EP 114: Dancing with Gravity - Thomas Mengel

 
 

Dr Thomas Mengel is Professor of Leadership Studies at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. He holds degrees in theology, adult education, history, and computer science. He has worked and consulted in project management and leadership in Europe, Asia, and North America, and is also a professional futurist and writer. He is a proud member of APF, WFSF, WFS, and ILA, and he has published widely in academic journals, books, and in magazines across various disciplines and fields. Most recently (July 2021), he has edited and co-authored Leadership for the Future: Lessons from the Past, Current Approaches, and Future Insights. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. The book has been featured on the publisher’s Books-in-Focus website.

Interviewed by: Peter Hayward

More about Thomas

References

1) My Story

2) Frameworks

  • Randall, William L. (2019). In Our Stories Lies Our Strength: Aging, Spirituality, and Narrative. Independently published, Kindle Direct Publishing - https://www.williamlrandall.com/books.html

  • Christophilopoulos, Epaminondas (2021). Special Relativity Theory Expands the Futures Cone’s Conceptualisation of the Futures and The Pasts. Journal of Futures Studies, 2021, Vol. 26(1) 83–90

  • Mengel, Thomas (2021). Exploring meaningful futures together – An integrative approach to futures and values-orientation in theory and practice. Mengel, T. (2021; ed.) Leadership for the Future: Lessons from the Past, Current Approaches, and Future Insights. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 351-366.

  • Denning, Stephen (2005). The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling. Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative. Jossey-Bass.

  • Denning, Stephen (2004). Squirrel Inc. A Fable of Leadership Through Storytelling. Jossey-Bass.

  • Milojević, Ivana (2021). COVID-19 and Pandemic Preparedness: Foresight Narratives and Public Sector Response. Journal of Futures Studies. 2021, Vol. 26(1) 1–18

  • Mengel, Thomas (2021 ed.). Values-Oriented Leadership – Discovering meaning, exploring options, realizing values. Mengel, T. (2021; ed.)  Leadership for the Future: Lessons from the Past, Current Approaches, and Future Insights. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 68-86.

  • Mengel. Thomas, & Stewart, Mary (2021; eds). Practicing Gratitude. Independently published, Kindle Direct Publishing - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09GZPV1XQ

3) Futures I pay attention to:

4) How do I explain what I do

  • Gidley, Jennifer (2017). The Future: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

  • Slaughter, Richard & Hines, Andy (2020). The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies (available from https://www.apf.org/page/Publications) 

  • Robinson, Kim S. (2020 a). Ministry for the Future: A Novel. Orbit.

5) The Book “Leadership for the Future: Lessons from the Past, Current Approaches, and Future Insights”:

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 Dr. Thomas Mengel. Thomas is professor of Leadership Studies at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. He holds degrees in theology, adult education, history and computer science. He has worked and consulted in project management and leadership in Europe, Asia, and North America. He is a proud member of the Association of Professional Futurists, the World Futures Studies Federation, and the World Future Society. And he's published widely in academic journals, books and in magazines across various disciplines and fields. In July, this year, he edited and co-authored Leadership for the Future: Lessons from the past, Current approaches and Future insights. Welcome to Futurepod. Thomas.

 

Thomas Mengel 

Thank you very much, Peter. Thank you for having me.

 

Peter Hayward 

Pleasure. So Thomas, you've said you have listened to FuturePod. So you know, the first question is the one that everyone enjoys, which is their story. So what is the Thomas Mengel story? How did you become a member of the futures and foresight community?

 

Thomas Mengel 

Yeah, right. Aren't we all story creatures? On the other hand, we don’t know what the story is until the story is over. One of my teachers was Auschwitz survivor, Viktor Frankl. He said that, one’s life’s ultimate meaning can only be grasped on one's deathbed, in hindsight. Until then, I'm hoping and thinking that twists, turns and surprises can still change the story. A colleague of mine in Fredericton, he is a gerontologist, Bill Randall, he talks and writes about what he calls restorying your life. And he encourages everyone, to start the project at any point of one's life, the project of restorYing. So what I can do now is just to tell you parts of my story, how I currently see them, particularly in the context of my place in future studies, and how I got here,

 

Peter Hayward 

One of the things that I've noticed in the podcasts is that I've never thought about how significant it is for people to actually be able to tell your story, as opposed to a lived internal monologue, to actually externalize and put your story in a kind of chronology or logic to another person. And I have actually noticed that for some of the guests, they often explained who they are, where they've come from, as a kind of active process. Is there kind of this notion of restoration as to how you want to tell your story of where you're from?

 

Thomas Mengel 

I think it is. The way everyone tells their story, I think and I've experienced, differs from time to time. Now if it changes all the time, then you're probably suffering from some sort of personal problem, but we change the story whenever we change. I use to start from where I am right now, in the context of futures studies. The most recent thing that I've done, together with others, is publishing that book Leadership for the Future, just in July. That's probably what but also brought me to your attention. So how did I get to publishing this book? That's probably really what you're after. You already mentioned, what my my background is in terms of being an historian, computer scientist, theologian, educator. I've managed businesses, created businesses, consulted businesses. I write a lot, I read even more. For the past 16 years, I have been a professor at the University of New Brunswick, at the Leadership School there, and that will be my job for another good year. One of the perks of being a professor is it actually allows you to do all kinds of things that you would not be able to do in any one other job. The question ‘what does the future hold?’ was always on my mind. In theology, we studied eschatology, the science of last things, the final development of mankind, the end of times, and what might that look like? There are all kinds of different scenarios – of course, they are not called that in the scriptures, and every religion presents their own images. So that that certainly was there right in the beginning of my education. In history, among other things, you look at dreams, visions and values that made people do what they did, and motivated them to move forward. Finally, education and computer science have driven me to imagine what world we want and how to get there. So it all kind of comes together in an interdisciplinary way. Of course, when you live through that, when you study it, and you ask those questions, you sometimes don't see those connections. That's part of what I said earlier: the picture becomes clearer in hindsight,

 

Peter Hayward 

There's been quite a few guests who have trained in theology, or studied it before they've come to futures. And for me theology, apart from the belief side is also a strong philosophical basis to how we reason both in terms of logic and also the ethics and morals of action

 

Thomas Mengel 

It certainly is. And it also is a potential trap in terms of not just bases, but also biases. When I studied theology. I was a liberal, progressive Catholic, I went through all kinds of different stages. I would call myself now a spiritual atheist or a progressive Christian. Being based on Christian values, but without the divine part of it. It's an important part. But it was also an important part for me to realize how changing your belief system can open you up for very different kinds of perspectives and make you more careful not to get stuck in one particular philosophical basis. True. Anyway. In addition to all that, there's the personal side. I grew up in Germany. One of the stereotypes about Germans is that they're very organized and love to plan. And I'm no exception to that. I have created my own vision and mission documents and plans, my life plans in my 20s and 30s. That has resulted in strategic plans stretching over 50 years. I know some people laugh about that and just can't understand it. When I tell my students, they say ‘no, I don't want to plan my life, I can't look 10 years into the future.’ They have a hard time connecting with that. But that's where I come from.

 

Peter Hayward 

There's this notion of serendipity and emergence, and the notion of the planned and, you know, I suppose you'd say directed, and it's an interesting notion that people think they're either-or rather than actually the two can quite happily coexist.

 

Thomas Mengel 

Exactly, exactly. I also think, it takes some time to realize. At the beginning I was more on the planning side, and the older I get, the more mature, the more people I meet, the more comfortable I am with the attitude ‘let's just see’. But I'm a firm believer in what you see, the opportunities that you see, are very much affected by what you think about and plan beforehand. If you don't open yourself up in terms of your plans, you won't see certain things. And I've seen many people who just say ‘I go with the flow’, and they just go with the flow that they are immediately in so in the middle of the river. They are in that stream, and they're struggling to survive, being driven in the stream, they don't see the big picture. They don't see how to get out of that stream. So you need both. I think you're totally right about that.

 

Peter Hayward 

I think it was Ted Williams, the baseball player, who said ‘the harder I work the luckier I get.’ It’s that notion of the more you work the more emergence can seem to be providential.

 

Thomas Mengel 

Right. Talking about the sport analogy, the Canadian ice hockey player, Gretzky, is quoted for saying that a good player doesn't follow the puck or doesn't go where the puck is, he goes where the puck will be. You need both. That brings me back to how I got into the futures studies field. And that was when, as a leadership scholar and educator, I've realized that by the time that the students that I work with will graduate and increasingly take on leadership responsibility, the world will likely be very different. Exponential changes currently disrupt almost everything everywhere. So when I thought about that, I started to search for forward-looking and futures-ready approaches of leadership. Currently leadership is still very much focused on what might help now or on what did help in the past. But again, with the changes going on, that's just trying to play catch up all the time. It's about five to six years ago that I started to really explore and engage in the foresight and futures studies field and networks. Peter Bishop was an early mentor, when I started introducing basic futures studies approaches to my students. Then I started writing and publishing at the intersection of leadership and future studies. And I worked with colleagues globally to publish Leadership for the Future as the final step of that.

 

Peter Hayward 

So what is the intersection and relationship of leadership to foresight?

 

Thomas Mengel 

Is there just one intersection? For me, it was what I've just explained in terms of my story. I came from all kinds of backgrounds and ended up in leadership development, teaching leadership, and leadership research. And I had to add something to it that made looking into the future, looking forward, more systematic, overcoming basically this idea of, if we look into the future, we're just using a crystal ball, which of course doesn’t exist. Or we will just look at trends and just project them into the future. We know in futures studies, these are just very narrow perspectives of what we all look at. So the intersection of leadership and the future, in my words would be that leadership can be described as helping organizations, helping each other, to move from where you are to where you want to be. This is always a forward-looking, visionary kind of activity. And using the frameworks, tools and approaches of futures studies just makes sense. To base your looking-forward onto something methodical, it's not using a crystal ball. There is a methodology, there's a framework, there's an ontology, epistemology. There are different ones, of course. Different people use different ones, but you can argue about those things. And you have a foundation, a knowledge base, that helps leadership educators and leadership practitioners to be systematic about moving from where they are to where they want to be.

 

Peter Hayward 

Is there a tension to the history side of it, in other words, you talk about being forward facing in terms of where we wish to go and, and where we are? Obviously, history is the other part of it, because to some extent, where we are is how we lived previously. How does leadership do the learning side, the double loop and triple loop learning to understand that where I am is, to some extent, the product of how I lived previously?

 

Thomas Mengel 

it is certainly related to that, but I would be very careful to say that everything is kind of limited by where we come from. It is certainly informed by where we come from, but we have all kinds of opportunities to acknowledge where we come from and still distance ourselves in some way. Coming back to Frankl who said, that while we all are constrained by gravity, when when we walk, when we move – and a major part of living is moving, a major part of leadership is moving – we are limited or affected by gravity, but we can still hop and dance, we can fly into space. The analogy to that would be to say, it's very good and important to know your history. To some extent, we're still hoping that by understanding where we come from, by understanding our history, we might be more innovative and make new mistakes rather than repeating old ones. So it is important to understand where you come from, that you understand your identity, the factors that forge your way, your story. But it also is important to understand that the story is open, like the future is open. So history is important. I really am glad that I have history as one of my backgrounds, as one of my areas of expertise. But I also have experienced how these kinds of histories can be overcome. When they start to burden and to limit us, they can be opened up. I don't know whether that fully answers your question. History is important. But looking backwards is not the only thing. Scharmer has said that in the light of exponential change and the challenges that we currently face, and in the future, there’re really three different ways we can respond. We can try to paddle back backwards to the alleged good old days. We can try to muddle through by putting our eyes on the road and by trying to solve the problems in the present one by one. And/or –I wouldn't just say ‘or’, I think you need all three of those in your in your toolbox – the major framework for me has become to be able to leap forward, to look forward and to see, based on what you have experienced in the past, based on living with current challenges and seeing what options are there to open this up, what may be dancing moves to overcome gravity, or what might be a way to fly above and see the bigger picture.

 

Peter Hayward 

So second question, we've already ranged over about seven or eight possible frames. But as you know, question two, I like the guests to explain a framework, philosophy, approach, stance to the listeners that is central to how they do their work. So what do you want to talk to the listeners about?

 

Thomas Mengel 

Yeah, well, as you as you probably already can tell, storytelling, story reading, narratives are very important to me. Bill Randall’s most recent book was In our Stories lie our Strengths. So storytelling, narratives, creating narratives, understanding and interpreting narratives of others, are really important to me. And I think they are important for co-creating a meaningful future that we are aiming for. That's one of the aims of people working in the futures field. Narratives that we create for various scenarios that we imagine that we develop with others for various potential and sometimes even preposterous futures are key to imagining what preferred futures might look like. So these kind of things go hand in hand with storytelling and story reading. Developing stories with each other are number one, but they go hand in hand with scenarios and the idea of a futures cones. You mentioned something earlier, Peter, which I really liked, and which recently has been discussed in various presentations and writings and that is adding to the futures cone perspective by including the past and the present. So you know, this back and forth, the interrelationship between things in the past and in the present, and in the future. In the book, in one of my chapters, I actually call the futures cone a futures beam to highlight that it's something that we can switch on off. It's not something that is there in terms of reality necessarily. It's a tool to look into the futures. So when we do that and identify different kinds of ideas and scenarios, that will help us create stories around what might be, what do we want to do? So, foresight, anticipation, projection, imagination, all of that, allows us to picture what might be possible in various futures. And narratives help us identify and develop those scenarios. And then, of course, it's not a solitary process. It's highly participatory process.

 

Peter Hayward 

Yeah. Storytelling is talked about with anthropologists and brain scientists. They think the social aspect of storytelling was one of the major factors for the actual construction of the brain. Are we as a species, naturally good storytellers? Or are there things that we maybe should do to become better storytellers for what you're talking about?

 

Thomas Mengel 

That's an exciting question. Many of us are, but many of us have to learn it. The first time I started thinking about that was in the context of leadership. I'm just looking at my bookshelf and there're a couple of volumes that have to do with that. Denning was one of the authors who talked about leaders as storytellers. And the idea behind that was that we cannot excite people by simple facts. The facts that we need them to understand and to base their decision making on have to put into a story that's meaningful to the people that we want to be moved by the story. The pandemic is a case in point in a lot of ways. Public policy, health measures, resistance and different waves and how we deal with those. The lockdowns and the measures around that are directly related to the narratives that have been used or not been used to convince people to do what needed to be done from the perspective of the experts. So experts are not necessarily good at storytelling. They're good at fact finding,

 

Peter Hayward 

What are the essences of telling stories that move people? I mean, you've said it's not facts. So it's something else in the story that causes people to pay attention and get excited. What is the thing that has to be injected into the process?

 

Thomas Mengel 

Yeah, that is a good question. If you ask different people there might be different answers. But if you look at stories that work, in the in the sense of literary stories, novels, bestsellers, there is a compelling mix of a set of characters that you can identify with, those characters experience some sort of challenge or a set of challenges that are exciting to follow. And then you see how they deal with that, how they overcome those challenges. The hero's story is a typical pattern, but it's just one. If you look at the more literary art of writing, it's not necessarily the same kind of story arc that follows a simple pattern that is successful. The Art of writing also has to do with drawing people in at the moment, you're catching what they deal with in their thinking and feeling now, then slowly, you're guiding them to follow the development of a certain character of a certain plot.

 

Peter Hayward 

There's an aspect of the story we tell ourselves of who we are, which is I think, different to what you're talking about, which is externalizing and telling story for people to identify with and be part of. I'm particularly aware of Frankl's work and, and his recognition of the work in the prison camps about the necessity to do good, to be altruistic, as a futures directed strategy as the people who just cared for people, who seem to manage the process better than people who look for salvation at Christmas time or the next year or the next year.

 

Thomas Mengel 

Yeah, you're totally right. In one of my chapters, I spend a lot of time describing and harvesting Frankl's thoughts. I explore how they can play out in leadership, how they affect or inform the futures studies work that I do. Frankl found that you have to find something in life beyond just yourself. He identifies three different dimensions of discovering meaning of discovering values that that move your life forward. First, you're finding something in your work, which is meaningful to you doing something that is meaningful. That can be as simple as producing something that is of meaning to you. So if you love pieces of art than you, you produce pieces of art, if you are a carpenter, then producing a piece of woodwork that is functional, and aesthetic is meaningful, and so forth. And the second dimension is experiencing something as meaningful. The simple example is love. So the first one in general Frankl often calls the dimension of work, doing something meaningful. The second one he summarizes by saying love, but it's really more. In the sense of workplace leadership it is finding oneself in relationships, that one experiences as meaningful, creating meaningful relationships. For some people, it's a relationship with nature, experiencing a beautiful sunset, a mountain range, being on the walk or hike and those kinds of things. And the third one, and probably the most difficult one to translate from where he was originally coming from, being a psychiatrist and psychologist, is what he calls attitudinal values. These values come to the forefront, when you can't do or experience anything meaningful anymore. The typical example is somebody who is terminally ill, who can't move anymore and can't really relate to people. But they can still develop different attitudes. Frankl found that some people are able to develop a meaningful attitude to life, for example, an attitude for gratitude, not gratitude for the situation that they are in, but gratitude for something else, or they develop a way to appreciate the life they probably had before, and so forth is and there's tons of examples for that. That's the third dimension, and in the context of work and leadership some colleagues and I found that's a good dimension to translate into experiencing a crisis that that you find yourself in during all those exponential changes and  challenges that we can only overcome to some extent, if we find a way to reinterpret them. Others have called that ‘reframing’. And so those three dimensions are important, and they become important elements of story. So the story about what I do, the story about who I do it with, and the story about what I think about what I'm doing and why, how it makes sense, even in the light of, of challenges.

 

Peter Hayward 

Thanks, Thomas. Third question, Thomas Mengel, human being, what are the futures that you're sensing around you, that get you excited, that have your attention, that have you thinking? And what are the emerging things around you that possibly give you pause? And maybe even give you a concern? What are you paying attention to?

 

Thomas Mengel 

I have to come back to narratives. I just love narratives. I try to read as much as I can about different narratives and scenarios being explored. How do these inform and influence the world how I see it and that I live in? And, of course, I've been in higher education now for 16 years. So I'm extremely interested in where higher education is going and how does its practice resist certain developments that to me are very clear. During the pandemic it was it is really interesting to observe the majority of people who were saying personal education is the way to go, just let's stay away from online learning this is just out of the can education and it lacks personal relationships. All of them all of a sudden had to switch to online learning. All of a sudden online learning was no longer that outlier, either being very positively looked at as the technological future of learning, or very negatively looked at as something that I, as an educator many don't want to have anything to do with. I've always enjoyed online learning I did most of my computer science degree through distance learning. I've learned to appreciate the the positive things of that. So it was interesting to see that change. Now one of the frustrating things is to see that we are bouncing back or bouncing forward from the pandemic, it really is often a bouncing back. Now that we can open up everything again, let's move back to how we did things before, rather than saying, Okay, how can we integrate what we've done before and what really worked well into something that we now have been pushed to deal with, and sort of find a symbiosis, that really works. So that's something that I'm extremely interested in. But that also frustrates me because I can see people just paddling backwards, rather than surfing the waves of chaos and then moving forward

 

Peter Hayward 

What is the next hybrid of physical and online that you think could be starting?

 

Thomas Mengel 

Well, yeah, there's a couple of things that I think will work together and that we already started working on. I've actually described that in more detail in a recent essay that was published in Human Futures just this past August. In this essay I imagined where higher education might go in 20 years. Increasing virtualization, increasing elements of play and gaming, highly dynamic interconnected worlds of learning will certainly disrupt our still strong focus on traditional and unsustainable brick and mortar educational institutions. I mean, we know there's millions of professors doing the same things at hundreds of thousands of different locations. For example, I might be good at some things. But in a basic education, and in my lectures and seminars, I have to do all the things that students could probably get in a much better quality somewhere else. Some students already move into that direction. They pick and choose accordingly. And I've heard from students say, why is somebody making me sit in a lecture that I can get in a much more engaging way without for free from one of the top professors at another university? Doesn't have to be Harvard, but there are a couple of really good colleagues doing fantastic work. But right now, it's almost unthinkable beyond having a little section in my lecture where I show external videos. But it's unthinkable to many at this point, still, to have that interconnectedness, that fluidity and openness even across different campuses of the same university. Sometimes even for one student to move from one campus to the other, to take a program or course at the other campus. For some of my colleagues that's unthinkable. ‘Oh, no, no, no,’ they say, ‘he didn't do x or he didn't study y the way that I teach it, so I can’t give him credit for that. We have to get away from that. Education in the future will be much more student centered. We talk about student centeredness, but we are far from where it needs to go. It has to include those technological features that are developing: virtual reality, gaming, the ability to visit places that we don't have to fly to. There's marvelous programs where you can visit most museums and do virtual walk arounds in those museums. They don't fully replace the in-person experience, but just imagine what they could do to people who would never be able to afford to travel to those places.

 

Peter Hayward 

Maybe we don't need as many universities delivering roughly the same thing maybe we need a lot less.

 

Thomas Mengel 

Of course! If you look at any kind of University, mine is no exception, there is a mandate for the administrators to keep the institution going and to not ask the question ‘might we be superfluous or might we be better off merging some of the institution?’ You know, in our province, we have 750,000 people living and we have more than 10 different higher education institutions.

 

Peter Hayward 

Thanks, Thomas. Question four, the communication question. One that's always of interest to people who are starting out in the field. How do you explain what you do to people who don't necessarily understand what it is that you do?

 

Thomas Mengel 

Yeah. Well, you know, as a professor of Leadership Studies, I'm really used to people wondering about what it is I really do. Both my parents, who have passed away, had difficulties explaining to others what I was doing. And all that was important to my father, really, was what he probably shared with anyone who would listen, that his son was professor. Enough said, he didn’t have to explain any further. His son is a professor. So that was good enough. But seriously, since I added that label ‘futurist’ to my professional signature and when asked by people ‘what do you mean by that?’ I tell them that I read and write stories about the futures. And I make a point to say, yes, it's futures, plural. And then we have a conversation. I tell them my story, just like I did in our conversation today and about my reading and writing about the futures. And I think they get that for me it's about storytelling narratives scenarios, about imagining what the future might look like. And in the course that I just developed and taught for the first time over the summer Foresight and Leadership, I really enjoyed that a third of the reading – I use the Introduction by Giddley, I use the Knowledge Base by Slaughter and Hines, and the third part was a big major novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, the Ministry for the Future  that that just came out. I was curious how students would take that: Would they take it seriously? Would they enjoy that? And, you know, the students that I heard from, that gave me feedback on that, they said, they really enjoyed that, because all of a sudden, the material that they read in the textbooks, and the methodology and the frameworks and in the sometimes difficult to read chapters in the Knowledge Base, all of a sudden made sense to them. Robinson has made a good point on describing not the faraway future, like he's done in many of his other novels, but to look at something that is about to happen. And the book just came out, and all of a sudden, we had fires everywhere, we had floods everywhere. So people could directly relate to that. And it's, it's fantastic, because it's a narrative about what somebody else imagines how the future can pan out. And he draws it out a couple of decades and imagines how institutions might deal with it, how the world economy might respond to that. Those are very impressive, compelling examples of what we do at least what I do in terms of my work in that field.

 

Peter Hayward 

Thanks, Thomas. So onto the last question. Love to hear some more about the book, published in July this year.

 

Thomas Mengel 

Yeah, yeah. About two and a half years ago, I pitched the project to a publisher. And I didn’t want to do it all alone. I wanted to have different perspectives included and they jumped on it. So we started this process using my networks, all those different futures and leadership organizations, and people responded. We ended up with 20 authors from around the globe who present, explore and discuss different approaches from multidisciplinary, multicultural and planetary perspectives for the 21st century. They embrace a variety of diverse values, cognitive maps, definitions, framework, so it's not following one particular epistemology or ontology. I think every author brings in some of their own, which I really enjoyed, which I think is an important part of it. Is it enough diversity? I think you can never have enough, but at some point you just need to decide to stop here, to put it out there. Then somebody else will bring it to the next level. You need to let it go. That's also part of what we do, being able to let go and then let it develop further with the help of others. And so it's a mixture also of focus on the practice of leadership for the future including practical guidelines. But also some more theoretical frameworks and approaches. I think you already mentioned the subtitle, which is giving the overall summary: Lessons from the Past, Current Approaches, and Future Insights. The Future Insights I wasn't extremely happy about at first. The publisher just wanted me to shorten the subtitle. I wanted to include something like ‘insights from future studies and foresight’. But that just became too long. So Future Insights it became, and I could live with that. So in the first part, we describe the development of leadership theory models, and try to harvest lessons from the past that may inform leadership models that are futures ready. We look at the research about different approaches to leadership, and then try to take it from there. The second part explores what I call the ‘value shift’ in current approaches of leadership, where all of a sudden different values move into the foreground and have contributed to what I call an ‘equalization of leadership’ both in theory and practice. And in the third part, that's really where we draw from the field of futures studies and foresight to present and explore different approaches for what leadership in and for the future might look like.

 

Peter Hayward 

What was the most surprising future insight?

 

Thomas Mengel 

What really was surprising to me? There was a bit of anxiety at the beginning: How different will everything be? And how will I put that all together in one book? I envisioned a book that kind of presents a story with an arc so that people keep on reading. Although this is not a book that you necessarily read from the from cover to cover, but there should be a story arc. And surprising to me was that it was not that difficult. It was really still making sense at the end. The final chapter is about co-creating meaningful futures together. And that was not something where I had to twist arms or anything. It just naturally flowed out of what the different authors focused on. I then thought maybe that's wishful thinking of the editor. But that's part of the feedback that I got from from co-authors too. After they read the whole book some said that  it was really amazing to see how everything fits together. It's not a complete mosaic though. There are so many pieces missing and that we could have added if we had kept on writing. That was one of the surprising pieces that it made sense at the end. It flowed together well. I'm tooting my own horn here but that was one of the surprises in terms of the content. I think if you read up on what futures studies currently is doing and producing – and it’s a very exciting field but it's a field where you're still almost know most of the players and you can still somewhat follow what they write about – it was not so surprising. Another interesting question: what would you have done differently? What would you have included and didn't? One of the things that I was sad about missing was that particular trend that I talked about earlier, where we now in the context of the futures scone talk more about the necessity of including the past perspective. Most of the of the futures scones in the traditional writing of futures studies are really just looking forward. In recent publications over the last year or so, this other perspective came in. So that was surprising to me – or sort of disappointing- that I was not able, that we were not able to include that. But there also always has to be reason for another book to come up.

 

Peter Hayward 

That's right. I was gonna say, there's always time for another book. Yeah. Look, Thomas thanks. It's been great fun. I've thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for taking some time out to have a chat with the FuturePod community

 

Thomas Mengel 

Well, thank you very much, Peter, for having me. It was insightful and pleasant.

 

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.