EP 118: Finding our Tribe - Heather Benoit and JT Mudge

 
 

Heather Benoit and JT Mudge shared the Association of Professional Futurists Student Recognition Award award for 2021. They are also both studying at the University of Houston. They both found Futures and Foresight, or it found them. They describe their journey to date and what they hope for themselves and the field as a whole

Interviewed by: Peter Hayward

Interested in your University participating the APF Student Recognition Program? Email to awards@apf.org

More about Heather

Heather's student piece - The Future of Truth

More about JT

JT's student piece - The Future of Fisheries

Transcript

Peter Hayward

Hello, and welcome to Futurepod I'm Peter Hayward. Futurepod gathers voices from the international field of futures and foresight. Through a series of interviews, the founders of the field and emerging leaders share their stories, tools and experiences. Please visit Futurepod.org for further information about this podcast series. Today we have another different guest podcast. Since 2011, the Association of Professional Futurists has recognized the best student work from institutions that participate in their annual recognition program. The recognition program is open to universities offering Undergraduate, Masters or PhD programs or degrees in foresight, or future studies. If any listener would like their institution to participate, then please contact the APF. There will also be contact details on this podcast page. Quite remarkably, in this year's Masters award, there was a tied result. And coincidentally, both students were also studying together in the same program at the University of Houston. At Futurepod we have had guests who've run those programs like the Houston program, and many of our guests have graduated from programs like the Houston program. But just for a change, I'm going to talk to a couple of the current students specifically the joint winners of the best Master student work for 2021. Heather Benoit is the Executive Vice President of Strategic Foresight at SGR where she spearheads a foresight program aimed at helping local governments prepare for the future. Prior to that, Heather served as the futures and insight lead at M3 Design, where she led futures research in an effort to inform product portfolios and advance innovation. JT Mudge is a Director of Technology and data strategy at productOps, and specializes in data driven decision making and long term strategies for companies involved in sustainability and ESG. His work includes consulting with the Nature Conservancy on fisheries related issues and technology, including data systems and artificial intelligence. Welcome to Futurepod, Heather and JT. I believe you're both Futurepod listeners. So you know, the first question is the story question. And everyone loves the story question. So what, what's the Heather and JT story?

JT Mudge

I mean, I think this story is interesting. I mean, I've, I've been a consultant in technology for a long time, for about 25 years. And, you know, it can be fun, it can be exciting working with, you know, major brands, like like Apple and Samsung, and doing exciting projects around technology. But at a certain point, you start to look around and you say, "what is the world around me?" What is happening in this world around me, and am I part of something that's making a better world, or am I part of just churning out the world as it is. That idea had been nagging at me for probably the last five years or so is like, as you start to see more issues with climate change, you start to see more issues with just just the world values and the way my children were growing up, and I'm trying to be, you know, a good parent that I had, but it's but it's hard, and in this world of technology and social media, and again, with their outlook, seeing what they were seeing the future to be, right, which was very bleak, and so I felt like, I just had a responsibility to figure out what that change was, but didn't really know know what that change was, right? It was just sort of this evolution, this idea of values, of becoming to understand my own values better. And I had the opportunity in 2019, before the world shut down, to go to Barcelona for the Smart City World Expo. And I'm walking around the floor and I'm seeing just amazing, amazing stories, amazing ideas. And of course, smart cities just lends itself very, very well to be future oriented. And what I saw was not just stories about the future, but then data that drives it, right? And so, for me, being a technologist and a storyteller, this was this was like the perfect fit. And so I realized that there were actually people that got paid to do futures. This is an actual profession. And for me, I was like, it was like a light bulb. And I want to do that, right. But I still want to be able to take my experience and my you know, what I'm really good at, and how do I bring my 25 years of experience, but then look to shift something even larger, luckily, and at that time, when I got back, I started working with the Nature Conservancy on sustainability and fisheries around technology and data. So that was a good start to kind of matching with my values. And I had read a paper that IFTF, Institute for the Future, did around fisheries. And I was looking at this, and this is fantastic. Again, it's data driven. But it's very creative and engaging. And you know, what I do at my company at productOps a lot of times is data driven decision making, right? We help companies figure that out. And so what I realized is that there's this there's this twist, it's like data driven sense making. And that just really appealed to me. And I started looking around, and I called up Andy at the university, Andy Hines, at the University of Houston. As we as we're talking about the program and about futurists, he said, you know, those that work in traditional consultancies, organizations that are future minded are often the odd ones out in the organizations, people don't know what to do with them, right. And I'm, like, you've just described the last 25 years in my life. And I'm like, wait, there's a group with other people like me? You know? And so I realized a large, honestly large part of this was kind of selfish, in my mind a little bit, but wanting to find my tribe, right. I was like, I finally found what I was looking for all these years, and a lot of people that I've met in this amazing community at the University of Houston, Heather included, of course, and Heather's been a big part of what we started off as a community building, right? And finding people that shared similar values, similar mindsets, and have a hope towards the future. So that's kind of my story in a nutshell on how I came came across the foresight community.

Peter Hayward

Nice. Thanks.

Heather Benoit

Yeah, I think my story is similar, of course a little different. But I too was that weirdo at the firm, just, you know, always off in my own space, kind of looking at the future and not quite fitting into the box that everyone else was playing in. So my background is actually in product development engineering. I spent my career building products in industries from oil and gas to medical device to pet products and wearables, just really a little bit of everything. And I think what appealed to me in my work consulting was just the variety of all these different products and industries, and really learning all the challenges our clients faced and trying to figure out how to be innovative in their market and kind of shape the future of their product portfolio. But after several years, I kind of just got tired with, you know, you design one camera and then the next camera and then the next one. And each generation's a little bit better, but they're really just the same product. And how do we take that more aggressive, or larger leap forward to what the future really should be, and then make these really transformative experiences in the products? But I was also, at the same time struggling with being frustrated that so many decisions were tied to the bottom line. And obviously, it's product development. It's about making money, which of course, makes a lot of sense. But it was really frustrating for me and never really satisfied, I think, a deeper desire I had to tackle larger problems that really matter. So kind of going through those things and thinking about the often kind of short-term nature of product development, I started looking into longer term strategy and innovation as a process and really started doing a lot of research online. And I just happened to stumble across foresight. At that time, I found actually Andy Hines' book, Thinking About the Future, I think it's called. And then I discovered this whole profession, the school systems, education, so many different resources, things like Futurepod, that just opened up my mind to this whole new world and methodology for looking at the future and driving change in a more positive light. And I totally got sucked in immediately and fell in love with it and have had no regrets. Not looking, not looking back.

Peter Hayward

It's great. I mean, I had a similar experience. I certainly found my tribe, when I found the futures community. But the question I want to ask both of you is this notion of being inside organizations, but feeling like an outsider, belonging and not belonging? Is that just the personalities of who we are? Or is there something more fundamental and profound going on where organizations themselves and the future just really don't mesh too well?

Heather Benoit

I think in my experience, it could be personality, of course. But I think it's more. I think it's more just the nature of, at least in my experience, product development, and there's always this focus on being the first to market, getting the product out the door. It's very short term and it's very focused on profit. And in a lot of cases, as with many businesses, there's an aversion to risk. And anything that's unknown and new is, of course, risky. And I think it takes a lot for people to start getting comfortable with unfamiliar ideas, and really be okay with exploring them. And to me, my team at M3, really, there were a lot of really good innovative thinkers, who really strove to understand what's coming, and how social change is influencing things, how environmentalism is influencing things. But there's that limitation, I think, with the market in terms of what the market wants you to do, or what your clients want you to do that just, people tend to kind of hand wave when you're talking about holograms or AI or robots, because they think it's, it's so far off and so far-fetched that it makes you kind of sound like the weird one in the room.

JT Mudge

Yeah, I think that's a good answer. It's probably than my stumbling answer is going to be, but it's such a such a provocative question, Peter. I'm glad you asked it, because it's a question that I had been asking myself, and before I found futures, right, it's like, what makes my role here different? Like, why am I seen as sort of the one that they throw the weird projects? Which I like, right, there was there's a definite benefit from that. I got to work on the most odd projects that came across any organization I've been a part of generally. So that was great. But same point in time... you know, there's a feeling of just being different, which, which comes along with all the baggage goes along with that. So what is it that makes that different? And I think I think there's a comfort level a lot of people have in doing what they know, right? And for me, I find that tremendously boring. I want to do things that I don't know, I mean, that's kind of we, you know, as far as I know, we only got one trip around on this life, and, you know, I don't want to just keep doing the same old thing. I think that's why I'm also a consultant, right? Because I get to work on lots of different domains. I get to work in lots of different spaces, and I get to learn, and I get to challenge myself, and I get to bring my experience across domains, and it's a unique position to be in. So I think a lot of people just aren't as comfortable doing that. And so I think it's more of a fundamental issue of personality, probably. But I don't know the answer. So if you know, be sure to fill me in.

Peter Hayward

I'm not sure I do. I know Peter Bishop thinks that there's something that we need to bring longer term futures focus thinking as early as possible in the education system, that to some extent, people are already hamstrung.

JT Mudge

Yeah.

Peter Hayward

Because the education system has taught them a certain way. And I mean, yeah, the thing about futures in my experience is that we're swimming against the current, the majority current is just as, as Heather said, short termism. That's what's rewarded. That's what's measured. And we few who push against it, we are definitely pushing against the current. Interesting question as to whether you think the current is getting stronger or weaker?

JT Mudge

That's a good question. I think it's probably going, I think its kind of diverging into two rivers, and it's stronger where you're at, but the other river is also just as strong, if you will, right. It feels like we're getting to this polarization of IDEA and thinking and critical thinking that we haven't seen before.

Heather Benoit

Yeah, I think I'd agree with that. It seems to be intensifying but fractured into two very deeply divided sides.

Peter Hayward

Thanks.

Let's go to second question. I'm the imagining as proto futurists, you're getting all the tools and all the frameworks and all the things thrown at you on a regular basis. And you probably are borrowing things and trying things and also probably running away from things. But the second question, the kind of, you know, philosophy methodology question. Yeah. What are the frameworks that you think, really speak to you and you are going to make part of your practice going forward?

Heather Benoit

Being at the University of Houston and being plugged into the Futures Program, like I just loved absorbing everything that has been thrown at me. I just, I think all of it is fascinating, and I can definitely see all of it can kind of fit into a program and projects that you're doing over time. That said, I think, with my background in engineering and kind of spending the the first part of my career around engineers who are focused mostly on harder facts and numbers and data and kind of these tangible things, I think the idea of building stories and scenarios really stood out to me as something that was really interesting, as a way to be able to connect on a deeper level and maybe on a more personal level to the information that's being thrown at you. I've been in so many meetings where you're kind of talking through data points. And the, the point you're really trying to make doesn't always land. And I think the ability to write, what you're seeing into a story has really been really informative for me and learning how to do that and learning that also, that's okay to do. Because coming from Product Development stories are not exactly something in your toolkit. I think the other thing that's really been interesting to me is the gamification of futures, which we've talked about a little bit in some of our classes. And I'm actually experimenting with that a little bit on my own, I'm trying to build a retro platformer, it's like, kind of like the old Super Mario games, where you have a guy that kind of jumps around, and try to build scenarios into that. So each level you go through, you have to make a decision, and then live through the consequences and the implications of that decision in the next level. So as you go through the game, hopefully, these consequences will kind of stack up and become more intense as you go through the game. So you really got to think about what you're doing. And I'm hoping that that's a way you can kind of make scenarios more interactive, but also educate people about thinking through decisions and trying to understand the implications of their decisions on a longer timeline, even if it is just a short game. So those are the things that have stood out for me.

Peter Hayward

Cool.

JT Mudge

Yeah, I love the answer, Heather. I love the fact that you brought basically a lot of the concepts in from my answer. And I love the example you used about the Mario kind of the scrolling game, as a form of storytelling, right? You see, so it's not people often don't think of games as storytelling. I myself and my family were really big tabletop gamers. We have a huge collection of games. And, and part of that is and we teach our kids from their very young play, you know, adult thinking games, and part of it is teaching critical thinking. But part of its being able to tell a story, right, you're creating your story as you go. There's there's there's causes and effects, there's always things that happen in games, that are directly related to storytelling and, and for me, this concept of what methodologies or frameworks there are, there are tools in your toolbox, right. And depending upon the situation, you're going to find different ones that work better than others for that project, for the domain you're in, or whatever, whatever it may be. But at the core, I think is well, all these tools are practical. What resonates with me most is storytelling. I know that there's a lot of guests on on Futurepod, that and those are the ones that usually I listened to the most and listened to more than once, or the talk about storytelling, because I even added that to my LinkedIn profile shortly before I joined Futures Program, as a storyteller, because that's what I felt like I had to offer that was different than other technologists. And I have a BA in English so I actually, that was my first sort of love is storytelling. So for me, that really resonates, that's the thing. But it's not just about the storytelling, it's about bringing the people along with the story. A good storyteller in my mind doesn't really just tell they share and they show and someone participating in the storytelling process, they should feel empowered to go out and share that story, right, to become evangelists for it, and they shape it and make it their own along the way. But this is what humans have been doing for millennia. This is what, if humans are good at one thing, it's the ability to tell stories, right? And I think that that is our strength, and that is how we can convey these futures forward. And it's about critical thinking. And it's about being able to change someone's mindset. So it's about changing the way people think, and stories are a really good way of doing that, you know, we're moved, we're motivated, we're impassioned. And that, in a nutshell is what we need to be doing in futures in my mind is the most powerful tools. If you can bring people along with the story that's going to live a lot longer than any document or report that we create. Right? Those are nice, but it really is the story that needs to live on.

Peter Hayward

For me, stories are critical. The stories that I try to tell stories that put people into the moral dilemma of the decisions they have to face. Because for me, the decisions of most significance, I think Heather called the consequences of decisions, the consequences of decisions are the impact on people and often decisions impact on people who were not part of the decision itself. And to me, it's about putting decision makers in that space of them accepting the consequences, the moral consequences of the decisions they make.

JT Mudge

I think that's spot on. And in my work in AI, you know, we talk about bias, right? And why bias gets into a lot of automation and AI, is because of the people involved in creating it. They're not intentionally adding a lot of this, it's because they're not into that story. Right, exactly what you said, they don't have that moral understanding of what it means to be somebody else in that story, that their decisions are impacting or their algorithms are impacting. It's very important when we do this type of storytelling too to include those people, like you said, because it's hard to assume that we would be able to know their story, right, just because we think we've heard it, not until you've actually heard their story for them telling it, that that's very different. There are different impact.

Heather Benoit

Yeah, I agree. And the stories definitely have to bring the crux of the issue home for the decision makers, and have them really have them have a way to connect to the impact and the weight of their decision. And I personally don't think I've mastered that in in my scenarios and the things I've written up, but that is something I'm very keenly interested in and definitely consider as I'm working through my projects. How do we convey the magnitude of what this decision really means and make sure that people are making a very well informed decision?

JT Mudge

Yeah, you know, there's this game I got, it's called Icarus. It's a like a board tabletop game. The whole concept of this game is that you create a scenario, right? It's a city in the future that is at the end of its civilization. And so everybody gets handed out a role card. So Heather you might be a healthcare worker, or something like that, right. And I might be a politician, whatever, right? And so it's a cooperative game. And we go around, and as the game... and we kind of imagine, why does this city exist? What's its purpose? And where do we go, right? And then cards come out to kind of prompt different questions and different different ideas. And we have to tackle those and we can either support them or not, and whether or not our decisions, our intents go forward as determined, of course, it's a game, by dice roll. And if it isn't accomplished, like if the dice roll is not in your favor, then you add the dice to this tower that gets built up, this tower of Icarus. And as the game progresses, of course, the tower gets higher, and dilemmas and the problems facing your civilization get harder, and the tower eventually falls. And that's the end of the game. That's it. There's no winners and losers. That's just it's a way of talking through a story through a game, but it makes you get into the mindset of the different individuals involved in this city that we are making up. It's a very provocative thought provocative storytelling mechanism. And I think we could use more of those types of things in futures as well.

Heather Benoit

Yeah, to build on that, I think my my hope for the gamification stuff that I've been kind of toying with is that it helps put you in that seat a little bit and provides a way to connect to the experience of the story more directly. I still haven't figured out exactly how I'm going to do it. But I think there's a lot to be said for interactive scenarios, like the game you just mentioned, where you can explore in one way or another and really get a feel for the material in more ways than just reading it or kind of hearing someone speak about it. So, I think there's a lot of hope there.

Peter Hayward

Excellent.

Third question, the emerging future question, the one that says what's energizing you? What's, what's exciting you, what's scaring you? What are the kind of emerging scenarios that you're really thinking about?

Heather Benoit

My project for the APF award was on the future of truth. And so I think some of the things that have been top of mind for me, or that at least I've been paying attention to are just the, the way, social media has really changed our, our language, and the conversation on different topics, social topics, and political topics, and also how that's driven so much politicization of issues around the country. And I think, for me, as I've kind of watched it evolve, it really seems like America at this point, maybe other parts of the world too, are living in two totally different realities. You can see things like the Freedom Phone and Parler and these different products that are being created specifically for different political and social ideologies. And so that's something that concerns me a lot, I think, because when you're in such a different reality, from the other camp, you can't understand and shape and define the problems that you need to be working on in a common language. And if you can't understand the problems that you're facing in a common universal way, then you definitely have no hope of finding a solution that works for everybody, because you're not even working on the same thing. So that's something that, in my mind, is a really big issue. That seems to just be getting more divisive as the days go by. But on a lighter note, I do see more collaboration. I think that does give me a lot of hope. And a lot of people who are stepping up in their communities taking on things above and beyond their work and their lives and the other responsibilities that they have, and really trying to contribute and give back and tackle some of these bigger issues and find their tribe that can help them work on it. And I think those innovation collaboratives and online collaboration tools and communities that are cropping up, I think and hope that those will help us solve a lot of these really deep seated challenges that we're facing today.

JT Mudge

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to that Heather, too. I loved your report on the Future of Truth. And I think about that a lot, right? And it's a tough one. In my report the The Futures of Fisheries, actually, it was the the Futures of Pelagic Fisheries in the Pacific, I found... that was my first project, that was my first sort of soup to nuts, futures project. And since then, while I've been in the program, I've done maybe four or five more of those. And the one thing that was interesting to me is that, you know, when we first go into futures, we kind of one of the first tools we learned is STEEP, right? The social, technological, environmental, economics and political or some variation on that as, as ways of looking at your domain and ways of looking at the future, right, these are things you need to consider. And it seems clear to me that there's actually two more things that in all the projects that I've worked on, and seeing from other students that we need to be considering, and I think of it as STEEP, like CC, right? The first C is climate change. And that one seems kind of obvious, right? Everything's affected by climate change. And where we're going and how we handle it is paramount to almost any futures project we're talking about. And it's pretty much every city, even if you're not near the sea, or you are not reliant on farmland or anything like that. You have climate refugees, increase prices, supply chain issues, you name it. So we're really at the point now, where we need to talk about, we're talking about a futures project, part of that future project needs to be how are you going to mitigate the issues from climate change? The other C is China. And this one kind of surprised me a little bit because we've all been talking about China forever. Growing up, you know, there's somewhat, as we saw the decline of the Soviet Union, you know, people start talking about China. It was in science fiction, I think science fiction did a really good job of explaining China, that was going to be part of the future without having to say it, right. You look at Blade Runner, you see the very Asian future. And you see other other TV shows like Firefly, they did a good job of mixing languages of Chinese and English without going into the like, "what was up with China,' they just kind of put it out there. So I think fiction, got it right, and now we're catching up to what China's actually doing. And it's not. It's not a criticism of China. It's just a fact. Right? I mean, they they're doing what they're doing the way that they see fit to do it. But if you look at like, in my report, what China's doing to extend its geopolitical power at sea using fishing vessels, an armada of fishing vessels, it's quite astonishing. And it's quite clever. And you can see everything from supply chain to economics to everything that China is doing is expansion across Africa. They are a massive power. And look what happened when they launched the rocket back in May 2021 and it comes crashing down in the Maldives area. So it's, you know, that could have that could have killed a bunch of people, but it didn't, luckily, but they're just going at it full force. And so we have to be considering China as well.

Peter Hayward

I'm imagining that when you are taught approaches to the future, you're also taken back in time to better understand history. I believe it's fundamental when we teach the future and future ideas is to go back to go back at least as far as that we want to go forward possibly even go further back to really understand deep time, the long processes that are involved. And you're right, China's a good example and climate's a great example of something that's been happening over long timeframes. Timeframes that are much longer than lifespan. They're kind of meta time. Interestingly, I heard Heather talking about something that is almost, almost operating on as fast a time as possible, which is the whole social media stuff. So you've actually got these two things, you've got these long processes of climate, these long processes of civilizations. And you've also got this incredibly fast, temporary cycle time. And the two, the two are kind of occurring simultaneously.

JT Mudge

Yeah, I think that's really interesting, because obviously, they are happening simultaneously, and to a certain extent, I think they're feeding each other a little bit too. The whole idea, I mean, China in truth, just in general, I think is an interesting topic, because they want to control it, right? I mean, everybody wants to control but they actually go to quite extensive measures to control what truth is, and who gets to see what. How is that rapid cycle you're talking about? How does that impact the outcome, the real outcome of what we're going to see in both climate change and in China in our in our relationship to China as US policy changes and other international policy changes towards China, based in large part because of what's happening in the media and people's reaction to that.

Heather Benoit

The question of cycle time is really interesting. I'm working on this project with the team at the University of Houston, we're looking at all these different sets of scenarios and kind of analyzing how things have played out since they've been written and how that compares to different scenario archetypes. Our hypothesis is that systems move from baseline through collpase or new equilibrium and then transition to a transformation state. And it's astonishing how many of them have really not moved very far beyond the baseline since they were written. And we're trying to find historical sets back from the 90s, the early 2000s. It's amazing when you look at the scenarios that were written back then how it feels like so much has changed and has changed so quickly, but really, in the scope of those scenarios, we're really not very far along. We're just churning through the baseline narrative.

Peter Hayward

I mean, is that because when we were writing those scenarios, we were just so much inside our own view of how time happens? And we weren't open to the possibility of things moving dramatically differently or dramatically slowly?

Heather Benoit

I think that's a great question. I don't have a great answer for it other than I think, I think it's hard to anticipate how much society is going to push back against something or move in a different direction, from the thing that you're looking at. It's sort of like a society-level sunk cost fallacy, where we just keep resisting change for the sake of maintianing what we've already built. And it's very difficult, I think, to anticipate that and maybe that's just a part of the field that could use some development.

JT Mudge

Yeah, that's interesting. I, I think the pandemic surprised me a lot of ways. In particular, I really felt like this was, as horrible as it is, I really felt that this was going to be a shining moment for humanity. And I was like, really excited about that part of it, right, because I work in emerging technologies. And you know, I can solve with lots of different domains. And I could just see, like, wow, we can finally come together, we can do all this stuff, we can solve a problem together. This can unite us with all the vision we've seen, you know, in US and UK and other places, this is going to be our come together moment. And what really struck me was how opposed so many people were to change, not just the change of the pandemic, but to to all the effects that was going to have both good and bad. Having that pandemic really show us what we could and couldn't do, when push comes to shove, I think was sobering and kind of showed why maybe, as futurists, we kind of predict how people are going to react to change, right, or how people are even going to drive change. And this seemed to me like it was going to be a pretty clear cut case of how we're going to move forward in certain areas, and it just went completely the other direction for me, for my expectations. And so now, you ask us that question. And I'm like, I don't know. Like, it seems almost like how do you gauge that when, when we look at the future, and we think we know what's going to happen, and we just go completely sideways from that.

Peter Hayward

I think the people that post normal futures, Zia and Jordy and and others, they talk about the notion of the black jellyfish, the black swan, and the third black. I'm trying to think which one and I think it's a black elephant. This notion that we ourselves as futurists need to shock ourselves. Otherwise, we are just we are just running the same ideas around and around and around and they aren't that interesting.

JT Mudge

Yeah, I think that's exactly it and I think as futurists, you know, people, and even like, you know, people were predicting a pandemic, but I don't think anybody really predicted or like you said, shocked themselves enough to say like how we would react in this way. I think that was the thing that has probably caught most people off gaurd.

Heather Benoit

I think that makes a good point, I think we do need to shake ourselves out of our own ways of thinking to some extent. And granted, I'm still new to the field. But I think that's always good to do, I think it's always appropriate and useful and beneficial to push a little bit further beyond the conventional way of thinking about something, or kind of the standard way of thinking about something. And really dig till get to that point where something catches you off guard, because those are the moments where you really find, I think, true innovation. And that was something I think I learned personally from my experience in product development, you know, sitting in, brainstorm after brainstorm, trying to solve different problems. You never just give up after the first hour of brainstorm, and you've got a dozen solutions, and you think you've solved it. I always kept digging, until I found something that was unusual, and something that I hadn't thought about in that way before, or something totally different industry or technology, or whatever. And those were the things that really made the difference in projects, and really turned what we thought about those products on their head. And those were the things that always made products more successful in the long run, because they made them so different and approached the problems in a different way.

Peter Hayward

Thanks, Heather. Forth question, the communication question, I'm sure this is one that all students encountered the second day, or their first day back in the workplace when someone says, So what are you studying? So how do you describe what you do to people who don't necessarily understand what it is you do?

JT Mudge

The truth is I never explain it the same way twice, right? Because I think that's a tough one. It just really depends. And this isn't really too different from the rest of my career, being a technology consultant. Someone says, "What do you do?" And I say, "well, I'm a solution architect", and they go, "oh, so you work on buildings?" Like, no, not really, so then I say, "Well, you know, I help people figure out the solution to their problems", like their technical problems, whatever it is, right? So they come to me with a problem, and I help them figure out how to solve it, how to implement it, for me futures is really similar, except they're not really solving a problem, I'm actually helping them come up with what the problem is in the first place, or what the problems could be in the first place. So I typically tell people, I'm a consultant, and I help people think more critically about possible futures, you know, what could possibly happen? I know like my older kids, my grown kids that are out of the house, you know, they kind of snicker a little bit about like, "dad's a futurist - oooh", you know, kind of a thing. But my 10 year old, she gets it right. And she she works on assignments with me, and she can explain it better to her friends what I do than I can explain it to people. For her, it's not a weird thing. And she doesn't come with that baggage that people don't understand what it is. And so, when someone asks that question, it's like, oh, man, how am I gonna do this? Right? And so like, you have to psych yourself up to answer it a lot of times, because, again, you have to kind of know where they're coming from and meet them there.

Heather Benoit

So for me, depending on who I'm speaking with, I like to say that it's like history before the future, because that seems to provide a familiar framework for people to work with and kind of understand. So I walk them through that we're, you know, just like history, we're looking at trends and events and different things that have happened, and trying to contextualize that information and understand it. And then, you know, in history, you, you look at how that's shaping today, and how it influences the things we do today. And foresight's just like that, except we're looking at what's happening now, the trends and events that are happening now. And we're projecting that and trying to understand how it's going to shape the future. So I like to explain it that way. It just seems to help people kind of wrap their head around it a little bit more. And then, of course, if they want more detail, I jump into how we do horizon scanning and think about implications and build scenarios and all that. And then I like to end on really the point of it all being about setting the vision for the future, making sure that we understand what that vision is, and that it's really about giving people some agency and a voice in shaping that future, to be the future they would like to live in.

Peter Hayward

Well, one of the things I have to talk to students about was what I called the people having a foresight appetite. In other words, people having a preparedness to come towards foresight to come towards futures thinking to actually seek it rather than have it offered to them. Is your sense, since the pandemic, that we've actually got a better, we've got a, we've got an expanded appetite for foresight out there or have we actually got a constrained appetite for foresight.

Heather Benoit

My experience has been that it's increased, I would say, quite dramatically in my experience. So my, my current job is running a foresight subscription program, and I'm not so sure it would exist if the pandemic hadn't happened. Because I think a lot of what has happened recently in the United States with the pandemic, with the polarization and partisanship of politics, the cities and communities around the nation are really struggling, the leaders are really struggling to make sense of everything. There's a lot of uncertainty, there's a lot of stress, there's a lot of pain and trying to figure out what's, what's going on. And so there is a huge appetite, at least in this population that I'm working with, to make sense of what's going on, and to better anticipate change, and to be more proactive in addressing the things that are happening. So in my experience, I think it's it's ramped up quite significantly.

JT Mudge

Yeah, I would agree. And I think it was, in my experience, what I've looked at, it hasn't been through as a direct result of the pandemic, meaning that it wasn't because of the virus itself, right. I think a lot of people could envision a pandemic or what it was what it could be, right? I think, for me is all the little side things that really kind of, like I said, shock people like, like lack of toilet paper, right? When it first started here in America, I think people didn't really imagine an America where you couldn't buy toilet paper, or you had to wait in long lines to get some of this stuff, or there were limits on these things. I think for a lot of Americans, that was a wide wake up call. And so the idea that all we need to be thinking of these things, and these ideas can exist, I think is now something that is a shared experience. And that is one of the benefits to come out of this, because as we move into more of the effects that are going to be happening from climate change, then now people can start to realize, oh, I can envision a world where I can't get the supplies I need or lumber is 20 times the cost, or these things can happen. And if a pandemic can do it, then something even larger, like climate change, what can that do? And I think that is opening up people's appetite, if you will, for things like foresight and futures and being able to actually critically think about what's going to happen and not just, you know, the next quarter.

Peter Hayward

We're at the last question. So what do you want to finish with?

JT Mudge

Finishing with more or less where we started from was around the idea of storytelling as how powerful it is. And how critical thinking is a part of that, right? It helps people to understand cause and effect, and how the world can work and how futures can evolve. And so for me, and you know, Peter, you mentioned this, as well as like, how do we teach us in schools? How do we how do we get people to start thinking about futures? How do we get people to think more critically? How do we get storytelling back as a skill that we all have, instead of just consuming little tiny bits of information in very, very short, you know, tweets and things of that nature. So how do we, how do we move forward with a new mindset, and that is what I really would like to focus part of my career on moving past when I graduate next May, is to, you know, work on community building, work on storytelling with futures, and just help make this part of everyday parlance, if you will, getting people to really just think about it, and use it in their everyday lives.

Heather Benoit

Yeah, I think for me, I think the community has been such a big part of being part of the program at the University of Houston and just kind of entering this field, the ability to meet other students like JT, that have a passion for this sort of work and certainly a knack for it, has just been so thrilling, being able to bounce crazy ideas off the wall and talk about trends and talk about these weird technologies that we're seeing. And I really have enjoyed being part of that community and contributing to it and I'd love to see that continue to grow and mature as we go on. And, of course, invite more and more people to it. And like JT said, I echo the sentiment that, you know, it would be great and something to aspire to, to bring this to more people in society at large and really try to instill this long term thinking, strategic thinking, critical thinking, and I think in a lot of ways, very creative thinking to more and more people because I think the more we can do that, the better off we'll be as a society, a people, a planet. I think the creativity of the people in the community, and especially the design futures and speculative features community - I think there's a lot of really interesting and fun ways that we can make it accessible to people, kind of teach them the elements of foresight in ways that maybe they don't even know that they're necessarily in a lesson because they're having so much fun thinking about these interesting ideas. So that's that's kind of what I hope to see, I think, in the future.

Peter Hayward

Well, firstly, congratulations on your awards. The first time the APF have awarded equal first well done, and on behalf of the Futurepod community, thanks for taking some time out to have a chat.

Heather Benoit

Yeah, thanks so much for having us! I really enjoyed being here being part of the conversation!

JT Mudge

Yeah, and same here Peter, it's a huge privilege and an honor to both win the award and to be here with Heather, couldn't ask for better company. And just super excited about everything that Futurepod and the futures community is moving forward with so thank you for that, letting me participate.

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.