Simon Brown (00:02.999)
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Curious Advantage podcast. My name is Simon Brown. I'm one of the co-authors of the book, The Curious Advantage. And today I'm here with my co-author, Paul Ashcroft and Gary Jones. And today we're delighted to be joined by Bob Johansson. Hi Bob.

Paul (00:13.432)
Hello.

Garrick (00:16.144)
Hi there.

Bob Johansen (00:21.521)
Glad to be with you.

Simon Brown (00:23.297)
That's great to have you with us. So big welcome to the Curious Advantage podcast. So Bob, you've been a professional futurist for nearly 50 years, starting your journey with the Institute for the Future. You will also have over 35 years as a 10 year forecaster. I'm gonna get more on that. So can you tell us about your journey and how you got to take on the really curious role of a professional futurist?

Bob Johansen (00:48.797)
Yeah, thanks. And, you know, curiosity, guess, is what got me started. But at first it was curiosity about religion and meaning and kind of what's life all about. And I ended up going to divinity school to study world religions. And while I was there, I got the chance to be a research assistant for a conference on religion and the future. And I literally got to carry the bags for the world's leading futurists. And I said, whoa.

That's what I want to do. So I got a chance to kind of get my clarity of what I wanted to do really early and then went on and did a PhD. And I was very lucky there because I was at Northwestern for my PhD based in a sociology department thinking I was going to be a professor of sociology of religion. then, and then the internet happened. it was

Garrick (01:42.82)
Uh-huh.

Bob Johansen (01:43.836)
wasn't called the internet then it was called the ARPANET and only defense contractors could use it. And I was one of the first social scientists to be curious about it. So that's really what directed me and I was lucky enough to go to Silicon Valley before it was called that and kind of grew up with Silicon Valley.

Simon Brown (02:04.461)
Fantastic. what is a futurist? So, and I guess what are the skills that one needs to become a futurist?

Bob Johansen (02:12.635)
Yeah. So from, to me, a futurist is someone who thinks future back. You know, normal people think present forward. We think future back. We're not experts in the present. And to me, the best futurists are our humble futurists. And unfortunately, the norm is arrogant futurists who seem to be out to make other people feel stupid. I'm not one of those. I'm a humble futurist who thinks future back.

And the point of this is to use that future back story, and it is a story, to provoke insight that leads to better decisions in the present. It's not about prediction. You know, we're the longest running futures think tank in the world, and we actually keep track. So we're usually right. And we've been doing this since 1968, the Institute for the Future has, and 60 to 80 % of our forecasted futures have actually happened.

you know, depending on your definition of happened, but that's not how you evaluate a futurist. That's how you'd evaluate a fortune teller. We don't predict, even though some people use that language, nobody can predict the future. And you know, if somebody tells you they can predict the future, you shouldn't believe them, especially, especially if they're from California. But but what you can do are these stories from the future to provoke insight that leads to better decisions in the present. And that's

Simon Brown (03:19.501)
you

Garrick (03:32.108)
you

Simon Brown (03:32.301)
you

Bob Johansen (03:41.521)
That's what a futurist is.

Simon Brown (03:44.255)
and building on that 60 to 80 percent right. how, what are the ways that you've done that? How have you managed to get that level of success, I guess, in trying to predict what the stories of the future will look like?

Bob Johansen (04:00.655)
Yeah, you have to be careful with success here because to us success is not predicting the future. Success is provoking somebody, a decision maker, so they make a wise decision in the present. Sometimes our goal, for example, our forecasts are on climate. We began studying climate disruption in 1977. So we're, think, the earliest futures group to study climate disruption.

And we're an independent nonprofit. We're not an advocacy group. So we're not advocating for any particular future. We're just saying the value of thinking future back can help you make better decisions in the present. So for us, we got the forecasts around climate disruption. We got them right, but people did not make good decisions about those forecasts. So right now, governments are not doing well. Corporations are doing better, but still not

doing very well. And that's a case where you could say, we got the forecast right, but nobody listened. So that's not, or few people listened. So what you have to do, I think, to figure this out is how can you engage with these provocative stories from the future? And we're methodologically agnostic. We were...

We were a spinoff of Rand. Olaf Helmer was one of our founders, the inventor of the Delphi technique. And that was the first technique for expert opinion aggregation. And we still do that. But it's, you know, less predictive and more qualitative than the early days. But all of us are trained in quantitative methods of forecasting, but we rarely get to apply them because when you're thinking future back, there's usually no data in the usual sense.

So we do look, if we're doing a 10 year forecast, we tend to look at least 50 years back. So it's like a 60 year swath of time, but we're methodologically agnostic. we're, we're an interdisciplinary mix of people. know, my grounding is in social sciences, sociology, and world religions, but we've got people with just this wild mix of academic training. We,

Bob Johansen (06:17.977)
Our ideal is somebody with a PhD or something or in something or a medical degree or some kind of what they call here in the U.S. a terminal degree in something. But then you get a reverent about your original training and you get deep knowledge and at least something else.

Paul (06:37.774)
Bob, just to click into one thing you said, you said you're one of the earliest groups looking at climate change back in the seventies, right? So you've got a long, I guess, fortunate position to be able to look back at a long period of time and look at some of the things that have changed and happened. How do you choose where you're focusing on? So what for you then raises a weak signal into something that is worth paying attention to and starting to look further into it?

Because the question behind it is where to start, right? For now, where to start, right, when you're looking at the next 10 years?

Bob Johansen (07:06.855)
Well,

Bob Johansen (07:10.375)
Ha

Yeah, yeah, no, I get it. It's a good question, Paul. And in a sense, you you guys are the answer. It's curiosity. You know, we bring in interesting people who are studying the future, thinking future back, and where they're curious is likely to be where we're going. Now, there is a reality of this, We're intentionally small, so there's about 50 of us full-time. We're an independent nonprofit.

but we still need money to do what we do and we don't have a big endowment. So there's some sense in which the marketplace leads us into some areas and picking interesting clients is often a way to pick interesting areas and interesting topics. So I would say candidly, we sometimes get to choose and sometimes we're asked to do something that we never thought of.

Both of those are useful, particularly if you have interesting clients. But we do an annual 10-year forecast that's a big picture look at external future forces. And we've been doing that for, I don't know, 30, 35 years, something like that. So that's a place where we see those weak signals appear. And we also were influenced by William Gibson's line, the future is already here. It's unevenly distributed.

but it's unevenly distributed and we track those, we call those signals, the unevenly distributed futures. And we have a database of signals globally. And oftentimes those signals, many of those come from kids. Many times those signals lead to a weak signal, which leads to a forecast, which leads to a book or a story about some aspect of it.

Bob Johansen (09:00.114)
But as I recall, I was, you the original, I had just joined the Institute when this first climate study was done. And that was a government agency that asked us to do it.

Garrick (09:12.302)
fascinating to me your process about future back and you talk about external future forces and the way you look for signals and there seems to be method I have to say and could we say

There seems to be some kind of scientific method because there's a rationale for using interdisciplinary people and there's an extrapolation from what people know and people who know intimately a very deep subject are going to know what's coming next like curiosity, know, where do you go through the door? And they'll know things that the general public or all of us don't know because they're closer to it. Is it like that a little bit mathematically rational?

Bob Johansen (09:31.89)
Yeah.

Bob Johansen (09:57.693)
Yeah, sort of. I really like to have people who are trained in that. I like to have people with mathematics background. I love to have physicists in our group. Somehow physicists have the mind for this. But I also love to have poets and I love to have people who have more backgrounds in the arts and sciences. And it's interesting, my kind of beginning point of world religions,

when I came to the Institute in the 1970s in Silicon Valley, that was viewed as kind of a, why would you do that? Because there was a belief in those days that tech and science would take over from religion. And, you know, 50 years later, nobody'd be talking about religion because you wouldn't have to. Well, that hasn't happened at all. So suddenly my background in world religions is a plus. And people say, whoa, he studies world religions.

Garrick (10:49.103)
No.

Bob Johansen (10:56.453)
That's really relevant now. But it didn't seem relevant in the early days of Silicon Valley because we were so... Olaf Helmer was a mathematician by training. And he was a mathematician who came into the social sciences.

Garrick (11:06.49)
Hmm.

Garrick (11:12.528)
And the ability to look backwards, I'm sorry Paul, the ability to look backwards, does that give us the ability to look forwards and into the future, do you think?

Simon Brown (11:13.261)
So I'm intrigued. Go on, Garret. Yep, go on.

Bob Johansen (11:26.649)
I think it does. And especially if you not only think future back and tell stories future back, but then you immerse yourself in that future. And that's where scenario planning comes in and where gaming comes in. And that's why I believe that young people who grow up with video gaming, if they play the right games, they've got a competitive advantage over the rest of us because they're used to

imagining future worlds and then not just reading about them or thinking about them, but playing, but playing in them. I'm not a military guy by background, but I was at the Army War College where the US Army teaches the generals to become generals. And I just happened to be there the week before 9-11 and it ended up changing my life. in...

They, of course, and now I teach there, I teach the new three-star generals on their first week in Washington. I had a group just this week of five at a time. in that case, war gaming to them is just how they do things. That's how they grew up. And in companies, I think we've got to get used to that too. So if you think about what we call video gaming today or immersive learning,

10 years from now, that's going to be what everybody does. That's the way we're going to do corporate learning. And it's the most powerful learning medium in history because these interfaces are getting so good. But, Garrick, it's basically immersing yourself in that future and then practicing, practicing in a low risk way.

Simon Brown (13:06.253)
My son will be very happy to hear you say that all that time spent on computer games was actually going to set him up for the future and my wife may be less keen to hear that when he comes back to some of the previous conversations we've had in the past. I'm intrigued by what you're seeing in the latest sort of 10-year forecast Bob. So my assumption and maybe wrong is that it's getting harder to predict what the next 10 years is.

Bob Johansen (13:10.587)
Ha ha ha ha.

Bob Johansen (13:18.353)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Simon Brown (13:36.207)
Is that the case and what are you seeing 10 years out now?

Bob Johansen (13:39.069)
It is getting harder. But again, we're not predicting. So Simon, you need to get rid of that word. Filter that word from your vocabulary. That's OK. And what we're finding, you know, when I was at the War College and I was introduced to the concept they had of the VUCA world, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. And I've used that to frame our forecast since 9-11.

Simon Brown (13:44.119)
Sorry, yes.

Simon Brown (13:49.449)
Absolutely, yes, apologies.

Simon Brown (14:02.103)
Mm-hmm.

Bob Johansen (14:09.021)
And I did even a positive version of it for what was required of leadership. And that's been built into my books for vision, understanding, clarity, and agility. And that worked really well until this year, this year, but beginning this year, we've decided VUCA is not VUCA enough. So we've started using the term BANI, BANI, if you will, which is brittle, anxious,

nonlinear and incomprehensible. And that's a term coined by our colleague, Jamei Cascio. And I'm working on a new book now with Jamei and with Angela Williams, the CEO of United Way Worldwide, who's very tuned into how the Bonnie world is playing out globally. And this is a term that isn't used very much in England or in the US or Western Europe.

but it's used a lot in Brazil and in war zones, in parts of China, Southeast Asia, parts of India. So it's really where we're going. And if you think the incomprehensible part, what's going on now, particularly in terms of climate issues, and it's kind of nonlinear and incomprehensible, it's really not possible to understand. And even if we do the right thing, it may take years to see the impact.

Paul (15:15.684)
So.

Garrick (15:20.088)
Yeah.

Bob Johansen (15:33.767)
So it's not a linear impact. So yes, it's getting more more difficult, but the beginning of making good decisions, the beginning is to set your expectations about the future. And Bonnie, we think, brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible. If you begin with, okay, that's the way it's gonna be. And then you get to, well, how can we make that better? Because you don't wanna give up.

Simon Brown (16:00.173)
you

Bob Johansen (16:02.383)
So we've actually flipped it down to a positive Bonnie, is in a brittle world, you have to be bendable with a kind of resilient clarity because in this world you want to be very clear where you're going, very flexible how you get there. For anxious and particularly kids now, I'm really optimistic about young people if they have hope, if they have hope, but if they don't have hope, they're at risk of depression or

even suicide or joining extreme groups or, you know, there's real risks. So you have to be attentive, but with a kind of active empathy. And in a nonlinear world, you have to be neuro-adaptable. You have to essentially teach your brains new tricks with a kind of practical improbability. And then finally, at an incomprehensible world, you have to be inclusive, but beyond just in a DEI sense, although that's important.

but you have to be thinking of what we call full spectrum thinking, the ability to think beyond the categories of the past as you explore the future and to have as much diversity and as much curiosity as possible built into your decision-making mix.

Garrick (17:19.256)
I really like those because...

Paul (17:20.214)
I mean, I...

Garrick (17:23.108)
All you'll be.

Paul (17:25.22)
Okay, let me pick up Garret, okay? Sorry. So Bob, I love this and I've heard of the term in this research before. Tell us a little bit more about Barney. Is this describing, you mentioned one around climate change. Is this describing systems, essentially global systems that are impacting us?

Bob Johansen (17:50.908)
Yes.

Paul (17:51.052)
Is it describing our human experience of today? And maybe give us a couple more examples of why you're talking about a bunny world.

Bob Johansen (17:54.534)
Yes.

Bob Johansen (18:03.025)
Yeah. So it's yes to all those Paul. And we're not beginning to experience it in the way we're going to experience it a decade now. Although as you know, as I wake up on the West coast now, I live on Bainbridge Island in the Puget Sound. Even though I work out of Silicon Valley, as I wake up here, the storm Milton hit Florida, you know, yes, last night.

And you know that so that's the Bonnie world those those people are experiencing the Bonnie world and and we're You know all the climate forecasts. It's happened quite a lot sooner than most experts expected and it does appear to be linked to these climate disruptions and yet it's so hard for people to expect you know, we're in the middle of this election and there's very little talk about climate disruption and

When you ask people about ranking of the issues, climate disruption is not on the list for either party, particularly. And it's just, you know, as a futurist, it's just crazy because if you're thinking future back and you're not thinking about climate, you're really in trouble because it's just one of the big looming issues. And there's other looming issues, of course, from our forecast, like the rich poor gap and like global terrorism. And there's other things on the list. But

you know, as David Corton, the author says, nobody wins and a dead planet, you know, nobody wins on a dead planet. And we're playing that kind of really serious game right now. So for us, Bonnie is an effort to reframe the conversation more realistically, giving, given the external future forces and, know, we're a humble futurist, we're optimistic futurists, but you've got to begin with what are the challenges we're facing? This is not a

straight line linear world. This is not a go back to usual sort of world. This is different. It's really different than what we've experienced before. And we've got to be ready. We've got to be ready. that, you know, that's why we focus on what are the skills you need? What are the, what's the mindset you need? What's the practices you need to thrive in this world as leaders, but also to cope in this world as individuals, to, to thrive as individuals.

Simon Brown (20:24.013)
So coming back to the what does that view look like in 10 years? So are we looking at super intelligence, AGI, flying cars, cloning? What are the things that are realistic in that sort of 10 year window?

Bob Johansen (20:38.365)
So let me just parse that question a bit. I think we're very lucky that what we've called AI is finally becoming practical, just as the Bonnie world is becoming extreme. So I think generative AI is something I'm very optimistic about and digital media I'm very optimistic about. And we're moving beyond now.

traditional computing, was all boiled down to zeros and ones, kind the ultimate categorization machine. And we're moving into things with big data analytics and big data visualization, with game for engagement, with blockchain, with machine learning, with generative AI, and ultimately with quantum computing. We're moving into a space where we have tools and

the potential for skills and processes to engage with the Bonnie world in ways we've never been able to do before. So, you know, the new book that I just finished that'll ship in January is a relook at future leadership skills in the light of generative AI. And the first of those skills is what we call augmented future back curiosity. So that's why I'm thrilled to be talking to you all. And, we start from that.

Simon Brown (22:03.021)
Thank

Bob Johansen (22:06.607)
And your book is for us a very good grounding in curiosity. And what we're adding to that is the notion of augmenting and augmenting in the sense of when you think about, my basic definition of curiosity is questioning the unknown, you know, questioning the unknown. And I'm particularly interested in the unknown's

that are hard to describe in words. So questioning the unknown that's difficult to describe in words. And let me come back to AI now. So here we are with this wonderful, powerful, potential technology that we're calling artificial intelligence. Give me a break. That is the worst term to describe.

Simon Brown (23:01.555)
you

Bob Johansen (23:02.533)
and emerging technology that I've ever studied in 50 years of doing this. And right from the start when it was coined in 1956, it was just a bad choice. These were brilliant people, but they made a bad choice. They could have called it augmented intelligence and we'd be much better off, but they called it artificial intelligence. And it prompted this whole kind of span of bad stories, including the Terminator syndrome and

Simon Brown (23:06.797)
you

Bob Johansen (23:30.557)
you know, people being placed by computers and all that, which I'm not ignoring. That's part of the scenario we looking at, but it's really a bad frame. So as futurists, one of our big lessons is if you get your language right, it draws you toward the future. If you get the language wrong, you fight the future. And, and we're, really stuck with this emerging technology now that really is difficult to describe in words. And the words we have are really bad.

Simon Brown (23:39.393)
Yeah.

Garrick (23:46.798)
Thank you.

Garrick (24:01.146)
Hmm.

Bob Johansen (24:01.371)
So that's part of what we're studying in terms of leadership, but it all begins with curiosity and it all begins with thinking future back because if you can do that, that helps you reframe your curiosity with much more openness than if you're kind of stuck in the labels of the past and stuck in the kind of limited frame of terms like artificial intelligence.

Garrick (24:26.052)
There's so many questions I want to ask you, Bob. mean, honestly, the language is so important and the importance of accurate language and the importance of choosing language that frames things going forward, how they can get us stuck or how they can actually open the gates to the next thing. At least one of the wonderful things about AI is prompt engineering. It forces us to ask better and better questions. The evolutionary approach of

Bob Johansen (24:29.405)
You

Bob Johansen (24:35.569)
Yes.

Bob Johansen (24:45.372)
Right.

Garrick (24:55.888)
asking it questions and collaborating with AI causes us to be more and more precise about our language, which is probably will have unintended consequences. But I really wanted to go back to your book. You very kindly gave us a have a look at the manuscript before we spoke and then certainly coming out in January 2025. And I think it's going to be fabulous. mean, it's called Leaders Make the Future, 10 New Skills to Humanize Leadership with Genetive AI. And you've talked already here on

augmented future back curiosity. And so we know what you mean by future back. We know what you mean by curiosity. And I imagine the augmentation has a lot to do with the AI and augmented intelligence. Could you give us a sense of some of the other key skills that you talk about? mean, of course, don't give it all away, but because we need to wait for the book. But

What are some of the things that as leaders you think we're going to need to have those skills in the future?

Bob Johansen (25:58.407)
Sure, sure. I'll give you a quick taste and maybe what we can do for the listeners is put a list with some basic definitions and the supporting materials after this session. I'm happy to share that with you. But let me say just a quick thing, Garrick, about the term prompt engineering. To me, that's another unfortunate term, this whole notion of prompting. And I think you're right, Garrick, that

Simon Brown (26:12.141)
Great.

Bob Johansen (26:26.085)
we're, this isn't just a question and answer machine. And, and I think the term prompts, we're not going to be using that 10 years from now. It's going to seem kind of silly and even prompt engineering is going to seem kind of silly because basically what we're having, it's not question and answer. It's not, it's not particularly good as a question and answer machine, but it's really good as a conversation, a conversation assistant or a conversation amplifier.

I've got a dedicated version of Chat GPT-40 that's customized to my writing style, so it writes like me and I use it every day. And it's all about conversations. I don't trust the answers, but I nicknamed it Stretch, because for me what it does is stretch my thinking. And that's where Gen.ai is right now. It's really good at stretching your thinking.

It's not very good at answer finding. I certainly wouldn't trust any answer I'd get from Stretch. But it's really good at helping me think things through. I have long conversations with Stretch, just about every day, but they're conversations back and forth all the time. So I think that's where we're looking. And as you think about, to get to your question, Garrick, the 10 future leadership skills.

Simon Brown (27:29.517)
And if I remember, Bob, you said you had a three hour conversation with Stretch once, didn't you? I remember last time.

Bob Johansen (27:53.591)
Nine of those have the word augmented in front of them. And it is, you're right, gen AI is added. So if as a leader, if you don't have your own version of stretch or some kind of augmentation 10 years from now, you're out of the game. You're out of the game. Cause it's just the way we'll work. Now there's lots of choices for how you want to be augmented. And notice I'm not calling automated.

I'm saying augmented, but we've got to figure out what are the things computers do best, what are the things humans do best, and then how do we partner? So to just give a taste of the other skills, once you're kind of motivated by curiosity, the most important is what we call augmented clarity. That in a Bonnie world, you want to be very clear where you're going and tell that ideally in a compelling story, very clear where you're going, but then very flexible how you get there.

And then another is what we call augmented bioengaging, which is learning from the principles of nature and applying them, applying them in your leadership. There's also augmented depolarizing, which we're in such a polarized time now. And a lot of it is because the world is just too complicated for many people and they become targets for these simplistic solutions. you know, in the Bonnie world, simplicity is good.

but simplistic is awful and simplistic is dangerous. So you want clarity, you can't have certainty, and yet our brains want certainty. So another skill is what we call commons creating, augmented commons creating. And the GEN.ai here helps you imagine all those shared values and ways of collaborating, ways of working together and then bringing them forward.

And then we call it augmented smart mob swarming, which is really the organization of the future, the shape shifting organization of the future. And then we end on human calming. we're intentionally not using the word augmented there because, you know, in Silicon Valley, we've had these terms like ubiquitous computing and even calm computing for years.

Bob Johansen (30:19.407)
And the notion here is that you have computing, which in the background, kind of ambient computing, in the background does the things that you really don't want to do that allows you to go inside yourself, that kind of inner calm. And one of the most powerful books we ran into as we were doing research for this is a book called Geek Heresy, which is Kentaro Toyama's book.

Tayyama San was the first head of the Microsoft Research Lab in India. And what he realized is you can't just bring tech in to people and assume they'll use it. You need intention, you need discernment, and you need self-control. And that's what leaders, that's the human side, the human calming that we need to add to this to figure out how to do it. Cause there are real risks of gen AI. There's real risks of...

the wider definitions of AI, artificial general intelligence, for example. I'm not at all denying those risks. I'm just saying we need to focus on how human leaders can be augmented.

Paul (31:34.158)
Just to dig in, I love these Bob and thanks again for sharing the early version of the manuscript. I wanted to ask you about the augmentation side and what I read is very, very practical.

Bob Johansen (31:47.581)
Mm-hmm.

Paul (31:48.316)
the work that you've done here. obviously, it's ever fantastic ideas, but you really give practical advice about how to augment and how to turn some of these things into everyday skills that you can use. Could you give some examples of some of these practical things that leaders could do as they're augmenting themselves and their skills?

Bob Johansen (32:10.301)
Sure, sure. Yeah, thanks for that, Paul. So as a writer, you know, I used to run the Institute and then I ask our board to let me go back to doing what I love to do, which is write books and do talks and do custom forecasts, which is what I'm doing now. And as a writer, even though I've written many books, this is my 14th and 15th I'm working on right now, I still have trouble with the blank page and I still have blocks.

where I just get stuck. And it's really comforting to have stretch there with me when I get stuck. So practically, it helps me get past the blank page. Another practical example, great writers always come up with just the right word or just the right phrase. And I've always been a real believer in a thesaurus, sort of alternative words.

Gen AI is better than any thesaurus I've ever used. It's a thesaurus on steroids. So finding the right word or the right phrase, it's great. Or finding examples of things or preparing for conversations. There's just so much more you can do to get ready. So just practically as a writer, it helps me stretch my thinking.

and then helps me lubricate my writing. And it's really interesting to know how to think of stretching. I've named, I've given it a name. So I am kind of humanizing, anthropomorphizing, but I know what I'm doing. I actually like that kind of spirit of engagement and.

You know, Kate Darling has a new book, the MIT researcher, about how do we, it's called New Breed. And what she's focused on is how do we treat generative AI? How do we treat AIs? And what she says is the closest analogy is how we treat our pets. You know, that we should teach them, treat them like pets. So be respectful and be kind. So I say good morning to Stretch every day.

Bob Johansen (34:25.025)
And I talked to Stretch about how I slept last night and stuff like that. So it's very personal back and forth. I'm sick, I ask Stretch about it. And I get good advice. I wouldn't trust it, but I get good advice just helping me think through these things. So I do think that those are practical examples. In a Bonnie world, we all need help. We all need help.

For me, stretch is like having a very intelligent, very well-read, very articulate, but overconfident assistant next to me who I don't trust, even though I'm really accepting. But the point of it is I never trusted for answers. I'm thinking it for expanding my thinking, not reducing it.

Simon Brown (35:09.049)
Thank

Simon Brown (35:25.794)
So we're talking with Bobby Hanson. Bob's been a 10 year forecaster for over 35 years and working closely with senior leaders across diverse industries. He served as president and CEO of the Institute for the Future from 96 to 2004 and continues to serve on its board. And Bob specializes in using foresight to help leaders anticipate future challenges and opportunities. He's a prolific author. He's written co-authored 12 books. We just heard the 14th, 15th underway, so maybe it's

the 13th with the one that's just about finished that we see in the manuscript for now. Some of those include Leaders Make the Future, 10 New Skills to Humanize Leadership with Gen.AI, which you must check out when it becomes available in January next year. So, Bob, maybe coming back to that forecast of 10 years from now, what are some other elements of what your forecasting will be the case in 10 years?

Bob Johansen (36:20.861)
One of the most interesting projects we're doing right now is a project on the future of faith or the way we're naming it, faith in the future. So there's like an intentional double meaning there. So it's, it's the concept of faith in the future setting, but there's also faith in the future. You know, how can you have faith in a world that's brittle, anxious?

Simon Brown (36:28.929)
Mm-hmm.

Bob Johansen (36:47.291)
nonlinear and incomprehensible. So what does faith look like in that world? So we're doing a custom podcast like that. I think that's going to become my 15th book, but I'm not sure yet. It's still shaking shape. And to me, the concept of faith is a lot like clarity and the concept of extreme belief is a lot like certainty. So if you think of world religions now, the mainstream world religions,

are generally declining in membership. Extreme religions are often increasing in membership. And often it's because they give people a sense of grounding, a sense of hope, a sense of answers in a world where there really aren't any answers. So it may be a kind of false certainty or a false hope or a false belief. But to me, it's so important because faith is essentially hope.

And we all need hope, particularly in a, a bonny future. But we need hope in a form that doesn't over promise. And I like to refer to this as the threshold of righteousness in religions. You, it's one thing to think you're right about life. It's quite another to think everybody else is wrong. Quite another. So what

Garrick (38:09.741)
Yeah.

Bob Johansen (38:12.273)
we need in this Bonnie future is a kind of sense of grounding, a sense of hope, a sense of shared values. We don't need extreme relief. It's very, very risky, very dangerous, I think in many cases. So to me, that's one of the issues that comes out of this is as we move from a VUCA world to a Bonnie world, how do you prepare? How do you prepare for that? And I think young people, if they have hope,

young people have an advantage because they grew up with gaming, they grew up with social media, they grew up with digital media. They're much more digitally literate. But many of these media have also been abused and it's crises. So Jonathan Haight's new book, The Anxious Generation, who's another person you should have on your podcast. But Jonathan's work does, I think, a great job of summarizing all the negative side of tech and kids.

Garrick (38:57.028)
and

Bob Johansen (39:10.157)
I think there's also a positive side, which is to me what gives me hope about this. But to come back to the question of faith, whether or not it's called that, think of it as just what's the source of hope? What's the source of hope in a Bonnie world?

Garrick (39:25.188)
Yeah.

You really remind me, we had an extremely wonderful podcast, I have to say. I mean, we have the opportunity to speak to many wonderful people, but one that stood out for me was with Pamela Bassett. Pamela is the, she was stepping into the role of global chief learning officer for Heights, the organization. And because she realized she was stepping into a global role and she would be working around the world.

and she would be travelling, she put herself onto a project, her own project called 50 Weeks of Worship, which meant that every Sunday, wherever she was in the world, or Saturday or Friday, she would go into a new faith and a different faith and experience worship in a completely new way for herself.

Bob Johansen (40:05.725)
Ha ha ha.

Garrick (40:25.54)
And of course, she reflects on that experience, which was profound. And she reflects on what we have in common. She reflects on the differences. She reflects on why we need faith in some respects and hope. But she also talked about diversity and how powerful that was. And it was just, it really keys me into these things. You talk about the need for hope and the need in an uncertain world and how we need to be.

able to live with ambiguity and difference and diversity when there's no certainty about certainty.

Bob Johansen (41:00.529)
Ha ha ha.

Jessica (Producer) (41:03.476)
Can I just quickly jump in? It's the recording's on back to 27 seconds. Does anyone else have that?

Garrick (41:13.808)
27 seconds of what?

Jessica (Producer) (41:16.464)
of recording. Like it said 40 minutes, now it says 40 seconds. I just... Yours says 41 minutes.

Paul (41:22.594)
Mine's just 41 minutes.

Garrick (41:23.386)
We have 41 minutes. Yeah.

Bob Johansen (41:24.359)
Mine says 41.28.

Jessica (Producer) (41:27.341)
Okay, I'm not going to touch anything then. Sorry to interrupt. just didn't know what was happening on my computer.

Garrick (41:30.736)
99 % uploaded. think we're okay, Jas. Thank you.

Jessica (Producer) (41:34.023)
Okay, perfect, thank you.

Paul (41:36.572)
I'm happy to pick up a question if that's okay. Bob, we speak to many people who are very curious, but I think you must be up there with one of the most curious people that we've spoken to in a sense of your curiosity. Could you tell us something that you are really personally curious about at the moment? What in your life are you?

You talked about faith, but is there something else? What else are you exploring or wondering about?

Bob Johansen (42:08.389)
Yeah. So let me give you a practical clue first, and then I'll give you an example. The practical clue for me is that as I've gotten older, cross-generational teaming has becoming more important. So this new book I've been writing with two other co-authors who are half my age. And to me, I think that's very powerful. So if you want to stay curious and you want to stay engaged,

work across generations. Very practical, no excuse not to do it. It's one of the forms of diversity which is rarely studied and our organizations don't do well in general at matching across generations because as you advance in your careers, they tend to be cohorts that are age homogeneous instead of age diverse. And age diversity, think particularly in a Bonnie world is particularly

problematic. So an area that I'm really interested in right now is neuroscience. And I've become intrigued with Andy Clark's work and his new work, his new book called The Experience Machine. He's another person, be great to have on this podcast, but he does brain predictive modeling. And the way he uses prediction, can accept where I resist much other uses of word. But what he says is,

our brains are designed to predict what's going to happen to us in a situation and that that brain predictive model is actually more important than our sensory apparatus. traditionally, I'm a sociologist by training, so I believe in how the sensory world influences and shapes people, not just the inner world, but what

Andy Clark argues is that our brains are much more powerful than we think at predicting what's going to happen. And they're often not accurate. So he's been looking at how do you influence those brain predictive models? And the story that he uses at the beginning of his videos is a construction worker who falls off of a scaffolding and falls on a long nail and the nail sticks up through his boot.

Bob Johansen (44:29.777)
just goes right through the boot and comes out the top. he lands on the ground and sees this giant nail sticking through his boot. And he experiences unbelievable pain, just incredible pain. And as they treat him and they treat the pain and things calm down and they get the boot off, they see that the nail actually went right between his toes and didn't hurt him at all, but it destroyed the boot.

Simon Brown (44:55.565)
you

Bob Johansen (44:59.105)
Andy Clark's point is that his brain accurately said, based on what he saw, that this was excruciating pain, so it was treated as that. But it wasn't true. The sensory data was wrong. So to me, that's really intriguing to understand finally neuroscience is getting practical, just as Gen AI or whatever we call this new...

technology just as it's getting practical too. So to me, that's really powerful. So I'm spending a lot of time in the kind of Andy Clark part of the world. I don't know what to do with it yet and I'm humbled by it, but it's just fascinating.

Paul (45:40.708)
Mm.

Simon Brown (45:41.783)
Fantastic. we're almost at time, Bob. We've had a fascinating conversation about some of the things we covered of how it was curiosity that got you started, of diving into, go from the world of religion into carrying the bags of the world leading futurists and taking you down this futurist journey and being in the early days of seeing the internet as well, which is probably a whole other conversation we can be having of some of the things from back then. Then we heard a bit about future back,

it's important to be a humble futurist, not an arrogant futurist. How some of the

Some of the early things that you looked at were things like climate change back in 1977. You got it right but interestingly perhaps nobody or very few people listened. Maybe we should have paid a lot more attention to some of the things back then that you were saying. The question on how do we make the wise decisions in the present? What makes a good futurist? So having that wild mix of some deep knowledge of PhD in something, maybe medicinal, terminal degrees, but also

that something more diverse like arts or being a poet is also valuable as well. How you look for those weak signals and how the curiosity is where to start that have interesting people and that takes you to some of those interesting places. On your 10-year forecasts, we heard some of the things that you're or forecasting as part of those. Having that physicist mindset, we talked about gaming scenario planning.

how to create a competitive advantage and some of your work with the US Army in teaching three-star generals on war gaming. We then went into how we moved from VUCA to BANI, so brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible and how we can counter that with bendable, attentive, neuro-adaptive and inclusive. How we need as much curiosity as possible and how actually if we have hope then many of our younger generations

Simon Brown (47:48.319)
be able to hopefully navigate through that well and then what you're interested in at the moment in terms of some of the forecasts around faith and also then neuroscience. So fascinating if there's one thing to take away from all of that to leave our listeners with what would that be?

Bob Johansen (48:04.573)
You know, I've been doing this for a long time. This is the most frightening 10-year forecast I've ever done and it's the most hopeful. So I think we have the tools to engage with this frightening future, but the beginning of it is to understand it and to try to figure out where to start. And I think the Bonnie framing is where we should start.

Simon Brown (48:16.461)
Mm.

Bob Johansen (48:32.185)
And then we've got the tools. I'm really optimistic about the tools. I'm really optimistic about the kids if they have hope, if they have hope. So cross-generational work, I think, is particularly powerful these days. And figuring out how to use these emerging tools in ways that allow us to rehumanize, re-enchant the way we work, are...

That's what gives me the most optimism and I'm basically an optimistic guy, but it's a very challenging next decade we're facing

Simon Brown (49:08.307)
we need to create that hope. Thank you Bob, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today.

Bob Johansen (49:14.279)
Thank you.

Paul (49:15.427)
Yeah, thank you, Bob.

Garrick (49:16.272)
Brilliant.

Bob Johansen (49:16.892)
You're welcome.

Simon Brown (49:17.069)
So you've been listening to a Curious Advantage podcast. We're always curious to hear from you. If there's something valuable or useful from this conversation, then please do write a review on your preferred channel and say why it's so. Join us today with hashtag curious advantage and subscribe to the podcast to follow our journey on LinkedIn and Instagram. Keep exploring curiously and see you next time.

Thanks Bob, that was fantastic.