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Setting the scene
If we’re a planet of human beings and our identity is planetary, then the ethical question is, if we’re on a planet together and we can create abundance, it’s our moral duty to do so.
JANE
Welcome to Imaginize World, where we hear from forward thinkers, activists, and sci-fi visionaries. Today I’m with Sohail Inayatullah. Sohail is the UNESCO Chair in future studies and professor at Tamkang University in Taipei. He’s a researcher at the Think Tank MetaFuture and is famous for having created the futures technique of causal layered analysis. We’ll talk about that here, and more importantly, his views of our futures.
I have read a lot of your materials since I realized I was going to be talking with you, and it’s just amazing. You’re a world-famous futurist and you’ve been in so many places and done so many things, I wouldn’t even know what to say about you, to be honest.
SOHAIL
That’s very gracious about you.
Futurist Chair for UNESCO
Oh, well, it’s absolutely true. It’s impressive. And I think people are more and more interested in the future today than they used to be, and that’s the whole purpose of my podcast that I started about a year ago. I know that you’re the futurist chair, perhaps you could talk about that for a moment?
SOHAIL
So UNESCO has a project called UNESCO Chairs in different fields. In our area, it’s called UNESCO Chairs in Future Studies, Foresight, Anticipation. So these are ways that UNESCO tries to intertwine, grow global knowledge. In my case, the narrative I used when they asked me do I want to be a chair was my work was very much first about growing seeds, seeds of change, trying a foresight project here, a foresight project in this country, that group. And eventually I focused on six, seven, eight different groups, and so it became nurturing young trees. And the UNESCO work is really about growing a forest of foresight where one doesn’t get so worried about a particular tree or branch or bush or prairie, it’s how do you grow the entire area and field?
So you’re trying to get countries, individuals, organizations to think long-term to use the future to change today, to bring in a whole range of foresight methods and tools to not just personally reduce anxiety and depression, but to increase our agency, our ability to influence the future. And to really move more toward global and I would say rational policymaking, given that much of our policymaking goes against our visions and goals of what a good planet could be or can be.
Work in Futures Thinking
Right. You teach in different universities, I understand. I don’t know how many you have going all at once. It looked like a lot of different places. Where are you teaching right now?
SOHAIL
So my position is at Tamkang in Taipei, and they have one of the most successful foresight programs. I think over 150,000 undergraduates have taken a course in futures thinking, and almost 200 people have done their masters in futures thinking. So I’ve been there for 25 years. And also the UNESCO Chair is held at the Sejahtera Center for Well-being and Sustainability in Malaysia. And so that’s the International Islamic University there, so those are two large ones.
And then I’m an employee of a think tank, Metafuture.org, and we have the Metafuture School, which runs self-paced online courses. So the idea there is if you’re in a large organization and you want to learn future methods and tools, you can just take one of those courses and get the basic skill sets. And then you go back to your host organization and apply them.
And for 22 years, I’ve been running courses with my colleague Robert Burke, he just passed away a few years ago, for CEOs, senior executives on futures thinking and strategy development. And so that’s been kind of the areas I focus on.
JANE
That’s very interesting because you don’t sound like an academic futurist. You have your feet on the ground, if I can phrase it that way, and you’re trying to enable other people.
Audience fell asleep
My first presentation when I was in Hawaii learning future studies, it was with my professor, Jim Dator. It was for the Federal Credit Union of Hawaii, and the CEO fell asleep as I was lecturing.
JANE
No.
SOHAIL
My second presentation was with the Hawaii Justice and the Hawaii Courts, and the Chief Justice fell asleep. And by the early 1990s, and then I did one for the Labor Department, and by the early 1990s I learned pretty quickly if you lecture and don’t connect, people fall asleep. So I changed my style to ensure the content is rigorous, but find ways to connect, to communicate, to help people link from the world that could be to the difficulty of today. To help with that transition, which my colleague Rob Burke always said, “Okay, great. On Monday morning, what will we do different?”
Make a 10-minute pitch
So in our course at the Melbourne Business School, it was a four or five-day course. On the fourth, we said, “Okay, you teach back to us who is the futures of procurement, futures of sustainability, futures of AI? As a CEO or a chief financial officer, you’ve had three days of learning and now stand in front of us, pretend it’s a board meeting or pretend the CEO or the Prime Minister. Make your 10-minute pitch.” And so that forced them to take the four days seriously, and it forced them to think through Monday morning, “How will I ensure what I’ve learned leads to a better strategy, better policymaking? How does it ensure that it sticks?”
So that led to strictly academic work, which is my writing to I think what you’re talking about, how do I connect, communicate? I would say we all have our KPIs. I remember in Brisbane in the early 2000s, there was a Brisbane Ideas Festival run by Lord Mayor Jim Soorley. And he said, “Can you also run one for kids?” I said, “Sure.” So I ran a session for about eight or nine people from the ages of seven to 17. And with the young kids, that’s just draw the future. That’s phase one, phase two in this drawing, who are you in the future? Phase three, what would you really like this to look like? The 15-year-olds, we came in and said, “What are you facing today? What’s a better metaphor? From the new metaphor, what’s a better strategy?”
Working with young people
And after the meeting, one of the mothers came in and she burst into tears, and I said, “What happened?” She goes, “I was sure my son was destined for total failure. He now has a five-year business plan. How did that happen?” And I said, “Well, we just listened to him and made methods and tools that made sense for it.” And so a lot of that comes through narrative.
I still remember in one country, I think it was Brunei, my partner, Ivana Milojevic, she had a position there at that Center for Strategy Policymaking, so I was the plus one looking for things to do. And some of the directors said, “Well, how about you run something for our teenagers?” I said, “Sure.” And so I had seven teenagers in the room, and this was quite powerful for me. But I said, “Okay, I’ll run it but-” this was all mothers. “… you can’t come in during the 90-minute session.”
Then I also said, “As teenagers, you have to pay me.” They said, “Well, we can’t.” I said, “Okay, the cost is a slice of pizza each.” And so we agreed. And then I think my big takeaway is when we started the process, a few were just silly, but a few were really powerful. And one of them when I said, “So what would you like to be in 10 years?” And she said, “Well, I want to run my own bubble tea company.” I said, “Great.” I said, “So what are things you’re doing now to achieve that?” She says, “Well, I’m learning STEM, science, tech, math, et cetera, engineering.” And I said, “So what’s your current metaphor?” And she said, “Ah, the blinds are always shut.” “And so is that working for you?” And then she burst into tears. And then her friends all went around and hugged her.
New metaphor
Now, of course, I was concerned about the mothers outside the door thinking, well, why are their daughters crying? This was supposed to be a foresight session. And then I had to stay very quiet and silent. And so then I asked them, “So what’s going on? Why is that metaphor causing grief?” And then she said, “Well, I realized I’ve cut out my friends in my single focus pursuit of this career.” And then we said the transformation question, “What’s a better narrative? We’re not going to take away your goal to be a manager or CEO of this company.” And she said, “Aha, let the sun in. Open the drapes.”
And the final part was, if that’s your new metaphor, what does that mean in terms of the skillsets you’ll need? And she was just switching gears, “Aha, looking on stem, obviously I need emotional intelligence, even mindfulness.” And so then they all hugged. So what I learned was I can frame this as optimizing narrative for strategic goals, or I can say it the way I just said it, “Let’s tell a better story and have steps that can help us get where we wanted.”
So thank you for picking up, Jane. That’s something I’ve tried to focus on and find ways to language a reality that’s more accessible.
More about CLA – causal layered analysis
Yeah. Well, your examples there are just inspiring. We could stop right now. We’re not going to, so hang on. But we could stop right now and we would already have quite a strong message for the listeners. I’m just asking myself to what extent we want to go into CLA, your causal layered analysis. It’s really, really interesting, but I think you’ve written so much about it and you’ve talked about it a lot. I wondered, would you be willing to summarize it in five, six minutes, something like that, that people who are listening to us will get a sense of what you’re doing?
SOHAIL
Yeah. So my father was a civil servant and we lived in New York, in Geneva. My mother was kind of a Sufi mystic. And then I noticed when they would talk, I noticed when friends would come over and I went to international meetings in my 20s, I noticed the puzzlement and the fatigue and almost despair in meetings. And then what hit me was group one was talking in terms of data, “Here are the issues.” When I’m working with Mongolia, with WHO, higher rates of gastric cancer. Group two was always causation, “What are the causes? What’s creating it?” Well, type of food, too much stress, not enough time for exercise.
And group three with a big philosophers, “Well, in 1890s, here’s what it looked like.” Big picture people. And they say, “Well, the issue is we were in a socialist economy controlled to a market economy where it’s open, collective responsibility to personal responsibility. And group four were the poets, the storytellers, and they would talk about neither can nor carrot, it’s your choice. Doesn’t matter if it’s a can or the carrot is up to you. That’s the metaphor.
So I understood, well, here are four ways of seeing reality on the view of data, system, worldview, and story. And I needed a method in terms of organizing data to be able to see it in depth. Once I’ve done that, I’ve deconstructed reality, here’s the layers of why is there more gastric cancer or more diabetes? But our role as futurists is always to every problem there’s a solution. What’s the better story? In Mongolia, it was all in Mongolian, but the English version was a healthy bite. Overall worldview meant going from the socialist to market to the wellbeing, systemic steps forward. What are things we can do? Tax junk food more. Programs to stop smoking. Go out into the areas outside the city to do screening. And then what’s your KPI, your measurement, the data measurement? Dramatic reduction in gastric cancer.
The whole notion is there, you have four levels of reality. You go through them and then you come out the other [inaudible 00:10 :40] in terms of transformation. So the example I used with the young children was data, here’s where we wish to go. Why? We want to be successful. Systemic skills and tools. Metaphor, blinds are shut. What’s a better story? What’s a better strategy? So CLA does that for countries, institutions, domain areas, education, tech. But also what I find more and more is that you’ve done the external world, here’s a better strategy.
Example from Mongolia
In this case, back to Mongolia, so I had the head of numerous hospitals there. She goes, “Okay, here’s our possible strategy to reduce gastric cancer, to reduce alcoholism using CLA.” And I said, “Well, but we have to do the inner CLA on you because you’re going to be a leader, right? You’re the head of the hospital.” And she goes, “Aha, right now I’m the goldfish.” I said, “What does that mean?” She goes, “I have a short attention span. I have to please surgeons, please the Ministry, please nurses, please admin, and please the patients. Goldfish is always pleasing everyone and of course I’m getting stressed.” And the better story she said was the bamboo tree, flexible, adaptive. The junk goes right through her and she doesn’t notice it, and she can focus on what’s really important.
So why CLA to me works so well, we analyze reality at four levels, come up with solution at different levels, and ensure the person who’s part of the problem also changes. Traditional development is always we go to your continent, your country, and tell you what to do. So when I work with development agencies, the caring agencies, their metaphor is, “We do to you.”
JANE
Right.
Why development programs fail
And so thus development programs fail because, “We know best,” whoever the interventionist is. In this model, no, I’m working on myself. We do this together. In what ways is my metaphor in deficit? Or I create a metaphor where I’m in abundance and you’re in deficit. So the narrative part for the intervention process is included. So thus I change and they change and we all change in this process. It’s coevolutionary, it’s codesign, and it’s really understanding at a deeper level the ways of knowing people approach reality.
One is the Pacific Ocean. My colleagues there says, “We’re using iceberg as a metaphor, we don’t have icebergs here.” They use the island, the coconut tree, the beach, the ocean, and the deep ocean. In Paris, they say, “No, we prefer the gateau, the French cake. Every layer is delicious, the four layer cake.” So the method also has to keep its structure but change the way it’s represented as we change.
JANE
You said causal layered analysis is concerned less with predicting a particular future and more with opening up the present and past to create alternative futures. And I like the concept of opening the past. And I wonder if maybe you touched on that briefly right now when you were talking about the person who used the goldfish as a metaphor, because that was her present, but based on her past, I believe?
SOHAIL
No, that’s-
JANE
Am I understanding that correctly?
The future of the UN
So if I go to a macro level, the way it works, so say the brief is write a report on the future of the United Nations, right? And so then the report will be based on in 2040, the UN will have a bigger budget or lower budget, use more AI or less AI, will have bigger problems to solve. And those are almost predictable, quantifiable, “Here’s the UN in 2040.” CLA says, “Well, let’s go deeper.” If I want to look at the future of the UN, I have to ask, what’s eligibility to join? It’s a nation state. In scenario two, let’s imagine a UN where nature has standing. NGOs like Amnesty International, Medecins Sans Frontieres have standing. Where persons, one person one vote has standing.
So now we’ve gone from the future of the UN based on today and some quantitative predictions to CLA opens up who has standing in the UN. And now suddenly, by 2040 the UN is a very different type of organization. Now, the mid-range was people ask me, “Okay, so in 2040, nature’s part of it, NGOs are part of it. One person, one vote. A totally global governance immersion. How do we get there?”
The mid-range is, okay, right now we have policy stuckness because the Security Council have five members who veto everything. So nothing really is possible in this work. When it comes down to safety of children, the vulnerable, and there’s a war, one of those five will veto based on their own national interests. So then the scenario two is, well, they’re only allowed 10 vetoes a year. So they can keep on vetoing because they’re not going to give up power, but we reduce the number of vetoes.
Scenario three is more countries enter the UN. Scenario four is the full expansion, a real global … What William Irwin Thompson said, “A Gaian Politique.” So this is how CLA worked from here’s the official forecast which everyone is now focused on. Wait a second, why don’t you change the assumptions, the story itself? Then you go back to when the UN was founded after World War II, based on the nation-state central model. In 2024, the assumption of national [inaudible 00:15 :41] I don’t think holds anymore, clearly not at the same level. We have non-state actors. Gender is a critical issue.
JANE
So this is very interesting in that it really opens up possibilities that when you talk about them appear to be real possibilities. Even if they can’t happen for different reasons, there’s a reality to them. That’s very interesting, I find.
Use history and the present to open up alternative futures
Yeah, the role of the futurist is to use history and the present to open up alternative futures.
JANE
See, that’s it. The history and the present. People forget about the history, I think.
SOHAIL
I mean, you could almost argue, you can argue for multiple histories, and that’s a debate. But you can definitely argue for multiple interpretations of history. And then if you were using this as my colleague Ivana Milojevic does, she uses conflict transformation in CLA. So she asked the question, “How do we wisely use the past?” So the destructive use of the past is, “I got to this country first. My people are better than yours.” All that stuff. The constructive use of past is, well, there were 90 years of the 100 where we all got along.
JANE
Right.
Destructive use of the future
And then the destructive use of the future, in the future I imagine your ethnicity, whatever, disappearing. The constructive use of the future, how do we use the future to imagine all of us prosperous and abundant in safety? So this is where I think, Jane, where you’re going with the past and future can be used differently, destructively and constructively. And CLA suggests bringing the systemic design of it and the core metaphor behind it.
JANE
I don’t know if you know the Nigerian science fiction writer and scientist called Wole Talabi?
SOHAIL
No, I don’t.
JANE
He wrote a collection of books called Convergence. He’s written a lot of things.
SOHAIL
Okay.
African storytelling and tradition
I’ve read a lot of his stuff and I interviewed him, and it was absolutely fascinating. And the reason I mentioned him now is he talks a lot about storytelling. And he does a lot of his work, his thinking, and a number of his stories involve tradition, old Nigerian tradition centuries back and how they relate to technology today. And he blends them together in a way that is really interesting. I’ll send you a little note with his name and his books. I think you’d find it very interesting.
SOHAIL
Yeah, I’m just marking a PhD on that. He’s just finished his PhD on African storytelling and science fiction. So he uses the motif of today’s Africa, but suddenly there’s AI, robots, and aliens. It’s quite fascinating. But I think it’s this intermixing of genres, but I think more importantly, where you’re going with it, it’s using the past to create a different future.
JANE
Yeah, exactly.
AI for oppression or emancipation
And that’s really the best future studies does that. I mean, my own work was on macro history with the macro historian Johan Galtung, where we looked at the structure of time and said, “What are the key patterns of the past? And in what ways can we use these patterns to understand the future?”
JANE
Yeah, there’s just so many, I think, exciting things to discover in that area. What do you think are the ethical dilemmas that will become central in the future? What ethical dilemmas do we have to deal with?
SOHAIL
So I mean, the first one that comes up everywhere is the algorithms of oppression versus algorithms of emancipation. So the way CLA works, it says, “Okay, we’re given X and assumes it’s neutral.” So technology is neutral. Where CLA suggests, no, all technology is embedded in story, in worldview. And so phase one was AI is going to emancipate us all. And quickly, we’ve seen, no, AI amplifies current systems of inequity. But it does have some empowerment dimension.
The next phase is, well, in which ways is it biased? And then phase three is, what would an AI for our emancipation look? So that’s kind of how I start to frame the ethics debate. Look at how power and worldview is embedded in all innovation. So I know work I’ve been doing for at least 15 years now on the future of food, and we had a project with [inaudible 00:19 :25] in Rome with numerous corporations and the shift towards [inaudible 00:19 :29] agriculture.
World shifting
And there’s two dimensions to world shifting. One is aggregation of power in a few corporations. The second is the science and technology revolution, the ability to create protein, large amounts of protein through science and technology. So then there’s the issue is if we have that technology, the ethical part becomes, is it market-based or should be globally free? So if we can produce enough protein very easily for all, then there’s intellectual property dimension.
So I think more and more, and this is hard for many people to see, I just remember when I was a student, my professor, Johan Galton, he looked at me and he said, “We have the ability to solve most problems in minutes.” And as a student, I was like, “What? These are intractable.” He goes, “No, that’s not it. They aren’t.” And more and more I can see that, whether it’s through global food production, a global governance system, military insurance for small countries.
I think when COVID started, my daughter said to me when we all shifted so quickly, she said, “Aha, so it’s all easy and doable.” And I looked at her, said, “What do you mean?” She goes, “Well, this is a global problem that’s impacting elderly more than 20-year-olds. Yet within a day, within months, the entire planet has shifted. So why can’t we shift towards green sustainability? Why can’t we shift towards global safety, global food access?”
Will energy scarcity disappear?
So the same thing with the green technology. This one country I was working with, they’ve entered moments of the day where they have energy abundance because the solar is linked to the grid and there’s enough households producing solar. So then with discussions with them, they said, “Actually, yes, done well, we can have a decentralized and centralized global grid where energy scarcity starts to disappear.” The ethical question is, given either we already have or on the verge of having technologies of abundance, AI of emancipation, why aren’t we?
JANE
That’s a huge dilemma. And I have sensed it really strongly with several of my podcast guests who are from Africa, young people from Uganda in particular, Nigeria, and Kenya, who are activists in things that have to do with agriculture. And they’ve told me stories that are just amazing. I mean, it’s the famous global north and global south. That sounds trite, but it’s not trite, it’s very real for the people who live in countries that don’t have what we all feel are obvious things that we need.
SOHAIL
Yeah. So then if we’re a planet of human beings and our identity is planetary, then the ethical question is if we’re on a planet together and we can create abundance, it’s our moral duty to do so.
What narrative for normal people?
Absolutely. Just how do you get that message across to people? And more than message, get people awakened to do something about it? If nothing else, talk about it and share ideas with friends. And not everyone is going to become an activist.
SOHAIL
No, and not everyone should. I mean, everyone finds within their narrative a place where they can contribute. So futures thinking, our contribution with futures is not the battle in the streets. There’s people who do that well. It’s really saying, “Another world is possible. Other worlds are possible. Here’s what they can look like and here’s how to move towards there.”
The challenge of foresight work when I work with large companies is I remember many time middle management come to me saying, “Oh, I have this great idea. I hope they’re going to go with it. If they don’t, I’m leaving.” But now, when you have a project, I say, “By the way, if you do this and you’re igniting a flame, you are inspiring. If you don’t follow up with it, you are going to get people buying out. You get people depressed and you lose the energy and the vision that you’re going towards. So you have to really commit.”
JANE
You wrote a really interesting short chapter called The Next Stage of Evolution-
SOHAIL
Oh, yeah, yeah.
JANE
… in the book Eco-Fascism. And I read your chapter, it was very short and very broad strokes about I think the future in 2050, I believe. One note I took after reading your chapter was, “The West have to feel the pain.” I think you said that. And we need to consume less. And there’s a connection between climate issues and a lot of other issues. We can’t just talk about climate on its own.
Deconstructing Eco-Fascism
I think that when I got there, they said, “Please write a piece.” And I looked at the title, I said, “I’m not going to let them get away with it. How do I deconstruct Eco-Fascism to eco-liberation?”
JANE
Yes. Yeah.
SOHAIL
So then I thought, “But the editor has a point.” So I said, “It’ll be seen as fascist for those of us with lots of heating and light and benefit if we have to give up something.” And so then the needs of the planet overwhelm the needs of the few. And then the debate is what things do we give up and what things can be really abundant? Some things that we don’t need to give up; ideas, spirit, sharing. There’s lots of things that don’t need to be reduced, but some things do need to be reduced. And that ethical debate is about that, clearly.
I mean, it’s the same argument everyone uses, a constitution of power concentration. And I think the philosopher I studied, Sarkar, he said, “You want a system where people feel so much trust, money keeps on flowing. It stops flowing because we don’t have the trust that someone will take away from us, the landlord, the political leader, the other group.” So the evolutionary design is from untrusting, there’s cannibals out there, to trusting we’re on the same planet and thus money can keep on flowing. Now, those skill sets, we don’t have yet, right, how to cooperate better. How to co-design better. We don’t have them.
I mean, I have colleagues, friends working in cooperatives, and everyone hates each other. It’s not their fault. I’ve seen over and over fights about everything. And then I said, “Okay, this is interesting.” These are very advanced, in my view, spiritual people, full of compassion, love. Yet they’re failing in designing and running a co-op, why? And I think it became a skills issue. We’re so trained for scarcity, “I’m going to lose my pizza, I have to fight for it. Versus, keep the pizza going.
And then the skill sets around creating alternative futures, skill sets around conflict transformation, those are easy wins we can do. Where you are going is the tougher wins. How do you redesign global governance? How do you redesign the world economy?
JANE
Yes.
Invisible, visible and magical hands
And the metaphors I use is invisible hand, which worked for a while and then doesn’t work. To visible hand, what East Asia does, the state intervenes. And then what we’re moving towards is a metaphor of shared hands, which is cooperatives, peer-to-peer platforms, the regulars ensuring it’s safe, fair. And by 2080, the metaphor I want is magical hands. AI with advanced spiritual consciousness. And that’s far from now.
So it seems magical where people are living in the worldview of abundance. We have technology of emancipation helping us, and there’s enough goods and services flowing freely to all. And it’s utopian. But I had said, “Let me take Adam Smith seriously, invisible hands. Currently, it’s visible hands. What’s next?”
Sharing hands, I remember we were asked by the government of New Zealand during the COVID era, “What would a well-being New Zealand economy look like in terms of infrastructure?” And they developed, they said, “Aha. We would have a shared hands approach to the economy, focused on well-being, focused on cultural infrastructure, focused on sharing of paradigms.”
JANE
Yeah. So overall, are you optimistic about the future? This is sort of a crazy question, but the future of humanity, are you optimistic?
Every system comes to a bottleneck
I mean, so when I read Sarkar, Toynbee, Galtung, Sorokin, the big macro historians, they all say the same thing. Every system comes to a bottleneck where what worked before no longer works. And that’s throughout civilization. If we don’t respond, then we either go towards empire, the group with the most weapons, the most money wins, and it’s consolidation at a very strong hierarchical level. And we can see across the world the shift to the right, which actually wants that. Empire gives safety.
Scenario two is, no, we make the creative jump. We make some type of democratic global governance. And so there’s always a creative minority, a cultural minority who see this alternative future and they envision it and they do their best to create experiments to create it. So those are the two choices as I see it. I mean, many people say, “Well, business as usual, can it continue?” In some ways it can, but the contradictions are more and more, right? In terms of global population, global needs, global violence. So we see a great rise in progress, but the contradictions keep on emerging.
So I would say we’re in this bottleneck. And then as a futurist, the important thing is to be optimistic. Otherwise, you might as well just make weird doomsday movies. And I take the view the image the future creates is one variable in creating the future that emerges. So the actual visioning of the desired future is not decisive, but it’s clearly a critical variable in terms of the future we see.
So if I believe the future is inclusive, shared hands, and I believe we can create it, that sets up a momentum. If I believe we’re doomed and nothing we can do, then of course that sets up a different direction. So I would say I’m optimistic, but I understand that choices have to be made, and I hope we make the right choices. And the role of foresight is to say, “If we get it wrong, here’s what it looks like. If we get it right, here’s what it can look like.” And to keep on making the point, another world is possible, is not impossible.
I mean, that’s the first question I ask every group I work with. I ask them, “What’s impossible today but if possible changes everything for the better?” And that forces all of us out of the litany in terms of CLA, the problems and the possibility. And so then the purpose of the group is to partly create that. And then phase two is, what are the weights? What’s stopping us?
JANE
Do you find that the younger generation can go through this type of thinking better and faster than the older generation?
The younger generation
It’s place-based.
JANE
What do you mean, place-based?
SOHAIL
14-year-old in Singapore and Taipei and Seoul might be different than a 14-year-old in a different country. So the rise of East Asia, Southeast Asia in terms of poverty 50 years ago to material wealth now gives them memory that the impossible became possible.
JANE
Yes.
SOHAIL
If you’ve just gone through a war and the main memory is the horror that was impossible has now become possible, then of course when we do foresight work in those situations, you want to start from trauma-based foresight to understand. First we investigate, we inquire into what went wrong. So it’s again, back to what I was saying earlier, you meet the people you’re with within their story.
JANE
Yes.
Who’s not in the room?
Meet people where they’re at. And in terms of foresight work, again, one thing I always suggest is, who’s not in the room? Which I think that’s kind of where you were going. Who’s not in the room that needs to be there? And so participatory foresight futures work is far more powerful.
JANE
How do you see your own work evolving, say over the next 20 years?
SOHAIL
Well, I’m 66 now.
JANE
Well, you’ve still got 20 years.
SOHAIL
Thank you. So I mean, if I look at myself in my 20s, my first job was a teaching assistant with Professor Douglas Baer in political statistics. So I was very much a quant person. And then phase two was critical theory, unpacking the assumptions behind given reality. And phase three was this alternative futures visioning strategy. And phase four, I really think it’s the inner work, more and more how to reduce suffering in individuals, assuming they can spread a positive virus of compassion and love.
The donkey carrying bricks
I know recently in one country, there’s a very powerful 40-year-old. And when we were doing visioning with him, came down to he felt overwhelmed. And he said his core metaphor was the donkey carrying bricks. And people looked in the room and said, “What? He’s the one we’re looking up to, and if he has problems we’re in real trouble.” And then as we explored, he said he felt overwhelmed by his father self, duty to children, his husband self, duty to wife, his national self, duty to the country. And he had a new scholarship to go to a different country to get a PhD. And he felt overwhelmed like a donkey.
And so then the inner work was, that’s lived reality, what’s the better story? And some of the room said, “Aha, stop thinking of the bricks and yourself as a donkey. You’re investing in future generations. The bricks are the foundation for your new home.”
JANE
Nice.
SOHAIL
Essentially went from this to this. So that inner work, I find it as important if not more important than some of the external parts. So that’s part one. Part two, back to the UN. I would really like to see in 20 years a far more robust global governance system that’s not nation state based, that doesn’t allow five countries to veto any innovation. So those two things, if I can do those more and more, I’ll be very happy, as well as, as much as possible to still be playing basketball and swimming.
JANE
I’ve worked with a lot of UN organizations, the Secretariat and the Peacekeepers, and I worked with them as a digital workplace consultant was my specialty.
SOHAIL
Really?
JANE
And I encountered a lot of things that you’re talking about on, I would say, a limited area that is a limited scope of their digital workplace. Which of course is the way of working of the organization. It’s quite a broad scope. It’s not just collaboration tools or intranets, it’s much broader than that. And if I had known about CLA at the time, a lot of things you talk about are things I did little bits and pieces here and there, but not as a organized approach.
And the thing you’re talking about now, about the UN, I felt that very strongly when I was at the Secretariat in particular. When I asked questions in the audience, you could see who answered and who didn’t answer, and how people looked at each other. And it was just not a comfortable creative context overall.
SOHAIL
I mean, yes. So I mean, I know with the digital, we were working with one country with a UN organization on digital platforms for SMEs. And the first phase was tough. They go, “Why would we focus on narrative? We just need more tech.” And finally, the person heading it said, “Well, when you speak to your minister, do you give your minister 100 pages of tech briefing?” They said, “No.” They said, “Well, then along with your tech briefing, it seems like you should be more conscious of narratives that inspire the minister to fund digital public life.” [inaudible 00:33 :42] “Aha. So we want to make a bridge from the private to the public sector so all can flow on that bridge easily.” And then they understood it.
JANE
In all your work over the years, is there one or maybe two things that you feel especially proud of?
Focus on the energy in the room
I think personally, the first mistake was long boring lectures where people fall asleep. Mistake category number one. Mistake number two, in a workshop where I’m trying to include and bring alternative perspectives and get people to enhance agency, to go from every solution has a problem to every problem has a solution, there’s always a few people who fight back. And my mistake earlier was focusing on them. And now it’s like, “Yes, I acknowledge this is difficult. I know you don’t want to do this. All good. But there’s 20, 30, 40, 50 people who do.” It’s shifting the energy there and not picking up the stick.
So now that I’ve got a bit better of that, that gives me lots of joy. And the thing I really enjoy the most is in the room where someone has that aha moment where you can suddenly see a smile, someone’s, “Aha, I’m relieved. Number of people I meet, “Aha, my pain disappeared. Aha, I can now see I have a better future.” So I would say those moments, I leave full of energy.
Now, externally, I can talk about international organizations. We’ve helped shift their purpose, their narrative, their strategy. That’s all fantastic. That’s when you’re giving a speech, you let people know because everyone thinks it’s important. I mean, I get it, that’s all true. But I don’t think that’s the real issue. There’s someone in pain in an organization, can’t figure out their role. They do the inner [inaudible 00:35 :17], “I know what to do. I know how to create the greater good now.” That moment is what I enjoy the most, and I think makes it purposeful.
JANE
And you’re able to trigger that in situations that you set up and in the work that you do, that aha moment.
Institutional, planetary transformation
Yeah, when I’m in that space. There’s the method, let’s apply it and let’s focus. And so it’s the personal transformation. With the organizational transformation, I think Jane, we’re both on the same story. The missing part we both want to see is institutional, planetary transformation.
JANE
Oh, yes.
SOHAIL
And so futures is about that. And the macro history part is very clear. Letting people know we’re at a bottleneck, as Cardiff’s just said, other planets, if they exist, failed at that bottleneck, destroyed themselves. We have a chance to be a different type of planet and actually transform.
JANE
Wow. I guess on that note, we will stop the conversation for this round. Maybe have another round of conversation in a year or so, that would be interesting.
SOHAIL
Yeah, that’d be great, Jane. I really enjoyed it. You know your work, I can see that. But thank you so much for taking it seriously.
JANE
Well, thank you so much for your time and for all the incredible work you’ve done over the years that I have just barely touched the surface of.
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