. And especially I think this is where the real skill set of a good futurist is that you don't have the same foresight process for every client. You really need to look on the sweet spots and how they're receptive to it, and you kind of mid-patch your different methods to come to different outputs. And most likely, and this is what Peter Hayward said a lot of times, as soon as you're in the process, you still start changing the process because the more you unravel with the client, the more you need to turn to different. So I would say the worst thing could be if we had all stand-aside um generative foresight processes, um, and we don't have this creativity. And so I'm always open to also mix and match with other fields on that. And for me, more the understanding and the mindset and the the the groundbreaking maybe uh tools um set uh would be good to talk about, at least communicated and understood by people who really want to work with the future.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I uh my take is on the not not so much the specific methods, because obviously if you're a designer, like you can take different ways to get to solve the problem. It was also like uh things such basic as like job titles. Because the people that are hiring them aren't the few to your point about the trend, this or the br that's a branding thing of somebody maybe that's a pr a speaker or the you know the high-end consultant. That's different, right? Versus like I'm gonna try and build a team at XYZ company. And I think that's something I've been very much evangelizing, like how we need to do that. And you know, I think for where you've you know, you've spent your career helping people, like organizations move from the reactive forecasting to the proactive preferred. But I kind of want to ask you a quick question about the clients. Like, so if you could design a world where your you know, children, the generation behind then that's next that actually inherits this, what's the one you would design? Like, what does that world feel like?
SPEAKER_01Well, first of all, I think in order to design it, starting with schools, I really think we should teach future. Like we have history in school to really see how do you understand different concepts of future, and there's exactly nothing that's happened to you. It's something that you can create. But also with uh futures, one of the first scenarios I did was about future and university, that we go away from schools or
Rebuilding Planets For Citizen Participation
SPEAKER_01universities about consuming insights. It should be actually reflecting and having debate. Um, so you can get all the insights now in on the online class or through the internet. But we need to know spaces actually in school and in universities where people of different opinions come and debate, and we do this. Because these days in in the world, I feel we're really missing agreeing to not agreeing to disagreeing, because we have a lot of left and right polarization and we don't have the middle anymore that actually debates, comes together and find compromises to move forward. And I think this is very, very dangerous. And if I could design something, I think I would really put um, and this is not um physically and especially I think not humans in the center, but really nature and holistic symbiosic in the center and to see I'm it I'm attacking, of course we should use technology, but should we use just technology because of the sense of it, or should we actually think about it?
SPEAKER_00It's not the panacea. It's it's not a panacea to solve it. No, it's not. It's it's got its uses, but it's also got its limitations.
SPEAKER_01And if you look how humans feel most happy, it's actually when we help other humans or other uh or animals or we're doing something good. So I feel we get actually really depressed and we get all those mental health issues because we're disconnected from nature and we're sitting all day in front of a computer, which also feels like time moves faster compared to if you're in nature, because our body uh reacts more with that. Um so I feel really we need to get through this holistic thinking of saying, are we actually in this treadmill of all of our um uh form of GDP and and growth and profit that we need? And is it really something that the world needs? Or isn't this a bigger purpose to really see how to use resources better, how to um uh tackle big issues like uh climate change, like the hunger and all the the misstery that we still have a lot of places in the world, and how we can really solve this with technology, and especially how we can create better views for leaders to make better decisions. And one of my favorite things about this is what's called the overview effect, and it was based on uh astronauts actually be backing back on the ISS, and they said even the the tension between uh Russia and Americans started uh in the ISS, they still feel really connected because they looked down on Earth and they saw this really fragile planet with the thin atmosphere, but so beautiful and stunning. And if you look at that from space, there's almost no borders. There's no borders. There's no borders, and there's no way how you can understand that humans don't protect that, but they fight each other and the others. So I had once this idea that we needed to shoot every politician to space to see this, uh maybe it's maybe just keep on going.
SPEAKER_00I don't know if we want to bring them back, but we can just, you know. But I agree with you. I think the more we can get it commercial and get people up there, not just, you know, uh the the well the super wealthy or just but just make it accessible and commercial, which I think will happen over the next uh couple of decades. People's perspectives will change. People's perspectives on what the world and what how rare, you know, the the fragility my favorite scene is uh of of that is is the movie Contact, where like the radio signal that's kind of that's received, I think it's been almost thirty years, so I'm not giving away spoilers here, but the beginning is like Carl Sagan's kind of message of you know, the amount it's it in it's it's a lot of empty space, it's like if there's nobody out there. But you see the the the the how small we are in the millions of galaxies, it goes outward to planets to the all the way out to the and it's like wow, you feel infinite and it zooms back in and you feel infinitesimally small in the scheme of things. And the and the things that people, you know, we argue about, or you know, even in the world today that's just we're fighting over is pointless. It's just in the scheme of it all, it's just it's not worth it.
SPEAKER_01So let's The only subnote I have on this is to the question is how we can do this really sustainable, because if we shoot everyone up in the air, I feel like the emissions that we produce from that should not be as maybe counterweight to to the other part. But this is where I thought almost about um VR or something, that you really have this experience, even with people in a room and intermersive, um, where you look at that but you're still on Earth. Uh but yeah, if we would find a sustainable way to go up there and down uh without emissions, I feel like this would be a must before you're like 10 years old, you have to do this, and then every kind of five or ten years to go and to remind you about this disputy there. And I think to for your for your questions back, if I really could create a word of just this mindset, I feel like a lot of futurists have about seeing the bigger picture and connecting things. So this is why I say in organizations, foresight, it's just a philosophy how you lead an organization. It should not be an inside department. And I feel this is where a lot of corporate departments actually fail to be corporate foresight, being the inside department, everyone looks for the answers instead of really opening up the horizon of the entire employees and especially the shipboard to make by themselves better decisions with some of the tools and the edging and nodging that we're providing, but to really don't see it as a as a poor intelligence tool, but rather to have um any managing power to make better decisions and that everyone in the organization should understand what that means.
SPEAKER_00Well, you know, it's time to use the to keep in the dancing vernacular, let's change the tempo. Uh so as we kind of uh wrap things up, I always like to ask kind of a few rapid questions, but you know, what do you think that this is kind of a what do you think the Foresight Futures community is they what they talk about constantly, but they're actually terrible at it? What do you think?
SPEAKER_01Well, I was so bold when I was on the board at the APF. I was like, oh, we want to change the world. And I was like, but why are we still aboard? So why is it very hierarchical how we kind of organize ourselves and shouldn't we get rid of this? And it's a little bit if you look at some of the craftsmen and how worse their own homes look like because they're not focusing. I feel but futures is something hard you can apply to yourself as a futurist the same. You need someone else to challenge uh your own mindset. And I feel sometimes as futurists group, we need to do
Backcasting And Stress Testing Decisions
SPEAKER_01that more often though, and to challenge our species uh on the things that we've done before if we should not change and shift and open and especially yeah, organize us um in a in a different way, maybe to get this set up or prototyped uh so we can also bring this into the world.
SPEAKER_00So what do you think is a oh you know, I love weeks, like looking for weak signals is one of my favorite things because you feel like you're in the end and nobody it's like, you know, cool kids, you know what's going on. Uh what What do you think is a weak signal on the horizon that people are not paying attention to? Like they're missing? What do you what are you seeing?
SPEAKER_01Well, I found that super interesting one that was here in the region and we had kids eating putting with a fork under the bridge.
SPEAKER_00Putty?
SPEAKER_01Pudding. Pudding? Like a dessert. Pudding. Pudding. Yeah. Okay.
SPEAKER_00Putting said putty, like like putty on the like on sounds like like what?
SPEAKER_01There was my German accent pudding.
SPEAKER_00So Pudding under a bridge.
SPEAKER_01With a fork. Very interesting. With a fork. Because it takes longer. But if you under under lie and unravel that um signal, I feel like I feel like we're missing social spaces these days. And going back to social dancing in the 50s or 60s, you had those big ballrooms, and Friday night you would go out and you would social dance with a different dance partner. So you also had somehow a human touch, but you had your space, you had respect when you dance, but you really connect with human on so many different levels. And nowadays I feel we don't have that. And it's interesting then then the young people need to come up with a crazy idea why to meet, which is eating pudding with a fork under a bridge. So they seem to have a purpose because we're missing this. So I feel that this tension and this hopelessness and that people feeling lonely really see that we need to get those marketplaces and those social places back in the world where people really can meet. And we saw this after COVID, and to do so. And um the second signal, this is also a thing with the youth with something that we call um micro-retirement. So young people actually don't want to work from now till they're 65. They're like, I work two years and then I travel for three or four years and then I work again. But of course, why should I wait till I'm old to do that? And anyways, it feels like life is so expensive. If I wait and just save anything when I'm old, I can't spend it or it's less worth. So why not they spend it immediately? So it's this shift from being stuck with a company and having a career for 25 or 30 years before you maybe make a career change to no, reinvent yourself every two years and they actually just earn the money to be free again to travel, and it's not this loyalty to organizations anymore.
SPEAKER_00It's interesting because I there's a few things on that. Like I just wrote in Future Proof about reinvention as a constant process. It's like a uh ongoing, like a constant thing now. Used to be like you had to maybe do a second career, you change thing, you know, if you had to, or something really in your life, you or you wanted you've always wanted to do something different, right? But at the same time, employers would look at they want you to have the connecting tissue, they don't want you to see the time off. You know, I just took a sabbatical to write super shifts and I took the time off, also spent it with my son. It was, I don't think considering mini retirement, but but it was also I'm seeing that a lot more because I think people are going to be working more and longer. And it's a it's a question in the gaps. It's like, would you rather take a time off, take a year off in your 50s and really when you have the energy and the ability to go to places when you're trying to be 70, and then you might have a little harder of a time. I think the one thing that I see a lot, which is the analog push, which is wild, because uh as a as a teenager in the 1980s, we grew up with albums and cassette tapes, mixed tapes, right? But it's a social thing too. You can trade alb you can trade records, you can collect it's is there's a physical thing with books. I love that because it shows me that no matter how digital we get with everything, there's a visceralness to the the physical, the physical media. Like I'm actually buying all the DVD hard DVDs and Blu-rays of all the films and all the shit things I like because one there might become a time where just streaming exists and streaming goes in and out, and you may not be able to find the thing you want to watch. And or they they did this with It's a Wonderful Life, they modified it to be like to cut some of the bad things out, it completely destroyed it. But imagine like just for example, like uh MGM's owned by Amazon. Imagine Amazon decides they don't want to they want to take the perceived misogyny of of James Bond in this, like the 60s James Bond, you know, they want to cut this. They they that's the only way you can get James Bond. So I think the people, the kids now realize that there is a value in having those things. So yeah, you touch upon some really interesting um you know items. I love the the putting the putting in the fork thing. That is just awesome. So I guess for me, like, you know, you know, when you look at this kind of journey for yourself, what would you wish what what advice you wish you had when you started this and you're starting to kind of take the journey?
SPEAKER_01That's a good thing. I think also to probably here also not be afraid, and and I think especially as a as a woman you're really self-um criticizing, and I I'm a very perfectionist person in one way, they're really hard on myself.
SPEAKER_00I'm I'm ger I'm my my roots are German too, I understand.
SPEAKER_01So I think just to really be saying it's okay and being in the moment and exploring also different options, even if they're uh going into something different direction. I think this also connects to what I had before, how productive do we need to be? Because why does it really have to be that it is growth and is growing GDP? Why do we have to produce more and use more resources if that ends up that people see less of their families and are less connected? And in the end we are in this machinery of treadmasters. So why are we actually doing this? Just to make a few people more rich, uh richer and uh and maybe probably suffocating the the human being and and some people even the best times with the kids because they're they're working. So I feel like how can we
Weak Signals And New Life Patterns
SPEAKER_01really solve those issues in the future where we see of course we should be productive in a way, especially making um things better for for humans, the planet in general life. But how can we also question the things just the way we've done it and not being afraid to work in parallel or horizontal instead of always need to go up, up, up?
SPEAKER_00So last question. Legacy question I always ask. You know, you've you're uh you know, in that cafe, you know, by the Danube beautiful place, you know, and most beautiful place on earth. Uh what would you if you're looking back at a career, you know, you've done a great deal, what would that be? What would you want that life that career life lived well to be? What you've given.
SPEAKER_01If you you mean if I need to change something with my life now?
SPEAKER_00No, no, your your legacy, like what you contribute. What do you f what would be what would make you feel happy about the things you've contributed? Like looking looking back.
SPEAKER_01Well, I think I really enjoy that I find really my my passion, I think in English is called the the calling for. It's not just a job. It's like with 13 years now I doing futures and I love enjoying it every day, and especially uh being on the stage and sharing that with people and transforming them from the fear futures to the hopeful. And although we are so uncertain, doom world or I don't lose my optimism. And I think, yeah, maybe we need to go down, but there's so many good people coming back up in in my generation and after who think differently and who really probably see uh the the the planet as a beautiful thing that we need to take care of. So I think what I'm really proud of is that I was able or I am able to create those voice out there and to bring people joy back and hope to to move towards futures that we like and to create futures. And that yeah, that necessarily doesn't um mean or need to know where you're at. You just need to be in the right place in general and you're always in the right place where you're at, and you meet the people that you can then just multiply and and bring this this joy forward um to that. So it's not the big stages that you need, but the the people and organizations around you that you can influence so they can influence others.
SPEAKER_00Well said. So Tanya, where can people find you? Around the internets.
Advice, Legacy, And Where To Find Her
SPEAKER_01Currently I always find it with uh my name. So I have a website, but you can especially follow me on LinkedIn. Um I have don't have time to write then many long blog posts, but I have now the newsletter Dancing with Uncertainty, and I try at least to put something out um like uh every month as a newsletter, but every week I do a bit of a thought piece um and to really get those things back. And I shifted here as well. I was always internationally, I was always writing everything in English. And sometimes I've noticed now, and probably also because I'm a smaller part of Germany now, that uh I need to write more in German because all my English friends they can push the button and get already get translated uh automatically, thanks to AI these days and LinkedIn. But there's a lot of language barriers for Germanies, especially for smaller companies, to uh even read that. And the automatic translation from English back to German is often not as good as the other way around. So um I really found that I currently trying to have my my roots back and to uh write more in German and to speak here more in German, exactly from I don't need to be uh everywhere internationally, but I may need to start to do some smaller or bigger changes uh here in my surrounding and in Germany.
SPEAKER_00And it's Tanya with a J, so T-A-N-J A. Thought it'd be some people still doing a lot. So we'll have uh locations and things in the show notes, but thank you for so much for this time. It's been great to you know talk about the future with you.
SPEAKER_01Well, thank you so much for having me, Stephen.
SPEAKER_00Great. See you all next time. Bye. 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.
