Colin Russo is the Managing Director of Engaging Futures and he has extensive experience in running Community consultation in a range of organisations

Interviewed by: Peter Hayward

More about Colin

Contact

1. LinkedIn.com/in/futuristauthordrcolinrusso/

2. Https://www.engagingfutures.com

3. Email: drcolinrusso@gmail.com

References

Edna St. Vincent Millay, from “Upon This Age That Never Speaks Its Mind,” Collected Sonnets (New York: Harper Perennial, 1988), p. 140.
Inayatullah, S. (2022). CLA 3.0: Thirty Years of Transformative Research. Tamkang University Press.
https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/queenslands-50year-vision-for-its-southeast-must-take-heed-of-regions-needs-20160618-gpmftc.html

Audio Transcript

Peter Hayward: How do you create negotiable futures that we all want to be part of? How do you transition from traditional strategic management thinking into community development thinking and community consultation? Is it important to ask the community openly about their preferred futures? And are all our projects just going to be asking about the next one to two to three years?

Colin Russo: It's a two-way process where we offer communities the opportunity to have real input, and then we give them the transparency of saying how their input influenced the future or influenced our community consultations. And these projects ushered in long-term integrated planning but I argue that those are so specific that we miss other issues . . . So a key metaphor or poem that I use here to talk about this, is briefly described by Edna St. Vincent Millay, who makes this claim in her poem, “Upon this age that never speaks its mind”.

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour, Rains from the sky a meteoric shower Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined. Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill Is daily spun; but there exists no loom, to weave it into fabric.

That's a section of the poem and the futurist mindset is aligned with its internal logic - those interactions are needed between sectors to navigate the “shower of facts”, or media storm. So without that interaction, we may see one-sidedness and limitations in a great many of those facts and we may miss the inequality that becomes visible to us as polemics, as comparisons of worldviews in society. That there's no loom, means that we need a way to understand inequality and to weave polemics into a useful fabric that would carry our dreams for the fulfilment of deeper, more important issues. So, future's thinking is that loom and it's made for vision and strategy creation.

Peter Hayward: That is Dr. Colin Russo the Managing Director of Engaging Futures, who is our guest today?

Welcome to FuturePod Colin.

Colin Russo: Thanks very much, Peter. Thank you for having me here.

Peter Hayward: So Colin what is the Colin Russo story? How did you become a member of the Futures and Foresight community?

Colin Russo: Thanks great question Peter. And I should say I'm an Australian futurist from Engaging Futures in Brisbane, and I acknowledge the Indigenous people, the Turrbal and Jagera people, on whose land we meet and their Elders, Past, Present and Emerging and always give some credit to my mentors who helped me onto this journey, including the UNESCO chair of Future Studies, Professor Sohail Inayatullah and also Dr Ivana Milosovic and Dr. Marcus Bussy at USC. My story is that I often speak about What a futurist does, and most of my transformational learning talks are about futures mindsets - that behaviours and frameworks help leaders to shape the future. Being that there's no crystal ball we use the smartphone, but I haven't seen anyone predict the long-term future yet with a great degree of certainty using one. The smartphone is more in the category of emerging AI that takes the jobs of human beings. For example, if I ask SIRI, “Hey, Siri”, What is your definition of Artificial Intelligence?

SIRI: Artificial intelligence means the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.

Colin Russo: What Siri is doing there is taking the job of a human being. And that's generally what we fear from our future. But then, if we asked SIRI that question slightly differently and said, “Hey, Siri, what is your definition of AI?” the answer would be incorrect.

SIRI: “The three-toed sloth. Do you want to hear the next one?”

Colin Russo: That’s clearly not the correct answer, but it’s what I expected Siri to say. AI is correct only up to the point that you ask the question correctly. And of course, correct up to the point of what is preloaded into artificial intelligence. In the future, AI will advance to be more intelligent than human beings. AI will ask and answer the questions that we would like answered but that we didn't know that we should ask. So, I situate many of my discussions as part of a much larger global to local discussion about foresight. Helping us to get ahead of VUCA - volatility and uncertainty and complexity and ambiguity. Subsequently, I discuss more than business-as-usual reproductions of the past.

The practice for me is to teach people to conceptualize possible and preferred futures to apply futures thinking and methods to their sectors to create preferred futures with more hopeful visions and strategies. And so there have been many sectors that I've worked and presented futures thinking, keynotes in and workshops too including the Federal and international levels, even though my early learnings were in state and local governments.

I've helped the transformation of cities from Gold Coast to Geelong and from Redland City to Bulloo Shire council, which is southwest of Queensland on the border between South Australia, New South Wales and The Northern Territory. And also the State and Federal governments in international organizations such as UNESCO and OECD. So that's generally my background having worked in State and Local government with futures thinking. And I'm always asked the question, ‘so what is the future?’, in those workshops. The future is simply the time after the past and the present. It's bounded by the laws of physics, but what it holds for us is conceptual. And that's why it helps to have the methods and the tools for thinking and talking about the future, to guide multi-sensory methods that open us to possibilities and that is used as part of navigable, relatable, futures frameworks.

Peter Hayward: So Colin, I'm curious. What's your earliest recollection of you starting to think this way? Because I didn't imagine you just popped out of the womb fully formed and thinking this way. This is something that you developed over time. What do you think the early beginnings of that, Colin Russo journey start was?

Colin Russo: It's in those earliest thoughts when you start to meditate at home and think about what I want to do for my future. What are my preferred futures? And then you think okay, is meditation enough? Is this the way I'd like the world to be? That is, for my friends and family to have happy and healthy lives. But what tools are there to help me along that journey? How do I achieve that?

Then, how do I start to ask questions like that of my friends and ask them what their preferred futures are so that we can create the common ground needed to assess where we could work together on issues? We use tools and frameworks that present different narratives. Academically, when you go to university, you learn that these are quantitative approaches when we try to predict the future, and qualitative when we try to interpret the future. I studied in the Business and Social faculties (communications and later the faculty of law, arts and society for my PhD). And so, you take a Social focus and then add that to a Constructive focus to answer, “How do you construct the future? How do you engage people around that focus?” And that's included in the frameworks for futures thinking that you learn about. But we then have to link it all together to action the future.

And so I think it begins in those early psychology questions that you form in your mind. If you're going to map and create an overview of the past and the present and the future, and ask the question, “what is my preferred future?” you generally come across your past pessimism. So when futurists think about the past, we learn that centuries-old practices still influence us today. You go to university and you find out that the factory model of education exists with its conveyor belt to exams. It still exists instead of focusing on employability for current emerging technologies, communication skills, life skills and also all of those past practices e.g. agricultural production regimes still causing too much meat protein in our diets and still all the problems of smoking, alcohol and sugar.

Then there's Optimism. The more favourable aspects of society help us, to balance that pessimism. It's important to map the depth of past achievements in terms of human rights and health gains, and ecological awareness to give ourselves an idea of what's worth keeping and what's properly useful for the future. We evaluate Optimism and Pessimism in every temporality of the Past and the Present and the Future. But it's when too many problems happen that we all want to shape the underlying meaning of our systems. And we challenge those past influences that aren't giving us both what we want and what we need as preferred futures. This kind of model of Optimism and Pessimism Evaluation leads to an exploration of the myths and the assumptions that later we can provide alternatives for.

Peter Hayward: Were these nascent ideas you had before you encountered the formal field of futures and foresight or were you travelling down another Epistemological framework, through your training and then found foresight as a second set of thinking tools?

Colin Russo: I always began with that question in mind, how do we make the future better for ourselves and our families in terms of health and wellbeing and across a range of systemic areas? I talk in terms of ten systems, of the social, economic, legislative, environmental, cultural, technology, industry or international issues, organizations, and noelgenesis, meaning production of knowledge, and also sustainability (the acronym I use is SELECTIONS as referred to in my chapter in CLA 3.0). And of course, I ask where are the tipping points in all of those? So my earliest recollections were going through University, my first degree and thinking about social ecologies and business ecologies. I always wanted to connect between government and communities. And I saw myself as trying to do something a little unique in that we didn't even have a community consultation position established in those days. But I wanted to connect the ideas of communities with the government to create better futures.

And it took me a little while to get onto that track, but I was certainly learning about social ecologies and business ecologies and networked solutions through my earliest studies. It took me a while to get into formal futures thinking but those were the essential underpinnings. Using trends and projections we create more hopeful trajectories for the future. And as I say, you take those trends out across the systemic areas.

To offer examples for today for health and wellbeing, we are currently reducing early deaths and diseases and disabilities for which there are DALYs statistics - years lost at work to disease, globally. And the DALYs have decreased over the past 20 years for communicable diseases, but they've almost doubled for diabetes (an 80% increase between 2000 and 2020 over the past 20 years). And DALYs increased by 100% for Alzheimer's disease. Another trend is the housing and homelessness crisis, and the unaffordable interest rates. These crises are caused globally by the Ukraine War and by global population growth, but also locally by increased demand for housing and decreased supply. Australians are experiencing sea changes, meaning people are wanting less debt and anxiety in the Southern states, and they want more space and time, and they can see cheaper prices and affordable prices in the Northern states. People are moving at an unprecedented rate to the coastal housing areas, and that's causing homelessness and crises. The larger problem is population growth.

It's an amazing time to talk to you about population growth because as of this week 8 billion people exist on earth, with 10 billion people projected for 2100, according to the United Nations. We've added 7 billion people in the last 200 years with 1 billion added in the last 12 years. But we're accelerating. And that, but that trend of acceleration will slow down. In terms of human advancement, - and this is what futurists do, we create a metaphor to understand the context… if you took the metaphor of the campsite, we're about 80% of the way through setting up Camp Earth with what we know currently. Dad's on the roof, setting up a satellite dish, mum's outside choosing between restocking the lake with fish or choosing whether to grow urban crops. The kids are experimenting out back with water-propelled rockets and the neighbours have been flooded and they're starting to move in. Using all the camper's knowledge around the campsite, our education of the area and knowledge of the area is still growing. That metaphor is about what to do to make the most of the short time that we all have together. Meaning in real life, the full extent of our existing knowledge and capabilities can be developed a lot further based on existing knowledge.

At the moment, NASA is exploring Mars, and Tesla is still learning how to get super-heavy spaceships off the ground. And scientists globally are still developing new fuel sources such as plasma, and doctors are still developing the world's knowledge of vaccine capabilities. We've got a lot of knowledge that is and has to be developed yet. And our technologists are creating smart cities and internet of things capabilities. In cities, while we are good at transporting people between all the capital cities, e.g. Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth, we aren't as good at getting people from work to home or shops and parks, particularly through our peak hours. We slow down. People have to quadruple the time spent on the road during peak hours compared to off-peak hours. So humanity is good at some things, but we've still got a long way to go to develop our existing knowledge.

The capacity to develop existing and new knowledge is growing, rapidly. While the earth’s population will increase 20% by 2100, we will also gain efficiencies through health and wellbeing. Men and women will live the same length of lives with better quality health. And those health gains will increase efficiencies in the workplace. Also, in total, having another say, 30% effective input from population growth and efficiency increases will mean a reshaping of society. A universal basic income may be possible and this will drive more startup innovators joined by people with more time and focus to create preferred futures. Artificial Intelligence will take over the more meaningless jobs from remote control shipping to warfare, waste disposal, mining and agriculture. We'll see a shift back to the Commons production style of life, and a massive shift into Research and Development jobs with more time to innovate.

So further increasing the ecology of innovations exponentially will bring a further step-change to many of our systems. Systems transformations will bring a further increase in production efficiencies. We'll become a more advanced world with perhaps 50% more total knowledge production and manufacturing production by the turn of the century. The pace of change is set to double. We're going to be on a freeway of change. While we may say that we are going to see more change in the next 10 years than in the past 100, it's also feasible to say that by the end of the century we'll see more change than in the last 3000 years and at the fastest pace in history.

Peter Hayward: The way you described that, certainly, emergent future scenario through knowledge and technology. You began the interview with an acknowledgement of the country and that we live on land, so your campsite was traditional land somewhere in Australia. I wonder how traditional knowledge, which is still alive because the culture is still alive, how traditional knowledge also participates in creating preferred futures.

Colin Russo: Yes, it should do and it should do. After mapping trends, what we ask, is about what we are doing in the present to achieve the futures that we want. Continued change from community feedback brings about new forms of governance and teaching. And as said, on our Engaging Futures website, we never really live in the future. We live between the present and the future. We're always engaging futures on a visioning journey of multiple possibilities. Working with people internationally over the last few years, I could tell you that globally governments are thinking ahead, incorporating foresight. But to answer your question, I have to think back to the transitions I've experienced here in Queensland where, it was firstly, to build community consultation policies with the State and local government levels through the Environmental Protection Act of Queensland (1994). Section 26 of that Act in 1994, required us to consult the Australian Torres Strait Islander community and stakeholders around the state on policies such as air, noise, water, mines, and waste. And you can't help but note the absolute interconnected, depth of knowledge gained in the traditional form, so closely linked to our ecologies. Traditional custodians of the land have a much closer connection to ecologies of water, food and waste systems. The idea here is that we engage people including ATSI communities in open creative dialogue about futures possibilities.

If you go on a great project like we're on with Bold Future which is the city of Gold Coast, it's an example of long-term community plans delivered by councils. Now, many Queensland councils started cities on the pathway to thinking ahead. But it's the engagement aspect, the community consultation that was developing in Queensland, as from 1994 through to 2000, we didn't have any community consultation positions, in local governments. We had to think, okay, yes, it is important to consult indigenous peoples. It is important to consult community groups because that builds your perspectives and worldviews and it's always been what I wanted to do from leaving university and thinking about my preferred futures. How do you create negotiable futures that we all want to be part of?

And so we had to create those positions. And slowly we introduced them. So the state government had them in, had one or two in place for national, for statewide policies, but local governments had to have new position descriptions right around Queensland and then around Australia. And then we would network in Southeast Queensland and talk about how we improve community consultations. It's a two-way process where we offer communities the opportunity to have real input, and then we give them the transparency of saying how their input influenced the future or influenced our community consultations. Today you'll see on the City Council annual plan or annual report the words asking the community about their long-term views or their views of the future. If they have new ideas, they can share them with the Council.

I was a Community Consultation Policy author, before I started on my futures journey, through the hierarchy of the City Council, helped to take the Gold Coast from ad hoc retrospective perspectives of the past to long-term integrated planning. The legacy is of working with our SEQ regional plans and master plans. But I argue that masterplans are so specific that we miss other issues not having long-term plans that are open to all systemic issues of society and linked to our governance plans. We need the whole of the city 10-year community plans to still be in place. A key metaphor or poem that I use here to talk about is his because we think the key problem confronting humanity at this time in history is briefly described by Edna St. Vincent Millay who makes this claim…

Peter Hayward: That’s beautiful.

I've been aware of your work, for a long while on the work you do and how community consultation and the way you do futures and foresight are central to your practice. I wonder if you wouldn't mind just talking to listeners about the importance of doing community consultation in our futures work and also how you do it.

Colin Russo: Thanks for the opportunity, Peter, because as I said, it's important to me to connect between government and community groups and also industry. And when I began in Local Government as a Coordinator of Community Consultation, certainly around the year 2000 through to 2003. We hadn't even at that stage connected up with the rest of the world. In 2004, I coordinated an international local government community consultation network initiative from the City of Gold Coast, office of the CEO, Corporate Communications Branch. This is probably the first multi-lateral international example of consultation about community consultation governance policy, globally. The work was approved by the then Director of the Office of the CEO, Joe McCabe. I consulted colleagues in Brisbane City Council, Logan City Council, Melbourne City Council, Sydney City Council, Perth City Council, London City Council, Edinburgh City Council, Auckland City Council, Quebec in Canada, and Boston City Council plus other Councils in the United States, to collaborate on community consultation policy and practices of community consultation.

And certainly, Australians at that stage, as they are now, were leaders in community consultation. There was no question that the policies that were coming back were all asking similar questions around Austra around the world. How do we consult communities better? And we all started on this huge learning curve and wave of knowledge about practices. What are the important community consultation methodologies? How do you transition from traditional strategic management thinking into community development thinking and community consultation? Is it important to ask the community openly about their preferred futures? And are all of our projects just going to be asking about the next one to two to three years?

Because most projects focus on the electoral cycle for the next one to two to three years. And it wasn't until those massive long-term planning processes came through around 2009 in Queensland certainly around Australia at that time as well. So nine to 10 years later that we started to think long term. But you have to remember back in 2000, we all had paper surveys and community consultation meant going out into the communities and setting up a town hall using newspapers and local media, television, and press to gather together people who were stakeholders and who were directly affected by the outcome of the community consultation process. We had our directly affected community members that we would send a letter to and invite and talk to, and that might mean that the direct effect was about setting up a policy that affected a local park or playground.

But for me as a coordinator of community consultation across the city of 350,000 people at that stage, I was working across all directorates. Meaning that I would work with our corporate plan, engagements, our major city plan, our annual plan, but also the major visions, strategies and actions of the city council. We think long-term for those major documents, but short-term for say, community communities scattered around the widening of the local road, the undergrounding of the local telegraph lines to make them safe and give us all the visual amenity that we wanted. Then, you had to use statistical validity rules. You had to survey people. Anything that involved rates and expenses would then have a confidence level for that survey and you would have to ask a certain number of people for it to be statistically valid. In 2004, I wrote a model “Establishing A Valid Consultation Process With CLA, plus a chapter, “The CLA Questioning Methodology”, in Sohail Inayatullah’s book, The Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) Reader (2004), which I then envisaged could guide the use of some futures methodologies in community consultation frameworks - the CLA layers are of Litany, Systems, Worldview and Myth Metaphor. Almost two decades later, I’ve written another chapter, An Analysis of Queensland City Futures Initiatives: Using CLA to Map Processes of Planning and Engagement", in CLA 3.0.

And that’s where I think, that in consulting directly affected community members, we could integrate some of this thinking and start layering back the community's perceptions of their reality across more layers, to deepen our knowledge of the effect of a project upon them and what their suggestions may be. The potential effects would be across the litany systems worldview and with myth metaphor frameworks. Then I would address findings using the methodology in certain committees. So high-level committee groups in council meetings perhaps. But then along came Bold Future, and we were able to apply CLA and a range of, methods like Futures Triangle in training sessions, and retrospectively to analyse the initiative.

In 1994 I began to work on my Master's Degree with Professor Tony Stevenson and met Sohail Inayatullah at QUT, where my thesis topic was Futures Oriented Action Learning (and Research). That started me on my early thinking about how futures thinking opens up questions beyond the first year, second year, and third year of a project to long-term thinking. How do we think about Futures oriented planning, action, observation and reflection? And what are the strategic questions that we can use to take us out there, to take us into the possible futures rather than the predictable and known? This is your A, B, and C alternative futures, and how do you think about that, those kinds of outcomes? So there's a big difference between traditional strategic management and foresighted principles of Futures Thinking.

And so around the world working with other councils, it was in the United States with Boston City Council, who were kind enough to put the early International Local Government Community Consultation Network proposal and discussion documents up onto the American Psychological Association website for perpetuity, because I think it was one of the earliest examples of any country reaching out to talk about community consultation globally and gather practices. Of course, later on in Queensland, this work led to working with the local Government Association of Queensland because all of our community consultancy teams would meet at LGAQ’s head office in Newstead, Gold Coast City Council, and Brisbane City Council. Then we met with the LGAQ to develop a good practice framework of community consultation standards and principles. And then I and their Senior Policy Officer consulted around Queensland, more than 20 different councils to help develop that Local Government framework. And that started to standardize between all the councils in Queensland the community consultation frameworks and policies and practices that we see today.

And after that, LGAQ helped developed an international local government or community engagement conference in Brisbane. And then long after that, the IAP2 was developed in Australia as The International Association for Public Participation. But it was from that early groundwork that we all started to get our thinking around the standardization of community consultation processes. And we have to think, what does that word standardization mean? Does that lead to cookie-cutter processes that are all unified or does that leave within councils the framework and the ability to continue raw thinking and development of the methodological process? How do you reinvent community consultation such that you can make it your own, and still feel confident that what you are doing is valid and appropriate? And so the answer to me is that you need both. You need to be able to have a general framework to refer to, but you also need to make it your own and keep it alive in new ways that use your own “reason for being” or “divine spirit” - your ability to navigate. As I said earlier, my earliest hopes are to connect governments with community groups.

I think each council needs to be able to create and customize its local processes. So in fact, to enact what it's all about, consult communities, consult internally and formulate frameworks and policies that are relevant to local people, including indigenous people. And that's not just in terms of worldview culture, but also terms of disciplinary and of course professional practice cultures.

Peter Hayward: Are there particular techniques or things that you have to do to give people the encouragement that they will be listened to and that their ideas will be part of the thinking that goes in? Or do people just naturally assume that if you're running a consultation process of course you're going to listen to what they say?

Colin Russo: This is about the area of both trust in government, but also of the social contract. And every council around Queensland, and probably around Australia having consulted further down south, that the social contract is very different in every council. And as a result of having your international standard, but your local political party election process of the mayor and the councillors, you gain different views on democratic principles of how to conduct governance. And although every council will tell you that its governance framework is the mayor and the councillors and the electoral cycle there's much more to it than that. And the issue of trust has come into this because councils have started to rely more on the digital feedback that they receive through Facebook and other forms of social media from Snapchat to what they can pick up from Instagram and other places, particularly LinkedIn. But an overreliance on those social media forums will ground people down to a specific view, and it won't necessarily create an evaluation/analysis. If we talk in terms of diversity inclusion and equality, it might give you some diversity and some narrow sets of inclusion, but it might not necessarily create equality and it might not satisfy principles of validity or confidence, statistical validity in terms of community consultation feedback.

So it's incredibly important that community consultation continues. And you'll find that traditionally, there's this division between Liberal Party governments and Labor Party governments. Labor Party has always consulted more broadly out through the grassroots if you like. And the Liberal Party has tended to consult the top stakeholders at that end of the hierarchy. So what we need is for that moderated approach to be always available in our governance frameworks so that you can maximize the value of community thinking, but also educate the community and bring them along the journey. Thirdly, creating empowerment and agency for the community so that they have a sense of that divine spirit continuing, rather than being turned off.

We're always trying to keep that doorway open to communities and create a connection with our councils and think about preferred futures. We could ensure that our macro frameworks, our macro policies and our vision is family-friendly and community-friendly. If we just focused on industry or private organizations and the top end of town, we will miss the nurturing of families. Consultation helps build the idea that we are all unique, we're all able to provide opportunities and use a matrix style of thinking to gather feedback from a crowdsource framework. What we need to be doing is opening community consultation to 24-hour feedback. We could use that CLA framework, and I write about this in my latest chapter in CLA 3.0 (2022). And it talks there about using CLA as a kind of governance framework. There are many ways of thinking about methods and practices, but it comes down to democratic governance frameworks and the will of the people to understand the value of transparent opportunities for feedback on government proposals.

We have only achieved in recent history, social gains in this country e.g. female voting and indigenous voting and the freedom of speech. So we have to continue to keep open the idea that democratic governance can be improved. It's still in its infancy. There's still a lot more that we can do, even though we have the Internet of Things and we have Smart City thinking. To frame what we do with futures thinking technologies or methods is to look at paradigmatic research frameworks. That includes using the Six pillars, with Mapping, Anticipation, Timing, Deepening, Creating and Transforming the future. That leads us to the Engaging Futures Framework which is essentially about if you look across a Past, Present, Future framework and think we need diversity, inclusion, and equality in all of those, plus Epistemology and Ontology and Pedagogy by actually addressing these important issues. In our thinking, we create that diversity in our outcomes that openness to the future. And we create that depth and breadth and centricity that means we've got democratic thinking and not autocratic thinking in governance.

Thanks, Colin.

Peter Hayward: Now I want to have a chat to Colin Russo person citizen of wherever about the particular emerging futures around you that you are paying particular attention to and why. So what might those be?

Colin Russo: Okay. For me, a lot of what I'm doing in terms of shaping the future is, In terms of the action learnable question. Subsequently, we asked about views of the future, including the feared view of the future. So when I was workshopping futures at the Australian Federal Police in Canberra they answered what the Australian Federal police fear most is the future of an isolated headquarters. When we know that the importance of Cybersecurity issues means that we should be asking everyone involved, to take action when they see cybersecurity issues. Their answer to another question of alternative futures was, while they're excellent at cybersecurity, they'll continue to diversify and use all available possibilities. We were discussing Darwin City Council's new cameras, and the ability for facial recognition systems if needed. And that perhaps community consultation was needed before they were installed to help people understand that they would be used only for significant reasons, not recognition technology as it's used in other parts of the world. We know there's a fear future there for most police too, that their community mindset is used to identify criminals but also predictively before crimes occur. This gives us both an upside and downside that we're identifying, who is very angry in the community or very excited in the community, or someone who's simply drinking alcohol and looking sleepy shouldn't be heading back to work. How do you use facial recognition technology for community good, but not invade people's privacy? So all of those questions, are important issues for today.

For the City of Gold Coast, their feared future is being seen as a sleepy holiday and fishing village. So their alternative is to be a modern, thriving tourism and business community. And it's because also doubling in size by 2050 is their main issue. And so they're going from 350,000 to 550,000-700,000 people into the future. So they wanna see the financial exchange from that. But they saw that continued urban sprawl is a used future borrowed from the past unsustainable and a much better future is the one they have now that connects people in places using light rail through a new health and knowledge precinct to the hospital and community village created in time for the Commonwealth Games. Basically, we have a health and knowledge precinct connected by light rail to all the tourist precincts.

And I've just worked for the Thompson Psychology Institute on the Sunshine Coast. And they have as their feared future the Neurodiversity health system where children have limited access to medical services, leaving them struggling and reaching out for help. And what they want is transformation that offers all school-aged children, automatic free access to groundbreaking medical scans that predict their mental health futures. So this is this new area of brain fingerprinting that they have actually developed and can now predict the future of people's anxiety and also neuropsychology. And they can predict if someone in the next three months or 12 months, will have a problem in terms of their lifestyle or career. We always begin with those questions about what are the feared and the used futures in our organizations or sectors.

And I think that leads us to the question of why people don't want to change if they have all of these predictive technologies? And I always talk about the example of Finding Nemo, the Australian movie. And the taboo was to touch the boat, to have a great adventure and to learn about what's outside of our playground or our neck of the woods. A similar movie is Moana. Which has the plot of a blight that strikes her Pacific island and it kills the vegetation and shrinks the fish catch. And so Moana asks, do we go beyond the reef? Because, her elders don't want her to leave the local area and want her to live near home. And she says look, we've got to leave the reef to solve the cause of our problems from outside the local frame of reference. I ask the question, do we know how our stream fits within the whole cycle of its being? Do we go upstream and downstream of our sector to see what feeds it

What struck me recently was hearing from the Prime Minister of Tuvalu and Cook Islands about how they are currently preparing for their islands, and their homes to be inundated by the end of the century. And that means that they are now shifting their identities online to create a digital twin and community memory for all of those people as climate change takes over. These are all examples of massive transformational shifts that we're all embarking on. And I think that we're all challenged by, whether it's legislation or shifts in the global economy, but it's also when national policy accelerates population growth too quickly and it has the outcomes that we fear. There are all of these tipping points across all of our systems. We also fear emergent issues in the digital home space, say the digital meta workplace, which has 7 million users. It's disrupting the shape of the workplace and knowledge communities and the potential for turning universities into multiversities.

The Metaverse will create a new space to conduct business and social events in three-dimensional virtual reality, so we can work and live on the internet in one connected hyperspace. So a disruption in the questions of our emerging future, investment-related housing becoming decoupled from the market, transferring our investments to an encrypted digital twin of our Australian housing market. So this experience has begun overseas already with virtual reality housing, now able to be purchased and sold for large sums of money at insane amounts of money more in some cases than the actual physical price of that land. As with any blockchain-based exchange, the value is determined by scarcity and desirability. There's plenty of trade currently, but there's no telling what will happen to the market once the last plot of land is bought.

So subsequently futurists ask how much further online will our identity move. And I gave that example of the Cook Islands in Tuvalu but so notwithstanding all of these moves, digital living may work with democratic geopolitics in place, but the future is still questionable. And it's unknown because, with autocratic governance cultures in place and structures in place, we don't know what that will do to the marketplace. Like what's happening in Ukraine at the moment. These unpredictable futures. So after the fear future, we navigate our preferred futures journey by asking what then are our assumptions? It could be addressed by creating alternative strategies. And then which of these alternative strategies do we prefer?

And you asked me what I do as a futurist or what am I thinking about. One of the metaphors or analogies I use is the Star Trek 2 Wrath of Khan simulation. It’s a simulation exercise conducted by their Chief Executive officers to interview applicants for leadership. So the CEOs use simulation exercises including two blind, no-win outcomes. So they don't tell the participants as their selection's based on a capacity to respond to losses, which is a good idea to test people on how they can cope with success, but how do they cope with failure? But in the simulation a Star Fleet ship surrounded by warring Klingons, the Enterprises beams into the scenario. And then Captain James Kirk must decide between A and B. A whether to save the crew of the Star Fleet ship by firing on the Klingons, thereby revealing his position in the Enterprise. Destroying his crew and himself, which is the corollary of course. Do you reveal your true intentions today in the organization and say, look, I'd like an alternative, A, B or C, you reveal your position and potentially blow yourself and your staff, so you've got to be quite courageous in Futures Thinking.

Or B Captain Kirk could have departed using warp drive, saving only his crew and himself, and leaving that stranded Star Fleet ship to its fate among the Klingons. Of course, the corollary is do you leave your fledgling idea alone and leave it there for another five years and wonder about its fate? But Kirk would then have to explain himself. Instead, Kirk sneaks into the operating system before the test begins and he uploads a new ending to the computer scenario, a new preferred future in which he saves the Star Fleet ship, its crew and the Enterprises team. So Kirk transformed the underlying system, and then he rose to a position as commander of the Enterprise.

What I do in workshops is to help people negotiate the alternatives that they could have taken and community consultations that important role that we have. But do we ask what role has community consultation in shaping the normal futures that we think about during the day in the organization? Are we able to formulate a survey and ask our friends? Are we able to formula formulate a survey and ask managers or directors? Other role plays will help us with our inner selves, such as the Sarkar game, and personality profiles, so that we can observe the real-time creation of alternative futures, and identify what potentially could go right or wrong. So if the Warrior role, for example, has a gun in their hand, why on earth did they shoot the priest when they could have negotiated with the priest? So you can ask action learning questions. Weren't there better possibilities? And they might say look, we just thought we didn't, we didn't have that option. That it wasn't part of the rule book or that we didn't have enough time to conceptualize that. We just acted.

And so futures thinking and long-term strategy creation is always harder for people who just want to act. They don't wanna think outside the local neck of the woods and beyond the reach that they're living. Future thinking's always going to be harder until you create that training program and train the champions in your organization. So for me in Australia, there's certainly a lot of VUCA ahead and there's less time for grand experiments with our World Heritage and with encroaching on animal and bird species during land clearing that globally is the cause of Covid 19, and its future variations. So there's less time to understand whether the plastic waste in clandestine wars will impact us greatly, or what effect a possible global fertility crisis might have on our populations. But on the positive side, on the horizon, there's this, transition to renewable energy by investing in hydrogen and solar and wind and battery technology. And there's also quantum computing and CRISPR gene technology, nanotechnology and biotechnology, and even Neuralink telepathy further out there. So emphatically we need futures frameworks to combine all of the possibilities long term into useful guidelines for navigating the future and creating preferred futures.

Peter Hayward: Do you wanna just wrap this up for the listeners?

Colin Russo: Okay. So in summary, I'll give you some points that we focus on, and the first one is the knowledge of possibility rather than recreating the past if the past isn't working. Also multi-polemic solutions rather than a choice between one thing or another, beyond binary. And transformational thinking does more than diagnose problems but anticipates them. Also more than just predicting and projecting. We anticipate and we solve. We integrate across in between systems and sectors, more relationships, and more convergence of opinion about what we do. And we aim for less volatility because of changing political ideas or systems. And on a final note, we create scenarios across a wider spectrum of possibilities and we work with the preferred futures.

Peter Hayward: Great. Colin, look, it's been great to catch up again. Thank you very much for taking some time out to have a chat with the Futurepod community.

Colin Russo: Thanks, Peter. Fantastic.

Peter Hayward: My guest today was Colin Russo. His was a deep and extensive inquiry into and demonstration of engaging with communities. To weave their hopes and dreams into our preferred futures. There is a lot to take from my conversation with Colin. Futurepod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the Pod. And please check out our Patreon which you will find a link to on the website. This is Peter Hayward saying goodbye for now.

*Edna St. Vincent Millay, from “Upon This Age That Never Speaks Its Mind,” Collected Sonnets (New York: Harper Perennial, 1988), p. 140.