A reinterview with Rebecca Ryan, discussing ‘doing the next right thing’ and Future generations.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
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 over three years since we launched futurepod, we have been checking in with our previous guests to see how their work and their thinking may have changed since we last spoke to them .We call this series the Reinterviews. Today we are reinterviewing Rebecca Ryan. We last spoke to Rebecca in podcast 65 called Energy First. Since then she continues to rekindle her passion for future generations and building better futures. Welcome back to futurepod
Rebecca Ryan: Rebecca.
Wonderful to be with you and it's been so much fun to listen to the re interviews of your other guests as well. It's amazing how much things have changed.
Peter Hayward: So how has the last couple of quite calm and peaceful years been for you?
Rebecca Ryan: Well there's nothing like a major disruption to make people reach for the tools of foresight. So in a way it's been very busy and I feel like I've grown as a Futurist, as much in the last two years as I have in the previous parts of my career. It's really been a phase change. But I also personally have really felt the toll of that. And some of it is exhaustion, just personal exhaustion from work. I think some of it is living in the midst of so much uncertainty. I mean, we're living through what everybody else is living through. And, I hit a little bit of, I call it mental black ice here in the upper Midwest. We have this thing called Black Ice where you know what it is,
Peter Hayward: You don't see it coming and all of a sudden you going sideways.
Rebecca Ryan: Exactly. I went a little sideways with my mental health, in December of 2021 coming into 2022. And, I really had to take some time and, I share that because number one, I think that, it's a sign of the times. I think a lot of people are struggling with mental health and anxiety and depression.
And we're doing it as a global community. But the other thing is, I do think, the responsibility I felt was that it's hard to think about brighter futures, which are really necessary right now. Sohail talked about it and I am 100% nodding my head back and forth in agreement, violent agreement. But it's difficult to imagine brighter futures when you aren't even sure how you're gonna have the energy to get outta bed. So it's been a heck of a journey. A lot of peaks and a few valleys.
Peter Hayward: Yes, Richard Slaughter penned a quite provocative journal article called we have to give up the notion of preferred futures, which he put out as a provocation to the field. And of course, Stuart Candy coined the I think quite memorable phrase of our Emotional Burden that as part of our job if we're trying to get ready for the future and imagine all futures, then we have to go to some places that we do not wish to occur, but we need to at least appreciate them, understand them, possibly see the early emergence of them and also the search for leverage. But that's an uncomfortable thing to do when we know that a lot of other people just would prefer to just not think about it.
Rebecca Ryan: Yes, and as a facilitator, there are times when you want to be a counterpoint to the energy that's happening in the room. So, easy example is after lunch, energy tends to recede. So you have to be the more energetic counterpoint to that to keep people focused and on task and thinking together. But, the other part is true as well. You want to have have the sensitivity that if the community or the group is really struggling, how far down the road of a challenging future, do we really want to go when everyone is already living with these very trying circumstances. I think the work of doing challenging futures has become more difficult and personally, when your energy isn't there and you have a hard time thinking about a brighter future, it's a, it's difficult to lead clients through that journey as well.
Peter Hayward: I wonder Rebecca, and if I use the collective We it's not just us as a field, but it's maybe the sort of profession and also our clients. If we actually are not equipped or not practiced in working with futures that are not bright and shiny. Because we know that negative futures are enormously, powerfully motivating. You've only got to look at people who are energized to prevent futures. Look at, Black Lives Matter, the Climate protests with the young people. They are both embracing futures that they do not wish to occur, but they're actually putting it on the front foot and using it as the way to create energy, rather than just not wanting to deal with it. And yet there is this other, understandable aspect where people almost feel like we used to say, if you talk about the devil, you invite the devil in .
Rebecca Ryan: I've had that experience, in groups where people say, I don't wanna speak it or it will come true. Yeah but generally I've actually had the opposite experience of what describing generally I've found that groups can pretty easily go to the dark place. This was before COVID. And we used to always joke that the challenging future should come with some Xanax because it's a little depressing to, to go there, but those challenging futures. On the scale, we're far more challenging than the aspirational futures were aspirational. So, I found prior to COVID that it was much harder to get people to think truly aspirational. It's almost like the upper limit of what they could imagine was what was available to them. Availability bias or, familiarity bias. So, now I think the aspirational futures it's possible, they may be even harder for people, because if we are ground down, if our personal reserves are even lower, getting to that high soprano note, hitting that crescendo note, maybe even even more difficult, but I'm, I'll tell you what, I'm gonna go down trying.
Peter Hayward: When I'm talking to you I'm talking to a trained practitioner in Buddhism. You understand the Buddhist notion of the Cause of Suffering in the End of Suffering and without saying that our field needs to become Buddhist to become more effective, but are there things that helped you or could well, help people find the reserves or find the place from which to start the work that you are talking about? It's hard to often just gird your loins so to speak, to start the process when you are tired, when you are weary, when you are feeling to some extent, either hopeless or pathless.
Rebecca Ryan: Yeah. You know, I actually come back, I would come back to something that is not necessarily a Zen concept, but it aligns well, and it's something that you and Rowena Morrow have talked about frequently, which is Hope Theory. That Pathway and Agency are the requirements. And in Zen, for sure. In my Zen sect of Rinzai Zen action. Taking action. Not letting there be a hair's breath between what is is needed and what is done.
That's deep in our training. You do the next right thing, with no hesitation. The Pathway. The Pathway feels like the place where people are having a hard time. Like even if you know how bright of a flashlight do they need to have to illuminate the next five years, let alone the next 10 years. So in that case, I'm finding with our clients that they're not as interested in 20 year futures, they wanna do 10 year futures. They'd prefer to do five year futures. And if you'd be willing to work with them on their next 12 months, they'd be even happier.
Peter Hayward: Again, then I think we have this unwitting causal nature of first the path, then the act and I wonder if in fact it is the act and then the path?
Rebecca Ryan: And, and both at the same time. I don't think there actually needs to be such a hard and fast division between the two, because you're right. You take the next right step and then more of the path can appear. But we've lulled ourself into this belief that, we'll design this 10 year future and. The path will just be clear. Well, there's just so much murkiness in the environment right now that people are having a hard time imagining the path.
Peter Hayward: So let's unpack the next right act. As a facilitator, as futurist. Where do you find the next right act? How do you facilitate the conversation with your clients around finding the next right act?
Rebecca Ryan: I'm in the midst of this right now because in person events are coming back online and I'm traveling more and key noting more and that emotional burden that Stewart coined the term for, I'm making friends with that. I feel like I have more of a responsibility today than I have ever had, as a futurist. So for me, the next right act is gonna be different based on the audience and where, where their heads are and their hearts. And one thing that is common is I feel like part of my job is to help people remember. And I use that word very intentionally. So we all know what it means to dismember, to pull things apart into different pieces and remember, you could think of it as just putting things back together. And some of what I'm trying to help people remember is who they really are. And when we can really face into ourselves.
Somebody asked me once, Rebecca, if you could have anything you wanted on one billboard across the whole world, like the same billboard at the same time, everybody would see it. What would you want it to be? And I said, I would want there to be three words on every bill aboard around the world. You will die. And if we can start to face into the fact that we aren't gonna be here for forever and we should be facing into what we want our legacy to be, what we believe our one true note is. Those kind of questions are very clarifying for individuals. And they are a wonderful place to start to build brighter futures.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, they're a great place for organizations as to why do you exist?
Rebecca Ryan: Exactly. That's it? I mean, that's the other piece of it is, facing into the existential questions and returning to the first principle questions. Why do we exist?
Peter Hayward: It's interesting when you use the word, remember. Because what came up for me, Rebecca was the notion of, to remember the body, remember the heart, to leave the abstract behind just for a short time to come back into the corporal-ness of us and the pain and the sadness that we have, but to actually remember that as part of the fuel for, the next right act.
Rebecca Ryan: That's really beautiful. I guess that's probably where it should start is to come back to your body. Feel your feet on the ground. Gaze at something that you love and think about where that came from. I'm sitting in a house that was built in the late 1800's. And I think about the craftman's hands that built these doorframes. And I think about how long ago. They lived and who their parents and grandparents, and you can just push it back and back and back and back, and you can see how I'm living in someone else's future. But then how do we remember our connection to other things the natural world? How do we remember our connection to generations yet unborn? These things all come in and through our corporal bodies, but the corporal body is not the end of the story. It's part of the story.
Peter Hayward: Might be a good place to start, but then the notion of forgetting the notion of being forgotten is another interesting aspect. Because you talk about the craftsman who built where you are living the people who built the beauty around you, and they are forgotten in the sense that as they no longer exist and you can't even name them, but they're also not forgotten because their acts, their right acts are what are remembered.
Rebecca Ryan: Yeah, you're right. And I think it's such a useful place for people to enter foresight as an example.
I was with a company, a few weeks ago and their company is celebrating its 75th anniversary. So if we do the math and we think that every generation is about 20 years, they are the fourth generation. That group of leaders was the fourth generation. And we talked about how, they were living in the imagined future of their founder, whose papers on water management are in the Smithsonian. You all are living in your founder's future and you are creating a future, that will be your ancestors' present. And you could just, see how it was kind of reordering their brains to think about that deep time connection, backwards and forwards.
Peter Hayward: I worked with an organization that was a food production organization and the founder created the organization over a hundred years ago. And the purpose of the organization was to provide healthy food that was accessible to people who couldn't necessarily afford it. And the founder wrote a letter and, it was a faith based organization, but it was also this quite concrete letter that the founder wrote about what the purpose of the organization was. And before we started their planning exercise, they did testimony.. They, went around the table with the executive group and asked each person to give personal testimony as to whether they felt the company and themselves were consistent with what the founder asked. And it was a tremendously powerful way to start a future's conversation because they grounded themselves in purpose. They grounded themselves in legacy. And then from that point they faced uncertainty of the future. And it struck me that perhaps one of those next right acts, this is just a suggestion, maybe organizations and groups that are leading maybe now is a time to write something down, to commit in writing, not for yourself, but for the people who come after you. As to what your purposes and hopes are for the collective group, because I've seen the power of that with the next generation. It's such a simple but powerful thing that could be done. And what better time to do it than right now?
Rebecca Ryan: Oh, Peter, I take your idea. I take this very seriously because we are at, a threshold moment. Many of our organizations are at threshold moments and to put something in writing, is extremely powerful. We had this group of executives at a utility company, create a time capsule for 2050, and we had them right to their future customer owners. It's a public power utility. And. We gave them a few prompts, they were free to use them or not use them. And I'll never see these letters. I don't know they ended up writing, but boy, you could have heard a pin drop as these executives were writing to prompts. Like, I hope in your life, you are enjoying. dot.dot.dot. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I hope you can see, and experience, the difference we were trying to make when we dot.dot.dot
Peter Hayward: So what do we need to remember in order to activate these really powerful ideas that are at the core of what we do?
Rebecca Ryan: Well, I think one of the most powerful ideas to remember is that, although we individuals narrate their whole lives as if they were the lead actor, that's a myth. And an example, is, when I was in about the first grade, so maybe six or seven years old, I spent the night at a friend's house. And although she only lived a few blocks from my house, I was really little and I didn't know how to get home. So I left from her house and then I quickly realized I was disoriented. But I recognized the house of a friend of my parents, who were probably in their forties or fifties, and that seemed really old to me at the time, but I knew, you know, these were friendly friends. And I knew that if one of them could answer the door, they could help me get home and hopefully even take me home. And so I rang the doorbell and Harvey came to the door and I said, Harvey, I'm leaving my friend, Krista's house, and I'm trying to get to my house, but I don't know how to get there.
And Harvey who was a world war II veteran. He was a baker, during world war II and he had come back from the war and now he owned a funeral home and a couple of other businesses he was very entrepreneurial, very friendly, very friendly guy. He said, oh, here's what you need to do. You go north up main street. And then when you get to the top of the hill on main street, turn east, and he was giving me all of these cardinal directions and I didn't know what he was talking about. And I said, Harvey, I don't understand. North and East, but can you tell me left and right. Like I understand left and right. And I got home, good news. I got home. But what I, when I think back on that, from a young age, we're conditioned with left and right, which is from the individuals perspective. And if you go into some societies like long time civilizations, all of their directions are cardinal. So you could say lift your north foot and they would lift their north foot.
There is no such thing as left and right. And it's also then no wonder that there're much more communal organizations. As the one suffers, everyone suffers. As one kill is made, they all reap the benefits of eating the meat from that kill and that feels much closer to the truth. So the more we individuate ourselves, what's happening to me, we're selling ourselves more and more of a delusion that actually causes more and more separateness and suffering.
Peter Hayward: There's the generational futures conversation, which has never gone away, but , I have a sense through the podcasts that the generational futures question and how to work the generational future process is starting to get a lot of energy and juice. I think it was Renee Roback in his podcast where he talked about that future exercise that he was running in Lille where they work with the client industry, but then they bring in the next generations to work with them. And the next generation don't just give them information. They actually teach them about, of their future. This is the notion that it's not about the adults explaining and the adults using, but this is actually bringing in people who almost become your Pathfinders because they are not, you they're after you, they are different to you. And I'm wondering how we can weave this notion of the generations after us are still here. And how can we invite them in as Peter Bishop will be saying in his podcast, which will be coming out with yours. Is how can we learn about the future from the generations who come after us?
Rebecca Ryan: Oh, I cannot wait to hear that podcast. You know that's my fire for foresight is to try to leave a better world for people I'll never meet. I don't expect them to know my name. I just want them to have a livable inheritable future that's worth inheriting. You know, it's interesting as you talk about the future generations, teaching us being Pathfinders for the future, as we teach executives, how to think like a futurist, like how to develop their own future's literacy. I'm a big proponent, as you can imagine, because of my Zen training in helping people get quiet. Because when they can get quiet, they can actually notice. And when they can notice a bigger field of opportunities becomes aware. And when they notice that bigger field of opportunities, maybe they decenter themselves a bit and they see themselves just in the field of possibilities.
I've tried a series of techniques over the years, and by the way, listeners, if you've got excellent, ways of teaching people, how to slow down and get quiet, I'm all ears, but there's one that people love doing. I can do an exercise with these folks every day for a week, but the one that they come back really pumped about is when we ask them to interview a child. There's something about talking to our future ancestors that brings it alive for them in a different way. And of course, most of them interview a child that they care about. And just the questions that, you know, the, I wouldn't ask these children, these questions, unless it was a homework assignment. So it just uncorks something, in them, that makes them come alive in a different way.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. Yeah. Once again, you look at most executive groups we work with, they're all generally speaking, roughly the same generation. And yet they they've got there's other employees in the organization. And it's much richer. There is more diversity in the world. And one of the challenges we face working with executive groups is how do you bring diversity into their thinking process? And yet probably all of them know a child.
Rebecca Ryan: Yeah. And I think also, as I'm listening to you talk about the homogeneity among executive groups. Another thing that I do believe helps people is we have a fair amount of play in our exercises. And we all know that's so good for the soul, and for futures, but man, we have beaten it out of ourselves. I mean, for example, if I'm interviewing for a project and we start talking about play, you can tell people sort of shift in their seats, like, oh shit, how am I gonna sell this to the boss? If we're gonna do any play at all, like this needs to be serious. And yet it's one of those interesting flips, you know, that the more you can play, or be playful, the more the future can come up and through. It's a paradox.
Peter Hayward: I'm a very cunning, devious person, as you know, maybe we couch it as gaming. We couch it as simulating, give it a sort of adult-ish flavor. But we know when people get in there and they get the pens and they get the paper, we don't have to call it play in order to create playfulness.
Rebecca Ryan: Right. Right. Thank you for being my corporate thesaurus. Gamify, Simulation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Peter Hayward: Where around you are the signs of hope and the signs of agency. What are you opening to and leaning into?
Rebecca Ryan: Well, The signs of hope are people's overall resiliency. This is one of those things you don't get to demonstrate to yourself or to others, how resilient you are unless you face an enormous challenge. Yeah. The resiliency of folks is amazing and you've gotta stop watching, bad news, because there is so much good happening in your neighborhood, in your community, in our world. Of course the terrible news leads and that is what should come with a Xanax. But the resiliency feels extremely hopeful. Extremely hopeful. And then the pathways, I ran across some information from Karen Kimbra, who's the chief economist at LinkedIn. It's an interesting time to be the chief economist at LinkedIn, at least in the United States, there is so much volatility in the labor force. And she said that there are three major things that companies are focusing on right now. And to me, these are the things that have been lost before this COVID period. So number one, companies who say, we need to connect to purpose, like if we're gonna attract and retain talent, they're not just coming for the paycheck. We have to discover what our purpose is. That that halo effect over our work so that people feel like they're coming for more than just a job or more than just a paycheck. The second thing they said is we have to be welcoming to all people. They have taken Black Lives Matter. And the D E I A conversation, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility to heart, and they are doing reviews of pay scales and thinking about how work days are set up and how buildings are set up and how culture is set up so that it can be accessible to all, not to some. That's enormous. And then the third thing is really thinking through, whether we honor people's whole lives. And , this is Otto Scharmer's theory, U, right? He says that the three main disconnections is disconnections from ourselves. So for me, that would be my Zen practice, right? Like really connecting to who and what I actually am with no delusion. Number two. Not feeling connected with other people. So the tribalism, the We They-ness and the third is just being disconnected from nature.
So when I think about how, companies are working on purpose, they're working on, DEIA I know I mentioned, workplace culture, but they're also working on climate, how they can have a climate response at whatever their scale is. It's like, wow. Companies are looking for solutions to these three main fissures. And that gives me a great deal of hope. Not because companies need to save us, but at least in the United States, we're living in an absence of leadership from the public sector. And a lot of things are falling to the private sector to help figure out. And so I think it's a sign of health and potential that these pathways to helping people reconnect with themselves, reconnect to a higher purpose, reconnect to the environment, these things are happening.
Peter Hayward: Cool. Lovely. Lovely. I'm gonna close you on. It's not quite a time capsule, but I'm probably gonna interview you in a couple of years, time again for your re reinterview. What would you hope that listeners have felt or seen or done? When I speak to you again? dot.dot.dot
Rebecca Ryan: I hope that our listeners have reconnected to their purpose. The thing that is bigger than them, but that will get them outta bed on a day when they're not feeling at their best. I hope that generational futures begin to happen. maybe even at scale. Those two things reconnect to purpose and do some generational futures.
Peter Hayward: Lovely. Always an honor to spend some time in your space. Thanks very much for taking some of your Sunday time with your partner to spend it with future pod community.
Rebecca Ryan: I spent it with you, Peter Hayward, and, I'm glad to spend it with this community that has given me so much. So thank you for the opportunity.
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. The, this is Peter Hayward saying goodbye for now.