A re-interview with Rene Rohrbeck where we discuss his latest thoughts on the Corporate Foresight Maturity Model, utilizing generational futures thinking to raise organizational foresight capability and discussing what is responsible corporate foresight?
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
Listen to Rene’s other FuturePod interview
More about Rene
LinkedIn: Rene Rohrbeck
Future of Buildings (Scenarios and Student concepts): https://www.edhec.edu/en/future-buildings
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 the emerging leaders share their stories, tools, and experiences. Please visit Futurepod.org for further information about this podcast series.
As it's three years, since we launched Futurepod, we thought it would be interesting to check in with our previous guests and see how their work and their thinking may have changed since we last spoke to them. And so we created a Futurepod series called the Reinterviews. Today, we are re interviewing Rene Rohrbeck.
We originally interviewed Rene in podcast 24. It was called Expanding Corporate Foresight. And that is one of the most widely listened podcasts that we've had in three years. People are very interested in the notion of corporate foresight. So it will be of great interest for me, and I'm assuming listeners to hear where Rene's thinking is now given the past couple of years of disruption that we've been through.
So welcome back to Futurepod Rene.
Rene Rohrbeck: It's lovely to be here, Peter.
Peter Hayward: So how's the last couple of years been. I think when we spoke to you last time you were in the process of leaving Denmark and your university at Arhus. So maybe just want to talk about where you've moved to and what you're doing.
Rene Rohrbeck: Yeah, you're absolutely right. Since now two and a half years in the north of France with the EDHEC Business School, which is one of the leading business schools in Europe, and I'm running a chair here, which is called Foresight Innovation and Transformation
Peter Hayward: right up your alley.
Rene Rohrbeck: So the idea was really to create a center which can help firms understand how to create fundamental change and therefore picking up on my earlier work on focus more F. I have the entire fit permission with us. So also thinking about how this transformation then can actually happen, what motivates that transformation? What is also the barriers of transformation and all this, of course, in a setting where not only the society at large, but also the business schools they invent or reinvent their role also in driving a sustainable transition. So that's something which underlies all our work and thinking here,
Peter Hayward: Certainly now got a big sandpit to play in haven't you.
Rene Rohrbeck: Right. For us, we have a number of different formats with which we engage with the business community. But right now you don't need to motivate any business any more to start thinking of what is the sustainable future. What is harder is to actually get some activities which are meaningful out of it. And this is also something we'll be touching throughout our discussion today.
Peter Hayward: What is the status of the corporate foresight maturity model that you started working on? What almost 15 years
Rene Rohrbeck: Originally it was a model which was built out of the wish to connect often very local, very unconnected type of approaches, projects, and so on which firms do to look into the future and plan for their strategy. It's started to to have two layers, the layer of more the actions, which we call the Three 'P's, which has Perceiving, Prospecting and Probing. So this process, which a firm goes through when it is preparing for doing something about future threats and opportunities and a capability layer below, which is something which we're even more interested because even for us as humans when we build the capability, this is something we can then deploy for many different goals. We have many different benefits we'd get out of it. And this is something which we have then also driven through a lot of benchmarking work, looking deeper into what is it exactly firms, which are responsive, which are doing right. What is the processes they have in place? What are the routines for scanning the horizon? How does that connect them to decision-making? How do they create also emotional involvement across the organization, et cetera, et cetera. So we've been continuing our work and using that model for benchmarking and what we want to take it towards is to make an openly accessible index out of it. And it's still the same notion which we had when we started this work. We need to give organizations a tool to counter balance their focus on the here and now.
And I think for us, this is even as human beings, something very important to get this balance between the here and now and the future, and maybe the future of my children and the ones who come after me, but this is something which we learned from our research, which doesn't come natural to organizations whether they are non-profit or for-profit, and this is something we want to do something about and such index, which you can track across different industries across countries is something which we want to contribute.
Peter Hayward: I mean you, in our conversations, quite a while ago, you introduced this notion of maturity. And so the question I have to ask you is are organizations getting more mature in the ability to do this?
Rene Rohrbeck: We have seen actually a huge boost coming from the COVID situation. I think this was a wake up call across the board, which earlier we witnessed more industry by industry, digital transformation, which is hitting almost all industries and where industries are starting to transform and then companies to realize that they are not adapted anymore to what's happening around them. The COVID crisis amplified this in a very meaningful way, so that practically all firms we talk to, then it's a bit biased because firms also come towards us to discuss these questions, but they not only aware, but they often have already teams working on horizon scanning, teams working on scenarios, teams looking for a broader notion of risk assessment in the mid and long term. The other day, I was talking to a really nice lady who is whose job title is the Assurance of the Long-term role of that company.
Peter Hayward: Wow
Rene Rohrbeck: That's right. That's right. So there's this notion of going beyond resilience to understand your place in a future world, your place in the system and your impact on the system is something , which is clearly emerging in a much more stronger way than we have witnessed in the past decades.
Peter Hayward: Is there something there's probably not a simple answer to this one, but have you got a sense about where the developmental opportunity or what things are still inhibiting the development of real corporate maturity in this space?
Rene Rohrbeck: So that's probably a couple of points which come to my mind straight away. The first is still this notion that efficiency needs to rule in large organizations. For many firms this is something which allows you to cut short or to any kind of reflection exercise that you say "this is going too far", "this is not us", "this is something which takes out the attention from from more important things", whatever those important things then are. So there's notion of, we need to be efficient also means that you are not organizing your people in a way that you have resilience afterwards, I keep reminding also the leaders we work with that the most robust society in nature is ant colonies. And the main reason for that is that 30% of ants their tasks, was not going after the known sources of food, but running around randomly looking for new sources of food. Now there's a couple of companies who might spend some 5%, maybe some 7%. Some leading companies are also spending up to 15% of their revenues on R and D. Maybe also have a strong 'R' or undirected research to gather new technological knowledge or other kinds of knowledge in order to then build the future of their company on the basis of that. This is still very rare. So that's certainly the first point, which one needs to ensure that there's a balance between the current set of products and services you are offering and the new ones, but that's an old topic.
Now, the second thing which I'm increasingly seeing is the attention span. And that's more of a societal challenge. The attention span you can put on dealing with challenges, which you can set on new projects is more and more difficult to protect. And this of course makes it very hard to then, keep the attention, not even in the planning process is already hard to keep that attention, but then to keep the attention on executing then on those insights, building new parts of your business. Building larger changes in the way you produce your products or even the kind of products you have and we have big transformations, which we need ahead of us. And for that, we do need this attention. So this is something which I am often invite also leaders to reflect on how much attention do they have on creating change. How much in terms of time per week, time in the month, time in the year, this is something which is important to, to reflect on I think.
Peter Hayward: I've always thought that it'd be interesting, and, I don't know whether you've seen this in your research, but there are corporate organizations that have a very close connection to the market, and in terms of the quarterly reporting and that kind of thing. And then you have what are often privately owned organizations that don't have to respond to the market as readily. And I've always wondered whether privately held firms that are somewhat independent of, the pressures of the market. Can they in fact be more mature because they can take longer to do things and think about things and that kind of thing.
Rene Rohrbeck: Yes. This is something which comes out actually very strongly, also empirically from even 15 years back when we were starting this type of research in our research program. We seeing a lot more sort of readiness to engage with the long-term in companies, which are family owned companies, which are owned by foundations. And sometimes this comes also then, in almost hidden or indirect ways. So many companies, which have still, maybe not a hundred percent, but a strong base of family ownership, they would still do the quarterly reports because they are public company and they're traded and they need to do them. And in many of the conversations we have then with leaders of firms, which have some family heritage or ownership, they would say, yes, managing the company as a public company yet, there is this dinner invitations, where I need to say something about where do I take this organization? What has this organization for an impact on society that can be sometimes a very local society of saying how are our workers doing? How are the families of our workers is doing? What kind of schools do they go to?
So a very local responsibility, which they feel but, we also been privileged to do some work with very old and very large chemical companies, which often in many ways in the crossroad situation where they'd say we have been actually financially very successful in the past decades because we feed basically our products into growing economies around the world. And we are leaders. We have patented technologies. . We doing very well. At the same time, we also profiting from the throwing-away culture which we helped create. And they often have this inner dialogue, which is represented by the younger employees and the older employees. I often find myself now mentally on the side of the latter, then you're starting to say, oh yeah, of course we need to go further and higher. And we need to do more to our top line and for our bottom line. And it comes natural while the younger generation say will, why should that be natural? Why can that be detached from our responsibility towards what is being done with our products and there's tremendous amount of work for foresighters and futurists to get into this discussion and help canalize this or help making this a productive one.
Peter Hayward: So one of the things you have been doing is, I think you call The Future Of projects, and you want to maybe just talk about maybe some of those projects, but also talk about what is it you're trying to achieve with those.
Rene Rohrbeck: So this is something which in different names and forms I've been doing now for over 10 years, but I'm really reinvented them to a certain extent when I joined the EDHEC Business School also because, we are here in a business school, which has the heritage of engaging a lot with its near shore partners in the industry, but also internationally and students they are also in this situation where, on the one hand, they getting still a traditional business school education to make them effective managers, and then they're also looking for this amplified role as change agents, understanding how they can be part of the sustainability transformation, which is going on around them. And we were looking for ways to bring these two populations together. So the firms wondering about their future, the young people who want to be part of that future in futurist terms where we often talk about this as decolonizing the future, so it's not the old people making the future for the young, but that's that the young can create their own future.
And so we've been fine tuning this type of approach now for some time. And the basic logic of this is that we take the firm's first, through training on foresight. We then take them through a foresight project with more of a classical type, you would imagine where we work on horizon scanning, where we work on scenarios, where we work, and that's often for the firms, very important with the emerging companies or with startups, mid cap companies, which are doing something different than their industries. And we are disrupting with that first phase of the project the thoughts about what can be the future of their organization and the industry which is their context. And after this disruption, we bring in the young people. And I've got the privilege of teaching a course, which is called Foresight and Strategic Design. And I'm teaching this actually in two of our programs. So there's some 350 students, which I can get involved into these kinds of Future Of projects. And the students come in with fresh eyes on everything. So without the rucksack of the rules, which I expect an industry to work by and which cannot be altered.
And the two recent ones, which we did was the future of air travel in the middle of the COVID crisis. And this year we do in the future of buildings within the housing crisis. So we also picking deliberately industries where there's a particular pressure on where there's a particular moment in time where people reflect, where people ask questions and it's a wonderful meeting, a melting pot for ideas, for generations, and it can still be enhanced. I'm also taking inspiration for lots of other such type of projects. I'm taking a lot of inspiration from the UNESCO and Riel Miller's work with this Future Laboratories, which is really about this awakening, this instinct of reflecting this instinct of thinking outside the box. And there's amazing inside stories. And also action coming out of those Future Of projects.
Peter Hayward: Wow. I wonder. Given my interest is always the moral basis of the actions we take. Does the actual moral basis, the moral understanding the conditions of who is impacted by the future of the industry come up in these generational conversation?
Rene Rohrbeck: Yes, this is one of our big missions in this that we want to create this systemic understanding we want to make the students also where I mean one needs also to be fair towards managers in the sense that managers, they are not and then they're not waking up and saying, I'm going to make life easy for me. I'm trying to take straightforward decisions. Even if it appears sometimes from outside challenges, of course, that organizations are complex within they're surrounded by a complex environment and firms need to take decisions. To move and to be functional. So of course we have a big role also in making sure that our students are able to take decisions and I'm catching myself sometimes as a futurist that I'm looking at a challenge which I'm facing and I'm enjoying myself so much on reflecting on it that, that can take some time that some action comes out of this.
We of course do this type of projects to bring options on the table. And what is fantastic about this is that we are able to keep attention on this reflection for nine months, that's typically the way we run these projects. So the firms, they're starting through a series of workshops to work on the future among themselves. We also bring firms from different perspectives into it. And what amazed me for instance this year and the Future of Buildings. The building industry is, very fragmented, so there's the ones who would make initial design, the architects. And the building engineers they need to work out how to, I want to, if they're able to build this then there's the retail real estate companies, which are then getting the money, finding the customer, bringing the financing together, who are then contracting the construction company after construction, the real estate companies they often sell very fast the projects off. So then they stopped caring about the long-term life of a building. So there's all kinds of challenges, structural challenges for bringing together the actors in the industry to take a sustainable view on the industry. And what doesn't help is that they also don't talk with each other.
So we quite deliberately, we want to create this forum and what amazed me was when we were three months into the project, and this was 2020, so you can imagine the workshops, which otherwise are a great place to be together and to exchange thoughts, to warm up with each other, to build trust while they were online.. So we do our best to get discussions going. And we do a fair job, but it's not the same. So the first time we meet actually is in summer 2020 in Berlin for what we call the startup trip. So we invite startups. We scouted as being particularly advanced in the field. And we're looking at companies which, for many reasons in areas where they pollute a lot many of our listeners might know that the building industry is depending on the country responsible between 35 and 40% of CO2 emissions. However, this is often something which is not directly attached to one organization has also something to do with heating the building and so on. And across the board all these organizations they look at me at the start of these two days, which we spend together and say we really here because we are all looking for making our industry more sustainable. And that was for me. Okay. I was expecting that this will be part of the discussion. There's plenty of other topics, shortage of labour, of talent, there is digitalization coming in, and new types of players coming in. So the established companies also need to defend themselves, but this was across the board. The biggest challenge or the most important challenge they actually wanted to work on, even though it's probably not the biggest in terms of the impact on their organizations just yet.
And this gives me a lot of hope. And then of course, what is interesting is for the different actors in the industry, many of them, they are profiting of course, from, the boom in house prices, for instance. And we bring them together with the group of people which suffers the most, which are our students, which are particularly in our Paris campus, or so you can imagine how big apartments can get when you are a student budget and you're living in Paris. And then what kind of conditions you're then joining maybe online courses in these COVID times. You're start creating very powerful reflection opportunities, let's say for the access of the industry. And what was interesting for me to see them, the second part of this Future Of project is really about creating concepts for the future and those concepts, they are then fueled by the horizon scan. They have fueled by the scenarios which we developed, also develop and videos, which we could also share with the listeners with a link, which gets then further amplified.
So with the startups we see in the space, and we had very inspirational startups working on circularity of building materials, for instance, among others. And then the students come in and they start to build actually as a team work, these solutions, ideas, inspirational use cases, et cetera. And what was amazing for me to see there was that many were also looking for solutions, which would fight this loneliness that they are experiencing right now in COVID crisis, but going beyond that and saying, we also need to bring communities back to my living environment. We're seeing that sort of society and the different elements of societies that are drifting apart. We need to fight this and in the sense this is for me a bit of a time travel because in Denmark this notion of we need to make huge efforts to keep our society together has been something which has driven policies also , in buildings and in also how you organize cities for many years by now. But in France, this is still something which is rather new, but where you can see this powerful driving force of the young, who bring that in with them all. The heart and the energy and the emotions also into the discussion through a series of pitch videos, which we then also shared widely with our partners and were partners are still coming back to me and saying "can we have this video again from these students? because I want to show that internally at this and that workshop". So it's creating real impact. It's one of the values of the people involved and not just involved in creating the buildings, but also involved in using them and being part of society and so on. So I think this brings, it brings moral, and these emotional elements out very strongly in the planning later on.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. I'm hearing that. When you talk about the difficulty of managing the here and now and the long-term and the tension that's between those two things, what you're talking about of course is the trade-off. At what point that we trade the future off for the present and what time, and then what notion that we do, we possibly trade off the present in order of a longterm. And I think what you're saying is by getting people's thinking out of just their own organizational context, at least to the level of the system, even beyond the market or the niche and get it into the community. It doesn't make the problems easy to solve necessarily, but you have different sets of values upon which you can make this kind of future present trade-off happen.
Rene Rohrbeck: Yeah. And I think my work is also driven by the notion that it's not just about trade-offs. It's also about finding smarter ways of acknowledging first and then also shaping the system, which governs then how we do business and then how we consume and how we organize ourselves as a society. I think also the previous project we did was the Future Of air travel. And this is, particularly on the side of the airlines an industry, which is extremely boxed in what we don't realize is that many airlines, they are barely profitable. So they have very little extra cash to spend on the different type of future and what you could also see when the crisis hit. And I had the privilege of seeing this also from somewhat from within, because I had an existing consultancy engaged with a major airline. And then we started also this project, which involved in two airlines, two airports, all four major ones, some think tanks, you have got Amadeus,, which is known, maybe for the Amadeus codes with which is a digital player, which helps in, in many ways, not just that industry, but mobility at large on with digital tools and digital products. The entire industry was basically looking at COVID like the mouse is looking at the snake,
Peter Hayward: Cat.
Rene Rohrbeck: .The cat with big eyes. And, the only question which was asked was. How long will this last until we're back to normal? And from the beginning, you are from an outside perspective is of course much easier, but you say, this is an industry which was any way on, on a path.
Peter Hayward: It was on its knees, any sustainable vein, and now you've become completely unsustainable. You might as well either transform yourself or disappear.
Rene Rohrbeck: That's right. And I still reflect on the discussion we had on your terrace. When I was starting to say, okay when do we see you over in Europe? And you said you will never see me over in Europe, by the way. My, my brother has also was at the 75th birthday in, in the U S and I'm not going to visit him because I'm not going to put all these CO2 emissions out just to take the plane. And I had a reflection a little bit later when I was sitting in a plane going back from Hong Kong to Frankfurt, I think it was. And we had to wait. So the German pilots is giving us a little bit of information because he enjoys this and he's anyway bored. So he says, by the way, we almost ready to go. And we fueled up and it's 220,000 liters of kerosene and, and then we're going to take off and we have 400 people and we're going in the next 10 hours going to burn 220 thousand liters of kerosene!
And then of course you do the math and you say for sure, the airline industry is selling the plane saying this is more fuel efficient now. It's only four liters per a hundred kilometers per person sitting in the plane and the perfect conditions. And then you're saying, yeah, but the problem is the number of kilometers. If you do take your trip to Bali to enjoy nice weather and winter time. You need to be aware of you will never be able to catch up the CO2 emissions by taking your kids by bicycle to school every day for the rest of your life. So I think this is something which from outside, of course it's easier to spot them from inside. This extreme competition between airlines, the marginal cost of an extra seat is close to zero, which means that you will always find tickets, which are so ridiculously cheap that no relationship to what you're actually consuming in terms of energy and in terms of service overall. And then of course, with also , in a situation where these external costs, which this industry is putting on everyone else is just getting too large. So we have this flight shaming movement, cetera, et cetera. So you're sitting there and the only question, these major players are asking for the first three months of the COVID crisis, how long is it going to last without even considering that there might be some radical changes. And it's something with, the students, which we have, they of course, reflect , in a very personal way. Many of them, they chose to get this education with us. Many would be, also intercontinental travelers to make that happen. So they also reflecting of course, on this and quite practically now wondering what will be the ticket to go home to Christmas. Is that something I can still afford if that industry changes a lot? So there's a lot of highly, emotionally loaded discussions which happen then in in such Future Of projects.
And for us, we are not there to judge. We are not there to come up with a solution, to predict the future or to form a future, which we like, but we are there to bring options on the table. So also there, we worked basically in informing, showing what are the drivers, which will make sure that this industry will never go back to an old normal, it will be transformed and we are there to show in which way this could happen. And then it's, that's the joy of a futurist is that you can with that, then be part of informing action, but you're not the one doing the action. So it's something which gets picked up then on different levels. By legislation, but also by the actors in the field, how, they look forward, but we do want to help to bring in this not just fresh air, but also this room to maneuver that other narratives can survive in an organization where otherwise it would be everything so much focused on efficiency to meet this bottom line slightly above the red to make sure that this continues to happen. And this is something which really brings back a lot of excitement then to everyone involved in these projects.
Peter Hayward: I'm sure.
You're doing some work with Ted fuller on Responsible Corporate Foresight. Maybe just want to talk a little about that.
Rene Rohrbeck: Yeah. I think it's amazing work which Ted is doing. So he has created a UNESCO chair for Responsible Foresight. And for us as foresighters who tried to bring options on the table, we also know that some of these options they would be picked up they would be implemented. They can be good and bad. So there's always this notion that if you create new forward views. If you open horizons, then the genie is out of the bottle, and then this genie might do things you haven't intended the genie to do. And Ted doing an amazing job to really create this 360 degree view on foresight and responsibility and how do they interact? What does it mean to decolonize the future? What is our responsibility also? on reconnecting these feedback loops, which are unconnected. I think we had this discussion earlier about the inability for us, for instance, to reconnect the feedback loop of us consuming food. But us also, taking care of our planet so that food can be grown. And as we know, crops are already changing in many places of the world, which still sounds positive, but then it also means that in some places of the world, the crops used to grow. they are no longer possible to grow there. This kind of feedback loop is impossible to see when you are in the shelf on a supermarket that's foresight has also strong role to play, to recreating those feedback loops.
And we had also an amazing discussion and going back to, to more near shore for you to. The Aboriginal society in Australia, which is not only the society, which has survived the longest as a society that we know of, but also in an incredibly scarce environment. The more you have scarcity, the more the feedback loop actually closes for us that you realize if I'm hunting now, one fish too many, then it will not reproduce. Now if I'm going after this tree, because I want this woods this tree is actually feeding the animals which I'm then later on use for food. And I'm also not going to fall into this trap of this abundance which I feel when I'm in a supermarket and I've got the money to buy whatever I want this myth of abundance, which actually is not there on the planet is something which we need to overcome.
So this is ultimately part of what futurists can do to shed light on this systemic nature of those challenges. Also on the implications. We basically, without acknowledging them in many times have to to care for, and to me, it's still something which organizing my own thoughts around this notion, what will be responsible foresight in a corporate environment? This is something which I'll be working on with Patrick van Duin who is for many years more than me an active, informed voice about how foresight in firms gets used to what ends. So I'm really excited about this project.
There's really a couple of things which I would love to, to explore. First of all it's the notion of what are we doing and where are we doing it? So what is already done by firms? And there are some interesting things I already see in, for instance, a big chemical company, which said we're going to use a scenario exercise to involve some 200 leaders old and new to look at the purpose of our organization. I found that an amazing activity. I like to to do some research to find more of such activities, which are already in a context where they need to exercise their responsibility or where they want to enhance responsibility of firms.
The other question is what is actually the role firms need to play? There still is this tension. So to speak that on the one hand can listen to Milton Friedman and say, the business of business is business. So you need to focus on what you do. You need to focus on your top and bottom line. And the rest is given by the context which comes from society and from politics to give you the rules under which you need to operate. The notion gets challenged for good reasons and saying we can't behave like that, that everything, which is not allowed I'm free to do. It's also firms need to think responsibly about what is the implications of my actions. So I think many see an emerging trend which potentially gains in strength, move more towards a stakeholder base economy. That is certainly something which we need to address there, but it's also very big topic and to ultimately I'm also a pragmatist. So I also want to see which kind of formats actually make sense to engage into more more, more sustainable type of foresight, more responsible type of foresight.
I'm also very eager to explore and continue exploring methods, which allow us to open up this process. Maybe like I do in a humble way with my Future Of projects, but to bring different groups together in order to be open about the strategies which are being built, about the implication of those strategies, et cetera, there's a lot of potential also through the tools which we all use now. Online forums, social media, et cetera, which allows us to bring in a very lean way, voices into the debate about future priorities, which is something which we need to get much better on in order to build really this robust, resilient futures for us and a more sustainable planet for all of us to live in..
Peter Hayward: Yes, we certainly have to .
It's been great to catch up
I think the work you're doing with Responsible Corporate Foresight is right up your alley. I can hear your juices running. And I think the work you're doing in the business school with the Future Of is the beginnings of that kind of participatory in non-colonized futures idea we both hope can find a place in organizations, but thanks for all the work you're doing. And thanks for finding some time out to talk to the Futurepod community.
Rene Rohrbeck: Well has been wonderful to be here, Peter, thanks for bringing me back and thanks for your fantastic work of bringing all these voices together. I'm still a keen follower of your work and looking forward to some bright futures for all of us.
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 has been Peter Hayward saying goodbye for now.