EP 117: How Hard Can It Be? - Kristin Alford

 
 

Dr Kristin Alford is a futurist and engineer, the Director of Insitu Foresight and the inaugural Director of MOD, the Museum of Discovery at the University of South Australia. The museum's immersive experiences sit at the intersection of art and science. Designed for young adults, they showcase how research and innovation shapes our understanding of the world and informs our futures.

In this episode, Kristin describes how she uses foresight frameworks and methods in the creation of exhibits for young people, using levels of adult development to design content that is relevant for both children and young adults.

Interviewed by: Amanda Reeves

More about Kristin



Transcript

Amanda Reeves: Hello and welcome to FuturePod. I'm Amanda Reeves. FuturePod gathers voices voices from the international field of futures and foresight. Through a series of interviews, the founders of the field and emerging leaders share their stories, tools, and experiences. Please visit futurepod.org for further information about this podcast series.

Today, our guest is Dr. Kristin Alford. Kristin is a futurist and engineer who explodes the possibilities for tomorrow and how they can emerge from today. She is the Director of Insitu Foresight and the inaugural Director of MOD, the Museum of Discovery at the University of South Australia that sits at the intersection of art and science.

Their immersive experiences are designed for young adults, showcasing how research and innovation shapes our understanding of the world and informs our futures. Kristin holds a PhD in Process Engineering and a Master's of Management in Strategic Foresight, and she is a regional editor for the Journal of Future Studies, Perspectives.

Welcome to FuturePod, Kristin.

Kristen Alford: Thanks for having me.

Amanda Reeves: Can you tell us what is the Kristin Alford story? How is it that you came to be where you are?

Kristen Alford: Well, the short answer to that story is red wine and a late night internet search. where I was convincing myself, I really needed to do an MBA and sifting through the internet, trying to find the right one. And then I found the Masters of Strategic Foresight at Swinburne University. So really I have Peter Hayward and Joe Voros and Rowena Morrow to blame or to thank for bringing me into the futures field.

The long answer is that it did also make sense based on what I'd done prior to that moment. I had just finished starting a family. So I had three children under the age of four and was really looking for a direction of where to go next.

And I wanted to consolidate the experiences that I'd had and, do something useful with them. as I came through that journey of raising a family and then moving back into the workplace. so I guess where I started was, you know, when I was at high school, I really enjoyed maths and science and French.

Those were my specialties. I liked the rules of language. I liked the solving of problems in maths and science, absolutely hated the sight of blood or talking about it, and decided very early on that I was not going anywhere near health sciences or medicine. And so that left this gap of engineering.

At that stage, not a lot of girls did engineering. It saddens me to say not a lot of girls do engineering 30 years later, but here we are. And I just thought well, that's a challenge, let's give that a go. And I really loved it. And I spent my vacations in Mount Isa at Mount Isa mines.

I just found the work really interesting and the people really great and, decided that I would do my PhD in engineering after my undergraduate. That was a fantastic project. That was very, very practical. I spent most of my PhD project on mine sites in the Northern Territory and Northern Western Australia.

And I also spent three months in London at Imperial College so really it was like this big adventure. I laugh now because I think, to be honest, my PhD was probably not the best academic PhD the university had ever seen. it was an industry PhD where we were trying to solve an industry problem, which was to prevent various silicon corrosion, happening when you, sort things like diamonds and iron ore in the processing. I did all of this work and basically the recommendations from that work is if you just stir it it will be fine.

I did look at this recently to see if anybody else was still working on the problem and I couldn't find anything. So I think I solved it.

Amanda Reeves: Nice!

Kristen Alford: I think that does sort of set up that, I do have a very practical, pragmatic view about how to do things. That amount of detail, stir it every 12 hours is about perfect for me. I then went to work as a graduate for a mine site in North Queensland with BHP and really enjoyed it cause it was a new mine so we were commissioning. So actually a lot of the work did was about recruiting new staff and commissioning bits of equipment, and it was all very interesting in that startup phase. And then we kind of got into the operational phase and I just, just really didn't enjoy it as much.

I'm not good with detail. I'd miss obvious things in a graph. I just thought I want to be closer to where the decisions are made in the business. So at that stage I applied for some internal roles and one of those internal roles was as an HR coordinator or HR manager with the Melbourne research labs.

Lucky that the manager there was Dr. Peter Binks, who said, yep. Let's go. I'm sure this will be fine. I'm really grateful to Peter because he had this phrase, which I've used over and over again, which is like, you know, you do know that I've never done any HR and you do know that people do whole degrees in HR, and you just said, how hard can it be? And I really liked because the answer to that is, you know, it's both really hard and also not as hard as you think it's going to be. It's all of those things. Really enjoyed working with Peter, but it was short-lived because BHP did some restructuring and we ended up closing the labs within the year of me being there.

 So I made a lot of people redundant, but also found other homes for them and really worked through a process and learn a lot in a really short amount of time. With a specialty in redundancy, I moved to Ansett this is, where the story goes a bit south. So I moved to Ansett Australia, to work mainly in labor strategy around enterprise bargaining agreements.

But of course, you know, within 18 months Ansett had what we had September 11 and then, Ansett was grounded from then on really. I was seven months pregnant at that stage. And so quite keen for another change and thinking maybe HR really, really wasn't the window to the big, you know, big, meaningful decision making that I was looking for.

And then I had a really enjoyable period while I was raising my children where I went back to work for a manager of mine from Ansett who was now the CEO of the Royal Agricultural Society of Victoria. So, run the Royal Melbourne show. I wasn't so much involved in the show, but I was really doing some stuff around strategy and product development, for industry engagement in agriculture.

Weirdly I know a lot about wine and beef. And then I went to work back for Peter Binks. He'd become the CEO of Nanotechnology Victoria, and he's looking for someone to do marketing and comms. And I said, you know, I've never done marketing comms before, you know, people do whole degrees in marketing and comms.

And he said, how hard can it be. That was 2004, so not quite yet social media, but certainly blogging was just taking off. So a lot of what I was doing was trying to market a company called nanotechnology when nobody knew what nanotechnology was that morphed into, trying to explain to people what nanotechnology was.

And we were doing techniques through, you know, schools, engagement, science comms, doing a lot of blogging. I keep getting reminders on Facebook about a time that I spent in 2008, when I went to a nanotechnology conference in Puerto Verde in Mexico. and I was doing live podcasting and of the conference sessions.

And you know, like you did when you were playing and practicing with something that was really emerging and new. So that's where I was when I was drinking too much red wine and looking at the how do I make sense of this ridiculous set of career paths which make no sense, cause I'm no longer really an engineer.

I'm definitely not going back to HR. I don't really have a marketing and comms specialty, although some of those skills and some of the science comms is quite interesting, really like strategy work. Maybe it's an MBA. No, maybe it's a Master of Strategic Foresight. So that's when I started the Master's degree.

And then my consulting work that I'd been doing slowly morphed towards more futures and foresight consulting. Rarely sold it as futures and foresight to be honest, it was often sold as community engagement or science communication or strategy or technology roadmapping, but the work was all kind of futures work at some core.

And then just over five years ago, I was grappling again with those career transitions that come up. My children are a bit older, I'm enjoying the foresight work, but I'll do a day workshop with someone and I'll never know whether I've made any difference and it seems little and it seems bitty and I just want to do something really big and impactful. I saw the role for the director of a new science centre at Uni SA advertised and was successful in getting that role. We turned that centre into MOD, the museum of discovery with a very strong futures framework underpinning that.

And so my role was to really set it up and we launched that in 2018 and have been running exhibitions ever since. So I still think of myself as an engineer because setting up MOD really required a lot of the process engineering skills that I had, and I still very much think of myself as a futurist, but I bring both of those things to the execution of the role in directing the museum. So that's, that's how I'm here.

Amanda Reeves: I find these stories so interesting, this sense that there's a path between things that look quite disparate and then foresight seems to be this underpinning framework that helps bring in these different skills and different interests and gives people a broader remit that still connects in with their other skills and interests and passions.

Kristen Alford: Yeah, I distinctly remember my first day in the Masters where Joe Voros said, the knowledge base for future studies is the sum total of all knowledge that humans have. And I was like, oh, that's a good starting point. but I think there is, you know, when you talk to a lot of people in the foresight and futures community, they do have these kind of weirdly tangential things that they bring.

Generally, it's not just one disciplinary area, it's that interstitial space, that kind of gets filled. And then you can dance around the other intersticies, I think with foresight and futures, because it's an enabling capacity more so for me than a bucket of specific knowledge.

I did ask Peter when I was deciding about the role at MOD whether I should do it and you know what he said. I said, people do hold degrees in museum curation.

And he said, how hard can it be? There is something interesting, I think about working in the future because you're working in a space that is unknown and unknowable. And I think that, that idea about, well, how hard can it be to do it? You know, it is really hard, but it's also not as hard as you think it is.

And not knowing is absolutely an asset when you're a futurist. So I think that's a strong kind of link for me that I pull out of that weird career path.

Amanda Reeves: If we knew how hard things could be, sometimes we wouldn't make the change and we wouldn't try something.

And there's actually some benefit to bringing a little bit of naivety to that and go, oh, well, how hard could it be? Because otherwise you may never, ever get started.

Kristen Alford: Yeah. And look, I notice that in some of the younger team members or, students that come in as well, where they may be concerned about doing something the right way. We're trying to do something at the moment, and I brought someone in to help me. And I'm like, you should absolutely not know how this works because none of us do. And that's the fun, that's the project you know, we can't go wrong here because it's not working as it is. So we just got to explore, and give it a go and work through it and I think that mindset really does help.

Amanda Reeves: I'd like to know a bit more about your practice. What are some of the go-to frameworks or methods that you use?

Kristen Alford: I think it's probably worth starting with Richard Slaughter's types of foresight practitioners, which looks at the pop futurist and then the pragmatic futurist, and then the civilizational change futurist. As I said, I've got a family. I don't have time for the civilisational change

I don't get to spend weeks of uninterrupted thinking time, pondering those deep questions. But I probably wouldn't if I had the opportunity anyway, to be honest. As I said, PhD was very pragmatic. I think I firmly fit in that pragmatic futures space. I guess I'm also less concerned in some ways with what the future will be and more concerned with making sure that people know how to work it out and know how to think about it. So my passion really lies in the building futures capability part. As a futurist and in my futures practice, the framework that I've developed to help me work with people is a thing that I called five ways to think about the future.

 It starts off with the premise that there are five ways to think about the future, and most people use one and even then they do it insufficiently. And so, that first way to think about the future is to look at your past experience and extrapolate from that. So at that point, I tend to bring in something like Wilbur's four quadrant tool because you know, people are often stuck on the technology and economics part in that bottom right-hand quadrant rather than thinking through everything.

So that becomes a more powerful way for us to really map the past experience and the knowledge we do have. The second way is to look at the distributed present, which is obviously Gibson's quote, which is really around helping people develop a scanning practice. My favorite thing is to get people to introduce randomness into their life, to find out the things that they don't know that they don't know. I use that known knowns quadrant to play with those ideas and help people understand that that's what scanning is about. It's not going to do research on the internet. It's about, you know, listening to the future.

Third way is generating possibilities. So that's firmly in the futures cone territory, and helping people push to the edge you know, Jim Dator's, must be ridiculous law so getting them to think about preposterous futures, which is quite lovely.

I think people aren't often given permission to do that. I did an intervention with an electricity supplier a few years ago now, and we talked about preposterous futures, with a fairly old industry that's about to undergo lots of change or is undergoing lots of change.

And I did get feedback that, you know, three months later, the guys were bailing each other up in meetings going, well, that's a good idea, but it's not really preposterous, which I just adore, because I think that that shows the power of that space to play and generate possibility.

Amanda Reeves: It's so expansive. I find that when futures work is permitted inside an organization, even if we can get away from predicting the future, it's the yeah, but, tell us what's likely to happen.

Kristen Alford: Yeah. Or people shut that down so quickly, you know, and this could happen, but oh, you know, and they disregard it. So, the workshop I did yesterday, where we were looking at a future of an organization, we were using Harmon Fan to step through a timeframe, to imagine the possible futures as we went into longer term space, and one of them had the organization no longer exists, and one of them had, we're no longer in government, and it was like, okay, now you're playing in the right space because you're not trying to hold on to things that are important to you either you're letting that stuff go. So that was really, really great.

 I do like a quick go-to scenario, so I'm quite fond of my two by two scenarios. I love a good two by two matrix, I use them all the time in my head to deal with tensions. I've done quite a lot of work with a project called Australia 2050, which was done with the Academy of Sciences from 2010 to 2015, where we used the archetype scenarios from the University of Hawaii, looking at those growth, restraint, catastrophe, and transformation scenarios. It's helpful to have something to grab onto and to play within a boundary. So that works really well.

The fourth way then is thinking about envisaged futures. I think you've touched on it with the probable people are so used to thinking about the probable that when you add the preferred, there's still that a little bit of tension, you know, but aren't we already aiming for the preferred? And so I think Futures Cones really help to get that. I think that's also where Causal Layered Analysis comes in really well when you're thinking about that deep level of myth and metaphor, because that storytelling of what the envisaged future might be and being able to use that shortcut narrative is really powerful.

I have a set of metaphors that I use, it's just a picture of a road or a picture of a tree or a picture of the ocean. And we play with those pictures and say, okay, well, what if the future is a road, what does that look like? It's a map, it's guided, it has certain directions. What does it look like if it's the ocean? It's unbounded, it's open. and I think that helps to reflect the culture of the organization or the thing that you're trying to think through. It helps to reflect the real goals and the mission. So, using that sort of stuff is good for the envisage futures.

And then the final one is emergent futures, which is really Theory U helping people to be much more conscious about the moments of profound, innovation. Often I don't necessarily get to that when we're running people through a futures process, but if we've got more time, there's a meditation that I developed with a colleague of mine, Simon Divecha when we were teaching Business and Carbon Management to help people get that felt sense of the aha moment at the bottom of the U.

And then we've applied it to lots of different learning situations. That five ways to think about the future is my umbrella if you like for quite a lot of go-to methods, they're the ones that I would use the most. and then the other thing I always go back to is the levels of adult development, Cook-Greuter, or Rooke and Torbert, or Keegan. It doesn't really matter which one, but I, I always go back to that cause it just helps me make sense of the world.

In the workshop I did yesterday, we were looking at scanning and I was trying to help people scan through different lenses of adult development, which is, probably a little bit, way too ambitious, but what I ended up doing was bringing it down to six key questions.

 What's in it for me? How do we make things more efficient? How do we make things better for people? Where's the novelty? How might we do this with a planetary mindset? And those questions I find just so powerful to help sift through. So even thinking recently around lockdowns and COVID, there's all of this stuff coming out and I just went, oh, it's just reflecting these different levels and different perspectives.

Protests are what's in it for me, better COVID testing and vaccinations is more efficiency. Thinking about mental health for people is about making it better. You know, designing a home quarantine app is finding novelty it just helps me sift through that noise.

And I think, as Director of MOD, where we are focused, particularly on young adults, and thinking about where they might be generally speaking in that journey, they're likely to be at that level where they are moving from having identity shaped by their peers. So that's the diplomat level in some of that language to asking the question, well, who am I. What am I going to do with my life? what are my strengths? What are my skills, moving into that expert level. So at MOD we're deliberately designing to help with that transition. We want it to feel like a place where you belong, where people like you belong, where people like you do these interesting things like exploring science and technology and ethics, where you can start to explore who you might want to become.

So really I find that underpins just so much of my work. It's my go-to. And actually I've got the Rooke and Torbert Harvard Business Review article in our welcome to MOD folder for any new starters, like, you know, like read this, you'll understand why we do what we do if you understand these levels.

That's generally the way I work, but I think you can also see that it's quite pragmatic. So there's theory underneath it. Even when I was teaching foresight at the University of Adelaide, like most of it's about let's have a look at this framework and let's apply it. Let's practice it. Let's use it in that pragmatic capacity.

Amanda Reeves: I'm so excited to hear you talking about the levels of development in terms of futures work. It's something that really grabbed me myself when I was studying, but I find it so useful once you've got some of these frameworks and you've got a good enough understanding of what are these different levels and how do they show up.

It is so valuable for adding richness to any kind of futures work. You can move past whatever level of development you are generally sitting at and how you frame the world. And you can start to see how different groups might be telling different stories about the present or how their preferred futures would look differently based on some really useful hooks to be able to plug into. I think it's just such a powerful way of developing better foresight practices.

Kristen Alford: I had one of those moments yesterday where I realized I'd been stuck in a strategist moment, I think there's multiple pathways, you can kind of see how things are moving, you know who you need to work with, you know you don't know the answers, it's going to be emergent. I think we were talking about Barnaby Joyce and the unwillingness to act on climate change because it was going to cost too much.

 I was speaking to a colleague of mine who just said, well, the other way of thinking about that is it's priceless to act and money is a construct. So we just construct something different because otherwise we die. And I was like, oh, obviously, that's the outer planetary mindset I'd been thinking about the world, but I hadn't been busting open the world enough to go, well, what are the new structures and the new systems that would completely change the way that we think with that very, external planetary mindset.

Cause if you looked at the planet now and you looked at us, you'd go, what are they doing? Like seriously, just, just fix it. It's not that hard. So I think I think that's where I find that useful because in that moment I was like, oh, I've got to take it up a notch. I've been stuck in my comfortable strategist mode of knowing how to manage the things, I think that's really helpful.

Also I know that when I get stressed, I go straight to expert. But being able to know that in myself and then also being able to pick it up in others and knowing that that's also the mindset that I will react negatively to and then I'm more aware and that whole awareness makes it then easier to facilitate a group and bring in those different perspectives because there's a framework to hang those perspectives on.

And they don't all have to be treated equally. So, you know, the perspective is valid, but that doesn't mean the solution from the perspective is going to be all equal. Having that room to go, I understand where you're coming from. I understand where you're coming from. This view gives us a bigger room to play is really valuable. It's the way I make sense of my world. And I think it's interesting cause we've been having discussions lately around leadership, and the fact that a lot of our leadership at the moment is driven from an opportunity diplomat kind of mindset.

Amanda Reeves: Yeah.

Kristen Alford: You know, what's in it for me and people like me. And just how depressing that is in a real yearning for what we might see as more eldership, which I think is the mindset driven from a higher level of adult development, where you are able to take that very large perspective. And if you're not at that level, not everything makes sense.

The stories that you are able to understand, evolve as you move up through those levels. So the elder has this sense of really that post-conventional thinking and that very complex understanding of the world that is just so needed.

And I think we see that kind of yearning for some eldership at the moment.

Amanda Reeves: Yeah. that sense of stewardship that comes with it.

Kristen Alford: Absolutely. Yep.

Amanda Reeves: So I'd like to ask a question to Kristin, you as Kristin, the human, not Kristin, the professional. What is it that you're seeing emerging around you and how are you making sense of this?

Kristen Alford: Oh, that's such an interesting question, I do actually find it really difficult to separate. I think for me personally there's some stuff in the really near term future, which is all post COVID. It's not going to be post COVID for quite some time I, think. There feels like a real aftershock happening at the moment.

Last year was hard and it was all weird and it was all new and it was all strange. Let's just get back to normal. And then now there seems like this, Hm. I wonder what that actually is now.

Amanda Reeves: Yeah.

Kristen Alford: And I get a feeling there's a real exhaustion creeping in, but it's also not a logical exhaustion.

So, people will say I'm really tired, but here in south Australia where we have been very, very free of the effects of COVID like very low community cases and very short lock down and really business as, as, as usual as would be possible anywhere in the world, there's still the sense of almost whiplash exhaustion.

And I can only imagine how it must be for people in Melbourne and Sydney and the regional areas around there, as well as overseas where things have been even more heightened, but it does seem like there is this real, yeah, this real exhaustion creeping in and it's not logical, and it's not when you would expect to be exhausted by it either.

 So I'm really curious as to what the next five years look like with that. You know, and then my futurist brain kicks in and goes, oh, that's really interesting because, you're seeing, like there was an article this week around the great resignation, which is about people reevaluating their lives, and I'm thinking about that. And then if you triangulate that kind of rethinking of what work is and where people find meaning and the search for the balance between home and work and you triangulate that with stuff around Universal Basic Income, and you then ask questions about why do we work. And you put that in an automation context, that becomes a really interesting miasma of stuff to be thinking about the structures in which we've set up and how we actually exist in the world. So that's one thing that's emerging for me.

And then I think, the other side to the post COVID stuff is thinking about, do I care about privacy? I have a lot of futurist colleagues who absolutely care about privacy. And I think, that's often done with a view to global conflict and tension, to bad actors, to misuse. And I'm just too naïve in some ways to let that really sit on me. I used to be quite active on Twitter and I, enjoyed my social media interactions, but I'm also a bit ambivalent about them. I think my use is okay, but maybe I'm deluding myself. And then I look at the other effects that we're seeing. So especially for young adults, the effects of that mirroring of expectation, and the weird distorted images of the future that that gives to people I think is really problematic.

Amanda Reeves: Yeah.

Kristen Alford: So that's something else that I personally am sensing around me. And then there's a bunch of things that I sense from my work in the museum sector, which are either things that we've been deliberately trying to put out there for people to explore, or we're seeing other museums grappling with these questions.

So, one of these is all about the social contract that we have with each other. A couple of years ago we commissioned Superflux to do a speculative future work on the increasing tribalness of the internet. I mean, this was early Trump presidency. It was that early toxicity.

Well, it wasn't probably early, but it was the toxicity that was coming more mainstream around, the incredible racism and the TERF movement radical feminism and just stuff, which is really, really nasty bubbling up. And so they made a film for us that looked at that. About a seven minute film, it's still available through our website. I get to the five and a half minutes and I feel like I want to throw up. It's just... You're kind of left asking, like, is this where we've gotten to as an individualist culture? And how do we come back to a collective culture where we care about each other.

 In the next exhibition was all about pleasure and seeking pleasure, so it was called Hedonism. And you can't really do pleasure without sex and drugs, I don't think. Drugs are a little bit hard to do in a museum context, to be honest. We worked with the student counseling unit at the university and said, what do young people need when it comes to sex?

And it was stuff about pleasure and stuff about consent. And again, this is 2019, you know, the mood has completely changed within a couple of years around that. So we dealt with the pleasure aspects by having a couple of workshops on how to masturbate well done by theater performers.

And it was fantastic. It did cause a few issues across the university when you're advertising things called Wank Bank and Pussy Play. Which is great. That's, what futures should do it should it should test and challenge people. , then we ran a game which was based on a game called Adrift and we built it in the museum as its own installation.

But the premise of Adrift is that you come onto an alien spaceship which has been stranded, and there's no one around except for the artificial intelligence of the spaceship. And you have to work with the artificial intelligence to help repair the spaceship. But you can only do that by following the five rules of consent, because if you rush through and do it too fast, or if you haven't gotten consent from the AI, or if the AI is entirely unintelligible and you go ahead anyway, you fail the game, essentially.

It was really fascinating because our version was called Fable and it was by no means subtle. So there were large pink, frilly soft things that you would plunge your face into, you know, like it was, it was very unsubtle.

And so for an under 10 year old audience, it was just a fun, kind of crazy place. For a 15 to 25 year old audience, it's very clear what it's about. And then adults, I don't know, some of the adults were kind of not really picking up on those clues, but they'd get to the end and they'd realized they hadn't followed consent and were horrified just that visceral, oh my goodness, I've just, I've just done something that I never thought I would do. And they would go back and do it again to make it right.

Amanda Reeves: How interesting.

Kristen Alford: That felt experience of working through those issues is a really powerful learning tool. You know, It's a little bit like going back to the Theory U we talked about and giving people that felt experience of the moment, you want that to come through.

So things like that around the social contract that we have with each other, I think are really big questions of which direction we plan on going. And you can see that erupting all over the place at the moment. The next one is, I mean, it's obviously climate. Again, when we started the museum, when I started thinking about it in 2016, it was still trying to convince people that this was an issue.

I mean, maybe we are still trying to convince people , but it has become really one of those things, in the museum sector, how do you actually act in a way that is going to be helpful. So it's not enough to put on an exhibition that talks about climate.

Are you being funded by fossil fuels? Are you still using fossil fuels for your energy? Have you made any energy reduction? So it becomes this whole package of what the museum really should be doing. It's walking the talk.

What I talked about before in terms of, you know, rethinking the economy around that. So I recently did a short course through Ubiquity University, led by Kate Raworth on Doughnut Economics, which was amazing, to hear her talk about her theory and it just blew my mind cause I had been similarly puzzled about, well, how you price a forest?

You know, if you're going to use it for timber. Sure. But it has value. How are you pricing that? And getting the brush off, , like, well, that's not economic growth. It's insanity that we have basically externalized typically women's care work, that we've externalized the environment, that we've externalized the volunteering work that actually glues communities and businesses and industries together, and concentrated on like maybe a quarter of stuff as the economy.

So I'm seeing this stuff more and more in terms of people, just fed up with a slowness on climate policy, especially here in Australia, but also it's not just about fixing the thing. It's not a box of stuff that we can fix that sits very neatly by itself. How do we think more systemically? So at the moment we've got an exhibition called It's Complicated, which is all about complex systems. And that has been deliberately designed again, thinking about those levels of adult development and knowing that most of our audiences at a level where systemic thinking doesn't come naturally and it's hard to grapple with the dynamic evolving kind of thinking. At that level, we prefer something that's at steady state. You know, you change from to, you don't have constant whirl. And so we've deliberately looked at a model which talks about the seven principles of complex systems, and then all of the exhibits refer to those principles to try and give young people a scaffold to grapple with climate.

Another thing that I'm noticing is just endless conversations on the future of work, everything from automation to artificial intelligence to work from home and virtual reality and immersive metaverses and whatever else we want to collapse into that conversation. You know, as well as the organizational structure of work and work cultures, and flexible and family and all of the stuff around gender equity as well.

 The other thing especially for the museum sector is, movements towards decolonization. For us at MOD, we have a particular principle about being two-way minded, which was me trying to put us into what might be a post reconciliation future for Australia. Like if we just got everything together, what would it look like? And so it looks like the use of language, it looks like reference to place and understanding country.

It looks like bringing Aboriginal perspectives in, it looks like Aboriginal people being visible in the space. It looks like talking about Aboriginal ways of knowing, around deeply layered and embedded storytelling and reciprocation. So trying to do that and then trying to be more aware of structures that are colonial in nature or patriarchal, which then exclude. The lovely example that I keep coming back to is a conversation with a colleague who talked about music software.

And the fact that music software is developed from Western music. And so the structure in the software is Western structured. And so if you come from a discipline that's not Western structured, the software doesn't really allow you to create what you would create if you had a different structure.

Amanda Reeves: Huh.

Kristen Alford: So trying to find those deeply embedded structures in the way that we do things. And sometimes it's simple things like timelines. I mean, we have to put an exhibition on, it opens on a certain date. There are timelines, but there are things that we can do that don't have timelines attached, where we can have long conversations.

And those conversations aren't necessarily in pursuit of doing a thing, those conversations are in pursuit of forming relationship, for instance. We are a museum that doesn't have a collection and so we have very different I guess, a freedom there, whereas a lot of museums have collections of things taken from First Nations people and working out how you care, return, manage those I think is a really big question.

And then I think in the broader world, especially in the Australian context, just looking at, the Uluru Statement From The Heart, thinking about the emergence of Makarrata and treaties being set up and having a structure to them.

And I think there is a proportion of Australians who really do yearn for that type of connection that Aboriginal people have with country.

Amanda Reeves: Yeah.

Kristen Alford: And we won't have that same connection, but I think we can honor that connection and we can learn from it and we can do better, so finding that way of being together in the future in Australia I think is starting to really shift. I was asked to make a set of predictions for 2021 at the start of the year. And one of my predictions was that we wouldn't be celebrating Australia Day in 2022 on that day. I will still made the prediction that that's not far off.

And then the final thing that I'm seeing is just the future. Like everybody's talking about the future.

Amanda Reeves: The future is hot right now.

Kristen Alford: So hot right now. And I'm finding it really, really interesting. And I think, I mean, I think it's COVID, because people said, oh, we could never have imagined pandemic like this. And I'm like, well, take your pick of a bunch of texts earlier.

And it's not to say that it was predicted, but the interesting thing is then understanding what wasn't anticipated and that's where the real futures work comes in. So I think there are people grappling with that, but then also recognizing that actually, maybe this work is valuable. Who knew? Actually anticipating, preparing, planning, envisioning, experimenting with unthinkable futures is actually very valuable. I'm noticing new roles pop up. I'm noticing people connecting with me on LinkedIn who have very different backgrounds. then I'm also thinking about things like the Future Generations Act recently in Wales and people are looking at those models, as Slaughter says a 200 year president or the seventh generation for some First Nations maybe that is something that we really do need to do. How do we do that?

 I did a talk for the copper industry a couple of weeks ago which is a little bit daunting, I haven't been in the mining industry for a long time. I was really trying to maybe challenge the timeframes. The conversation around copper is very much in what's the demand going to be in the next 10 to 20 years, given the transition to renewables.

And it's huge. And when you've got a public who is anti mining, because they're anti fossil fuels, I think that's a really tricky story to say, well, actually, we do need to mine a lot of copper if you want your electric vehicles, and if you want your solar panels, and if you want your wind turbines. So most of the conversation is happening in the 10 to 20 year timeframe.

And then I said, well, if you look at when copper was first discovered in like 1846, almost 200 years ago, maybe we should be thinking about what 200 years in the future looks like. And then we, then we've got this journey of what the copper industry looks like in South Australia, and we can make a more coherent story about it. And then I said, well, you've also got to consider that First Nations people have had stories about deposit sites.

So, you know, places that maybe you shouldn't go, or maybe you shouldn't use. There are stories that maybe 45,000 years old. So what's your 45,000 year future for copper? Oh, that's actually really something to think about.

Amanda Reeves: How is it that you explain what it is you do to people who don't necessarily understand what it is you do?

Kristen Alford: So I'm a big believer in using the futurist term. I like being a futurist, and I think there are all sorts of lovely, conversations around, whether you call yourself a futurist or a foresight practitioner or a strategic foresight practitioner or a futures thinker, or a strategist, or however you want to use it.

But I really do like the term futurist. I like the heritage of it. I like that it starts a conversation Someone will say, well, I heard a futurist talk and you know, that that's probably a futurist that's coming maybe from a pop futures framework. And then it gives an opening, it's a way to start a conversation.

And it's short. I like being able to say engineer and futurist. That sums up the way that I think is really framed by both of those disciplines. If someone sort of says, what do you do as a futurist? I would say that my key thing is to build the capability of others to think about the future. And I just leave it at that. That's probably the most that I do, it's around, how do we think about long-term futures and then how do we bring that into present action? But as I said earlier, it's not necessarily what they're looking for. So I think that's the challenge in doing this type of work.

If I'm trying to build capability for people to think about the future, it takes a special kind of person to say, I don't think I can do this. Can you help? I don't think I know how to. is really what you're saying. And so I find that the work I do as a consultant, which is mostly local or state government or not-for-profits.

Those people are prepared to challenge themselves, they're probably thinking post conventionally. They have the self-reflection to of understand the gap. So they're really great, interesting people to work with, but most people are not in that category, as we know. And so most people don't want to be told how to think. And so a lot of the work that I do is then reframed into other services that people need, which is why, we might sell community engagement or science communication or something else.

But I think that is also changing. There is that "we need someone to help us work out the future" question is coming up more often than it used to maybe 10 years ago. Yeah, I think it's interesting to see the acceptance of the field evolve.

Amanda Reeves: It's like we've got permission now to say, we're not sure what's happening in the future because there's been this universally accepted big disruption. We've given each other permission to say, we're not sure what's happening there, so let's have a better conversation about it.

Kristen Alford: Yeah, let's have those better conversations, which is why I'm also comfortable with the futurist term. One of the responses you get to saying "I'm a futurist", oh, can you tell me what's going to happen? Can you predict the future? And I say, absolutely I can because that is the probable future.

And that is absolutely what we should be doing as futurists to say, this is where people think the world is going. But again, it's only that first way of thinking about the future. So to me, that's a really good starting conversation where we can say. Yes, I can. It's just not sufficient.

Knowing what we think the future is likely to be is really useful, but then we also need to know what it could be and what it might be and what it should be and all of those other big questions. That's why I don't really have a problem with the futurist label because it's a good conversation starter, but also, I'm fairly pragmatic. If you can do something that helps, if actually understanding a probable future is more than someone's done previously, it's going to be better than nothing at all.

You know, Peter Hayward always talks about foresight appetite and understanding where people are at and then trying to adjust the window of what kind of futures you might discuss with them based on where they're at and then testing that foresight window and being smart enough to know when somebody else's appetite for crazy is more than yours.

Amanda Reeves: Yeah, stretch, but don't break.

Kristen Alford: Yep.

Exactly. Exactly.

Amanda Reeves: Kristin, I'd like to hear a bit more about how you use futures and foresight techniques in curating and designing exhibitions.

Kristen Alford: Yeah. So, as I said, I've designed MOD based on thinking about futures frameworks. Pulling in levels of adult development, for instance, or thinking about whether the exhibits that we're putting on are meant to be preferred futures or probable futures. So last year we ran an exhibition that we adapted from the Eureka Science Center called Seven Siblings From The Future. That's one probable future and being very clear that it is one consistent world that we're building and it's a probable world I think is really helpful to frame people's expectation and interaction with that world. And we also have a number of adjacent design principles that are sympathetic to futures thinking. So one of those as being open and open-ended, we're a science center that doesn't tell you how things work. It's more about putting something there and letting what one of my colleagues calls the productive struggle of learning of not really quite understanding but then working through it.

 And we do things that are designed to be participatory, which I think is the real value of good foresight work is that it's not driven by the expert announcing what's going to happen. It's participatory. And it builds from the community of people who are going to be in and creating that future.

 One of the things that I'm really proud of was we ran a forum in April, 2019 with about 90 of our stakeholders. So it included mid-career and early career researchers, professors from a range of universities, people in really significant roles, such as the director of a festival. It also included a bunch of year tens, a bunch of teachers some artists and contributors who might be thinking slightly differently, and members of our youth advisory group as well. And we asked them two questions. What's important to be thinking about when you think about the future, and what kind of conversations do you have at 2:00 AM when you're in the, you know, those really deep kind of questions, whether you're either on your second bottle of red wine or you're up at a sleep over and, you know, everyone's still kind of dissecting the meaning of life.

What do you talk about? Interestingly enough, the answer to the second question was mostly Maccas or Uber Eats. Maybe it's just me that remembers having those deep and meaningfuls. But the answers to the first question were really, really wide ranging. So we ran a open space methodology, and I think we ended up having 42 topics of conversation across the day. They ranged in things from thinking about ubiquitous sensing, data privacy, the right to hide, which I just thought was a beautiful, beautiful question to be thinking about. Thinking about social equity and thinking about automation and artificial intelligence. Thinking about food systems, thinking about of learning and what that would look like, relationships, how we are with each other identity. Yes, really big, beautiful questions that evolved during the day. And then we poured through all of those conversations and we started to make connections and through those connections, we've developed themes for our upcoming exhibitions.

So the first of those themes has just been released with our online exhibition Up Close. That came from conversations about relationships and closeness and intimacy. But also curiosity about some of the research that was happening around the nanoscale. And, So those two things, relationships and nanotechnology don't seem to go together, but they do in this this exhibition. So that exhibition starts from inside you and thinking about gut bacteria, to on you and thinking about tears and sweat, and then to touch and into relationships with other people and then to relationships with machines and then to relationships with place. So it's like a zoom out.

Amanda Reeves: Beautiful.

Kristen Alford: Yeah, there's some really lovely things that I'm really excited about that are in there. But to me it's exciting to have people put those things up and then being able to deliver something that talks to some of the things that they were thinking about. And then the next exhibition that we launched in January, February next year is on the theme of invisibility. And that came out of that question of, do we have the right to hide, and thinking about sensing and data. But it also came out of conversations around social equity and hearing the voices of people who might not often be heard, who wasn't in the room and those sorts of questions. So we've got this beautiful, beautiful exhibition that I'm really excited to launch. It has a very unsettling mood to it.

I think it'll be really interesting to see how people react. We've got an exhibition developed by Tactical Tech who I think are in Berlin, data detox for your devices and just exactly what you are providing, where and how to get people to really think about that. We've got a beautiful work by an artist, Yandell Walton looking at the effects of climate, especially around oceans and looking at sea level rise and plastics pollution.

We've got an augmented reality exhibition where you interact with large screens and they interpret your body and your movements in distorted ways. Are you really who you are? And are you there? We've got a couple of exhibitions that are coming from the Science Gallery Melbourne has had them, and that's around mirror images and the use of artificial intelligence to tell us stuff about us that we might not recognize. We've got an exhibition that we're developing with Baden Pailthorpe, and, he's working with Adam Goodes and Old Ways New in Sydney. Adam's got access to all of his player data from his time playing in the Sydney Swans, so what does that data tell you about Adam? And what does it tell you about Aboriginal identity, its patterns and the data that we might see reflected in kinship or country? So that'll be quite beautiful.

 And then we've got an exhibition looking at, the Nullarbor Plain and it's an artist scientist collaboration, between geologists and artists who are both working on the Nullarbor. And it involves four sets of TVs in this huge tower where we're going to put you in a dual core.

And so it's going to be quite interesting as well. Quite powerful. And a few other things as well, but again, that work comes out of those discussions around what's unseen? Are we always being monitored? There's a beautiful thing in the foyer, which is called Women's Work, which features 14 portraits of Aboriginal women in leadership roles to make those contributions visible and to bring it to the fore.

I mean, it's nice to be able to share a little bit about some of those exhibitions that we're working with, but also I think the important thing there is that they reflect the concerns and the dreams of the community that we work with. So using futures in that way is quite interesting.

Some of the emerging signals that we might be seeing and especially around aspects of future generation, decolonization, regenerative economies, and social equity. Those actually form four parts of a compass that we've been developing as the world for a potential film project. And so part of what my colleague Brenton Caffin and I did a facilitation last year where we were talking to people in significant roles in South Australia about what post COVID futures might be. It seemed like there was this really strange kind of moment at which the window for acceptable things had shifted, you know? So you could now spend billions of dollars on Centrelink. Which is almost like a Universal Basic Income. And suddenly that was okay. You could now make sure that people were checking in everywhere they go, and monitoring their movements. And suddenly that was now okay.

And so we thought, well, if things are becoming different, what else would we like to make okay? And so really thinking about regenerative economies and thinking about, reconciliation and treaties, and thinking about putting in long-term futures thinking, what would that look like?

And so, Brenton basically stood up at that thing and said, Kristin and I are going to write a book about this." So, and I said "Sure". And then the next weekend he came back to me and he said, I don't think we should write a book. And I was like, thank goodness. Cause I don't, I'm not a very good writer. Like I never, I never get to the detailed thinking of writing. You know, I'm a facilitator, not a writer. And he said, I think we should make a film instead. And so over the past year we've been working on a script, with Lucy Campbell Smith to develop a six to eight part drama series of the sort that you might see on SBS, ABC, or Netflix that follows the lives of four young people, we meet them in about 2024, probably graduated at the end of 2021. And then we skip from 2024 back to 2021 and then forward. 2034. And the story itself is personal drama, but those personal dramas intersect with some of the big signals of change that we're seeing. So one of our characters, you know, is probably third generation, his family's owned a property development firm, they're well off. All you has to do is, go and do his law degree and join the family firm and he'll be fine. And you know, he's not going to be fine because you've got all of these things around affordable housing and house prices, and you've got all these things about the use of machine learning in legal practice.

You know, his world is going to very significantly change over those 10 years. And then we're thinking about, okay, what policies then would you put in to support that transition and change and how might we see how those policies interact with his trajectory otherwise. And can we do that through a series of flashbacks and flash forwards where the decisions we make today influence how that happens.

So, we're still trying to find a production house to help us make that film. But I'm really desperate to see it. And I think we're so used to seeing the future portrayed through dystopias, because that's where the drama is, and there is drama in the darkness.

But we felt if we could make an experience where the drama was in the personal and the future was not darkness, but it was complicated and it was fragmented and it was, rich and nuanced. That would be something really exciting. So that's the other thing that we're applying our futures techniques, hopefully for benefit, but even just having done that thinking work of how it works.

I find myself drawing on that compass of, what is the direction we want to go in, and how do we put those things around social equity and regenerative economy and decolonization and long-term futures? How do we build that into things?

Amanda Reeves: That sounds fantastic. I can't wait to say it.

Kristen Alford: I can't wait to see that. I just have to find someone to help us make it, get it funded, you know, the normal film project yeah, it's nice to have it at that stage at least. And we can keep cracking on with it if we can.

Amanda Reeves: How hard can it be?

Kristen Alford: How hard can it be? I've never made a film before. How hard can it be?

Amanda Reeves: Kristin, thank you so much for making time to talk with me today. It has been such a pleasure to hear more about your story and what you're up to and what you're seeing. And I can't wait to see what comes out of MOD next.

Kristen Alford: Oh, thank you so much, it has been a delightful conversation and I've really enjoyed sharing some of what we do. So thank you.

Amanda Reeves: 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, visit the Patreon link on our website. Thank you for listening. Remember to follow us on Instagram and Facebook. This is Amanda Reeves saying goodbye for now.