With a strong background using conventional models to bring Government programs to community regeneration projects, Kieran found himself primed for the unlearning and investigation, which a Masters in Strategic Foresight unleashed.
Working with colleagues at his six-year-old Foresight Lane business, serious investment was made into learning and iterating, gradually building their craft in strategy, futures thinking, innovation and service design across education, community and health sectors and supporting a meme shift from machine operation to ecosystem models.
Interviewed by: Meredith (Mendy) Urie
More about Kieran
Contact
LinkedIn: Kieran Murrihy
(M) 0418 398 305
(E) kieran@foresightlane.comForesight Lane and Crazy Ideas College
www.foresightlane.com
crazyideascollege.com
Some of the theories and tools mentioned in the episode
Futures Action Model : Jose Ramos, Futures Action Model
The Three Horizons: Bill Sharpe, Three Horizons: Patterning of Hope
Integral Theory: Ken Wilber, A Theory of Everything. Sean Esbjorn-Hargens https://www.metaintegral.com/
Causal Layered Analysis (CLA): Sohail Innayatullah, The CLA Reader 2.0: Transformative Research Theory and Practice https://www.metafuture.org/shop/
Ecologies of Innovation: Jeffrey Goldstein et al, Complexity and the Nexus of Leadership: Leveraging nonlinear science to create ecologies of innovation
Design: Transition Design: Terri Irwin, https://transitiondesign.net/
Audio Transcript
Mendy Urie
Hello and welcome to Futurepod. I'm Mendy Urie. 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 honor 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. Our guest this evening on Futurepod is Kieran Murrihy. Can you be an Irish leprechaun and semi sensible futurist at the same time? Truth be told Kieran has followed a reasonably orthodox path into and through the futures field over the last 11 or so years. Kieran has spent 15 or so years working in state government in community regeneration initiatives. He reached a point in his life where he wanted to learn and study but MBA seemed a trifle common. He signed up for MSF, Master of Strategic Foresight, and realized that the wacky kids being left in charge. He oscillated between outright confusion and delighting in the unlearning of futures. He took the plunge six years ago and started a consultancy, Foresight Lane. Foresight Lane has specialized in strategy, futures thinking, innovation and service design across the education, health and community sectors. Over that time Foresight Lane has done some decent work and maintained a solid yet unobtrusive persona. They have, however, also spent that time learning the craft and working out where they can best offer value. 2019 marks a period of getting a little bolder, and Kieran and the Foresight Lane team are working on two initiatives. Building a community where the creative folk in education, health and community can collaborate, innovate and disrupt. And establishing Crazy Ideas College, a social enterprise equipping young people with the skills, confidence and connections to do crazy good in the world. Welcome to Futurepod Kieran.
Kieran Murrihy
Thanks, Mendy. It's a pleasure to be here.
Mendy Urie
So we're very keen to hear your story. Can you tell us about where and how you bumped into futures and foresight?
Kieran Murrihy
Yeah, thanks, Mendy. So I might just recap on I guess the vocational experience that set me up or primed me to maybe hear the calling of futures. And then work into what that first initial introduction into futures felt like. So as you mentioned, I'd worked in state government and a lot of that work had been in communities that were marginalized or experiencing socio economic disadvantage. And where it was about bringing the community together with government, service providers, business to start to understand what the community would like the community to look and feel like and the experience of living in that community what that might be like in 10 years time, or there about, so they were fairly long term projects. I was really lucky to come in on one of the pilot projects, probably in my mid 20s, with a public service training background. I understood the bureaucracy quite well, and found myself out in the lounge room in this community. And we were trying to figure out what the hell this program was meant to be like. And it was it was probably in terms of experiences, both for my life, but also vocationally, it was definitely a game changer. Because it enabled me to flip on my head, I think the whole thinking about the relationship between government and community, and the individuals and where stewardship lies and where good action lies and where the imagining of futures, lies, all of that. So it was a, it was a wonderful experience. So I found myself in the community, where there was, as I mentioned, a lot of learning to be done both individually and I think as a program and also as we were discovering what worked and what didn't. It brought forth a lot of critique around whose values were being espoused in the futures visions that were being brought forth? And how do we organize as society? How do we organize this community? What are those underpinning values or assumptions that are made that help us see what the future might look like, and also what actions we need to take to bring those futures about. So whilst it was an incredibly exciting program to be involved in, I was involved for 10 years, sort of over three different programs. It also did require a lot of deep reflection at various points in time. And, as I say, some of those questions around whose vision was actually being enacted in these programs, where stewardship lay where the responsibility for individuals lay in terms of their own trajectory and their own lives versus how the systems and how the services help set them up to live the life that they would like to. I think there was definitely a lot of overlaying of middle class values in the program. And also, we had some pretty interesting moments in those programs where there was residents calling us to account on the fact that a lot of money was being spent on these programs, and really that going into the benefit of the community, in terms of all the service providers were getting money, the people who are employed on the program didn't live in the community. So there was a lot of things where we were being disrupted in our own thinking as well. And programs were being overlaid with pretty bureaucratic structures, you know, so things that made sense to the bureaucracy about how to organize them. So committees, and it was really about managing the parts. So there was a sense of do bureaucratic structures really help us do this community regeneration work well, and also probably a recognition that sometimes when we're looking at the deficits in these communities, we're not recognizing the wisdom and assets and the different ways of thinking that might actually be called upon to help us find new paths forward, that maybe the bureaucratic overlay kind of sometimes doesn't necessarily always authorize or legitimize those views. So where the wisdom lay was an interesting thread for us to be continually thinking through, and again that sense of where the bureaucratic structures work, or whether we need to find new models of enabling communities to grow and develop into their own visions and the individuals within those communities to do it. So lots of questions. There was a lot of goodwill, some really good work done, as I say, I think one of the primary lessons was that often in bureaucracies, we treat the service providers and government as the experts, and the big flip was community as the experts. And so you know, there's always a lot of rhetoric in those types of programs around making it bottom up, and that's not necessarily how a program like that will work. But I think there are definitely some things that you want to shift around, where we where we think expertise lay, and where we think the the knowledge lay for crafting new futures and new possibilities. That was a wonderful experience to get me thinking that all the things that I thought about how the world worked, may not be as sound as I initially thought they were. And you know, once you start that inquiry, I guess, you're on your way. And you start lookin, and it starts with the question. So I reached a point in my life where it was, well, I want to study, I'm not quite sure what. I think I'd read a futures book, it was very technology focused, so it was probably the vision I was bringing my head around futures. Just scanning across the various options, and then I obviously found the Masters of Strategic Foresight online at the time. I thought it looked interesting. The mode of delivery in terms of the blocks worked well for me, because I was traveling from the country and went to an information night, I thought I knew what I was getting myself in for, and of course, I didn't. So turning up at that first session was quite an experience. And I think you mentioned in the intro about it feeling like the wacky kids had been left in charge, and I was reflecting on it today going, that actually is what it felt like. I came in mid year, and it was a pretty out there group that I walked into. We had the fabulous Rowena Morrow facilitating it, but within that first three days, I think all of the topics that polite society wouldn't talk about had been discussed. And so I knew I was somewhere different. But I also recall, I think it may have been that first three day block Joe Voros doing a talk over the course of probably two and a half or three hours he described all the way from the Big Bang to the need for humans to colonize planets, and what that might look like. And I remember feeling so alive in that session, you know, my head was obviously splitting. I didn't understand it all but it opened my eyes to think that we can start to try to understand the world or comprehend the world at that scale is quite magnificent. And whilst there was a lot of things that were kind of causing me confusion, it was compelling. I couldn't look away. And so I think pretty quickly I worked out it was a journey that I wanted to go on.
Mendy Urie
Everybody else was probably in the same boat when you looked around the room I imagine Kieran.
Kieran Murrihy
Yeah, I think probably everyone who's been through the course knows that there are lots of incidents and episodes where people find things pretty challenging in it. So that's right, and I'm sure it's not an unfamiliar experience.
Mendy Urie
Yeah. So what was the effect on your work in the community? Was there a direct relevance there or how did that work?
Kieran Murrihy
I think it absolutely did in that once we started using the frameworks, I got more familiar with the frameworks that we were applying in futures. It gave me a great basis for critiquing, so that where in the past there might have been an intuition that something didn't quite feel right, I could apply a way of thinking that through. Once the critique was done - e.g. hang on, why are we doing it this way, this is what I now see through this lens, you can start to construct something new. So I would say I might have started futures three or four years into my work in that space and absolutely, it gave me a way to understand what was happening better. And therefore a way to think differently about how we might organize ourselves and think differently about what sort of actions might actually be most effective. So I was really lucky because a fabulous program to be involved in because because we were out in community, we were disconnected from the bureaucracy in many ways. And we were inventing how things were being done, particularly as a pilot project. And so, we were working across health, education, safety, urban environment, all these various aspects. So we had to take a systems view about how change gets effected and so to have a program that enabled me in a sense to take a more effective systems view, systemic view, was really helpful. And I did most of my projects in some way shape, or form around the projects I was working on to really help kind of land what I was learning in the classroom.
Mendy Urie
Can you speak a little bit about some of the frameworks that you found particularly relevant, or the author's perhaps. You've spoken about some of the lecturers that you found stimulating.
Kieran Murrihy
I was drawn pretty quickly to Integral. And the journey of trying to understand integral and getting into all the books. I really enjoyed that and Integral remains a framework that we still use, that kind of inflects all of our work to some degree. I think the best advice that we were given around frameworks in the course was to hold them lightly. You know, they're a lens on the world, but don't get caught up in them has been really sound and has enabled me to dive into things like integral which you can kind of get wrapped up into a degree and try and see the world continuously through that framework to not just get caught there. Integral has been important. I have been part of a community in Australia that's been looking at integral, and a program that Sean Esbjorn-Hargens brought out to Australia. I find his work really impressive in the integral space. And so that's been nice to have that community of fellow people that are interested in that framework. Sohail's tools are just lovely and I remember being utterly confused by metaphors and CLA. But again, it was one of those frameworks that just felt as though it was going to be increasingly important in the work. And it was as much art as science. And so it wasn't something that could just be, you know, you couldn't just click your brain into it. I needed to just keep feeling into that and testing and working with a tool like CLA to find a way into it in a way that we could apply now in the work that we do. And we use it in almost all of our work to some degree, even if we're not badging it as Causal Layered Analysis. And we've been really fortunate - I may talk a little later about this, but we brought Sohail into work on one of our projects, because we just thought that was too good an opportunity to pass up. So his work certainly influences everything that we do, I think the complex adaptive systems and the systems, frameworks that we used have been really helpful. And I was always drawn to the work or the writings of Jose Ramos as well. And now I'm part of his mutant futures community that is kind of starting to build up and so he's got models like the futures action model that I think are really interesting, too, in terms of bringing together both those persons those personal callings around the change we want to contribute into the world and how we connect them up to the ecosystems of change that exists already around that. So Jose's work certainly had a pretty strong influence at various points in time as well.
Mendy Urie
Kieran, when did you make the huge decision to start up your own business, your own consultancy? Was that partway through the study or was that after?
Kieran Murrihy
Yeah, I think that would have been six years ago. So I may have beeneither just finished or nearly finished. And I think I did my course over four or five years. So oftentimes, I was doing two or three subjects a year. And that actually worked out particularly well for me, because it felt like I had the length of time to keep returning to futures and, you know, it didn't feel rushed in any way. So that really worked for me, but, there may well have been some crossover. But again, because of all of that priming of, you know, maybe some resistance to the bureaucracy, feeling like it was time to go out and saying...
Mendy Urie
You are saying that with a bit of a smile Kieran.
Kieran Murrihy
Well I also loved the experiences I got working for state government. They were absolutely remarkable. I got to learn from community. But I also got to learn the wisdom of how government organizes things. So yeah, that was an amazing gift. And I loved my time there. But I think futures kind of, you know, there's a lot of provocation in futures works as well and it probably gave me a little bit of confidence that there were there were also the frameworks and the ways of thinking about things differently, that we could add some value in the marketplace. So I went out with a colleague about six years ago, Claire, she wasn't a futurist, and that's kind of been I think, a thread that's moved through our business is the intersection of kind of some of the futures but we've tended to have people from other public service backgrounds, pretty grounded practitioners in as well, so that we're trying to merge that really pragmatic view about how change happens in the sectors we work with, with the possibilities that emerge, when you're able to use the future's lens to think outside of the conventional orthodox assumptions and habits and patterns. So yeah, we went out six years ago, we really didn't know whether we'd make it work. So there was two objectives basically, that we set ourselves. We didn't over engineer it. We said, if we survive, that's magnificent. And the second was, if we get to do interesting projects with interesting people, that would be an absolute bonus. And so we found ourselves as often happens, I'm sure for many people, when they first go out consulting, people that we had previously worked with our roles in the state government brought us in to do pieces of work. We were so grateful for every job, and we saw them as a gift, we treated them as learning labs. Rather than just delivering a product, we said, this is an opportunity to learn. And we over invested in a sense to kind of make sure that - we didn't see it as an over investment - because we were actually investing in our own professional development every time we do a job. And we also alongside that, the thing that we decided to do, which looking back was probably braver than I might have even been now is, when we were getting jobs, we were using it as an opportunity to invest in bringing really good people in to work with us. Again to see it as a professional development experience to work live on projects, which is where the real learning kind of happens from a consulting craft, I think, with good people, and in fields that could add value and stretch us. So one of the first jobs that we did do was in working with an assembly of seventeen health services across a particular geography to imagine new possibilities of what their future might look like. And then starting to set up an innovation agenda around that. We brought Sohail in to do a two day workshop and I remember sitting there, and this is where I was very fortunate with Claire, kind of being very supportive of us looking for bringing the futures in where we could, saying, oh, maybe we were just email Sohail - I'm sure we won't hear back from him. But I remember, you know, within an hour and a half, I think of sending the email, he said, sure, I'm in.
Mendy Urie
Wow.
Kieran Murrihy
So that was an incredible opportunity to kind of do the planning with Sohail and see him deliver that workshop. And we were fortunate off the back end of that, to have several meals with him and just have the opportunity to have him talk about his approach and in his own gentle, subtle way, point us in the right direction about how we might find our own way into it. So there was no doubt seeing Sohail's work gave us some great shortcuts to how we might work with groups in those ways. But also Sohail was really good in a couple of respects - a couple of his key points I recall was when he's bringing his future stuff up and kind of doing some provocations, and you know, the dynamics in the room can be moving all over the place. And Sohail's sobviously, incredibly calm through all that. And I remember him saying, don't worry, even when it's not perfect, it's perfect. And I think that was a key learning about how to hold a space for a group when you're doing things like futures, how you allow for the various dynamics that need to ultimately come up to do that and to to remain calm and hold that space and with skill to allow good outcomes to occur off even sometimes the back of dysfunctional exercises. That was fabulous and also his advice, to find how you Be yourself in this space. So you know, everyone's gonna have their own take everyone's got their own background and threads and talents and emphasis that they can bring into the future space and to relax enough to find that. To say, it might take some time, but you know, you're gonna have to find your own way. And don't try and be a carbon copy of anyone else. Even then being able to apply that, where we're using futures frameworks, and maybe modifying them to meet people where they're at. So being prepared to do that to say that we don't have to, because the framework and futures have been designed a particular way we can modify it, where it's useful to do that for the people that we're working with. So working with Sohail was amazing. And we also did some work with Adam Jorlen who's a graduate as well as the program who's over in West Australia doing great work. He was trialing a game at the time, so we invested in that. And also, I think one of the things that we recognized, and I'll maybe talk to this a little bit later, is the intersection of foresight as a great opening up the possibility space (and really the thinking) but that oftentimes what we also needed was the processes for the doing part of it. And so design, I've been fortunate enough to do the first subject of foresight and design with Bridgette Engeler Newbury - I loved that course. And I loved that, that gave us a framework for action and a process for action. So we brought a good design studio in Melbourne that we've ended up collaborating with over the last six years, them to come into some of our processes, so that we could learn how they were doing things, and then pick up from them. So I think that was, in hindsight, a really smart move. Because it helped us learn the craft, not just by muddling our own way through - a bit of that - but then also learning from people who were doing particular aspects really, really well, and learning how we could apply them. And then the other key thing I think, that stood us in good stead was, obviously every time a client comes to you and talks about work, they believe that there's a particular problem they're trying to solve. And I think really taking the time to get the value proposition of the piece of work clear upfront, we spent a lot of time with that on projects, early days, learning how to spot that, learning what was going on, then, obviously, the more and more of those you get - and if you're really focusing on where the true value lies in a lie in a project, you can see the patterns that are emerging in your various projects. So it gets quicker and quicker. But being able to reframe the brief in a way and check back with the client to go, here's what we're hearing, here's what we think true value for you might be in a process - here's the process we think would deliver on that value. And then really focusing all the way through on the project around delivering that value. However, we got there, not worrying too much about our time. Obviously in time, you get better and better at being able to quickly move through to delivering value. But for us maintaining a clear focus on finding where the value lie and then delivering on that has, I think stood us in good stead and enabled us to get the repeat work and to get the referrals, because it's quite clear what you're delivering.
Mendy Urie
Great. Kieran, can you speak a little bit more about some of the frameworks that you've road tested? In front of community in this time, when you were building your business? What were some of the models that you were finding, were really working for you?
Kieran Murrihy
Yeah, so the the ones that I've indicated around integral framework, Causal Layered Analysis, the Futures Triangle and also design. They all feature prominently in our work. But two I didn't come across until post my involvement with the course. The first is the three horizons framework that Bill Sharpe has written the book on. And why that's really useful is just the simplicity with which you can overlay a change story on that. And I remember, way back, when I was doing the Masters of strategic foresight, Peter Hayward gave me some great advice one day, if you've got a complex story to tell, tell it simply. And if you've got a simple story to tell, then you can tell it in a complex way. And that really stuck with me and as a way of us thinking about how we meet people where they're at, to how we bring futures in a way that is useful, productive, constructive, but isn't disconnected from their everyday realities. And so the three horizons has proved kind of like a bit of a lightbulb moment, I think, for us around that, but also for our clients. And so I'll just talk briefly about how we use it and frame it and what we find the response then from clients tends to be. Ther is obviously the three horizons around status quo business as usual, all the habits, patterns, structures that enable the orthodoxy to continue. And it's really valuable we need our business as usual for us to be able to structure up our organizations, our own lives, society. So saying that's all well and good, but you know, business as usual is very powerful and its job isn't to actually bring change, its job in a sense, is to sustain itself and become more efficient. So saying that's a part of the puzzle. Horizon three is competing visions of the future. And oftentimes we will say, don't worry about that. Because that's too far out there. But just know that the horizon one today is very different than it was 10, 15, 20 years ago, and everyone can understand that. So horizon, one is going to shift. And the really interesting space to think about is horizon two - the transition zone from where we are now to where we might be in a period of time both your organization or your sector, generally, when we're working with clients. And the distinction between horizon two minus as what you might call kind of adaptation to the status quo, or I've heard it referred to as the progressive status quo, for saying that's a part of the change agenda as well, where we're innovating at the margins. But we're not kind of challenging the orthodoxy too strongly. And we talk about - or Bill Sharpe talks about - horizon one capture, and so we can talk to people about the whirlpool of horizon one, and how you can have ideas that might be far out - but the need to understand that business as usual, status quo will oftentimes kind of filter an idea back towards something that looks quite conventional. And so then began to make quite a clear distinction between horizon two minus and horizon two plus, as horizon two plus is that zone of disruption through experimentation, you know, it's a zone of discovery. And that, oftentimes, a way of identifying whether something is truly over in this horizon two plus space is whether it's flipping the conventions in horizon one on its head. And so then being able to tell a really simple story of we need to allow for both of these. So you can show the organizations that have paid no attention to horizon two plus and then have been completely blindsided. So being able to suggest that if you are doing strategy work, or innovation work it provides a very simple framework for saying, particularly in the strategy, space - your reality is that you need to live in two worlds. So it's not innovate or die, because particularly for organizations who are funded by government, so many of the policy frameworks and the funding arrangements are still going to mean that they need to operate very well with their core business within the existing arrangements, even if all the rhetoric in a particular field might be around an emerging kind of way of operating, recognizing all these structures are going to hold them in place to a degree. And so saying, that's okay, you can't afford to totally take your eye off that ball. And so what it also then does is alleviates the fear of the people in the room - because you obviously got many different dynamics in a board or in a leadership group - in an organization that you're not going to be developing a strategy that's totally disconnected from their realities. And so those who care about the financials can get a sense that we're going to pay attention to that. But then also saying, if you don't actually authorize some work in the innovation space someone else is going to come and innovate potentially over the top of you, and you're not building your future pathways to prosperity and viability, because oftentimes, a lot of these organizations are also grappling with, well, do we have a future. So that enables us to legitimize both having a strategic story about the existing, and starting to craft the strategic story about their best hopes for the emerging future, and saying, if that's our best hopes for the emerging future, then we need to actually put some actions in place that start to bring that to life. So it's a wonderful framework, in that regard, as I say, because it validates all the various perspectives. And we'll talk about how often these perspectives feel as though they're in opposition, but that actually, each of them brings value, you know, so horizon one is really good at understanding what needs to endure. So even if you're then talking into Sohail's futures triangle, you know, what's the part of history that we want to bring with us, even as change occurs, again, brings people who are more kind of in that space, allows them a spot in the strategic journey that we're developing as well. So we will then from a strategy point of view, we say you're living in two worlds, you need a dual operating strategy. So you've got a strategy for your conventional kind of arrangements, your core business, and a strategy for bringing your emerging future to life. And so that's wonderful and then there is John Kotter's work around the dual operating model. And how you start to organize for the experimentation in the horizon two plus space has been really useful to say that, if we're going to truly innovate over here in the horizon two plus space, we need different processes and structures and Systems than horizon one. Horizon one wants predictability, you know, and it wants, if we're going to do a new piece of work in horizon one in government, they're very used to building up a business case for a pilot project for $400,000, over two years, or whatever it happens to be, and moving them more towards, you know, lean experiments in horizon two plus space. Saying we actually don't know what the outcomes will be here, we can start to design some principles for the sorts of experiments that we'll undertake here. But we need to have a totally different way of actually experimenting here than what we would traditionally do in horizon one. So we start to say, so we need to build the space for that to happen. And so in a strategy we will have within the horizon two plus the innovation missions and the connection between the traditional bureaucracy that might exist in an organization and those who are ready to innovate and bring the emerging future to life is saying that that experimentation needs to be around the things that matter to horizon one. So if you're going to go back for resources, and if you're going to go back for authorization into horizon one, you need to make sure you're working on things that they care about, and experimenting around things you care about. So setting the innovation missions up in a way that gives them a chance of actually landing and being supported, then becomes really important, as well. I think that that work emerged, the work around innovation emerged for us kind of in identifying the gap, at the back end of a lot of our strategy work, in that we would do the work around creating the visions of the emerging future that they wanted to step into. And it was really hard to find where to hand them off to, in a sense to actually do that experimentation. So there's some fabulous innovation companies around like Inventium and we've connected up with them at various points in time. But the other thing that we know is many of those organizations in the sectors we're working with, they're not used to funding this - they used to funding strategies, they are used to funding service design. They're not really used to funding, innovation, experimentation. And so we what we then worked out we needed to do was start to build and test some processes, some frameworks we could offer that would enable them to say yes, to actually building the innovation and experimentation space out within their organization. So I think what's been occurring for us too, is where we've identified where our work might do a certain thing. But then, you know, we were leaving people, to some degree enlivened about bringing a new future to life, but not necessarily any way to actually do that. And so then starting to work out, well, maybe we need to build that out. And so that's where we've started to over the last three years experiment with our own processes and offerings that we can bring into that innovation space, which is essentially building experiments.
Mendy Urie
Here is a question that we like to ask our guests, and that is to have a crack at giving us a bit of a picture of what you're seeing emerging in the future. Choose Your Own horizon - 30 years.
Kieran Murrihy
Yeah, well I'll keep this fairly specific to the work that we're doing. And where I think the most interesting prospects for change are. And I think, to some degree, it's around where stewardship sits in society around the sectors we work in. So where's stewardship for education, where's responsibility for how we organize our educational model sit both at a collective level, and then even for an individual who's crafting their own way through that journey, whether that's a young person or an adult. And so I think how that whole process unfolds over the next 10 to 15 years is going to be absolutely fascinating - across all of those traditional institutions and big service sectors that we've set up in society - are e going to still say government's best placed to actually manage the resources, oversee them, coordinate how services are rolled out, or are we going to start to move more towards models where stewardship sits with an individual level in terms of having their own ability to work out how their resources are spent. Whether that's in disability or education or elsewhere, but also at a collective level about how we organize those structures. The metaphor that tends to work reasonably well with our clients about thinking about how we might bring some coherence to understanding what the big shifts are is thinking about a shift from organizing those sectors like machines to moving across to organizing as an ecosystem - and how they look different. And that whilst we haven't really built the ecosystemic models out yet, that's where, from our perspective, a lot of the really interesting work lay. So it's difficult, I think, at this point in time to predict exactly how that will play out - because there's no doubt going to be a lot of resistance as institutions and our conventional models increasingly get challenged, or we find disruptive models that are coming in and circumventing even their ability to actually do what they need to do. There's a lot of tension and turmoil and disruption. And some of that's going to be pretty messy and difficult for communities and people obviously working in these spaces. So it's easy enough to critique what's wrong, where the machine metaphor, the machine way of organizing is kind of looking a bit tired, is no longer serving the needs of the people it's there to provide services to - it's no longer serving the needs necessarily of the organizations and the people working in the organization. And also, it's not serving the needs of the funders at times. And I think people can recognize that and just the story of look, it's done a really good job, you know, it served us well. But let's recognize that over time, we actually need to find another way - that there's an appetite, I think, with a lot of our clients in these sectors to say we want to find another way, we want to be constructive about building out the new. So as I say most of the innovation and experimentation that we do is about helping them understand how they can work in ways, organize themselves in ways, that might be more consistent with how an ecosystem might work. And you know, we do work to really ground that - the way that we do that is show them the difference between a machine - you know, manage the parts, we are only the kind of measuring a few different points or objectives, where it's quite often closed and we're protecting the information - where it's you or I - so the zero sum game- and moving across to an ecosystem where it's about flow, starting to look at abundance starting to look at I don't need to own things, I just need to make sure the resources need to get to where they need to at a particular point in time. But the thing that really strikes people, when we talk about that metaphor is suggesting that the move from - you or I - to, this is obviously pretty harsh generalization of the machine metaphor, but it's something that certainly helps people kind of understand it. It's either 'you or I'- and there are discrete resources that we need to compete over - to 'you and I'. And suggesting that 'you and I' isn't just - I want you to thrive because I'm a good person, I love it when people are doing well... to actually in a network in an ecosystem, when you thrive, I've got a better chance of thriving. So this sense of actually our chances of success is shared. And how do we actually collaborate in ways that bring productive partnerships to bear. Where we can find the opportunities to win in collaboration, because I think organizations in our sectors have been pushed to do a lot of collaboration and partnerships. And we've done a lot of work with the collaborative models. And almost inevitably, they're great challenge is - people are dropping out because of a lack of purpose, a lack of clarity, a lack of understanding about what the value of having a structure of partnerships and collaboration is. That people intuitively want to partner, but that it hasn't been purposeful enough. And so I think this is going to be the really interesting challenge, to, as we move towards these network models is how we bring coherence and purpose to them. And certainly, if you look at innovation networks, they thrive when there is that clear value exchange. So this isn't just about working together - that this is about having structures that are decentralized, but obviously the trick of bringing some sense of purpose and leadership, where does leadership sit? And all those are going to be fascinating questions, I think when you start to look at it from - what's education look like in that space? What's health look like in that space? Then obviously, you know, people are talking a lot about the disruptions of technology, as you know, maybe the lens through which they're looking at the future. And you know, the future of work is everywhere at the moment. And it's all about, you know, disruption through technology. But I think, most of the people in the futures field know, that's a part of the story, but it's not the whole story. So I think people are understanding that technology has the potential to disrupt. So I think the fascinating thing that we're starting to see that hasn't really emerged yet, is ultimately the conversation that we might start to have about what does a good life look like? What do good lives look like? So what are the multiple perspectives on what a good life actually looks like? And then how do we actually start to arrange ourselves to enable as many people as possible to experience a good life. You know, a simple example of that might be where our labor markets are changing in a way that the employment models may not be set up for the same levels of security. And so we've got the emergence of things like the gig economy, which are prompting, some young people - still at the margins - to start to think very differently about how they build a vocational model that speaks more towards the life they want to live than just recreating a model of - I've got to find a specific job that gives me the security to buy a home and all these various things. So I think the intersection of us starting to build new visions of what would a good life looks like into the future, and how we then need to organize our institutions, and big service models to help deliver on those new models of what a good life looks like, is where the real fascinating conversation takes place. And I think an econsytemic model that starts to move stewardship over increasingly, to communities are going to be well placed to play a role in that.
Mendy Urie
Kieran, every futurist I think comes across this at some point, the question about what is a futurist? How do you answer that question?
Kieran Murrihy
I don't know if I do. To be honest, I think most of our work, we're not couching oftentimes, as futures work. It's a strong imprint all the way through it - and we do a lot of futures workshops. But I don't know if I've got a good answer to that. And if I ever give anyone a good answer, I can't recall being asked recently. So I'll say maybe it's not even that important to have a good answer to that for me currently, in terms of what I'm able to describe to others. But I think through our work, the way we think about futures is across three aspects. And the first is really helping us build a really broad and rich understanding around the strategic context within which an organization exists. And what futures brings in is both understanding the current, the historic, and also the push factors that are there. So what are the patterns, currents of change that are starting to have implications for a business, for example, in a strategy. So part one is.. futures can do a really good job at giving you a much richer view of all the various factors that you might need to be thinking about as an organization as you embark on imagining and working towards a new future. And integral, even in models like integral, you know, really help in that space in developing frameworks and models that take various factors into account. So giving a rich picture of the context and enhanced picture of the context, understanding the factors of change, and the implications and opportunities that are in that. I think, the beauty of futures to really help people imagine their best hopes for the future.. in that context. If this is our context, what can we imagine - what's possible. And we use the three horizons as a way of stretching people out into imagining new possibilities. So we will get people who perhaps have an appetite for horizon two plus to work together to craft their vision of the future. And we'll have our conventional vision of the future. So again, saying - there are these multiple futures at play. But futures has a great way I think of bringing some coherent, compelling, really hopeful visions for the future. So understand the context futures can help you do that. Futures can help you kind of really craft a vision that excites you and compels you forward - compels you to act. And then I think this is where we have then merged that (and I still think this is good futures work) with the doing - so the experimentation that brings those futures to life. And so I would,say futures helps you understand your context - what's important - what's not - and helps you build a really hopeful view of the future and helps you design and introduce experiments that bring that future to life.
Mendy Urie
Kieran, you've told us that for 2019, you've got a couple of really interesting programs on the way - building communities for innovation and establishing Crazy Ideas College. Can you just tell us a little bit about this and why this is a focus of your work?
Kieran Murrihy
Yeah, so I'll start with the innovation ecosystem work that we want to start to increasingly move into with Foresight Lane, and I think it's the next iteration of bringing more sophistication to our work and understanding where the real opportunity for impact might be. In that, you know, we did the strategy work and the futures work which you can create the vision. And then we need to do innovation labs, in organizations or across multiple organizations (in health in a region for example). So we'll do those discrete processes and then saying, well, the gap at the end of that, with the organization's and sectors we're working with, there's not really anyone holding the innovation ecosystem together. Or let's talk about it as community - it might be a nicer language for the rest of the conversation. So the community of innovators in that space, the scaffolding is not there to hold that community together. And so for us, we're really interested in starting to understand what's the value of building that community out. And so what we intend to do is to start to go to some of the clients where we've got good relationships and where they've got a a clear agenda for change. So as an example, this would be in education, we're collaborating with an organization who very clearly has an agenda - they've got a whole host of schools that are signing up to move towards models that are more in line with the education revolution. So we would go and partner with them to say, let's work with your schools to run these innovation processes. So they can start to bring that to life. And let's start to connect that up. So we will go to where some of the people who are leading change in specific areas and look to collaborate with them. In a sense, putting in plug in processes where we can get moving, where we can train people up who have the appetite, you know - the 15- 20%, or whatever it is, the people who have the appetite. This might be in the adult education space or whatever that really want to get in and build some more transformative models - where we build their capacity to innovate. But through that process, we actually have a whole host of experiments that get developed and delivered. So we start to connect all of those up, in a sense, so that people can learn off each other. I think the other interesting thing that we're finding is that when all of those pieces of work are discrete (because obviously we're not the only people out there working with organizations that are trying to experiment and innovate), when they're discrete, it can be a little bit disheartening for people because the experiments oftentimes- whilst they may speak to a really big disruptive vision - can be quite humble. And so when you do an experiment that's humble, oftentimes, it's hard to see how that's really contributing to the greater effort of change. So I think even psychologically, people being able to recognize that they're part of a bigger community that's building this change out and they're connected to it will be of value. And the other thing that we can start to do then is do the learning at scale. So what are we seeing when we start to look at where the common barriers are, where the common successes are? How do we start to bring resources into the community to actually look at some of the real leverage points for change - where there's some commonality? How do we advocate for change in policy, where we're starting to see those system level lessons being identified in the community. So we have no doubt at the moment that whether it's us or someone else, that doesn't matter, there's an opportunity to connect up the work that's being done across these sectors - where they are working towards a common vision. And we'd love to see 1000 experiments across health, education, community sectors in the next eight to 10 years - that are connected up and help us all learn about what innovation looks like, and where as a community, we can start to support the efforts of each other. So that's what we're really keen to do there. We are a fair way off making that happen. But I think we've been sitting with - is that what we want to do? And we've decided, yes, that's what we want to do. So that's half the battle - is getting clear that this is the thing we will pursue now, and we'll see whether we can make that work. And we'll have our own experiments to start to build that out. The other aspect that we're focusing on is Crazy Ideas College, which is something that emerged five years ago for us. A part of my previous role with state government, at one point in time, was seeing all the submissions that came in for funding for youth consulting work. And I think it's fair to say although there was a lot of goodwill, a lot of good intentions - most of the submissions were fairly uninspiring. And so as part of that we asked - well - are we going to sit here and complain about how young people have been engaged in the world, or are we going to try and develop something that changes that model. And so we've been tinkering with this at the margins for five years. And there's been times where I've been really wishing it would go away and kind of die a slow death - or maybe even a quick death. And it's refused to. So it's kind of bugged me all the way through. And we've had various projects float up - where we've been asked to come and do it. And so, over that period of time, we've learnt where we can bring this into the market. We've learnt how to work with young people through innovation and design processes - and how to connect those innovation efforts up to the real world challenges that exist in their communities or at a societal level. And we take them all the way from, discovering and exploring the issues that are presented, through to generating ideas and prototyping. So really using all the design and innovation methodologies. And building experiments out that they're pitching to the decision makers. Whether that's in the community - we've had Councils bring us in to do it - we've had headspace who brought us in to do it around mental health and young people - and we've had schools that have brought us in to do it as part of their school curriculum. So we've decided it's either time to be in or out - to go big or go home. And so, this year, we're spending a lot of effort in seeing whether there actually is something in this. And again, our vision isn't just to develop plug in products that people can use, but is again to build an ecosystem of young people, refashioning, reshaping, remaking the world. And so that's the longer term goal, we're collaborating, again, with some good organizations around that. I think that's part of the key - isn't it, if you want to work on things that have got a bold vision, you need good partners. And so that's what we've worked on - we've played the long game on a few of those - on finding good partners who can maybe give us a more confidence that these aspirations we've got, we can actually bring them to life. So this year, we're in the midst of hopefully organizing a roadshow across four states with crazy ideas college. And so we've reached 1800 students probably around 20 or so times in a heap of different contexts. And we're really trying to scale it up and ramp it up this year with with some vision that we want to hand that over to young people. So I've got a young designer, who's now part of our team who's leading a lot of the efforts in this space. And we'll be connecting up with young people to keep building out the future versions, and with the aim that we're exploring ownership and leadership models - what this might need to look like - to actually hand this over to young people. So yeah, we can see lots of scope for really disrupting education and a whole host of things. But first of all, we've got to have products that plug in with where the market is at. So I think that's one of the things that we've learnt too, is maybe having a vision for where things can be in five years. And really understanding where you can plug into where the market is now. With the view that although you're clear on what that vision might be - the path there is going to look completely different than what we might envisage right now. But give yourself a shot, get yourself in the game, work with the orthodoxy to start to bring that in. So we're able to go to schools now and say, with a fair bit of confidence that, we can take your students through an eight week design and innovation process, where they'll be pitching to decision makers around things that they care about - things that they want to change.
Mendy Urie
Fantastic. You've got a lot of work to do. You've done a lot of work. It's been really inspiring to hear about all the areas that you're moving into, have moved into. It's been great Kieran. Thank you so much for sharing all the aspects of your work. Congratulations and good luck. This has been another production from Futurepod. Futurepod is a not for profit venture. We exist 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 Mendy Urie saying goodbye for now.