Setting the Stage
Welcome to Imaginize World, where we hear from forward thinkers, activists, and sci-fi visionaries. Today I’m with Jonelle Simunich and Chris Luebkeman talking about [y]our2040. Their goal is to bring people together and help them imagine how they can build a future in ways that are positive and especially pragmatic.
What would interest me a lot is a question I ask all of my guests, which is, how would you describe yourself in just one sentence?
CHRIS
I’m a bridge builder.
JANE
That’s a great one.
JONELLE
Explorer of ideas.
JANE
Explorer of ideas. Okay. Well, I think exploring ideas and building bridges sounds like a good combination.
CHRIS
That’s exactly what we do. We build bridges while we’re exploring ideas, seeing if we can make them happen.
JANE
I have looked at our 2040 or [y]our2040. It’s a very smart name.
What is [y]our2040?
Thank you. We worked on that.
JONELLE
The Y is in brackets because we focus on the future, so we focus on the year 2040. But for us, the future is both yours and ours together. And so that’s why there’s the brackets.
JANE
It’s a great, great name. In writing it comes across really beautifully. And I looked at a lot of your materials on LinkedIn and other places, and I saw that I got a very beautiful sentence about the objective of [y]our2040, which is to create impactful and actionable solutions to enable radical transformation, to create a clear, positive pathway for our future that is really, really inspiring and I would say ambitious.
CHRIS
Thank you.
JANE
Can one of you pick up on that and talk about it a little bit? Because it’s so amazing. I had like to know a lot more about it, what it is, how you do it.
CHRIS
We’ve been doing futures work for many years together. Jonelle and I have been working together for 10 years, and I started almost 30 years ago doing futures work. And one of the things that we find, it’s very difficult to help individuals imagine the future, and this is from experience. When you say the future, first question is, well, how far? Talking about six weeks, six months, six years? And the further you go, the more difficult it is for anyone to imagine.
On the other hand, it’s easy to imagine the negative future and dystopia. And one of the things which we realized is the hardest part is to instill this belief that a future is possible which is both positive, and pragmatic, and regenerative, and worth working towards.
And so it’s this positive future, this positive, and I repeat that again and again and again. Positive, that we’re really most interested in helping to instill in others because we have to reconfirm that with ourselves constantly.
JONELLE
And so that’s a good setup for what we do at [y]our2040. We bring people together to really imagine what a future could look. And not just crazy ideas, but a positive, plausible and pragmatic future. So we come together, we look to create visions, collective visions with other people of where we could go in the future and then make it tangible. So create pathways and actions, help people feel like they have authority and autonomy, and an ability to do something today to get to that future that we all want to go towards.
Be the best ancestors
Because at the end of the day, what we’re trying to be, as we say, our vision is we want to be the best ancestors we can be, to be able to look at are the next generations and plural, look them in the face on, at least for me on my deathbed, Jonelle’s got a little bit further to go than I do. And I’d say on my deathbed and say, “I did everything that I could knowing what I knew to give you the best chance to get out of your way to help you make the future what it could be.” And I say knowing what we know because the work we do, we take a look at science. And science is not fake news. It’s very real. And the fact is we know that the world is heading at the moment, where it’s 2.6 to 2.8 degrees sea above the 1990 protocols. And that is going to be a profoundly changed world.
And so therefore, given that, how can we actually look at this in a way which is positive? And say we can cry about the loss of glaciers because Switzerland will lose all of its glaciers in the next 20 to 50 years. And so what does that mean for the nation? What does it mean when these storms, which one experiences there so much energy that the 1,000-year storm comes every 20 years?
It’s not trying to be a fear monger. It’s just saying, okay, this is our new reality, our new context. What do we need to do so we can have a good life? And the collective we. So this is what we really been focusing on. This is a lesson that Jonelle and I took out of 10 years of working together, science at the core.
JANE
I don’t know if you’ve looked at my website. I have a website for the whole podcast. The name is Imaginize World. And the whole thing across the top is Imaginize the world that we want for future generations by bringing voices, all these different voices to the forefront.
CHRIS
Exactly. And we need this Jane. That’s exactly why we said yes when you invited us to join. Now the negative voices get too much bandwidth. And what we believe is we need positive, in face of challenge, we still have to be positive.
JANE
I saw photos, incredible photos of these events that you hold. Could you talk about those events?
[y]our2040 gatherings
So the big thing that we do every year is we call it a gathering. So it’s the [y]our2040 gathering. And we hold this in La Punt in Switzerland, and eventually we will hold this in other locations. We bring 100 people together. And I’d say we have kind of three key themes to do this and make the whole experience special for everybody.
One is knowledge. And the way that we do that is we bring in experts around a theme to share their knowledge with the community and the people who join us. And we design it in a way to make knowledge more accessible and so that the participants are also engaged in learning. So what it looks like is more of an American talk show like think late night TV, rather than a traditional stand-on stage and do a PowerPoint performance. And the reason for that is that the audience is at the same level as the experts, and you’re able to engage better around what you’re learning.
And the second is community. So we have 100 people that come every year and we keep it at that number because in over three and a half days with 100 people, you can really start to find the other people that you resonate with. And our promise to everybody is that you’ll leave with at least two people that you’ll continue to stay friends with, do work with, collaborate with regularly. But most people end up with more than that. And so over that amount of time, you can really find your resonance and the other people that you resonate with.
The third part is we also have group work. So it’s another opportunity for all of the participants to find other ways to connect, collaborate, and work together. I think one of our pillars of the whole gathering, we say change happens at the rate of trust. And so everything that we do while we’re all together is to try to create an environment of trust where people find one another and want to keep working together afterwards to help make change faster.
JANE
So they work together afterwards, in whatever group they have created?
Community of 2,000
Some do, some don’t. It’s 100 people. Now, this is the fourth year. So our community is about 2,000 plus individuals. So we take a look at the applications and see why should you join us and what you have to offer, what you wish to take away? And so it’s a very rigorous process which we look. And it’s not just Jonelle and I. We have usually four or five individuals, different ages and places taking a look. And sometimes I’ll say no and the everyone else says yes. And sometimes I say yes and everyone goes, “No.” But in the end we have an amazing group of individuals ranging from five years old to 75, 80.
JANE
Five years old?
CHRIS
Yeah, yeah. So five to 80. And we have students who participate from high school students as well, university students, scientists, bankers, very wealthy individuals. We have artists, musicians, architects, engineers, couple of futurists. You name it we have it in our community. It’s an amazing gift to have these people part of our lives and for them to be able to curate these moments when they can come together.
And the other thing that we really do Jane is I think it’s really important that we respect different typologies of humans who come together. Not everyone’s an extrovert like I am. I like talking, I like standing in front of people and things like that. And so we really design it with introverts, extroverts, house-verts. We really are very, very careful in how we think of every 15 minutes of those three and a half days.
And so we respect the different needs of different types of people as well as the fact that this gift of time that one is giving to us, and giving to each other, and giving to themselves is extremely important. And we respect that. And so we design it, as I said, every 15 minutes with the end in mind of, as Jonelle said, building trust and building momentum to help us make change happen towards a positive future, which we hope to happen.
JANE
Can you give me an example or two of projects that come out of this?
What future with climate change?
I can say what we’re doing right now, and maybe Jonelle can reflect on a couple of things that’s come in the past, if that’s okay? Yeah. So right now we’re working very carefully with the local community of La Punt, which is in the middle of the Engadin Valley away in the high mountains to say, what is your future going to look like given climate change when the trees that you’re so in love with will no longer be able to live? And we can plant pear trees and apple trees. Where before you’d only had snow, now you can have orchards.
And so what does this look like? And we’ve been working with them very closely and it’s been quite fun and challenging at times. But we’ve got 12 future stories, which we have evolved this past summer. And that’s going to turn into what we’re calling our future vision with the village and the community. And then next summer we’re going to be taking a look at processes and pathways for this transition to a regenerative future. What does this mean on the ground?
As a matter of fact, last weekend we had 14, 15 of the 100 come together, come from afar, from Lisbon, from Munich, from Zurich, from the western part of Switzerland. Took as long for the person from the western part of Switzerland to come over did from Munich to come over, and to really work on these stories with these characters and say, what could this be?
So it’s really quite beautiful to see these future stories turning into a vision. And it’s really, that’s one thing that’s very real, and the community’s interested and excited.
JANE
The people who are building the stories, are they in positions of decision-making?
CHRIS
The humans who are doing the stories? No, no, they’re not. But the people who are participating from the government and the local citizens… Switzerland’s a very direct democracy. So you vote on everything. I would say every citizen has decision-making power in this village. So they get to decide what’s going to happen to the family-owned ski lift that might or might not get snow. They get to decide what happens to the street. In Switzerland, they vote on everything. They have three or four elections a year, three or three or four votes a year.
JANE
I had a couple clients in Switzerland over the years and over the coffee breaks, they were described to me about the elections and how that happened. And I was just stunned. I mean, being American, born in America, but living in France now for 50 years, I’ve lived in two completely different countries. But neither one is one where you would say the citizens have an active role. I mean they vote of course, or at least in France they do. But in terms of actually having a voice in what happens, it’s not local enough.
CHRIS
We have the gift of great interaction with the local community, really.
Change by ripples and secondary impact
Some of the other things that have happened over the years, last year we had, one of our partners was a furniture company and they were interested in exploring circularity and reuse materials. And so the town that we host this in is called La Punt, and they have an old building that is planned for demolition. And so what we kind of coordinated was a group of participants from our gathering went into that house, pulled out some of the old materials, and they built a bunch of furniture. And so it was just like a prototyping opportunity for our partner. And also, the people who worked on it really loved doing it because they were learning too.
CHRIS
And what it did is the company was able to, I think we can say the name, there’s Vitra, Vitra is the name of it. It’s a Swiss, very beautiful, beautiful, beautiful furniture. And they’ve been contemplating for a while the idea that you could do more with the used furniture or scratch and dent furniture. Because up until last year, they had never done that. I was just kind of curious, what would happen if we did this kind of activity, which is a circularity, this reuse. And that then led to them internally thinking more about the possibility of in their largest markets of having a reuse type of pop-up store or reuse opportunity for their scratch and dent stuff. Instead of throwing things away because they had a little tiny flaw, they’d say, “Well, let’s see what we could do with it.”
JANE
Is there any way that, or maybe it happens naturally that these very interesting results are shared with the world.
CHRIS
There’s a great German word, which is yes and no together in one word.
JANE
Oh, I don’t know that.
CHRIS
JANE
I see, that’s a good one.
CHRIS
And I say yes and no because our participants come from all over the world already. From South Africa, from Nigeria, from Lagos, from the United States and West Coast, East Coast. And they take with them this ethos, this mission that we have, and they take also the results back with them. We share PowerPoints, we share our YouTube reels. We have a website where all of this is documented and it’s easily accessible, but we don’t push it per se into mainstream media. It’s simply because we just don’t have the capacity, nor is it our intent to go stand on a soapbox and scream. Our intent is to change by ripples and by secondary impact. So the individuals who come, they go away, and they make change where they are. So to me, it’s much more personal, and deeper, and based on this idea from Steve Covey of trust.
JANE
And it’s more lasting change that happens that way.
Planetary boundary cities
We hope so. Let’s go ahead and talk about the planetary boundary cities.
JANE
What are the planetary boundary cities?
JONELLE
This all started when a friend named Patrick Frick, he just started a group called the Global Commons Alliance, and they were looking for different partners to help them in their mission to bring awareness to the global commons, which are those natural elements on earth that don’t belong to any one of us, but that we all require to survive and thrive as humans.
And so they were specifically looking for someone that was focused on cities and the built environment to partner with them. The question was, can we redesign the built environment to help the planet? And so that was the question that underlined all of this. And that led to a five-year internal program where we were doing things from desk research, to prototyping, to funding R&D type projects, to this foresight paper that was focused on the planetary boundaries and what the built environment can do today to help reverse the changes that are made or at least help them be more neutralized.
And so to me, I think the real premise is at the very end of that book, the report, we call it regeneration. It’s really around how can we regenerate and use the built environment to do that.
ARUP and 2050 vision
A little more of the backstory for the planetary boundary cities is we completed a piece of work which also lasted a few years called Arup 2050 scenarios, looking ahead out to 2050.
JANE
I saw that, I saw that document-
CHRIS
What the world might be looking at. So there’s a way for us to engage with our clients, also an internal vocabulary in which all of our business and geographies could dialogue with each other about what this might look like when we’re heading towards the future.
And one of the outcomes of that document, which is really well received, was this realization as Jonelle said, is that cities are the biggest driver on our planet of negative change within the biosphere. What can we do? Because Arup is very responsible for lots of change. How could we make sure that we’re doing the best that we could be at that time? And I’m not [inaudible 00:17 :22] I can’t say we anymore, but at that time it was we. What can we do with our smart men and women to redesign our cities and help our clients commission things which were beneficial rather than commissioning things which were negative?
So it was really, that was the aim, trying to help our clients be better versions of themselves. So that the engineers and the architects, the designers could do a better job. And that was really what it was.
Global Commons Alliance
And she referenced also something called the Global Commons Alliance, which I’d like to make sure we bring out because the Global Commons Alliance is quite important because it really is giving voice to those things as Jonelle indicated, which we need in order to survive and thrive. And that is continuing on. We helped get it off the ground, and Jonelle was seconded there to help them think about the role of cities in the very, very early stages. And she did a great job with this so that it helped give birth to the different indices which they now have, which we all now can use when it comes to the Global Commons Alliance. And I think those are also really important work that Patrick Frick led in those years. Yeah.
JANE
Well that’s in line with 2040, isn’t it?
CHRIS
The thread with all of these I say, is really, how can we be the best versions of ourselves as humans? And how can we help others be the best versions of themselves as humans?
We are the creative force on the planet at the moment. So therefore, we need to have an opportunity, an obligation to make positive change.
And we were very fortunate to be part of Arup when it was truly focused on how to be the best designers in the world. I mean, this was something we was very proud of at that time, and really did great work. And thinking about the early days of sustainability, sustainable cities, that moved into regenerative cities, regeneration, what that means. And that’s really the theme which we took out of with us from Arup, was what does regeneration mean?
And just to close on this thought is regeneration is not just at an urban scale, but it’s also at human scale, because there’s a regeneration which is required of many of our humans on the planet to get away from just focusing on greed and acquisition, to more instead of the me to the we. And I’m not a communist or a socialist, but I am just saying we have to really look out for each other on our planet. Includes nature and includes the infrastructure. You just have to really walk a bit lighter on our planet. In the terms of the 1970s environmental movement, tread lightly, and we need to get those lessons back. This is something we’ve really been working also to do, and this has been a thread which we picked up and carry very proudly, this thread.
JANE
It’s interesting. Just a quick side note, the last person I interviewed is a Nigerian science fiction writer, Wole Talabi. And what you just said, Chris, sounds very much like part of what he says. One thing he feels strongly about is the way social media can be used to bring people together in a different way. And he talks about how he thinks that can happen now, which I won’t talk about here because that’s not the point of our conversation. But I find that he believes science fiction can play a large role in how people see the future. And it reminds me of what you guys are saying about stories.
I mean science fiction are stories. He says, our lives are stories we tell ourselves, the stories based on… And so you guys are talking about stories too, and you’re working with people to help them build stories that will make a better future for them and for all of us.
CHRIS
Exactly. I agree.
Human condition is a series of stories
That’s sort of what the human condition is. It’s a series of stories. Some live on, some don’t. Some are past, some are future, some are today. But that’s the fundamental form of how we all communicate with each other is we’re telling each other stories all the time. And it’s just, which stories do you want to believe? Which stories influence you? Which ones inspire you? Which ones do you want to create? Which ones do you want to stay away from?
JANE
Overall, I think your work that you’re doing must be hard sometimes. You must encounter obstacles, difficulties. Can you talk about that a little bit? Although Chris, you’re looking so positive in your expression. I’m not sure you feel you haven’t countered any.
CHRIS
Of course there’s always obstacles in life Jane, but our biggest obstacle right now is funding and getting ways to help support the initiative. Other than that, I think it’s hard for me to pick something out of the air and say that, and I mean it sincerely because it’s such an honor and a gift to be able to do what we’re doing.
JANE
Yes.
CHRIS
I’ll do this until I die. It’s really simple, and it’s what we’ve been doing and what I’ll continue to do is how we help others build this bridge to a future which we want to have.
JANE
I see you have a GoFundMe site for a book about stories. Stories about the future.
JONELLE
Yeah, so that’s just one of many things we do. So we’ve talked a lot about the gathering and the ambition of [y]our2040. We’ve also been running or doing lots of other kind of projects and I don’t know, making materials in the background, so that’s one of many.
But that book specifically was an engagement. We held a competition with people from, I would say around the world to write positive narratives for the future. And so we ran that probably about a couple of years ago. We got about 30 or 40 submissions. I don’t know, we got a lot of submissions that were really nice and we ended up narrowing it down, and we’ve chosen a collection that we think are really exciting, and with a diverse breadth of people from different countries, and ages, and different backgrounds from around the world.
And so we’re now turning those into a book, and illustrating it, and we’ll be publishing it in the not too distant future. So we had the first draft and we worked with a group called Swissnex. They’re part of the Swiss government and they’re kind of the cultural arm, I’ll say, for lack of a better term. And they have locations around the world. So they have a location in San Francisco, and we worked with them to take a couple of these stories and put them on exhibition about a year ago there.
JANE
Nice.
CHRIS
It was very cool.
Next generation better than us?
I’d like to ask you what you think the next generation, you’re working for the next generation. What do you think they will be better at than what we do?
JONELLE
Empathy.
JANE
Empathy.
JONELLE
I think a lot of the people that I know who are, I’d say 10 to 20 years younger than me seem to not always, but sometimes understand each other I would say better than a lot of the people I know or that are older. So that’s one thing that, I don’t know. That’s the first thing that comes to my mind.
JANE
Something come to your mind, Chris?
CHRIS
When you say next generation, what do you mean?
JANE
I would say people who are maybe born just very recently, maybe kids as they get older. I’m thinking of fairly short term in that sense. I’m thinking maybe 20, 25 years, not beyond that.
CHRIS
I’m going to give you an answer which is slightly complex, but it’s not convoluted. I believe we’re in the most dynamic period of time that you or I will have lived through. And in every single way, across all lenses you can take a look at. And this complexity is going to give this next generation a very unusual context for them to be able and need to deal with. So I think they’re going to be quite good at navigating what we would consider to be loss. And they will not see it as loss. They’ll see it as a new and different world.
We already have killed 75% of the natural entities on the planet in my lifetime. And if you think in another, as you say born today, when they come of age, it’ll be another 5%, maybe 7%. And so that loss, they’re going to be very good. They’re coming up with solutions and survival solutions. And I don’t mean thrive, but I do mean survival.
And I say that and that’s intriguing because our mission is to look at positive futures. I do believe in our positive futures. And at the same time, I do believe the next generations are going to have to understand how to deal with so much less. We’ve always assumed that in the northern parts of the hemisphere, we could just turn it, not everywhere, but turn a tap and we get drinkable water. We’ve assumed that you could take a shower every day if you really wanted to. There are many assumptions about daily life which I don’t believe will be valid. And that doesn’t mean that the life is going to be miserable if you’re born into that. That means it will be different.
And so that’s what I mean, they’re going to have to navigate what we would consider, it would be their new reality. And I think that’s our obligation is to lay some of the groundwork that’s not decimating, but it’s actually empowering.
JANE
Okay, that’s a lot to think about. That’s a great answer. I like both your answers. It’s very different, very complementary.
CHRIS
I think Jonelle’s right too. Without empathy, without empathy, the next generation will not be able to thrive.
JANE
The next question I have, I think you’ve pretty much answered it was, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the long-term future?
Optimistic or pessimistic about the future
I’m both actually. Four days a week I’m an optimist, three days a week I’m a pessimist. At the moment the balance is still on the positive side. And I have the privilege of working with young people at the university and I get to see in my own two young people at 26 and 24, my children. And I interact with them and I see their attitude towards the future. And I’m just so amazed by them and what they’re thinking, how they’re looking at the world, what they’re believing, and how they’re navigating through life.
At the same time, I look at what’s happening in our oceans, I look at climate change, I look at political upheaval, I look at nuclear proliferation. I look at all these things and I kind of go, those are the three days. And so the four days, I’m still there. And I think this is what this community, and with Jonelle and working with all these individuals in 2040, they help me stay on the four-day side.
JANE
And Jonelle, you tend to be more optimistic or more pessimistic?
JONELLE
Very. I mean I am probably very optimistic-
JANE
To be doing the work you’re doing.
JONELLE
Yeah, I guess over the years being in foresight, the first few years were kind of rough and challenging because when you’re looking at the future, like Chris was saying earlier, the first things you see, and remember, and stick in your mind are all the bad stuff. And it took a couple of years. And I remember going and talking to, I don’t know if you remember this, Chris. Chris when I started and I was like, “I don’t know if I could do this. How do you do this every day? It’s just exhausting. You’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders.” And I’m like, “I have to go advise people and tell them we can make stuff better.” And I’m like, “Everyone’s dying and the ocean’s dying.” And I was very sad. And then anyways, he gave me some tips to how to deal with it. And then since then has changed.
But I think I see it very differently now. I see it more like there’s no such thing as good and bad. They’re just experiences we live, and it’s up to us to decide, how do we want to engage with this? Yes, arguably bad things happen sometimes. But the majority of life on earth is really up to us to decide how we want to engage with it. They’re just experiences.
And I think the other thing is generally when I look at humanity long-term, not the last 30 years, but the last 500 or 1,000 years, we have changed a lot. Physically, not so much, but the world that we’ve created around us has changed a lot, right? We’ve made lots of improvements, there’s been lots of innovation, we’ve made lots of progress. And also on things like collaboration, there’s less war today than there was in the past, even though it’s not happy every day and bad things happen.
Upward trend over last 500 or 1,000 years
But when I look at the human time-scale over a long period of time, I see an upward trend. And so that also helps me say, yeah, sometimes you’d have a little bump, but in general we continue to go upward.
CHRIS
So summarize, Jonelle’s sort of a six day a week optimist.
JONELLE
Yes.
CHRIS
There’s that one day where she’s going to go, “Ah.” I’m a little bit on the other side. But I think one point that she brought up I think is really important Jane in our work, and I do quite a lot with Singapore. And every couple years they bring strategic foresight professionals together from around the world.
And I’ll never forget the early days, it was probably 20 something years ago when I was doing in the midst of this. And this one gentleman said, “It’s my job to have nightmares about our future so that our citizens do not.” And I took that to heart. I really obviously still think about that. And I think about, it’s important for us to think about some of these unthinkables and the impacts that they could have so that we could potentially avoid them or plan for them so that our citizens and our families don’t have those nightmares. And I think this is something that I’ve lived with and lived by and professionally are consulting.
JANE
That’s very interesting. How do you see your work evolving over the next 20 years or so?
CHRIS
20 years. Interesting.
JANE
Yeah, 20 years.
CHRIS
Jonelle, go for it.
JONELLE
I think probably three things. I see our impact growing. So going beyond Switzerland, starting to work in other countries, regions with different groups, organizations, companies, etc.
I think our influence spreading, so being able to help more people. A part of that, going to different places, growing our community and hosting these. Just having more, I don’t know, positive influence I hope.
I think third is, well, I guess that goes hand in hand, but I hope to see us spreading messages of hope and positivity. And the future can be happy, good, and better place. Not in a naive way, but in a way that gives people more authority, autonomy, and just comfort in knowing that they can shape the future that they want to go towards.
CHRIS
That’s cool. I like that Jonelle. So for me, Jane, it’s a really good question you say 20 years, because I expect to be able to live that long. I’m planning on it and others are planning on it as well. It’s quite different than if you’re 20 like my children, or 30, or 40, that’s very different. And in Switzerland at 65 you typically retire officially. And so I’m not too far away from that, frankly.
Time, most important commodity we have
And so I’ve been thinking about this question quite a lot. Where do I really want to spend my time? Because time is the most important commodity that we have. We don’t get more of that. We can get more blueberries, but time, can’t get back. And so for me, [Y]our2040 is my passion project, my heart project. It’s where I believe that we can truly make a profound difference, especially in this extremely challenging time, which will be coming. To find tools, techniques, and methods, and community to be able to share how to think about the future in a positive way, in a pragmatic way. And then to make things happen.
Now, as famously said, you run a marathon by taking the first step. This is a marathon. And so therefore, we’re taking the first steps. We’ve taken four years of four steps. We’ve created a method which I completely believe in. It’s the best thing I think I’ve ever done personally in 30 years of professional life. And I think this is really, really powerful.
At the same time, I know it’s also important for me to make way for others, like Jonelle and others to continue to grow, and to expand, and to take 20, 40 to other corners of the world. And so there’s also, very interested in the whole issue of ancient wisdom. And as we move towards the future, this unknowing, what are the lessons which we need to capture now before it’s too late?
And there’s so many interesting things with ancient wisdom and just, we used to call it indigenous architecture, and these beautiful simple dwellings which followed the rules of nature’s ancient wisdom. And so what are the things that we can be taking there that help us with this positive storytelling of the future?
And the last thing is I do hope to spend some time traveling, to visit friends, to seeing these stories, to sharing our mission, almost as a missionary. I’m not really a religious human, but I believe that this word, this message needs to get shared. And so that we grow the belief that a positive, pragmatic, renewable future is possible. So I hope to be able to some places which I’ve been to before or have not yet been to.
JANE
Well, this has been an extremely interesting conversation. I hope you two have enjoyed it as much as I have.
CHRIS
Thank you.
JANE
Is there any sort of last minute thing that either one of you or both of you would like to say?
CHRIS
Jonelle, you want to go? I am going to add something.
JONELLE
I think I’m going to pick up on something Chris mentioned. Personally, I have three philosophies of life or three truths of life. One is we’re all going to die. Two is you have to be you till you die. And three is change is constant. And what I mean by that is we’re all going to die, so time is the most valuable thing that we have as humans, which is something that Chris mentioned earlier. So you spend your time wisely, know that you have the ability. It is also the only thing that you as a human being have full control over is how you spend your time. I can’t choose how anyone else spends their time, only me. And so I think that’s the most valuable thing we have on life.
Two is you have to be you till you die. So find a way to like yourself because you’re on this journey with yourself. And some people need a little encouragement and we need to spend time working on ourselves, some of us.
I think third is the change is constant and it’s not always comfortable or fun, but learn to kind of roll with the punches and take things as experiences, and you can learn from everything. So try to find a way not to be scared of change, but rather take lessons from it and grow from it.
CHRIS
Those are good. I like those.
JONELLE
Thank you.
Strategic Foresight Hub at ETH
Jane, you asked earlier about the ETH. The ETH stands for the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. That’s the [German 00:37 :26]. It is the Swiss Federal School. We like to say MIT is the ETH of North America or Caltech of the West Coast to the great republic. And we’re one of the top 10 technical universities in the world constantly. And we’re the number one technical university in Europe since many years.
And I have the pleasure and the privilege of leading the Strategic Foresight Hub within the office of the president of this institution. I joined the ETH after leaving Arup. This was five years ago. And to pick that up and to help us create a new way of doing strategy and thinking about the future and introducing foresight thinking across the institution.
And so that has been my mandate, and that’s what I’ve been doing with great pleasure and with great challenge, because we’re thinking about the future of higher education, because we’re in a great time of change in many, many different ways when it comes to higher education. And so I’ve been looking at what’s driving change, what can we do about it? What do we not about?
Also within the context of the changing needs and expectations of society, because ETH has is its federal parliamentary, congressional mandate to teach, to research, and prepare the nation for the next economy. And so this is what we take very seriously. And so we have to think very carefully about, what does it mean to teach and to learn? What do we research, how do we research, and what is the next economy going to look like? And how do we make sure that we’re preparing the students and future leaders and the country for that next economy? That’s what I’ve been doing for the past five years.
JANE
So that under underlying a lot of what you do. And maybe it doesn’t underlie, it complements a lot of what we’ve talked about.
CHRIS
It’s one of my other roles, sort of-
JANE
You have a lot of roles.
CHRIS
I do. That’s just a few of them.
JANE
Okay. Well, it’s been a great conversation. A lot of fun. And I think our listeners will enjoy it as much as I have.
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