Peter is an internationally respected futures thinker, foresight practitioner and educator. Hear Peter speak about the influence of systems theory on his practice and the development and use of individual foresight. Peter discusses the concept of 'peak people', being the point where on a finite planet the human footprint will impact everything we do, considering energy systems, political systems, technology systems and more.
Interviewed by: Rebecca Mijat
More about Peter
Connect with Peter on LinkedIn
Peter’s website: pspl.com.au
Mentors mentioned:
Richard Hames, Richard Bawden, Bruce McKenzie, Joseph Voros, Richard Slaughter, Sohail Inayatullah, Susan Oliver, Zia Sardar, Wendell Bell.
Tools mentioned:
Kees Van Der Heijden – Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation
Audio Transcript
Rebecca Mijat
Hello and welcome to futurepod. I'm Rebecca Mijat. The futures and foresight community comprises a remarkable and diverse group of individuals who span academic, commercial and social interests. At futurepod, we seek to honour and to learn from the wisdom of those who have established and developed our field, to connect and support the practice of those who work in this space, and most importantly, to give pathways and inspiration to those who wish to join us in creating humane and better futures for ourselves and those who come after us. Today, our guest is internationally respected futures thinker, foresight practitioner and educator, Dr. Peter Hayward. Peter was program director of the strategic foresight master's program at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia, from 2005 to 2017. Peter's PhD studies were undertaken in the development of individual foresight. He has also published journal articles regarding the intersection of systems theory and individual psychology with the practice of foresight in organizations. Peters twin goals are the promotion of capacity in foresight in individuals, and the use of foresight in organizational contexts. He feels strongly that while humanity does face challenges in the future, the resourcefulness, creativity and determination of people can create profound change that lead to better futures for all. Welcome to futurepod, Peter.
Peter Hayward
Thanks, Rebecca. Good to be here.
Rebecca Mijat
Great. So to start off with, it'd be great for the listeners to hear about your story. How did you actually get into the field of futures and foresight? Who were your mentors or inspirations? And how did you actually develop your practice?
Peter Hayward
I suppose it's got to be said that. The way I think about foresight now, some, some 20 years on is probably not how I was thinking about it when I started in the field. So if you say, if it's about where did I start? I think I was fairly typical of people who came to foresight, certainly fairly typical for my students. And what I saw was, I was a technically trained person who was, by nature, curious about things, and really regarded, you got better by simply thinking more clearly through problems. So I was probably a classic problem solver. And so I think I came to futures and foresight, as a person trying to solve problems. The problems I was involved in in trying to solve with the problems of complexity, large organizations, I was working for the Taxation Office is a very sophisticated organization, struggling with big issues about economic social behavior. And they were embracing different ways of thinking. And so I kind of got in on the coat tails of a lot of people who were trying to drive change and drive thinking. So my early mentors and people like Richard Hames, who was actually working in the tax office, and he's one of the first real futurists although Richard I'm sure wouldn't say he's a futurist that I got up close and personal with and I saw Richard work, Richard was introducing thinking systems into the tax office. I did a scenarios project with Richard are very large scenarios project. And so actually, he introduced me to scenario thinking. And also, at the time, we had a lot of consultants in like, Richard Bawden and Bruce McKenzie, who taught systems thinking, and so they were kind of my two influences that led me to foresight. They're all just trying to find ways to more clearly think, through complex situations. The thing I would say, though, Rebecca, is that I think what it was I was, I was of the view that there was always a solution to whatever complexity you faced. And at the time, I just saw future thinking or foresight is just being another one of those things you use to solve complex problems.
Rebecca Mijat
Right and and you studied as well. You Did some some formal study in the field
Peter Hayward
Yeah. I mean, as I said, I was I was a fairly typical technical operator who'd moved into management and moved into projects. I was always just curious about, you know, trying to trying to do things better and use technology and try and work with people. And I was after any good ideas I'm so I was actually reading the books of Richard Slaughter at the time without necessarily thinking I was actually a foresight person. And I met another practitioner Jan Lee Martin, who told me that Richard was starting a Master's Course, is I was reading Richard Slaughters work and I met Jan Lee Martin, in Sydney. And Jan told me that Richard was starting a course in foresight at Swinburne in 2001. So I managed to get myself into the start of the masters of foresight, I was in the first class first day, along with three other people
Rebecca Mijat
Peter thank you that's great in terms of understanding your the points of entry into into the foresight and the field and some of your key mentors and inspirations along the way. What would be really great to focus on now is how did you actually develop your practice? Once you started to move from that space of being a student of foresight into practicing foresight?
Peter Hayward
Yes, it's to be said that when I when I engaged with the academic side of foresight, and I came in contact with another group of people who were tremendously influential people like Richard Slaughter, Joe Voros, Sohail Inayatullah. And I suddenly realized there was a whole intellectual domain, that instead of me, just being a pragmatic kind of consultant type person who was trying to solve problems, I suddenly encountered this real deep inquiry. Unfamiliar, another person whose name springs to mind is Zia Sadar, the editor of futures, I mean, serious intellectuals who asked deeply profound questions, not just about how do I get better at something, but what exactly is going on? Why are we doing and where are we heading? And so that was something I didn't necessarily come to foresight, thinking I needed to do but the further I stayed in the space and the more I engage with the intellectuals and academics at Swinburne, that I started to ask those fundamental questions of, of myself and purpose, because that's where that's where the foresight inquiry went. So, so my practice, I mean, when I started, I was still a very pragmatic person trying to solve problems. At the same time, I also met other practitioners like Susan Oliver, and who was another tremendous influence on my on the develop my practice, because Susan was a corporate futurist I even on boards, and so I got to, you know, do scenario project with Susan. I think I was helpful too, because I, I understood a bit of system mapping. And she liked doing her work with people who could, who could draw systems. And as I saw Susan operating, without, I mean, she's fundamentally still asking the same profound questions, but she's trying to make a difference in organizations. And so by practice was really a dance between deep inquiry, and the pragmatics of trying to help people deal with complexity. And as a practitioner, I suppose I kind of flipped between those two poles, I didn't find many consulting opportunities, that it was possible to have a deep inquiry about the meaning of life. But sometimes, that was the that was kind of the entry point as to what could help an organization. But as I should say, the big change in my practice, Rebecca was that I started, at the time I was doing the PhD. I started to give up on the notion that there were answers to all problems. And the thing that started and has continued in my practice going forward, is there are issues arising through complexity and uncertainty that we don't have an answer for, and it's okay not to have an answer. It then comes down to what do you do when you haven't got an answer for something? And that has come in kind of been where my kind of practice has gone into the space and our sense of practice of what are you doing? I've got an answer. But there are things that we don't know what to do. And yet we need to do something
Rebecca Mijat
Peter so you mentioned systems thinking as a tool that you used with Susan, all of us specifically, what what tools became your favorites for helping people to explore possible futures? And why? It'd be great for you to speak to some of the tools that you've used and sort of your go to use to help to open up people's thinking of futures and exploring futures?
Peter Hayward
Certainly, yeah, I mean, I was originally exposed to systems approaches in the tax office. And in and in the tax office, I was taught approaches like Chris Argyris, and Donald Schoen organizational learning, a Peter Senge's learning organization, and the Fifth Discipline, Stafford Beer, and his work with cybernetics. And also the soft systems methodologies of Peter, Checkland. And so those were all the things that I was exposed to in the tax office, and trying to address the real problems of trying to manage compliance design systems. and support the revenue system for Australia. So when I came to work in the foresight space, I suddenly realized that the things that I've learned, like, for example, with with Chris Argyris, and his work on single and double loop learning, which is another approach to foresight, I mean, single loop learning says we have a view of the world based on it, we determine actions, and then we get results. And single loop is where you go back and re examine your strategy based on your results. And as Chris Argyris said, well, that's fine, except what happens if your view of the world is wrong. No amount of single loop learning is going to address if you've actually got the wrong view of the world. And so Chris Argyris said, you need to do double loop learning and re examine how you see the world and because your actions come from how you say the world, that's an approach that was completely consistent with the way foresight would simply talk about worldviews or how we see the world is where we create our problems and how we create our solutions. In Peter Senge's case with learning organizations and archetypes, again, the things that happen with that make perfect sense for how you understand so many system archetypes in futures. And I'd even say that Senge's work goes back to things like limits to growth. And that work as well, that we that we do have these, you know, what's the present and the future, to some extent, follow a set of archetypes, and we can obviously disturb and change the archetypes. But so I say, systems may was a natural progression into foresight, I found that, you know, most of the approaches, whether it's mapping systems talking in terms of information control through cybernetics, using Chris Argyris single and double loop learning, to me, they are all consistent, ways and not dissimilar to foresight. So they were already waiting for me to come into the space. Our foresight, of course, asks some quite singular questions that actually make it quite a distinctive field, particularly about this notion of time. And the notion of whose future we're talking about, because one of the things in futures that really, really important and seminal, is this moral dimension of exactly whose future are we? Are we talking about? And we can say, Well, I'm just talking about mine? And the answer is, well, is that good enough? Maybe you think about the generation of people who are coming after you, or maybe you think about the people who perspective up and not part of it. But there's a side for me, you know, my practice was heavily based in systems because that's what I used as a as a set of thinking tools. And then, and most of them transferred across the foresight quite comfortably. And then foresight, then laid a further level of social responsibility, critical thinking to those tools.
Rebecca Mijat
That's great, Peter. And in terms of as your career progressed, from the education or into the education space, were there any any new tools that came to mind that you started to use that were different from your time in the in the tax office?
Peter Hayward
I suppose. The thing that I honestly believe a lot of my practice came from the classroom itself on watching people like me, trying to find ideas, models, tools, and so forth. That helped them whatever they're trying to do, whether they're trying to run a more profitable business, write better policy for government, create social change. I mean, I saw I saw myself itself in some microcosm of all my students and I saw the things that they gravitated to. And I suppose the tools early on that I use, probably the most were probably scenario tools. And I was, I was particularly taken by scenarios as a methodology. But increasingly, what scenarios were, as the famous Kees van der Heij den book on scenarios said, is around conversation. scenarios are a great conversational tool. And probably that's the one thing that I learned from the classroom, and then eventually became central to my external practice, is the ability to create and sustain useful conversations for people. Useful conversations about the situation they're in useful conversations about what they wish to create, and useful conversations about how they might get to the future they wish to create. And of course, that was also the way that we taught foresight. We didn't teach foresight as a kind of pedagogical where someone told you what to think or told you what that was. The classroom was conversational, I saw the students readily move into a conversational way to use foresight in order to for them to learn it. And guess what, for clients, and people trying to wrestle with complexity and uncertainty. good conversation structured with appropriate information is one of the most useful things I found to do as a practitioner.
Rebecca Mijat
That's interesting, Peter, around scenario planning and the conversations around scenarios and that being really valuable in organizations. Why do you think they are so valuable?
Peter Hayward
Scenarios are a technical device. And I think people can just start off saying, Would you jump for doing scenarios to get the scenario right? or correct or something like that. But there's actually a lot more going on in scenarios. And as I, as I became to learn, and what, why I got interested in scenarios as a conversational tool, is that in organizations, it's really hard to talk about the past and the present, without power being present, because organizations have things that you can't talk about. If there are successes, people protected their successes, if there have been failed, is there hidden? Yeah. So the past and present are very contested in organizations. And if you want to have an honest, open conversation about those things they're very hard to do. The beauty of having a conversation about a future is that nobody owns it. Nobody can claim it, they actually can't. They can't authorize a particular future. And so what I found was scenarios or really any conversation about the future, is it. Everyone's got an opinion. And it lets people who ordinarily wouldn't have a chance to say, say things. And it has people who might regard themselves as being the experts are the keepers of knowledge. It's just their opinion. And so and that's what I got very excited about watching that the future is a very, can be a very democratizing place for people who don't normally get to talk around the past present. And that's what I think that's also why Kees van der Heijden called his book, The Art of strategic conversations, because properly structured and supported and designed, I think one of the most profound things that you can do in an organization, in a group setting is let them have a important conversation about where we've come from, where we are, where we wish to go. And that's probably the core of my practice is currently stands now
Rebecca Mijat
Peter. So in terms of the future itself, and from your own perspective. What are you seeing what, what sort of future dm o you see in say, 30 years time? What are some of the forces that you think is shaping the world that we're living in? And how can we actively help to shape a preferred future?
Peter Hayward
It's a big question. I know I'm a person who, like a lot of people in the future space. I do. I continue to study history. It's fairly typical. People who stay in the space for a long time while the future is interesting. The past is also an interesting process, someone famous, I can't think of their name said, history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme. So there's something around if people want to work in the future space, then learning learning history is appropriate, just as a kind of way of understanding what happens through time. So again, I look at my first answer to the question is the historical perspective of what are we living in in this particular moment. And at one level, if you want to go to the level of the geopolitical level, we're living through another one of those civilizational Empire transitions, we've had a dominant trends. We've had a dominant American empire that once upon a time, replace the English Empire. And maybe we're going through a situation where the Chinese Empire is or the Asian Empire is starting to replace the American Empire. So I think at one level, it's fascinating to watch, watch what's going on at that level of, you know, the geopolitics. Another thing that I think is really, we live we could be living through is we're starting to bumping into the limits. And you might be familiar with limits to growth, but what I'm talking about the limits there, we might be getting to peak people. meaning there's a point where as many biologists and and people have said that they, they Yeah, I point will be raised on a finite planet where the human footprint will start to impact on everything we do on the planet. And we're possibly starting to see the human footprint now starting to impose its own level of limits on the biosphere, the physical system x system. Yeah, yeah, we're seeing shortages in materials and that kind of thing. We're also seeing migration of people, which is not a new idea, history tells us there have been mig rations, but we're starting to see migrations happen. And those migrations are now having a knock on effect into political systems. What seems to be in retreat, in some ways, other kind of grand notions of universal ethics and, and are sort of coming together as a global village. And at one level, we've also got a rise of parochialism. You know, where people saying I'm okay, keep them out. So I mean, and again, I say that as being another one of the consequences of lots of people starting to compete for space, and being able to move globalization. I mean, globalization has been a, again, an historical process over many 1000s of years. But maybe there's a push back on globalization. So again, um, for me, as I talked about the future in the next 30 years, certainly is, I think it's in flux. I think there's, there's a, you know, there's a number of things I'm paying attention to, I'm certainly looking at the political, I'm looking at the issue of how the public regards their political systems and what they want from their political systems. And I say that being a very contested space. And of course, then you go to the what's happening at the biological level, which appears to be, we appear to be in a, another large extinction phase, if you look at what appears to be happening to species. At the energy level, we're possibly looking at a transition from energy systems, which we know from history tells us if if the energy system changes, everything changes, and then to lay over the top of that technology, and what are things like artificial intelligence, then that kind of stuff going to do? So as I said, I don't really see the future as anything in particular, what I see it as being is a contest. And of course, if you talk about the future is well, whose future we're talking about. I mean, it might be a theory might say, look at the Western world. And what they could be showing is the signs that they're distressed about the future, because I think the future sounds threatening to them. The perhaps if I'm coming from East Asia, Africa, also in the future looks pretty exciting. Again, this notion of the contest, this notion of it, it's not about someone, someone has to get better at someone else's expense. But they're understanding that people are seeing the future as something of opportunity for them and others are saying, I see future is concerned, I see a future was lost for me and people like me. And that's how I kind of see the 30 years and that's what I'm watching is I'm watching and observing the context.
Rebecca Mijat
And then so bring it back to individuals. How do you think people can take the reins and help to influence or move themselves in a direction of preferred future for them
Peter Hayward
Wendell Bell had a great piece that he said that as futures thinkers, we need three things that he thinks he says are really, really important. And I can't argue with Wendell. One is we should learn consequential thinking, and really practice and learn consequential thinking, because every action we take, and every inaction we take has consequences. And so as part of our deciding to do something, or deciding not to do something, spend some time to run the consequences that emerged from that. So a big part of it. Second thing, Wendell said, was to be skeptical of our own views, meaning our views are, while they might seem terrific, now, they're probably going to change. So we should have ideas of what we think is good, wrong, right? Yes. But be skeptical that it's probably going to change, it's something's going to come along. So we don't hold our opinions too tightly. We're prepared to say, this is the this is what I think works now. But don't be surprised if someone comes along with some bits of information comes across that says, Look, I'm wrong, and be prepared to say you're wrong and change. And third one is, have a moral dimension to your actions and your purpose. And all that really means is, apart from just this is what I think this is what I'm going to do. This is what I think are the consequences of the things I wish to do. But to ask yourself, and give yourself the permission to have a moral reason for your existence. So what is it that your life and your actions are trying to achieve and contribute and show to other people? We shouldn't see moral, we shouldn't say it is a burden to have a moral dimension to our actions. I think it's one of the most humanizing things we can do, which is to understand that people watch us people see people learn from us. And so giving some moral dimension to our lives, along with the first two, I kind of think of a kind of core ways for how you managed through this notion, well, we don't know what's going to happen, but there's a lot of stuff that could happen. And so then it comes down to well. This is kind of how I think things are going, this is what I really think is the best thing for me to do. And when I kind of work it out as a moral set of actions. I'm kind of happy that I'll be held to account for doing that.
Rebecca Mijat
Peter futures thinking and foresight itself is quite a different or unknown field to many people. How do you go about talking about foresight and explaining foresight to someone who hasn't been exposed to the word the term the field?
Peter Hayward
I've got a couple of ways to do it. Rebecca, one, which is not mine, I borrowed this one from Joe Voros. If I had a person who understood how history worked, that we collect data about the history we write up, you know, we describe the history based on what we find about it, then what Joe says is well, foresight is like history. But rather than using historical data, we use prospective data, which is a very elegant way, if a person understands history, they have a will that make sense, the data about the future is prospective data rather than received data. The one I'll use probably most commonly, though, is based on based on another model, but it's based on the model of, of hope theory from Chris Snyder. And someone said, someone someone says to me, what is it you do? And I, I say to them, well, there's actually two things that I can do to help someone . And there's two ways that foresight can help you in your life to help you in your organization. One, it can help you with pathways. If you know where you want to go in foresight is a great way to explore options to get there. It's a great way to see ways of getting there to explore different ways of getting there to imagine the future and see different pathways to get there. So foresight is an exploratory process around pathways. And that's really useful for people who need to find different ways of getting some way. The other thing that is distinctive about foresight is this thing around purpose pathways and are used to if you don't know where you want to go. And the other thing foresight, I think, delivers in spades is the ability to actually ask the question, what is my purpose or wish to achieve? What What is my meaning? What is it that I wish to contribute? And the thing that emerges from purpose, from the purpose conversation is the energy to create the path. another colleague of mine, Nita Cherry talks about leadership as the mobilizing of human energy. And one of the great ways to release human energy, in my opinion, is to have the purpose conversation. If people find their purpose, which you never have it just you just borrow it for a while, then if you have purpose, then you generally have agency, you definitely have energy to seek it. And those two things, the energy to create purpose, and the pathways that you follow, are the kind of two ways that I kind of couch foresight for people and people generally find something in there that will be useful.
Rebecca Mijat
So Peter, I'm interested in your PhD, and the study of the development of foresight in individuals. Can you please talk a bit about the ability of individuals to grow their foresight, their own foresight?
Peter Hayward
Yes, my PhD stemmed out of a, an observation that when I was around, in when I was starting foresight, and starting the PhD, around 2000, to 2003, I was often attending information nights for prospective students. And so we had, you know, the university had its MBA program, and it's MEI program and Marketing programs and that kind of thing. And we had this thing called the foresight program. And I was struck by the number of people who, when they walked up to me, and wanted to talk about this program called the foresight program, very early in the conversation, they would say something like, I don't want to do an MBA. And it struck me as unusual that as a reason to do a course, they were defining the course as what they didn't want to do. And it was a particular thing. And it was repeat behavior. I yeah. And it struck me that there's something going on here, when people come to this thing called foresight, what is it, but at the same time, their compass has been set by the line of saying, I don't know what I want to do, but I what I don't want to do. And so that kind of that was kind of sa t with me as a kind of researcher as to what is going on, because people are clearly looking for something. And foresight can be anything, depending on what it is you want. But I was struck by this notion of what is it with people? And why were they defining it as what it wasn't, what they what they hoped it wasn't rather than what it was. And so in my own. In my own research, I, I kind of theorized what that was about and I collected data on a number of dimensions. And also I read heavily about what people thought foresight was and how foresight developed. Before it's all about my results, I might just come back some of the things that I noticed in the literature, one of the most important things that I think is fairly common to what foresight is, in my PhD I called at the end of rational certainty, certainty seems rational. It makes rational sense to believe that something is now unfixed and doable. And at one level? That makes sense. And another level of makes no sense. Because it makes no sense given uncertainty, complexity, pure just serendipity, to believe in certainty. So one of the things that many people have talked about the future and foresight capacities, this ability to just put down the notion of something being certain, and to be comfortable with uncertainty. And that's a big part of just developing anyone's practice is this notion of just you have to learn to lean into not knowing. It sounds scary. But the absence is the denial of uncertainty, which to me makes no sense. So I've made a big part of developing practices, just lean into what you're not sure about. lean into what you don't agree with. Rather than push away the things that don't match our view of the world, move towards the things that don't match our view of the world. Because it'll probably enrich and and change how we see the world. And that's, that's not a new idea. It's not a particularly forceful idea, but it's a fairly common one. Another one is the ability to take the broadest possible view, which, again, is not is not something that particularly came out of my research. But this notion of what's called now the balcony view, the helicopter view. You know, whatever situation you are in, and trying to understand that what is the normal response to understand something is to break it down into smaller and smaller parts in order to understand it, which is what you do, if you've got something, if you've got a machine which doesn't work, then you tend to break it down. Well, what's not working in your phone, the smallest possible part that's not working? going in the opposite direction seems strange. But it does seem to be one of those core capacities that if you're not sure yet, even if you think you know what's going on drawback, look at it in a broader context. Keep drawing back, keep drawing back, because it changes what you're seeing and how you see things. It takes things that you believe situated as normal. But if you draw back, you suddenly look at it and say, why is that going on here and not going on there? Why? So it's this kind of notion of pulling away to see the most. So those two things alone are just two of the most, you know, profound things for developing any foresight practice is the extent to which I am deliberately leaning into things that I'm either uncomfortable about, or I'm not sure about or even see, or challenging my notions of what is certain. Almost like I said, a muscles to deal with it. And the second one is that to whatever is your context, draw back and look at it in a broader context, if it's local places, and abroad, or if it's national places back, just keep drawing back, because there's always a broader context. And it does take what you think is important is suddenly is now it's a component of something else. It's a, it's a dynamic of something else. And the third one is, the notion of dynamics is not seeing things as static. So when you look at something, when you observe something, it's not static, even though you're seeing it a static, it's not static, it's something it's moving from a condition to a condition, and you're seeing it at a point in time. So try to look at things as dynamic events rather than a set of, well, this is going on, the answer is no, this is going on, or this went on at a point in the past, but what's going to happen in the future is the dynamic gonna continue. In terms of my research, I'm just kind of kept that I said, when I went back to studying the why people were talking this why. And I was looking at different models of how people thought, then the one that was most sensitive in my research, and the one that made sense with people saying, I don't know I don't want to do an MBA was Suzanne Cooke-Greuter's work around self development or ego development, it's got many terms now, it's now being picked up by the work of Terry O'Fallon, as Suzanne Cooke-Greuter was a linguist, so she understood how words work. And what Suzanne observed about how people develop is we often if we want to describe a future self, we can only describe our future self in a language that we currently have. And if and so if we know what we are, or sorry, if we know what we have been, then we can often only describe ourselves as not being that in order to describe it as something that is new. And that was my hypothesis that what was happening was people came to foresight, saying, I'm not an MBA person, I'm not an MBA thinker. I'm not an MBA. And so they that they didn't have a language what they were going to become. So they described themselves as not being their prior self.
Rebecca Mijat
Peter, what do you think are some of the indicators that a person is open and willing to look into their own individual foresight?
Peter Hayward
Big one, for me, Rebecca is to the person's actually a bit like those students, or potential students who saw themselves as a prior self and talking about the future self people who people who are set showing signs that they wish to inquire as to what really is going on. I kind of I don't believe foresight is a useful thing to put in front of someone who is not seeking foresight themselves. So listening for what again, and listening for a person who's starting to show signs of relaxing certainty. You know this for a person who's not regarding uncertainty as a mistake, or an error, or a lack of data, but just something that is a natural thing, hearing a person who's naturally starting to draw back to look at a situation in a broader context. Those are the kinds of things and usually and again, back to what Suzanne cooke greuter, or it's listening to people's language. What am I saying of themselves in this situation? Are they sounding like they're in an inquiry space? Or are they still in that? I have to fix this and make go away space? And if they're in the former space in if they seem to be in the sort of inquiring space? And then I think foresight is really useful for them, because foresight is a quintessentially a form of inquiry. So So the big one for me is, is it? Yeah, listen for when people are already starting to ask foresightful questions, the beginnings of foresight or questions, and then come forward with Well, you know, can I help you with that? Would it be useful if that kind of thing, but it, it certainly is never useful? To go along to someone saying to them, that I think you need foresight, that's more likely going to get you a smack in the chops than actually get them actually come towards you.
Rebecca Mijat
And and why is it good to have foresight, why do we need foresight? Or do we need foresight?
Peter Hayward
foresight is contextual, and situational. You don't need foresight, every single waking day of your life. The status quo is a wonderful beast, and what has worked in the past, and it's got a fair chance of working in the future. So we need foresight when we are not satisfied with the status quo. We need foresight, when we don't really understand why we're doing what it was we thought we should do. So we're starting to have that. This used to make sense. Now it's starting to not make sense kind of view. And just simply, I have run out of things to try that I've tried everything I know to deal with a situation. It's not being dealt with. It's not going away. I'm not getting any closer. What do I do next? Then I think foresight is that thing that helps you through that process? Because foresight takes you from a situation, the now the past and the now Yeah, yeah. And we use the we use the idea of the future in a useful way. Because the future is a wonderful space to explore what you might do, how things could be different, and you can play with it, because it hasn't happened. It's not a place that, you know, we should be sad. It's a very playful space, it's a great place to inquire from. And in an inquiry, come back to my core two points. In that inquiry of the future, we might find a path. And we Well, that's the path I want to go down. And the also we might find in that future, a purpose. And if a purpose calls us or a path is appealing, go for it foresight's been useful.
Rebecca Mijat
In terms of an example of an everyday person using foresight, is there an example you can give?
Peter Hayward
individuals use foresight all the time? I mean, any effective person who makes decisions? I mean all I mean, again, someone famous said I can't think who it was, but all decisions are about the future. So every decision you make, is actually is actually in its own way a foresightful decision. Question, I would say is it a conscious or unconscious decision? And do you do you want the future that that decision is taking you towards? Yes, we make decisions and decisions about the future. But am I making the decisions in my life that I want to make? Because the decisions I'm making and the decisions I'm not making? are creating futures. As I said, if a person is living their life and creating the future, they want to craft for themselves. Fine. I mean, that's what foresight there. But at points in our lives. We start to question why we're doing what we're doing all the things that I did float our boats is no longer floating our boats we start to doubt ourselves, our situation our purpose effectively. And that's not a bad thing. It says to me the doubt is not something to be afraid of it's then to be well, this is interesting. Well, you know, what is my purpose that that thing that I used to love to do and I get well paid for? It doesn't. It's not sounding if it's not feeling like this is actually what I'm about. And when that openness starts to emerge, then you've got to ask the futures question. The thing about foresight of course is it's a natural human process, individually. But it's not a natural social process, which is why it's a dickens of a process trying to get people to agree on a future. So one of the great challenges actually is having shared futures. Because people say, Well, actually, I want what I want , yeah, but there's things that you need to do with someone else. And so you need to create shared futures. And if it's around sharing the thing we create, collaborating and cooperating, then that's actually a foresight process. And that's, in some ways, a more important point than just individual foresight, because people kind of, as Paul Keating said, in the race of life, always best self interest because you know, it's trying 100% but it's creating shared futures that I think some of the greatest and most useful work and foresight exists.
Rebecca Mijat
Thank you, Peter. It's been great having a conversation today and thank you for sharing your thoughts with the future pod community.
Peter Hayward
Thanks, Rebecca.
Rebecca Mijat
This has been another production from Futurepod. Futurepod is a not for profit venture. We exists through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support Futurepod, go to the Patreon link on our website. Thank you for listening. Remember to follow us on Instagram and Facebook. This is Rebecca Mijat saying goodbye for now.