Breaking Banks
Hosted By Brett King, Jason Henrichs, & JP Nicols
The #1 global fintech radio show and podcast. Every week we explore the personalities, startups, innovators, and industry players driving disruption in financial services; from Incumbents to unicorns, and from the latest cutting edge technology to the people who are using it to help to create a more innovative, inclusive and healthy financial future.

https://provoke.fm/show/breaking-banks/

this week on the futurist he’d gone back to pagan villages he was seen exactly the same in terms of who was given more freedom who was asked to be involved in more decision making it’s basic human nature but we forget it and i think it’s those very human attributes that are going to help us succeed most in a very tech-centric world so the leaders are in a world before we’ve got complete artificial general intelligence replacing all of us and everything in a world where we still have humans it is going to be those who know how to work in a human environment best

welcome to the futurists hey brett you know we’ve been having these conversations now for a long time with different people who are thinking about the future the kind of people i call future minded and we’ve learned some interesting things you know you can learn a lot from a science fiction author or a by a biologist um but i think one of the things that keeps coming up is people want to know what to do with the future how do we make a practical use of the future and so for some time i’ve been thinking it’d be great for us to have a conversation with a practical futurist someone actually uses a a future future forecasting methodology for practical purposes uh like a pragmatic approach to futurism and i can think of nobody better than rohit talwa rohid is a world famous you know him you’ve met him you’ve worked with him in the past um but he’s famous around the world because he is so prolific not just with forecasting but with analysis and ways to think about it he’s written a number of books he gives many many public speeches all over the world and he’s the ceo of fast futures so so welcome to the show rohit it’s great to have you here today great great to have you on man thank you for having me guys we’re going to get tactical today i think yeah i’m really curious about this idea of practical futurism uh you know when you’re engaged by a company tell me about that process what are they seeking to accomplish by bringing you in well generally people bring me in because they want to have a conversation about the future about half the time it’s because they’ve seen me having a conversation about the future elsewhere and they want to bring some of that conversation back in so whether it’s the ideas we’re talking about of how things can come together what does the world look like when people are giving their money intelligence and authorizing their money to keep swapping itself from interest from a bank account to bank account all day long in order to find the best interest rate they love having their mind blown by those kinds of ideas but then they’re they’re into that thing of what how do we then bring it back into our organization get that kind of thinking to inspire us to change what we do today identify the risks that look a bit ugly that we’d rather not deal with till they manifest or to go after the opportunities that are out there that could be even scarier because they require us to think differently behave differently learn new things work with different people and have very different business models and so they want someone who can help them with that process both the methodology for exploring the future identifying the insights opportunities and risks but also that practical piece of translating it back into the organization and making sure that the organization doesn’t reject it the body language the dna of the organization doesn’t reject any of those ideas of change because they’re they’re too shocking or they’re too challenging to the way things are or the way things work now rohit you know when we look over the the last you know 300 years maybe 200 years more more more measurably in terms of impact of changes to certain industries we’ve got a whole swathe of you know use cases and examples of industries that have failed to adapt to the future you know when it’s steering them in the face you know borders blockbuster you know etc um so what is it that makes an organization from a cultural perspective future proof do you think really really interesting question i don’t think there’s one thing often people believe that the fish rots from the head and so it’s often kind of a finger pointing at the president ceo whoever ultimately uh makes the big decisions and i think they have a lot to do with it their style of dealing with threatening information do they see it as something to be understood to learn about do they see it as something to uh tap into to take advantage of or do they see it as something to to pretend it didn’t happen because acknowledging it is an existential threat there and uh funnily enough i was with a group of people who still publish yellow pages i was with them on monday crazy uh in majorca and i remember doing work with yellow pages a good 30 years ago when the conversation at the time was how do we stop our customers from using the internet right right and how did that work out for them yeah but and the conversation this time was how do we convince our customers that using the search engine really isn’t as good as coming to our online version of a book and actually there are some reasons why they are but there’s something about the mindset that doesn’t change whatever the technology and in the meantime that the yellow pages have shrunk from probably 1200 pages down to 200 or something right well the online versions have grown but apparently in greece they still have one physical copy somewhere in the country but these businesses are phenomenally profitable so there’s also that challenge that when you’re doing really well someone telling right fire coming can be really hard to acknowledge if you told the mayor of london uh you know in 1939 that blitz was coming and most of london would have been obliterated what would he have done like it would have just been bigger than a brain thought and i think that’s some of the challenge that you couldn’t move london at the time and the same thing for organizations it’s like the resistance to changing fossil fuels or um you know those those sorts of issues it’s there’s so much momentum and inertia behind that idea that even though it can be done um you know you’ve got to change so many parts of the system to to make it work even though you know renewables are significantly cheaper and we’re solving the storage problems and all of that that’s a yeah there’s there’s a lot of that that we see around us you’ve experienced that with banks brad and i’ve experienced it with auto companies you know the people who are successful in those companies are there because they understand how those things work right and they’ve contributed to the success of the business so you know they’re kind of doubling down on the past they’re the least likely people to be open-minded about switching yeah so rohit what i’m hearing you say is that if you’re going to be a practical futurist you’ve got to have a combination of skills certainly you need to understand technology you need to understand the economics and what drives a business but you also need to be a kind of psychologist or a salesperson because part of the job is to persuade people to open their minds talk about the psychology of futurism for us so that’s a really interesting one there is a school of futurism that says you don’t worry or future thinking that says you don’t worry about any of that your job is just to tell people what’s shaping the future and then to take a very sort of de-reduced approach to say this will happen and this is what it will mean to you and largely they’re wrong because nothing will happen exactly as we think and we can never be sure what the second third or fourth order effects are we can’t be sure how organizations will respond so i tend to panic a bit when people stand up and say this is what’s going to happen and this is what you should do i think we get the whole value of the future is about getting people to think flexibly about a range of scenarios you can’t take them there in one go so literally just before talking to you guys so we’ve been designing a session where we’re going to send people out for the next six weeks to make little videos of what they see changing in the world how technologies change or whatever so they’re immersing themselves cool they did they’re having little conversations then once a week with their colleagues about a topic of their choice when they’re not allowed to do more than 10 minutes of research but they’re going to come back and just chat about what they’re learning so when they come into the room they’ve already started to engage with the future and you’ve dealt with a lot of the issues then about it won’t change it won’t change this will change but you’ve also got them thinking that about what does this mean for me and hopefully you’ve already stoned them that self-directed learning self-managed learning is the way forward because that’s the only way we can navigate the future is if we take control of our own destiny no one cares more about my future than i do so i can’t i can’t outsource responsibility for my future and we’ve got to get people to understand that and get everyone learning you can’t just have your futures do it for you but what your futurist can do is help you explore these things connect ideas in ways that you wouldn’t have imagined that start to say okay if on the one side we’ve got ai that is starting to interpret our emotions on the other hand we’ve got people who are incredibly socially awkward uh but want a partner could they trust ai to do everything for them take away the dating app and just arrange for them to meet someone because we’ve taken all that away and there were aias have spoken to each other so they’ve kind of guaranteed your compatibility and therefore all the risk has been taken out of you because it’s done by the tech in which you trust so you start to blow people’s minds with these possibilities and then you get them having those ideas you get them being creative matching one trend to another one idea to a development and starting to see what’s possible and normally it comes down to pain or pleasure it comes down to how do we solve something that’s currently causing us pain or how do we create a new source of pleasure in the world and if those two kind of basically the root of most ideas that we have and then it’s about bringing them back into the organization creating a conversation about the data that we used to inform the storytelling and then assessing our current strategy against the scenarios and then working out what new ideas and opportunities come out of that so it’s a process you step people through you give them worked examples you give them guidance on the kind of language to use you stop them writing directional statements say this will happen but you get them into this practice and it is a practice of having open and flexible dialogues and then you make sure that with two things one is you make sure that you don’t have a senior person walk into the room afterwards and say and now back to the real world is practical which kind of does happen and the second is you make sure that there is something happening within the next 48 to 72 hours allowing for weekends where they are going to be asked to use the outcomes or the insights in that session in something tangible in their job so you connect it back to what they’re doing and then you have check-ins so you you don’t have this half-day day two days of exploring the future as being some random thing that happened and then you get on with banging out the numbers you actually use it to inform everything they do so if they’re writing a plan you say well okay how does that fit against the three scenarios we talked about for our marketplace where is it valid where is it invalid what are the things we would do under any of those scenarios and what the things we only do under certain scenarios and so you you force them to to use it and the more they use it the more it becomes a standard tool in their thinking so it’s a series of conversations right you’re not talking about a single engagement it’s not like a single lecture here this is more consulting where you’re working with individuals and groups we could be i mean it could be that you’re doing this in a day but what you’re making sure you leave them with is the support mechanism inside the organization to keep using it you you don’t want to just fly in like you know like a seagull drop on them and go you want to leave them in a better shape than you found them with more skills more tools more processes to make the future useful so so rohit what are the tendencies we have when we when you know we look at something like artificial intelligence which you just use an example of there um you know to many people it’s an abstraction even though ai is having you know an automation is already taking jobs out of the system which people don’t generally see but um you know if you take an example of ai or many of these future scenarios um you’re talking about one of the key problems is unless it’s actually happening in front of people right there and then it tends to be something that might happen in the future and so we debate whether or not ai is going to impact employment for example instead of what we should be doing is really focusing on how we transition to that future state because we you know as futurists obviously we embrace the fact that it’s it’s going to happen so how do you bridge that sort of gap in terms of the where the future is too far away for people to see it impacting their daily lives or their business versus you know um as a futurist understanding the trends that make that largely inevitable you know in 250 years of technology disruption we’ve not seen a single industry ever defend itself against technology so we know what the the typical uh you know success of this stuff is but how do you get people into that mindset instead of debating whether or not this is going to happen in terms of accepting that it is a possibility and then talking about how to how to adapt so a lot of it is around the language we use we like to use quite violent language that this will happen this will destroy you that the fear principle drives a lot of the conversation this will happen this will wreck you so you’ve got to act a few people are excited by the possibility but as you say there’s a there’s a big gap between where we are now in this thing some people can make the leap they can go okay it’s one two three steps from here and we have to do a to get to b to get to c but most can’t so then you have to inevitably you have to water down the future a bit you have to bring it back to some examples of what’s going on now um and this idea that the future is not evenly distributed so what we might think is five years away someone else is almost inevitably doing so you use those examples to show what’s going on and you try to get people out of the natural defense mechanism which is finding a way of rubbishing what the other company is doing or why their circumstances are different or they’re a startup or they’re in xyz country or they have a better regulator or whatever and you try and get them past all that and say let’s just look at what they’re doing what if you were able to do this what would that make possible for us if we could get over those hurdles what could we do and it’s getting them to sort of stand on the other side imagine you’re the innovator why would you have done this what would it create now imagine you were starting us again and this was available to you how would you use it so you have to find lots of different well you try lots of different routes in to get them to engage with the idea and with i’d say 90 percent of the people it has to be with examples that are happening here and now right it’s ten percent that you can tell that illustrate to them the changes that are happening yeah now now 2022 started off as a a pretty disruptive year in history um you know if you take uh you take crypto into the the case um you know actually uh brock pierce was pointing out that this this is a bigger crash than the dot-com crash if you account for the shifting crypto um which is sort of an interesting perspective but obviously you know um 2022 in terms of the difficulties from the russia ukraine situation um you know that’s just emphasized issues we’ve had the supply chain difficulties that came from um you know the uneven employment issues during the pandemic and so forth so um you know put your futurist hat on today and and play out where you know where we’re at 20 in 2022 today and some of these issues um that you know we may not have anticipated you know say five ten years ago how are they going to shape the future over the next decade or so so for me uh what you’re really seeing is is the the first really solid evidence that a lot of our governing and enabling systems are running out so a lot of our systems were built late 40s onwards but late 40s to early 80s our health care systems our education systems our governing systems our financial markets management systems the structure of corporations today still look pretty similar in many regards they did in the 1940s and we’re discovering all of those are running out whether it’s because you’ve got more players more people wanting to have a say whether it’s because of technology innovators coming in and saying i don’t have to play by your rules what we’re seeing is is that’s what’s happening so the pandemic really demonstrated that our model of running healthcare was broken whether you were a free at point of service or paid model the the way in which resources were allocated and things were prioritized just wasn’t designed to deal with a pandemic and whenever anyone did scenarios for a pandemic most people failed in their pandemic preparedness exercises because yeah we had all these things mapped out for strategies and they were ignored yeah financial markets what’s great is uh i think what’s happening crypto has been a fantastic exercising in testing whether the market manipulation strategies that we’ve used in equities in derivatives in commodities can be used in crypto and you know the experiments work you’d see it all the time this has got nothing to do with people’s perception of the underlying value of a digital uh you know asset ecosystem or blockchain technology or trustless uh based models or any of that none of that has been disproved it’s still kind of an absolute belief the number of users is going up uh more and more companies getting involved what it’s demonstrated though is that the power brokers who thought that they might be losing control they’ve been able to see that with relatively small amounts of money they can do untold you know unimaginable things to the crypto market which would cost them a lot more to do in the equities market or in the year thanks blackrock well exactly um and uh you could say that i couldn’t possibly but you know and so i think this is what we’re learning and then the geopolitics thing is interesting so there are so many levels to this but what we’re seeing is there were ways in which we dealt with conflicts before uh we use proxies and now we’re playing out yet another proxy wall but in this case one of them is actually involved they’re not using a surrogate uh one of them is actually playing and so we’re changing that game again of how you deal with big geopolitical tensions we’re seeing some institutions being strengthened some being sidelined and some trying to work out their place in the world so what we’re seeing now i just think is at one level isn’t it’s a disaster obviously the fallen crypto prices the falling stock markets grain shortages energy crises geopolitical tensions but at another level my macro perspective it’s like thank god it’s happening right because we need this stuff to happen we need some of these old systems to be pushed to the point where they break none of us are willing to break them beforehand and start again not design that way so we need some of these things to fall over and then we’re gonna have to accept that there’s gonna be maybe 10 to 50 years of creating the next solutions but we need that because we can’t keep trying to run these old world institutions using some of the new world ideas and solutions but with old world assumptions underpinning them so we all that needs to change that’s a great topic for round two after we take a break the the this notion that some of these old institutions need to fall over what’s remarkable about the pandemic but also the crisis in the ukraine is the speed of the response you would not have expected a response as fast as we got you know in the past it took four years to develop a vaccine here we developed the vaccine in about a year and based on technology they’ve been in development for 10 years but nevertheless and that was a really rapid rollout of a global vaccine program and in respect to the war in the ukraine uh the global response to that has been very quick as well i think surprisingly i think it caught the russians off guard but let’s save that for after the break so um agree yeah let me take a live conversation great thanks robert thanks uh rohit we’re talking to rohit tawa he’s uh a global futurist from fast future and we’ll be right back after this break welcome to breaking banks the number one global fintech radio show and podcast i’m brett king and i’m jason henricks every week since 2013 we explored the personalities startups innovators and industry players driving disruption in financial services from incumbents to unicorns and from cutting edge technology to the people using it to help create a more innovative inclusive and healthy financial future i’m jp nichols and this is breaking banks

you’re listening to the futurists with robert turscheck and brett king and this week we’re interviewing rohit tawa a global futurist from fast future um and uh rohit great to have you on the show um you know before the break we were talking about uh you know some of the elements of how um you know the the the black swan events of the pandemic and the ukraine war have affected uh you know future forecasting but um you know in in terms of um you know before we sort of dive back into leadership and and things like that what excites you the most about the future there’s a few things one is uh we were talking offline in the break that we’ve seen some incredibly rapid responses we’ve seen how we can mobilize people in in incredible ways here in the uk we have three quarters of a million people volunteer to help out during the pandemic organized very easily we had the development of the vaccine at breakneck speed and obviously it was building on platforms and science it was already there but it was still incredible we had a level of scientific sharing that i don’t think we’ve seen in many cases in the past so we’ve seen a lot of good indicators that human ingenuity passion and a commitment to a common goal can get us a long way very quickly we’ve seen a very interesting response certain parts of the world now to ukraine and the situation with russia uh we’ve also seen some of the old tenets being challenged everyone assumed that russia would roll over ukraine in seven days and actually 80 90 days in they’re not really it’s not really clear that they’ve done anything other than lose a lot of their soldiers and a lot of their hardware and and a lot of their reputation um so we’ve seen that some of the old assumptions are now being challenged in a positive way we’re seeing space being created for innovators uh what i’m most encouraged by is the people working at the margins to try and change things across society so moving to a more sustainable culture one of the businesses i love uh is called elvis and cress so they make handbags um they started by watching people throwing stuff away at rubbish tips and they discovered the uk fire service throws away 70 tons of unrepairable fire hose every year and pays 400 plus pounds a year per ton to throw it away these guys investigated and discovered that high-end handbags are made of the same material so they now take that material for the next 20 years contract is they don’t pay a penny for it they turn it into high-end handbags and give 50 percent of the profits back to the uk fire service charity to me that is just that’s fantastic um and and we’re seeing lots of those examples and and they’re really inspiring and that’s what i think is is great is when we take our eye off the big government moves and big business moves which can be a little frustrating at times because they’re slow and you watch what some of the the smaller more nimble players are doing you see them moving mountains literally overturning hundreds of years of assumptions behaviors to to make something happen and you’re seeing this breed of people emerge who are i don’t know what the right word is but they’re catalysts they’re able to bring a whole range of people together in different ways and find solutions that solve everyone’s problems you’re a you’re a health care commissioner you’re a mental health practitioner you’re an advocate for patients you’re a district nurse you’re a gp practice all of you’ve got these issues about this poor mental health patient who’s not getting what they need and there’s a bit of technology over here that could absolutely do it for them that would support them and get them the resources they need when they need them but no one knows how to commission it because it doesn’t fit within the existing framework but if you can step in you can facilitate that conversation then everyone’s happy turns out we save money and we get the outcomes that we’re all being measured on and most importantly the beneficiary has a far better experience and actually get some help and so it’s those social catalyst social engineers who i think are the the real you know the the real fuel for the next the next wave and what i love about that is a lot of these people are the ones who don’t know it’s not possible they’re 22 25 they’ve never been in that situation before they’re not blessed by a whole group of people around them telling them why it can’t be done or why we tried it before and it didn’t work they’re just going in there driven by a passion and i think you know passion is back in fashion and and allowing those people to just have their heads it doesn’t matter if something breaks the world is not going to end but i’m much more inspired by them than i am by my generation tied up as we are with all our angst about what we didn’t get right and you know all the things we know that stop things happening i think the for me the future is going to be facilitated by these people it might be paid for by other people and obviously we have to influence a lot of people but it’s it’s that core of people across the planet who are almost limbically connected and the agency they have now to make change is just truly inspiring not just greater thumb book but there’s a you know a million grasshoppers out there doing incredible things so what you’re talking about right now to me is um a new definition of leadership or a new kind of leadership and i’d start with this observation rohit that we haven’t had very inspiring leadership politically in any country i can think of for the last 30 years in fact we’ve got a political class it seems in the western democracies that’s conditioned to pay attention to polls and they’re very cautious and now they’re very concerned about their base of voters and they kind of tune out everybody else and so you have as this kind of inertia in the political environment and as a result relatively poor leadership it’s uh it’s not even consensus it’s basically uh certainly poor policymaking yeah yeah and there’s and they’re slow they’re slow to make policy and they’re often slow to to respond of course there’s exceptions to that but at the same time there’s another group emerging uh they’re often entrepreneurial minded but they’re often informed by technology and these are people who have conviction what i notice is that they are they are motivated by a rock solid belief in what they believe is going to happen next it often comes from first principles so they may be scientifically grounded in their reasoning where they work it out they say this is the way it has to happen one example is is dr jacobs who created qualcomm this is a long time ago right this is back in the 1980s 1990s but at the time the conventional wisdom in mobile was that cdma couldn’t possibly work there were no there was no way there were microprocessors fast enough in a phone to process code division um and the entire gsm world you know all the european tech companies and motorola in the us were against him and they tried everything they could to stop it and he hung in there because he had the conviction that mathematically speaking like speaking from physics this is the right way to do mobile telecommunications well of course he prevailed it took it took decades but eventually he prevailed and we see examples of that all over you know for instance you mentioned the modern vaccine for the covet 19 problem uh you know that was 10 years in the making and the people in modernity had this conviction that there was a way to engineer of vaccines as a radical rather than you know breed it or cross-breed it in the conventional way that took them many years and frankly there were many years in the in the wilderness for them right they had to go against uh conventional wisdom there as well and so we’re starting to see something emerge i think is very exciting it’s not limited to the us it’s not limited to the western countries there’s a global phenomenon of leadership driven by conviction and like you said passion right it’s not just the conviction that they’re right but this passionate commitment to make this change and they won’t take no for an answer and finally there’s financing for that there’s there’s venture capital that will back that up so if they’re right and they pass the due diligence process for the first time we now have adequate amounts huge amounts of venture capital to deploy to support a disruptive idea like that talk to me about how you work with leaders because when you’re working with companies many of the places you deal with those leaders aren’t cut from that cloth those leaders are cut from the kind of conventional thinking and maybe a little bit more concerned about preserving the past at the expense of the future i think it varies quite a lot and i think by almost it’s a self-selecting group maybe that a lot of the people who bring you in already have an interest in the future or you’ve resonated with something that there was a story in their head about we’re not looking over here enough so you you were timely and so a lot of the leaders we tend to work with are ones who do want to make something happen don’t necessarily have all the tools they don’t necessarily understand all that they need to change about themselves to make it happen but they they are in the game in a sense um those who don’t it’s very hard to convince them because it’s not just around the future that they have a blockage they’ll have the same thing in every part of their lives whether it’s buying a new suit moving the chair in the bedroom closing down a division of their business or launching a new product they’ll behave in exactly the same way so sometimes you just have to accept that this is an issue that’s deep in their psyche they’re not wrong it’s just how they are and if they want to change that then they’ve got to do some fundamental work and i talk more and more to people now about doing the work so going and finding someone to work with it with processes that help you deal with those blockages to help you improve your response help you change your language because it turns out that everything you say comes across as negative how do we get you to use non-violent communication how do we look at your personal brand uh what is it you’d like to be known for what are the characteristics you’d like people to ascribe to you versus how do you show up and so a lot of that situational leadership comes from how your how you come across in meetings and now we’re finding that uh i’ve just been on the call with a client um now and it’s someone from their people and culture piece who i think is the most incredible leader in the organization just because of the way she shows that she listens the way she always demonstrates that she’s taken on board what someone has just said and she’s made space for them and is not driving home her point and just this sort of passion for what we can make possible this celebration of the good that people are doing and it’s a way that she builds trust and the more trust she gets the more opportunity she creates none of this is new if you’d gone back to pagan villages he was seen exactly the same in terms of who was given more freedom who was asked to be involved in more decision making it’s basic human nature but we forget it and i think it’s those very human attributes that are going to help us succeed most in a very tech-centric world so the leaders are in a world before we’ve got complete artificial general intelligence replacing all of us and everything in a world where we still have humans it is going to be those who know how to work in a human environment best and get the best out of people that are going to work well it’s not the same so if i’m in a large financial services institution with 20 thousand staff a lot of my stuff is about rah-rah keep the messages simple motivate them if i’m in a deep techie nerdy science lab and we’re trying to reinvent sciences okay have some fun with us but how you motivate me is letting me work on cool science because letting me go over to mit and talk to one of the leaders in my field for a week it’s clearing the blockages that procurement or hr won’t let me buy this thing i want that’s leadership for them it’s very different but it’s still very motivational but as a leader i value what you bring to this organization i’m going to do everything i possibly can to help you fulfill your potential you know right what i’m hearing you say which is super interesting because this is not at all where we started this conversation but what i’m hearing you say is that even in this time when we’re thinking about artificial intelligence and machine intelligence and machine learning there’s a huge need for leaders to have emotional intelligence particularly if they’re dealing with people who have an ego and people who have drive and passion and so forth how to find a way to communicate with them that recognizes that drive honors it respects it and rewards it and so um you’re reminding me your comments are reminding me of something that uh randy comassar the the uh entrepreneur in dc once said to me a long time ago he said what i look for in companies in leadership and companies is empathy and self-awareness the they’re the two traits that are the most scarce in business and of them self-awareness is the most scarce now this is a super interesting notion right like you talk about the legacy as a motivation for a ceo uh you know what you want to leave behind what do you want to accomplish we see great ego strength in ceos right you have to have great ego strength if you’re going to manage a big organization but i’m not sure if we see that much self-awareness so it sounds to me that part of your mission is to work with that psychology and to help develop some awareness well it’s interesting because people ask me so what do i do to stay grounded how is it that i don’t get into a fight in a room where everyone’s trying to provoke me and you know people are shouting and pointing a finger because i happen to have bought in the future and my view is well i found ways in meetings to just drop into myself like because i learned meditation techniques i spent my time in the buddhist temples i’ve learned how to in that moment just go inwards ground listen to what i really think has been her said and then come back in a way that doesn’t take the legs away from any of us most of us aren’t trained to do that and i’m impressed that you know about non-violent communication because we don’t often hear about that in the workplace usually that’s thought of as a relationship thing um but you know this points to this need to build consensus uh you know too much of what happens in media right now is to pick one group against another that’s a great job rivets people it’s exciting it sells newspapers it gets people to watch tv news um but unfortunately what it doesn’t do is create any kind of consensus or any kind of agreement even on the facts let alone the solution or what we ought to do next so in some ways it sounds like you’ve developed a technique for working with people that that defuses that polarization and helps them find the commonality and helps them find empathy so one of the things it’s taken a long time to realize this is the future itself as presented is a threat the last thing you want is the messenger to also be seen as a threat as the person facilitating to be seen to have another agenda other than the greater good of the organization and the people in the room so the challenge is always to show people that you’re coming from that place you have no acts to grind you have no stake in the game in wanting you to go one direction or another so uh you know one of my favorite slides that i use at the moment is six race is the six tracks on a race late you know you know for a athletics track the six lanes and that’s the first response i say to people the first and very legitimate response you can have to this is to do nothing stay in your lane if you think that what you’re doing is going to work your sense of your market your sense of the opportunities is such that you can carry on then that’s what you should do don’t cause yourself stress and an ulcer by trying to do something you’re not genetically geared up for however if you think there are there is a possibility that you might want to learn then here are some steps to take so you have to start where people are coming from and acknowledge that they’re not bad if they don’t do anything take out their fight element as soon as you can take out the fight element open up the window that lets the future in and then allow them to breathe allow them to have the conversations about what they like about this what they dislike about this what they’re scared about with workshops and things that the pressure is on particularly the top team to have instant answers because you go go go go so there is no moment for them to process 13 different messages they’ve just heard and come back with a consolidated considered view because you go so you build in lots and lots of breaks into those sessions where they can go for a walk talk pee fat cigarette whatever just to give us time for the system to absorb that reflect and come back with a more considered answer you get so much more quality out of that and we’ve also created people with a twitter mindset now you know 240 characters input put someone in a session but for eight hours you provide their brains so you’ve got to respect that and you’ve just accepted that we haven’t really advanced human physiology a great deal uh in the way that we’ve advanced tech yeah we can get to human augmentation another time but so we’ve got to accept that our basic tech hasn’t improved that much you know it’ll last longer but the basic functioning hasn’t changed the way the brain processes information hasn’t changed in 200 years maybe some of the pathways are bigger but if you work with that then you have you’re halfway there because you’re really working with behavior so we haven’t really talked much about the future because 10 of what i do now is is helping people think about the future helping them make sense of it uh 95 90 is really about how do we work with this how do we deal with emotions the change how do we translate that into something real and it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t fit what i thought was the vision of exactly what we’d be doing because i’m not in the organization every day and i’m not trying to make it work which is one of the reasons why so many digital transformation projects fail because the consultants envision it and the organization isn’t full of people from that consultancy who think a certain way they’re trained differently they live differently and so they can’t execute in the same way and you don’t get the same outcomes and so you have to allow people the the freedom to design what they’re going to design and operate what they’re going to operate with the insights you’ve given them and give them the courage to do some tough things give them the permission that they need to give themselves to have ideas that aren’t going to work and voice them to put out dissenting views and just to make mistakes the final analogy i always use is this is like a dance floor every business and every individual has a bunch of dance routines so i the marketplace changes i know how to dance to that customers come up with a new requirement we know how to dance to that energy shot we know how to dance that economic turned out but now everything is changing at the same time so no one knows the right dance steps when we don’t even know what the music is going to be and the music is changing all the time the only way we can do that we can’t sit inside and write a business plan for how to dance you have to get on the dance floor you have to try stuff you have to kick people trip over your own feet look ugly as hell the most attractive people in the room are probably not going to come over and want to dance with you for a while but unless you do that you don’t learn and it’s only when you do it you start to get confidence that suddenly you know you try a few things you kind of twirl your arms you do things and suddenly you feel good and you feel like okay i’ve now got this space and it’s exactly the same for organizations we just need to give ourselves permission to learn to listen to adapt and to do the very human things that are normally the problems that stop us moving forward as an organization well bro that’s a great overview of the human empathy element and and how you get people to open their minds and begin to contemplate these ideas so that’s great that’s practical futurism in effect now let’s talk about far futurism yeah let’s go full futuristic full futurist okay

so let’s let’s talk about you know you’ve talked about agi and uh you know elements like that but but looking out over the next 50 years you know what are going to be these material changes that human society is really going to have to work to adapt at and and what are those that are we’re welcome um you know what do you see as as the big impact is uh moving out over the next 30 to 50 years so i think a kind of handy way of thinking about this is the blurring of boundaries the blurring of boundaries between science fantasy and science fiction and reality the blurring of boundaries between the human body and what sits outside it the blurring of time boundaries what we thought was 100 years away happening much faster and so when those start to blur we start to get some very interesting possibilities i.e changing the human uh brain giving us really enhanced capabilities extending our memory our processing power giving us the genetic makeup of other species so we can enhance our hearing or whatever those are the kind of things i think are on the table at that level with science and tech we we’re talking about the potential for ai to basically be running everything creating everything managing everything and then the big challenge for all of us is what do we want it how do we want it to work who pays for it who gets the money from it uh how do we ensure that we still have some purpose and value in society how we want to decide define it and then how do we make sure it’s benign in its decision making and it doesn’t compete with other ais or other agis and it’s unlikely that we’ll have one running everything so what could the consequence be of agis competing and gaming each other and what could the human side effects of that be we have no idea because it’s so far out and then uh the i say the fun stuff is when you start to look at what science and technology makes possible so material that can change its property over time atomically precise manufacturing so i can manufacture at the atomic level nanotechnology visions truly realize then you start to engineer things like cars that contain change their shape when they go around corners buildings that can change their shape and their heat reflective properties titanium body parts that will change their shape depending on whether you’re walking or running all that kind of stuff and then biological materials that can absorb carbon in the atmosphere that can basically do all the environmental cleanup but also fundamentally change the way we think about everything so we know that the experiments have been done we’ve been able to store a million books worth of information on the dna of a single drop of water i was with huawei last week and they were saying i was quite amazed that they told me what they’re doing in their research labs they’re working on dna storage and they now calculate that you could take all of the information that exists on this planet and store it on one kilogram of dna conversely crazy conversely they reckon within five years or so we’ll get to about a yottabyte of data uh being generated a day in order to store that using the best hard drives out there if you laid them in to the end they would take us to the moon and back 284 types so physically impossible to do there isn’t enough space in the planet so we’re going to need radically different science to do all this and this is some of the stuff that i get very excited about is when we start to solve fascinating challenges that we’ve created for ourselves we start to really transform the planet from something we’re abusing to something we’re enhancing and we start to say you have more choice a choice over how you want to live as a human if you want to live to 150 that’s fine but you take the consequences if you want to give yourself you know bat-like vision and dog-like hearing that’s cool but let’s not have that at the cost to someone else so we we got some very interesting stuff to be done around ethical moral frameworks commissioning in society who governs it you know you have these treatments when you pitch up to the conventional health service something that’s gone wrong who pays for that how we’re going to deal with that so i think there’s so many exciting possibilities i love the idea of flying cars i love the idea of you know deciding when i want to give myself a treatment to deal with the niggling injury in the back of my knee or whatever not having to wait for a health care provider i love the idea of having all those staff trek technologies in my home but what i love even more is that there’s a bunch of super nerds out there who now think it’s possible yeah and a bunch of investors as we were saying earlier who are really happy to put the cash up really happy to put the money up to try this stuff because when you’ve got gazillions then it doesn’t matter if you put 20 billion into something it’s an experiment so that’s fascinating that the key for me is that we don’t end up doing all this to the benefit of a very small proportion of society this is really key isn’t it you know it has to be inclusive it has to be a future that we build for everybody you know um and this is what is great about the technology it makes this possible unfortunately you know we could continue this conversation for another half hour at least or another hour hit um the the you know i would have loved to dive more more deeply into some of that future tech stuff maybe we should do a show just on that future tech stuff uh robert you know bobby you know so hey but uh um you’ve been listening to the futurists uh rohit tawa from fast future thank you for joining us on the futurist this week um where can people find out more about yourself and about fast future uh the easiest place is our website is fastfuture.com you can find me on linkedin facebook twitter etc and the email is rohitfastfuture.com fantastic so if you liked this episode um you know make sure to check out uh rohit connect 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