
Ja-Nae Duane Show
Welcome to the Ja-Nae Duane Show. My name is well, Ja-Nae Duane.
In this show, we will explore the systems that shape human behavior in society through the eyes of technologists, scientists, executives, and leaders, from the algorithms that govern our digital lives to the future of work. We'll be taking a closer look at how these systems function and their implications on our lives.
But really, what sets this show apart is how these future systems will impact humanity. We will ponder what transportation will look like over the next century.
How will artificial intelligence impact our economy? How can we reimagine smart cities to revolutionize urban living? The possibilities are truly endless. Now, you may be wondering, who am I? I'm a behavioral scientist who conducts research at Brown and MIT. My passions lie at the intersection of human behavior and technology so that we can understand that beautiful relationship a little bit better and understand not only how we influence technology but also how technology influences us.
Ja-Nae Duane Show
Ja-Nae Duane Show EP 6 - SuperShifts and The Age of Intelligence with Futurist Steve Fisher
Steve Fisher invites us into the fascinating world of futures thinking, sharing how his teenage encounter with Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock" sparked a lifelong passion for anticipating what's next. As he reveals his journey from accidental technologist to respected futurist, Fisher offers a refreshing "protopian" perspective – neither blindly optimistic nor darkly dystopian, but grounded in human resilience and potential.
What makes this conversation particularly valuable is Fisher's practical framework for navigating technological disruption. He distinguishes between technologies worthy of "experiment dollars" versus "production dollars," helping listeners develop discernment amid constant hype cycles. The discussion around AI's impact feels especially timely as Fisher challenges conventional wisdom about job displacement, suggesting instead that professionals focus on leveraging these tools to enhance capabilities and create space for more complex problem-solving.
• Started as a futurist at age 13 after reading Alvin and Heidi Toffler's "Future Shock"
• Developed natural ability to spot trends and weak signals before they become obvious
• Built early career in networking technology that evolved with the commercialization of the internet
• Distinguishes between "experiment dollars" and "production dollars" in technology adoption
• Co-founded McKinsey's Futures Practice just before the COVID pandemic
• Believes this technological revolution differs because changes are happening too quickly for gradual adaptation
• Encourages professionals to learn AI tools to enhance capabilities rather than fear displacement
• Co-authored "Super Shifts" to help people understand systemic changes across various domains
• Describes himself as "protopian" – optimistic about human potential despite challenges
• Recommends resources for developing "futures fluency" including podcasts, books, and courses
• Emphasizes continuous learning, especially about topics outside one's expertise
Never stop learning. The key to being a great futurist is being an autodidact – constantly challenging yourself with new ideas outside your wheelhouse and questioning non-obvious futures.
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For over 20 years, behavioral scientist Dr. Ja-Naé Duane dedicated herself to one mission: Make life better for one billion people. This award-winning innovator and expert on global systems focuses on helping corporations, governments, and universities understand and develop systems of the future using emerging technology such as VR/AR, AI, and blockchain. Ja-Nae guides companies forward, helping them get out of their own way to create exponential innovation and future forecasting. She has had the pleasure of working with companies such as PWC, Saudi Aramco, Yum Brands, Samsonite, Natixis, AIG, and Deloitte. A top-rated speaker within the Singularity University community and the author of the bestseller, “The Startup Equation,” Ja-Nae at helping both startups and multinational firms identify new business models and pathways for global scale. Her next book SuperShifts is due out in April 2025.
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Hello and welcome to the Janai Duane Show, where she explores the systems that shape human behavior in society through the eyes of technologists, scientists, executives and leaders. From the algorithms that govern our digital lives to what the future of work will look like, we'll be taking a closer look at how these systems function and the implications they have on our lives.
Speaker 2:Hello everyone, welcome back to the Janai Duane Show. So today is a special one. No, it truly is special, and the reason why is because I get to sit down with someone I consider to be extremely brilliant and someone who has been my partner in many ways, from co-authoring books to being my creative partner, to being my business partner and just my partner in life. And so the guest I have today is Steve Fisher. So Steve Fisher is a futurist, an innovation leader and design executive with over 30 years of working experience where he's worked with startups, global executives as well as government leaders as they all try to figure out how to shape the future.
Speaker 2:He began his career in the trenches of digital design and has lead teams at Digitas as well as Sapient. He has worked on really great cool products, such as the Coca-Cola Freestyle to working with American Airlines. He's worked at McKinsey and helped to co-found McKinsey's Futures Practice. He's also the co-founder of his Foresight and Innovation Advisory Firm, the co-founder of the Revolution Factory, as well as the Think Forward Network and the Human Frontiers Institute. He is always focused on the future, and it's one of the reasons why I love every mostly every conversation. Since we're married, you know, sometimes it's not every conversation, but mostly every conversation. And with that, with no further ado, I would like to introduce you to Steve Fisher. So, steve, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 2:I know this is going to feel weird for us, but that's okay. I'm really excited to actually dive in and have a conversation with you about this and for listeners to get to know you a little bit in the way that I know you. So I would actually love to jump off and have you tell folks a little bit about yourself, how you've come to become a futurist and I know that journey hasn't been a straightforward path. So dive in wherever you want.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that's a funny thing that I've interviewed a lot of people on Think Forward and the one thing consistently from those who are futurists is that we are all accidental. I don't think that there might've been a moment where you discovered the thing, but the way you come at it is kind of like accidental. For the most part, I was 13 years old and this is in the 1980s For those of you who were born in the 80s or after that. The Cold War was going on. There was lots of terrifying destruction. There was global cooling, not even global warming, there was the ozone layer. There was lots of uncertainty and fear, like we have now more into mainstream households with personal computers is just starting. So there was this shift going on of not computers relegated to big rooms but making information more accessible, skill sets, and there was a book called Future Shock written by Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler. So there are futurist books before that, herman Kahn, and not to give the whole history of futures, but it did start out as scenario planning in the 50s about nuclear war and it turned into a lot of back then in the 70s and 80s about client, about the environment, about what the energy, especially the energy crises. So it was like what might happen and companies like shell took advantage of it to help their business. I didn't. I realized I read this about future shock and then the third wave, which is about telecommunications and information age, that this is a job. I was like you can do this. Like you know, heidi and Heidi and Alvin were probably some of the best well-known futurists.
Speaker 3:But yeah, I was 13, you know I had guitars and girls and cars and you know. But I wanted to be a pilot. And through my college career I took a more traditional, you know, business career and technology. I got into technology that I kind of fell into, which was my accidental, but through the and I got into technology that I kind of fell into, which was my accidental. But through the years I got into building products, getting with the early internet, seeing the opportunities, but always being farther ahead than my peers, seeing kind of farther out. I didn't realize it was a gift. I was able to pivot a lot of my career and seeing things before they happen. We're just noticing trends, noticing signals.
Speaker 3:And then, around 2000, I started to build products and be product manager in places and I started to learn more about the field and I started to bring it into my work as scenario planning or I call it other things other than futures, and I think what a lot of people are finally acknowledging is that this is necessary, whether it's a skill set you learn or it's a job that you do. That doing futures work and all of the associated methods and tools and even the mindset, can really make you competitive and have an advantage over others. When you're trying to get a job or you're trying to do your job, you don't have to be purely a futurist. A couple of years ago I was at McKinsey and I helped co-create the futures practice and that was, I would say, beyond the design and innovation groups that I ran, that I brought all this into. I would consider myself a design futurist because people like Stuart Candy and Jake Dunnigan, who brought in concepts of speculative design and design fiction, like Julian Bleeker, allowed someone who's creative like me to help communicate the future, not just create a scenario.
Speaker 3:So I brought that, with a number of others, into McKinsey and there was a lot of resistance, as naturally it would be Consulting firms that are paid a lot of money to tell people what to do in the very, very short term and I see you're laughing, but then we were putting this together around the fall of 2019.
Speaker 3:I think those of you listening probably see where this is going. Then, about five months later, the world kind of like everything shut down and imploded. We became very popular. A lot of people didn't know what to do tomorrow or what to do next quarter. There was that long-term planning, but there was this set of how do we navigate this uncertainty, and what McKinsey allowed me to do was to formalize a practice like this and bring it to a lot of clients and really educate them, which will kind of lead to my current mission and future's fluency and getting people aware of that. I was at FTI for a few years and then we left there to take a sabbatical and really focus on futures full time and write super shifts, which is where we are now.
Speaker 2:Yes, we are.
Speaker 3:Yes, we are.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, there's so many different threads I want to pull on before we jump into super shifts and futures fluency. How did you accidentally become a?
Speaker 3:technologist, a kind of a transformative moment. This is way before the internet, so around 1991, 1990, 1991, yes, like around the world, the Berlin Wall, this is like that. Long ago Most of computers and companies were like these, like yellow or green screen terminals, just like kind of dumb turn. You're typing things in, you're getting basic information. With PCs there is this concept of networking and Ethernet and being able to tie computers together into networks and have them work off of centralized servers. That was huge and I was working at Wells Fargo and nobody knew how to do it and nobody wanted to do it.
Speaker 3:So I dove in and I kind of had a real knack for it. So I learned networking, which I think is a skill set everybody should understand, how to network your house like TCP IP addresses. That gave me the foundation to understand how information architecture and structurally network, being a network architect, came about and it led me naturally and I just kind of fell into it and then it turned into working doing that full time while I was trying to finish my bachelor's degree, which took like seven years. I mean, some people become doctors. I got a bachelor's degree but I went more part time because I was doing, you know I was making a good living as a young, young man and I was very lucky to you know it was good timing and but I could see that was getting commoditized.
Speaker 3:And then when the internet was commercialized with the Telecommunications Act of 93, isp started to pop up. The intranets were a thing in company, like the web pages. It was starting to. You could see this pre-Cambrian explosion about to happen and that was like I'm going to move to that. But I used the network, so that's how I kind of I just fell into it and yeah, it's been very, very good to me these few decades.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can attest to that see almost beyond the horizon and see weak signals and how they're going to start to create a bit of that rippling effect before the grounds swell and I've been with you time and time again. It's what's been really lovely about so many of our conversations throughout the years. For you, what does that process look like? Is it a process, or is it just something that you intuitively do? Because you said earlier it's a gift, and part of what I have always wondered with you is is it actually a gift, or is it something that you've trained and you don't realize? Or have given it enough thought to realize that it is something that you've trained and you don't realize? Or or um, have given it enough thought to realize that, um, it is something that you've trained throughout the years?
Speaker 3:yeah, I think it's. There's a few things to this. Um, one, I'm an avid, a huge sci-fi fan, read a lot of hard science fiction as a kid as a kid, um, in college, and I think for me of of all as much as I love dystopian fiction and it is also more utopian, which is like a Star Trek. I am protopian. I am very much positive about the future. I mean individual humans here nor there, but as a human race, the resiliency we've been able to beyond recorded time. We've been around for hundreds of thousands of years, the, the ability for us to to survive and move through it may not be, it may be rough at times, but I've always seen that those futures, those possible futures, and what they are and how we might get there. So I always saw these paths. They're almost like these paths, they're almost like lay lines of like how we might get there. And for me, visually, like I would see trends or signals and I could, it was an intuitive sense of, yeah, this is gonna die, you know, this is not gonna, or it has a 50-50 shot. And so I was never like the super, super early adopter of things. I kind of want to let things play out a little bit, but I paid attention. I think that's the most important thing is I paid attention to the change and I saw the adoption and when. The would definitely bring it into my world and that could turn into bringing technology in early. Like this one just popped into my head.
Speaker 3:I remember in 2000,. We had 2000,. Early 2001. So Wi-Fi was just beginning to come out. So Wi-Fi was just beginning to come out and we had an $800 network Wi-Fi hub router, just a dumb Wi-Fi in the office and we had these cards If you're listening just by audio, we had these cards that you could stick into a laptop and if we turned it into a Wi-Fi You'd be able to do Wi-Fi and they were like they were a fortune but people could move wherever and I could just see like even before that like this is going to be a thing Like I knew Wi-Fi before it was like became commonplace, but I was able to take advantage of things like that and get ahead. We're seeing this with AI right now. It's the same type of thing, but there's a little bit things that are more systemic with this than other maybe technological changes.
Speaker 2:With AI, you mean.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yes, we can get into that, because that's a whole nother world. But I think the last 15, 20 years for me maybe even more than that 25 years you see the Internet come, not like, yeah, you don't have to change, you can go live in the woods in a cabin and be just, it's your choice, but there. But civilization will move on. It will continue to progress and some progress is better than others. But nevertheless, what I've been able to see is is there not only a adoption for it, but is there like a cultural change to it? Right, is there an? Like? Everyone wants to buy online. Before people were. People use Salesforce.
Speaker 3:Now, 25 years ago, when they first came out, people were terror, like they would fuse. The thought of them putting their customer data on somebody else's servers was like you want me to what? And like the cloud the cloud was like a scary thunderstorm because they're like I'm not putting theyats on the Titanic and they're going to have to jump in the water, and that is probably not the best analogy, but still there is. There is a sense that when you see something out there, the weak signals will get stronger. And when they get stronger, look for the culture, look for other types of partnerships, look for the growth and the adoption of it, and there's an early moment where you can kind of jump and ride it, which happens about I think in technology, about every seven years, maybe a little longer, but we're definitely experiencing this now. But, like I said, there's a difference.
Speaker 2:Let's talk a little bit about early adoption, because I'm curious about this and I don't know if you've given this any thought. You are absolutely an early adopter and I've seen that time and time again, one of the questions that always pops up into my mind and I'm not always an early adopter because I don't want to start to dig into things. I like to see how they.
Speaker 3:Now let me preface the early. I will not waste money in this household. I will research it to death. I will research it to death. I will make sure that it has a long life. So there's not like just buying of a toy and it gets thrown away and like there's. There's an important distinction in that, right. So yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But so let's look at the other side. Let's look at the other side of that of maybe folks who do not research it to death and are not really thinking through and are just, you know, are hopping on the hype cycle. I mean, how much of that in your mind leads us down these paths of of I'll say, uh, you know, blips of technological enjoyment, maybe recklessness, lack of conversation around the ethics of our use, or even, we'll say, lack of guardrails in understanding how we should use these technologies. I don't know, are these things that you think about? I mean, these are things that I think about pretty frequently and I was just curious because we've never had a conversation about that.
Speaker 3:Are you talking about technologies in our household or are you talking about technologies just in general In?
Speaker 2:general. So I'm talking about technology, like jumping on tech hype cycles. Because it's a new technology, it's a new, we'll say it's a new user. It might not be a new use, but it's being marketed as a new use and just sometimes that groundswell that you see we can use NFTs as an idea.
Speaker 3:That's a great example. Yeah, I never. I bought one to learn the process and I paid like $2, but it was fun. I never saw them as investments. You know, even speculation Crypto. I have crypto, but knowing what it's for and its utility, you know. But nfts nfts fascinate me from a utility perspective because you can have royalties, the smart contracts, you can use it for community and access, which I think is interesting. You can use it as a souvenir, but the fact that you're going to like flip them, like you know, buying sports cards and hoping, you know you can, you it's, it's it's gambling, it's it's speculation Um, I think, on the broader sense, like knowing when to jump onto something is also as equal when to jump off of it, and I saw that with Web3.
Speaker 3:You want to look at a hype cycle, right when you think about blockchain. I mean, my last role was in doing blockchain digital assets as part of my job, but I did a lot of work on projects like that at McKinsey and that was where it was really hot and that's where it was Everyone was, and I differentiate it between what I call experiment dollars and production dollars, and these are investments by like innovation, by innovation teams, innovation portfolios in an organization or even product teams, innovation portfolios in an organization or even product teams. You want to look at technology as is it going to be an experiment or is it going to be something core to our production and our and our use of as an organization and even as an individual? Because over time, it's where the, the, the adoption, fades, or the use of it's not even just adoption, but the use of it fades away or its promise does not meet its reality. And that's what the hype cycle comes in. We saw this in recent Web3 centrally collapsed, and I witnessed that at my last job.
Speaker 3:And yeah, you can talk about AI and blockchain, but blockchain has become a fundamental technology, which is good. It's become a technology we can all use, but it's not become one that companies are going to pay $900 an hour to consultants to figure out. They've already hired blockchain engineers. They've already shown that it could work in like, say, in finance or someplace, so they're going to do it as part of their again investment. It's moved from experiment to investment. Ai is in the experiment phase and probably I think what's happening with AI is we are going through our boom and bust cycles are going to get more accelerated because ai itself has gone through its hype, but there's a, there's an arms race right now to get and the and the.
Speaker 3:The thing that I mentioned earlier about the change and adapting is that most of the times when the adoption happens, there's time to kind of see, like I can see, beyond the horizon. But the horizon keeps rolling up faster and faster and the rate of change is so fast that people are feeling it and it's unsettling to many Because, yes, there's a lot of layoffs. If you take away all the undocumented and unemployed like I'm not talking about, sorry, the not counted you're looking at probably 17% for um unemployment. These are people that are not even collecting unemployment anymore, they're just doing part-time.
Speaker 3:They're just not in the system, versus 4% or 5% that are still unemployed. But a lot of people in the tech industry have lost their jobs but they're not getting like. It's not because of economic conditions or even constrictions, it's because they're being replaced by more automated processes and that is going to continue to. Either people have to adapt to be able to work in that kind of environment or they're going to have to do something different, Because before we would have time for new job types, roles, things to evolve, for people to kind of change careers, find new work like new things. We don't have that time, that luxury of time, anymore. I think that's what's, that's what's very that's what's fundamentally different this time, and it's not just like this time is different. No, this is. This is pretty different.
Speaker 2:So yeah, no, I know it's something that many people struggle to grapple with, but it very much feels like the Wild West, the way that early 90s, the way that it felt in the early 90s, that's for sure, no-transcript, but I think that's an opportunity to really flex one's own curiosity, to see what else can I do. I don't know. I mean, what are your thoughts? If folks are unemployed or looking for a potential jump, how do you think they should explore that?
Speaker 3:I mean, if they're in tech, they should consider it depends on the role that they have. I think that if they're developers, they need to learn how to use this tool to power their development. Developers everyone keeps saying developers are going to be gone. I don't think so. I think there's an orchestration level that changes with developers in the next decade. I use the example of a design system. So if you don't understand what a design system is, think about if UX designer or product designers have to go in.
Speaker 3:If you go into a new project or new company, a lot of times things are kind of a mess. There's nothing standardized, right, dropboxes, radio buttons but imagine having to do that every single freaking time you have to build that. Well, you want to create a design system, one so everyone's standardized and adheres to it, but two that everyone can use and not have to reinvent, that it opens up space to do harder things. So I would look at, say to yourself, the jobs you've had before with this type of technology. What leaves me? What do I need to learn so that I have a superpower and I can do things better than everyone and that I have the ability to have the space to do harder things. I think if you can come at it that way, yeah, it's, there will be other jobs that I think evolve. I mean even like prompt engineer. I think has even gone away. You know it's been, it's got a half-life of like a year and a half and now like going to get a job as a prompt engineer, like. So I think there's the fundamentals. There's things that will not like. If you can use mid-journey to design and prompt it correctly and create outputs, and then you can use video tools to create video, there's a multitude of things you can learn. But don't fear the reaper. It's not going to kill things forever. If you don't want to learn this, I highly recommend exploring other job professions because it's going to be infused in itself.
Speaker 3:I just read an article this morning with Google IO. Google IO is their search results that are going to be built into, especially with Gemini. It's going to look at into, especially with Gemini. It's going to look at your search history, things that you do, your patterns. It's going to give you results that are one-on-one. They're personalized. How do you design SEO? For that? You're going to have to rethink your entire marketing strategy.
Speaker 3:Okay, you're a marketer. How do you position yourself, do some projects, do some stuff for your portfolio. If you're out of work, how do you show somebody who might be scared of that how you can do that that nobody else can. They'll hire you. So it's really not just about the project, but it's also about the skill set.
Speaker 3:You have to add a whole new skill set to your ability to function. I mean, you could go back 40 years. I mean my father did not, and still he's retired. Now he's an engineer and he refused to learn CAD. He had engineers, he had draftsmen, he ran the firm. He didn't need to and he just didn't. Man could still use a slide rule. He could probably send us to the moon, but he's super smart, but he never wanted to learn that. And well, some people might have that. You know that ability, but most don't right.
Speaker 3:I think about spreadsheets, like when VisiCalc and Excel came out in the 80s. Like that was like people discovered fire the fact that you could just type in numbers and it'll calculate everything for you and you can change a number and I'll do it all. Like that was magical. Before you'd have to use calculators and paper. And so there were people that were afraid of that because they saw themselves put out of a job. And I would also lastly say that if you think that you're future-proofed by or you're protected, you're not, and I would make sure that you diversify your skill set by learning these tools just at a base level. Even if you have to be the one to hire the people to do the work, you need to understand how they work so that you can find the people. So they're not telling you a lot of BS. So there you go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love it. Let's talk a little bit about Super Shifts. You and I get asked a lot why we wrote this book and I'm interested from your perspective why you felt like this book needed to come out into the world reasons and then the selfless one.
Speaker 3:Selfish reasons was I had a social theory that I wanted, that I've tested, and I wanted to get out into the world. We have a few and I have a futures and foresight method we use. We wanted to get out into, really kind of formalize and kind of put a stake in the ground and, and you know, make sure that that was established, same with the futures operating system. I think it was that you see, I saw trends and signals and all these things that are, you know, banded about as terms and in futures work and you could talk about megatrends, but a lot of it was like synthesized and locked in but it was not at a systems level and and I feel like nobody has taken the time to look at the larger systemic change. Try and synthesize them in broader categories, help people get a sense of what is actually the, because you see it from all directions from energy, from the ecosystem, the environment, the technology, like we just talked about, ai, the adoption, the change in longevity there's so many things You're just getting like how do you make sense of it? We tried to do that and I wanted people. I wanted to just put the names in there and have it as part of the conversation. So people talked about it. The selfless one was for Max, for our son, because I wanted to.
Speaker 3:As a protopian, I wanted to show those who might read this a few years from now that might be teenagers in college that things seem like they're really messed up right now, like the whole world is on fire Cyclically yeah, it's true, but I'm thinking about another five or six years. It's going to be a different place. This is going to be a tough decade for a lot of people, but there is hope and not just rebellion. Rebellions are built on hope, but that things that are, um, great futures are built on hope, and I think that having that positive message where everyone's reading dystopian or watching, you know, zombie, shows that the world is collapsing, that, yeah, we're going to make it through it.
Speaker 3:There's an amazing future ahead and these kids are going to live to be at least 100, maybe 150, 200, who knows what may come about so they can live through this whole age of intelligence. What does that mean for their careers, for their lives, for their interests? It's exciting. I wish I kind of was 10 years old again, because it's amazing what's ahead, and I think I wanted to take away the fear and the mystery a bit to help people. It's not going to be all perfect and perfectly. You know, there's no prediction, but I think that if people can use this to be one of their tools or one of their guides when they communicate and they can understand how it impacts them, I did my job, so what about you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, for me, this is really about and you touched upon this this is really about identifying a new way to create new systems, to be to the systems that we're already surrounded by in nature and how symbiosis works, or even looking at how feedback loops work within nature and how we don't necessarily think that those things apply to us. You know, that's. Those have been, those have been things that have been sitting with me for for years, I mean even before, before COVID, you know, for it was COVID that made me go. This is the opportunity to start. You know, people, people are almost at that, they're ready to reset in a way, or they're at least open to it, and so this is the opportunity to create that conversation. So that's why it was really, it was really important to start to explore how open people are to that, how we can start to reframe that. How do you do so? With the intention of positive some outcomes instead of, you know, us versus them, constantly pitting ourselves against one another and against, you know, even against the environment, as if we don't need to inhabit this planet and we don't need its resources. We just, you know, we could take it all and and and, you know and the spoils go to us, um.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I mean, those are the reasons why, for me, I felt like this was the time was right, and and it just sat for so long brewing, and I even remember our early conversations of jana what does you know?
Speaker 2:The transform model, in particular, like, what does this look like and how do you articulate it, and so those have been really fun thought exercises to come, to come to and to work through with you. You know what's really that I'm really proud of with this and I want to I want to touch on this before we start to wrap I really feel and I'm really proud of the amount of tools that this book has that provides, yeah, that provide individuals, organizations and even collectives with starting to build their future fluency muscles. If you will, I would ask you, as individuals are starting to think about future-proofing their business, as they are thinking about future proofing their business, as they are thinking about future proofing their lives and, um, and trying to build that fluency within themselves, what are some of the first things or first steps that they should either be thinking about or for steps that they should be taking in order to start to head on this journey?
Speaker 3:that's a really good question like.
Speaker 2:Are you praying?
Speaker 3:no, I'm not praying um. No, I was looking.
Speaker 2:I I actually had this written down um for you if you were just about to jump into it and futures into futures work, yeah where and you knew a little bit. You know, maybe maybe you read the book but you're like, okay, I need to figure out that one or two, those one or two things well, it just so happens that I have a hundred episode uh series in think forwards podcast called foundations and foresight, so they could learn.
Speaker 3:They could learn the basics as well as all the super shifts. I think getting that that's a good start. I think there's a lot of opportunity. Just taking some small classes and about futures, You're going to see that there's a multitude of ways people approach it, but there are fundamentals, there's signals and trends, there's the drivers of the future.
Speaker 3:You're moving that into world-building types of exercises, like scenarios as well, and then writing. We call them people of the future, these design narratives of the people, future like these kind of design narratives of the people. And then you know how do you apply it in a strategy doing back you know like what the, that those implications are and what those possible futures are, and then working it back into the products and services that might be farther out that, how they implicate. You know now and what they can be done, so connecting you know to the people. That can't go that far out or don't see immediate action. I think those are the kind of fundamental concepts. There are some good futures podcast shows like mine and like FuturePod, I think, listening to other people who've been doing this for a while. I think it gives you a lot of perspective. There's a couple of good books out there, like Super Shifts, but there's so many books. But I would say Nick Badminton's book on hope engineering is really good. There are.
Speaker 2:Roger's book.
Speaker 3:Roger Smith's book. Yeah, yeah, it's on his triple a. Um model is just disruptive futures book.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, there's we could put books in the. You know, what we can do is we could put books, uh, shows and podcasts in in the show notes for folks so that they can dig in and start to explore some of these resources.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and there's a lot of people that call themselves futurists that are on LinkedIn. I think it's also looking at newsletters and people that essays people write, getting a sense of what the space is. But, yeah, I mean there's a good chrysera course that jay mcgonigal does uh, from institute for the future. I think is worth. It's free, I think. I think that's a good place. I think you know things like the foundations of the futures episodes, her course, um, there's a few other out there we'll put in there. I think that'll give you a basic, fundamental knowledge of the language of this space and then translating it into your work. So that's about the. Those are my kind of like. Those are my short, non-prepared advice.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a process. It is a process.
Speaker 2:Such is everything in life.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So, Steve, I would say for our last question what's the one piece of advice that you would like to leave our listeners?
Speaker 3:Never stop learning. The key to being a great futurist is being an autodidact. It's not just about a passion for what's to come. It's about constantly keeping up and learning new things, reading about all kinds of things, especially stuff that is really outside your wheelhouse. That's the only way you're going to be able to reach and that mindset of never stop constant learning but also challenging yourself as to the non-obvious futures. That's another great book. It's non-obvious. Some of Rohit's stuff as well is good, but it allows you to not just bring your biases and the limited field of view you might have, but it's, like I said, constantly challenging what you may know and believe, and then that will make you a better futurist plus a more empathetic human being. And being able to talk to people who you may never thought of ever having conversations with can be some of the best, most rewarding times you spend.
Speaker 2:Fantastic With that, stephen Fisher. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Till next time. Thanks for listening to the podcast. You can find us on all the major podcast platforms and at wwwjanaeio, as well as on YouTube under Janai Dwayne. See you next time.