Charles Brass accidentally found Futures as an HR Executive looking at the Future of Work. He then went onto to create his own Futures focused organisation that he has worked in for over 30 years. Charles sees us being a point in time where we can examine and ask the right questions about our relationship with money, wealth and value.
Interviewed by: Charles Brass
More about Charles
LinkedIn: Charles Brass
References
Joe Voros’ analysis of the Futures Cone
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by Buckminster Fuller
Some books that explore alternative economic systems
“Plunder of the Commons – A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth”, by Guy Standing – Pelican Books, 2019
“Is Capitalism Obsolete? – a journey through alternative economic systems”, by Giacomo Corneo (translated by Daniel Steuer) – Harvard University Press, 2017
“Creating Alternative Futures – The End of Economics”, by Hazel Henderson – Perigee Books, 1978
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 in the emerging leaders share their stories, tools and experiences. Please visit futurepod.org for further information about this podcast series. Today, our guest is Charles Brass. Charles Brass helped create the future of work foundation in 1991. This foray into the world of foresight represented his fourth career change, beginning as a wedding photographer, he became a school teacher and then a corporate Human Resources executive. It was in this latter role that Charles became involved in a project designed to envisage the world of work in the year 2020. And he realized there was more to thinking about the future than simply asking people what they thought might happen in the future. In the early 2000s, the future work foundation merge with Jan Lee Martin's created futures foundation. And since then, Charles has continued to work with, as he puts it, with anyone who will sit still long enough to pay serious attention to creating the future. Welcome to Futurepod, Charles.
Charles Brass
G'day Peter, good to talk to you.
Peter Hayward
Thanks, Charles. So the Charles Brass story. What is it?
Charles Brass
So, yes, in the late 1980s, after a couple of twists and turns in my career, I found myself on the board of the professional association for HR practitioners. And this was at a time when HR was just beginning. It was emerging out of the separate professions, if you like of personnel, industrial relations, training, health and safety, which had been separate occupations up until that moment, and they were being merged inside corporations as well as inside professional associations into one body, which is now known in Australia as the Australian Human Resources Institute. And the National Board of that organization in the late 80s. wanted to demonstrate to the world the value of HR practitioners. We came up with the idea that we would write a book, using a very common way of writing a book nowadays, but back then it was a relatively uncommon way. The idea was that the book would have a number of chapters written by different people and organizations. And the then there would be a pre script or an introduction and a post script written by the Human Resources Institute to demonstrate how clever we were by pulling together various threads. And the book was going to be called Australians At Work in 2020. So we decided we wanted a 2020 vision for the future of work. We thought this was pretty clever. And it turned out to be prescient, we went out to all sorts of organizations and individuals. The federal government was involved. We asked the opposition, they didn't come on board. But we went to trade unions, we went to church groups or into women's groups, we went to big businesses, individuals, the Lord Mayor of Melbourne got involved, we had all sorts of people involved. We asked them all one simple question, what do you think work will look like in 2020. And they wrote us a chapter. We didn't know the phrase Delphi project at that time Delphi process, but we engaged in a Delphi process, it took us a year, they wrote us a chapter each, we compiled that together, and then fed it back to them and said, having read what other people have to say, do you want to change anything here, right? And so some people went through two and three revisions of their various contributions. And then we came towards the end of the time. And the idea was to turn this into a book and also to write the foreword and the afterward for the book. Unfortunately, HR practitioners can't count. And we decided that a 2020 vision had to have 20 chapters, and we had 29 completed submissions, and we didn't know what to do about that. What we did was, we invited everybody who hd submitted to come to a two day event at a hotel in Sydney. And we should have known we were in trouble when 43 people turned up to the two days including three lawyers, three different organizations brought lawyers along, designed to protect their interests in this process. To describe the first day of that event as chaos is to do the phrase chaos a disservice service, it was appalling. We had some very, very high profile and high opinionated people stamping their foot on the floor and saying, I don't care what anybody else thinks my view of this is going in your book, and it's going to be chapter one. Thank you very much. And we we literally finished that day without knowing what to do. On the evening of that day, a group of us went for a walk that evening. And along the course of that walk, we mused that perhaps we might have asked the wrong question in the first place. And so what for want of something better to do we turned up on the second morning and said, Look, we don't know what to do with this either. But just out of curiosity, what difference would it have made if a year ago, instead of asking you what do you think work will look like in 2020 we asked you what would you like, work to look like in 2020. And the mood of the room changed instantly, a whole bunch of people said, Oh, we don't want most of what we think is going to happen to happen. Here's what we want. And by the end of that day, we actually had a manifesto, I call it the vision statement, 314 words, which I can probably quote, which was a consensus of people in the room about what they would like work to look like in 2020. And so everybody went home relatively happy, except the Australian Human Resources Institute. Because instead of getting a book, they got 314 words, and they didn't think they could publish that. So in fact, the Institute was launched without it's wonderful book, and the book 2020 Australians at work in 2020, never made the presses it doesn't exist. All the materials still exists in the futures foundation library. And the best the HR Institute did was in in 1991, it published the vision as a lead story in its member journal, the story of the process. But the book never got published. But it had a profound impact on me personally, and some other people in the room for two reasons. One, the obvious one is that it provided a sort of guiding vision statement for what we might like; what changes we might like to see in the world, to turn it into a world we'd actually like to live in in 2020, rather than one which we just felt we were stumbling into. But similarly familiar, it had a profound impact about the importance of asking the right question in the first place. And as you said, in your introduction, that led to the creation of the future of work foundation, whose mission was to bring about that vision from 1989-1990 in the year 2020. Now, as it happens, we're recording this in 2020. And it's not surprisingly caused me and a few others to go back and have a look at that vision statement. This isn't the place to have the conversation. But needless to say, much of it hasn't arrived. Bits of it have, but there's still a bit of room to go. One of the things we've contemplated doing but haven't done largely because of COVID was trying to get people together and and ask, here's what people said in 1990 they'd like to happen in 2020. Do you still think this is good? And if so what do we need to do to bring it about by 2030 in 2040 2050, that may well happen at some time in the future. But it was that that led me to understand the importance of thinking about the future. That brought me into connection with all sorts of people in the space called futures and, and foresight, in particular, and introduced me to Jan Lee Martin, who although she wasn't part of that original event, one of the facilitators of the event is a futurist called Peter Saul, who was on the board of Jan Lee Martin's futures foundation, which hadn't actually been created was just in the process of being created at that time. He introduced me to Jan and that led to things we're going to talk about as this unfolds.
Peter Hayward
Good story. It's a great story of, yes I've been in I've been in workshops that I've actually been running where I've got to, as you say, the night of night one where you go for the walk, not knowing what the heck you're going to do at the start of night, morning, two. So again, from that, what's then what's the segue from that into into where you are now is that pretty well lit or is that is there more to add about people or things that have played a pivotal role in getting you to where you are?
Charles Brass
Oh, yes. That was just a very, that's just the introduction. So that happened in 1990 1991. I think Jan created the futures foundation in 92, or 93, or thereabouts. And we kept in contact. We'll talk a little later about where the futures foundation is now. So one of the questions for the future of work foundation was, what are we going to do about this? So what does it mean to have set up an organization? I actually quit my corporate role at that time, perhaps I was naive or how sometimes people can be called to follow a passion. I quit the corporate role and became the driver behind the future of work foundation with the objective of bringing about that change, you know, that 314 words sat on my, on my wall , and the question was, what are we doing to bring that about, and we did a variety of things, which I now recognize have resonances in the future space. We ran what we call futures forums, where we've been running futures forums since the early 90s. And the idea of a futures forum was we invited someone who had something to say about what would make Australia a better place, not necessarily around work and jobs, although that was the focus, we got them to come and say what they what they thought would make Australia a better place. Then we invited an audience of no more than 20 people. The theory was that they would sit in the room listening to that person. Then at the end of that, they would say, well we think this is a good idea, or we don't think this is a good idea. And if we do think it's a good idea here is how we will support it and will make things happen. And so the idea was it was meant to be focused on achieving things. I have to say, it never quite worked out that way. You've had plenty of experience in sessions like this, someone would come along and talk. And then what would happen is people would ask questions, and then they'd get up and leave and nothing much particularly happened. But in that process, we were asking, who do we want to come along? Who is there in the world in Australia, who has something to say about making Australia a better place? I think, forum number three was Richard Hames. forum number two was Richard Bawden. Forum number five was Richard Slaughter. Forum number six was Peter Ellyard. So we just went around and found these people, none of whom I knew at the time, but who had some sort of public visibility, that in some way, they were saying they would want to make Australia a better place. We invited them to come along and be part of a forum. They came along, we're part of a forum, we did a little early version of futurepod, we recorded this. And we made them available to people. At one point, we were working with Michael Schildberger, who was a journalist at the time trying to turn them into a commercial, sort of early podcast product that didn't work. But that was how I got to meet people like Richard Slaughter, and Richard Hames, people like that. And then I mention the two of them, because as you will know, they then came together in the late 90s, to put together the foresight program at Swinburne. And so I was on the periphery of that whole process with Adolph Hanich. At the time, I also had headed of into another role. And so many of those people who were conspiring to make that happen, I had a peripheral role in that whole process. And ultimately, as you know, because you were my teacher, I came along and did the foresight, Masters, but it was meeting all of those people at the time that introduced me to the world of futures and foresight.
Peter Hayward
Thanks, Charles. Question two Charles the one where I encourage the guests to talk about a tool or a framework or, or a method or an approach that is central to how they practise. So what do you want to talk to the listeners about?
Charles Brass
I'm actually going to explain this out of order, unfortunately, because I'd like to be able to explain it in order but one of the things that you were adamant about when you were teaching me at least in the foresight Masters, you and and Rowena particularly, were that everybody ought to have an interest in the future. Not necessarily that everybody was a futurist, but everybody ought to have an interest in the future. And that philosophy has absolutely stuck to me. like glue, since this began. The future is not some abstract rarefied place that only some people are interested in. The future is certainly not the place that futurists are somehow uniquely interested in. The future is, in fact, something we are all interested in, by definition, as it wasn't George Burns, as many people think it was actually someone else. But as someone said, in the late 1890s, I'm particularly interested in the future because that's where I'm going to spend the rest of my life. And that's true of all of us, both in our individual lives, and in our collective lives, whether collective is family, community, company, government, whatever. And so what has particularly informed my thinking about everything I've done in futures is what does it mean, to actually get everybody to recognize that they have an interest in the future. And as I found over 30 years, it takes no time at all, no time at all, to get everybody to say they're interested in the future. Everybody says that, everybody, from the trivial things of: yes, I'm working out whether I'm ever going to go on a cruise again, now that COVID-19 is struck, and to whatever it is: I'm going to go and study something because I want to change my career to whatever it is, everybody has interests in the future. The challenge is not getting them to express an interest in the future, the challenge is getting them to do anything seriously about that. And that's been where my focus has been. How can you in a way that is engaging to whomever you are addressing at any point in time, get them to want to stay with their interest in the future, long enough to do something about it. And in that regard, the thing that I have found most helpful, of all the possible tools that are out there is the futures cone. Given that this certainly has a bit of an academic history, I'll acknowledge that there's a bit of uncertainty between Clem Bezold, and Joe Voros about exactly who created this and where it came from. So we won't get into all that. But as a tool, what the futures cone demonstrates in two dimensions, is that the future is an infinite space. Because what the futures cone says is, if you are looking out into the future, what you see is infiniteness. And then what it attempts to do is to somehow codify or stratify, or at least name different parts of the future in ways that mean something to people. And I found that incredibly useful. It means that everybody acknowledges, if you have a conversation with them, yes, I can see that there is a considerable difference, and a useful difference between the predicted future and the possible future. Now, that still doesn't cause many of them to say, Okay, I actually want to spend some time exploring what those differences mean to me. But nonetheless, that tool has been of immense value to me. But it's only a tiny part of its immense value, is the fact that it allows you to acknowledge very quickly with whomever you're talking that there is no such thing as THE future. There are many alternative possible futures, or alternative types of future out there, and that there's value then in exploring those. It then does two other things, from my point what it does one other thing, and then there's one step that goes beyond that. The last p, in the futures cone is the preferable or preferred future, which is a qualitative different step into the future. It says, Yes, there are all these different types of futures out there, the future is infinite, that you can explore them and there are predicted and preferable, probable, possible and preposterous and all those other ps, but then at the end of the day, the challenge for you is, what am I going to do with all that? And the first thing you do is say okay, which of those bits of the future do I like? Which of those bits in the future do I not like? And then the final step, which is little outside of the cone, but the final step is to say, Okay, now that I've worked that out, what do I need to do to make what I like happen? And what do I need to do to make what I don't like not happen? And that's why I am absolutely adamant with every conversation I have that actually venturing into the future, or using the futures cone is not about the future at all. Really, the future is a tool you're using to help you make better decisions today
Peter Hayward
That's right. We are presentists not futurists
Charles Brass
Exactly what we're presentists. But we're presentists who have spent time both exploring the past, because in fact, that's the first step, the first step is to understand how the past brought us to the present. And then the second step is to say the future is out there. And it is variable, it is inherently uncertain. But that doesn't mean anything goes. There are options out there for you to choose between. And then finally, you make some choice among those options and decide what you're going to do today.
Peter Hayward
Yes Wendell Bell certainly used to say that the point of the future is it makes the consequences of our actions matter. In other words, it makes the connection between the things I do now or don't do and the futures I want to I don't want. It actually draws those into, into some sort of correlation. And that he said was people had not necessarily made that connection between the futures they fear in the futures they wish, and the decisions they make, that they actually do, they actually do link up.
Charles Brass
And I actually think that's part of the reason why many people are scared off by futurists, because they think they're going to be wandering off into some meaningless esoteric space. Whereas in fact, good futurists and you just mentioned Wendell Bell know that the whole point is grounding it back in the present.
Peter Hayward
So you talked about the willingness of people to take it seriously, and as you say, to, to sit still long enough to want to do something about it? I mean, what is it? What's been the guiding idea of how we get people to want to do something about the future?
Charles Brass
Well, they actually don't think that's difficult. I don't think that's difficult at all. Really, there is a difficulty in getting people to pay someone for that. And most, most, if not everybody in the world needs to actually attract some income in order to be able to live in the world. Even at dinner party conversations, the thing might wander off into other territories. But eventually if you stay in the dinner party conversation long enough, you can get people to, to sit down and to start exploring alternative futures. I'm finding that particularly true in this time of COVID 19. We have as a species, not just as Australians, but as a species become much more aware that not only is the future unpredictable, but once you're in the middle of the sort of turbulence that we're in now, there are so many possibilities out there. Everybody acknowledges there are so many possibilities out there, that it doesn't take long to get people starting to engage with those possibilities. One of the delights for me of the last little while is the way we've operated the futures foundation that I've been part of. I. .t's been for the most part, some people will know it has a bit of a history. But for the most part, it's been viable enough to keep itself moving along comfortably in the world, which means that I've had the privilege of having all sorts of conversations with all sorts of people exploring all sorts of futures, just because that's what people are interested in. And just enough of those have actually turned into useful productive foresight work, that I've had enough income to keep a roof over my head. But I genuinely believe that it is a delight and a privilege to be in possession of some of the tools, techniques and understandings that I've got through my foresight work, that I can actually help anybody who is in any way vaguely uncertain about the future become a little more certain about that. I don't think that's actually difficult.
Peter Hayward
The thing about COVID is that we've seen a very wide disparity of the ways people do respond, given uncertainty. And we see people who respond quickly and swiftly and we see people who prevaricate or tell outright fairy stories rather than face up to a situation.
Charles Brass
And that's absolutely where the value of a good futurist or foresight practitioner comes in.. Both calling that out when they see it, and being able to demonstrate that there are more robust, more useful, more credible ways of engaging with the future. It's a travesty that some of the political leaders in most countries don't have connection to the sorts of futures and foresight thinking that would prevent them doing some of the fairy stories you've just described.
Peter Hayward
Thanks. Third question: the one I encourage the guests to talk about how they are making sense of the emerging futures around them, both the futures that interest them or the futures that possibly concern them, and also in terms of how far into the future or who or whose future you are kind of looking at. But how does Charles Brass sense the emerging futures around him and his family and his community again, you, you place the context where you want?
Charles Brass
Well, I, I could talk about my family. At the time that the future of work foundation was created my first two children had just been born, my third child wasn't even born, though my children are now in their early 30s, and late 20s. And one of the reasons why I decided to quit, the corporate world I was in was that having realized that there was a potential better future out there, I wanted to actually do something to create it. And I do chastise myself seriously, on a number of occasions for not having done enough in the last 30 years, because my children are going to inherit a world and I'm not sure it's a better world than the one I was fighting against the 1990. So I could spend time talking about that. But, but I'm not going to because the biggest context in which I personally operate currently, is actually the world of education. And that's a coincidence. And so I need to explain a little bit of the coincidence, it's not by design. When Jan Lee Martin created the futures foundation, her vision was to bring foresight and futures thinking into large corporations. And well, as you know, Peter, because you worked in the tax office, the tax office was one of the first large organizations that connected with the futures foundation, to get that type of thinking into the organization. That was the original vision. And Jan, and a number of people carried that forward for about 10 years or so. In the early 2000s, Jan was finding that both personally and professionally more difficult. And so we ended up merging the futures foundation into the future of work foundation and creating what is has carried on the name futures foundation. And as a part of that process, we asked the question, was that the right base for the futures foundation, or was there another base. And we decided that the, that a version of the original base of the future of work Foundation was more likely likely to be both productive and useful. And that is, the as it is now, the futures foundation is a membership organization that opens membership to anybody in Australia. If you have $195 a year, you too can join the futures foundation. And we put out all sorts of marketing things in various ways in the early 2000s. And all sorts of people and organizations came along and joined the futures foundation. And by I think, more coincidence than design, about 40% of the current members and historical members of the futures foundation have been secondary schools. It's probably not completely accidental, because much of the reason for that was around future of work, jobs and careers. So we'd already been doing in the future of work foundation, a bit of work in schools around future jobs and careers. And so a fair bit of the reason I suspect why schools joined was around that. But since then, in more recent years, there are two other reasons why schools are part of the futures foundation. One of them also has an historical as a contemporary link, and that is the Teach the Future organization that Peter Bishop has created. It's completely independent, although we're the Australian arm of teach the future, but teach the future is designed to get futures thinking and futures tools into schools. That's its aim and objective. And, in fact, to go back to Richard Slaughter, that was one of the things Richard was doing well before I knew him, and he'd had connections with various parts of Australia trying to get that stuff done in the 80s and 90s. So the idea that there are futures tools and techniques to be brought into the curriculum is something that we've brought to our education members. And the third thing that's, that's probably the most foresight related component of education interest is that since the 1990s, even state schools in Australia have been much more required to be self sustaining, and self generating entities. Once upon a time, if you were a state school, the central Department of Education handed you, your students, handed you your teachers, handed you your curriculum and said go do it. Since the 90s, that hasn't happened. Schools can now hire, do hire their own teachers, even in the education system, they are more responsible for controlling curriculum, and they're even able to do and have to do a whole lot of work to generate students. Schools, particularly in the private sector have been doing this for a long time, but also in the public sector, have been forced to ask themselves what sort of a school do we want to be in the future? And how are we marketing ourselves to the world? So these are these are the reasons perhaps why schools joined the futures Foundation. Let me go back a little and say, there's a bit of a, a honey trap in the futures Foundation. It's not really all, it's not certainly not secret but it's not all that visible. And that is that everybody who ever joins the futures foundation gets a phone call from a futurist that says, Why did you do that? Why is it that you've suddenly decided you're interested in the future? And how is it that a futurist might be able to help you? And so that's the that's the logic. So my logic for maintaining the futures foundation is that it is a vehicle for identifying what in marketing terms would be called the early adopters, and then connecting them with people who have some services to deliver on. And that's what we do. And we've been doing that for since 2002. And so now coming back to the question of context, and futures and things since 40% of our members are schools, that means a lot of work that I particularly am doing is in and around education, and schools. And I'm particularly interested in that it comes back to the whole question of family, and my own kids, because I am convinced that it is the education that we provide to our children, that is going to make the difference in the future. So I'm vitally interested in the way that education systems are currently positioning themselves, to prepare people to be leaders of the future.
Peter Hayward
So how are they How do you think they're traveling in that preparation task?
Charles Brass
Like everything else, it's mixed. There are some exemplary examples in various places, and there are some appalling examples. So that that's true of everything. And also, it's still very, very person contingent. We've learned over the 20 years, I've been doing this, that the principal in the school is a crucial factor in thw whole process. If you've got the right principal, you've got a chance that you you're going to be doing these things if you haven't got the right principal. And since principals change relatively regularly, the nature of the school can change far more quickly than we'd like to think. Yeah. So that does make a difference.
Peter Hayward
Question 4. The communication, challenge question of how does Charles Brass explain what he does to someone who doesn't necessarily understand what Charles Brass does?
Charles Brass
I have listened to and congratulations, Peter on your podcast. I've listened to them all. And I prepared for this question with a case study. I currently live in an apartment or a unit that is right next door to a 24 hour chemist. It's one of the few 24 hour chemists in the area. And it's got a nice little niche model as a 24 hour chemist. Almost everybody in my area knows that because it's open 24 hours a day. About four or five years ago, a large warehouse space about 150 meters from this chemist became available and the wonderful in inverted commas franchise Chemist Warehouse bought this space and converted into a Chemist Warehouse. And it didn't take much of a futurist to recognize this was going to have a bit of a potential impact on the area. And what I did actually, there's a little amount of choreography in this, I was in the chemist next door, picking up a prescription for my wife. And because when you pick up a prescription for someone, the agent has to provide their name and address on the bottom of the prescription form, the woman asked me for my name and address, and I pulled out a business card, and my business card for 20 years of said futurist on it. I pulled out my business card, and I gave it to her, I know this is going to happen because it happens every time. In parenthesis, it's one reason why I never tell anybody when I travel internationally that I'm a futurist. Because I never get through immigration and customs, because they all want to talk about it. So I handed over my card, and she read my name, and she read futurist. And she said, what does that mean? And I said, Well, what that means is if anybody's got any doubt, or uncertainty or is worried about the future; futurists are people who know how to help people through that process, and she took me aside and said, we're a bit worried about what this Chemist Warehouse is going to mean for us. And I said, I'm not surprised at that. And what I would do is sit down and talk you through that process. And so she came into my lounge room one day with her partner, and we sat down and we started talking. And we've been we've worked together for about two years, she doesn't need me anymore. She's got herself here, well in place. She will we've agreed in 2015 in 2025 if she's still running the business, and she's not sure she will be, she's going to engage me again, I'm going to go back through a process of formal process and have a look. But we sat down and what and I basically said, What is it you're worried about? And we went from there? And that is exactly how I go about everything I do. It goes back to my comment about you join the futures Foundation, I'm very likely to be the person who gives you a call. Why did you do that? Why are you interested in the future? And my argument would be if, as a futurist, you can't answer that question in a useful way that you are not a particularly competent futurist.
Peter Hayward
Now, it's a classic, you would have heard again, so many of the guests have said you start the conversation where people are exactly, you start with the issues that they have, and you go from there.
Charles Brass
Which, incidentally, is why I consider the tools and techniques that futurists are taught are incredibly important. But they're not that important that the client needs to know about. Yeah, they're important that the futurist knows about them. And every now and again, it's useful to tell the client about them, particularly if that client is going to carry on using these tools in the whatever their setting is, it's useful if they know what they are, and they have some way of thinking about them. So towards the back end of a project, you might be saying to someone, well, these are the sorts of questions or the sorts of things you want to keep asking yourself as you go along. But I've never, never one who no one would ever know that I had a tool in my toolkit in the conversation, I'm rattling the tools in my head until they until they become necessary. And that is not until a long way down the road.
Peter Hayward
We are at question five. So have you got a sense, what you want to talk about?
Charles Brass
Yes, I have. It has struck me for some time that the most difficult challenges around the future are confronting what, Sohail Inayatullah and others who use Casual Layered Analysis would be the deepest levels. The worldviews that people that we are immersed in that old adage about don't ask a fish about water, they have no idea what water is. The biggest challenges are the deep worldviews that we take for granted. And it strikes me that there are two planes on which those worldviews currently require the most challenge. The first is our relationship with the natural world. This is manifesting in what we currently talk about as climate change or species extinction or whatever. But it's it's the relationship between human beings and the planet that nurtures and harbors us for the last four or 5 billion years. It's clear that we have allowed ourselves to operate in a way that is increasingly inconsistent with the operating principles of that underlying natural world. And we need to do something about that. I'm actually, to be honest, I'm less worried about that than I am about the second thing I'm going to talk about, because one thing I and everybody else knows is the natural world doesn't give too much of a damn about us. If we stuff up, it'll just go on happily and create something else. So if we're too stupid to fix our relationship, our underlying relationship with the planet, well, that's bad luck for us. It doesn't affect the planet. But the one that has consumed me and does bother me enormously, goes right back to the beginning for me to the future of work of jobs, which is, in fact, in my reading of it, not about work and jobs at all. It's about money. It's about our relationship with money, wealth, and value. We have allowed ourselves to create a global economic system that believes that fundamentally, the way in which ordinary, quote unquote, ordinary everyday people can connect with wealth and value is through having, quote, unquote, a job through which they earn income, and then they spend that income. And that's what makes the economy go around and around. We have, we are so immersed in that way of thinking that it is almost impossible for us to imagine any other way. At the same time as that way of thinking that we are immersed in is being destroyed by us. So we are creating technology now, that means we don't need people to do stuff, we need fewer and fewer people to do stuff. The technology that we now have means most of the stuff that needs doing can be done by technology, and done cheaper and more effectively. And so those in charge of wanting stuff done, deliberately and quite intelligently are getting rid of people wherever they possibly can. At the same time, as our economic system says the only way we can operate is if people have access through a job to that wealth. So I'm profoundly interested in the question of whether there are other ways of conceiving our relationship with wealth, money and value that allow the whole world to participate meaningfully, that are based around that conventional economic notion. And that's what consumes me most of all, and having been thinking about it for the last 20 or 30 years, I'm convinced there are other ways of doing this. I'm mildly confident, well, no, I'm very confident that their current COVID-19 experience is causing us to think about those ways. I'm mildly confident that it might actually that we might find some change in the way we operate that might mean we might actually create systems that allow people to participate in ways that they're currently being excluded from participating. That's the thing that engages me most in the world. And I'm happy to spend as much time as you and your audience want to have to talk about what those alternatives might be and what they might look like and what we might need to do to make them happen.
Peter Hayward
Well, I mean, you could, you could certainly lay out in terms of the cone, you could certainly lay out some of the possible futures and maybe even probably good to hear where you put your stick in the ground to talk about preferred
Charles Brass
Well okay, in terms of alternatives, there is no doubt that we could create a world we could maintain a world in which everybody has a job. If we wanted one, we could create an economic system that gave everybody a job, whether it be a w well paid forget about whether it's well paying or meaningful or whatever, but we could give them a job. And they could then have income and they could spend it in the world, we could construct a world that look like that. When Barry Jones wrote Sleepers Wake in 1982 he pointed out that if we wanted to go to full employment, all we would have to do is to cut off the reticulated water system in Melbourne. And then everybody would be spending their day walking to Sugar Loaf reservoir or wherever to get water out and bring it home And if we wanted to pay them for that they didn't even have meaningful income for doing that. Now that's a possibility. We could do that if we wanted to, I suspect, for a whole host of reasons, we don't want to do that anymore. I know that no business entrepreneur wants to do that anymore. If you're running a business, what you want to do is to produce your widgets as cheaply as efficiently and as quality a product as you possibly can. And invariably, that's increasingly involving technology because technology is both cheap and more reliable than human beings. So we certainly could go back to creating a world like that ; we could even go back to a world without money if we really wanted to own and there was a time when money didn't exist, and people shared things around in all sorts of ways. So there are a variety of ways in which we could operate. I ask the question, what's a way in which we would like to operate. And here's how I frame it. What I would say is that what we have, as human beings have demonstrated, over, particularly the last five or ten thousand years of our history, which is not all of our history, but it's the most significant part of our history, we've demonstrated that we human beings have incredible capacity to create wealth and value and meaning for us as human beings. The mere fact that Peter and I can have this conversation today, I don't even know where Peter is, he doesn't know where I am, it's being conducted over a medium that both neither of us understand well enough to be able to create. But it's something that human beings have collectively created. And the number of people involved in making this happen is just phenomenal. So human capacity to create wealth and value. Let me just pause and say sometimes to the detriment of the rest of the planet. So I want to acknowledge that but leaving that out for a minute,. Human capacity to create wealth and value is remarkable. What we have not done particularly well is worked out how to distribute that wealth and value. And the current method of distribution, which essentially is the job seems to me to be dead, dying, and I would say Good riddance. So we need to find another way to do that distribution. And my preferred way of that distribution is to think about it by nature of a community dividend, or a citizen dividend. If you own shares in a corporation that is creating value, you get shares, your shares in that Corporation earn you a dividend, you get a representative proportion of the wealth and value that is created in the form of a dividend. Australia creates wealth and value. It is quite possible that that wealth and value could be distributed to Australians in the form of a community dividend. Some people call this a universal basic income. I don't like the phrase, I prefer citizen dividend, social dividend or something. But the idea is that the wealth that is created in society is distributed to those who have helped create it. And that strikes me as a model of the world. I'd like to live in
Peter Hayward
That's the Mondragon model that operates in Basque, Spain.
Charles Brass
It's the model on which Mondragon was based when it was created. But Mondragon has discovered and this is the challenge for any of us who want to do this, that the bigger you get, the harder it is to maintain that model. And Mondragon is now huge. And there are a number of people in around the Mondragon model who are questioning whether it is still maintaining its original conception of those values. But that certainly is absolutely the way Mondragon was originally created.
Peter Hayward
So there might be a scale issue that Mondragon has bumped into that that the actual Mondragon type, community share dividend model, a bit like the Athenian state, that there's a particular size that once you get to it, you have to break up.
Charles Brass
I would agree with that entirely. It's one reason why I haven't been welcomed inside large corporations as a futurist for quite a while. When they make the mistake of inviting me and I tell them what to do is break themselves up and they don't like that very much.
Peter Hayward
All right, Charles, look, I think I will wrap the interview there. Thank you very, very much for taking some time out to talk to the future pod community. And I'll also acknowledge that you have been probably our earliest future pod patron. So again, thank you for that as well.
Charles Brass
Well, it's a pleasure. Congratulations to you on supporting this process. I also, as part of this I've probably got into the concept of foresight before you And I've watched your journey through this process, particularly since Swinburne and congratulations on maintaining your connection to that community in very innovative ways. Despite the fact that the university wasn't prepared to recognize the value inside the university. You've continued magnificently outside to you and your colleagues exceptionally well done. Thanks.
Peter Hayward
This has been another production from future pod. Future pod is a not for profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support each pod, 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.