Using The Future Today

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Hello, everyone, and welcome. I've got Victoria Mulligan with me today. She's a New Zealand strategic foresight practitioner and futurist who works across commercial, purpose-led, and government sectors. Now, Victoria, there's a whole list of things I can read of what you do, but I think it's best for people to listen from you. Futurists. What on earth is that?

SPEAKER_02 0:34

Yeah, it's good fun. It is good fun. I do get a lot of blank stares when I describe myself as that. I often talk about myself as being a foresight strategist as well. But I guess the easiest way to describe what I do is that I use the future to make better decisions for today. So if I'm if it's an elevator pitch type thing, I'll say I work with leaders and teens to help them think systematically and creatively about the future so that we make better decisions today. And the key thing that I underline is really the so that, you know, because we can think about the future, we can imagine different ways that things might play out. But unless we connect that to decisions that we make today or ways that we change our behaviour, then all of that futures thinking is just speculation and conjecture. And it's super fun. It's a really enjoyable process to go through, but it's not always helpful unless we connect it to today. So that, yeah, that's my job. No, no prediction, but very much looking at all plausible futures and seeing how we can make our decisions and our strategies robust across all of them.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

But your background is not that, right? You were doing something completely different before you landed here. What were you doing before?

A Squiggly Path Into Foresight

SPEAKER_02 1:49

Oh gosh. Uh so I in I originally trained as a psychologist. I specialized in forensics and I worked in prisons and probation. Uh, I worked in New Zealand for a long time and then I moved to London where I worked at the home office there. But I got quite into human rights at the same time. So I I retrained in in law and human rights, which sort of took me on a complete tangent. Ended up working in sort of international development for a while, moved to Africa and worked in Eswatini, Swaziland for a while. So I always say it's a bit of a, it was been a bit of a squiggly line. But I think when I think back, like looking back now, I can I can see the thread that you know ties everything together. But I think it's trying to move. I've always tried to do something that adds value, like everybody does, but every every sort of path I took, I felt like I was the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. So I I I just ended up sort of, I think, drifting toward strategy as an as a an attempt to get in front of it, you know, and then came across foresight as a discipline looking out further than just the three years. Because I was working with a lot of strategy teams at the time, and everything was around that three-year mark. Like we would look back three years and go, oh, well, this worked over the last three years. We'll do similar for the next three. But to me, that felt a little bit like, you know, driving using the rearview mirror. You know, we just you can't see ahead unless you change your mindset around what's possible around the future. So yeah, ended up in foresight and now do long-term strategies, so sort of five to ten years out for organizations.

SPEAKER_00 3:40

You pretty much answered my question because I was going to ask you what's the difference between the strategist and the futurist?

SPEAKER_02 3:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:47

And I guess it is that shorter versus longer term.

SPEAKER_02 3:51

It's a really good question, that one though. And I get asked it a lot because I have to work very closely with strategists now, because strategists are very good at connecting today to the goals of an organization. So what do you need to be doing to reach the goals that organizations have set out? Whereas I tend to go to go out. So I'll say, well, is that a is that the correct goal for this organization, given the world that they're we're operating in right now? So I sort of stress test at a higher level, whereas a strategist is saying, this is the correct goal, how do we get there? And a foresight strategist will be saying, well, here is the external environment, and have we got the goal right? So they work, they're a real complementary discipline, which I think is is helpful for the time we are operating in right now.

AI Hype Versus Real Change

SPEAKER_00 4:44

Well, I was about to say, we are in the very interesting time, so the whole AI thing. What are you seeing if you put on your foresight hat on? How is AI going to change the industries of the world and including our industry, like the financial services? Because I know you've done some work in that field as well, haven't you?

SPEAKER_02 5:04

I have, and I think I think there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff going on right now because I a lot of the time I feel like we are getting caught up in the hype of AI. You know, there are a lot of other forces that are coming down the pipe that are, you know, not AI. Like we have demographic change going on and we have climate to deal with and increasing inequality. We have so many different forces that we need to be thinking about. But AI is taking center stage because it is so obvious. It's it's right in front of us. So when people ask me that question, I tend to say, look, there's there's two different questions. So one is, well, what will this technology be capable of and when? And that question is just really hard to answer. Like the experts can't agree on that. I mean, even was it last week we had people saying it's going to be the end of humanity within the decade, and yet you'll have other people like specialist AI technologists who disagree with that. So right across the spectrum, it's impossible right now to answer that question with any certainty. The second question I think is more interesting, which is what's, you know, the the broad direction of change, is it so significant that we're going to have to respond to it as an organization? And I think there the answer is pretty clear, right? So I talk a lot about uh something called capability overhang, which I'm sure you're all familiar with, and if not the term, then the the concept, which is we all have this technology, we have access to this technology now, which is capable of doing things that organizations haven't even touched yet. We haven't touched the sides of it, it's not in our workflows, it's not in our job design or anything like that. So even if AI development stopped tomorrow, there would still be years of organizational change simply from organizations having to adapt to the capabilities that always already exist. And I think that's really important for people to remember. And I saw a I saw a stat the other day, I think it was a Gartner stat, something like 95% of organizations have, let me get this right, have implemented AI in some capacity, but only 20% are seeing significant or transformational value around it. And I think that's kind of really interesting because it forces you to sort of shift that conversation away from trying to predict when the next model release is going to happen toward asking, okay, what does work look like? What does job design look like when we start to embed some of these capabilities? So I think we just need to shift shift that question, I think a little.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

I love that because for me I always think that AI is only as good as a human using it. And if we're not training the humans, then AI becomes a bit redundant. And I think this is where you know 90% of the organizations have adopted AI, but only 20% of them are really using it successfully. Yeah. Because there must be some sort of missing link.

The Human Edge With AI

SPEAKER_02 8:09

Yeah, and I think maybe so there's when I when I talk about this with people again, I say that I think there's four advantages that humans bring to this AI story. And I can't take credit. There's a guy I think he's got a dog, hello, who talks about this thing's Ethan Mullock, if you're familiar with his work, but he talks about deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste and agency, which I think is a really nice way to appreciate the, you know, what humans bring to this conversation. So deep expertise is, you know, when you have so much expertise in a field that sometimes the decisions you make or how you work within that domain becomes almost intuitive. So if the example I always give is with accountants, often they will look at a spreadsheet and be able to tell you that something's off before they can necessarily tell you exactly why. They just they can they can tell, and that's deep expertise. Then wide expertise is sort of is different again, and I'm quite excited about this. This is the idea that you need enough breadth of knowledge to be able to connect things that sit in different domains. For example, that that suggests that things like the arts and the social sciences will get more of a game on now because AI has access to this breadth of knowledge, but doesn't always connect these different domains unless you ask it to. So, you know, um if I if I take my own work as an example, so you know, I could say to Claude, you know, create me a project plan for a foresight project for this FMCG business. And it could do that pretty well. It takes a deep expertise to know when it's, you know, suggesting things that are completely bonkers. But then someone who knows things across a lot of different fields. So I might say, look, well, actually, you're not getting so much into, you know, how humans might behave in these future scenarios. Or, you know, what does neuroscience tell us about the way that we appreciate overwhelm in future scenarios? Being able to connect it to different things is really important. And so as humans, we bring that breadth of knowledge to AI. And I think the more that we lean into those wide knowledge skills, all the better. And then taste, which is of course interesting because I could talk about this for hours, but AI gives us, what do I say, gives us all of the coulds all day, you know, like we have just an abundance of information that we have access to with AI now. So we can ask, you know, what should my business be focusing on over the next three years? And it will say, you could do this, you could do this, you could do this. But it is a very human capability to say or to suggest what you should do, you know, because you know the context, because you operate with empathy. So being able to separate, I think, the shoulds from the coulds when it's when it comes to AI is really important. And then the final one that he talks about is where was I, our agency, which comes back to what we were talking about before around the overhang. Because if we haven't even touched the sides of what AI is capable of now, having that agency to go out and look for that value and how how it will add to your business is really, really valuable. And that takes, you know, that human capability of going, oh, I think I'm gonna try it in this sandbox, in this way. I'm gonna test it for these different clients or for this organizational strategy, having agency to do it as something that is particularly human. So that's a long answer to that one. I love it.

SPEAKER_00 11:56

I was like, whoa, that was a whole presentation there.

SPEAKER_02 12:01

I've I have to talk about AI so much at the moment. It's just there's just so much there, but also, like I said earlier, I just constantly feel like we are we it we it's blinding us to some of the other stuff as well.

SPEAKER_00 12:15

Yeah. And that makes me curious to think about your own work when you're putting things together for businesses. Like, how do you know which lane to go with? How do you know which I don't know, strategic? Yeah, the future to decide and worth exploring.

Megatrends And NZ Demographics

SPEAKER_02 12:32

It's a great question. So I tend to operate a lot at, again, that sort of high mega trend level we call it. So mega trends is a sort of what we call deep structural forces that evolve over decades rather than, you know, these hype cycle things like whatever the latest LLM might be. And that's really useful because you can see those trends coming down the pipe. We can see them coming, but because they are slow moving and so significant, we often just think of them as there and you know, their background noise rather than seeing them for what they are, which is slow change that is giving us a, you know, time enough to adapt to. So there's, you know, there's a few, anywhere from like maybe eight to eleven of these mega trends that I would ground my work in, and that's everything from climate to population change to emerging technology to geopolitics. And so when I am working with an organization, I'll have a sponsor, for example, in the organization, and we will work together and say, actually, of these trends, these are the ones that we think might be most significant for our industry. And so that's what we want to explore. But every every sort of client engagement is really different for many because it can be from, hey guys, here are the here are the trends, here is how I think they're going to land for you, good luck, or it can be, you know, more of a three to six month project where we really explore what those trends mean, how they will land for your business, what your strategy should be to be able to to navigate those changes and and make sure you're robust against all of the plausible futures that can come up.

SPEAKER_00 14:13

I love that because like I often think about my own industry and where we're going with that. What trends do you see? You can just give me one example in a financial services, and how will that affect the consumer? Okay, that's a great question. It feels like an exam.

SPEAKER_02 14:30

So one thing is great, it's great. I like tricky questions. So one the demographic challenge that New Zealand faces at the moment is very significant. We're starting to see it crop up more in mainstream media, which is is good. So, you know, we have an aging population, we have declining fertility, the shape of our population is changing as well. So, you know, if I take Auckland, for example, where I'm based, we have what is this right? This was it this year for the first time ever, the highest, the ethnicity, the highest birth number was ethnicity Asian, which has never happened before. One in four of the babies born in Auckland have like, what is it? I think like multi multiple ethnicities. So rather than us being like the same shape of population in 20 years' time to what we are now, just a bit older, everything is changing. So we will be older, we will be more diverse, we will be very different rural versus urban. So our rural populations are becoming um older and smaller, whilst our cities are becoming more diverse. We're seeing a complete change in that sort of way. So what that means, I think, for people who are working in financial services is that your client base is changing. They are the people that are making decisions might not necessarily reside in New Zealand. They will be far more global. They might have different ways that they think about wealth and trust and investment and accountability and all of those, the way that they think about the world when it comes to finances is not necessarily the way that we have thought about it, you know, for the past 10 years. And that will change very quickly. And also the priorities, depending on where you're working in New Zealand. If you're working in a smaller region, you know, you're probably looking at how your business is going to cope with workforce shortages or how it might be able to take on more automation. Whereas if you're in a city, you're you might be focused on, I don't know, growth or new technologies, or there will be different ways that we need to work with clients and businesses because of the way that our demographics are evolving.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

I love that. I think that's super, super important for people to understand because New Zealand is not what it used to be like 50 years ago and 40 years ago and 30 years ago. I mean, I've been in New Zealand over the last 23 years, and the changes have been significant. Like even around Carpeti, where I'm based, and I've been here 11 years, and I can see how that's shifted the landscape from going, this is predominantly retirement villages or holiday batches for people that live in Wellington to now actually a place where people live and call it home, and there's a lot of investment that needs to go into infrastructure because suddenly our schools are overpopulated. Suddenly we realize that we don't have enough medical systems to cope with that. So it's always fascinates me to look into the regions, and especially like with my investment hat on, going, right, where's the next place where things will take off?

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:57

Where are the roads being built? What's happening out there?

SPEAKER_01 18:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:01

And yeah, so it's really it fascinates me when I look at that.

Critical Ignoring And Uncertainty

SPEAKER_00 18:05

Now, in your work as well, as I was reading up about you, you talk a lot about critical ignoring. What is a critical ignoring?

SPEAKER_02 18:12

I'm really curious. No, I do, because I think that we act like our attention is infinite, right? Like we can read everything and engage with all of the headlines, but we can't. Like I think our attention is is scarce, you know, and we are just hemorrhaging at the moment when we're bombarded with noise constantly. So I talk about that capacity or that capability to be able to see the signal through the noise. And I think that is a muscle that needs to be built. So I say, you know, like every single day, and I I was um talking to a group last week, and I went through and I grabbed, I'm gonna say like 10, 12 headlines from around the world just about AI, which covered every single spectrum of AI from humanity, ending right through to the medical advances that we're going to be seeing because of AI. Now, that is in one single domain, and our brains are getting this constantly all day, every day. And our children, you know, our children are growing up with this as well. So, unless we start to build that capability to go, this is important for whatever reason, then we actually we can't sort of metabolize it. It's it's unhealthy. And so, yeah, I do talk very regularly about, you know, stick that on a post-it and put it on your mirror, you know, not every piece of data will deserve your analysis, not every bit of rage bait deserves your energy. Like it's very, I'm very clear that in order to be able to make sense of change, we have to see the change that matters and then connect that to what we can do about it today, because that agency and being able to do something is what will keep us.

SPEAKER_00 19:53

But how do you how do you train your brain to do that? Like, how do you train your brain to understand what's important to focus on and what's not important to focus on? I mean, again, if I draw an example from the life that I have, I find a lot of clients come to me and they go, you know, I've heard this on the news, so I've read that on Facebook, and this is what's going on, you know, and you try to give them the right information, but often they will override you and ignore you because the brain is telling them what they've seen is correct.

SPEAKER_02 20:24

Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that we have to move away from is treating uncertainty like it's something that we can eliminate, like we just can't anymore. Um, and what I what why I say that is because most of us have learned earned sort of our sort of leadership stripes, for want of a better word, or like learnt the way to operate in business. We've learnt it over the last, you know, 40, 80 years, depending on how long you've been in your career. And over that time, we've had a really relatively stable international system, right? That's been held up by rules-based trade and multilateral alliances, and that world is changing. So we're now operating in an environment where we don't have that very steady structural underpinning. I just don't see that changing. And what I see is people saying, we might just have to wait this out until things go back to normal, but I don't think it will. So until we sort of shift our mindset around this uncertainty is going to be the new normal, then I don't think we can navigate it. And I find that, you know, again, when I'm working with leaders, they'll say, Oh, I need more information before I can make a decision. And again, when I describe what I do, I tend to say I work in that gap between certainty and optionality. So we can see that there is disruption on the horizon. And the closer that we let ourselves get to that disruption, so you know, you wait, you think I'll get more information this week, and then I'll wait for more information next week until you're certain about what that disruption is. But by the time you get to that point, all of your options have narrowed. So part of the role Of foresight is to be able to say, okay, I see that disruption on the horizon. I've seen it before all of my competitors have. And I'm going to start developing some options for how I can respond to that change, how I can prepare for that change before it keeps coming, before it gets, you know, it gets in front of me. So instead of asking, you know, how do I become more certain? You want to ask how do I make a really good decision despite that uncertainty? And one of the ways I encourage people to do that, which is extremely easy and can scale, is to say, well, what are the assumptions that underpin the way that we work? And that's something that people so rarely in business do. You know, you have a strategy. What are the assumptions that underpin that strategy? Is it that your client will always want the services that you are offering? Is that your workforce will always be available to you? Make your assumptions really explicit and then test them. See what happens if they're wrong or they wobble or they break, because that's when you start to go, okay, well, if this wasn't true anymore, this is what I should be doing now to prepare. And you can do that, that gives you that sense of agency to get ready for change, which means you can look at what is coming down the pipe and go, does that start to shift the assumptions that my business operates on? And if it does, there is something I need to do about that. If it doesn't, so be it. Let it go. But if it is likely to change the assumptions that hold up your strategy or your way of working, then it's something that you do need to do something about.

Government Foresight And National Vision

SPEAKER_00 23:47

I was just thinking how incredible it is to have people like you. And I hope you do a lot of work with the government because I feel like this is where we really need you.

SPEAKER_02 23:59

Yeah, so so that is a really interesting comment. So I do do some work with the public sector, primarily and Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet who do long-term insight briefings. And I encourage people to look at those long-term insight briefings. Not because I think that they are perfect by any stretch, but they are an open source, I don't want to call them a tool, but they are open source documentation about shifts, changes, disruptions that will likely impact New Zealand. And some of those briefings are better than others. And there's probably too many. I think there's 19 at the moment. I I would suggest there only needs to be five, maybe because these trends are so cross-cutting. But globally, New Zealand has quite a good reputation for futures thinking and foresight because we have tried to build some of that capability across our public sector. We're nowhere near where we should be. Like I look to Singapore constantly for an example of good practice when it comes to futures thinking. But we're also not the worst. What I would like to see is more engagement between public and private when it comes to thinking about the longer term. I don't think that we see enough of that yet. And then at a super like macro level, what is the vision that we want for this country? Like I'd really quite like to learn that, you know, because I think once you learn that, then you have a public sector that can work toward it and look at those things coming down the pipe, look at the trends and go, how can we use this? How can we leverage this change in our operating environment to move toward our vision? And if it is a if it is going to, if it is a risk, that trend, then how do we mitigate it so we continue toward that vision? And and likewise for the private sector to be able to use that same sort of strategy. I don't know if we have that vision as a country yet. I think we'll we'll get there. And I think it's a really hard thing to do, but I think once we get there and we join up the sectors and our ways of thinking about the long term, then all the better.

SPEAKER_00 26:13

Do you see a lot of fear in people wanting to have the foresight? Do you think people are scared to look far ahead beyond the two or three year Maha?

SPEAKER_02 26:25

We don't have space to look far ahead at the moment. So that's sort of the biggest challenge I see to this to building this muscle in organizations or building this discipline is we when I again when I talk to leaders about this, they will say that they it's really hard to look up and to look out because we're required to respond really quickly. We have to read it, we have to fire fire. Like there's things in the short term that have to take priority. I can't be thinking about what is going to be, what, what, what's going to be coming down the pipe in 10 years' time. You know, there is so there is that mismatch between short term and long term. Now I would argue that you need to do both. And you can do both if you have the tools available, you know, and you have built that muscle internally to be able to do that. Um, I don't think that foresight should sit with any one person or any one team in an organization, but it certainly needs to be championed at the exec level and at the board level. So no, I don't necessarily think it's fear. I think it's not having the capacity to look up and out. So you don't have the you don't have the opportunity to really make sense of what is coming. And the fact that you can't make sense of it makes you feel overwhelmed, and that might be felt as as fearful, but I think it's less than that. I think it's the fact that we actually don't have the opportunity to lean into what it is and what it could mean for us.

NZ Innovation, Geopolitics, Energy Shifts

SPEAKER_00 27:58

If we're talking about opportunities and talking about New Zealand globally, what opportunities do you see New Zealand is missing out on at the moment? It's missing out. That we could be tapping into.

SPEAKER_02 28:12

That's a big question. I mean, New Zealand is very good at niche, you know. Like I'll often, I'll often say that. Like we don't, we can't compete with the big global data centers, you know. But on smaller scale things, we we're like incredible. Like you look at our space, our space environment. Like we've got Rocket Lab, we've got stuff going on in Orthasi Christchurch and the Gizman Tigraffity, maybe. But you know, our space infrastructure, our ground-based space infrastructure is on par with, I think we've launched, we were number three. I think it was US, China, and then New Zealand in terms of how many space satellites we launched last year. Like that is a massive economy for us. And it's super niche. Likewise, we have technology and hydrogen energy, sorry, technologies and security technology with Halter. We have so many very niche businesses that have been able to uh test and learn here and then scale. I would like to see more investment in innovation and research and development in New Zealand because we need to be able to focus on what I call sort of weightless exports. You know, I think we do great with our commodities, like our agricultural economy is great, but I think going forward, that weightless economy, given that we are down the other end of the planet, we have long supply chains, things that we can export that are weightless, whether it is IP or technology, I think will be really valuable for this country.

SPEAKER_00 29:44

I love it. And I know you also done some sort of looking into the whole Middle East conflict and petrol prices and things like that. Can you add something about that? Because I know that's a huge, huge concern to a lot of people. I mean, just briefly, you don't have to go into any sense to say.

SPEAKER_02 30:03

No, not at all. It's absolutely fine. So the Middle East, this okay, so I would say that one of the silver linings of the Middle East conflict for New Zealand, and likewise with what COVID did for us, is it really highlighted how something that goes on on the other side of the world, I mean, COVID ended up here as well, but something that is going on on the other side of the world has massive implications for us here. We feel it very concretely. But I think when you first see it coming up, it feels abstract and it feels far away. So I think it's been a very good lesson for New Zealanders to say, oh, actually, you know, the the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has a real impact on us here, not just in terms of petrol prices, but the inputs, you know, the the cost of components to bring them here, inputs into fertilizer, which affect our agricultural economy. Like it has very tangible impact. So I think it's been a silver lining. So one of the things that we looked at quite early on during the crisis, I think it was back in April, and it's still playing out today, it's quite remarkable, was what is the what is this disruption when you, and when I talk about trends, I often say that the one of the most important things to bear in mind when you're looking at future trends is how they collide or converge to create either risk or opportunity. So I wanted to look at, okay, we have a disruption going on in the Middle East. What happens when that lands on a high trust environment, you know, trust in institution or a low trust environment? And right now in New Zealand, our trust landscape is pretty poor. We have pretty low trust in institutions and government, we have low trust in our media environment. Um, and so we built four plausible scenarios that looked at, you know, what do we take for granted in an environment where this disruption goes for a really long time and we have low trust in institutions. And then it's, I mean, it's a bit wordy to describe each of the plausible scenarios. But what we were trying to do is check our assumptions about the way that our society can operate going forward, you know, in these, like when you have a disruption, so often in New Zealand we rely very heavily on community infrastructure, but we don't recognize that, we certainly don't reward it. So, what does that do to our community infrastructure? Does it deplete it? Probably. You know, does it burn them out? Probably. So, what could we do differently if we know that that is a high-risk situation when disruption happens? And so we played them out in scenarios.

SPEAKER_00 32:54

Interesting. So, do you think more people should invest into like electric vehicles and solars and stuff to be more sustainable given New Zealand doesn't really have its own fuels to sustain economies?

SPEAKER_02 33:06

But that is the direction of change, 100%. I mean, and there's I'm not an energy expert by any stretch. And when I do this sort of work, I have to draw on uh people who are. But yes, I just I don't think we will be going back to that old way of reliance on fossil fuels. Like I think perhaps it will be considered as backup if required, but no, I don't think it's feasible. You know, people talk about degrowth, degrowth economies now, which I think we have to start thinking about what that looks like because again, we have finite resources on this planet. And so how do we use them in a way that is regenerative as opposed to depleting? So, yes, I mean I can't see another way around that.

SPEAKER_00 33:50

Because there was a big boom when this whole crisis started back in the beginning of the year, and the biggest thing we've seen is electric vehicle sales goes through the roof, and then the solar panels, because everyone needs to be sustainable. But I believe like the vehicle sales went from I don't know, five a week to like 25 a week.

SPEAKER_02 34:12

Yeah, it's just I think it's been like there's I heard something about like Trump's unintended consequences of the Middle East war was to really supercharge the green economy, and it's just happened, you know, like the globally there is a really great uptick in you know on alternative energy sources and and how we can look to sustain them over time. Really interesting. Again, those unintended consequences, right? Like we really that wasn't what he set out to do, I'm sure, but it's that's a positive. It's a silver lining, take it.

SPEAKER_00 34:45

Yeah, especially given his conflict with Alon and then the leader's he's giving him a helping hand. Totally.

Assumptions, Options, And Readiness

SPEAKER_00 34:55

Look, Victoria, I've got a question for you. If someone's listening right now, and a lot of my listeners range from first advised to investors and stuff and business people, if there was something that you could let's let's think about the business owners for a second, and then we'll move to the general public. If a business owner was listening today. And he wanted he, she, if the business owner wanted to become a bit more ready, future ready, what would be one thing that, like the first thing that they could go and do and start implementing today to become a bit more future ready?

SPEAKER_02 35:31

One so the one, the one thing, like the for me that most the minimum viable that all businesses should be doing is checking your assumptions. Like that is that is core to foresight, and we talked about that. So, what are the assumptions that underpin your strategy? And they will know them, and that's part of the problem. Often business owners hold that information in their head, but it's never written down. And so when it's not made explicit, it's very hard to test it. So that is the the very lightweight first sort of futures move that you can make. Write your assumptions down that hold up your strategy, and then get your team around you, even if it's one or two people, uh, I don't know. But get your team around you and stress test them. So what could what would happen if those assumptions weren't true? And then what would you need to do for your business to be able to operate in an environment where that assumption was not true? Like it's very, very basic stuff, but that has been what I have seen one of the most valuable moves that people can make um early on, uh, at no cost, just to really stress test the way they work.

SPEAKER_00 36:46

Um I was thinking about my own assumptions and my own business, and you're right, like a lot of it is in my head. And the first thing that I should probably do is just get it out of there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:56

And yeah, make the implicit explicit. I think that's good's good across the board, but I think particularly with assumptions. Um, and then can I add another one as well, just because I think it's really helpful. Um, I talked a little bit about optionality and certainty. So, like as an as a business owner, uh you might want to collect more information until you're really certain about what that assumption, uh, sorry, about what that disruption is that you're seeing coming. You might want to wait. And that is absolutely your call to wait. But just know that the more certain that you get about what a change will look like and how it will land, the fewer options that you will have. So create options as soon as you can, because when you rehearse behaviors, when you rehearse options, when you rehearse moves that you might make, they're not new and wild, like they will feel in a crisis. And so you can implement them very quickly in a way that your competitors just can't. So identify what those options are and then rehearse them and be ready to go.

SPEAKER_00 38:05

Hmm. I like that. And I know you and I talked about having multiple children offline, and all I could think of was my I love my analogies, and I was thinking about the prenatal classes, you know, how you go to the prenatal and they teach you how to wrap the baby, how to feed the baby, how to hold a baby. So when your baby arrives, it's there. So you semi-ready. Yeah, this is why we've got those classes, and it's almost the same thing, isn't it? Is it you just got to be prepared for what's to come, and you can't be prepared for all. I mean, the babies may not have colic. In my case, the babies had eczema. I was not prepared for that, but I knew how to deal with colic.

SPEAKER_02 38:48

Yeah, and I think that's all that foresight really is. You know, we use scenarios for it, we use lots of different types of tools. But what you're trying to do is get yourself into a situation where you are better prepared. And I will tell you that like most businesses in New Zealand are not and do not do this. And like we, when it comes to foresight and futures thinking, whilst we have a pretty good global reputation at sort of public sector level, our businesses are far behind when it comes to that sort of stuff. So any business that does start to use some of these tools and does start to build that foresight muscle will be way ahead of the crowd, just like significantly out in front. There's some really great, I mean, I can point you to great research on it, but there's a guy called Renee Rawbeck who's done a lot of research on return on investment in foresight for businesses. And it's just it's just huge, like even if you're looking at the numbers for it. Um, and I think it would probably be bigger in New Zealand because we just don't have that culture of foresightful thinking in our businesses.

SPEAKER_00 39:56

Yeah. No, I love that. Thank you for that. And then if we return to listeners that just listening, there may be business owners, there may not be. But if you could give people one mindset shift for navigating an uncertain future, what would it be?

SPEAKER_02 40:16

I would say a very easy thing, which is to shift your mindset from there being one future that is hurtling toward you to the fact that there are multiple plausible futures. And you don't need to know all of them, but just an understanding that there are multiple futures because they have not been created yet. We are creating them with every decision we make. And so you have agency around what is going to come based on the decisions that you're going to make. And that's the only way that we can navigate uncertainty is to appreciate the fact that the uncertainty isn't going, that the futures haven't been written, and that we can create steps toward the one that we prefer.

SPEAKER_00 41:00

Love that. I love that. I think that's so, so, so important to remember that, as you said, there could be multiple futures. Don't just I would probably add from my point of view is don't get hanged up on one.

SPEAKER_01 41:12

No.

SPEAKER_00 41:13

I see a lot of people just, you know, focusing just on one and hyper focusing so much that they just can't see outside of one potential.

SPEAKER_02 41:23

Yeah. And the risk with doing that, and I sort of hasten to talk too much about risk with foresight because I think that's what it gets muddled in with, but it's risk and opportunity. The risk is that if you prepare for only one future, only one eventuality, you are exposed to all of the other futures. And that is far riskier than being prepared for multiple ones. You know, what is what is what the scenario planning does for people, scenario development does for people, is that you can test out your strategy over multiple futures and then look for the moves, the actions, the the whatever that are helpful across all of those futures. And then you know those are the ones that you want to make sure are going to work.

SPEAKER_00 42:14

And that can be adaptable to people's personal lives, finance lives, business life, right? Like it's not, we're not just talking about people's businesses or the public sector. Like you could apply it to anything in life, I believe.

SPEAKER_02 42:26

Oh my goodness, yes. And actually, there's a massive move now to personal futures, like using some of these foresight tools that have been developed over time for business, you know, to be used personally. And in fact, I think particularly in New Zealand, like we have an Indigenous way of knowing and being in the world that has been cultivated over millennia. Like our Iwi organizations, they plan over 100-year horizons, which is something that our organizations do not. There's a really great, great outfit down in Orthofahi Christchurch called Tokona Teraki, and they're called Māori Future Makers, and they are constantly sharing like tools and ways of thinking and engaging with the future for young people, you know, to think with agency about what is possible and to learn from the past and apply those learnings to the future as well. And it's really cool. And again, like it is one of the foresight and future spaces that is particularly well recognized globally, that that like sense of Māori future making in this country.

SPEAKER_00 43:35

I love that. I absolutely loved it because now more than ever, like if as you were saying, you know, you look back at your life and you're like, ha, that's what happened, and this is where I've ended. And if only I knew what the future held for me, I would have prepared better. Yeah. But I was only prepared for one scenario of the future and not multiple.

unknown 43:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:58

But looking at it now, and I wonder again if that comes with age, whether personal age or business age, whichever angle our listeners want to look at it. But it's so Also important not just to look at risks but at opportunities that are ahead of us and not get hung up on what-ifs in a bad sense of things, but what-ifs in a good good way as well. And be excited, yeah, and be genuinely excited about what the good stuff could bring you.

SPEAKER_02 44:32

Yeah, yeah. And again, because what and when I come back to like talking about megatrends, for example, they they they can be, you can find them. There's lots of megatrends that are open source, and if anyone's interested, then I'm very happy to shoot them some stuff through. But I think they are really helpful because they are those slow-moving structural forces that require us to shift our gaze from the headlines that we see every day, that we don't know necessarily how they're going to land for our businesses or in our in our homes, to these slow-moving shifts that we see coming and we can do something about. And if I take the demographics one again, because I do think that's particularly interesting for New Zealand, is we're aging and not a particularly productive country, but our working lives are already extending. So we're older, we're going to be older, and we are going to be working for longer. So we do need to be thinking about how we evolve over time. Because whilst lifespan increases, so does our health span. So, what does that mean in terms of how we engage with our community, how we engage with work, and how we retrain, how we change our systems around what work and life looks like. There's all of these really big and, like you say, super exciting questions that we can start asking and answering now because we know how this force is going to play out. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:06

I always try to approach things in life from the point of curiosity and not fear. Because I feel like the moment we get scared of something, that's when the logical brain switches off, and you know, we can't normally think of the possibilities. But if you approach it from the place of curiosity and go, huh, I wonder if this would happen and what would I do in that scenario, and actually just play it out from curiosity. Yeah, that that tends to put your brain into a completely different mindset and work with you to find your solutions versus be terrified of the tiger jumping in.

SPEAKER_02 46:50

No, totally. And I think you what you're talking about is essentially what good foresight should look like and should enable, which is helping us to ask better questions, you know? I think that's just so important. Like, are we asking the right questions at the moment? I suspect probably not because we are so focused on will AI kill us this decade? I don't know. You know, like that's what what that's what we get caught up on because we're we're just leading from heart and overwhelm as opposed to systematically looking at some of those trends and considering what they mean.

SPEAKER_00 47:23

Exactly.

Tools, Links, And Final Advice

SPEAKER_00 47:24

Victoria, I've taken almost an hour of your time and I just can't believe what conversation we had and where it took us. And I'm excited genuinely to see where this journey takes you. Could you share some tools with us that our listeners could tap into and then they can click in the podcast notes in terms of you know what they can do for themselves. Yes, totally.

SPEAKER_02 47:49

Absolutely. So, like we talked about offline as well. So, in terms of tools, like I actually have a podcast which shares tools for thinking about the future if that if that's what you're interested in in playing around with, that it's quite a unique way of presenting the tools. So we talk with the creator of that foresight tool, and then we game it out in an imagined workshop, which you can do by yourself or with your team, but that's all there and available to play with. But yeah, let me have a think because there's there's tools everywhere. Again, like it's the signal through the noise, right? There's a lot of information around foresight and futures thinking that is out there, and some of it is exceptional, and some of it I wouldn't touch with a barge poles. So I can I could very happily send you some of this stuff. I think it's pretty solid.

SPEAKER_00 48:35

Thank you, Victoria. Really appreciate it. Any parting words before we wrap up? With the with them.

SPEAKER_02 48:41

Any parting words, gosh, I don't know. I think I would just encourage people to look up, to create the space to look up and to look out, because I think that's the first step. You start doing that and you won't go back.

SPEAKER_00 48:55

I love it. I love it. Thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you. And we'll put all the information about you in the notes. So for those that are listening, make sure you click on those links and find Victoria Mulligan. Thank you, Victoria. Thanks for having me. Caquito.