Gill Ringland managed people and projects around the world and found Foresight as a helpful tool in doing that. The vocation that emerged from that is one of making Foresight useful to people with day jobs. She has authored numerous books on how to do just that. She believes being classically training in Physics equipped her with a sound intellectual foundation. Onto which she built careers in technology and consulting, covering the gamut of project implementation to strategy development.
She believes that Foresight professionals have to get better at communicating their ideas, they need to find the right managers in organisations to assist, to help them at the correct time, and to help them to get things actually done.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
More about Gill
Her Books
Audio Transcript
Peter Hayward
Hello, and welcome to Futurepod. I'm Peter Hayward. Futurepod gathers voices from the International field of futures and foresight. Through a series of interviews, the founders of the field and the emerging leaders share their stories, tools and experiences, please visit futurepod.org for further information about this podcast series. Today, our guest is Gill Ringland. Gill's early career included stints at the Universities of Bristol, Edinburgh, Newcastle, California at Berkeley and Oxford University. She was CEO, Director and a Fellow of SAMI Consulting (strategy with a view to the future) from 2002 to 2017, with clients from the private, public and NGO sector globally from Mexico to Malaysia, including the European Commission. From September 2017 until February 2021, she was a Director at Ethical Reading, which was set up to create a community of organisations in the Reading area, who do the right thing by each other, the wider community, the environment and thrive in the process. She has a Bachelor of Science and a Master's in Science degrees and is a Fellow and was a Council Member of the British Computer Society. She was co opted to the UK Science Research Council's computing Science Committee, the UK Economic and Social Research Council, and the three separate European Commission high level expert groups on foresight. She has over 100 publications, and contributes globally to conferences and workshops. Her books on scenario planning and strategy are used at business schools, including Harvard. Her most recent published book, the eighth one with Patricia Lustig is Mega Trends and how to survive them: preparing for 2032. Welcome to Futurepod Gill.
Gill Ringland
Thank you, Peter, for offering to let me be interviewed it is a great opportunity. Thank you.
Peter Hayward
Thanks, Gill. So question one. What is the Gill Ringland story? How did you become a member of the futures and foresight community?
Gill Ringland
Well, my foresight story is about using foresight rather than inventing it. And it's about using it in my role as ICL as a manager, and then as a consultant and running a company. So what I'm going to try to bring out as I go through is how a manager, which is how I think of myself, a person who gets stuff done, I found that foresight was helpful and then started to help other people use it. So my background, I'm the oldest of five children, born within sound of bow bells in London, so that makes me a Cockney. My father took three years secondment to the Post office Telecoms in Melbourne when I was in my teens and so I went to Methodist Ladies College, which is course is just around the corner from Swinburne, so I wonder if there's something in the air in the Melbourne suburb? What do you think?
Peter Hayward
I think there was something there, yes.
Gill Ringland
I came back to the UK and went to the University of Bristol to read physics. And physics is a super education. Because it's about models. It's about data. It's about connecting to the real world. It's about real people doing experiments and how error bars happen I just wish more people in government and politics and in the world at large had actually had that education because so much of our world is dependent on that thinking. And yet a lot of people are totally blind to it. So physics, great education. As you said in your summary, I had a classic academic career going to Edinburgh, Newcastle, University of California, Berkeley, Oxford, I was happily married to a brilliant guy, world class physicist. We had so many friends who were trying with marginal success to have two academic careers in the family, because of course, it's difficult to find two academic jobs in the same place or even the same geography. And I'd learned how to program computers during my research on the theory of liquids. So I thought, I'm going to be a computer programmer. And that was a grreat choice because it was a really exciting time. I joined this small company with 30 people called Computer Analysts and Programmers, we grew to 1000 people, worked on projects like the Concorde fatigue test and the first credit checking online program, designed an operating, flew into Calgary in a thunderstorm to give the keynote on data architecture, which was frightening. I went back to Berkeley for a year and I wrote the American national standard for tape headers. You may laugh, but it was important at the time. And I was invited on to the Science Research Council's Computing Science Committee. One of the other people on the committee was Iann Barron, who is a serial entrepreneur. He was about to start up Inmos, a semiconductor company. So he invited me to join him. And I did and it was fascinating, I learned so much in a couple of years. But one of the things that I learned was that he was a mathematician, and he had a vision. But, being a physicist, I looked at the practicality of implementing and the technology was about several years, probably a decade away from being available to actually implement his vision. So I jumped ship, and I went and ran the European software group of an American process control company. And that brought new insights, we made the wrong choice for our next generation processor and had to retrench. So instead of going to work in Fort Lauderdale in Florida, I went to work for ICL at Bracknell. I was recruited in by a very unusual woman, Hilary Cropper, who became a friend. And she was unusual in that she was really down to earth, she had three children and a very senior career. And she she was nice, well was is the past tense, because unfortunately, she died quite young. So the first thing she plunked me into doing was, the company was highly dependent on a vital project called computerization of PAYE for the tax authorities in the UK, and ICL was about to get thrown off the project, because a salesman had made claims, that weren't true, about the application software. And the whole viability of the project was bsaed on the ability to support the application, in fact, from the Canadian system. So, Gill,, could you take a look at this. I went and talked to the client, and found out what the problem was, and there were something like 43 software interfaces that didn't work. So I went around ICL and found out who the specs for each of the interfaces, was the interface changeable? Yes, no, if not, what would be a route around:you know, classic stuff,. I went back and got the client to work out what he could do in terms of modifying that software, came back and about six weeks after joining ICL, I called a meeting, including the MD and all the divisional directors to tell them what money they had to find in order to fix this. Because it wasn't there, it wasn't squeezable out of budget. So anyway, ICL did not get thrown out of that project, and did live to fight again. The next thing that happened was, I was asked to start running a business inside ICL, to develop some office systems software, I decided that in order to have an international business, we had to be on Unix. And that meant we had to get a new product line installed. And luckily, the management was behind me because I kept having corporate seagulls visiting to question the decision. At which I said fire me or let me do it. But inside I was I was scared stiff, because I had people like marketing people and finance people and legal people and HR people and customer service people working for me. And I was a techie. And you know, women are always a bit sort of nervous. So I got the company to send me to Stanford to do their MBA course in two months that they do called the Senior Executive Program. And that was very high stress. But I found that my little clique consisted of a finance guy, a marketing guy, and a legal and between us, we could sort anything. So that was great. That gave me confidence. Now the software business was really successful. We launched in 17 countries simultaneously, which was revolutionary for ICL, because normally ICL was focused on the UK, and then sort of rather grudgingly let the foreigners have some, some product. Some of the countries were Australia and New Zealand and I spent quite a lot of time going and talking to clients in Australia and New Zealand because they were openminded. And a really good testbed. I sometimes tell people I went to New Zealand for lunch, which is more or less, right, because I was in Sydney at the time. And we were launching Office Power at lunchtime, so I went to New Zealand for lunch. So software Yes, really successful built up a billion dollar turnover business inside four years. So I was brought into the center to do strategy, I didn't know anything about strategy. We did some benchmarking, and we found that we had businesses inside the company that had totally different management dynamic So we were able to benchmark them not against each other but against external comparators. And then there was the question, Where was the IT industry going?. And it was very confused. And this was really how I got into foresight. We were based on the River Thames, more or less opposite Shell House. And Shell House contained the scenarios team, which was then under Ged Davis. So I wangled an invitation to go and visit him. And he and his group were tremendously helpful. We set up a scenarios team internally, and we developed some scenarios that were important to ICL, because what they did, they articulated that a company in the IT industry could be small and nimble, or else it could be big enough to sue. And we were stuck in between, which is why we went and got the first Fujitsu stake. But the real success that I'm most proud of in terms of that project was that about three years later, I was going to visit a client with an account manager. And he said, Gill, this client is quite interesting. The Board is very Deep Sea, (that was the "big enough to sue" scenario. But the person we're talking to has the ear of the CEO, and he's absolutely Coral Reef, (innovative ICT) so he can sell the new application for us if we can sell it to him. And so our scenarios had been useful to people at the coalface in understanding what they were dealing with. And that was important because obviously, everybody in ICL instictively thought we were in a Coral Reef world and all the literature had Coral Reef type assumptions, which was the ICT was bright and innovative and exciting. And most of our customers just wanted something that worked So we had to rethink our marketing literature. While I was doing the strategy job at the center, I also would talk to journalists about the scenarios work and one said, it sounds to me as though there's a book there, and I'm on the board of Wiley. So they commissioned the first scenario planning book, and ICL was very good, They not only helped by funding a ghostwriter to help me get the first draft togerther, but they didn't restrict anything I said. And so it's sort of warts and all book which is something that you know, Harvard and other business schools really like I was also very lucky in that ICL let me do a number of outreach things. I was on the Court of the IT Livery Company, we did a lot of outreach of it into socially deprived areas and to schools. I was on the Council of the British Computer Society, representing IT management, I chaired the Conference Board, Europe's Futures Council. And that was interesting, because we started with about 40 people who were employed by large firms across Europe, who were recognized as being the sort of foresight person in their organization. Within five years, most of them had either become consultants, or they had gone back into line roles. Because it's an incredibly difficult balancing act, being a futurist in a big organization. The tension is between two sorts of credibility. You have to be out and about to get external recognition and credibility. And inside, you have to be spending lots of time with your line managers and stay empathetic with them. I remember going and talking to one line manager and said, Oh, I'd like to talk to you about scenarios for 2020. And he said, Gill, if it's 20 past eight tonight, keep talking. If it's 20. past eight tomorrow, come back tomorrow. So line managers are not always receptive. And I understand that. I also reinvented Foxes and Hedgehogs - I had not come across the descriptions. But in trying to introduce line managers to futurists, and seeing the line manager's eyes glaze over when the futurist talked about intelligent toothpaste I went, Okay, people are different. That's also when I was on the Economic and Social Research Council. We were setting up a Management Research Center in the UK, and I got Michel Porter to do some research on what the lacks were in British management that needed research, and hecame up with a really interesting answer, which was the International Management was totally, you know, internationally standard. But at levels two and three - so that's not team leader but the two levels just above that - there were nearly twice as many British mangers, and they were under qualified compared with those in France and Germany. So it was a lack in our education system, rather than a lack in research. That was a really interesting Aha, something useful to have done. Another great opportunity was that ICL was a member of the Global Business Network, which meant that I was able to meet Peter Schwartz who was quite mesmeric, very charismatic, and also Napier Collyns, the ultimate networker and is still a friend. So really a good time at ICL, combining IT and foresight. But then it became clear that we were going to be taken over by Fujitsu. And I could not face the flight to Tokyo as the most senior woman or a head of strategy or whatever, no. So I talked to the people at SAMI, I worked with them when we sponsored a project on Scenarios for Scotland, and joined as the CEO. We built up SAMI from the three of us up to 20, as you said, in your introduction, we worked globally It might be interesting to talk briefly about the European Commission, because working with them over a decade, we saw such an evolution in their understanding of how to use foresight. And I think there's a good message there. So the first project I was asked to work with was as part of a high level expert group, the Commission had assembled a group with about 15 different languages, and about 17 different academic disciplines, or maybe vice versa, an order to assess how the European Commission's research might deal with nano bio info cogno technologies. Because of course, there are lots of social implications of working at nano level in biological systems. And the Comission was very cognizant of the fact that, genetic modification had raised all sorts of alarms all over Europe. So the group met every month for a year. And for the first six months, it was a nightmare. Nobody could understand anything anybody else was saying, because of the translation problems together with the esoteric topics we were talking about, between the different languages, the different academic disciplines. The organiser had suspected this might happen, and so had arranged to get us all marooned in a small Conference Centre in a park in Cambridge in the UK for three days to develop some scenarios for the future of Europe. And this we did, and it really worked. Because it meant that when somebody was making a point about whether the research was viable or not, somebody else could say, Ah, that's because you have in mind one scenario, a view of the future of Europe, that Europe is for social cohesion, but actually, we also have to think about the economic aspects. And so there was a mechanism and language for having that discussion. And the report was very widely circulated. In fact, a couple of years later, I was visiting a Fraunhofer Institute. And they said, Oh, you're on this report and we're guiding our research by it. So it's really nice to see that, that the result of sweating with all those impossible conversations was worth it and we turned out to have usable output.
Peter Hayward
It is so important to give people a shared language to talk about the futures.
Gill Ringland
And then the second high level group I was commissioned on to was something called the European Forum for Forward Looking Activities, EFFLA. And this was brilliantly chaired by somebody I'd never met before, Professor Peter Piot, who in fact, was one of the discoverers of Ebola, and is now head of London School of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine, great guy, also, a super Chairman, best Chairman I've ever worked with. Under his chairmanship, what we were able to do was understand what problem the Commission were wrestling with. And the Research Innovation Division was wrestling with the fact that they had been told foresight was important. And they kept commissioning these studies. And so they have 30 40 50 studies piled up, and the policymakers didn't know what to do as a result. One of the members of EFFLA was from Finland, and they had a similar problem with their politicians. And so they had developed a quadrant model, which showed that there were policymakers who were about decision making, and then there was a just do it quadrant. And then there was a horizon scanning quadrant. And then there was a sensemaking quadrant, and it was the sensemaking quadrant that the policymakers were missing. And so that was a real Aha. And in fact, SAMI uses the quadrant diagram quite often with our clients because, you know, it works.
Peter Hayward
Is that a quadrant of foresight or is there foresight in a different form in the other quadrants?
Gill Ringland
Well, the top right hand quadrant is what policymakers do: they make decisions. The next quadrant is just do it, you know, where the troops are out and about, you know, just doing stuff. The next quadrant is horizon scanning, where you're trying to see what's happening in the outside world. And then if you like the last quadrant, which is what most of us would think of as foresight, is labelled the sensemaking quadrant. We didn't want to use the word foresight for that quadrant, because they thought they were doing foresight by having all these studies, by doing all the horizon scanning that, therefore we've done foresight. So it was the sense making that links into the policy makers, that was a really useful understanding, but it took two or three years to get to that. And y during that time, SAMI did a number of other projects with the European Commission, on horizon scanning, risk management, wildcards and so on. We also did a conventional scenarios project with them, helping them to think about Horizon 2020, which was their flagship research program, and what the priorities for the next stage. But then maybe one of the most interesting projects was one, which in fact, is not in the public domain as yet. And Wendy Schultz, who was on one of your previous podcast, talked about it a bit. She talked about a gameboard, which was useful for helping policymakers from across the world, understand where their region was on a spectrum of possible attitudes to research and innovation; and where they thought they might go to. And the big breakthrough there was that Wendy brought with her, these little animals. And so for instance, Australia was represented by - guess what - a kangaroo. And these policymakers were able to have the discussion about the positioning of theirr region on the gameboard, but also not just a position, but what direction they were facing in and where they were going that direction, or whether they were going in the other direction. The animals and gameboard provided such an immediate metaphor, it was really great. And I'm not sure whether it's directly as a result, certainly the introduction to the workshop, where we used the gameboard, was by a Vice President of the Commission, and after the workshop, a couple of months afterwards, it was announced that there was a new vice president for international institutions and foresight. And so foresight is now being recognized at the top level in the European Commission. And that is just such an interesting travel over 10 years. And being an observer at it was absolutely fascinating.
Peter Hayward
Thank you. Yeah, great story.
Gill Ringland
I thought I'd mention maybe three other projects, just because they identify different aspects of foresight projects. One was Malaysia, where they had been asked to develop new industries. And the group came up with the idea that actually, because Malaysia has always had rubber gloves from the rubber industry, why didn't they get into more fancy PPE, because, you know, there were going to be pandemics weren't there? Yes, there were. Yes, there were. And so Malaysia is really relatively well positioned in the PPE market now.
Peter Hayward
That's good foresight.
Gill Ringland
Yes! and another project tht Tricia Lustig and I worked on together was with Angel trains. They were going out for their next round of funding, and the finance guy was a bit worried that they didn't have a story to tell. So we did a classic scenario project, interviewing people, workshops with the top team, and so on. And it was one of the breakthrough moments when the CEO suddenly went, oh, shit, I understand that we're not in the train business, we are in the risk business. And that meant, of course, that they were hiring the wrong people, they had the wrong management processes and so on, because they were in the train leasing business, and train knowledge, expertise, engineering was not only what they were about. They were actually also about understanding what need there was, what demand there was, and managing the risk. Another project, which was interesting, in different way, was for a big teaching hospital, divided into seven business units. The CEO wanted each of the business units to work through some scenarios with us, in order to think about how technology might change the way they work. Five of the business units were run by classic medical consultants. And two were run by a radiographer and a pathologist. And it was chalk and cheese. None of the units run by medical units could get their minds around forward thinking future thinking, whereas the radiologists and pathologists, absolutely. It was so black and white, that I think it's a really useful reinforcement of the fact that there are always going to be times and places where it's not useful to try and do foresight. While I was at SAMI, I wrote some books, one was Scenarios in public policy, I think it's still the only one. Scenarios in marketing, I wrote with Laurie Young, and we got on so well that we ran a series of events called Blowing the Cobwebs off your Mind, because his clients and our clients were both asking "what's happening out there?". So we ran workshop type events at the Royal Society in Pall Mall, London, working with Wendy Schultz and also Chris Yapp. Unfortunately, Laurie died very suddenly and unexpectedly. And we didn't have the heart to continue the series, they were so much dependent on our group chemistry. I also wrote a book called Here be Dragons, which people give as Christmas presents, because it's partly a novel, about an organization using foresight; and at the back, it's got a handbook of tools. And that was with Tricia, and three other guys. And we all did a chapter. The foresight at SAMI used a number of tools, but many of our projects were either horozon scanning or scenario based. It was actually at the brainstorming meeting that I was holding as part of my handover, when I decided to leave SAMI, and hand over to Jonathan Blanchard Smith, who's now successfully running it, that somebody said, "there's so much uncertainty out there, that quite often, I don't think scenarios are the right approach. I think that giving people something that is reasonably reasonably full castable is something gives them something to hold on to, particularly if it's mega unlikely to be swamping them". And that contributed to my thinking. And so Tricia and my book on mega trends really arose out of that hand over at SAMI in 2017. And in fact, I've just stepped down from three years at Ethical Reading, to focus for a while on getting the next book out, which is Green Shoots, which is about how Gen Zed and Millennials are really different. And how they have a chance of reshaping the world that we've messed up for them. So before I finish this section on what is my story, I thought I might just try three messages. First, I wish that foresight, people put more effort into trying to communicate to you know, audiences that need it. Second, scenarios are brilliant, when they create images that people can share, and gives them insight and a shared language common way of thinking. The third message is that I think there are some business schools still teaching, you know, scenario planning as a board activity. That's a no, no these days, that's to do with the time pressures, and also the focus of boards, which is mostly on risk avoidance these days. Also, you know, coming back to the fact that, scenarios are really good when they give you an image to compare your current assumptions against. And few people have strong assumptions about what's happening at the moment.
Peter Hayward
Thanks, Gill. Question to Gill: the one where I encourage the guest to talk about how they do or what they believe we should be doing, as futures people and as foresight practitioners: what would you want to talk to listeners about?
Gill Ringland
We have covered, I think, in a sort of snapshot way, why scenarios are powerful, and how they can create images. But that's really well worn. I'm really thinking much more these days about how foresight can be made accessible to young people, and to people who need it when they want when they need it. So for instance, I used to commute by train a lot before lockdown. And people were often on their iPhones or their laptops, either they were watching films or they were working. I thought, why don't we have foresight type games that people play with? I know that there are some young people in the APF who are looking at that. And I think that's really, really important. And the other thing is, in the same way that I thought my physics education was really, really important, teaching some foresight to young people in the schools could be really, really important. It could help them think about what might be what is going to be, what is certain, what they can do about it, and give people a sense of being in charge rather than being victims. Because that's one of the strong things about foresight. If you've got a view of it, you can decide what to do about it. That's really my two pleas: gamification and other ways of making foresight available to the wider world, and thinking strategically about how foresight can be helpful to school kids, as they try to face the strange world we're handling
Peter Hayward
The experience of people trying to bring futures into education is it's, it is a contested process, because as you know, there's a lot of competition to be a lot of things compete for teachers time.
Gill Ringland
Absolutely, absolutely. And so that's why it can't be, you know, a new curriculum item. But you know, bringing bring it into history, or geography or science, for instance, some thinking about that could be creative.
Peter Hayward
I want to go to the third question of, so how do you see the emerging future and you know, what are the emerging futures that you're paying attention to?
Gill Ringland
The thing that Tricia and I become really conscious of, in writing Green Shoots, is that the world has really changed in the last year, it's been illuminated by COVID. It was more hidden before, that we really are at the end of an era. If you think about individuals, the fact that they are likely to grow up in a single or to two sibling family, with several grandparents still alive, and maybe even great grandparents. Whereas a couple of generations ago, they would have had three or four siblings, and maybe meet one grandparent, a totally different dynamic. We're facing a society where there are a lot of only children, and only children don't have a lot of their social reflexes conditioned by learning to live with siblings. So different sorts of people, different sorts of families, Organizations are also different. The fact that two thirds of the world's firms are family firms, fits a society in which families had several children, and that usually one was able to take over. But in a world where families have one child or maybe two, it's less likely that there'll be a family member who is able and willing to take over. That is a great source of instability there. And another factor about organizations, of course, is the hollowing out. There used to be a solid middle class of middle managers. A lot of those are no longer there, because their function has been replaced poorly, but has been replaced, by IT or management system. And so you've got senior management, and you've got floor level people and very little in between. And that, again, is a source of instability, because you know, societies with middle classes are much more stable. Then community has developed in a whole new sense, with the connected world - community used to be very much about geography, people near you. And now it's very much about people like me, who may not be local. And that changes the dynamics as well. Then we're thinking about government, and governments are based on nation states. And nation states are, again, focused on place, but money is mobile. And the ability to raise taxes is, as you know, it's a bidding war out there.
Peter Hayward
You get to tax the small ones, you can't tax the big one,
Gill Ringland
The relationship, therefore, between citizens and the benefits from government is getting more tenuous, because governments can't actually afford to pay for what citizens quotes expect, unquote. So we're seeing the breakdown of the Washington Consensus in all its branches, including the welfare state. And of course, we're seeing a complete change in the international balance from the US to China in terms of economic and therefore political heft. So it's, it's a different world. And so the new book is about the cusp of a new era. It's it's arguing that among all this change, people can make a difference that there is a focus now on the big issues, climate change and public health and inequality, and that Gen Zed and Millennials are looking towards are trying to make it happen. So cusp of a new era, reason to be hopeful,
Peter Hayward
What about the green shoots that you're seeing that says that those those generations can create a momentum of change.
Gill Ringland
You can think about the Belarusian mass movement, which destabilized and changed an autocratic government. You can think about Young Women in Mining, which is a cross company organization which is changing the policies of mining companies towards health and pollution of the environment, you can look at the fact that in a pretty depressed part of the UK, there's a big manufacturing company that can't hire apprentices, because young people think that manufacturing is not doing enough for the environment, and they are have not given adequate answers to the questions about sustainability, dealing with waste, and so on. So there are just lots of small green shoes. And one of the things we're doing in the book is, we call it snapshots, just gathering these up and giving illustrations because what works in one place, will could work in another,
Peter Hayward
do you believe that the generations that have that are holding on to power will acquiesce to the pressure from those generations,
Gill Ringland
I think there's been a sea change. We use the Overton window as a metaphor. And I think that, you know, with China declaring it's going to go net zero by 2060, similarly Japan, and Joe Biden's making noises in relation to climate change. In relation to public health, medical discovery, antibiotic resistance, and so on, I think there are big issues. And if there are big issues, it's easier, in a way for people to put their arms around them and mobilize behind them. And so I think that Overton windows change. And that yes, of course, there will be lots of explicit and implicit resistance to change. And particularly in relation to climate change. If you look at where fossil fuels embedded in our way of life, it's just everywhere. And so you know, there's no quick answer, I believe the transition in attitudes is happening.
Peter Hayward
Question four Gill, the communication question, how do you describe what it is you do to people who don't necessarily understand what it is you do?
Gill Ringland
As I sort of explained at the beginning, I'm not a pure futurist. I'm a manager who has found this future stuff really important in elucidating problems, in helping people to make decisions. And people find, I think, that aspect easier to relate to, say telling a story about, working with the Malaysians, and their cultural differences between Malays and Indian and Chinese, and how the discussions went, how the decisions were made. And you know, what the surprises were, it's talking about the process of decision making and management, rather than talking about foresight methods, per se. And I'm not intending to get to go go back to traipsing around the world after lockdown is off. And so what I do is giving talks over zoom or podcasts or whatever, and writing, and so that's a lot easier. So for me, it's not a big issue. If you're giving advice to people that are starting out what is the what's the best way to make foresight useful to line managers, you've got to find the right line manager. Think about foxes and hedgehogs tape locks work is is actually comes from Greek myth. And so I ran into problems because actually, foxes in Muslim countries are thought to be dirty, whereas we were talking about foxes as being quick looking around. Now people are on a spectrum. There is absolutely no point in trying to do this stuff with headshots. How do you recognize a fox versus a hedgehog, just talking to them about the news don't have just different views about the news. And so you find allies, and you shore up foxes be as foxes in organizations quite often are pretty threatened. So you give them ammunition, you provide them with stories, you provide them with a sounding board, you help them plot the next couple of years. And you know, I remember doing that with the new CEO of Grant Thornton, UK, it just took us a couple of hours. And we just plotted what she was going to be doing in terms of rethinking the culture and helping people understand the new world. And it was about a two year program and we just got it on a couple of whiteboards and I needed obviously her to be the one who wanted to do it. She needed my experience of Understanding how long these things talk and what you introduced when it's being able to be that sort of support that's needed. Going in as here's the answer, McKinsey style doesn't work.
Peter Hayward
And so you really need to find the person who actually wants to use force.
Gill Ringland
No, no, you don't find a person who wants to use foresight, because they don't know the term necessarily. What you do is you find a person who has a decision to make, and you assess whether foresight is going to be helpful. I mean, it may be that they just want to really bog standard benchmarking projects. But if they, if they show signs of being interested, when you start talking about some of your war stories, then you start exploring what form of foresight might be helpful to them.
Peter Hayward
OK we are at the last question, is something that you want to close on?
Gill Ringland
A bit dramatic, I think but yes. So we were talking about dystopian futures? And what might cause the world to collapse? And there's a classic list, including sort of nuclear war, famine, earthquakes, pandemic pandemics? Yes, I think there's another which is probably more likely than any of those. And that's a catastrophic software failure. We did some work for the European Commission on software, way back. And we were looking at the problems of embedded software, and the testing characteristics, and the testing regimes and the compatibility. And I don't think any of that understanding is in a lot of the systems that are being pulled together to deal with smart cities, the software from various sources, they're all have updates at different times. And we all know what happens when, say Windows has an update, and nothing works for a few weeks. And you can't have part of London or Melbourne, shut down for a few weeks, because there's an incompatible upgrade. And I'm not singling out Microsoft by any means here. It's the fact that the profession has not developed a software architect role as somebody who has a checklist for how to make these things work.
Peter Hayward
Yes. It's not an open system that people can easily create interoperability between between parts of the system, is it
Gill Ringland
mostly that the systems are a bit complex? And you know, they have built interfaces that aren't particularly well documented or may change? And so something that depends on that interface may well just stop working?
Peter Hayward
Because there was the great fear of y2k.
Gill Ringland
Oh, yeah, it was a specific thing. And the industry got behind it. And there was very little problem around y2k, this is a more pervasive thing. And I really don't know where to start with it. I mean, Tricia, and I have done a pamphleteer on it, which has got several 1000s, I think, current count. Here's where to apply pressure, where I really don't know what the moment all I can do is talk about
Peter Hayward
if people wanted to find out more about just the nature of the risk, what might they start looking for? And how might they start to get a sense of it?
Gill Ringland
Hmm, well, that's difficult, because there are, you know, websites around software disasters, but there hasn't been a sort of outreach from the profession into, you know, these are the things to look for in terms of, you know, your Smart City and what might cause it to collapse.
Peter Hayward
Thomas Homer Dixon, the Canadian, I suppose you'd call him a futurist, he talks about the nature of complex systems themselves is that complex systems are always will eventually reach a point where they will break down because of their own inherent complexity.
Gill Ringland
Yeah, and it may well be that smart cities have reached that limit.
Peter Hayward
And so watch this space is that the advice you're giving to the list?
Gill Ringland
Put brain in gear and think what you might do about it. I think rather than watch this space.
Peter Hayward
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 Peter Hayward saying goodbye for now.