Oliver Markley is a member Emeritus of the Association of Professional Futurists, a Fellow Emeritus of the World Futures Study Federation, and Professor Emeritus and former chair of the graduate program in the Studies of the Future, which was at the University of Houston Clear Lake, and is the program now that has subsequently moved and is located at the University of Houston's current Futures Program.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
More about Oliver
LinkedIn: Oliver Markley
References
Please note that all references below are posted online at
http://www.olivermarkley.com/futurpod-references/.
Each citation is listed after when it appears in the interview.
1. 5:18 Harman, Willis W., O. W. Markley, & Russell Rhyne. (1973). “The forecasting of plausible alternative future histories: Methods, results and educational policy implications,” pp. 299-387 in Long Range Policy Planning in Education. Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
2. 9:12 Markley, Oliver (2012). “Imaginal Visioning for Prophetic Foresight.” Journal of Futures Studies, 17(1), 5-24. See also the greatly expanded preprint of this journal article, available online.
The Omniverse Center for Cultural Development.
3. 13:38 Markley, O. W., D.A. Curry & D.L Rink (1971). Contemporary Societal Problems, Research Report EPRC 6747-2. Menlo Park, CA: Stanford Research Institute.
4. 14:22 Markley, O. W. & Willis W. Harman. (1982). (Eds.) Changing images of man. Elmsford, NY: Pergamon Press. This is the commercially published version of a 1973 SRI report “The Societal Consequences of Changing Images of Man, by Joseph Campbell, Duane Elgin, Willis Harman (Project Supervisor), Arthur Hastings, Oliver Markley (Project Director), Floyd Matson, Brendan O’Regan and Leslie Schneider.
An extended summary is: Markley, O.W. (1976). “Changing images of man.” Renaissance International Journal, Part 1, 1(3), 39-51; and Part 2, 1(4), 1-19.
5. 15:26 Markley, Oliver (2008) “Rescuing elephants in the living room” an unpublished white paper slideshow. The concept of Systemic Integrity is treated in Part IV, “Promotion of Integrity and Integral Activism.”
6. 17:03 Markley, O.W. & Thomas J. Hurley, III. (1983). “A brief technology assessment of the carbon dioxide effect.” Technology Forecasting & Social Change, 23(2), 185-202. The positive feedback loops I mentioned are portrayed on Fig. 2, p.193, “Interrelations among phenomena associated with the CO2 effect.”
7. 18:20 Markley, Oliver. (2011). "A new methodology for anticipating STEEP surprises." Technology Forecasting & Social Change, 78, 1079-1097.
Markley, Oliver. (2015). “More about a new typology of wild cards.” 2015 APF Methods Anthology, 2-4. Retrieved from http://www.olivermarkley.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/More-on-Type-II-Wild-Cards-in-APF-Compass.pdf on January 17, 2022.
8. 20:25 Markley, O.W. (1983). “Preparing for the professional futures field: Observations from the UHCLC futures program.” Futures, 15(1), 47-64.
Markley, O.W. (1989.) “Explaining and implementing futures research.” A two-part paper for the 1989 conference of the World Future Society, in H. Didsbury (Ed.). (1989) The Future: Opportunity, not Destiny, pp. 199-213. Bethesda, MD: World Future Society. Research.
9. 22:57 Markley, Oliver. (2015). “Learning to use intuition in futures studies: A bibliographic essay on personal sources, processes and concerns.” Journal of Futures Studies, 20(1), 119-130. This essay is part of a Symposium on Intuition in Futures Work recognized in 2016 by the Association of Professional Futurists as being a “Most Significant Futures Work” advancing the methodology and practice of foresight and futures studies
10. 23:04 Markley, Oliver. (2003/2017). “Communicating with nature spirits.” Unpublished documentation of personal experience, available online.
11. 24:43 Markley, Oliver. (2007). “Mental time travel: A practical business and personal research tool for looking ahead.” Futures, 40, 17–24.
12. 29:88 Steinbrecher, Edwin. (2006). The Inner Guide Meditation: A Spiritual Technology for the 21st Century. Newburyport, MA: Redwheel Publishing.
13. 30:31 Markley, Oliver. (2020). “Shift-It! With the Transformative Power of Imaginal ReVisioning.” Unpublished white paper, available online.
14. 31:43 The political sensitivity of using visioning tools in corporate settings is shown in the second case example on page 21 of the Mental Time Travel journal article (ibid).
15. 34:49 Markley, Oliver. (2011). "Research and action toward the upside of down." Journal of Futures Studies, 15(3). This paper won the 1st Annual Jan Lee Martin Foundation award for best paper of the year in the Journal of Futures Studies. It is probably my single best writing of this entire list of references.
16. 36:28 Markley, Oliver. (2011). “Manifesting upside recovery instead of downside fear: Five ways megacrisis anticipation can proactively improve futures research and social policy.” Journal of Futures Studies, 16(2), 123 – 134.
17. 30:36 Markley, Oliver. (2015). “Aspirational guidance for wiser futures: Toward open-sourced ascension from ego-centric to eco-centric human communities.” Foresight, 17(1), 1-34.
18. 40:45 The Perennial Philosophy (1946), by Aldous Huxley.
Transcript
Peter Hayward
Hello and welcome to Futurepod I'm Peter Hayward. Futurepod gathers voices from the international field of futures and foresight. Through a series of interviews the founders of the field in the emerging leaders share their stories, tools and experiences, please visit Futurepod.org for further information about this podcast series. Today, our guest is Oliver Markley. Oliver's career began as a Design Engineer but quickly shifted to social psychology and proactive policy research on possible, probable, and preferable alternative futures, ultimately specializing in the development of intuition based envisioning methods for proactive insight, foresight, and wise choosing in order to help people realize the futures they aspire to. Oliver is a member Emeritus of the Association of Professional Futurists, a Fellow Emeritus of the World Futures Study Federation, and Professor Emeritus and former chair of the graduate program in the Studies of the Future, which was at the University of Houston Clear Lake, and is the program now that has subsequently moved and is located at the University of Houston's current Futures Program. Welcome to Futurepod. Oliver.
Oliver Markley
Thank you, Peter, and glad to be here.
Peter Hayward
It's great to be finally speaking to you all over if your name has come up very often in our interviews with other members of the teaching faculty at Houston, obviously other people that were taught by us, yeah, your reach has been tremendous. It is a privilege for me to actually have a chat to you. So question one, so everyone loves Question one, it's the story. So what is the Oliver Markley story? How did you become a member of the futures and foresight community?
Oliver Markley
Peter, I confess that my personal story should start at the end rather than the beginning. I am 84. I've been retired for 20 years. I'm currently living in an assisted living retirement community. And like many of those with me here, I experience various age related losses of capacity, including, how all of a sudden, words fail to come. So I will give it my best shot. But in answer to your question of what is my story, I think it probably should start when I graduated in engineering as an undergraduate, won a four-year graduate fellowship, the Danforth as it was known, for people who have a religious background, who want to teach college. I won one of these, and took it to Stanford. My fluid mechanics teacher said, if you go to Stanford, you must take a course taught by an electrical engineer named Willis Harman. It's called a seminar any human potential. It turns out that that seminar transformed many lives, including my own. Willis was a pioneer of the new, so called third force, of humanistic psychology. And he introduced us to writers like Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers and that, and he introduced us to the whole new world of psychedelic research as a way of contacting higher consciousness.
Oliver Markley
Well, I fell in love with all of this. And as a result, I was clear that I needed to transform from engineering, mechanical engineering, to social psychology, in order to become one of I thought of as a humanistic social engineer. And so it is, it turns out, I got accepted at Northwestern University with the great research methodologist Donald T. Campbell. And since I had three years of fellowship left, I hustled around and I was able to do a thesis masters and a PhD, all in three years. And at that time, Willis had left Stanford University as a teaching base, and moved over to Stanford Research Institute, to do research on all of these kinds of things. And he had just won a multi-year contract from the US Office of Education, to look out 33 years ahead to the year 2000 and draw back implications for educational policy. Educational Policy Research Centers, they were called, and he offered me the slot to manage methodology development for the new center. Of course I was up for it. And I was off to the races.
Peter Hayward
Wow. That's an amazing ... an amazing start to, to a career to both you and I get the chance to be alongside one of the giants and also really be given the the ultimate playpen.
Oliver Markley
Yes, exactly, so it was. We almost broke our pick, trying to figure out how to do this alternative futures research; finally found a way to project whole futures as future histories rather than - as now oftentimes thought about - whole scenarios like cross sectional cross cuts on the future. [1] And basically, when, out of some several 100 of such alternative futures that we looked at, only a small handful, were by any stretch of the imagination, desirable. And all of those involved either incredible good luck, or deep-seated transformation, about such things as pollution, population growth, resource depletion, armaments build up, etc. So as a methodologist, I reasoned that if transformation is the keynote to the really important futures to study, then methods of thinking that are based on rational analysis, don't cut the mustard because that's basically like trend projection. Yep. We need to have ways of visioning whole new possibilities that don't come from the rational basis. But they come from intuition, the wisdom sources within ourselves. So I basically I undertook a private research process to identify potential best practices for tapping intuition as a source of imaginal; What ended up calling imaginal visioning. And it turns out that the best practice, undoubtedly, was relaxation based, guided imagery. I found that by taking a course in self- hypnosis, which I learned, not for this purpose; but in order to learn how to do speed reading, I used self approaches to speed reading to get a handle all the things we have to cover. And in that process, I learned a process that derives from something called Silva Mind Control, which is basically a way to follow a 10-step process of deep relaxation, letting go of expectations and beliefs, and opening up into new possibilities. So I basically enlisted my colleagues to form a weekly pilot-test group. In it, we would simply take the most difficult issue of the week that we were having a problem dealing with, and would select one to work with. Then given my newly found intuitive abilities to do this, I would go inside and intuit a visionary research process, through which to do it. And then I would lead the rest of the group.
Oliver Markley
[Please note that an additional tool that we, for the most part kept secret, was the use of psychoactive chemicals such as LSD and cannibis sativa. This use was later documented by Art Kleiner in his book, The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management (1996, pp. 186-198); and by Michael Pollan in How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (2018, pp.180-182). What, to my knowledge has NOT been documented, is a warning about how overly frequent use of cannabis for creativity can dull the analytical capacity of the brain for complex problem solving. ]
Oliver Markley
For example, Peter Schwartz was heading a scenario study for the US Office of Transportation. For it, we wanted to look at the conditions of smog above the Los Angeles Basin, in the year 2025. So I basically had us all imagine that we were in a 10-foot diameter eyeball; an imaginal eyeball, that was our space-time ship. We flew this eyeball above the Los Angeles basin, and everybody would look out of that eyeball and get what they got a vision. Then we'd come back out of the relaxation, we would share with each other what we got. And out of that we would get tangible results, not as forecasts; but as visionary possibilities, that then we would use the rational handling tools to deal with. It worked just very well. [A visionary experience that greatly deepened this was a guided tour of a knowledge repository for evolutionary operatives called "The Omniverse Center for Cultural Development." Our little pilot test group later found it useful in resolving a problematic scenario for Schwartz involving cultural transformation.] [2]
Peter Hayward
Given that you were working on this research with professional colleagues, what were your initial observations of people's comfort in actually working this way?
Oliver Markley
Well, there was a certain amount of learning to learn. I basically taught them many of the same processes of relaxation, and if you will, self-hypnosis that I had learned, and I would basically count them down as we went. And then I would basically say, here's the problem, and I would suggest things to take a look at, but it's up to them what they see. And their comfort level was quite high, once we got into it. The credibility was initially fairly low. But as an example of how that increased - we did a run-through of the scenarios, before briefing them to the client. One of the people who was most suspicious about the credibility of all this happened to be something of a hard-bitten transportation engineer who had been transplanted into our group to ensure that we would reflect hard-headed thinking. He was very skeptical. But after we went through the scenario run-throughs, he came back and he said, Wow, for the first time, I feel like I understand these scenarios because I lived through them... But I fear the briefing is not going to work, because as I imagined going through it from the client's standpoint, I can see why it is not going to work for this specific reason. So in our little Sunday afternoon pilot-test group, we simply changed the design of the briefing. And when the group did the revised design for the client, it worked. And OMG - that is exactly what we needed. But we wouldn't have see that without doing this visionary process. That really did a lot to restore credibility.
Peter Hayward
When was this process running roughly, was this sort of in the early 70s?
Oliver Markley
This would have happened in the early 1970s, about 1972 - 1974, and like that. When it came time to write up the report to the client, in the Methods Section, a big question was about methods used; do we talk about doing this or not - this pilot test of using visionary methods? We decided to not mention it, because they're just not credible, and the whole studies of the future issue, is facing credibility issues. And then as this interview gets on to the methods section, I may have another story about how important it is to sell the credibility of this process upfront before you report the results.
Peter Hayward
Yeah, in which case, the client really wants the outcomes rather than the methodologies employed to get the outcome.
Oliver Markley
Yes. So at rate, did that; and that worked very well. And after several years of that work for the US Office of Education, they came back to us and said, essentially, congratulations, you did what we wanted you to do. But now we decide that this is not what we need. The reelection cycle of four years, amounts to the planning horizon, we need to work within. And even though you have come to us, as a result of your futures research, saying that we need to to have a transformed approach to education that would be ecology-oriented. We don't have a mandate to do that from Congress. So we're kind of dead-in-the-water on that. So they shifted our work to things like education of the disadvantaged, educational technology, and like that. But Willis Harman and I, being bitten by the bug of transformative thinking, looked for new clients. And the main new client we found was the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, which was looking for a way to get more bang for the buck. They interviewed futurists on both coasts, and ended up picking Willis Harman, because he was really clear that the thing that mattered most was what he called "the issue behind the issues," which, for him is consciousness. And so they gave us a go. The study that the Kettering foundation first had us do involved identification of critical societal problems. [3] It was the first whole study that I was given direction of. It then led to a follow-up study, in which the major critical problem we looked at was about future imagery that's driving the main issue behind the issues: image-istic driver of development, and the possible emergence of a new paradigm, as Thomas Kuhn used that term, but applied to a whole society, not just a discipline like physics. So as a massive experiment, we did that study, which ended up being called - now rather sorry for the term - Changing Images of Man. [4] It should have been called "changing ethos of humanity" or something like that. But anyway, we did that. It was a pioneering study that we weren't able to get published for 10 years. So it kind of circulated as an underground document among many people from all walks of life. And it turned out to be a pivotal contribution to the field.
Peter Hayward
The thing that strikes me Oliver, is, you know, we're sitting here in 2021, at the end of a two-year pandemic that looks like it's going to roll into at least a third year, and this how much things have fundamentally not changed from the early 70s. We still keep searching for solutions to problems. But we have this deep underlying identified need to transform how we think about ourselves and our place in the world and other people. It's, it's still the same conversation, isn't it?
Oliver Markley
Yes, it is. And, for me, the issue behind the issues, other than values and such like, is what Buckminster Fuller called "systemic integrity." [5] Yeah. He contrasted ordinary ethics, like honesty and transparency. Systemic integrity is really looking at the whole system, whether it's a organic system, or what , and asking "Are all the pieces present and working together harmoniously"? And as I do a deep-cause analysis of societal problems, the lack of systemic integrity is the main deal.
Peter Hayward
Yeah, really, I think when people talk about wisdom, that's what they're talking about, aren't they, they are really saying that the person is wise not for any single action or for any narrow interest, but it's, it's wisdom for both the situation and the entirety of everything else. Yeah.
Oliver Markley
There is another main study that didn't read attract much attention. In one of my last projects at SRI, I was given charge of a small study to look at the so-called carbon dioxide, issue, i.e., "global warming." As thing turned out, I had a really ace ecologist on my staff, who did a detailed feedback chart of all the known phenomena involving this issue, including all those that the National Academy of Sciences had simulated in the global circulation computer simulations, and those variables that were not so simulated. It turned out that most of the variables that were not included in the global circulation computer studies involved positive feedback, which is deviation amplifying. This would mean that, in principle, their computer based forecasts were systemically too low. I tried to point this out with a reasoning process that also indicated that before we would be able to recognize global warming related phenomena, we would see weather change, which is a function of the rate of change of increase in C02 in the atmosphere, which when that rate of increase is greatest, that's when you see most weather change. Yeah. And that is turned out to be exactly the case. But I could not get that recognized, because I was not a climatologist, so I published it later in the futures journal, Technology Forecasting and Social Change [6]. Subsequently, it became something of a poster child example of what I've called a Type-Two wildcard having high probability, but low credibility. And then there's a whole family of type-three and type-four wildcards that I may talk about later. [7]
Peter Hayward
At what point, Oliver, did you start realizing that you were a modern day, Cassandra?
Oliver Markley
Ha-ha, yes, exactly. Well, it really comes from feeling like a stranger in a strange land. And, without getting too cosmic about it. That's why I came; that's why I'm here.
Peter Hayward
Yeah, sure. We're glad you came.
Oliver Markley
So I guess that would end this aspect of my story. After 10 years at SRI, both of us, both Harman and I, had pretty much had enough.. He got recruited to be the President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences that had been founded by the astronaut, Edgar Mitchell. And I got recruited to teach and chair the new master's level program in Studies in the Future at the University of Houston's branch campus out in Clear Lake City, right next to the Johnson Space Center. So I spent the next 23 years there.
Oliver Markley
The first thing I did was to interview the graduates. The program there had been underway for two years. And when I interviewed the graduates, they said that there are two major problems now facing them that they would have liked to been trained how to handle is: One: how do you talk about being a futurist? How do you describe this field? Two: they hadn't got training into specific skills to get jobs as a futurist, and to do these jobs. So I basically undertook a whole class to use the organization development and strategic planning things I learned at SRI, and we developed a design to transform the program into how to how to talk and how to do futures research. It was oriented toward consulting and, so to speak, consultative futures research, as opposed to a knowledgeable about the ability to argue the merits and the demerits of growth versus no growth in the liberal arts kind of away. [8]
Peter Hayward
And we have been viewed as part of FuturePod, great slabs of the teaching faculty, obviously, Peter Bishop, Chris Jones and Andy Hines and others, and and, of course, so many of the graduates of that program.
Oliver Markley
It was clear that the main thing that a chairman of a program needs to do is administration, with a lot of of administrative handholding that I have little patience for. Peter Bishop was getting tired of teaching one statistics class after another, and he frankly, got the bug of, "Oh, this Futures," I'm interested. So I cut with him a deal. If we teach him how to do futures, and how to teach futures, he could chair the program and it was done deal. Yeah. [I should also mention how Peter Bishop tutored me in how to scale back my attempts to teach the technical details of futures research, and to instead emphasize anecdotal stories as a way to make things come alive for the students.]
Oliver Markley
So he basically took over the chairmanship in the program, and continued that until we had some sort of a bump in the road that needed organizational transformation; then I would take over again for a year and then hand it back. That worked out very well for both of us in my humble opinion.
Peter Hayward
The two of you were certainly a hell of a tag team, no question you must have, you know, like any good like any good wrestling competition - you must have faced some fierce opposition using some illegal methods to try and to try and beat you. But you kept the program going, which was a great effort.
Oliver Markley
What I did do at University of Houston, Clearlake, was to develop my specialty: I was tired of writing grant applications and getting funded research, which is the way we survived at SRI. So I basically made my specialty the teaching of a class called Visionary Futures, which is where I deepened my skill level, and my teaching abilities to do this visionary inquiry. [9] And I would, frankly, use altered states of consciousness in the classroom. So that that went well. And during that process, and I developed a series of tools that I will talk about in a bit.
Oliver Markley
In 1990, I took a year long sabbatical leave, during which Jennifer Jarrett filled in for me as a visiting faculty member in the Studies of the Future program. During this time I was employed as a futures consultant to a team at Apple Computer Corp envisioning long-range alternative future possibilities for “digital convergence”- one of greatly resembled what we now know as the iPhone.
Oliver Markley
After 23 years, I'd kind of had enough. Peter Bishop and I were having a hard time keeping enrollment high enough to be acceptable] and my marriage was going in a different direction that I needed to attend to. [Actually, I was stunned to learn that my second wife suffered from a secret credit card addiction that had accrued unpaid debts of more than three hundred thousand dollars. This required personal bankruptcy and the loss of all of my retirement savings.]
To make sense of things, I took early retirement in the year 2000, and ended up in Hawaii for a couple of of years that involved divorce and experiential learning new approaches to meditation and research involved communication with plant spirits. [10] And after that time, I returned to the US mainland, and have done a variety of things including publishing in futures journals; but essentially living on Social Security, such that I have not been able to afford attendance at professional futures gatherings. So that's probably my story in a nutshell.
Peter Hayward
Let's move to the second question, the the methods question where I ask the guest to explain a framework or a philosophy or an approach to their craft that is central to who they are and what they do. And obviously, I'm really hoping that you'll talk about the intuition based visioning and to talk to the community about the concept and the theories behind it; also to also touch on some of the the actual challenges and opportunities for practitioners to use use these things. So over to you, Oliver.
Oliver Markley
Okay, so I suppose that the most usable of my various tools is something called visionary or mental time travel, although it might be called better, Imaginal Time Travel. [11] It's basically where you... there are various uses for it, but in terms of strategic planning, it's a really good way to do anticipatory impact assessment, where you're asking, What happens if I do policy A or policy B. What would be the likely outcomes; which would be preferable. So basically, what you do is you make clear what policy A policy B are; then you relax your intention and any beliefs as to which is which is preferable. So you're come into the exercise with an open mind, and then you go into the process of deep relaxation. Then a guide basically leads you from the short term future into the longer term future. You pay attention to what it feels like - to you, yourself; what it may feel like to your work team; to your client; whoever. And as you move from the short term, to the long term, and after you get a cut of a sense of all that, and you bring it back, and record it. Then you go and you do the same thing for the second future, and record that. And then often just ask, okay, now you have a sense of what Future A and Future B looked and felt like, suppose there's a Future C, that capitalizes on the strengths of each and minimizes the the weaknesses, or the threats of each? Is there any hybrid possibility that might make sense? And you come back and record that. It turns out that often is...
Peter Hayward
The third one is, is the one that is useful?
Oliver Markley
Yep. So that is a an impact assessment version of the mental time travel. You can also use mental time travel, just searching for surprises, breakthroughs, and see what happens sometimes, as you go through the vision, you suggest a right angle, turn, to the end the journey that symbolizes a transformation. And what do you see? So people see surprises like that.
Peter Hayward
Can I ask you a question. I'm going to take you into the kind of practitioner pragmatics, I call it, to do that. And I'm just going to take you on what you said you got a situation where we're doing policy impact analysis we've got we've got two maybe three possible futures emerging from policy. So my first question is, do you write a script, a specific script that you then use to move the group through?
Oliver Markley
I generally find it useful to have headlines or a bullet-and-block outline, but the facilitation wants to come from the heart; wants to be a flow state as well. And always try not to say what you will see; what you're looking for.
Peter Hayward
Yeah, you're setting the scene rather than telling the story.
Oliver Markley
Yes, some people aren't doing this make the mistake of saying, uh, now you see a tree and now you see a rock. I'm exaggerating. But, yeah.
Peter Hayward
The second question is, you talked about taking the people through a guided vision, so to speak, for Option One. And then you said, Well, now, you repeat that for Two, how soon after the first one would you move to the next one? Would you sort of do one and then move them into do the second one? Or would you allow some time to pass?
Oliver Markley
It depends on the context. Generally, we'd go on from run one; although you might also take a pee break, and do it. But generally we do it at the same time. The main thing that happened in the visionary futures class as I would have students repeatedly, do mental time travel, going through the vision of the short term, and then the long term future that involves present trends extended, generally the short term future in early 80's looked pretty good, but the longer term future looked very bad. When the students did this repeatedly, they actually got depressed. One of my foundational premises was the Hippocratic Oath of Do No Harm. So if repeated use of visionary time travel on least surprises futures, leads to depression, then I need to find a way to deal with that. So I then used the same kind of tools, visionary tools to come up with a way to handle that. A way that I've ended up finding to do it was in a chapter by an author named Edwin Steinbrecher, in a book called the Inner Guide Meditation [12] and basically there is a paragraph that says, if you find a problem you just can't deal with, and it's just giving you a difficulty. Simply go into it, get an image of that, and let the higher reaches of your consciousness transform that image into the highest image that's suitable for you at this time, and let it happen. I developed a process called Imaginal ReVisioning that does this. And I've got a space in my Internet site that I'm developing where people can do this for themselves. [13]
Peter Hayward
If people found mental time travel visioning, as you said, somewhat depressing in terms of what they imagined, then what happened when they did the revision,
Oliver Markley
The revisioning typically shifts their consciousness so that it's no longer a problem. And they see some new things that they can do that feel satisfactory.
Peter Hayward
Right. Is it that the person when you're actually inside a problem, and you've actually named it as a problem is that that the fact that you've actually moved them from being located in the problem to actually observing it in a broader context? And suddenly it takes on different properties? [Oliver: I would say both.] Right, the practitioner that wants to move into this kind of way of working, they have to do the preparation, that there has to be a process to basically both support the people [Yes] and make it a safe process. You don't just simply decide to do visioning without thinking it through.
Oliver Markley
Yes. And in most institutional settings, visioning is not a safe process. [14] It so deeply lacks credibility, that it must essentially be done in so, to speak, an asylum setting [yeah] for the confidentiality and training. The training can be done in a relatively short time. In fact, if set up right, I do mental time travel in a keynote speech, but set up in such way that it's very quick. And ... it's like it's in the context of an interesting game to do. And they get images, sometimes the images are so striking that it leads to transformation in one shot. But basically, the development of credibility of the process is absolutely critical. And I must say that, I was thinking about doing this interview and looking at the field as a whole, I really became rather profoundly depressed at my disappointment in the field, and my disappointment in my own self. And in my inability to inspire the students to do what they need on their own, to have the thing continue, that it has never really achieved a critical mass. It's out there, it works. Just like tools for enlightenment are out there .... But many are called; not too many respond to the call. (Ha-ha).
Peter Hayward
Andy Hines who I'm sure you know, Andy coined a phrase what he called Permission Foresight, which, and what Andy used to say, was that you need to build the confidence in the client needs to grow such that you can do visioning work. In other words, you don't do visioning on the first date. It's kind of a thing that each of you need to learn about one another become confident in the space. And then when the time is right, then a group that's ready and a practitioner that skilled, you can do the visioning work. [Oliver: Yes, precisely.] And the challenge there, of course, is that for many of the people that work in our field, we actually don't get the opportunity to work with a client for a long period of time, the client generally comes in and wants a single engagement with a single outcome.
Oliver Markley
And by and large, my experience is, clients really don't want to involve themselves in systemic change, even though that's the keynote of what is needed.
Peter Hayward
Thanks, Oliver. Let's move to third question. I think we're sort of we're sort of leaning into it now. How Oliver Markley, both senses the emerging futures around him; and what particularly you are paying attention to? What is getting your attention and what are the futures that you see emerging - both preferable or non-preferable so to speak?
Oliver Markley
Well, I wrote a paper prize winning paper called Research and Action On The Upside of Down. [15] The "upside of down" is a phrase created by a Canadian futurist, Thomas Homer-Dixon. What it has to do with involves something called Panarchy theory, among other things. And as things get tighter, and tightly wrapped up, finally, there's a breakdown and a transfer to break down and systemic restructuring. That's the down thing. And then the question is, how can we anticipate that so then we have another upswing, that leads to transformation. And I think that is the emerging future that I see. There's a science fiction author, William Gibson made a phrase about the future - that all these different futures are already happening simultaneously. They're just not evenly distributed. The thing about alternatives, all the alternative futures, they are all happening right now. They're not evenly distributed. [Peter: That's right. ] So there are all these panarchy-related transformative cycles happening. And they are getting more intense all the time. Oh my God, failed states, pandemic starvation, we're really in for it. [16] And at the same time, there are breakthroughs in consciousness and wonderful things are happening in terms of human potential, some here, some there. [17]
Peter Hayward
Let's go to Question four, because it is one that you said that the people at Houston, were very interested in. And I've got to tell you that years later, it still is the number one thing that when you're learning or you're practicing is is is how do you describe what it is you do to people who don't necessarily understand what it is you do?
Oliver Markley
As I was first learning to teach how to talk about what futurists do and how to deal with that, in doing research about that, for myself, looking at different ways of talking about this in party scenes, I learned to be very simple. And watch people's eyes. And as soon as their eyes glaze over to ask what it is that you do that basically and if somebody say, Oh, that's really interesting, tell me more, then we get into it about alternative futures and like that, or so it really depends on the context. One of the things I am increasingly aware of, is that there's a real variation in the population - even among client communities - on their degree of "havingness" for ambiguity and uncertainty. If that that havingness is low, you have to be very careful how you talk.
Oliver Markley
Since retirement, I sometimes refer to myself as a retiring futurist. My avocation for decades has actually been the experiential identification of promising practices for human wellbeing, particularly those that involve personal transformation. And so I have literally dozens of processes that I've personally explored and mastered. And the main thing now is really how to release egoic control of perceptions of separateness of being apart from reality, basically, to relaxing that into a part of reality. And gradually coming from Source at the center of one's being into awake awareness. [Yeah. ] So that's really the key: awake awareness. And it brings with it a heart-felt capacity for compassion, and well-being even for people who disagree with you. I'll simply use a phrase systemic political dishonesty and fraud of how to be radiantly accepting of that as part of the human dilemma. Yeah. So that's really the that's how I describe what I do is about that. It's about relaxing one's sense of apartness from the core of the human and cosmic dance.
Peter Hayward
OK, Oliver at the end, the last question, so what do you think is the greatest challenge facing the people in our field and for the work going forward and for what the world needs.
Oliver Markley
I'm glad you asked that, Peter, I think my answer to "what is the most important challenge I see facing professional futurists?" Is simply, "The need to recognize and explore the evolutionary potential of higher consciousness. Period."
Peter Hayward
I suppose that's an answer, but it also throws the responsibility over to each person to try and find the best way they can do that.
Oliver Markley
Yep, I think that's true. And we have a lot of historical guidance out there from all the cultures. Aldous Huxley wrote a book called the Perennial Philosophy [yeah], [18] which is the highest common denominator of all the major religions and that, and it's to use a metaphor that he liked. It's like there's a mountain and many paths up to the mountain, but there's only one top to the mountain. And that top of the mountain is pure awareness.
Peter Hayward
Oliver, it's been a privilege. I've heard so much about you, of you. And it's just fantastic that I've had a chance to meet you and have a conversation with you. So thank you very, very much for taking some time out to share with the community and also thank you for how much you've given us as a field.
Oliver Markley
Well, thank you, Peter. Glad to do it. And thank YOU for doing such a great interview; and for the whole FuturePod series that you and your colleagues are producing. I think it is a major contribution to the field.
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.