A conversation with Dr. Stefan Bergheim. Stefan strengthens Futures Literacy in politics, business, academia, and civil society with events and processes on topics ranging from innovation via mobility and democracy to quality of life. He was an advisor to the German government’s national wellbeing strategy and led the processes “Positive Futures - Forum for Frankfurt” and “Quality of life in the digital age” and is a member of the UNESCO Futures Literacy Network.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
More about Stefan
Center for Societal Progress https://zgf-fortschritt.de/en
Zukünfte Network https://en.zukuenfte.net/
Germany’s National Wellbeing Strategy https://buergerdialog.gut-leben-in-deutschland.de/EN/Home/home_node.html
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefanbergheim/
References
Aaltonen, Mika (2005): Complexity as a Sensemaking Framework. Finland Futures Research Centre. https://www.academia.edu/79939881/Complexity_as_a_sensemaking_framework
Bergheim, Stefan (2021): Futures – Open to Variety. ZGF Publishers.
Bergheim, Stefan (2022): On the Evaluation of Futures Literacy Laboratories. Manuscript.
https://zgf-fortschritt.de/media/pages/methodik/zukuenftelabore/1356567106-1666609565/bergheim-2022-evaluationof-flls.pdf
Laloux, Frederic (2014): Reinventing Organizations. Nelson Parker. https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/
Luhmann, Niklas (1995): Social Systems, Stanford University Press.
Miller, Riel, Ed. (2018): Transforming the Future – Anticipation in the 21st Century. Routledge. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000264644
Rosen, Robert (2012): Anticipatory Systems - Philosophical, Mathematical, and Methodological Foundations. Second Edition. Springer.
Snowden, David J. and Mary E. Boone (2007): A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making. Harvard Business Review. November, 69-76. https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making
Audio Transcript
Peter Hayward: We still need to plan notwithstanding, uncertainty and complexity but can we make decisions based on relevant futures forecasts and still remain agile and able to learn from what unexpectedly emerges? How is the quality of dialogue, fundamental to creating a shared sense of purpose and to build futures literacy more broadly?
Stefan Bergheim: What I'm doing these days is to allow people to uncover their assumptions and also get to see the assumptions that others hold. We want to understand what our own assumptions are and what the assumptions of others are, and we'll also understand the limitations of those assumptions. We understand that maybe they just describe the box in which we're thinking, and then aha. Okay, so that's the box, and that's the frame through which I look at the topic or the future of the topic of work or learning or whatever the topic might be. And often enough then people are ready to say, okay, maybe that box is too narrow. Maybe the frame is too conventional. Too standard. Why don't we at least play around with a different set of assumptions, a different frame, and see what happens? See whether this broadens our perspective, whether this allows us to see different things that we didn't see before. And especially if we do it together with others, we inspire each other and say, oh, let's try this, let's try that and play, just play around with it.
Peter Hayward: That is my guest today, Stefan Bergheim. Stefan is a designer and facilitator of Futures Literacy Laboratories for companies, academia and governments to enable their partners to better use the diversity of futures to create sustainable success.
Welcome to FuturePod Stefan.
Stefan Bergheim: Thank you. Great to be here. An honor.
Peter Hayward: A privilege for me to chat. So the first question, Stefan, the one that our listeners tell us they enjoy is the story question.
So what is the Stefan Bergheim story?
How did you become a member of the Futures and Foresight community?
Stefan Bergheim: Maybe I start when I began to study economics, in the late eighties and early nineties. And why did I do that? Because I thought it was fascinating to see economists play with their models and predict the future. So you raise interest rates as a Central Bank or you raise government spending, and then the economy reacts and you can make a forecast about that. I found that fascinating. So I studied economics and I read The Economist newspaper and there were all those bank economists in there who said, next year's GDP growth is going to be such and such. That's the route that I took initially. Then I joined Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan and worked as a banking economist there. And we created loads of forecasts. Others were creating the forecast for the exchange rates, which I found super difficult, but I was partly in charge of forecasting inflation rates, GDP growth rates for Germany and the Eurozone later on, and sometimes central bank interest rates.
And I traveled the world and explained to people what the future is going hold and how it's going play out, and where they should be investing. That was a great fun time, but it was partly also entertainment value that we created. We went through the Asian crisis in the late Nineties. It blew apart all our forecasts. And then there was the dot.com crisis. I was at Merrill at the time who were big players on both the equity and the fixed income markets. And everything went upside down in this phase. So shocks, and disruptions, one after the other made me a lot more humble in my perceived ability to predict the future. And then I moved over to Deutsche Bank and we had a team there that was called Macro Trends. So still the economics department and trend research. We had two people there from Daimler who had worked in the Futures area there. They introduced me to Scenario methods some trends and I first heard about Causal Layered Analysis at that time. That was in the 2002, 2003 area. So my toolkit broadened but I still was tasked to do forecasts.
We did a big project on forecasting GDP growth back in 2005, forecasting GDP growth up until 2020. A long time ago now. We created a big model with trends and clusters and forecasts and all that. The good thing about that model was that I got to present it at all sorts of conferences. There was one conference in Barcelona in 2005 where I met a guy by the name of Riel Miller for the first time for dinner. And also I was at the meeting of the European nodes of the Millennium Project outside of Brussels in 2005. I met Mika Aaltonen there who introduced me to complexity research. That opened totally new areas for me as an economist who was used to this plan, predict, control mode. He introduced me to emergence and final cause and nonlinearities and all that. None of that I had studied at my universities.
So that was fascinating new input. But at the same time, I also got some input from people who saw me focusing all the time on GDP, which you do as an economist. But there's a lot more out there on how to measure quality of life than just GDP. So at that same time I got into wellbeing and quality of life measurement and projects and processes. I found that super fascinating as well. So my detour or maybe intermediate focus was on wellbeing, quality of life with the OECD, the European Commission, all sorts of organizations focusing on that at the time. That led me to quit my job at Deutsche Bank and to focus more on quality of life. I started a Think Tank called the Center for Societal Progress. We ran participatory visioning processes. So in terms of methods, I was moving over to the visioning part. I also at the time finished my PhD dissertation on forecasting GDP growth to close off the earlier life.
So the participatory visioning processes on quality of life with indicators. Of course I'm still a quant person. I still like numbers. I still like measurements if it's appropriate. We did that in Frankfurt where I'm based. Go through dialogue elements and create visions, create indicators, and create actions. And then I suggested to our national government, that Germany should do something similar, which they did. Very nice. It was under Angela Merkel, the Chancellor, that was in 2013/14 area, and I was an advisor to the National Wellbeing Strategy of Germany. That was cool. To see this get off the ground. They did a wonderful dialogue process, but then, unfortunately, not much happened afterward. So good project, good indicators, but not really much action happening afterward.
Peter Hayward: Good process, not an outcome.
Stefan Bergheim: The outcome in terms of a lot of material created a thick report. Yes. But beyond that it was kind of tricky. So at that time I was ripe to go back to the Riel Miller, Complexity, Futures Literacy world. In 2015 when the National Wellbeing Dialog ended, Riel invited me to all sorts of activities, which I didn't really understand initially. But then he invited me to join the first Anticipation conference in Trento with Roberto Poli. That was 2015. And I presented our dialogue projects there, and that basically got me hooked and I started really into Futures Literacy projects and working with Riel more closely on the book Transforming the Future. I supported that and had a chapter in there and then I helped design, curate the Future Literacy Design Forum in 2019. And the high level Futures Literacy summit in 2020. I was one of the curators there. And then 2021 I helped with the World Futures Study Federation conference in Berlin. So that's basically where I'm at now in this Futures literacy world. Coming from a forecasting and a visioning background and as an economist, as a quant person. These days I think of myself as a designer and facilitator of futures literacy processes as I like to call them. Designer and facilitator, not a report writer, not a presenter. I was just asked the other day, can you give us a talk? Can you give a presentation about this or that topic? No, I don't do this anymore. That's just not this phase of my life right now. I don't give these kinds of presentations.
Peter Hayward: You've had a fascinating intellectual journey. Starting from macroeconomics and then finishing up with futures literacy and visioning. I'm gonna take you half way and say, can I call you an ex- economist if you're no longer practicing? But I also studied economics and I always found economics useful at a deeply sociological level of understanding how a lot of the psychology and culture of economy worked, and I found tremendous comfort in reading the works of the early economic historians. And so do you look back and give economics any value as a kind of discipline to draw knowledge and information from for our field or is it really a field that you say it's beyond helping anymore.
Stefan Bergheim: It seems that you had a different economics training than I did. Because what you describe, sociology, psychology philosophy, all that was not part of the curriculum that I had in Germany. I spent three years in a PhD program in the US and that never appeared on the curriculum there. I only learned about all these neighboring deeper fields much, much later. I'm a big fan of sociologists, for example of German sociologists. I appreciate very much Niklas Luhman,n for example. Lots of philosophy, lots of psychology. But I read up on all of that way after I studied economics, so I wouldn't contribute that to economics. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiment, yes, the founding father of economics, but that was totally forgotten, at least in the part of the field that I was part of when I studied economics and when I practiced this in the investment industry.
Peter Hayward: Second question for you is the value of the forecast. And I often say that all decision makers need a forecast in order to make a decision because all decisions that stretch out. Basically saying this is a good decision means you are making a kind of, informal call as to what the future will be like when the decision lands. So people wrestling with big decisions, whether they be purely commercial or social or whatever else, seems to me the value of the forecast is still there to support decision makers. However, there's the other side of forecasts, which is they're invariably not accurate. So where do you sit on that space of decision makers need enough information to almost do a proto forecast to make a decision as opposed to simply relying on forecasts as accurate epistemological statements of what the future will be.
Stefan Bergheim: I make use of a phrase thatI learned as an economist which is: It depends. It really depends on what the use of the forecast is. I love using weather forecasts, of course. That makes a lot of sense for all of us. I tend to make forecasts when I cross the street whether it's safe to cross t. And I totally see the possibility of forecasting stuff like the age structure of the population or the number of six year olds who might enter school in five years’ time. That is super valuable information. I get totally upset if our local government here in Frankfurt doesn't create those forecasts and doesn't make use of them. So yes, there is a good measure of usefulness in forecasts also in more complex situations.
I think what's crucial is that people make explicit their forecast. I'm basing my decision on this or that forecast, and in turn this forecast and I'm back to economics. What I learned actually in the first years is the models that we use are usually based on assumptions. So you make a forecast and that's based on this model. And that model is based on those assumptions. Okay, fair enough. You need a forecast. But now at least I understand where you come from. And then we can maybe argue and say, no, maybe this assumption is not appropriate. And then we're in dialogue. Then we can talk about it. And then we can decide, okay go with that forecast because we need a plan for our company for the next year. We need a budget plan. So we need a forecast for what's going to happen. At the same time, we can stay agile, flexible, and say, if that assumption doesn't turn out to be correct, then at least we talked about it. And knew there are other options, other assumptions that are possible. And if the forecast doesn't turn out right, then we can still be able to act. We're not totally shocked and surprised and still be able to act.
Peter Hayward: Now. Then if we lay over the top of that kind of notion that the forecast is contextual, the assumptions are critical to measure and observe, the viability of the assumptions is fundamental. When we lay over that vision and literacy, then what does that bring to the whole suite?
Stefan Bergheim: That's basically what I think I'm doing these days is to allow people to uncover their assumptions, their individual assumptions, and to also get to see the assumptions that others hold. So that's the dialogue element still happening in all the projects that I do. We talk about the future, not because we're so sure that this is going to happen and not because we necessarily want to make it our way. Make the future the way we want it. But we want to understand what our own assumptions are and what the assumptions of the others are, and we'll also understand the limitations of those assumptions. We understand that maybe they just describe the box in which we're thinking. Okay, so that's the box, and that's the frame through which I look at the topic or the future of the topic of work or learning or whatever the topic might be. And often enough then people are ready to say, okay, maybe that box is too narrow. Maybe the frame is too conventional. Too standard. Why don't we at least play around with a different set of assumptions, a different frame, and see what happens. See whether this broadens our perspective, whether this allows us to see different things that we didn't see before. And especially if we do it together with others, we inspire each other and say, oh, let's try this, let's try that and play, just play around with it. But we need people to invite into this kind of work, who are ready for that. That could be exactly what you mentioned, that people are now understanding that the future is so open and maybe they're looking for ways to deal with that complexity and uncertainty and open up spaces for new opportunities.
Peter Hayward: Thank you Stefan.
We've had a nice appetizer. You've got a tremendous banquet of approaches and I'm gonna ask you now to drill in and explain a way of either thinking about the future or engaging with people that is core to the work that you are doing that you just wanna elaborate. So what do you wanna talk about?
Stefan Bergheim: One thing is complexity which is fundamental. The other is anticipation, the theory of anticipation. And then bringing that together is the futures literacy framework basically that has developed. So, one thing is complexity, which I was only introduced to by Mika Aaltonen in 2005. Before that, I had no idea, no understanding of it. I was not taught that at university. So I don't blame people if they also haven't been taught at school or in university. It happens a lot and I'm trying to relay that nowadays to a lot of people also in government, in large organizations, but it's really not trivial to understand. I'm using a lot the Cynefin framework that Dave Snowden developed with a clear distinction between complicated and complex systems.
Peter Hayward: The chaotic and the chaordic
Stefan Bergheim: yes. The the clear or simple as well, but that's not often so relevant for me. The main helpful distinction for me is between the complicated and the complex. So that is amazingly helpful, but also, apparently for a lot of people, very difficult to understand. I have spent hours with some politicians trying to explain that difference and even after three hours, they just didn't get it. Because it's not in their way of thinking. Maybe they're not allowed to think that way. They can't, they have no experience in it. I like to not blame anyone for not seeing it. But this is just where we stand, where I stand in this. But a necessary condition for the way I work, is that people understand complexity, at least the basics of it. At least that often the most relevant issues cannot be predicted. And that we need to open up the discussion and take in a lot of different ideas. And coming back to politicians, they they're often seen as the ones who know, who set the course. So why should you open up the dialogue as a politician?
That's why I admired at the time Angela Merkel for opening up into a futures dialogue and into wellbeing dialogue, listening to a lot of people. But that is really unusual for politicians. So complexity in the Cynefin Dave Snowden sense has been very influential for me, and also complexity in the Niklas Luhmann German sociologist. He, to me, made clear and visible that in complex systems we have specialization, which is super helpful. We focus on certain tasks, which leads to the obvious silos in our societies or the subsystems in his language. Politics, economics, or business, academia, religions, those are all subsystems that develop their own ways of doing things, their own languages, their own incentive structures. All fine. That got us to where we are as societies nowadays. Specialization. But it also requires some communication across those systems, across those silos. And that, in my understanding, is not happening enough.
Peter Hayward: This is very hard to do, isn't it? Yes. This was in my education, Habermas's point around the whole notion of the hermeneutic process, where you have to have a basis for communication. Are we trying to have technical accuracy? Are we trying to create exchange and freedom? Are we even reaching into the kind of spiritual eschatological question? Habermas was I think, brilliant in explaining how those silos that were necessary found it very hard to talk to one another because they often didn't have a common interest to talk about that spread across them.
Stefan Bergheim: No common language, no common interest, no common incentive structures. I think it is crucial for a society to have that. The Think Tank I started in 2009 is called the Center for Societal Progress. I think that we can't make progress as societies on whatever it might be on our education systems, on our health systems, on what, whatever the topic is, if we don't act together, get all the information in the same room. But we're not used to doing that. Because specialization has gone so far. I enjoy trying to bring people together, but I also see that oftentimes it's just impossible. On the German education system, I tried many times, but every time I've failed to bring people together or to have a host. It requires somebody to host that kind of dialogue. I can't do this with my little think tank. That's a way to big a task, but who else would be doing it? They're all in their own systems in their own silos. Who is the overarching organization or person who has the calling power to bring all these different actors to the same room?
Peter Hayward: And then of course, the complexity of the subsystems is that they are increasing in their own complexity. Oh . As they stay within their silo. And then so we have these increasingly chaordic subsystems that are not stable, that are constantly emerging. And yet here we are, we're saying we actually need we need these systems that are all evolving in their own particular way to somehow, I dunno how you do it. Whether you, I mean you can't control 'em you, but you need them to at least communicate horizontally or influence one another or learn off one another. And that I suppose is a wicked problem as they as they conceived of it in complexity policy.
Stefan Bergheim: That's a really deep underlying issue in each of the silos. You have it in academia, the different departments don't talk to each other. The different chairs in departments often don't talk to each other. You have it in companies as well. The different departments don't talk to each other as much as I'd say it, it would be required. So you have this issue in every single subsystem,. It's a general issue. Are you able to communicate with people who are slightly different from how you are? I always admire the Scandinavians. Maybe I'm too naive on that, but those are the countries or the nations or the cultures that in my perception have been best able to maintain a certain level of communication and as a result, also have created what, as a quality of life researcher, I call the happy variety of capitalism. They created outcomes for the population with high wellbeing, high trust in each other, good economic outlook, good education levels, all sorts of different things that, that work really well. And I think, but I can't prove it, that is partly or largely due to their ability to communicate well.
Peter Hayward: I think Elliott Jacques work on hierarchies and complexity would possibly say that they are small enough as countries to be able to have a dialogue across the breadth of the country.
Stefan Bergheim: I'm not buying into the size argument here, because I see the breakdown of communication already when there is 2, 3, 5 people involved. I don't think it depends on how many millions of inhabitants you are. It depends I think, more strongly on your history. The culture that you've developed. And if I'm talking about us here in Germany, I still think we are a very hierarchical country. There's a lot of emperor still breathing down our neck. There's a lot of hierarchies in organization. We're also an engineering country in Germany, and engineers are mostly in the complicated sphere. They don't need dialogue. They just develop their better car engine or their plane engine or what have you. They don't need dialogue. So if you're a hierarchical engineering country, it's different from a distributed educated country like Denmark or Sweden. So that's the cultural differences.
The next really influential model that I'm referring to a lot is Robert Rosen's Theory of Anticipation. That comes from biology. Many listeners probably know that we all have models. We talked about that before. We all have models. We have models of ourselves, and we have models of our environment. Who are we and what is happening outside? We observe our environment, we observe the system, we make inferences, and we build our models from what we see, what we sense. We make sense by building our models. I have my model and we just shared our models about size of a country and how that links to the ability to communicate. On all sorts of things we have our models. I have a model. You have a model. And often enough we just don't talk about those models. And that's what I learned from Robert Rosen’s work. He came to those ideas by observing that there had been a lot of conflict across different departments in the research institute that he worked at. He was wondering why are they fighting? He claimed that it's because they have different assumptions. They have different models and they have different assumptions. They don't know the models and the assumptions of the others. There would be a lot less fighting if we were aware of those assumptions and models.
That's partly what the futures literacy approach is about: trying to reveal those assumptions, make them visible. I don't need to have your assumptions because your assumptions are very specific to you because of the way you were taught. That's why I also like your storytelling bio question at the beginning. That shows where my assumptions, where my views of the world came from, what roots they have. Others have traveled different paths. Which is wonderful. We just talk with each other about those different paths.
Peter Hayward: And we're not looking for a commonality. We're almost trying to keep variety and to allow communication across difference.
Stefan Bergheim: Absolutely. That's why the title of my book is Futures - Open to Variety. How do you do that? That's the tricky part. If people want clarity, want sense of direction? What do I need to do? What's next? And I say let's keep open the variety and create a space for emergence for new actions to, to come up. So again, it really depends on what is the context. Sometimes you have to create clarity and focus, and sometimes you create a broad spectrum of all sorts of crazy ideas. And then you see what happens later for some organizations this way, other organizations that way. And that's why I like the futures literacy framework that Riel Miller has created. This gives the flexibility to do any of that, depending on the context, depending on the need. Why do you want to deal with the future? Why do you want to engage? Why do you want to talk to each other? And then you pick what you think is the most appropriate way. You only know with hindsight whether the intervention then really worked. Whether it really got you what you wanted. That's where these days I come in as a designer and facilitator having gone through a lot of those projects and processes. We hear from the partnerswe want to do this and that. And then I can suggest, maybe you pick that method or this method and you play that way and you invite these kinds of heterogeneity into the room. Or maybe it's better to stick with a small team first and explore and then go more broadly. These are sorts of design issues that really depend on the context.
Peter Hayward: Thanks, Stefan.
So now I'm interested in the futures emerging around Stefan Bergheim. What's getting your attention? What's getting you excited? What's getting you thinking? What are the particular emerging aspects that are top of mind for you and why?
Stefan Bergheim: It's actually a really difficult question for me because I'm trying to stay away these days from all sorts of issue discussions, content discussions. I work on projects on the future of democracy, the future of trust, the future of health, the future of what have you. I'm probably not able to make sense of all the impulses I get there and understand what's happening and I'll leave it to the others, to the experts, to those who are staying in that field to make sense of those. My role is to enable them, to put them into a position or to facilitate them creating new insights for themselves, not necessarily mine. This doesn't mean that I'm not interested in what's going on in the world of course.
The war here in Europe. What a nightmare, what a disaster. And that we were so ill prepared that we were even ill prepared to react to. Few people really saw it coming. With hindsight, many more obviously. In Germany. What 's totally upsetting for me is that we had 50% of our gas coming from one supplier. How could that happen? And then we also sold them the storage facilities. That's something that upsets me.. Now everyone sees it now. I see that very importantly and in my terminology, a lack of futures literacy that's behind that. A lack of ability to anticipate different futures. I use it, I frame it, I turn it around into making the case for strengthening this capability across the board. Whether it works, it's a different matter.
Peter Hayward: Do you think in some ways that, the first year of covid was almost another example of countries being slow to react or countries having built logistic structures, health systems that were just completely unready for something that, really, could be not said it was going to happen in 2020, but it could be said it was gonna land some time. The old infectious virus has been part of everyone's scenario set since probably SARS.
Stefan Bergheim: At least since SARS. Again, I don't think you can be prepared for everything out there. The costs for preparing would be too high. If you are prepared for all contingencies. That just doesn't work. But at least you should be discussing in more broader spheres than just among a couple of futurists or epidemiologists. It needs to go broader. And then the crucial issue again is how do you react to this? Something new is happening. Are you totally shell shocked? For a few days probably. But then what do you do? Maybe we're initially at least in the chaotic sphere.It takes some time, but then you need to get your act together, talk to each other and find decent solutions.
Peter Hayward: I think the same thing you described is that you had the silos all trying to do their own bit of sense making agility, but what the broader system needed was the different systems to talk to one another and start to coordinate across. So we had a health system that was working with a border system that was working with an employment system, and they had to actually make it work horizontally rather than just try to solve it in one silo.
Stefan Bergheim: Absolutely. And you need to practice that. You need occasions where you just play around if there's no crisis, no shock, which is fortunately most of the times the regular state of things. But you do your exercises. Basically on a different track and the next track will be different again. At least you know who to talk to and at least know who's convening. Again: who's the host for these horizontal discussions, dialogue elements. Who's the convenor? Some structure has to be there. Some way of preparation has to be there, but not in terms of all sorts of medicine being stockpiled. I grew up in the eighties. I served in the German army when there was still the Cold War going on. We had loads of stockpiles back then, and we gave up on that and nowadays we don't even have enough stockpiles for a child's medicine against coughing. We had a scarcity of this kind of medicine recently. We are taking it way too far here in not keeping on our stocks.
Peter Hayward: You mentioned future of democracy, and what we’ve all been noticing is as there is this turbulence going on in the social and the economic and the foreign affairs, we are seeing pop up around Europe and also in America, these kind of people who have much simpler models of the world, that have much simpler explanations as to how you fix the problems. Have you got a sense of the trajectory that’s going on regarding people’s confidence in government or confidence in Democratic government?
Stefan Bergheim: I have a story that I think I’m seeing here especially in the German context. After German reunification with all the changes in Eastern Germany in particular, a lot of people there were just left on the sidelines, not looked after, couldn't cope with the new system, weren't heard, weren't involved in the new upswing that happened especially in the West. I think everyone, every human being wants to be seen and heard everywhere around the world. And my sense is that this didn't happen enough. I know Germany better than the US but maybe there as well. If people aren't heard by the standard system, there will be others who make them feel heard. There will be populists who say, I hear your pain. I know what its about. I have the solution. And then people fall for those simple answers, these simple models. Then there's some powerful interests who leverage that, who want to benefit from that upheaval. it could be media in some countries. It could be individual politicians. In Eastern Germany the far right politicians, many of them were born in the West of Germany. They moved over there. That is probably a controversial statement, to benefit from the unrest that was brewing there. Which is disgusting, but it's an explanation. What happened sadly, and maybe not just in Germany, but also in other countries.
Peter Hayward: It is, I'm not gonna say it's not a weakness, but a certainly a property of democratic government is you only need 51%. You probably need even less than 51%. That if you haven't done a good job in managing the majority of people's expectations of a good future, then if you only are pitching your message to an elite minority, then all democracy leaves itself open to what you described.
Stefan Bergheim: Absolutely. And I'd say even 10 or 20% of upset people can be very difficult in the long term. And again, my solution then obviously is, and I've work with lots of governments at the local and national level in Germany, to go out there and talk to people. Listen to them in particular. Not do your one-way message sending thing as you always do but listen to them. But then I found out that a lot of structures are not able to set that up at the local level. What do you say? We should go out to the rural areas of our country. No way. We've never done that. Plus there's a structural inhibitor here . If you are in the bureaucracy you take the orders from the politicians, right? Which is the way it's done in a democracy, which is totally fine. So your job is not to go out and talk to the ordinary citizens out there, because that's not the way we're structured. On the one hand see that this is the way it's done, but then I also think this is too narrow. We need the bureaucrats to be able to know and listen to what the ordinary citizens are saying. And we need ordinary citizens, whatever that is, to have the feeling that they are understood and heard by those in power. Otherwise, this is not going to work. But this is difficult for a lot of politicians. We have politicians involved in these dialogue projects, who just didn't want to do it this way. They just went to the dialogue events and gave a speech.
In this one occasion that I have in mind, there was a setup where there were people that were different from that politician. That was a unique opportunity so well set up with young people. There was such a great opportunity for that politician and his team to listen to a diversity of perspectives, but they didn't take that opportunity. Also the students, they loved listening to the politician. They had never heard a politician speak before. They enjoyed it, which is also understandable. It's something that we need to practice at all sorts of levels. And then we have another anecdote in Germany. People here love debates. There's debating societies, debating courses and all that. Debate comes from the French, “battre” (to beat down). You hit each other with your arguments. That's not the dialogue that I have in mind. That's not nurturing the mutual understanding of your position and my position. That's not what I have in mind. So oftentimes I worked really hard and long to say no, if you want to understand, if you want to listen to people, don't call it a debate.
Peter Hayward: The term that's been creeping into some of the things I've been reading is you walk alongside people. You actually talk as you walk shoulder to shoulder rather than facing one another. It's actually a journey you are both on.
Stefan Bergheim: Or from the dialogue literature, dialogue is a conversation with the center rather than sides. It's quote I love very much. So we have a shared interest, a shared topic, and it's about that issue. For example, we want to improve education in Germany. Isn't that a worthwhile center topic? Butwe keep fighting along so many different lines.
Peter Hayward: You've mentioned a couple of times a phrase that I think is interesting. I'd just like you to unpack at this notion of the host, the notion of the person who holds the conversation. And I'm gonna assume you mean that person isn't necessarily invested in part of the conversation. That person, the host job is to ensure that there is a circle, there is a center. Is that right?
Stefan Bergheim: There's three different roles that I like to distinguish. One is the participants, of course. They add their content, their perspectives, their images of the future. Then there's the facilitator who who holds the container, who holds the space, who designs the event beforehand, and then holds space and gives people an opportunity to contribute. The host is the personor the organization who brings all that together. Who offers a room, who has the calling power to bring the participants into the room. Who knows that maybe a facilitated process is better than if I, as a host give my perspective and then have a Q and A session from participants afterwards. So a person or an organization who understands the value of these participatory processes. So three different roles, hosts, facilitator and participants.
Peter Hayward: So how does Stefan explain to people what Stefan does when they don't necessarily understand what it is that Stefan does?
Stefan Bergheim: We have a case right now where we're trying to work with teenagers on futures. We had to think really hard about how to communicate. How do we bring them into the room? How does it feel attractive for them to join? Usually when I have the opportunity to talk to someone directly, I ask them : you deal with the future all the time, don't you? And often start events with that introduction, going to the weather forecast issue or the crossing the street issue or the planning for your next holiday vacation or what you want to study. There is always the future involved. Sometimes you don't need an expert to do that. Wwhen you cross the streets, it's automatic. But sometimes maybe it's a good idea to do it in a bit more structured way, a bit more conscious way with additional methods that you don't learn in school. And that's basically where I come in. I would explain to them that's what I have. I have a big toolbox of different methods, depending on what your issue is. I'm not going to help you plan your next holiday. I do that for my own family. But if it's something bigger, larger, I can support you with different tools and methods. That's simple. It's a universal thing dealing with the future. And there are different ways of doing it, different methods that can be used. I just have some methods that might be helpful.
Peter Hayward: Do you occasionally step into the host space?
Stefan Bergheim: I did, when I was focusing on the quality of life topic, when we were looking in Frankfurt to do this. I call it a quality of life process from dialogue, visions, indicators and actions. I was looking for a host and I couldn't find one. So I decided let us be the host and invite and also be partly the facilitators, but we had others who were then doing the facilitation work. So I basically, was, or my organization, the Center for Societal Progress, we were the hosting organization because of a lack of someone else doing it. But we had limited resources to do that. It was a great exercise. Great practice. I learned a lot and we invite a lot of people. I think we created a lot of interesting insights that carried through. Even 10 years later they're still, I think, relevant. But I'm not doing this anymore. Now I'm always looking for someone else to host and to do the invitation, except for some little things. But I'm hosting something on the futures literacy community in German, but that's probably not what you mean. We're offering trainings, we're offering open futures literacy laboratories, and I'm offering network meetings where everyone who's interested in this kind of work comes together.
Peter Hayward: I'm just wondering whether we lack hosts to have these conversations about the things that we need to bring back in the old days, I'm older than you. We used to have a thing called a Search Conference. I think you probably you might have heard of search conferences and that was the simple idea of let's try to put the system in the room. And there were massive search conferences. Were over a hundred, 150 people and there were multiple facilitators, and there was an organization that hosted the conference that actually said the conferences brought together to put the system in the room. And it just strikes me that when you now introduce hosting, I'm sitting here going, if we look around in 2023, who are the people who would host these conversations? And I, it's not apparent to me who these organizations or groups are that could operate as hosts.
Stefan Bergheim: I totally love the method of Future Search. I have a chapter in my book on “Futures - Open to Variety”, which is about this. I tell people, especially in a controversial situation, that's a good method to be used. But I haven't really found hosts for that in Germany as well. That's the underlying issue. The host that I tend to work with sometimes are in companies. Ideally, it's the CEO, it needs to be high up. I'm also a big fan of Frederic Laloux and his work on Reinventing Organizations.
I don't know whether this well-known in the futures community. He said that you can't have a change in an organization longer term if it's not supported from high up. Which is very sadbecause I think I'd like to go away from the hierarchical structures. But that's the fact right now. We need support from high up. So ideally in organizations, in companies, in one way or another, we need the support from the CEO or at least the head of the department. The understanding needs to be there. We want to do this. So that's a typical host. Sometimes we have university professors or departments in universities who also understand that there is an issue. But so far it's a challenge for them to really generate that calling power, especially into the general public. As a university, you're an elite academic organization and maybe don't have the reach into normal citizens. But you can learn it. We discovered that it didn't work for citizens to show up. You invited, but they didn't come. What can you do? Maybe you go there. You don't invite into your rooms, but you go into their rooms. So there are ways of doing it. You're still basically the main host, but then you have little hosts and you go to them. There are different possibilities out there. And again, yes, I see a big need for more hosts.
Peter Hayward:
So Stefan, I noticed on the listserv for the Federation that you posted some questions that came up in the Berlin Federation conference. Why did you post those questions to the listserv of the Federation now? What were you trying to do?
Stefan Bergheim: First of all, I'm a very big fan of questions. In the Futures Literacy Laboratories, there is a phase where we invite people to ask new questions. I thought at the end of the conference in Berlin, it was time for people to reflect on the overall conference on what happened, and what conclusions they draw from that. And with my preference for questions, formulate those issues as questions. So that was my invitation at the end of the conference. And we distributed moderator cards and pens so everyone had a chance to write down their questions. What I did afterwards and what I send out on the listserv and distribute nowto everyone was basically the harvest of all those questions.
So it's initially not my questions, but it's the questions that the participants of the conference asked. I just sorted them a little bit from my subjective perspective on what I thought are similar questions. I found them super helpful. I added some deeper questions where I thought maybe there is a question behind the question, which is also helpful. One of the overarching questions that I think I saw relates back to the hosting issue that we discussed. It relates to the issue of what is the role of the federation or of other organizations. Is it a host? Is that the organization? Is that the people who bring together the different perspectives for sharing, for conversations with the center rather than with sides? And that apply futures methods to themselves basically? To their own organization. Do a Future Search, for example, for the futures community. Do a visioning process, do a reframing, whatever you want to do, talk with each other. The Listserv could be a place where some of the smaller conversations could be held. The next conference in Paris in October, the 50 year anniversary conference, could be an occasion where this hosting conversation dialogue element could play a big role. I tried to introduce that already in the Berlin conference. But I'm hoping and dreaming that more of that can happen going forward.
Peter Hayward: It's still only fairly early times from when you posted the question, but what's your sense of how it was received by the Federation members?
Stefan Bergheim: There were some members who responded as I was hoping. They indicated that there are some action items in there, which is usually also in the sequence of how I work from the question. There is often a quest that is developing. So somebody grabs a question or a set of questionsand , wants to do something with those. Participation of younger people or definition of terminology or whatever. There is a long list of possibilities in there, but in an emerging complex system I just hope to see some people then just do it. They don't need my permission at all to do something with those questions. Just grab it and go with it wherever the energy is and do something with it.
Peter Hayward: From Future Pod's perspective, we talk across the communities. We have a lot of Federation members, like yourself and me. We've got the Association of Professional Futurists, who is another community. And then there are all the people that sit in the future's ecosystem, who don't belong to either, but still are in the ecosystem. Given technology and given all experiences of two years with COVID you would imagine something was possible that doesn't require us all to spend carbon to come together to have a conversation.
Stefan Bergheim: Absolutely. You can have small focused conversations of an hour or two hours. You can have large conferences in that spirit that are online. But again, it requires someone to host it. Someone to invite into it. Someone to design it. So why are we meeting? What's the purpose? What's the why behind our coming together? What do we want to create that carries on after this conversation? I think every futurist asks these kinds of questions when we engage with partners, with clients. Maybe we can apply some of those to ourselves and host online conversations, host conversations on a listserv, host conversations onsite, host conversations just among members, among a wider community. Or host conversations just among academic futurists, just among corporate futurists. There are all sorts of possibilities. Just grab them there's so much more out there. Yes.
Peter Hayward: I am gonna wrap it there Stefan. It's been terrific to meet you and and talk to a fellow exe economist who's who's found the life is much richer than macroeconomics ever was. But thank you personally and on behalf of the Future Pod community, thanks for taking some time out to have a chat.
Stefan Bergheim: Thank you so much. It was a real pleasure, joy, and honor to be here.
Peter Hayward: My guest today was Stefan Bergheim. You'll find more details about the things that Stefan spoke about in the show notes on the website. I hope after hearing Stefan, you feel encouraged to design and support your own futures dialogues from the center rather than the edges. Future pod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you'd like to support the Pod then please check out our Patreon link on our website. I'm Peter Hayward saying goodbye for now.