Eric Meade is a facilitator who assists groups adopt a forward-looking perspective to accelerate the shift to a better world. He is the author of Whole Mind Facilitation: How to Lead Workshops That Change People, Organizations, and the World.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
More about Eric
LinkedIn: Eric Meade
Whole Mind Strategy Group (https://www.wholemindstrategy.com)
Books / articles cited
Reframing Poverty: New Thinking and Feeling About Humanity's Greatest Challenge
Whole Mind Facilitation: How to Lead Workshops That Change People, Organizations, and the World
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. Today, our guest is Eric Meade. Eric is the principal at the Whole Mind Strategy Group, a consulting consortium based in Colorado in the USA. Through inclusive and innovative facilitation, as well as by contributing his own insights based on experience and forward-looking perspective, he accelerates the shift to a better world. He's the author of Reframing Poverty: New Thinking and Feeling about Humanity's Greatest Challenge, which won five book awards, and Whole Mind Facilitation: How to Lead Workshops that Change People, Organizations, and the World.
Welcome to FuturePod Eric.
Eric Meade
Thank you, Peter. Glad to be here.
Peter Hayward
So Eric, question one. What is the Eric Meade story? How did you become a member of our Futures and Foresight community?
Eric Meade
Well, I guess those are two slightly different and related questions. The Eric Meade story is, definitely that question captures my interest because I've spent a lot of my free time over the past year putting on paper some draft of a memoir of a certain period of my life. And I've learned that, there's what happens to us and then there's the deeper story that's happening. And that's really what you want to write about. And I'd say the Eric Meade story is maybe a redemption story.
Maybe we're all in our own little redemption story, but that's maybe that's the genre I would find. Just figuring out life one, one step, one mistake at a time. And it's a work in progress. And when I say that it's, I'm talking about the memoir, the life and the redemption.
If there's a genre to the Eric Meade story, maybe that's what I'll choose at this point. In terms of how I got into the Futures and Foresight community, I would say the first part of my life was really an experiment in having the wrong job. So I paid for college with a Navy scholarship, ended up on a nuclear submarine as an officer tooling around the world's oceans. And then left that and went to get an MBA. Ended up in China where I was traveling around hinterland factories, making wooden toys and like rubbing my hand along the pieces to make sure they weren't too sharp or rough for a kid's hands.
Trying to talk to factories about improving their quality. And then I ended up, I was still in China. I was living in Shanghai and I had gotten married. I had a daughter and my wife and I were out in the park, outside our apartment complex, pushing my daughter around in the stroller. She was a few months old and we ran into a guy who lived in the same complex. His name was John Cashman. And we exchanged business cards when we met and he was an American and his business card said Futurist. And I said, what the heck is that? And he told me about it and it felt a lot like what I did in my free time for fun, but he was getting paid for it.
So we went out to a local Starbucks, not far from our apartment complex, and he told me more about it. And then a little bit more serendipity. I had to leave China. After you renew your visa a few times when you live there, you have to leave, come back in and you start the process again. So I had to leave China to get a new visa. And for some reason, most people just go to Hong Kong. For some reason, I decided to go to Washington DC. Because I have friends there. And so I figured I'd take a trip to the U S and then I did a little internet search of Futurist and found out that the World Future Society conference, and this would have been 2008, was in Washington DC the three days before I was going to be there.
So I adjusted my ticket, went to the World Future Society conference. John hooked me up with a guy named Jim Burke. These are names you may know[1] . Listeners may know great generous people, all of them. And, John asked Jim to let me into an APF meeting the day before the day of the start of the conference.
So I went to this thing. I walk in. Everyone's a professional futurist. I'm just a guy who got off a plane. I took Peter Bishop's pre-conference course on intro to the futures. And so that's what I knew about being a futurist. And then we did big introductions in the whole room and I said, my name is Eric Meade. I'm a futurist. I live in China and I'm interested in psychology. And then at the first break, another generous person named Jonathan Peck made a beeline to me. He was at the time president of the Institute for Alternative Futures and was working on a project in China has a great interest in psychology. I spent four of the next five days after the conference in his office having great conversations. And by the time I went back to China with my new visa, I had a job offer to come to Alexandria, Virginia, and work at the Institute for Alternative Futures. So the hand of serendipity or grace or whatever worldview you have has been active for sure in my life.
Peter Hayward
I've heard your story many times across the microphone, Eric, but I've also had the same experience. I came out of academic economics business background, but the thing that struck me, when I just went to the first conference and did my first thing was, and I keep saying this, this amazing generosity amongst a field I feel that, if I say where marginal, where marginal in the sense that almost no one's heard of us .People are scratching around to try and make a living out of it. And yet within that scarcity of what we do, there's this amazing, remarkable generosity where someone says, Hey, I'm doing X people, just, you get this fire hose of offers. Obviously you had that. Have you got a sense of why that
Eric Meade
I think the field of futures and foresight is a home for a certain type of thinker, a certain type of person. It's not like you see a job ad for a futurist and you're like, oh yeah, I'll give that a shot. It's that you, you find out that it's a thing and you're thinking, well, why the heck didn't I know about this sooner. So I think it's probably more a home than it is just a business model. And so when people find other people that have that same inclination, that's the priority is, Hey, let's all let's stick together and support one another.
Peter Hayward
The first day in the classroom, when I had Richard Slaughter, in the first day giving me, twenty-five books I needed to read, but the strong sense and feeling I had was I'd come home. I'd come home to something that I didn't know that existed. I'd found my tribe, I think, which is also another line that came out of a recent podcast. Because I think what you've touched on quite rightly is that we tend to be outsiders. And so we feel as though we don't belong somewhere, we're almost inside the, outside the world.[2] And yet when we find ourselves sitting on a table with people who don't look at you, like you got two heads that we actually feel very generous and very supportive towards one another.
Eric Meade
I think there's another part of it, which is the recognition that the need is real. There's enough actual need to go around. It's not like there are three companies that should think about the future and everyone else is doing just fine. So it's maybe it's a home first, a movement next, and then the third is, it's a way to make a living , if you can figure that piece out.
So I moved to the U S. I think it might've been on September 11th, 2008. We sold everything in our apartment in Shanghai. September 12th we had a flight to the U S. We drove around the East Coast, picked up stuff I had in different locations. My daughter, all of 13 months, sat between us in the U-Haul truck. I think her unconscious mind might've thought I had gotten a job as a truck driver or something ’cause we were just on the road for a week. And then on the 22nd, I think it was, I started the new job and we were settled in Virginia, so it was a big change. And really, if I could look back at how that happened, I think also, um, there were a number of things that, that reminded me of, that I was a type of person that might like something like that. I remember the first time a European friend suggested I watch this video on Ted.com. So I think, there's a point about the democratization of insightful thinking through the internet and other things where I was in this job. And I'm looking at toys and traveling around and doing things that are very much not exploratory, big idea thinking stuff. But there were these little breadcrumbs that I found that led me back to this more cerebral, more exploratory, creative kind of person that I am. So then finding that home, I was ready to recognize it when, when I saw it.
Peter Hayward
So you did an MBA, you had the life experiences of both the military and the entrepreneurial spirit of China. What, what were the things you then started to deploy? When you call yourself a Futurist, and you started to do this. Was it just going back into your bag of tricks that you had, or was it about acquiring a new set of frameworks and tools?
Eric Meade
I think the first thing was it was reawakening a way of thinking that I did as a kid and a lot of Futurists would probably tell the same story. The first futurist work I ever did that I could really call a futurist bit of work was when I was in college. I took a full year of British history and the professor kept on reminding us that if you added a hundred years to a big event in British history, you would get a corresponding event in US history. And I thought that was pretty cool. If you look at the Glorious Revolution of 1689, add a hundred years to get our revolution in the US. You can play out the pattern of the Napoleonic wars. The British army leads in defeating Napoleon and takes on this global hegemon role and the US after World War One, same thing.
So that got me thinking. Okay, well, if we add a hundred years to American history, if there's this pattern, then we can start to develop the profile of the next global superpower. And so I played it all out and I came up with two candidates. I came up with Germany and Japan, which had the minor complication that, whereas the US for example, had won its war of territorial expansion, the Mexican-American war, Germany, and Japan lost their wars of territorial expansion a hundred years later. Uh, but Hey, they were the candidates I came up with.
And so I've always been, I've been watching as the 21st century started, what is Germany going to do? And what is the role of the EU? And is that pattern that I found as a 19 year old undergrad, is there anything to that? So it wasn't so much about the tool. This may come out later as well, I'm a little bit agnostic when it comes to tools and frameworks. What I'm about is how do you spark the new thinking so I like having tools in my toolkit, and I think tool is the right word to use for that. It's, it's a tool to use for the job, for which it is appropriate. But as I got into futures, it really was reaching back to the more creative, pattern recognition kind of thinking that I did, even as a kid.
Peter Hayward
I have to ask at what point is there a pivot to your first book, which is the one entitled Reframing Poverty?
Eric Meade
Well, I think the book is consistent with what I do as a futurist in that it is really a reframing. And it is a reframing from a long-term perspective. And I have a good friend here in Colorado, a very smart woman and thought partner, and I got together with her and just laid out, Hey, , here's what I want to say about poverty. And she said, it sounds like you're really reframing the whole issue.
And I think that's, that's a large part of what I do with clients whether I tell them I'm a futurist or not. It's having that big mental space, the openness to different perspectives to say, Hey, what would we find if we looked at it this way? So what the book does, I mean, it is not at all how to book about solving poverty. What it is, is a look at how we have thought about poverty. And if you write a book, you have to have a two-by-two framework. So I have a two-by-two framework of the four prevailing views of poverty over the course of the last, at least 500 years. And so my argument is we have those views compete with each other. There's one view, for example, that would be characterized by, personal responsibility and, these people need to, get off the sofa and go get a job. That's one view. Another view would be that it's largely systemic or all systemic and institutional, and that could be around forms of discrimination, racism, sexism. It could be just generally a lack of jobs, a lack of quality schools, those types of things. And those views are just consistently fighting with each other. And there are two other views, but these four views, if well-meaning sincere, intelligent, people have been arguing for these different views for 500 years or more, chances are there's some validity in each one.
So then how do we take the best parts? And then not just allow for them all in kind of an ecumenical sense, but also how do we integrate them? And that's where I bring in some developmental psychology, some complexity theory, and I say, look, let's reframe poverty in a way that captures that long-term perspective and understands, one of the things I say in the book is that poverty is the initial condition of the human species. At one point we were all roaming around, hoping we could find some nuts or some berries or some game to hunt and eat. And when I do workshops on this, on the book, it's, I usually start with a little small group exercise. And the question is, who's the first person in your family line to get out of poverty and how did they do it?
And what you find is everyone is connected this. So it is the initial condition we all come from. Most folks don't have to look back more than a few generations to see how they came out. And so the focus is still on this long-term trajectory of, okay, here's where we started. Here's where we are now. Here, all the factors that are in play. And then we can think about where we might like to go from here.
Question 2
Peter Hayward
I'm interested and I'm getting a sense here that we're starting to pivot into the how of what it is you do . Second question is where I encourage the guests to explain a framework or an approach that is central to who Eric Meade is, and how Eric Meade does what he does. So what do you want to introduce now?
Eric Meade
You mentioned the book, Whole Mind Facilitation, and my company is called Whole Mind Strategy Group. So that is the concept I've really latched on to invested in, as I've put myself out there with my own company. And the Whole Mind, that concept, refers to what I call the three domains of the human mind. There's thought there's emotion and intuition. And if you picture those as a house and imagine that thought and intuition are on the first floor, you know, above ground and then the emotion is in the basement. And thought refers to all the cognitive models, what you know about an issue and how you've been addressing it. And it's really all of the ways that a person like you with your background, your training, just your complete way of thinking would address the issue. It is largely bound by experiences and what you've learned and, and gone through. Intuition that's the opportunity space of anything that anybody, regardless of their background, regardless of their training might do in that situation. So one is very bound by your own experiences and knowledge and thought processes. The other one is just wide open. What would one do in this situation? Now, the problem in this house is the door between thought and intuition only goes, one way, you can only, you can go from intuition to thought, but you can't go from thought directly to intuition.
I can't walk in as a facilitator to a room and say, okay, I want to be creative or be intuitive. And so the only way to get from the thought to the intuition to get from the bound thinking of the way we've always done it to the wide open space of what might a wise person doing the situation is to pass through the basement. And that's where the emotion is. So it is maybe articulating a vision that gets people's hearts involved that way. It might be working through some negative emotions or trauma is a word that's thrown around quite a bit these days, but I'll throw it around too and people will know what I'm referring to. So just the negative experiences that have created burdens that we carry with us to this day and that shape our thinking. So getting through that's how you come up into that intuition and the point of facilitation or, what I'm calling Whole Mind Facilitation is to get people into that space and make those new connections.
And then it's a little bit difficult. It's not as difficult as getting to intuition, but to get from intuition to thought. So now you have these big ideas and you do have to create a framework and you have to name some priorities. So then you come out of the process with something that you can act on that is translated into the world of thought, and you can measure it, you can develop the strategies and that kind of thing. That is that's the overall philosophy maybe. It's maybe more a philosophy than a framework, but that really guides whether it's strategic planning or organizational development or scenario work, whatever it is, that's the underlying thing for me.
I define emotion as the felt experience it's really in the body. [3] It's these patterns are things we've picked up that, that are held in the body. And then that they shaped the thinking that we have about an issue. And in the Reframing Poverty book, I talk about how, the reason I'm so focused on how people's families got out of poverty is because my suspicion is that part of what shapes, how we think of a poverty now. So if your parents worked like crazy to get out of poverty, you may have a view that says, look, my parents did it, why don't you do it? Why don't you get yourself out of poverty? Whereas if your parents struggled and you could see them working so hard and they didn't get the benefits of their good work, you might end up with a different view.
I think that the ability that futurists have to go into that emotional space and hold the space for those types of discussions that are so critical to owned and to disowned futures. I think that's a really critical asset that we bring.
One of the things I learned early on in my work as a futurist was, you have to stand in it in front of people. I mean, no one bashfully calls themselves a futurist. So you're already inviting, the attacks and the questions about where's your crystal ball and all you're already in that space. So by taking it all the way and just allowing whatever conversation comes up. There really isn't a complicated science of, for example, how I facilitate a meeting, or a futures workshop. It really is just, can I go into the room focused on what I believe to be the best outcome that the group could achieve, very nebulously defined? And then just be there for things that are coming up. And there are so many workshops that have turned on just me naming something that happened. And in so many meetings that people have, they just don't name what happened. If someone says something rude or if someone's really upset or someone just can't see this future that someone else is really excited about and just the ability to recognize that's part of this process and make space for that.
I think that's the key. And then once, if you can establish that, then you can go into different emotional territory. I mean, probably at some point in a workshop, if it went in a certain direction, I would be thinking we're probably into space where a professional therapist might be better suited, but in many groups situations talking about the future, it's just a matter of, being honest, being open, and being authentic with, what's happening and naming it. And by your words, and deeds communicating that you just sincerely want the best for this group and that you have some confidence, they'll be able to figure it out.
Peter Hayward
The thing that I certainly felt, working with groups, Eric was that often people have their own personal trauma and baggage about all the, what happened to them in this job or their prior job or whatever else. And this seems to want to come out when we're talking about this thing called the organizational future. When in fact it's always people's futures, it's always personal that there's no such thing as an organization. It's just people and the futures that they're creating for themselves and the people they love and care for. I wonder whether it's the nature of those particular conversations we have about the futures that matter in the futures that we fear in the futures we hope for that actually bring the emotion into the room almost guaranteed.
Eric Meade
I think, I think they do. We are unique perhaps among professional consultants or facilitators in that we're not bound to one particular approach or one way of viewing things. So we may be among the few people that organizational employees work with, who can create the space for them to recognize the truth that you just stated, which is it's not an organizational future. It's people creating a future that works for them and for others. And it, as soon as it's just the organization, then the machines have taken over. I mean, it's, it's just the, the structures are driving things in, who wants to live like that. So our ability to just own that space of look, we're all going to be assuming we don't go extinct. We're all gonna be here. So let's have an honest conversation about what we'd like that to be like.
Question 3
Peter Hayward
The third question is the one where I ask Eric Meade, citizen of the world, father in Colorado. What are the futures that are emerging around you that you know are getting your attention? That you're sensitive to, that you're interested in, both from a, there might be interest through optimism hope, and they may be interest through anxiety, fear, but now what are the futures that are really occupying you as they start to emerge?
Eric Meade
So I would say that the over the past two years with COVID and, a couple months ago, we were really worried about COVID now in the US we're not talking about COVID it's are we in World War Three? So, it's, been a tough couple of years. And during that time, I'd say my view of the emerging future has forked a bit. When I was at the Institute and even after I left and went out on my own, I think I, I very much had an optimistic “isn't the future going to be great and maybe we just have to go through some difficult birth pangs to get there” kind of perspective. And I remember right after I started my own company, I did a guided visualization with Oliver Markley another wonderful, generous person.
And he led me through this visualization. And I remember I pictured myself in this, it was like a gymnasium, it was like a middle school dance is, I don't know what then, but this says about my, emotional baggage from middle school dances, but it was a big gymnasium like that. And I found myself walking around little groups of people chatting, and I would tap them on the shoulders, and I tried to direct their attention upward. And it felt powerful at the time, and what I took from that was that my job was to inject myself into conversations, to convey the possibilities, convey look, there are good things happening, we need to define them and we need to accelerate them.
And that drives a lot of what you said about me, in the introduction about accelerating the shift to a better world. And that's very much in that spirit. So then the pandemic happened and it coincided with my midlife crisis. So that's convenient. But it makes it difficult to attribute things to one or the other. I'll turn 48 later this year. So I started to maybe let go to the extent that was just a Halcyon view of the future of isn't everything going to be great, we just have to get through to it. I might've let go of that a bit the future might have compressed a bit toward me as I just focused on, okay, how can I keep my family safe and, answer some of the questions that a lot of people were dealing with. But as I come out of that experience, I'd say I'm looking at the future three different ways. And I think they're all true and they need to be held. It's one of those paradoxes and you need to hold them all in your head at the same time. So there is the progress view, I think evolutionarily or, the adult development and the integral, all that work has always been interesting to me. So there is that, and we can hold out that possibility. And I think there are also reasons for us to think about, the future in terms of extinction, and I'm not going to make a scientific argument, I'm making more of a humanitarian, or just a human argument that it's worth thinking about how we would want to live if we knew that 20 years from now, 10 years now, next week we were going to be extinct. And I think we all deal with that in terms of our own mortality, but you can get through that by, doing a great work of art, having kids, there are other ways that we think of creating a legacy that so we're not really totally going away, but if you're thinking about nuclear weapons, if you're thinking about climate change, I think it's worth thinking about how you would live your life over the next X years if you knew that the whole species were going to go extinct. And how can you go extinct with dignity? How can you do that the right way? So that's the other view that I think is worth taking. And then the third view is related to a great quote from CK Chesterton, who said, I spent my life building my heresy only to find out it was orthodoxy.
And that view assumes there may not be big, fundamental changes, but we all are going through our own process, our own journey and as we need new things, we create them. So this is where the patterns of every a hundred years or just on an ongoing basis, every generation has its wars or its depressions or its different events. And it's just the world is as it is. And the future is more shaped by how people themselves are dealing with the things that are appropriate for where they are in their lives. So, paradoxically, that's the one that maybe gives me the most hope, because if you recognize that even all the stresses that we face now with war and climate change is a little unique, nuclear weapon certainly is unique post 1945 compared to before. But there have always been issues, the US is in a difficult place politically right now, heavily divided. The 1960s were also divided. There were other times that were bad. World War Two was arguably worse than World War Three has been so far.
So that's the third view is making peace with the present in all of its messiness and destructiveness, and also promise. So those are the three views that I'm trying to explore. How do you hold those three in mind at the same time? And just like you might do with a scenario project where you say, Hey, let's come up with three or four scenarios, figure out what we would do strategically in each, and then the things that show up in all three or four scenarios we definitely need to do. How would you apply that to this as well? And say, how would I want to act if I knew the entire species were going to be extinct 10 years from now? How would I want to act if progress is happening and it's just painful and there really is this transformative future ahead of us? And how would I want to act if I just had to recognize that this is life and these are the things that happen? And then from those strategies or actions that have been identified across those three futures, what's consistent. What serves you well in progress as well as it serves you, knowing that you'd be extinct in 10 years and how do we align ourselves around those actions?
Peter Hayward
Those three are interesting. They've come up a couple of times as you'd imagine in the podcasts. The second one, I think Riel Miller coined as how do I be a good ancestor is notion of, you know, if there were people coming after us, way after us, how do they look back to us as a species, as a generation and feel some sort of gratefulness for them. But I wonder if all three of those are about coming up with a form of ethic of how you live in the face of the truth of each of them?
Eric Meade
I think that's, I think that's right. And this is the part that we probably shouldn't tell non futurists is that a lot of the value of exploring the future is figuring out how the heck you should act right now that you're not doing. But it is a more personal ethic. I say it in the epilogue of the poverty book, I say, something along the lines of, we are all completely connected to one another and we are each fundamentally alone. And at least in the way I approached the problem, there is a driving toward, okay, how do I act? So it is ethics, at a very personal level, because a lot of these things are so far beyond my sphere of control. And I'm not saying that to be fatalistic. I'm just stating the fact that I have limited power to mitigate or reduce climate change.
I have surprisingly little influence over whether or not Putin is going to use nuclear weapons. These are things that I cannot control. So it really drives to a personal ethic. And I think that touches on the point you made earlier about how organizational futures become people futures because when you inject a future, it raises big questions and it drives people towards figuring out what their lives are about and what they want to do.
Peter Hayward
And is that new thinking that sort of sits at the core of really the two books you've written and the work to this point, that the thinking is not just to be creative and novel and open, but to actually be deeply aware of the consequences of the decisions you can make?
Eric Meade
I don't know as if that's exactly how I would frame the work and the books. A bigger theme for me and I started with the Redemption Story. When you asked what was the Eric Meade story and it says his Redemption story. And I think that maybe where I am right now is that what we need is a lot more forgiveness about where we are and about the fact that all three of the futures I just described are possible. So I think about in the extinct future, it seems paradoxical even say, but the extinct future, I think about the movie Don't Look Up and I don't know how much play that movie got in Australia.
It's built around some pathologies that are maybe uniquely American, but the way they end that, where it is about, it's just expressing gratitude and forgiveness. And so, spoiler alert, all those things are useful in the other, in the other futures as well. And the world will be a much better place in the progress scenario or in the, this is just what life is like scenario. But I think that's the theme that I'm finding in my past writing, my current writing, and my work is how do you just create forgiving spaces and frameworks? Hey, all four views of poverty, all have some validity. There's some forgiveness in that. So you don't have to argue, you don't have to be mean to each other about it. Let's just recognize that and pull out the best pieces. In a workshop it's the same, everyone's got different perspectives and great and for good reason, and let's pull it the best pieces and let's stop viewing other people as defective versions of ourselves because they disagree.
Question 4
Peter Hayward
Fourth question is the communication question. So how do you explain what Eric Meade does to someone who doesn't necessarily understand what it is that Eric Meade does?
Eric Meade
I would say the reframing aspect of my work is one big thing. And people who have worked with me as clients. They will consistently speak to my ability to reframe the issues, the problems in ways that generate new insights and new, creative work to solve the problems or mitigate. So I think having the mental space to reframe, I think that's something that I often use to describe it. And then the other thing, which I I'd be curious if you've heard this from other futurists is just, I often say that I go into rooms, I act like myself, and then later on when I send an invoice, people pay.
So it's a nice gig. But I think so much of this work is just inherent in who we are, that it really is just, it's not what you know, it's not that specific tool, it's not that one article that you've read, it's that you're going in and you're creating the mental space and the emotional space, the intuitive space, to have much more productive interactions with people. And to the extent that I can stand in that and do that, then I know I'll be successful. The only time I get concerned is when the ego creeps up of, well, am I going to look expert enough? And that's a dead end road right there.
Peter Hayward
I don't think anyone's actually described who they are and what they do quite as honestly, as you described there. I mean, my sense there, if I play back what I think people are responding to when you do that is the absolute honesty, but you turn up as you are and from who you are and everything that comes with that you start and what you are encouraging people to do, whoever they are is come up as you are. In other words, turn up as you are, don't turn up as something you think you want to be, or I want you to be actually, we want you to be who you are good and bad. And then let's use that as the fuel for how we work together.
Eric Meade
I think that's spot on Peter and I had a mentor named Doug Krug. Still do have a mentor named Doug Krug . He's here in Colorado with me, but years ago, I asked him maybe how he achieved some certain outcome in some workshop setting. And he said, I just assume that people are going to show up as who they are. And I go from there and it's exactly what you just said. So, to the extent that I can do that and be honest and even make mistakes. And if I say, Hey, I just made the mistake or, Hey, I don't know, you know, in a workshop, it's very powerful to say, I don't know what we should do right now. Does anyone have an ideas? I mean, that's not my, that's not my go-to tool but just the honesty and the authenticity in the moment to say, look, we just want to make things better and how do we do it?
I think that's key to it. I mentioned in the facilitation book that I noticed, there are a couple of facilitations I did a number of years ago where I just made kind of silly errors like early in the workshop, like there was one, like I, I got into talking about something and I forgot that we were supposed to go to a break. So someone had to raise their hand and say, Can we take a break? I gotta use the restroom. I was like, oh yeah, we're supposed to take a break. So what I found after a few of those was those workshops ended up being incredibly successful. And I just wonder if the fact that people are sitting in the room and they're thinking, oh, I can't make a mistake. And then the dang facilitator makes a mistake and it just opens things up. So I think it really is about being who you are and recognizing other people are going to be who they are and making that okay. I think that it's not rocket science, but it seems to work.
Peter Hayward
I'm going to say I agree on it, but I'm going to give you a but, or an and, which is, you're also evoking this notion of forgiveness. You're also modeling this aspect that there is no right or wrong in this. We're just doing our best and our best might actually get where we want it to, or our best might take us away. But hey it doesn't matter because if we forgive and forget and we kind of move on, then everything contributes if we can be as generous and open to the process and the people in it.
Eric Meade
Yep. I think that's right.
Question 5
Peter Hayward
Okay, Eric, we're at the last question. I just want to, if I can. I love the house metaphor that we talked about early on. Intuition. It is a slippery, interesting, rich term. I wonder if you can maybe just unpack what you think intuition is and how it operates in terms of both the future's work, the creativity and the emotion.
Eric Meade
Yeah. The intuition is tough. And I think for a lot of people, it is difficult to access individually and it may be fundamentally difficult to access individually. And I do see that as something beyond the individual and in the facilitation book, I'm very clear that the intent of facilitation, if you do it according to that book, is to get people together in a shared space where they're able to go into that together, because it is beyond anyone's individual experience or frameworks or thought processes. The big tip, the only time I underline anything in that book is when I say don't use tables in your meetings, because it is all about just a circle of chairs, human beings together like we've been doing for millennia of sitting together in circle. And trying to tap into that. Now where it comes from, is it a part of the brain? Is it beyond any of us beyond all of us? I think that all those answers might be true at the same time. The mechanism might be through the brain and the source might be external. I would say that I do operate as a futurist from a deep faith and it's, I won't name what the faith is in even if I could. I would say that both the progress future that I described of, Hey, everything's getting better and better, that might be too juvenile approach to the deep faith that I'm trying to articulate now. And then the extinct future that I described kind of denies that faith. So the future that, maybe most consistent with where I am on the faith level is that future of look the world is as it is. The real question is how are we making peace with it and with ourselves and operating in ways that shape our present in a way that we'd like and also at least a view to the type of future we're creating for ourselves and for those that come later. So I will leave it as nebulous as it was at the beginning, because I don't know as if there's another option, but, it is central to how I approach life and the future. And to me that has to be an important part of it.
Peter Hayward
Eric it's been great to meet you. I've had an absolutely great time talking to you about your work. Thanks very much for taking some time out, to spend some time with the FuturePod community.
Eric Meade
Thank you. It's been a good time
Peter Hayward
and I understand your coming down under Australia for the first time. So maybe a while this podcast has got a bit of currency. Do you want to just talk a little bit about what you're coming down to Australia for?
Eric Meade
Well, I'm actually coming down because my pandemic hobby was picking up the bass guitar I've owned for 20 years and had played about five times. So I'm in a rock band that is in quotes, maybe touring Australia. You have at least two gigs lined up, next summer in your part of the world. I'd love to make contact with folks if they want to talk more about the future. So, maybe some people who hear this will reach out and we can grab a coffee or something.
Peter Hayward
That'd be great. That'd be great. Well I hope the book continues to go well and and I hope the trip to Australia works well, but thanks very much Eric.
Eric Meade
Thank you, Peter.
Peter Hayward
This has been another production from Futurepod. Future pod 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.