Mina works as a futurist for a Fortune 500 corporation in Central Florida, USA. She previously worked at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard’s T.H. Chan Public School of Health on a team that produced executive education programs in sustainability innovation forsenior leadership. Mina holds a master’s degree in Strategic Foresight from the University of Houston.
She believes that the state of flow is accessible by everyone and that a fundamental requirement of entering the state of flow is foresight or vision. In order to move towards that vision one has to have a sense of direction, knowledge of the system you are in and a navigation plan. Her life’s work is to equip and motivate others to search, locate and become what is possible.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
Reference
Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope
Transcript
Peter Hayward: How do you move and sustain people through change? Can you scaffold processes so that change agents don't get burned out? What stops people changing from behaviors that are producing sub optimal outcomes to changing them for actions that create better futures?
Mina McBride: I like to talk to people about how important the past is, even when you're talking about change. So if we take that out of the realm of looking at methodology for a moment and just think about change itself. When we are talking about culture. Cultures have established themselves, the mores have established themselves, what people feel is right or wrong is established. So we walk into a being. Meaning we walk into something that is. And it's wrong, I think, to ignore that what is an exchange for what could be, because the two coexist together and unless we get them coexisting together, generally the is wins out.
Peter Hayward: That is my guest today. Mina McBride. She comes to us via the Center for Health and Global Environment at Harvard and the Houston Foresight program. Hers is an approach to foresight and supporting change that is scaffolded by System knowledge, Lifestyle Medicine and recognizing that sometimes we have imperfect knowledge of what is the optimal thing to do and so we just need to do our best.
Welcome to future pod Mina.
Mina McBride: Thank you so much, Peter. Happy to be here.
Peter Hayward: Mina the first question is the story question. So what is the Mina McBride story? How did you end up as a member of the Futures and Foresight community?
Mina McBride: Ah I think I would say pretty much like you say in your intro on your website that it found you. I was working with a group at the TH Chan School of Public Health and part of what we were doing there had to do with how do you move innovation through large organizations? And specifically we were looking at sustainability initiatives. So you have this great sustainability initiative, but how do you get it through? And these are early days in sustainability. You had change agents who were getting burnout because they tended to be the one in their organization who was trying to move it through. And so the whole idea of moving innovation through made me think about "well what's happening in the external world?"
And most people came prepared with a very specific plan. So we would deal with corporations, we'd deal with municipalities, universities. And I just felt like on the external world there was so much going on that might impact these organizations. And so I just started asking " who in your organization is tasked with looking outward?" And I was surprised that pretty much the answer was no-one. I thought there was a Department. This is how naive I was. I thought there was a department that did such things and I was surprised to find out there's not one person doing this in most organizations and therefore I became really interested. I had been exposed early on to the Futurist magazine. Just because I like reading things and I remember reading that magazine. So I thought well those people seem like the people who would know something. So just really went down a trail and researched as we futurists do and tried to figure out and connect the dots to how someone might do this for an organization. And from there found the University of Houston and the rest is history.
Peter Hayward: Right. So who were the people that were most influential in that kind of exploratory journey for you?
Mina McBride: I would have to say like the person who probably gets the most credit for being patient was Dr. Andy Hines . So I was coming, as you can tell, from the story of very academic background and everything was evidence based. That was drilled in your head. At the time to I was trying to decide do I want to explore things in a corporate world or would I rather do something in a field called lifestyle medicine, which I find to be really connected because they're both about trying to get to the root cause of something and improving the outcome where you know that an outcome could be improved.
And so coming from that evidence based world, but also full of research papers and not doing very much, but doing a lot of reading. One of the things that I wanted to do was make sure that I had some practical application. So I did not want to spend the years in Grad School learning about Foresight but not actually applying it anywhere. So I was armed with what I was looking for in the program and peppering with all kinds of questions and how much will I get to apply? And do I have to take these certain courses? And can we be flexible and give me more things where I'm actually working with the material and working with organizations to try to see if some of these ideas would work.
And so, like I said, he was extremely patient with all of my questions and just assured me if I went with that program, it was a really good mix of theory and application which I found to be true. And it's not necessarily what's right for everyone, but it was definitely what was right for me at the time and probably still remains correct for me because even at the School of Public Health what we were doing was this idea of taking all of the research, taking all of the theory, that we had learned about change and organizations and innovation but they were directly connecting that to how can that be applied now in a real world setting? How can we help you as a change agent, not burn out? So it's always for me that nice connection between the knowledge and the theory, and like having that work in the real world.
Peter Hayward: I'm always interested in I was a student of the course myself, and then I became a teacher of a course like Andy and Peter. And I'm always interested in people who come from you are a coming from a quite structured academic approach to the work. And I've always said well part of futures is both knowledge base, methodology tools and philosophies. But the other thing that I, that happened to me and I also saw in the classroom was it was very much around personal development. It was not a body of knowledge that someone necessarily applied to who they were. It was something that in the process of acquiring it it actually changed the actual container. And I just wonder about your experience in that process.
Mina McBride: It's so amazing that you would bring that up, like the true professor that you are. Because one of the things that I was thinking about when I joined the program. So these are very early days and futurist physicians were fairly rare. You didn't go to LinkedIn and look up someone who was doing Foresight or anything like that. It just wasn't out there. And so one of the things that I thought was, if nothing else, I should exit this program a different person. So I should take with me a set of thinking skills that I didn't have going in. And therefore the way that I looked at the world would fundamentally change. And so that would be something that I could take with me regardless if I ever actually wound up working as a Futurist. I didn't know if I would, but I knew absolutely that I would leave with a way of processing information and seeing the world that was different than the way that I went in. And that was something I felt no one could take away. You'd always have that.
Peter Hayward: So when you talk about change and equipping others to better move towards what they wish for themselves, what's ahead of them, what's outside of them. To what extent do you think people, either working in change or people working as part of change. They have to go through some sort of fundamental change process themselves who they are in order to really be successful. Does it have to change the person in order to be successful and sustainable?
Mina McBride: I think that would go back to what I liked about and the reason I was interested in Lifestyle Medicine specifically. So the idea for me fundamentally behind Lifestyle Medicine is there are a set of individuals that for whatever reason are experiencing optimal health in an area. Therefore we know it's possible. And the trick is always if we know that this optimal state of health is possible, is it also possible then to look at them and say, "What are they doing?" Is what they're doing somehow different than the general population? Is there some kind of similarity perhaps in their genetic makeup? But can we determine what the difference might be between their optimal condition and individuals who are not an optimal condition? And then take those lessons and say, we will take that just like a set, list them and say, if you try some of these chances are even if you don't experience optimal health, that you'll be able to be much further along the trail than you would've been without the set of tools or thinking, or, ways of behaving than you were before.
So I think that I'll answer it also another way. Because you asked specifically about an individual, does the individual need to change in order to help shepherd others through change? I will say, the way to answer this question is really like, asking a person who can see something about the color red. I've been forced to change in my life so often that I'm quite comfortable understanding and being able to empathize with someone who's going through a change process. And so I do find it extremely helpful. I don't know if you can do it without it, because I haven't had to. So of course my bias is absolutely. You should go through change yourself. But I do think that it gives you insights that are and valuable when you're helping someone else. Yeah.
Peter Hayward: So Mina you've got the Masters of Foresight. You have returned to Harvard and there's a bit more to the story. How you are now working for one of the Fortune Five hundreds as a Foresight Manager. So I'm interested as to that part of the story
Mina McBride: Actually that goes back to the network. And one of the things that I really appreciate about the Foresight community is it's a fairly tight knit community if one chooses to belong to it and be engaged with it. And that actually the current position that I hold really came through those connections at the company. Someone else from the University of Houston was working there. They had received something that's called a Professional Internship. So Professional Internships are, as you know, quite valuable when you're in the Foresight field. And remember one of my driving forces was to be able to always apply what I learned. And so as this individual was leaving a spot sort of opened up and I received a call saying, "Hey would you like to throw your hat in the ring in order to see if you could get it?" And so at the time I'm living in North Carolina, the positions in Florida. And I don't think a second, I just think, oh, I'm not gonna get it anyway. There are so many people would apply for this. So I really did not give it a second thought. I did not think about what this might mean for my life. I did not think about the fact that you'd actually have to be working physically there in Florida. I just went for it and just figured there's a 1% chance. So of course I'll throw it in. However three days later I did have the position so then I had to figure out, all the tactical things, but I think that being open to opportunity, being appreciative of the network that you have and always turning around to see what you can do to help someone else, whether that's someone who's within the field or outside. I think one of the things I talk about is like connecting people. And so that's something that is really big for me is connecting people either to opportunity or connecting people to each other.
Peter Hayward: Okay Mina so let's move to the second question. The one where I encourage the guest to talk to the listeners about a framework, a philosophy an approach that is central to how Mina McBride does her work. So what do you wanna talk to the listeners about?
Mina McBride: As of late I have really been focusing in on, I call it a modification of the work done by Bill Sharpe and having to do with the Three Horizons. And what I like about that framework is when we're thinking about challenges or we're thinking about change, one of the things comes up it's we try, I feel, especially with Foresight, because we're normally asking people to look at a long range of time. 10 years plus. And then what I felt was going on is that people were trying to time it. If I could just look at the scenario or look at the information that they're bringing me and if I could time it to just the right moment. I won't utilize resources that I don't necessarily need to use, but I won't lose any opportunity. And I felt so much time was being taken up, trying to time the action that we were actually driving ourselves into inaction. Therefore we do nothing as we're waiting to do something. So what I like about the Three Horizons model and I've been using this in a way that might be a little different than how other people have been doing it. And I'll be the first to admit that this is somewhat of an experiment to see if it works. But so far it's been working very well is to disconnect the Foresight work at least from the client's viewpoint from time. So I do find that as a Futurist, when you're working with a group it's helpful for that group to know we're thinking 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, because they need to have some kind of parameters around what it is and how far they are to go. So I do feel for the working group purposes, it's really helpful to have a time however, from the client side, the client is not given, "this is the future of X years from now, this is 2040, 2050."
And the reason I do that is to release them from this desire to try to figure it all out. What I want people to focus on instead is the evolution of change. So what I do with all clients at the very beginning is talk to them about the Three Horizons. Get a real base level understanding, make sure that they have that ask them to explain it back to me. Can they give me an example of how Three Horizons has either worked in their life or worked in some kind of system that they're familiar with? If they can do that, then I'm quite comfortable with releasing them from time. And so when we take on a project the way that we describe the project is, okay for this project we're looking at H2, we're looking at horizon two, or the ideas that you get from this are going to be horizon three. And that gives them an idea of about how far out we're going. But it also says instead of paying attention to the time, let's talk about the change and what's occurring over that time.
And so then we just lay out like starting with our baseline, what's that evolution and what might that evolution look like? And hopefully my end goal by doing it that way, is that absent my presence they're able to recognize that idea that I just read, isn't H2, that conversation, I just heard that sounds kind of like H3. And so that they're able to begin to place it themselves. Understand how close or how far away that it is, but also have this way where action never seems far away. You can't say, well, I'm gonna act in H3 because there is no actual H3 there's no time bound. And so you can begin to pay attention to the change and think about how one might want to act and be proactive within that.
Peter Hayward: Yes. We only have, have a very, very moderated version of H1, which is where all our actions live. I think it's interesting that you talk about liberating, okay you didn't say this word but I'll say it. You liberate people from time, because of course the arrow of time, which we have normalized in certainly the West, in certainly corporations, but there's many ways to experience time that have nothing to do with the arrow. And I think what you're doing and this is for you to play back to me, but is that you are actually taking time through an experiential frame rather than necessarily a kind of conceptual frame. And so you're trying to place it in their bodies, in their histories, in their stories. And I think that's what you are doing with your modification of the Three Horizons.
Mina McBride: Absolutely. And one of the things that I've been doing more and more is, we normally start a project by looking at the past or having an understanding of the past and rarely does the client get that part of the process because they're subject matter experts and we don't normally go into the past with them. But as part of the training exercise, I like to talk to people about how important the past is, even when you're talking about change. So if we take that out of the realm of looking at methodology for a moment and just think about change itself. When we are talking about culture. Cultures have established themselves, the mores have established themselves, what people feel is right or wrong is established. So we walk into a being. Meaning we walk into something that is. And it's wrong, I think, to ignore that what is an exchange for what could be, because the two coexist together and unless we get them coexisting together, generally the is wins out.
And so we have to recognize that the being is there, the being of whatever that is, how the culture has established itself. It. We do things in a way to be successful. So we rarely will pick up habits or behaviors or thoughts because they didn't serve us. Generally they served us for some reason. Now they may not continue to serve us, but they have thus far been successful in helping us achieve some type of state that we find pleasurable. And therefore it's important to recognize that. To allow people to hold it to the degree that you can to allow them to carry some of it with them while you're simultaneously sort of integrating because to me I don't like to necessarily think of it as a dropping because there's a feeling of loss. It's just like grief and you don't wanna put someone in a grief state where they felt like they'd lost something. So the idea is can we scaffold, which is something coming back from that innovation work at Harvard. Are we able to provide a scaffold where they can go from where they are to where they may need to be, but feel that they're doing that in a way that's safe?
Peter Hayward: Hm. Yeah, Sohail Inayatullah with his Future's Triangle and we talk about the Weight of the Past and the weight is both burden and it is also responsibility and legacy to go forward. There can be benefit exploring the sense of loss in order to build the sense of importance of what we carry forward. In other words, not everything can go into the future. We have to choose. Choice can have pain associated with it, but in that pain is actually almost a galvanizing force to make us be clear. This is really important. This pain is not necessarily while I'm not enjoying it, it is necessary to get to the thing that we want to get to.
Mina McBride: Right. And it's that idea of when I say exchange, it's that idea? It's saying Yes, if we were to put this in a health context. Yes. I really enjoy eating that chocolate cake every night and I get to choose a different cake every day and I really love that. And the exchange is one prefers to have optimal health. For some reason they're getting a bad outcome. And therefore there's an exchange of what was giving me pleasure before for this new pleasure. And yes, you're right. There is pain involved sometimes in giving up that cake. But I do think that there are ways to again, provide that scaffold and walk them through that exchange where they're exchanging that good that they were getting before, which is now bad to a new good. And it makes me think about the transformational scenarios. And one of the things that they talk about there is what situations need to exist for transformational scenarios to work? And when you think about the idea of people feeling it has to be something where they feel like the situation is unsustainable. They have to feel like it's unstable, like all of these things in general, when you're human bring up very negative feelings. So sometimes, they have to feel like what's going on or what's happening is unacceptable. It's all very negative. And sometimes we have to have the weight of that negativity in order for us to want to release something in order to gain something that is more positive, but sometimes we can be really resistant, really stubborn and prefer to hold quite tightly to that bag of negative, because at least we know what that is. And there's like this scary feeling about going forward, which is why, you have to be in practically a crisis situation sometimes before we will make the changes that we need to make. But we do know that it's quite possible. We've watched our world in the past two years, do some amazing things and make some amazing changes. And it was because we were in that type of situation, we felt like the possibility of millions of people dying was something that was unacceptable. And all of that was really a projection. It was our projection of what we thought the outcome could be, but that projection was enough to get us in mass, to act in a way that was different than we may have acted at any other time.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. And of course we had stories. If we didn't have experience, we had stories of previous things that we might have read, seen. We had the numbers from the last pandemics we had. We had the historical stories of plagues and so forth. So there was a whole lot of evidence and cultural reinforcement that said this is serious. You need to pony up and really take this seriously. And it's particularly gratifying given the two years. Yes. When the numbers are coming out and I'm sure you've seen them, they're estimating up to 20, 30 million people who, probably would've died if they hadn't have been the global response that they'd been both in terms of the social responses, the quarantine, obviously the vaccines and everything else. It's interesting that people talk about the success of when we dealt with the Ozone hole, because there was a problem. We did things. It's clear what we did had a result and yet something like the pandemic, which was taken over a longer period of time and is still a live disputed thing. It is not clear that we are making a difference. It is not clear that we are getting to a better future. It's not clear that what we are doing is actually making any difference. .
Mina McBride: Oh, that reminds me of a conversation that I had recently about urgency and how long urgency is useful as a tool. And from my perspective, I feel like, urgency is useful, but it generally doesn't tend to be useful for those protracted type problems, because it requires, again, going back to sort of like a body analogy, the adrenaline raises and you're ready to deal with whatever's confronting you. Whatever that challenge is. However, we're not made to be in a state of heightened adrenaline over a long period of time. And therefore we're going to do something to adjust and sort of bring it back down to a level that we find that's sustainable over a long period of time. So that idea of a protracted problem, that's what I'm trying to figure out is when you have those types of problems that aren't solvable right away, and sometimes may be difficult to see the progress that you're making. How do you break that down? In a way that makes it same as though, and one can recognize what's actually happening. If you're on an exercise or a gym, it's very difficult to see what difference lifting weights yesterday made at all. You don't see that for a long period of time. And so a lot of the things that we deal with as Futurists, when we're trying to have people imagine new futures, sometimes it can be solved right away but many times we're dealing with systems and the systems will require change, sometimes years, decades in order for everything to be working. And yet this change, whatever we put in there to change over that time, it has to remain, it has to stay in place because at some point, if we give up and say well nothing's happening, then the change that was in motion has now stopped. And so how do we help sustain people through periods of like longer periods of change and help them fill those little celebrations along the way?
Peter Hayward: Yeah. Great. Thanks Mina.
Third question, the emerging futures around Mina McBride. I'm asking you, if you can, to put down the expert professional futurist perspective and just talk about yourself. What are the futures that you are paying particular attention to or around you that matter the most to you?
Mina McBride: I would say like hope for youth, and I'm really, really interested in seeing what happens as this generation grows up. So now I'm thinking Generation C and Generation A that follows them. Yeah. I just feel like they have this unique mixture of things that they have experienced and ways that they look at the world that I feel it will be very interesting to see what they wind up doing with that particular set of makeup that they tend to have and what the world will be like as a result of it. Generation A what fascinates me is they have grown up in this world. So I have children. And when my children were growing up, my daughter could tell you because she has a three year separation from her brother. And, there was a thing in my house, "no television for babies" no television at all. Because I wanted them to be able to, I don't know, just have that space without something being fed into them. So now they can both tell you just some crazy things. I tell them I'm so sorry when I hear some of the things that I put them through as they were little, but it was all in this effort to try to help them become fully functioning human beings that were able to think for themselves and didn't feel like they needed to look outside of themselves so much for what were the correct ways to be and what were the thoughts to have, and for them to be able to be critical thinkers earlier.
And I feel so much of that is established through like the exposure to art or the exposure to fiction or the exposure to documentaries or all of this thing that could give you material to work with that is not typically what we feed our children and therefore Generation A to me holds a particular fascination because so many children in that generation from pretty much, almost straight out of the womb, and literally now over the womb where they have a contraption where you can hold an iPhone or a pad of some sort over their crib to keep them entertained as they're in the crib. So you're dealing with a generation that has never known that type of interface and I think that they're going to look at the world differently because of it. And I'm not of the opinion, like some people, that it's all bad or that it's good. For me it's just interesting to see what impact it has. And how might they turn out differently because of it. But I do feel that they'll definitely look at the world in a different way and probably function and relate to the world and each other in a different way, because they've always had sort of that intermediary in between them and the world.
Peter Hayward: It's an interesting one because I'm much older than you and I remember back when I was a child, there were actually households that didn't have televisions and deliberately didn't have televisions. And so this notion where parents tried to assist or prepare their children for the future, which I was guessing is a natural parental response versus the Futurist reality that you really can't prepare people for something that you yourself don't know what it's gonna be. So how do you equip people for something and children particularly, and how do you best prepare them? Is it their thinking or is it about giving them authority and power much earlier than say we had in our lives? To me this is actually quite an important question because a lot of people talk about hoping the generation's coming next, but then you've gotta look at the system to use your frame, the system doesn't let them get hands on any of the levers or push any of the buttons until 18 - 21?
Mina McBride: I think your question relates to the question of being a good parent and how are you a good parent? And I've talked to some people who are growing up and just beginning to experience the trials and tribulations one goes through when they have small children and watch this search almost in desperation for what is the right thing to be doing. Looking for guidance on how to raise them in a way that is going to be most beneficial. And I think, as humans, what we do is we do our best. You take into account your personal values. You take into account the way that you think that your personal operating environment is working. And I think what most people are going to wind up doing is taking an assessment of those things and saying, "how might I best prepare my child for when they're no longer in my care?"
So for me that came out looking like a particular set of things, which may or may not be the same choices that someone would make. So I've indicated no television for babies. And that was until they were about like three or four years old was my mental cutoff and what I was trying to do there was allow their brains to develop in the way that I thought best. After three to four they were limited then to essentially our Public Broadcasting System, which is not commercial television at all. It's basically learning all day, every day, that's the only programming pretty much that they do. And they do have programming for children. So they were limited to public broadcasting for a long time, for years, probably until they were approaching their teenage years. And then they began to be able to make their own selections. So for some people the way that I did, it might not work for them. But I talked to them a lot. I explained things to them a lot. I spent a lot of time with them and therefore it was always this exchange. Between an adult and a young person.
So it wasn't that they were left now with this gaping hole and they had a vacuum that they needed to fill. It's like, no, we put other things in that bucket. And those were things that I thought might help prepare them by giving them the ability to be flexible in the way that they related to the world. But someone else might make a completely different choice. Yeah.
Peter Hayward: Riel Miller has a term. He refers to being a good ancestor and particularly our generation as to whether they will be looked at as being benevolent or actually capricious ancestors to the generations after us. I wonder given that you've used a health metaphor to look at this. I wonder how you also are thinking through the notion that the mental health of the younger generations is not terrific. There is data that says the mental health is certainly more prevalent that levels of youth suicide seem to be much higher than they were before. We are their ancestors and we are getting data about them that suggests that we are not possibly preparing them well or maybe it's impossible to prepare them for the world that we're creating for them.
Mina McBride: If I could, I'd like to expand that too. That's not something that's just true of children. That's true of the populace and it makes you wonder what we've done? If we knew what was leading to the cause certainly we would fix it. Lifestyle medicine would say, here are people who are optimal, mentally healthy, and let's list these wonderful traits that they have. And in fact, there have been studies within the field of lifestyle medicine about that, but it is quite different from the way that we live. So there's studies on stress versus use stress and there's studies on meditation and studies on sleep and studies on nutrition and all of those things. We don't look at them independently. We look at them as a holistic way of making a person. And yet if you think about our society in every single one of those areas, we haven't necessarily done a great job.
If we look at how we're feeding ourselves, if we look at stress versus use stress, if we look at exercise, if we look at sleep and we're seeing an outcome because of it. And so what do we want to do there? There's a lot of ways to look at that, like a prism, almost of ways that we can think of. I don't want to necessarily use the word attack, but it's the word that's coming to mind. Like attack the problem of what's happening with our mental health and how do we insert more kindness, both to each other and to ourselves. Those were the things that were the other things on my list. So I had mentioned the generations being some of the things that were things that I was looking at. And on the other side, you have things like our overall wellbeing and how are we going to move forward in a way that is best for the whole person.
Peter Hayward: Does your optimism for the generations coming after, give them a sense that they may be better at managing those kinds of things than we've been?
Mina McBride: I'm optimistic in their creativity. And also what I see as some resilience. And so are they going to be able, collectively speaking, to harness both the creativity, to maybe change some things that are not working so well, and yet they need the resilience to be able to make it to the point where those creative actions bear fruit? Because they're just having to keep bouncing back. And it's very concerning because I feel that the results that we're seeing with mental health, the results that we're seeing with people being under stress, the results that we're seeing with depression, I feel like those are quite recent to modern history. And therefore I think somewhere in there is the key that might tell us what we've done in order to get that kind of outcome.
Peter Hayward: Fourth question the communication question. So how does Mina explain to people what Mina does when they're not sure what it is that Mina does?
Mina McBride: Oh, this is the wonderful question for all futurists everywhere. It is funny because I can relate to sometimes thinking you have just nailed that definition. And it's funny because my daughter who's in university now. She was here during the summer and I said to her, " Are you watching what I'm doing? Do you see what I do?" She goes " I still don't really get it". So, if there's any hope in that. So what I will generally do is I'll start off with the one sentence answer, which is normally some form of helping organizations or individuals look at the future in a way that can help them take action for arriving at some preferred state or some variation on that.
Those are usually the three key things who it is. Put in the future there somewhere. And what kind of outcome, why do you do it sometimes? I'll say for example, to help them when they're doing strategic planning or giving them that rough framework generally that will lead to more questions. And when that's the case, I just take into account. Who that person is and then try to turn it into a story that they might be able to relate to. So if it's a lay person I might use a story like their profession, something that they're intimately familiar with and just briefly explain to them how this might play out for their industry or something that they intimately understand. If it's someone who's a business person, I might talk to them about strategic planning or being able to prepare beforehand.
So I just take my audience in mind. If nothing else what my goal has always been and what I think about when I communicate specifically, sometimes the concepts that we talk to people about in foresight, whether it's what we do or it's when we're going through scenarios and we're like explaining these possible worlds to people and it can all get very large and grand. And my goal for communication is always, can I leave them more inspired for action than when they met me? So in explaining to them what I do, can I leave them curious, still and wanting to know more either about thinking about the future now in a different way, thinking about how they might want to look at something or some topic in a different way, or can I leave them in the case of debriefing a project? Can I leave you feeling inspired about the possibility of the future, where you feel, although some of the things we might tell you might be completely daunting and we have evidence to back it all up and it might not look like the future that we might want to walk into, but can I leave you feeling like you are empowered to make a choice about it and you're empowered to act, and if I can leave someone feeling inspired, then I feel at least they can go forward and they can be in motion. So that's always my goal for communicating.
Peter Hayward: Has your communication approach changed much, given what we've been through? Is it pretty much the same as it was before COVID started? Or is it actually different now that people you are now engaging with have just been through an experience?
Mina McBride: I think the way that I look at it is if you spend the time individually clarifying who you are. So that's a question that can take decades to answer, but if you can get down to the core of who you are, what your values are, what moves you, what drives you then? I think it's fairly easy for your core messaging to stay the same. So to give you an analogy, if you think about 9-11 and when 9-11 happened in the United States. You had a lot of people having conversations and questioning themselves about things that they were doing in their life. And sometimes someone might be a professional comedian, and they would think, is this what I should be doing with my life? It just seems so silly making people laugh and had they already gone through a process of examination they would know the answer to that question. And I'm not saying that the answer to that question is easy to get to. No. But I'm saying that there are two different types of comedians. There's a comedian that understands every day when they wake up what they're doing, and there's a comedian that wakes up and they're doing what they want to do.
And so I think fundamentally those are two totally different places to be. And therefore I think I've been able to stay fairly consistent in my messaging pre and post pandemic because of having this clarity about what it is I'm communicating and why I'm communicating. And something like that I think has the ability to withstand the ups and downs of what we go through.
Peter Hayward: Thanks Mina
We're at the last question. The open question. So what do you want to finish with your conversation with the listeners?
Mina McBride: I want to say that I just love our Futurist community. They are a group of creative, ambitious individuals who generally aren't afraid to be sometimes the only person in the room saying what it is that they're saying. And it takes a brave soul to do that. So first, love to the community. And I think second, what I would encourage us to do and continue to do is to just really drill down on the importance of the work and why we do what we do and to be out there and be a positive force for helping others with the changes that they would like to make. Being the ones that are providing that scaffolding for them to help them be there. But primarily always figuring out, who am I as a futurist? Where do my strengths lie and how can I best put that forth in my work? So I think those are the ideas that I would leave individuals with.
Peter Hayward: Well, thanks Mina. It's been fun to catch up. Thanks to John Sweeney for introducing us. And, thanks for taking some time out to spend some time with the Futurepod community.
Mina McBride: And thank you. I love being here.
Peter Hayward: My guest today was Mina McBride. Hers was such a lovely combination of the thought and data driven foresight craft blended with a heartfelt and human-centric approach. I hope you found something helpful from Mina's wisdom. Futurepod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the Pod then please check out our Patreon which you'll find a link to on the website. This is Peter Hayward saying goodbye for now.