EP 161 : Together and Unique - Fabienne Goux-Baudiment

 
 

A return interview with the French Futurist, Fabienne Goux-Baudiment which covers our emerging social evolution, Meritory Foresight, the new VUCA, artificial intelligence and gaming.

Interviewed by: Peter Hayward

More about Fabienne

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Audio Transcript


Peter Hayward: Do we face novel challenges or are we merely repeating previous patterns? Are the concepts we employ to understand our challenges adequate to what we face and have to address? If we need new ways to think about our human situation then where might we find the courage to think differently?

Fabienne Goux-Baudiment:

The human being is shaped by two main structural trends. One is the need to live together. We are a social animal. And during all our evolution, we have elaborated, developed, experimented ways, many ways to live together. And still, I think we don't know how to do it in a plain way and in a sustainable way. So this is still a work in progress.

And the second factor, which is shaping the human being is that he is feeling him, herself as a unique individual. We're unique both by what we are when we were born, and what we acquired during our experience of life, and doing. So what we all want for us is freedom. Freedom and justice. Justice because we want to be recognized as different from the others. And we want this uniqueness be recognized and be understood. And we need freedom because we want to develop ourself as a unique being. And to do that you need to be free. But being free and asking for personal justice, I would say it just at the opposite side of living together.

Peter Hayward: That is my guest on Futurepod today. Fabienne Goux-Baudiment. A French Futurist and researcher. It has been far too long since I've spoken to Fabienne again and her ideas are always deep and stimulating and she is always a joy to speak to.

Welcome back to Future Pod Fabienne.

Fabienne Goux-Baudiment: Thank you Peter. Very happy to be with you this morning,

Peter Hayward: Fabienne, it's probably been three years since our last interview. We interviewed you, I think in the second year of Future Pod and FuturePod's, now five years old. There's been a little bit happening in the world for three years.

Fabienne Goux-Baudiment: Yeah. Almost four years now. So Yes yes. Many things happening. Indeed.

Peter Hayward: So generally how was the kind of before Covid, during Covid and after Covid life for you and your family in France?

Fabienne Goux-Baudiment: Wow. I have to say that, I am a bit ashamed to say that during the Covid lockdown, it was quite nice for us because suddenly we found a peace that, yeah. we never experienced during our life. We were together at home with an incredibly sunny year, so we spent a lot of time outside in the garden, and I had almost no work because most of of my time is taken by giving keynote speeches. And of course I kept the research work, so I had something to do.

But I have to say that mostly half of my time was free, which never happened in my life. So it was a good opportunity to rediscover a way to live together with my husband, because usually we are separated all the day. So yes, we had to cope together again, which is good before retirement. It was a good experience. The second thing was that we never had so many communications with our friends all over the world. Constantly having news from one and another, like a huge worldwide web of friends and family: How are you? What are you doing? What's happening?

It was very interesting. For me it was a very interesting time. So we had the chance not to get the Covid at that time. We got it just at the end of the last year. So it was one of the most benign version of this virus. But yeah life was good at the time of the lockdowns, the virus lockdowns, because we had many in France. Then we rediscovered the world in a way that the world has become a little bit different from what it was before. We had an incredible demand for being presential, I dunno how you say it in English, but you have to be there. The people just refuse, when I say people, clients. They didn't want remote participation anymore. They want you to be physically present, what we call 'presential' in France. I spent the last year really to run from a place to another in so many different places that I thought so improbable, because big companies wanted to go in very small towns in the countryside to hold major events.

It was very unusual. Usually in France, everything happens in Paris or sometimes in some big cities like Lyon. But in this case, I just discovered very small French cities and I didn't know even that they could host so many people in these places.

Peter Hayward: So what are your clients asking you about, post Covid?

Fabienne Goux-Baudiment: Post-Covid… it was interesting because before the Covid they mostly asked about very operational things like the evolution of management, the lean society, something very concrete for them. And now it seems that after the Covid, our clients are more, I would say, philosophical.

For example, they continuously ask about the alien generation. This is a topic that is not changing at all. Even worse, I think that during the lockdown parents rediscovered their children and they suddenly discovered education as well, and how bad education was. We had many topics about education, about this alien generation and why they are so alien.

About the Liquid Society, and especially the fact that people cannot be put any longer in boxes. They are moving from one box to another one. And they are Liquid. They go out of the boxes and they move.

And now it doesn't mean so much that you are heterosexual or homosexual, but you are mostly pansexual. Which is a completely different thing: it is not about being 'bi' (as we used to say in France) but 'pan', I don't know how you say it, but pansexuality is something very different. It means that you are no longer governed by your sex, but you are governed by the love you have for someone; which is something interesting. So they asked me about that.

They asked me about family. What is a family, deeply. You have a family: who is now the father who is not the biological father, or the mother who is not the biological mother? You have children living together who are not siblings. So it's quite complicated to understand what is a family today.

So, it is part of the question.

It's very interesting that most of the questions my client asked were about society, not the company itself, not the corporate or foresight or this kind of thing, but about society. Who are we? How are we living? Is a way of life a sustainable one? They were also very interested by the fact that suddenly they became aware of the nature. They saw nature coming back in the cities and with animals… well, for example, in my garden, we have never seen a butterfly during the last 10 years at least, and now they are coming back. And people can see this really with their eyes. It is not something from a theory or from books or whatsoever: it's something very concrete, something that you really see.

So yeah, I would say that the main topics were about education, family, Liquid Society, and, of course since the end of the last year, the metaverse.

Peter Hayward: Yeah. Zygmunt Baumann coined that phrase, Liquid Modernity. Over 40 years ago now.

Oh yeah. Even, yeah, at the end of in the 90: he published it in 98.

So is it, was Bauman prescient or do you believe that this was present when Bauman was writing it, but now it has been speeded up?

Fabienne Goux-Baudiment: I think it has been speeded up. I didn't think he was prescient, I think he was a really excellent sociologist. And that, as a Social Scientist, he really understood what we, Futurists, are doing, which is to look back at the structural trends in order to understand what they will produce. In doing so Zygmunt Bauman really did a work of futurist, and this is really important for me because I read it of course, and I tried to see what he was seeing at that time. Let me put it this way. The human being is shaped by two main structural trends. One is the need to live together. We are a social animal. And during all our evolution, we have elaborated, developed, experimented ways, many ways to live together. And still, I think we don't know how to do it in a plain way and in a sustainable way. So, this is still a work in progress.

And the second factor, which is shaping the human being, is that he is feeling him/her-self as a unique individual. So it is, I think, our personal uniqueness. No one can be compared to another one, we are too unique. We're unique both by what we are when we were born, and by what we acquired during our experience of life. And doing so, what we all want for us is freedom. Freedom and justice. Justice because we want to be recognized as different from the others. And we want this uniqueness be recognized and be understood. And we need freedom because we want to develop ourselves as a unique being. And to do that you need to be free. But being free and asking for personal justice, I would say, is just at the opposite side of living together. I think that the question of Liquidity is the fact that liquidity today is a new way to live together, by getting out of the categories that living together imposed us during the evolution. And I think that this is what Zygmunt Bauman found.

Peter Hayward: You told me a story of yours that I found quite incredible when you told me. And it, it was a story about France and it was a story about a society that had fairly rigid categories. And this was the story of what you wanted to call your son. That there were certain names you could use and you wanted to use a name which wasn't considered to be a proper name and you had to go to court to be able to name your son what you did. That's right. Is it, have I got the story right?

Fabienne Goux-Baudiment: Yes, exactly. It was the name of my grandfather who was Ukrainian. Yes. And this name wasn't recognized by the French authorities. So I had to go to the court.

Peter Hayward: So how does a society like that, a society that says there are certain names you can use, there are certain names that we can recognize. How does a society like that cope with what you discussed about individual freedom and personal justice?

Fabienne Goux-Baudiment: It doesn't cope with it. And this is the exact reason why you see all the social unrest that you can observe since…, I think that the apex was in 2019. If you look at the world in 2019 you can see that all over the world, on every continent, you had social unrest: big manifestations of people who were unhappy, who were not willing to accept the rules that, maybe not the society, but the politics were trying to impose them. I'm talking about Hong Kong about Colombia for example, in Africa as well. All over the world, you had such a manifestation. So, I think that the problem we have today is that individuals are developing themself quicker than the society is able to adapt. And that this discrepancy between the evolution of the individuals asking for more personal justice and more uniqueness and a different education and different jobs and different rights, is no longer on the same track as the society that tries, according to very old models, to keep people together.

All the societies right now in the world are radicalizing themselves in order to strengthen the bond between people. But when you strengthen this bond, it's always the bond of one part of your society against the other. And most of the time it is against the Other with a big O. Which is a different One, the one who is not part of you. And that's why you have so many movements of the right-hand parties (political parties) that you can observe all over the world. This radicalization is an attempt to maintain the bonds, the national bonds, but maybe it is because the nations are no longer the right category for the citizen of the world?

Peter Hayward: And it might also, to some extent, reflect an aging population where we might have older people wanting to hold onto the old categories and the younger people having absolutely nothing to do with those categories.

Fabienne Goux-Baudiment: Absolutely. As a famous, what we call here as a WASP population, Yes, the white Anglican I don't remember the rest, but Anglo-Saxon

Peter Hayward: Protestant.

Fabienne Goux-Baudiment: Yes. Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Yes, that's right.

Peter Hayward: There's a term in Australia, Fabienne they refer to it as Pale, Stale, and Male. Wow.

Fabienne Goux-Baudiment: Wow. Yeah. Good, really good. I will use it.

Peter Hayward: Go ahead. Yeah. So you've also been doing, you've also been continuing your work in Morocco. Do you wanna talk to the listeners about some of that work that you've been doing for quite a long time now you've been working in Morocco?

Fabienne Goux-Baudiment: It has been 20 years now. My first contract was in 2004, so yes, almost 20 years.. Of course, during the time of Covid, we were asked to produce a strategic report on the Post Covid world. And it was where I spoke about this Liquid Society and many other things, but our first report was in 2020 about the post Covid world. Just before that, I don't remember if we talk about this, but the last report in 2019 was about a new model of Development. And if you remember, my big theme for the previous decade, from the beginning of 2000 to 2018, was about the Great Transition. And, since 2018, it's about the new model of development called X.0. I wrote it down for the first time and I was very happy with that because it gave way in Morocco to the adoption of a new model of development. Not the totality of what I described, but some part of it.

So I'm really happy with that.

So then, we work on the Post Covid world trying to describe what it could be and what would be the impact of digitization for example. We have seen many made attempts to digitalize things that were not, like libraries for example, bookstores, many activities that were not digitalized at the time., so what it could become in the future. And then I took two years to produce the following strategic report, which was published just in the beginning of this year, which is about the ocean, as UNESCO decided to claim Ocean decade for the years 2020s. So now it's a United Nation theme and we have many Governmental conferences and many groups working on the ocean. But at that time when we began, it was in 2021, nobody was talking about the ocean, and it was very difficult to find information. Now it's exactly the contrary. You have too much information, about it.

Now we have a 300 pages report about this. Keep in mind that if you want to elaborate a foresight work, you have to work in a system thinking approach. And so many people are talking about this system thinking approach, but they don't practice it. And we try really to do something very accurate about this, which is that we talk about the ocean, but we also talk about all the interfaces of the ocean. Ocean with a cryosphere. Ocean with a lithosphere. Ocean with land. Ocean with ocean in an island system. We really try to establish a real system thinking vision of the ocean, and to work at the planetary level talking about one ocean like we have talked about one health during Covid, but here it's really about talking of one ocean: there are no borders in the ocean and fishes and everything can move freely. But you have some hotspots, especially what we call upwelling. Upwelling is the place where all the nutrients come up to the surface and so will nourish, will feed all the living beings around. And this is very important to take this into consideration. We also spoke of the Deep Living level in the ocean, usually you talk only about the fisheries and about the living beings in the surface which is quite shallow. But here we talked also about the depth of the ocean and the richness of this layer. I tried also to put in some new concepts because I think that new concepts are important to change the world and especially, maybe, three of them.

The first one, I don't know how you can translate it: we are talking about "ecosphere", "ecosystem" so it's "oceanosphere, which is a way to understand and work on the ocean as a global entity with both non-living and living entities inside. And it's a way to describe the whole entirety of the ocean. Not only the liquid part of it, but also the materials, also the microscopical things that you cannot see which are not living things but not dead things neither. So all these kinds. Oceanosphere is really an interesting concept.

There is also the concept of maritory. Until now you talk of territory. Territory because terr"terre" is land, it's earth. Meritory , it's sea. And the idea is to conceive, to think about, the coastal interface: so I would say five kilometers of the land/the coast, and five kilometers of sea, both together as a territory, so Meritory. Something that you have to deal with, that you have to understand that you have to cope with because it is what it is and you cannot change it. If you change it the consequences on our climate, on the fisheries, on the sea level rising, on the life of so many people living along these coasts will change. So you have to manage them and you have to deal with them. So Meritory for me is something that is really a new concept for public policies.

And the last one, it is a concept for countries, mostly for nation states. You say "entrepreneur". Okay. Entrepreneur is a guy who is able to have a leadership and is able to have a project and to assume this project and to build a company and to make business with it and to employ people and so on. And for us, Aquapreneur is the same thing. It is not about creating a company, it's about creating a way to manage efficiently water, making business from it for sure, because you need to make business from something, but in a sustainable way. In a clever way. When you create a company, of course you have to make business, but you won't kill your employees. You won't kill your client, you won't destroy your resources. You have to manage them. It is the same thing for ocean. You have to consider ocean as an asset and not kill its living beings, not kill its ecosystems, not kill its equilibrium as well. So that's the idea:. the concept of Aquapreneur.

Peter Hayward: I'm curious Fabienne as to why for so long? Entrepreneurs, not aquapreneurs, but yes entrepreneurs have been so uninterested in the ocean and more interested in space and why we've always had people interested in exploring and living out there. And seemingly we are either disinterested or just really don't want to go and consider the oceans as really the great undiscovered frontier.

I

Fabienne Goux-Baudiment: I love your question so much, Peter, really! This is exactly the same question I asked myself when I begin this report, that I tried to understand. What I understood from my modest research is that, when you look at the sky, you can see the stars, you can see the vastness, and okay, you feel you are part of it and you are attracted by it. You want to go to the stars, but you do not go to the stars. That's the point. And the trouble is that the sea is a star. The sea is an absolutely alien planet to us and – we have to understand this - because of what? Because of water. We cannot breathe water; if you stay too long in the water, you begin to deteriorate your skin barrier. Water will kill you. This is the first thing. And the second thing is that it is not only water, it is salty water. And the salt is even deadly for us. So you have here a totally alien planet just here on our own planet, which is supposed to be livable for us, bringing us oxygens and all what we need. But inside this planet there is another one. Not hidden. Visible for everyone but you cannot live in and it is so complicated to access it. For example, can you imagine that we have a better mapping of Mars, and of course the moon, than we have of the ocean. Isn't it incredible?

We are not even sure of the way it's working. It is so little that we know about the ocean with no comparison with Mars or the Moon. I think the reason why is that we are just afraid of the ocean. We are afraid by the pressure when you are going down deep in the abyss, you have an incredible pressure that can just break you. You cannot breathe in it. And the salt will attack everything that you will bring in and corrupt everything. It's a deadly place for us. But that, but does it mean that we have to destroy it?

No, because the problem is that we have to change our paradigm. The current paradigm is that we are living on earth and in all our minds, earth is soil, is land. It's something you live on. Okay? But it is wrong because Earth is not Earth. Earth is just the sea. First you have more sea on Earth than you have land. That's the point. And land is just a part of the Earth that is mainly an ocean. And as long as we will understand Earth as land only with some sea over it, we won't be able to change our way of mistreating the ocean. We have to understand that we are living on an Ocean-based planet on which some land can support our life. But the thing is that if tomorrow this ocean will stop to function as it is doing right now, the land won't support life anymore. Mostly because ocean is the first provider of oxygen. It is a plankton that, that is creating most of oxygen. If you suppress the plankton, at long term no life will be possible on Earth. We have clearly to change our mind about the ocean.

Peter Hayward: I can hear that your paradigm has changed. When you were talking to me about Territorial Prospective and yes, completely, and yet there is still Territorial Foresight. Yes. But you are now including in territory, the ocean.

Fabienne Goux-Baudiment: Exactly, as a Meritory. And I things that we absolutely need to develop a Meritory Foresight. Absolutely. This is my deep conviction.

Peter Hayward: Lovely. Oh, next time we speak, you can tell me about the development of Meritory Foresight. I'll be looking forward to it. So Fabienne we had a bit of a chat before we came on. You were talking about how we do Horizon Scanning and how most of us in our field, we scan the horizon for certain things and you've got a view that we need to broaden what we are looking for with our Horizon Scanning.

Fabienne Goux-Baudiment: Sure. Of course all the Futurists in the world are doing Horizon Scanning, we cannot work without this. But the thing is that most of us track emerging trends., some continue to track weak signals (but I think that weak signals are very complicated in a VUCA world). I think that we need to have a better understanding as well of what is happening in the society. And most of the time we have no tools to understand how quick are evolutions in society. We leave it to Social Scientists and then we, as Futurists, try to build up on what the Social Scientists can observe. But I think that we need to go faster and faster enough to understand the deep, really deep and maybe unconscious evolution of society worldwide. And for this, emerging concepts are interesting for me. Most of these concepts will just fade out after a while, that's right. But most of them will tell us something about how the society is thinking right now and how this can orientate the evolutions.

And for example, among the last concepts I spotted, I saw LAMO. I know that Lamo means something specific in Slang American, but this is not about this. It's a French acronym, LAMO, L for linear. A for Anthropocentric, let's say Human-centred, M for Mechanistic, and O for excessively Orderly Thinking. It's the way of characterizing the kind of thinking that allows us to industrialize the world. To name the rationalization characterizing the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. And obviously this way of thinking Linear and Mechanistic is no longer adapted to the world we are living in since the, I would say, the end of the last second World War. And even more since 1989, which is, for me, the beginning of the 21st century. So I think that the fact that now social scientists are becoming aware that this way of thinking is no longer the one which is needed to help us to progress, is for me, something just 'wow'. It's a kind of huge, huge game changer for me. So this is the kind of things that I'm tracking when I'm doing horizon scanning.

The second one, for example, is the fact that, after Covid, so many people wanted to find a new way to express VUCA. We have been living in the VUCA world since I would say the end of the eighties, (so I remind " Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous" world). And now we so badly need a new expression to characterize the post covid world. So I went through all the literature about this, a little bit, and I think that there is a kind of VUCA 2 that we could use. The V for Vulnerability: we suddenly discovered that we were highly vulnerable, despite our high level of civilization. Still a huge Uncertainty: And even I think that, in the first Vuca, uncertainty was conjunctural while, in this second VUCA expression or version, Uncertainty has become structural, we won't find again certainty in the coming century, I think. And C for Criticality. Our organizations are in a very critical situation. It means that if we don't change them, they will fail. We have had a huge shake and I think that if we have another huge shake — and we will have it, with the Debt Crisis that is coming, with the Climate Crisis, all these crisis that we see — we have to change, we have to diminish the level of criticality of our situation regarding these crisis.

And the A for Artificialization. The fact that with Covid, as I said previously, we suddenly became aware that during all the last century, we have pushed Nature outside of our own world. We have wrapped ourselves in a kind of dome and we pushed Nature outside this dome, the urban dome I would say. Artificialization is the fact that now we understand that we are taking more and more soil for new cities, for urbanization. It is also the fact that we are living on chemicals and no longer on natural things and so on. So I think that this concept of Artificialization is really coming very strong now from this Covid period. These two emergent concepts are really saying us something about the way our society is evolving.

Peter Hayward: And I take your critique of the Field that we've probably been Horizon Scanning the safer, easier things. And the challenge you are putting out to us as a Field is that we need to actually scan more around these conceptual, philosophical ideas because these are the rules in inverted commas of how people are gonna think of themselves in the world.

Fabienne Goux-Baudiment: Yes, exactly. And I think that the trouble of most of the Futurists today is they describe the world in which a kind of static individual would live in the next 20, 50, 100 years, but they completely forget that this individual is not static at all. And it is changing itself. And that there will be the fact that the context is changing, society is changing, and the individual is changing, is multiplying the effect. And that the result will be far different from what we currently imagine.

Peter Hayward: At the moment we are seeing a frisson of excitement and fear being caused by the seeming rapid development of the Large Language Models that are being characterized as the first iteration of an artificial type of intelligence. And we're seeing a lot of serious people coming out calling this the end of humanity, some calling it the hope of humanity. Is this part of this new VUCA for you or is this another one of these concepts? Is this the concept of what is human? What is life? What is person?


Fabienne Goux-Baudiment: I think that it's too early to think of it. I have been very surprised that so many of my clients suddenly ask me conference or research notes about what is the Metaverse. As soon as Zuckerberg announces the Meta and I was very surprised of the very, very poor knowledge, technical knowledge of decision makers, especially in the field of tertiary activities. Not industrialized, but tertiary. And maybe it's different in the United States or Australia, I don't know. But in France we have more a culture of social sciences and nd philosophy than a culture of maybe mathematics or technology. So maybe it's purely French, but I have been very surprised, and it has been a long time that they ask me to tell them about the advance of robotics, of artificial intelligence and suddenly the metaverse, it was something new. And very strangely, during the last six months, I have had no demand from my clientry about ChatGPT to name it.

Because all the papers we are mentioning are about ChatGPT. If you open any kind of review or journal, they're talking about ChatGPT and how it would change the world and so on. But in my clients' issues it doesn't occur at all. They don't care about this topic at all. So I think that, I'm not saying that it is not an issue, but what I'm saying is that currently, in Europe and more specifically in France, the topic of using ChatGPT or not is not an issue for corporations. It's an issue for education, clearly, because teachers and university professors just don't know how to deal with that ChatGPT thing, the use of it by the students. But I think for me it's a very, sorry to say it this way, but obsolete way of dealing with this topic. Before ChatGPT our students choose to go on internet and make a copy paste of the text they wanted to use in their homework. We called it plagiarism. Okay. It was plagiarism. Fine. What is different with ChatGPT?

From the current teachers there is no difference. But for me, I see a huge one. ChatGPT is like a second teacher. I have to confess that I was very resistant to use it, but I was convinced by my grand-cousin, 16-year-old, 17 years old now, saying "you have to use it, you have to use it!" I said, "come on, don't tell me about this". And then I used it. And frankly, now, ChatGPT is a kind of colleague, someone who is here in my office, and I can ask a question, he will answer, but I won't trust him more than I trust my colleague. My colleagues are human beings. They are not perfect. There are some things I know, some things I don't know. And as a good Futurist that I hope to be, I always crosscheck my data. So when I talk with ChatGPT, it will answer me, I will never take what he's saying for granted. I will crosscheck it. But it's really interesting to have a real conversation.

I ask him something, he answers me and I can say, "okay, from what I say, I did use that, this, and this, and what do you think about that?" Or "how do you match the discrepancy between this and that?" and it can answer. And I have to say that the topics I used to deal with, are not very simple; most of them are quite complex. For example, I'm working right now on the concept of Governance and Wow, it [ChatGPT] was brilliant, yeah really. And we have been able to have a really interesting conversation and it helped me to think a lot about things that I didn't included in my research previously. And it opened my mind about seeing different things and with a different vision of the topic. So I think we have to be a little bit more open to such new entity, but taking it for what it is. Yeah. It is not a perfect thing. It is not a deus ex machina, it's just a machine, with a huge knowledge, but not with the critical thinking of human beings

Peter Hayward: So Fabienne we're gonna finish up soon, but before we do, I'm delighted to know that you have joined along with me and a few of us, you are now a Futures game maker, and I'd love for you to talk to the listeners about your Futures and Foresight Game.

Fabienne Goux-Baudiment: Yeah, so it was a big gift that the lockdown offered me, to get enough time to be able to devise a game. It has been decades that my clients were telling me "Foresight is very complicated. We have to read books and there is no easy book really about it. And, or when it is easy, it is too easy. We really would like something to understand foresight and to practice it and blah, blah, blah". But I never had time to write such a book or whatsoever. And during Covid finally, I was helped by a colleague of us, Kate McGLONE, a Scottish person, and a very young guy, 19 years old, who was a student in a laboratory called Gamix Lab,

a lab dedicated to creating games. And so all together we work together. We designed a game called The Game of the Great Transition, and we have now 220 cards divided in four categories. One is Emergencies, of course. Mega trends, Obstacles, and Game Changers or levers of action. And then we have Challenges. And so you take one challenge for a game table, and you have to build an answer to this challenge using all the cards you have in your hand. If you don't use them all, you lose points, right? So you have to use them all. And the thing is that because the cards are a lottery,.I mean it's by chance you have them…

Peter Hayward: You play with the hand that you are given.

Fabienne Goux-Baudiment: Yeah you have to make sometime really incredible. I don't know how you call in English. You know this figure when when you dance, you have to open your legs and split. It's called the splits. The splits, okay. So what we want is that the players will make the splits in their mind with so different cards, and try to put them logically and cleverly together and, I'm very happy to say that I hope that I will be able to present this game which has been printed in French and in English, at the next conference of the World Futures Study Federation in October in Paris.

It has been now two years that I use it with my clients and they are quite happy with it. And now one of our colleagues, Thomas GASPAR, in Hungary is using it with his students, doctorate level students. And we have a good friend, an African, Clement HOUNDONOUGBO, who is playing it with African rural people in Burundi. So, two very different situations, doctorate level and agriculture peasant-level in Burundi, using the game. So I'm very happy with that.

Peter Hayward: Congratulations. Thanks. I love futures and foresight games. And the more the merrier. So congratulations. It sounds fascinating.

Fabienne look, it's always wonderful to catch up. Thank you very much for taking some time out and congratulations on your work and the Ocean Research series also. Congratulations on the game and I look forward to our next conversation and you can, and we can talk about some of these new concepts that are now in foresight.

Thanks very much.

Fabienne Goux-Baudiment: Thank you Peter, because you are doing an incredible work and I will never thank you enough for your contribution to the field of Future Studies.

Peter Hayward: I hope Fabienne made you think about yourself, our place on this territory and meritory, our new VUCA world and maybe our new AI colleagues.

Future pod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist because of the generosity of our supporters. If you love listening to the Pod and would like to support us then please check out the Patreon link on our website. I'm Peter Hayward saying goodbye for now.