EP 132: On Foresight as Agency - Bronwyn Williams

 
 

As a Trend Analyst, Bronwyn shares her insights on the dilemmas we face in society and how we need to hold on to choice in an increasingly homogenous world.

Interviewed by: Reanna Browne

More about Bronwyn

References

Transcript

Reanna Browne: Hello and welcome to FuturePod I'm Reanna Browne. 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 experience. Today, our guest is Bronwyn Williams, futurist, economists and business trend analyst.

Bronwyn has over a decade’s worth of experience in strategic management trend research and foresight. Her deep experiences coupled with an impressive academic catalogue of qualifications, ranging from degrees in marketing management, economics, foresight, and future studies. And most recently, a Master of Applied Economics.

By day Bronwyn is a partner at Flux Trends, a South African based consultancy that focuses on macro social economic trends and emerging technologies impacting businesses, industries, and nations in the near and long-term future. In case that wasn't enough, Bronwyn is also a media commentator, a guest lecturer, a publisher an excellent book The Future Starts Now. This is a of story that I'm really looking forward to hearing. Welcome to FuturePod Bronwyn.

Thank you so much.

Question 1

Reanna Browne: Okay. Question one is about the Bronwyn Williams story. How did you become a member of the futures and foresight community?

Bronwyn Williams: Yeah, the origin story, so to speak. So I originally studied marketing, which meant that I was quite close to the world of trends because I was fortunate enough to work in businesses where I had quite a lot of creative control over the brands and the products that I was managing, which meant that I got to engage with quite a lot of the people that were really looking at what's shifting in the world of consumers and in the world of money too, which is quite interesting because the products that we're selling were actually products, around ideas rather than actually around objects.

So, I had quite an unusual background there a lot of classical sort of brand management on the one hand, but also this access to selling the world of ideas of some of the smartest, brightest, best educated people, not just in my own country but all across the world. And of course, that makes you more and more curious about everything.

It also makes you somewhat unemployable. I think when you start to get exposed to the world of ideas, as opposed to the world of selling socks, it's quite hard to go back into the sort of brand management and like try to organize planograms and, boring ad campaigns just doesn't have quite the same sort of intellectual appeal and being privileged enough to be playing with these ideas on a day-to-day basis and exposed to these really great minds eventually you start to get slightly arrogant to think, oh well, I don't want to be selling other people's ideas. I might want to actually be part of that conversation too. And fortunately for me around that sort of point, when my mind was opening up to how important ideas are and how narratives and stories, not only can help us predict the future and to a certain degree, but it can also help us shape it because expectations really are reality.

I met Dion Chang who is now my business partner, and I started doing some research for him because he was playing in the trend space, like looking at consumer trends and what's going on there. And I started moonlighting for him and writing some of his research articles, absolutely loved the work.

And over time it took over my life. And your side gig became your main thing. But in the meantime, I also decided to do back to school, as you said, I've got quite a checkered academic history. I've got qualifications, everything from theology and future studies through to economics and commerce.

It's quite a broad range because I am curious about a lot of things and also tend to get bored quite easily. Right. But what I have figured out is that the tools that economics would give us to think is probably the most useful set of education that I have got for myself because economics has quite a bad rap.

People tend to conflate the idea of economics with the idea of capitalism and a lot of people don't like capitalism, so it becomes quite a polarizing type of subject. And there's also a lot of confusion around what economists do, which I think is fascinating as I've studied both future studies and economics.

What you realize quite quickly is that economists do predict the future. Whereas most futurists don't right because of economics and econometrics is about forecasting it's about trying to figure out how the past can impact the future. And what does that causal line of trend and that's basically what most economists do some better than others.

Some more objectively, some more subjectively, but those tools become really, really critical to understanding the base case scenario or the base case trend that is carrying us through into the future. And then of course, you've got futures which people tend to think of sort of looking into crystal balls.

But futures is much more about broadening your horizons. About opening up possibilities, about being divergent. So, by sort of being able to switch between those left and right brain patterns, you able to get quite an interesting perspective on the world. So I'm quite grateful for my somewhat checkered career but also the ability and the luxury to have indulged myself in higher education that has broaden my mind, rather than using education purely as sort of a means to land a job in a company, which I think is probably the best advice that I gave myself and actually took myself to actually think about how to become that somebody that's a bit unique in the space that has a different perspective because that's what our clients pay us for in the future space, they pay us and they engage with us because we think differently.

And because we have the luxury of playing in a different sort of realm of a focus to what most people that are dealing with the day-to-day task have to do most people have to by definition of their job and the way they are running their business, focus on the here and now and on the urgent rather than more longer term important. And as professional outsiders, which is what we professional observers and trend analysts and analysts all do is we do have that luxury of space and perspective. And I think that I was naturally suited for this role because I said I've always been quite a curious person.

I've always been looking like, Ooh, new idea let's go follow that down the road. Even as you can tell the way I'm talking right now. And also, being an avid reader since I was a very small child and people might sort of roll your eyes at that and say like, oh, why do you need to read today? And they're like, you want all information on YouTube and all the rest of it, but the point is that if you're consuming knowledge consciously over a long period of time, creating all those networks and all those other nodes within your own brain with your, in your own consciousness it becomes a scaffolding upon which you're able to start spotting how ideas are connected to each other. And as I said, you might want to do our work and watch what we're doing, and sure you can try catch up now. But have you spent the last sort of 30 years collecting a scaffolding of ideas and quite a broad divergent one too, upon which to start to spot how things are playing out?

What's the bigger patterns in play here? And you need some perspective on that, and you also need some depth in that in order to do it. So that's sort of basically why I did it because it's entirely, self-indulgent kind of career it's perfect. Basically, get paid to read books and tell people about them.

It's great I highly recommended future studies as a career path, but you have to start early, and you have to be very conscious about accumulating that information and very deliberate about where you are applying your attention. Trying not to get caught up in the news and the noise and to focus rather on the deeper shifts that are going on around us which you can see once you start to train yourself into, thinking in those ways. But anyway, since then, since 2015, I have been a partner at Flux Trends and we've basically been doing futures full time and more recently over the course of the last year, I've been playing more with wearing my economics hat too.

And also applying some of the ideas that I have been talking about eating a bit of my own cooking. And I'm not also a partner at a company called Carbon Based Life Forms where we are building a massive multiplayer space opera game. And we're also building some technology that's allowing us to apply sensible economic principles, the ones that we're ignoring in the real world right now to the metaverse.

So, it's quite the challenge, right? Trying to stop people, making the same mistakes we've made with our fiat currency world. And to hopefully do our little part to build a slightly more positively sustainable future as we are all seemingly quite committed to virtualizing our lives and careers away.

Reanna Browne: Carbon Based Lifeforms sounds fascinating. We should pick that up again in question five. I'm really interested with futurists and the assemblage of education and the experience that they have.

Like you've mentioned, I think it often creates a really interesting kind of professional mutantcy, which tends to make sense in its totality. Even though that, your assemblage may be quite different to mine, that does tend to be a similar thread where we find a practice, find the edge of that practice and then move to an entirely new space or practice that challenges some of those core norms.

Bronwyn Williams: Yeah, absolutely. I think that we are a slightly divergent thinking bunch. And I'm gonna say that the futurists are the one of the few groups of people you can always have a good conversation with. I think that we kind of find each other and we all a little bit strange, a little bit hard to put in a box.

That's the difference between like a futurist as a consultant and like a consultant coming into a company, consultants you can expect, or more traditional ones you can expect to get the same. One will be much like another. Whereas with working with futurists, you never quite going to get the same person.

And that's exactly what you need. We have to maintain ourselves as being professional outsiders, which is why I've always been very careful about what projects I have gotten involved with on an application basis. Because as soon as you start getting involved in applied work and focusing on a particular industry or particular career your scope of vision does tend to narrow on what you're trying to focus on.

And the point of futures is to always broaden that perspective, always looking at things that your clients, the people you work with are not able to see. We've got to work past those blind spots, and you've always gotta be checking yourself to see where your blind spots are and continually spinning around.

Question 2

Reanna Browne:  I'm really interested in, and this takes us to question two what are some of the tools or frameworks or methods that describe the way I guess you work or how you work?

Bronwyn Williams: Yeah so, I suppose I've spent the longest time in this whole sort of space in the trend analyst space, which is a bit different I think to a lot of other futures who might've started out in academia and come at it for the, with a lot of a different set of tools that they would be working with. But because I have come out of the trend background due to my marketing background, that made a lot of sense and the train background is still, it does still tend to be present based.

So, a trend is something that's already in place. It's in motion, it's occurred in multiple places it's inherently backwards looking but it can then be projected once you start to see where those patterns start to develop. So, our methodology still does look at that because although the past was definitely no guarantee of the future, it's really all we've got to work with if we want to see what's likely to happen. And that's of course the first sort of step to understand the difference between what is and what we want. And I think that's the hardest challenge of all. It sounds very sort of wishy washy. It doesn't sound like a particularly great formula or like a methodology for anything, but it sounds so simple, but it's really, really hard.

And that's to say, what is like, can you actually look at the world without glossing over the blind spots, can you actually formulate, as they say in the sort of more future space, the mess right. Do you actually understand what is right now? And you have to, to get that on a very positive basis. This is objective now it's subjects of wishful thinking and all the rest of it. And only once you have that sort of, as they call it empirical rationality, this ability to sort of understand what is, and to know your actual facts and the facts, of course, hugely under attack.

And under question, everyone's got personal facts and subjective ideas and you know, like it's postmodernism now so like what is real anyway and all of that. So it becomes really, really hard, but if you don't understand what you're dealing with, how can you possibly hope to think about how things could be happening in the future?

And only then you can get into what should be, which is the next sort of big question to debate. And then there's the even harder one, which is how are we going to get there? I think that that third part is actually the one were most people in our field gets stuck because they've done the hard work of articulating where we are and they've done the hard work of thinking about what direction is going to be better to walk towards or walk away from without being super restrictive, and going into sort of utopias, which is also a hugely dangerous thing. But the hardest part is then saying the means to that end. How are we going to get there?

And I see that many people get hung up on their favourite means like people look at what's happening with technology at the moment and they say, we need universal basic income, but you've got to be like, wait a minute, hold on that's a means that's not an end. Like, is that the best means to get to, to a better future?

I know you're trying to avoid massive technological unemployment that's a good thing. We should be tending away from massive technological unemployment and reducing poverty and all the rest of it but why is that means so important to you? Why are you focusing on the means rather than focusing on really defining the end?

Because it's probably not the best way to get there at that point. And you've got to ask those questions. And that's the way the sort of thinking like an economist is, something that futurists should engage in because economists think about incentives and trade-offs, and that's as simple as it is.

But the thinking like that is to think about firstly, what is the actual trade off in terms of the goal we are trying to get to? And our choice of means, and we must never get hung up on a particular route to that destination because they can change.

And there's always a trade-off there's, there are no free lunches in this world. There's always, if you get a bit more of this, you get a bit more of that. The classic one, there is freedom and security. Right? You can have more freedom, but you have less security. There's always a trade-off. It might not be so obvious to you now, but there's always a trade-off and that cost is always pushed somewhere, and it can be pushed across space, or it can be pushed across time.

So, when you start to think about the means, think about what is the trade-off here? What am I giving up in order to do this? And who's going to bear that cost. And unfortunately, when we get hung up on these means we do tend to think about the means that will benefit us and might be free for us or free at the point of consumption, we'll ask that there's always someone else that's going to carry that cost maybe in a different country. Maybe they're in a different age group. Maybe it's just yourself in the future. And you know, who knows you in the long run, we're all dead. So, let's kick that can down the road and there's always a trade-off.

So always think about those trade-offs there and where the cost is being carried. And is it fair that that cost is being pushed onto that group of people. Or should we be aligning risk and reward and benefits and costs more closely? And I think a lot of the means that I'm seeing not to solve those messy sustainability, environmental and economic problems sound really good to the target market that they're being sold to, but we've kind of hidden the fine print, the terms and conditions, and who's going to carry that can.

Like If you want to take sort of money printing in the US there's literally no downside for America to print money. They're not the ones that carry the costs. The cost is carried by people in my country and South Africa because money is global, right? So, you can take that money and you can use it to buy my real resources that a price that I can't afford.

And I can't play that game. There's always a cost, but it might be completely irrelevant to people who are voting on that policy. But it's our job to broaden that perspective because otherwise we do end up with our very in world that we have right now. So, the understanding, the trade-offs, formulating the mess understanding the trade-offs really, really critical.

And then the other point is understanding the power of incentives or as they call it sort of instrumental rationality, which is if I do this, am I going to actually get the result that I want? Because quite often we think that doing something will get us will get us from A to B, but actually it'll get us from A to C.

 And I think that really objectifies a lot of these sort of our precious means that we get so hung up on our favourite plan to get us to where we are going that, and that is you have to understand those incentives and that incentives are always going to trump in. And that's, you will be judged through history for your choices, how they affected the real world, the result they had, not your good intentions, you know, like the best laid plans can lead us to very dire places. And that's, always the challenge. So, in terms of the, where we headed, we've got to avoid utopianism and we must think rather about directions towards this, away from this, rather than this is exactly where we need to be, because no utopia is going to fit, anyone we need more choice or choices, not like more single-minded convergence of a particular goal and the end space.

So then on the means how we get there. We can't be hung up on those at all. We have to let go of our favourite children. Unfortunately, that's where a lot of the ego sits right? It's like my plan will get us to the promise land. Right? Whereas that's not the way? But it's the means where we have to dance with those systems as Donella Meadows said, right?

It's the, we can go, we can try working towards a particular goal, but we cannot, we cannot fixate on a particular means, and we count fixates on an imaginary utopia at the end. So those are sort of really big guiding principles as to how we sort of look at our work and have the conversations that we have about. But in terms of the sort of fuel that we used to fill these conversations and it's also, I think, where there's a bit of divergence from what a lot of academic futures do compared to what us, it's more in sort of pop and corporate space. The court jestering industry as we want to put it, is that you have to marry the theory around futures and around futures, cones and scenarios and whatever else you want to do with actually bringing something to the table. And that means you actually have to bring the content to the model. And that's where the trends come in. So, for us, with our trends, we use our own methodology, which we call a T R E N D S methodology, which is essentially six buckets to put interesting things within. So, most futures and trends people do some version of this, whether it's like a Miro board or a physical whiteboard where you are collecting trends and it's helpful to have buckets because buckets force you to look across that full circle, force you to look across your blind spots. So, you might me to particularly interested in the world of money like I am, and you might be less interested in say, you know, the world of environmental studies.

So, you're not actually looking what's happening in terms of environmental trends, by having an environmental bucket, you're forced to look at those things inside those places. And by doing that constantly and making it a discipline of making sure that you're adding things to all of those buckets, you start to develop both breadth and depth and start to see the connections.

So, the next step, of course, is to sort those trends into what's useful and then to use them as a set of information with which to bold scenarios, which to start playing with the future. But advice would always be, if you are working with clients is to bring something to the table. Don't come with an empty model, come with some content to fill it with too.

Cause that's what starts to inspire conversations. So, we do that trend scanning with our TRENDS methodology. Once a year, we put together a presentation, we call the state we're in, we do that January every year, which is basically we release it just at the same time as our President does the state of the nation address.

But it's like all the stuff he didn't speak about, right? We, these are the trends that are going to impact the next year. And we use that to open up conversations as the sort of thin end of the wedge to, to get into corporate boardrooms and into those hallowed towers where decisions are being made and to help people to see a little bit, a little bit broader as to, as to what's going on.

And then through that, in terms of methodology, we use all the classic sort of futures models many of which we've actually simplified hugely because especially in my country, there's not that many really large businesses. It's quite a lot of smaller and mid-size businesses. And it's it's quite self-indulgent to do like a three month long sort of scenario workshopping process.

Whereas if you can condense that into a two to four hour workshop, you can make a lot more impact and you can at least start having those conversations start shifting those perspectives start getting people to question those incentives and those trade-offs. And that's how you make change.

Question 3

Reanna Browne: So, this is a question that I'm really looking forward to asking getting inside that pattern, seeking trend analyst, mind of Bronwyn Williams. What are some of the possible futures that you're seeing emerging around you now?

Bronwyn Williams: Yeah, I think the big the big frame, a way to look at what's going on in the world right now and I always like to pair them because we do find quite quickly that when it comes to trends and futures that whatever pattern you're looking at they'd contain the seeds of its own destruction and that we do tend to have equal and opposite effects in the world and society around us.

And the big one at the moment is those as I'm terming them centrifugal and centripetal forces, things that are drawing us together and things that are drawing us apart, centralizing or decentralizing forces, and you can see this playing out at every level of society. And I do love to see how society is so fractal, how we can see the same trend playing out in the nuclear family, but we can also see it playing out on the geopolitical space. And if you want to sort of look at that in the nuclear family level, you can see how people are lonely, having less sex. We've got like 35-year-old virgins that are becoming like a common thing. Now I know it sounds like a joke, but it's a pretty heavy bellwether in terms of this fragmentation and atomization society is breaking down into the individual unit.

But at the same time, we see like a recoalescing of people around each other. And they are the bellwethers. They would be like in New Zealand, which has now registered your COVID support bubble as a family unit, right? So, these are friends’ families. This is much bigger than like the the idea of even the nuclear family.

So, you kind of got the pulling together and the drawing apart of people, which I think always very interesting to look at, but how we are drawing together is of course different, the way we were drawing together before. If you want to spin that all the way through to the geopolitical sphere, we can see how our economies are now entirely borderless, because we've moved way beyond the financialized economy.

Now we're into the virtualized economy, which doesn't have even virtual borders. It's just entirely opened up right completely globalized. At the same time, you see a sort of re fragmentation of physical supply chains with the wars and rumours of wars, and they're like literal blocks and the Suez Canal and the literal breakdown of a lot of those just in time systems that are making us question the differences between efficiency and resilience. If you want to see the difference between the two, like the crypto world is very efficient at moving money from one person to another. But at the same time, resilience is more like something that's essential for the physical world, right?

I mean, like if you have a physically efficient system and if it breaks down, because one ship gets stuck, you are not very resilient there are you. So there's always that sort of trade off. And that scaled too and of course, a lot of other centralizing and decentralizing things taking place in the cultural layer, somewhere in the middle too where you've got the decentralizing of all of us sort of going down our reality tunnels and that we all see reality differently.

We've kind of lost a common bedrock as to what is real because we no longer have common inputs let alone common outputs like whatever algorithmic journey is nudging us through social media and through web search or through or through even like what sort of app, you're going to use next and all the rest of it.

Those things are all sort of nudging us to experience reality differently in a very fragmented way. But at the same time, there's a, is a growing sense of cultural homogeneity and massive, massive pushes towards more group think and more forced censorship and forced, even not just for censorship, forcing people not to speak, actually starting to force people to say things that are the same as everything else.

So, there's both a negative and a positive sense of a forced cohesion on a sort of more superficial layer, but very different, but deeper down and even aesthetically, you can kind of see the same thing. So, my sort of my very cheeky observation as to what's going on and sort of the socio-cultural layer at the moment is that diversity is very much encouraged as long as it's purely aesthetic, right? As soon as you start talking or writing, it's very frowned upon in society to, to deviate from one of the two major consensus, because that's what we are starting to see again, there's a sense of both cohesion and separation in that we are constantly forced to pick a side, to join a team, forced into the sort of party pack politics module where it's a set menu. Right. Whereas, you know, if you support female rights, you've also totally got to support open borders and you may not have a gun. Right. Whereas if you're on the other side, this is your package you can't swap no swap outs. You know, the chef does not take changes.

You take the whole list, even if that list makes no sense and it's completely in-congruent in and of itself. So, if you say that you like a particular book, people will say, oh, but then you also like this, but you're not allowed to like that.

That's not you, that's not what our people do. So, this very strange sense of both centrifugal and centripetal forces. I think is the easiest way to see what's going on, and of course, in the economic space, that's the easiest one of all, how we see the Matthew effect playing out absolutely everywhere. We look rich getting richer, poor, getting poorer up, you know, the strong take what they will, the weak suffer what they all of that sort of thing.

So, I think that's a useful frame to see what's going on here.

Reanna Browne: How does some of this play out in your mind as Bronwyn the human, how do these patterns manifest, potentially over time and what are some of the hopes and fears that you have around these futures?

Bronwyn Williams: Well, for me, the dystopia is if it lands on either end of the scale firmly, rather than in balance. There's this a sort of idea that perhaps the concept of the end of history was wrong because the end of history was rather like an arrival at an end of like a T junction, which is the famous Francis Fukuyama book, on the end of history, which really didn't work because we've all had like recessions and wars and stuff since then.

But the point is, if you start to think about it more about being, a col-de-sac it's kind of like that's, as far as we can get towards actualizing our liberal values before we bump into a wall, it's almost like we painted ourselves into a sort of a boundary within which we can bounce between because we have this constant tension and our liberal values society, which really comes down to that whole sort of idea of sort of a liberty fraternity equality, right? If you pull fully into any one of those corners, it becomes very, very dystopian. But if there's a dynamic tension that kind of keeps us in the middle of, we kind of get democracy, which is kind of like the best of the bunch, right?

It's not perfect, but it's not wholly imperfect. And that's kind of the best-case scenario we can have. And that's, that's what I believe quite firmly, which is probably going to turn off a lot of utopians listening to this call that there is no heaven on earth. There is no utopia we can walk towards because utopia is by definition choiceless and this is of course, very much like Anarchy State Utopia and like Nozick and all rest of it, which I think makes a lot of sense actually, because without choice, it is a dystopia, right. And if you sort of find a society pulling into any one of those extreme views, it's not a healthy society because there's always weaker.

There's always stronger. There's always someone that's left out. And the things that horrify me the most would be the de-centralized DeFi community, who I love very much. And I kind of work in that space I can't really say too many bad things about them. If their world view wins, that's a new sort of state of nature where there's no protections for the weak or the stupid quite frankly. And it's a very uncomfortable winner takes all environment that we sort of heading towards there. If their worldview they win out against the, essentially the creeping Leviathan, which is the other worst-case scenario where we have a fully automated, not very luxury communism basically, a fully automated lower middle-class communism is the kind of dystopia on the other side, where everything is very equal.

Again, if you sort of look at that liberty fraternity equality, triangle, that's pulling towards equality and control, but it kind of cuts human agency out the system. And when you start to explore both of those angles, you can see how both of them are deeply unsuitable for human flourishing. And that actually, we need to embrace that mess.

We need to embrace a little bit of ambiguity. We need to embrace choice. And that's the third way. The third way is to refuse to pick a side. The third way is to refuse to dial down to that party pack set menu, and to actually insist on the chef that you are paying in this case, because they are mainly people that work for you literally in the government space or the companies that you pay money for. We must insist in them changing your order to tailor it to your taste. Right. We don't have to settle for either the Leviathan or this, that the state of nature. And that's always been the choice of humanity.

We think this is a new problem, but that's always been the trade-off there has always been the trade off, essentially between liberty and security. We constantly are having to find the balance between that and unfortunately the dangerous parts of our points in time right now is that technology is allowing us to actually actualize either of those dystopias. And I will call them both very much dystopias. We are able to execute an impenetrable wifi curtain that will allow us to all live in an entirely surveilled and controlled panopticon society. We are very close to building that. I don't know if people fully understood how close we are to that sort of completely naked and alone panopticon society, where every movement, every motion is tracked, observed, and nudged in a very cybernetic, very cold clinical computer says no kind of scenario.

On the other hand, we are very close to. An entirely micro monetized, decentralized world order where everybody is, is constantly monetized, still be monitored, still be managed. But even if you anonymously monitored and managed, you still being forced to dance on this on this micropayments treadmill, which is also a hugely distressing, depressing future. And it does mean the sort of the, the strong win and the weak lose. And we've got to fight back against both those things. I think that they're the biggest danger on both those sides is the sense of techno utopianism you know this idea that the code can somehow perfect us as people.

It cannot. And I see those arguments on both sides of these very divergent people on this fully automated, lower middle class communism side of the panopticon. The idea is that people have flawed and that we should be managed, that you should be punished for all your transgressions. And the perfect information is good.

I like secrets. I like imperfect information. I think that's where all the fun comes from is those little bits of grey areas. It's where money comes from to profits and all those good things, but there's the same sort of computer says no, and that's, you know, it's completely fair. And, and, you know, you interview people that live in these multiple panopticon societies.

Many of them are so conditioned they think no it is right. People should be automatically punished and put in their place and we should all behave together, but probably really doing is turning people into machines. Right. We'd be making humans more machine like.

On the other side, the sort of DeFi decentralized community is unironically building the same sort of idea.

Their biggest selling point is a trustless society trust in code, not in people, right. Which is just different form of an almost cybernetic society? Right. And that, there's still this idea that code is perfect, and people are imperfect and code is by definition discreet. It goes down to nice little ones and zeros and it'll pixels on a screen, but we miss a whole lot of lights and shades in between.

And it's a very dangerous idea that technology can perfect us rather than can just enhance I think that's what scares me the most about the sort of the almost re magicalising of technology, right. You know, they say in technology, what is the difference between technology and magic?

It's one you can understand. Like when you stop understanding, it becomes magic. And it's almost this sort of blind trust that the technology can do a better job than just muddling through like we've had to do throughout sightsee. So, my mission is to try and hold some space and to keep choice on the table and to keep those grey areas and those secrets.

And that's the continuity in place in face of the creeping discreetification of the world.

Reanna Browne: What would some of that choice be? So, what is that hopeful future for you personally?

Bronwyn Williams:  Yeah.

So, the hopeful future would be neither of these worldviews run out so that either of them become completely perfect, the circle isn't completed. There are still cracks in the wifi system. I think what scares me the most is that I suppose the two systems joining up, as political and economic systems tend to do around the back. But to hold choice and the most important choice that we need to be holding on to at the moment is the choice of nation states, I think is quite an important one.

Like society doesn't scale perfectly. That's another sort of economics principle that either, do you think there's marginal returns to just about everything, almost everything you can have too much of these, there comes a point where that's enough and you need to stop doing that. And that goes for things like globalization, it goes for homogenization of speech and thought. The size of businesses, right? It goes for the size of how many people we want to have in our organizations and to, and to be very conscious of those maximum points, the points of maximum return and no more and that the best way to hold choice to make sure that we do have different world orders competing.

You're not going to like all of them, but I think the world is a better place that has more communist and more capitalist countries living and operating at the same time. I think the absolute horror for me would be any sort of one world order, which would be entirely fair, but it would be also entirely unfree.

And that's not the point you want to. go to. So, looking for those maximum points as the best thing we can do, which is not a neat utopia at all. It's not one utopia. It's just saying we've got to push back against the maximum. Nothing scales, infinitely, whatever, whatever the sort of singularity universities of the world will you. It doesn't work like that.

Question 4

Reanna Browne: Question four is a straightforward one, but sometimes a challenging one to answer. How do you explain what you do?

Bronwyn Williams: The two analogies I use for our sort of work and our position in the corporate and the public sector and all the rest of it is firstly I see ourselves as being Watchman on the Watchtower. The contemporary version of the little medieval guy stood on the turret and had to scan the horizons for the marauding hordes to spot those blind spots and see what's coming up and give people a little bit of warning time.

And that could be both a positive and a negative thing. So the opportunities ahead to spot them with enough time that you are able to react to them, and same with threats to give you enough time to run away or to hunker down in the cellars and pull up the drawbridges and all the rest of it.

So that's one role, but the other role is also quite medieval. And that's the role of the court jester, which is a role I've had to start to adopt for myself because that is the challenge with futures because quite often we are challenging people's ideas and we are challenging those base normal forecasted trends.

The trends that the economists have predicted the trends that are based on backwards, looking data. If you want to challenge that, if you want to warn people about really big threats, it's quite easy to be humourless about this, right? But nobody likes the Cassandra and Cassandra's are cursed with not being listened to.

So, the only way that you can actually start to execute change and get people to actually act on those warnings, you've seen those threats take advantage of opportunities react to those threats is to wrap truth and a bit of a smile. If you make people laugh, you can speak truth to power.

If you can have a bit of a gentle sense of humour, you can inspire much more action than you can with using the fear and doom and gloom card which is I think a huge mistake in our industry right now. So many futurists already feel perhaps slightly insecure because we do have a very strange job, but a very privileged job too.

And I think a lot of us almost feel we're going to get caught out and thrown back into corporate if we don't behave. So, we try and be too serious. We try and over commercialize our roles and to try and give ourselves more academic credentials and to sort of wrap ourselves in seriousness.

And ironically, I think by wrapping ourselves in seriousness and trying to take ourselves more seriously, so people take us more seriously. They actually take us less seriously and they definitely listen to us less and we are less effective in our role.

Because that's again, the difference between being an economist and a futurist, these sort of two lenses I always try to filter through is that economist are supposed to predict the future and they get marked on it.

If you say there's going to be a recession and there's not, people laugh at you and all the rest of it, whereas futurists, we don't necessarily have to predict the future. We can predict what could happen and we can help paint the pictures of what should happen. But if the future does play out the way that we have predicted as futurists we have failed because the point of futurism is to affect change, to get people off that trend-based track that all the men and women in suits have pointed out and predicted for us.

So, I think that adopting the court jester persona, which people say oh you are diminishing yourself? But not at all really. It's a very deliberate choice, I think, to not take myself so seriously in order for our work actually to be applied more seriously.

I think that's the sort of space that I'm thinking about futures at the moment.

I think that's really powerful that dilemma of take us seriously as a trend analyst. When in fact intuitively and professionally, we know that the future happens via the ridiculous and what are the means in which we can invite people to consider the ridiculous. And I think using humour as a tactic is a really powerful one just as it is using art or other kinds of mechanisms.

Yeah, slightly less serious things, humanizing it again and not scaring people. I think people are so over fear at the moment. You can inspire people, essentially you can get people to move. And I know this as a marketer it's through it's through fear or greed and greed can be for either sex or money, if we can put it that way.

So, you've got the carrot and you got the stick. That's how you get people to move forward. And the stick works so far until it doesn’t, but the carrots can always be rebranded as a bigger better carrot. And we've got to, we've got to reclaim the sort of joy and the optimism of our field. Unfortunately, almost all futures conversations now with professional futurists of the professional associations have become so bleakly depressing that I actually don't want to be part of those conversations anymore I almost want to sort of isolate yourself.

Reanna Browne: And does it come back to this underpinning thread that I can hear around, doing the foresight work that you do with the intention, of agency pathways choice in the present in the present?

Bronwyn Williams: Yeah, exactly. I think agency's a massive one. It's about choice and choices, not just having options available. It's actually executing that choice and like agency, is something that I have spoken about a lot and it to always seems to come up in all these conversations. And that's The problem with agency is in these sorts of inalienable human rights and your right your own mind and your own consciousness, like they are inalienable they can't be forcibly taken away from you.

You can fight it until the death. I mean, like people have done this throughout the course of history, but you can't give them away. You can willing seed your options to choose. You can seed your sort of lottery tickets to the future, which is a huge travesty. And you see the, all the time, it's very easy to hand over power it's very different, difficult to get it back. And I took the classic sort of biblical story of the Israelites who demanded of their prophet to give them a king. I think there's a, the Aesop's fable with the frogs as well. It also demands that of the gods to give them a king and they begged them, and the gods are like, you don't really want a king. Why Don't you want to like, look after yourselves? And they're like, no, we definitely want a king? And they're like, well, are you going to get a king? And he's going to like tax you and he could kill you and it's not going to go, well, we definitely want a king. We don't want to have our agency. We don't want to have a king we don't want this burden of choice.

That burden of freedom, give us a king. And then you get a king. And then the king does what Kings do strong take what they will weak suffer what they must and we're like take the king away, like That's not the way it works. You've got a king now. Now you gotta live with this king. And I think that those sort of conversations also useful to have, especially that's quite a dramatic story, but it's, it happens in small ways too.

If you, if you are not participating in the choices of the future. You are going to get swept up in someone else's vision, you all going to end up with like Jeff Bezos' Elysium future instead of the great separation of rich and the poor, you are going to end up with Marc Andreessen's reality privilege, where reality is for the privileged and everybody else gets to eat empty cake, you know, in the midst of births.

And you know, like that, that those are the base case scenarios that people that have executed their choice are working towards. And it's up to us to change that. And there's a lot of sense that offer, what can I do so little, but we know this, this is what we know from future studies and from chaos theory, that very small measurements era, and you measurement era, right by just like going left and everyone else is going right.

Can have massive implications further down the line. It's the small little changes, the small little spanners in the works, the pieces of dust in the grindstone all the rest of it, that can change that that great arc of history from one direction to another, and we have to reclaim that agency.

Reanna Browne: That's such a lovely framing of the work we do. I love that sense of everyday action and inaction shaping our futures in the present.

Question 5

Reanna Browne:  Question five is an open one and I really want to take us back to the startup that you mentioned earlier Carbon Based Life Forms. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Where did it come from and how does that contribute to shaping a preferred future for the world that you want to be inhabiting?

Bronwyn Williams: Yeah. So, it's quite an interesting business. As I said, the company's called Carbon Based Life Forms and we're doing two things. We are building a massive multiplayer space game. It's called HyperSpace. And we're also building a piece helps game developers. In fact, anyone that's building any sort of virtualized economy and it could be used in the real world to, to balance their economies and balancing your economies is really just determining the real and relative prices of your digital assets.

So putting some scarcity in the system so that you're able to actually have value that goes with it. And I got a hold of this project because the founder and CEO at Theo Priestley, I wrote a book with him a couple of years ago. The future starts now, I think you mentioned at the beginning where we got futurists from all across to write essays about what they were most concerned about going forward.

And yeah, so we got to know each other quite well. And Theo's been trying to build a metaverse game for quite a long time now and during COVID we all had a bit of time on our hands, and we decided, oh, let's actually do this thing now because we all like each other and we get along. And because I do have a checkered, academic and background, I understand quite a lot about what's going on in the various corners of the world of finance and FinTech and blockchain and rest of it.

And with the whole world. So interested in virtualizing and going into the metaverse It's an interesting place to try and try and actually get your hands a little bit proverbially dirty because of course it's all virtual. So no one actually gets dirty in the metaverse and it's been challenging to build.

So, what Theo brought me on board to do was to try and design a sustainable business model. So, applying those, all those principles we've spoken about now, looking at looking at what we could be doing, what we should be doing in the space, is it going to be sustainable or not? What are the incentives we can put into place?

What are the trade-offs that we're looking at and to try and design a different way of creating and sharing value in the virtual space? So of course, like we all know about what Bitcoin doesn't have and other money does have is the backing of a State that has a violent monopoly, right? So, like most money is backed up actually by the stick and not by the carrot, whereas Bitcoin was able to be propped up by incentives alone, which is quite interesting. So, this is where the whole DeFi community is sort of grown from and relative that virtual values come from.

But unfortunately, a lot of it is very unsustainable in every sense of the word. A lot of it is very speculative and it's not grounded on any real reality, which is fundamentally divergent from the original sort of ethos of what Bitcoin was all about. And the gaming world is a wonderful place to literally play with these ideas because you know, the stakes are low, which makes it so fun.

And that's also what makes it so valuable because it's just a game. But at the same time, it's dealing with very, very serious concepts. So, it was a wonderful project to get involved with. We've designed this way of balancing game economies that are not so speculative, like all the other crypto games on the marketplace. And we're I'm excited to see how that's going to go, because we've tried to apply all those sound principles of trade off incentives and making sure everybody gets to win and that we're not creating more monopolies in the metaverse. And the reason why it's an important space to be interrogating these ideas is because we are in a very dangerous point in replicating a lot of the economic injustices and inequalities and monopolies, they're all monopolies.

Basically, if we want to know what's wrong with the economy it's the monopolies everywhere monopolies fricking everywhere and they're all legal backed up by the law. and like, how do we break away from that? How do we make. I make economies more free and more fair and more fun and yeah, we're only playing in the game space now, but I think that these sort of learnings that we were collecting along the way, and our team involves much smarter people with much more, much more proper academic credentials than myself working with it, or if these ideas are going to feed their way back into society.

And to start thinking again about where value comes from and ultimately where it comes from in a gaming environment that comes from the attention of real human beings. It doesn't come the virtual sphere. It comes from us. Sure, that value that people bring to spaces is, shared and not hoarded, and it's not ruined by speculation or hoarded in bad monopolies. And that's basically what we're doing. So, we're sort of applying a lot of the, the ideas and playing with them. And it's fun to be in at the moment.

Reanna Browne: Sounds so exciting. I think the temptation is a futurist is that we sit on the edge and we're sitting around the conversation of what's happening what's changing we're not really in the centre of that. So, a futurist with skin in the game and designing a preferred future in the present is a really exciting prospect.

 This has been such a rich and insightful and challenging conversation, and I've enjoyed it so much, on behalf of FuturePod thank you for taking the time out to chat with us.

Bronwyn Williams: Thank you.

Reanna Browne: You have been listening to another production from FuturePod. FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you'd 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 Reanna Browne saying goodbye for now.