EP 136 : Futures Weaver - Cat Tully

 
 

Cat Tully is the founder of SOIF, the School of International Futures, celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2022. Before setting up SOIF, Cat worked as a strategy and policy adviser to the UK government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. She is motivated by a focus on social justice and the importance of multi-stakeholder approaches to the challenges of the 21st-century world.

Interviewed by: Peter Hayward

More about Cat and SOIF

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 Cat Tully. Cat Tully is the founder of the School of International Futures, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2022. She has extensive experience as a practitioner, helping governments, civil society, and businesses become more strategic, effective, and better prepared for the future. She is motivated by a focus on social justice and the importance of multi-stakeholder approaches to the challenges of the 21st century world.

Before setting up the School Cat worked as a strategy and policy advisor to the UK, and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. She has also worked in strategy and international relations across the not-for-profit and business sectors. Welcome to Futurepod Cat..

Cat Tully: Hi Peter. It's so lovely to be with you and your audience. It's my absolute pleasure.

Peter Hayward: Thanks Cat. So first question is the story question. So what is the Cat Tully story? How did you end up being a member of the futures and foresight community?

Cat Tully: I imagine like many of the stories it was a very windy, windy one. That all makes sense when you look backwards, but absolutely when you're taking each step on the way, it was really quite unclear where I was moving towards. So I think what's been really formative in my motivations and what I've chosen to do, I think is the fact that my Mum comes from Portugal. And that my Dad, his parents came from Ireland and also the East End of London. And so this has kind of given me a real sense of interest in adventure and always, growing up, looking at things from very different perspectives. One of the most clear memories I have was in the Eighties when with the IRA, bombing in the UK, and there was a very strong narrative in the UK about those events. And then you heard a very, very different perspective from the Irish community and also the Portuguese community. So I think that both gave me the traveling bug and the kind of inquisitiveness bug of like, how do things look like from different people's perspectives?

So I basically just like went wandering. I spent some time in a Chateau du Vin in Bordeaux that was extremely formative when I was about 17. I spent time in West Africa living in Senegal for a year all over really crossing the Sahara by public transport going through Central Asia by train. I studied at university and I was lucky in the very early Nineties just after the Berlin Wall came down to do an International Relations and Politics course that was about global security. And I think that was like 10 years before pretty much other courses caught up with the fact that we need to think about security issues and wellbeing in a holistic global and systemic way.

So I feel phenomenally privileged that this was a bit of a random course that was just available for three or four years before the funding stopped. But that's how life happens is that, you know, lucky sometimes to be in these moments of propinquity really and then, you just use that as a platform. I could tell you a little bit about working for Proctor and Gamble because after working in Senegal. I was like, I'm in West Africa, I'm on the edge of the Sahara in this beautiful place called Saint Louis. I'm running a bar restaurant at night where, you're seeing the President's son-in-law and the Minister of the Economy and all these development people. But then also during the day, I was volunteering in a food security project with some of the kind of poorest in the community.

And it was just like, "why is it that there so much development aid that's been sent out here over the past 50 years with no impact?" And yet, Israeli and Lebanese businessmen who are actually making amazing agricultural fields, you know, productivity out of the Sahara with drip irrigation. And yet they can't export that tomatoes and green beans into Europe because of sanitary and phytosanitary barriers. So again, it's this whole kind of thing. Like if you're interested in issues around social justice, of innovation of growth, then like let's get to the kind of systemic heart of what's going on rather than putting a sticking plaster on top of it. But, if you're going to do that, you need to kind of work across the business and civil society and government.

So that was quite a formative insight. And so ended up, getting my three to four years of experience in Procter and Gamble, because I wanted to know what business like, and then ended up having the privilege of working in government, which was fascinating too. So it was that kind of appetite to itchy feet, but also appetite to look at the spaces between these communities and what happens. Like the different languages that business users versus government and see what happens when you can bring those actors together, that really motivated me. So now I'm actually on a nomadic year. I've decided to get dusty feet again, and to go traveling around in 2022. So, you're speaking to me here in London, but I hope to be in Buenos Aires, back in Senegal and also in Australia at some point so I hope that we get to meet.

Peter Hayward: Where you in the UK government, at the time of the UK Foresight project?

Cat Tully: Absolutely. And actually that's why I set up the School of International Futures was that there was a huge interest internationally in the UK government experience. Which I think that the magic of the UK story and I've have written an interesting history trying to compile the kind of 25 year history of foresight in the UK government just tracking the institutional innovations and the developments. I think the magic that happened under TB was basically, that he set up the Strategy Unit system as well as investing in foresight. So what you had was then a strategy community, strategy units in each of the Departments connected into senior decision makers who both, yes, worked on short term issues, unblocking questions, bringing Thought Leadership and data to bear on some of the crunchier challenges, but actually also were there, as almost the docking point for foresight work.

And I think that was incredibly valuable. I think the other thing that really worked under TB was that he got that, as a leader, he both had to create the space for, long-term thinking and contrarian thinking and he got it and that he was prepared to build a set of institutional capabilities around it, but also knew that himself as a politician would be under pressure to then ignore it. So he then created these Chinese Walls internally to ensure that, you could actually create an ecosystem that really supported under pressure decision-makers to have that kind of information. Now, it was far from perfect. Don't get me wrong. And there was lots that could have been improved on it. But in terms of direction of travel, it was a really interesting, good example of a future prepared ecosystem within a government. And the shocking thing for me, when I left in 2010 was how easily uprooted it was. Having said that, lots of culture and institutional memory remained, which then could then be picked up, a few years later, which is I think to the advantage of the UK. But yes, it is remarkably interesting how, quickly a Civil Service can respond to the incentives of leaders, including often when the pendulum swings to the right and right wing governments, as you saw in Australia and in Canada, et cetera. I don't want civil servants to really have that capability to look beyond the term of office because, from that results in bigger government and, thinking about the longer term actually challenges their ministerial and political views on the fact that they own strategy. So I will stop it there because I can very at that time. And it was a very formative experience. Indeed.

Peter Hayward: So after you then had that quite remarkable, institutional and cultural and leadership experience of foresight at the highest level. Then where did you go?

Cat Tully: I mean, that's a great question. I and one that I pondered on long and Hard. In July, 2010, I decided to take a train trip through, Russia through Kazakhstan all the way through to, Urumqi in China and Almaty. And then traveled through a lot of Uzbekistan where I then got arrested on the border with Turkmenistan on the Northern border, which by the way is probably one of the four borders that you really don't want to get arrested on. I think North/South Korea would probably be bad. Burundi/Rwanda, also bad. Turkmenistan, it was north Uzbekistan Karakalpakstan is what it's called. It's the bit of Uzbekistan that is actually nomadic in nature. It's not like the sedentary rest of the Uzbeks. They are horseman. It's the bit of Uzbekistan that produces all the cotton with often child labor and also it's where the Aral Sea is and this huge kind of desertification and hybridization of that land often because of the cotton crops. So I ended up for various reasons, which I won't go into, but it was a little interesting, under house arrest the six weeks. So I had long and hard to ponder that question. What the hell do I do now? After doing what was basically the most amazing job, because after being at the Prime Minister's strategy unit, I then was privileged to be two years under David Miliband at the Foreign Office policy planning staff, then applying futures approaches and, translating futures into impact in the here and now, but on foreign policy issues. Whether it was, the Artic, what happens when the Arctic melts and the geopolitical consequences of it, as well as the trade consequences, all sorts of issues around. Yeah, it was anyway, loads of fun.

And after applying to a few jobs, I was like, goddammit, I'm going to have to set up an organization because that's the only way that we can carry on doing something that exciting and innovative. And at that point, I thought that there would be huge amounts of interest, I remember being in government and, people around the world, different governments were coming along saying, please tell us about this experience that you've had in the UK government. I was like, okay, let's do a business model around that. Let's help disseminate what good institutionalizing of foresight practice looks like. What are some of the governance, the connections into the policy-making process? How do you talk to senior ministers and, civil servants so they can connect it to the business of public service, which is so important. And what are some of the kinds of processes and structures and mechanisms and connections between parliament and the supreme auditing bodies and universities that have the features of thick and effective foresight ecosystems. So that's what I thought we were going to do plus something that we're really good at is not so much, there's excellent supply of insight about the future. And what I saw in government was that, the problem of using foresight, it's not a supply side issue, it's a demand side issue. Like how do you get senior decision makers to understand what that means in a very busy environment, as well as the institutional context. And I think that also goes by the way for communities, because I think it's communities and senior decision-makers that really need it. I think if we're gonna, address the challenges of representative democracy and actually make it fit for purpose in the way that Alvin Toffler and many other great thinkers, including Professor Jim Dator have been talking about around, an anticipated democracy fit for the 21st century, then foresight absolutely has to be a critical part of that.

So both amongst incumbent decision makers, but also amongst the communities who can then explore their own futures and co-create them. So that's what I was particularly interested in and I set up the organization with a counterpart who was in government Office of Science and we were like, yeah, global financial crisis. Everybody's talking about building back better. There is no official future. We need to, do things differently and it's really important to have different scenarios. And what actually happened, there was a wholesale cutting of long-term thinking capability across all organizations, private and public. And also there was a whole of redistribution from the poor to the rich, which is a classic way of, setting yourself up as Ian M Banks said in his final interview before he died with the Guardian, which is worth a read. So I think in 2014 he was like, "I'm dying, I'm not going to miss the 10 years of pro fascism that we've set up for ourselves as a result of how we've decided the response to that financial crisis.

Anyway. So there is where we thought we were going to be, and it's actually really interestingly, taken 10 years for us to actually get to that point again. So I see a lot of similarities in the narrative and the pendulum swing interest again, outside the futures community in strategic foresight, which is all to the good. But having been through a few pendulum swings again, as I imagine you have as well Peter, I'm like, there is much a slip between the cup and the lip as they say. And so, uh we cannot absolutely say job done. We absolutely need to ensure that at the heart of foresight, is that it is about challenging power and it's about voice and it's about agency, all those things that big institutions don't really like to engage with. And the transformative power of foresight is still held and held true to. And so I am very optimistic visa vie 8, 10, 12 years ago, not for good reasons, but because we've got a generation Z of voters who were like, you know, bugger this, you what interest have I got in the institutions around me? In my entire formative years, since I was 10, that it's been a moment of austerity and poor options. So I do think that Generation Z and then Generation Alpha behind them are going to be key to driving the transformative potential of the insights that foresight activities can provide us.

Peter Hayward: We'll move on , because I'm sure we're gonna loop around these a number of times, so I'm happy to end question one there. So thanks. Thanks Cat.

 So second question I encourage the guests to explain to the listeners a framework or a philosophy or an approach that is central to how Cat does her work and how it is a central part of who you are and how you do this work. So would you like to talk about,

Cat Tully: I would like to talk about the journey of discovery that we as an organization has been on over the past four years, but I've only really probably has come to the fore in terms of talking about it over the past six months. Which is that we think that the Network Weaving field and the Futures and Foresight field have got, when brought together have the potential for transformation and change. And I'd like to talk about that experience of bringing those two fields together. Okay. So, we were introduced to Network Weaving, which is effectively a way of thinking about non-hierarchical, non hub and spoke approaches, to weaving different, actors for social impact together. And I think the field is very quickly growing. It's really emerged only over the last 10 years, but it's basically about coalition-building when you have a series of very different types of social actors. Public, private, and especially civil society who are trying to achieve a goal together. Whether it's addressing climate emissions, whether it's trying to get children to read in your community, there's a common purpose. And people are doing it out of motivation and passion and the desire to change the world. Not because they're incentivized by command and control, key performance indicators, or traditional kind of financial incentives. So that's an incredibly rich field actually. I encourage the listeners to read, Converge, their books on weaving for social impact. There's a great Stanford Innovation Review, short article, about the five Cs , you need to build common purpose, collaboration, understand what people are doing, and then weaving supporting people together. And it's about enabling the potential of that community to kind of create change. Now if you then map that, but the issue is, is that it's still kind of quite static view longitudinally of how change happens or, it's very much about organizations working together to create change. Now, if you then lay that on top of, futures and foresight in particular, the Three Horizons Model. Then you're like, wow, you're suddenly lifting, a two dimensional view of actors into three dimensional space. And you're beginning to understand the dynamics and you're taking Network Weaving and surfing it on the waves of the different horizons. And that's so exciting because basically there's different things that happening.

Firstly, it's your role as a Network Weaver is about nudging dynamics that are already in place. And helping people understand within that community what's going on. And in particular, the power dynamics. So you end up and I think this is the key thing that's been really amazing is that you end up having a language to talk about Power and Incumbency and the role that different actors have in the network in a way that's really kind, loving and giving of everybody there. So for example, what we I think are doing is when we work on things like, the future of human rights with open society, or we'd be doing some stuff on like how the humanitarian sector is changing or, we're doing a lot actually with the counter-proliferation, the counting nuclear guys. And so what we see is that the kind of people, and often this is philanthropists and foundations as well, you'll have incumbents in the field who are like Early Adopters and they're effectively bringing these fields together. What you can do is create coalitions of change of legitimate disruption and change in a community in a sector where you're working with the early adopters in the incumbent Horizon One organizations and helping them connect and understand to the voices in Horizon Three and to start operating in Horizon Two together. In particular I think what it also does is future's work really supports and empowers the authority of Horizon Three actors, vis-a-vis Horizon One actors who otherwise are like, "Who are you? Where do you come from? And why is what you've got to say relevant?" So it's just really, really exciting.

Peter Hayward: It's good. I'm hearing obviously complex dynamics there about learning from emerging systems, rather than trying to understand them because Horizon One is a dynamic and you can't really understand it. You can learn from it. You can listen and watch and talk about it, but it's moving and it's not waiting for you and Horizon three's interesting, I found Cat, because to me again, in my experience, it often was elites, it was often people with power who were, who were attracted by three to get away from one where all the problems where they could almost jump to three and say, oh, it'll be better when X, we just need that in the future. And often there was no connect between the reality of people on the ground, dealing with problems now, which were generally problems of not having power and having the elites talk about how the future was going to be. With this magic high-tech high, whatever kind of of future. And again, I'm hearing in it is this kind of bridging process where you actually, because often power is in horizon three and often the powerless or deemed powerless are in horizon one.

Cat Tully: Well, that's really interesting. Asking horizon, one actors to fill in a horizon, three graph is still a horizon one activity. . Genuine horizon three insights, I don't think can come from incumbents. So the question is more for me, it's like, how do you clinically put horizon one leaders in their box, which is very, not in a rude way, but it's just like, help them understand that even when they're talking about 2030 time horizon or 2100 time horizon, they may be talking about the future, but they're talking about a colonized future of the present. So the question is then how do you work with horizon one actors and leaders to help them realize that actually they can mandate and support and finance this process and put their organizational authority behind the changes that the process will come up with, but actually coloring in the bloody dots or what it looks like is , they can be a participant, but boy, do they need to be a participant whose role is mainly to listen not to contribute.

 And then, what does it mean to be a leader and lead an organizational transformation process into a future where your power base is not supported is a really, really challenging thing. But when I was reflecting on your question as well, the other framework or philosophy that I use, or perhaps it's the metaphor, perhaps it actually, you've picked something, your final question around how you talk about futures that, you can either see the future as a kind of shiny ball, which is there to be objectively examined from different sides and using calipers to measure it and describe it and it can be effectively wrong or right about it, or you can see, futures as a mirror where it's your opportunity to polish it and look around the peripheries and, see your reflections from different perspectives and have, truth spoken to power. And for me, the work that we do, because, we are big fans of Betty Sue Flowers, who says, that as many great futurists do that, the future is a story that we tell ourselves in the present. And so in that situation, the act of a futures work is to disrupt the present as as Gaston Berger says, and it is an active voice in agency and challenge, and it's a subversive activity and that's where we would squarely put our own practice.

Peter Hayward: Yes. Often we see particularly the young people are asked to be carriers of older people's ideas rather than actually getting the chance to talk about the things they want in the future.

Cat Tully: Correct! So we wrestled with that a lot with the next generation foresight practitioners network. We have a sensing network of about 500 young, we call them future inspired change-makers because they don't necessarily use futures vocabulary or the tools and the techniques as developed is what is quite a western, academic and Anglo-Saxon tradition. But they do the component bits that we would recognize, which is thinking systemically, alternative views, et cetera, et cetera. And so this is an amazing network and the question is, lots of people are interested in engaging in hearing what they've got to say but our role is as the convener or the Weaver of the network is also like it's to balance out that when you're working with a network, are they working on issues that they really care about or, being consulted on by horizon one actors who are really interested in what they've got to say, which is also important, but actually, what we always tried to do and think through, what are the vehicles of change, whether it's kind of seed funding, the impact fund that we've just innovated with, or whether it's the podcast, which I am totally going to come back to you and ask for your advice on, where are the spaces where their voice is allowed to kind of shine through clearly, rather than their opinions on issues that current people think are important.

Peter Hayward: Thanks, Cat.

So, Cat third question where I talk to Cat Tully, I'll get you to put down your expertise and role, and just talk about the futures that Cat Tully is sensitive to, as they emerge, the ones that excite you, the ones that possibly even concern you, but the futures that are emerging that energize you either to move towards them or to actually want to resist them. But what's happening around you.

Cat Tully: This is such a difficult one to answer. I'm going to give you a little bit of a smorgasbord and keep it brief because otherwise, as you can tell, I talk the hind leg off a donkey. And this is from travels and conversations, cause, I should probably have started off by saying I don't consider myself a futurist at all. I'm good at that translation. What I do is I listen out to signals that come from much better and much more interesting people than me. So when I'm sharing all of this, I'd like to pay attribution to all the many people whose time I've spent chatting.

I think there's something very interesting about the role of rural futures. Especially, we hear this from some of our Indian foresight colleagues and also across the African continent, that there's a lot of urban futures being discussed, but the quality of a kind of sustainable livelihood and village life and community life in rural spaces is under explored in particular across the continent of Africa and India.

Just because I've just come from the 20th anniversary, Nuclear Threat Initiative Dinner in DC, last week, I will also say that I think there's something really interesting about proliferation and futures. I think that the field was partly at least established by Herman Kahn and his multiple sensing and modeling of the doomsday scenario at the end of the world and identify as Jerome Glenn, who I then had the privilege of chatting to recently, he's a good friend and who worked with Kahn. It's about kind of identifying what are the things that you don't know. And it feels as if after a very significant period from the Sixties to the late Eighties, where this was a very present reality of life globally, whether concerns about nuclear proliferation and in particular bio proliferation, bio-security hazards will potentially be on the rise.

 I think there's something about the global security fears are on the rise. We have been very privileged in Europe and in the U S to also have had a period of relative conflict free decades, even though this is absolutely not the experience of people globally. You need to look at Congo, obviously Ethiopia at the moment, et cetera, but these regional conflicts have affected millions, but I think there is something about the world getting used to a world of global security threats and the associated, required thinking around multilateral governance that I think is going to be really interesting and keeps you a bit awake at night.

And then I think we've been working a lot on intergenerational fairness and what I'm seeing around me is, when the Facebook revolution and I'm for your listeners using heavy finger quotes, when I use that term, happened in Egypt, it kind of felt that democracy comes to a crossroads because representative democracy was not really going to be fit for purpose to address the kind of challenges that we've got to face in the 21st century. And I think that the past decades has just shown that. And so we've been looking at questions of intergenerational fairness and intergenerational dialogue and we've got big costs that we've got to invest to do digital and environmental transitions as countries, to prepare for the kind of future and to ensure that we actually have a future for this planet. And the big question is, can we get the politics right to make those investments now in time in the right direction? The big question is, the challenge is, our political systems in the West have singularly demonstrated that they are not really delivering the political leaders that are able to lead that process.

So political leadership has to come from somewhere else. And I think processes of building public consensus for how we share the burdens of those transitions, what's fair between different generations, and if it's the right thing to do, that's the business of politics over the next five to 10 years, right? So these intergenerational fairness, dialogues discussions, institutions, public policy processes, and political leaders that can lead those processes is I think the big, big question. And I think by doing that, because not doing that, we're just letting ourselves be totally open, but to populist playbooks, right? They just sow dissent between generations, between urban and rural, between men and women, between rich and poor otherwise, cause it's really easy to do .But that whole space for collective intergenerational discussion with space for unborn generations as well to have a role in that conversation is really, really critical.

And I think there is appetite for that. You've got the UN Secretary General has committed to this Special Envoy for Future Generations, whose role will be to do that. We have been working a lot in Portugal and the Portuguese President has just said that he's going to be the intergenerational champion, that he sees his role as representing future citizens, as well as present citizens. And he's getting his staff, because he has a role to scrutinize legislation that comes from the government, and so he wants his staff who does that scrutiny to incorporate intergenerational fairness assessment that we've been working on into that process. So I think that there's causes for positive optimism, this whole issue around the future of democracy, how we distribute the costs of the radical transitions that we've got ahead, and do so in a way that understands time and generations. I think is going to be a very, very, very important skill and thing to do over the coming decade.

Peter Hayward: Yeah. It's interesting Cat. I'm an student of history, particularly English history. And when I studied at university, I studied the Victorian England and particularly the political reforms of Gladstone and Disraeli, and it was interesting that at a time when their political system was falling apart, and Disraeli was a Conservative, but he championed the franchise change to actually let people who didn't own property actually vote and following on from that, of course in the next sort of wave we saw, then the female vote arrive, via the suffragettes. And again, one of the observations I make of the crisis of political systems is are we going to see another change to the franchise to allow younger people to actually vote? Because there's often a lot of thinking that the 18 to 21 voting age is somehow set in concrete. And yet history tells us that political people often surprising political people have opened up the franchise and the franchise can energize and change the nature of politics.

Cat Tully: I absolutely. I couldn't agree more. I think, David Runciman came out with a proposal for six years and up. I'm like brilliant. Yep. Go for it.

Peter Hayward: I think what we saw pre COVID where the younger people just started to take political action and going the streets because as you say, they don't see any representation in the current political system and the current political ideas given that they're going to live in that future. And so we saw the politicization of the 13, 14, 15 year olds. It was amazing in Australia. You might know that in Australia, we have a Conservative government, of course. And so when the kids walked out of schools on Fridays to protest and the parents cheered them and the school, teachers cheered them and the politician's answer was get back in the classroom and learn something. And they still are going to be voting in two years time. And in fact, they're going to be voting now they're going to be voting in our election, which is about four weeks away.

Cat Tully: Fantastic. Yeah. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you.

Peter Hayward: I think it's what you said. I'm going to say there has to be a subversive element to this. We actually have to take the Horizon One and to some extent, parts of it will not go into the future and they have to be stopped because the future can't emerge the way it has to arise in Horizon Three, if certain things are holding it back.

Cat Tully: Well, let's take a very like a black and white example. So you have a current Horizon One that's based on hydrocarbon economy. Now there are some actors in Horizon One, like the early adopters or the people who are willing to move, you're going to basically have the dregs, I use that intentionally, left behind including some actors who are pretty much prepared to act as blockers and potentially prepare to use quite nefarious tools in order to do so. And they may be countries, but they may be kind of actors who are very much insulate, private sector, actors who are insulated from the market. They're not publicly listed, they're based in countries where, it's very difficult to access them legally, et cetera. You need to be a little bit kind of hard nosed about it. It's about helping that future emerge. But as you say, there's potentially a side which is going and "what do you do with the current Horizon One actors who are going to block that unfortunately, and , we're talking about survival now. So there's a serious measures that are going to have to be taken in terms of counter operations and intelligence and surveillance and all this kind of stuff, but necessary.

Peter Hayward: And again, I think back to your point. There are the actors who have power. So these can often be some of the investors in some of the political figures that are invested in it, but there actually are to use your other idea, there are the people sitting in the rural places where these resources lie. They're relatively powerless. They're almost collateral damage in this future. Correct. And it's giving them a voice because it's almost like they're talked over. These are the people that are going to lose jobs, livelihoods, everything else. And, they're not part of the conversation other than to be turned into caricatures of ignorant yokels, rural people who've actually have as much entitlement to debate the future they want for themselves and their kids as the people in the cities do.

Cat Tully: Yeah. Yep. And are invisible unless they're weaponized by one side or another. Absolutely. The UN Secretary General has committed to these national listening dialogues. And I, I fundamentally believe if we're going to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, which is a positive vision for the future of this planet. And you've got multiple countries who do national planning exercises that used to be five-year plans, but now are about achieving the SDGs. These plans cannot be developed as Business as Usual, like same old practice in the room because you're not going to get just because you're like stretching out to 10 years, rather than five years, you're not going to get the transformative innovation ideas that achieving the SDGs need. For me, it's absolutely critical that you harness the insights and the energy and the ideas of communities in countries in order to achieve those outcomes. And so that's a kind of quite nice thing to say, but it's quite difficult to do, but at the heart getting governments to help really understand what co-creation and national dialogues. So taking citizens assemblies, but integrating foresight approaches to it. So the conversations aren't just about historic and present factors, but actually about dynamic and expert informed, but still citizen deliberated questions around trade-offs and insights and preferences that has to be the future of kind of policymaking. And what that looks like at both the national level and the community level, anything that we can do to support those kinds of endeavors that all being done by some of our Next Generation Foresight practitioners around the world is really important.

So we've done this national strategy for Next Generations pilot in the UK, which has taking the integrated review. Which is the only place where, the UK government does longterm thinking across the different departments, you know, what's the global environment within which the UK is supposed to prosper in the next 10 to 15 years? Those kind of exercises absolutely need to be prized open and public views, deep public views and engagement part of that, but in a way where their insights are taken seriously.

Peter Hayward: Thanks Cat.

 Fourth question is the communication question. So how do you explain what Cat Tully does to someone who doesn't understand what Cat Tully does?

Cat Tully: So, I do it really badly. I normally try to get kind of like a kind of conversational dipstick and go scanning. Okay. I think looking at me as if I'm totally mad and shall I try and reverse and try and enter this in a totally different end goal? Often what that means is that I throw everything like at the wall and hope that something sticks. Its a terribly bad way of communicating, um, so blah, blah, blah,

What we try to not do is use the word foresight. So we sometimes say that we're a Not, for-Profit collective of practitioners working on policy planning and strategy for future generations. So that's one way. Sometimes I just say an interest in using the concept of the future to create transformation today. And sometimes I say, as an organization, we organized in practices actually at the School of International Futures and each practice is taking one lens on the issue of why is it so difficult now to make decisions that are good for tomorrow and tomorrow citizens as well as today's citizens? And each of our practices is trying to take an angle at that problem. So one angle, which is the Next Generation Foresight practitioners is a community capability that is critical for the 21st century, because a community coming together to co-create and design and think about their futures is a deeply political act.

If we think that's really important, then we need a foresight community and army of people who are able to do tools and techniques, and approaches that are connected to people's lived experience from 8.5 billion people in 2050 around the world. So it needs to connect to the metaphors and the language and the ways of seeing time, which can be cyclical, linear or different, so we need diversification of a foresight approaches and people and tools. So that's what NGFP does. Our learning and transformation practice basically helps build foresight capability in organizations and individuals. And then Intergenerational Fairness Observatory basically helps us hold decision-makers to account for their longterm impacts of their decisions today. So depending on that, then I kind of slice and dice, but it's just really difficult and I'd be very, very keen to learn from your other interviews and also listeners on what works for them.

Peter Hayward: The fourth question is an interesting one to sit here and ask it over 140 times and listen to the answers, because again, everyone's listening to the answers, trying to pinch something. One of the things I did hear in yours, which I just want to acknowledge is one of the things about the future and futures thinking and making decisions is giving it a moral component. And to me, the future generation focus that you have is a way to land the moral aspect of, "whose future are we talking about?" And do they get a say? It's actually taking it from this technical solution where we're trying to solve something that's not known and we're not flipping it into a moral dilemma, but we are posing the dilemma that the people who are going to see what the future turns out, see whether your policy works or doesn't work, aren't here present at the table to give input to the policy. And, and that's the dilemma that should be at the front of all policy makers is how do we ensure that we're making decisions that actually give some consideration to the future rather than zero?

Cat Tully: Yeah. Yeah. So, absolutely. And it's a really nice, simple two worded backdoor. To make real, what does it mean to embrace uncertainty? Because we can use these terms and then people are like, yes, yes, yes. I'm embracing them, uncertainty watch me. And it's just like, no, that, that means that you, it is unknowable what the preferences of future generations are, therefore, back to the kind of intergenerational principle, the Rawls principal and Bruntland principal around trying to do no harm and limiting and trying to stop yourself from limiting their freedom is a really powerful kind of concept because it's like fairness people connect to that.

 So I think the German constitutional court ruling in April last year is a really, really powerful one. And I think it's a kind of, it's a straw in the wind where I can imagine a lot of that's going to drive a lot of the sustainability finance to move quickly, I think, in the Green Transition. And I think it's also going to accelerate a real appetite for building new kind of institutions to be aware of future generations. And that makes me very happy. And perhaps I'm just optimistic, but at least I prefer to kind of approach the future in an optimistic way.

Peter Hayward: Yeah. It is interesting when judges are often more courageous and more revolutionary than political figures. In Australia we had a famous land rights decision called the Mabo judgment that actually wiped out Terra Nullis and that was well ahead of any politician who wanted to do it or anything else, but the judges effectively pushed Australia kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Cat Tully: So my instinct is that judges can often tap into the best of us because they are concerned about legacy and they are concerned about decades into the future. The issue is not that the politicians don't see it. They do see it. They'd love to be able to do it, but the constraints around them and the pressures are impossible. So, let's try and give them a little bit more space to do the right thing, I think is my approach often with politicians,

Peter Hayward: Hear hear Cat.

 So we're at the last question, Cat. What do you want to finish with?

Cat Tully: Okay. I would love to pose a question to your listeners, and to ask your opinion collectively about the value of the Intergenerational Fairness Principle. How it might connect into your personal work? How you see intergenerational fairness, dynamics playing out in your communities and the topics that you work on? And if an Intergenerational Fairness Assessment framework might help you because, we are very keen to set up a community of people who are in different parts of the world and in different sectors, using that framework to start opening up conversations about the future. And we'd love to hear from you. Learn a little bit from the experiences that you're going through and to see whether the Intergenerational Fairness Assessment framework might help. If so it's on our website. So that's www.soif.org.uk

Peter Hayward: We'll put all those links on the show notes as well as if you want to create a link for people to respond directly to you. And we'll also add that there as well. Do you want me to respond to it?

 

Peter Hayward: I have noticed that the intergenerational has never gone away, but I certainly, through the COVID times, I've detected through my interviews that I see more and more practitioners, educators, responding to it as an opportunity, and seeing it as a way to get better quality outcomes, let them be educational outcomes, societal outcomes. So I think there's something. The zeitgeists says there is certainly something in this intergenerational, equity question. The revolutionary that I am given that I think futures by its nature is subversive. I think why I think it's essential to consider into generations is that it goes to the core of who has power and who doesn't because in Horizon One, we know who has power and we know who doesn't have power, but if you've actually posed as equity, then posing a group that are powerless in the present, but need to be empowered in the future, to me shows a path that as you said, gives us a chance to be better than we have been. It actually, it doesn't tell us how to do it, but it lays out clearly that it somehow has to be done. And that gap between what is, and what needs to be for people who lean into it. I think it's essential to make the future real is that this has to address equity because the future can't be better if we haven't dealt with equity.

Cat Tully: If I can have two more follow up questions, one just on this one. What topic either in your community or your country or, community writ large. Do you think that it would be most transformative to apply this lens to whether it's educational, whether it's like some constructing something down the end of your road, or, you know,

Peter Hayward: I think again in Australia, I mean, it just said Australia's political system is captured by, fossil fuel, but the reality of people living in communities is we had the worst bushfires we'd ever had pre COVID and now we've just come off the worst floods post COVID. To me using the notion of the future of place. In other words, where do you want to live? Where do you want your children to be living? Australia, like many places we are caught between these massive, massive cities that are getting bigger and bigger and bigger and more and more unlivable. And this romantic notion of the bush. But the bush is where bushfires happen and the bush is where floods happen. And so to me, the reality of climate and the absolute fairness and unfairness of the people who live in the regions are often there for economic reasons, not a lifestyle reasons, but yeah, to me, the inequality of climate, the inequality of climate impacts to me, it all comes to this rich consequence of who's causing it, who's benefiting from it, and who's losing from it? For me, the notion of where we live and how we want to live is such a rich place to have that dialogue where people talk across and people talk about the past that they want to live, where their, their parents lived and their parents' parents lived. And they'd like it if their kids had the chance. And then of course the kids hearing that, but also saying, but what do I want? That cuts through all the political conversation. Cause people know the climate is getting worse and worse and worse and it's the same in most countries of the world. So that to me is that it, to me is the richest, uh, darkest place to go, but to me it's also the most powerful place to go.

Cat Tully: I love it. Like foresighters as political, like the frontline of political activism in the 2020s. That sounds like a very appealing strapline for a profession. We should do that. Um, so final question from me is what, in my conversation with you stood out as being most different or when ping, you know, when something really kind of like resonates or captures,

Peter Hayward: Many things Cat, but the one that I probably did strike me, and again, it's great to hear it is you have a compassion for people in political roles that often they are pilloried and characterized as being fools or corrupt or whatever. And yet you said a number of times that these are people trying to do their best, but they're in an impossible situation. And it's impossible both in terms of the task they face, but it's also impossible in terms of the expectations of what people have of them. And the media turn into a blood sport. The political systems are adversarial, and yet we know politicians around the world. These problems require parties to come together. If we're going to tackle these long-term issues. And yet bipartisanship is really hard to find. And , you remind me of the fact that we need to cultivate bipartisanship in how we think our way through this, both at the community level, certainly, and also at the generational level, but also at the political level.

Cat Tully: Nice. That was, that was beautiful. Thank you. Thank you, Peter.

Peter Hayward: So Cat look, it's been an absolute blast. I finally got to talk to you after hearing about you and talking to some of your young voices that you sponsored, but on behalf of the future pod community, thanks for taking some time out. Thanks for your passion and commitment to future generations. And I wish you another successful 10 years, at least at the school.

Cat Tully: Very exciting. Well, thank you very much, Peter, and welcome anybody to reach out and get in touch if they want. Always lovely to chat. Take care. Thank you for the invitation.

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.