Yvette is the Managing Director of Kedge Futures. She comes from a finance and leadership background and discusses how foresight work must be used to promote more equitable futures for those who lack power and influence in the present. Leaders need both a Foresight mindset and the courage to deploy it.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
More about Yvette
LinkedIn: Yvette Montero Salvatico
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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 Yvette Salvatico. Yvette is the former Head of the Future Workforce Insights division at the Walt Disney company. There she led the efforts to establish an internal area of Strategic Foresight expertise, dedicated to identifying future workforce trends and assessing their potential impact on human capital strategy.
She trained in Finance and also holds an MBA. In 2011 she joined Frank Spencer as a principal at Kedge Futures where she's now the Managing Director. She's driven by the desire to help organizations and individuals discover their innate ability to create the future. Yvette understands that while leaders continually tout their need for futures thinking on teams, they fail to structure their business processes in a way in which long term thinking is neither valued nor rewarded. This fundamental disconnect is what causes firms to miss opportunities and ultimately fail and it is this disconnect that she helps them address. Welcome to Futurepod Yvette.
Yvette Salvatico: Thank you so much, Peter. It's a pleasure to be here.
Peter Hayward: First question Yvette is the story question. So what is the Yvette Salvatico story? How did you end up being a member of the futures and foresight community?
Yvette Salvatico: That's a great question. And I love it when futurists share their origin story. You could tell it a number of ways. As I think back to my interests, even as a child, I think I was a budding futurist, even though obviously I didn't know that term. My favorite part of any project was the research. I really didn't care for the actual outcomes. The papers. But if I could gather research for the entire time and until my teacher would say pencils down, I would continue to do that. But my first true entry into the field was at the Walt Disney company. I was at Disney for about 13 years. The majority of that was in Finance and in Strategy. At one point had supported the HR team from a finance perspective. Doing their budgets and all of those things from a Corporate Finance perspective. Because at Disney the role I played was more of an Operational Finance professional, which meant I was really a Consultant, an Internal Consultant to the Business operator.
So I have had offices behind the stage at Epcot and at downtown Disney above the Christmas store. And so I've had all those opportunities. And at one point I did support the HR function from a finance perspective and moved on after that. But the Disney Chief HR officer Jane Parker, who I believe is still the CHRO was a true visionary and she knew that although Disney was incredibly progressive in a lot of the work that it did, it knew a lot more about the past and the present of its workforce and very little to nothing about its future. So while she didn't know specifically about Foresight or Future's Thinking, she knew that there was a gap. And so she set aside resources to put this new team together and they asked me to come and join it. Now, what I usually don't tell folks is the part of the story where I said no. I said no because, and this might tell you a little bit about my personality, and how I sort of perceived myself in the foresight field as well. I said no because I was a Finance Professional. I had a Finance degree and an MBA .And I have a lot of respect for the HR field and while I also respected the leadership at Disney for wanting to choose me for this role I really felt like someone in that role should have an HR pedigree.
And so six months passed and I started to really regret the decision of not even having explored the opportunity further. And when I did I found that specifically what they were looking for was somebody outside the HR field, which again, is very interesting for Jane who, again, didn't have any formal learnings around Foresight, but just intuitively knew that this outside-in approach was critically important. And so they said no we really want someone outside of HR. We know that you're strategically minded. We want you to take this and run with it. So what a unique opportunity and knowing now what I know now, an incredibly unique opportunity to be given budget and headcount and said go, go after it. And as you know, typical didn't know I literally did not know that there was a Foresight field when I took this role. And so many folks have come to us in similar positions. Saying I'm interested in this and I've been tapped for this role, but I literally just discovered this field existed and now it's on my business card. And I'm always fascinated by that but it also happened to me. And so my first week of the job I went to the World Future Society conference, because my boss had already bought tickets. And so she was happy to transfer them to me. And that was my introduction to the field. And I'm going to be a hundred percent honest that I thought for a moment while I was at this conference, I have made a horrible mistake. My parents are gonna be so demoralized. I'm first generation American. They have paid for me to go to school. I have gotten my MBA and now I'm doing this! And to be honest that's your perspective when you first walk into that conference and I miss it so much.
I miss those opportunities at the World Future Society so much. But that was only for a moment. I then met some other Corporate Foresight practitioners from IBM and other organizations and then learned that there were even other people within Disney that were doing this work that I had no idea existed which sort of the way it goes in corporate world. So my start was in that capacity, really thinking about the future of work, the future of talent. And again, looking back on it, so funny to think about my maturity level from a foresight perspective even the description that you read. Looking at trends even then though I knew that the focus needed to be capacity building. So at least I knew that. I was doing that work for a little while and had done a fair amount of work with different consultants in the field and just felt like I needed even more support, went to my second World Future Society conference. And this one was in Vancouver and that's where I met Frank Spencer. So we shared an airport van the rest, as they say, is history or in this case the future. So my start was really in a corporate foresight perspective, having grown up in that organization as a finance and strategy professional. So not completely unique but still I think pretty interesting way to get into the field.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. There's an ironic story and question there Yvette, which is, and I've seen this in organizations where organizations understand the future of talent. The future of their workforce is central to what they can deliver in the future. So at one level they completely understand that. But then there is the, what I think is the paradox and the dilemma, which is a person like you doesn't know. A person like you, if they could answer what their future could be, what their future capacity might be it's probably not going to be that. And so how do you kind of quickly encapsulate that kind of dilemma that you yourself stumbled into a future? And most people do whatever it's futures or anything else. Careers seem to find people. And yet at the same time, corporate organizations seem to still believe they have to forecast with certainty or a degree of certainty, how these emergent futures are gonna land for them.
Yvette Salvatico: It is. Our work is just a never ending source of dichotomy and irony in a lot of ways. Why do organizations often say in one regard that talent is the most critical aspect of their work, and then it's the last thing they really wanna explore the future of? If we enter into an organization, not through the HR function, which luckily we often do. We love going in through the HR function, but often that's not the case. It's through strategy or innovation and we're doing work with them. We offer to explore the future of talent or some aspect of that. They're like yeah, no, we want the future of the consumer. We want the future. It's very focused on that side of it. And of course it goes deeper than foresight. It has to do in part with a lack of respect for the field of human resources and a lack of understanding of the importance of the talent and the fact that talent at its very heart is the most qualitative probably aspect of running a business. And because of that, it's the hardest to codify or to put into a spreadsheet. As a finance professional I think the reason why I'm really successful in foresight is because as a finance professional my goal was always to demystify the financial process to really help people understand what this was all about. And never just to use those ideas as a way to gate keep or make myself feel important.
And I think you still see some of that in the foresight field of like, I'm gonna be the expert on the stage. And I have all the knowledge and that's just not effective. And so even when I was doing the only planning that I knew how to do, which was in a spreadsheet. I knew it was wrong. Like I knew , everybody knows the numbers are wrong as soon as you sent them, but there's this thought that it's the best that we can do. And there is such a distaste for any uncertainty. And again, of course it's a false sense of security. From where we recruit or before then, how we educate professionals to how we recruit them into these organizations, to how we reward and recognize them any qualitative aspect gets removed from the equation as much as possible. So it is a very frustrating component of the work that we do within, especially corporate organizations, but I am seeing more and more the embrace of more qualitative measures. Which certainly helps. But I often say too, Peter, if I look back at a Kodak or these classic examples of organizations that have failed to see the future that was right in front of them that often they helped create. I often say that I don't necessarily think that Kodak needed to have foresight at a strategic level or at an organizational level to have a different outcome if they had implemented a career foresight program. If they had instilled at the leadership level, even selfishly, individually, how people mapped their own careers, utilizing foresight, which is part of what you're getting at. They would've had a different outcome because at the end of the day, those individual leaders and managers and engineers would have been equipped to see these potential futures and would've acted in their own best interest if nothing else, which would've led, I think to different outcomes. It's one of the reasons why our practice at The Futures School and at Kedge really focusses on the individual in many ways, because that's who you're trying to change at the end of the day. But, um yeah it's fascinating. Like I said, our world is a set of ironies all the time.
Peter Hayward: Let's go to the second question because I do want to go deeper into this notion of how really organizations imagine control, shape the future, but it comes back centrally to really who they are as people and what motivates them. So it's a long way to ask the second question, but this is a question where I ask the guest to talk about a framework or an approach or a philosophy or a method that's central to who they are and explain that to the listeners. So what do you want to explain to the listeners Yvette?
Yvette Salvatico: There's so much, but I think building off of where our conversation has gone so far, it really does have to do with power and empowerment specifically. I think if I had to distill my foresight philosophy to just a short conversation, it would be around helping people understand that they have the capacity to create the future. And so of course most of the listeners, if not all, will be familiar to this idea of the push and pull of the future. I love this framework because I can share it at a conference with individuals that may not even have professional degrees. I could share it with students with young people. And it's so simple to understand yet, so powerful to know that the future exists across a spectrum that on the push end of the future are all of these things that are changing around us. The trends, the emerging issues, technology, pandemics, demographic changes. And it's gonna push us to the future, whether we like it or not often kicking and screaming. And that's what we spend a ton of time on. That's what we spend a lot of our attention on. I often start my conversations with groups by asking them what obstacles are they facing? What are their big issues right now? What's on their to-do list? And of course when you ask a group that it's immediate uptake and energy. They can tell you, they wanna tell you they're 99 problems, right! They all think they're unique, but I can rattle them off before they can because it's all the same. It's time. It's money, it's resources. It's my boss, it's leadership. It's all of those things. But then you follow up and you ask. Let's say I had a magic wand that I borrowed from my time at Disney and I was able to wave that wand and I was able to remove all those obstacles and you could direct what is done. What would you do? And most doing, having done this for a decade now across the globe, most don't have an answer to that.
Even at the highest levels. Particularly at the highest levels, they are clueless with that question which is fascinating because how do you even know that you're tackling the right things? If you don't know where you would head, if you didn't have them, right? We're so organized and so structured to put out fires and to deal with the tyranny of the urgent. And we get an adrenaline rush. I joke that, look, I too use to-do list. And if I complete something. That wasn't already on my to-do list. I add it to my to-do list so I could cross it off . I mean, it's a sickness. It really is, but we were we're engineered this way. Okay. And it's quite the battle with Frank Spencer who doesn't make a to-do list. Like doesn't has no fondness for to-do list, but I do so. We're so ingrained on thinking about the push of the future that we ignore the pull end of the future. And so we love telling folks about the name of the parent company Kedge and how that's a smaller anchor on a sailing vessel. When there's no wind at sea, they would deploy the Kedge usually with the newer sailors and deploy that long roped anchor, and then pull everyone on the remaining on the vessel would pull themselves to that location The Kedge or the pull of the futures are aspirations.
The thing we would do if we were able to remove all the obstacles and everybody's like, okay, I get it. I can pull myself to my aspirations. Great. Love it. But it's more than that. It's more than just navigating the push of the future to get to our aspirations, to pull ourselves our communities and our organizations to our desired futures. It's about pulling that future to today. And again, I think one of the reasons I love working with all levels of Foresight practitioners, and with The Futures School, we get to train novices who this is their first entry into foresight, as well as seasoned practitioners. And I love that about this field that even seasoned practitioners are always looking to learn and we're learning from them. But one of the things I love because of that is I get to see it again from the newness. We forget. We forget after a decade or two decades or however long we're doing this because his work is hard. We forget those ah ha moments that are so simple to us now, but are absolutely earth shattering. This idea that we're all creating the future every day with the actions we take. And that foresight allows us to do that more participatory, more transparently, and with our aspirations in mind. That's it. That's the thing. And it's leveraging the push and the pull, and it's sad to me how many people have no realization that they are in the driver's seat. Especially the people that we work with that are in for most part the privileged class.
Of course there are many, many people far too many in the world that do not have the privilege to be able to think or create their future and that needs to change. But that's so simple this idea that, yeah, my decisions are setting forth the future. Organizations are built with this idea that the future is something that's in the future, something yet to come, that we can predict or that we can forecast. And it's this idea that the emergent property and the property of agency is completely foreign from the conversation. It floors me. We talk to heads of research and development for huge organizations that are setting the pace and the course for all of mankind in many ways and they fail to realize that it's not something that's just unfolding that we're hoping to look into a crystal ball to figure out it's something we're all creating right now in real time. And I know it's obvious to us, but I just think that we forget that it's not obvious to others.
Peter Hayward: The thing for me Yvette is that the phrase, we create the future to me, we inadvertently create the future or we consciously create the future. We actually have no choice in that matter. Our actions, the quality of our actions will create our future. I think the question which I think we could ask more clearly is are your actions creating the future that you wish? Rather than your actions creating a future, that you do not wish for?
Yvette Salvatico: Exactly. We always tell folks that the future at the end of the day is really not about the future, because how you think about the future typically unconsciously directs the actions you take in the present. And that's another moment where people are, if they're really listening, they're absolutely changed at that moment because they haven't really thought about it that way. I love the work that we do because it can be very difficult, like reading all the time what's happening in the world and not being able to shut that off, being told that folks aren't gonna pursue foresight or seeing organizations that are making short term decisions and not moving in the right direction. That can be really frustrating for our field and for the professionals in it. And I think it's one of the reasons why I love being able to train as part of what we do because you get to revisit. It's like Christmas morning when people first discover this field. It is Christmas morning. It is. And then you get to be the one that helps them open their gifts on Christmas morning. There is no cooler job than that.
Peter Hayward: It seems like a perfect job for someone coming from the Enchanted castle of Disney. It's almost like a Tinkerbell moment. Isn't it? I think another thing too, which again, I'd like you just to reflect on is again, this notion of push and pull. Another powerful notion is head and heart. Because often corporate organizations want to keep the future in the head space. And so much of it is heart. So much of it is gut. And is that again one of those areas that organizations have to lean into more? To really open the potential of people up because everybody has fear and hope and everyone has joy and anxiety and that's actually fuel for the future.
Yvette Salvatico: It it's so true. I think again our organizations are built on mechanical approaches and so we as much as possible have tried to remove the human ironically again, out of the equation. And so even in organization as storied, to use a little bit of a pun there, as Disney, it was, and again, I loved my time at Disney. I loved the folks that I worked with, but it was a corporate organization with all of the trappings of a corporate organization. And at the end of the day if you didn't have the return on investment, or if you didn't have the net present value, or especially having worked in finance. One of the reasons I stepped out of that role was because I saw the decisions more and more being made outside of the guests and outside of the cast, who is what we called our employees, and outside of the operation. And that's that wasn't gonna work for me. I couldn't be part of that. And I think that's one of the reasons why the HR role really tempted me was because of that.
For sure that we tell people all the time that future's not about technology. Because that's another I think mistake. This whole idea that the tangible aspect of technology makes people believe that's what the future's gonna be all about. It's gonna have technology obviously, but the future's about people. And so one of the things that I've really loved about our practice at The Futures School and at Kedge is that you talked about leaning in we've leaned in more to the human and to the aspect of love period. We had an entire podcast where we talked about running, fueling the world with love. And as a reformed Finance Professional, MBA person I have to tell you that there are times working with Frank I'm like I'm not a hundred percent comfortable with this. Because when I ask myself why that is it's not because I don't believe it it's because I'm afraid of how it's gonna be perceived. And when a part of your business is supporting corporate entities that perception is important but I've learned and I've grown. And I think that without the human element this work is not really very useful because at the end of the day, you have to appeal to people's emotions. As you said to their fear, to their hope, to their optimism. And it's the only way that people will have the wherewithal to commit to this when all of our systems work against it.
So we're in this, in between state. Where we have these tools and these methods. And there's a lot of us that are saying, this is the way forward. And there's many more people saying what we've done so far, isn't working, but our systems and our processes are still built on old methods. And it's a hard ship to turnaround. It really is. So you have to appeal to people at a higher level than just dollars and cents than just numbers. It has to appeal to, as you said, their heart and to their moral compass. And it has to be higher order reason for why we're doing this. And again do I write that in the proposal? Probably not. But we've gotten much better at when we do our intake conversations with potential clients. They may not know this, but the interview is two sided. So we know who will be effective with our methods and with our approach and who we will be happy and fulfilled with supporting. And so that's why we say when we do work even with large organizations we're doing the work with the individual. Or the individuals that we are hired by as opposed to the logo or the large organization we hope to impact even more people within the organization, as well as the consumers that they serve. But our interactions are with those individuals and we have to have a connection with them for it to be successful. And usually those connections are lifelong with the folks that we've worked because you can't help but be changed. If you really do this work well, it changes you at the end of the day.
Peter Hayward: It should. Thanks Yvette.
Yvette Salvatico: Absolutely.
Peter Hayward: Third question is the one where I ask Yvette, around you there's a lot going on. There's a lot of potential futures emerging, but the particular futures that Yvette is paying careful attention to as they happen. So what are the futures as they emerge around you that get your attention? That either get you excited, possibly even get you anxious, but the ones that you really are seriously studying, observing, and learning from?
Yvette Salvatico: It's hard not to have the headlines from the last few days, taint this answer. And that's like an evergreen response for the last four years because no matter when you're listening to this or when this was recorded, you know, that there was some kind of shit show happening just 24 hours probably before I'm uttering this sentence. Especially if you know that I'm in the US
Peter Hayward: So we'll give this a time stamp and a date stamp because podcast of course can be downloaded. But a couple of days ago the Supreme Court of the United States handed down the decision to overturn the Roe versus Wade legal precedent that had been there for over almost 50 years now.
Yvette Salvatico: So I am inherently an optimist. I don't think I could partner with Frank Spencer if I was not. But like everyone else I'm impacted by things that are happening around me. And so using that as a springboard for this answer the futures I'm following are the futures around women and those in marginalized communities. As a first generation American, my parents fled Fidel Castro. I was gonna stop and say, did my mom know she was fleeing Fidel Castro? Yes, she was 15. My mother was 15 when she and my uncle who was eight at the time were put on a plane and sent to America by my grandparents. No family here in the US. It was part of the Peter Pan flights, which were sponsored by the Archdiocese of Miami. And the call to action was this fear that Fidel was rounding up the children to put them in military camps. And so my grandparents didn't have proper documentation, but since the children were allowed to leave, they packed them up and they sent them.
And so that I think when people learn that about my past and about my family's past, it puts a lot of things into perspective. Because when you are a child of immigrants, especially immigrants that are fleeing this type of situation which again we have many of and will have many more unfortunately in the future then it frames everything. It frames everything. Even though I obviously I wasn't alive at the time, the story is told and it influences their behavior and ultimately your perspective. And so I think when I look at Futures now I think about those immigrants. I think about people of color. I think of women. As I said and how I believe wholeheartedly that we're reaching a tipping point and that these individuals who have traditionally not had a voice or not had agency to create the future. We'll be empowered to do so. And it's the thing that I think really continues to drive me and fuel my work.
I think from the outside people sometimes look at our firm because of my corporate foresight background and because of the work we continue to do with Disney and other large organizations that we partner with organizations, which we do. We also partner with incredible institutions. We just finished a piece of work with Amtrak, which is our large passenger rail here in the US. So we do a diverse set of work but our favorite work is with individuals. And so when I think about do I wanna keep doing this work because it is so challenging, the futures I follow in the futures that continue to fuel me are those of my mom when she was 15 years old and a caretaker of my eight year old uncle at the time being brought to this country with literally nothing. The funny thing is my grandmother packed for my mom a small suitcase. They weren't allowed to bring very much. And in the suitcase, there were two main things. One was the album of her photos. So she had just turned 15. And so they had a photographer and her fifteens, her pictures from her Quinceanera were there, which is, the sweet 16 but of Hispanic communities. And so that we have those photos, which is just incredible gift. And then my mother had taken dance classes and with castanets. And so I think my grandmother was thinking, this is how she's gonna make money here in the US. That she needs a trade. And so I can't imagine my mother landing here in the US going, this is gonna be really useful for me here in the US.
So I think about those and I think for me it helps me remain optimistic. It can be very, very challenging to do this work especially when you see the state of our world. But a lot of that is how the media paints the pictures, but a lot of it is true that we have obviously a lot of issues to work through. But for me, it's a very personal thing to think about. Those individuals that don't have a voice. And so when I, when we train individuals, we tell them, whether they're in an organization or within our public facing programs, we say to them now you have a huge responsibility. Because you have the ability and the capability to practice this field you're doing it for yourself and for all the others that cannot, that do not have a voice. And so how are you gonna practice this? How are you going to move the world forward in a more equitable fashion? We still have a lot to work to do to that. But we've had the opportunity to work with all the large consultancies, the big four, whatever they're called now. And again, someone in the organization wants to sponsor this work. They probably believe in it. Do the individuals that come to the training really believe in it? It's questionable whether they all do. And so when we say things like this, like the goal should be to create more equitable futures there are sometimes people brave enough to say the quiet part loud and say, but is it? And so again, it's an opportunity. To be courageous and to say, where do our ethics lie and where do our morals lie as practitioners? Because it is to create more equitable futures and I don't care what your job is. I don't care what your brand is. I don't care what you sell. I don't care what you deal. Your goal should be to create more equitable futures period.
Peter Hayward: And we are seeing evidence obviously in America, but all around the world where futures in some ways are becoming less equitable. Or the people who hold power, probably tenuously, are preventing futures or saying these futures won't happen. It doesn't mean it has to lead to conflict, but it will lead to conflict unless we find reconciliation of people wanting more equity, wanting more access and people who have power holding onto the future that they prefer.
Yvette Salvatico: So much has to do at the end of the day with the myths and the metaphors that we hold. CLA was one of the first tools that Frank showed me and I was equal parts terrified and thrilled. I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. And I had seen a lot of things because Disney does not skimp on training. And I had an opportunity for 13 years to get the best development from a leader perspective. But when I saw that tool, I was like, this is something. And so I always think obviously about the stories and the myths and the metaphors and how you have to change mindsets and how people hear that term of equitable and fear that they're gonna lose something in the process. So much of this is driven by fear. So much of these decisions are driven by fear.
We did work locally a few years ago with some very well meaning economic developers. It was a diverse group of individuals, representative of all different segments of the community, whether it was the nonprofit, obviously the for-profit we had members of the public sector also participate in this. And I just won't ever forget that we gathered these groups, this group of leaders from across our community. And we were pitching to them different ideas that they could use to explore the future. And one of the things we talked about was digital literacy and access to wifi. Access to the web. Access to the internet. Access to digital knowledge and information and the critical aspect of it. And I'll never forget when one of the participants said, well, can't they go to the McDonald's isn't the wifi free there? This is before the pandemic, just before the pandemic. And yeah, it is tough. It's tough when you get to that, when you hear that. It's really hard that "the let them eat cake" is still a thing. It's still a thing. But again I think it's the myth and metaphors that are held around scarcity and around that fixed pie that drives so many of our systems and our structures and our thinking even for a lot of the poor and the marginalized community they've bought into that narrative too.
That's the saddest part about this is that. They have bought into the I can't just lift myself up by my bootstraps. I'm a failure and it's just not true. And it's complex and complicated but until we can dive deep and help people, even with this abortion issue, it's all about narrative. It wasn't but a few decades ago where the Christian Right really made that their calling card because they knew that creating a narrative around that was going to really coalesce their following. And that's essentially what they've done.
Peter Hayward: They used the future. They created the pull. Yeah. And they utilized the push. Because this has been a long fight. And they've used foresight. They used foresight to get the future they wanted. So where would you be seeing what gives you the hope that the people on the receiving end of this now can themselves generate their own movement and commitment towards creating a more equitable future?
Yvette Salvatico: It's a good question. I think because I've seen the change in a micro level for so many years, I know the power of these tools and I am thrilled to see how many more people are joining the Foresight and Futures fields and are learning about it. And with each of those new leaders and new voices, I think about it expanding exponentially, because they can then tell multiple people and multiple people. And so I'm excited and optimistic about how the field is growing and how we are allowing more and more individuals. I remember when Frank and I had just started partnering and a very established individual in the field was referring to something that we had written or something we had done. And they said futurist Frank Spencer and Yvette Salvatico. So I didn't get the futurist in front of my name which is really funny. Obviously I need to go to therapy because I'm still thinking about it. Like a decade later. I might need to let that go. I bring that up just because I'm seeing less of that. And look I understand the importance of credentialing in the field. We also stood up a Professional Certification. We don't believe everybody should have it but it was more about building confidence with outsiders to the field. And of course Frank has a Master's Degree in Strategic Foresight and I'd like to say that I have a Master's Degree in Frank Spencer.
Of course, as I said before, I didn't want to take the HR job because I didn't feel like I had the credential. So I respect that but at the same time we have to acknowledge that for us to have a world to practice foresight in, in 10 years or 15 years, we have to get this thinking and these mindsets into everyone, into everyone. So that means that not everyone needs a Master's degree. That means that not everyone needs the pedigree or that we have to police who uses the title. But that we try to embed this. We talk about it as an operating system. It should be in the background of everything that we do.
How do we do that? It's by getting more and more people invested and aware and trained in this field into every other practice. Strategists innovators, but yes, HR professionals, dentists, doctors. Everybody politicians, God forbid we should get them to be foresight practitioners or else. There really won't be a world where we can practice foresight as quote unquote futurists.
So,
Peter Hayward: yeah. Thanks Yvette
Fourth question. The communication question. And the one that probably most professional futurists listen to other people's answers to try and get good ideas to steal . So the question Yvette is how do you explain to people what Yvette does when they don't necessarily understand what it is that Yvette does?
Yvette Salvatico: I find this interesting because it is the challenge of the foresight professional. And it is indicative of where we are as a world that it's that hard to explain to someone what a futurist does that shows you how foreign it is to most people to think about the future. So I always try to equate it back to the present. I tell folks that I help equip people and organizations with the capability, the innate capability, I feel that they already have. I help unlock it. To take stock of what's changing around them and leverage that information to make better decisions in the present. And that at the end of the day is what we shall be striving to do. We can do it a number of different ways and there's cool ways to do it. And there's amazing things that happen to the individual. But they'll get to that realization in time. And I think if you're trying to meet people where they are which we talk about a lot. You need to address what issues they are facing, which is they are overwhelmed by. All of the change that's happening around them. And as individuals and as humans, we don't necessarily like change. We like it for others, but not for ourselves. And so how do you stop being fearful of the growing volatility and complexity and instead leverage it for professional and societal advantage. And there's a way to do that. There's a way to do that by updating our own operating systems and those of our organizations and institutions.
Peter Hayward: You say that leaders particularly have a bit of a blind spot about how they talk about wanting this capacity but actually set their organizations up to not recognize it and reward it. Is that because they don't understand foresight or that they do understand it and they actually actively don't want it?
Yvette Salvatico: I want to say that it's because they don't understand it. I think that I also think that there's probably an overall lack of courage. Generally speaking if I'm going to paint with a broad stroke here it takes a lot of courage to practice foresight, especially in current organizations, because you are going against the grain. You have to be the person that says no, we're not going to report out on these results quarterly. We're not going to do it because it's not the right thing. And the reason we've done it is because my predecessor did it and his predecessor did it. And her predecessor did it. And at the end of the day, it's a small role will continue to function without me issuing this quarterly report.
I remember when I took on a new role at Disney in Finance. And it was at Theme Parks and the person that had that role before me had worked a gazillion hours. Like I was hesitant to take the job. I had just had my second child. So I was coming off of maternity leave. And before I came back from maternity leave, they called me and said, we like you for this role. It's a promotion. You'd come back from maternity leave into this role. And I knew who had the role and I said no way. I'm not gonna work all those crazy hours. And my boss at the time, Stephanie Janik, who's since retired. She would've been my boss in this role. She's like, no, no, no, no, no.
I know you're gonna make it your own. And she does a lot of things she probably doesn't need to do. So I took her word for it and I went in and one of the things that first off was they were going from register to register from point of sale to point of sale. If you've never been to the Walt Disney World there are hundreds of retail locations and each retail location could have a multitude of point of sales. They were going and reconciling to the penny, this one gift card issue. And this poor gentleman who worked for me, I was coming in as leader and he's like coming to me, so we do this thing where we go and we reconcile and I was like we're not doing that anymore. And he was what do you mean? I'm it's, it's not relevant. It's a rounding error. What are we doing? And so I think that's the case in a lot of organizations. We just keep doing the thing because someone told us to do it. And because they are afraid of not doing it or because they're not thinking critically about why not to do it. Or they're not evaluating the risk and reward. When people say to us I don't have responsibility for strategy or my boss doesn't believe in foresight. Who cares. Put your oxygen mask on first. Do you have things that you're responsible for? I sure hope so. They're paying you enough. So the things you're responsible for fuel that with foresight. Start with your own stuff. Stop making excuses. I think for a lot of leaders and organizations, it's really easy to say I don't have permission to do this. You're never gonna have permission. An organization as a whole is never gonna give permission to do this work because it's the antithesis of what an organization is built for, which is to never change. So if you're waiting for someone to give you permission and to put it with a big bow, you might as well skip out and not do this because you're never gonna get it. You're gonna have to do it and you're gonna have to show results and you're gonna have to impact people and then move on from there.
Peter Hayward: Thanks Yvette.
We're at the last question. So we've got a couple of minutes to go. So what do you want to end your podcast interview with?
Yvette Salvatico: Well, I would love to end it with a call to action. Our mission at The Futures School is to democratize the field of Foresight and a lot of hurdles that we've talked about today in terms of resources, organizational support, training that prevents a lot of people from practicing strategic foresight. We want to remove as many of those hurdles as we can. And we've done that through The Year of Free. So if you know someone who would make a great Futurist or could use training and tools, nominate them to receive free tuition. If you yourself feel like you could make a good Futurist and you feel like you could benefit from training, you can get someone to nominate you, for The Year of Free. But we also have free tools and templates. Our Natural Foresight® Framework is now Open Source. And we have so many different ways for people to get inspired and get resources this year completely for free. Please let your networks know because it's a huge opportunity for us as practitioners in this field to continue to open the field to others.
Peter Hayward: Fantastic. Yvette, it's been a honor and privilege to finally have a chance to have a chat. So thank you very, very much for taking some time out to share it with the Futurepod community.
Yvette Salvatico: Thank you so much, Peter. It's been my honor and I've been looking forward to it with excitement and a little bit of trepidation but I felt like it went pretty well. So I'm really excited. And for those of you that don't know me and haven't connected with me please feel free to reach out. I'd love to meet more and more of you and it was a great honor Peter. Thank you so much.
Peter Hayward: Thanks Yvette.
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 is Peter Hayward saying goodbye for now.