A conversation with Kelly Kornet Weber who is a member of the Strategic Foresight team at Autodesk, based in Canada. We discuss her journey into the field, the differences working as an external consultant compared to being an in-house futurist. And we delve into what collaboration really means.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
PHOTOS
#2 Kelly’s “wall of intention”
#3 The most whimsical Geum triflorum “Prairie smoke”, a native wildflower growing in my garden that was gifted to me by my neighbour Claire!
MORE ABOUT KELLY AND AUTODESK
Autodesk: https://www.autodesk.com/
REFERENCES
· The Co-Creative Futures Triangle: A Workshop to Build Shared Intent for Transformation (Lavonne Leong and Kelly Kornet Weber; publication forthcoming in World Futures Review)
· Systemic Scenarios: A Hero’s Journey Across Turbulent Systems (Christian Crews)
· Inclusive & Plural Futures: A Way Forward (Prateeksha Singh)
· Turning Foresight Inside Out: An Introduction to Ethnographic Experiential Futures (Stuart Candy and Kelly Kornet Weber)
· A Handbook on Ethnographic Futures Research (Robert Textor)
· Causing an Effect: Major Research Project for OCAD University Strategic Foresight and Innovation program (Kelly Kornet Weber)
· Acá nos tocará vivir / We will have to live here (Diagonal Studio)
· Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Eco-Anxiety (Britt Wray)
· Scottish Canals Uses Digital Twin to Regulate Canal’s Water-Storage Capacity (Redshift at Autodesk)
Transcript
Peter Hayward: What does it mean to really collaborate when we are doing our work? A collaborator is more than a participant. More than someone who just experiences our best efforts. How would we know if we are actually collaborating?
Kelly Kornet Weber: you're bringing together a small sample of the group to design the process up front. Even before you get a contract in place, you're saying, we're going to have 3 workshops and we're going to do this focus question, you're bringing that small group together - reflective of the diversity of the wider system and you're engaging them to design the process.
After experiencing it, I really understand why that approach can be really appropriate to, again, make sure that the folks in the room are heard, but also that the intervention that you design, whether it's a foresight program or whether it's a policy innovation project is designed with the group in mind. And something that they actually value and need at this point, based on the journey that they've already been on and where they want to go.
Peter Hayward: That is my guest today on Futurepod. Kelly Kornet Weber, who is a member of the Strategic Foresight team at Autodesk, based in Canada. We discuss her journey into the field, the differences working as an external consultant compared to being an in-house futurist. And we delve into what collaboration really means.
Welcome to Futurepod Kelly.
Kelly Kornet Weber: Thank you so much, Peter. It's honestly such a treat to get to be interviewed by you, to get to finally meet you virtually face to face. Really admire the FuturePod series and every episode just has so much insight and perspective to learn from.
Peter Hayward: Well, thank you. That's lovely. On behalf of the FuturePod gang. Thanks. It's great to meet people who've found it helpful and useful. That's why we do it. So what's the Kelly Kornet story?
Kelly Kornet Weber: Oh, it's been such a gift to get to meet so many different folks in the futures community. I stumbled into foresight in Grad School. I wish there was a more eloquent starting point, but in undergrad was taking a sustainable design course. It's kind of design thinking with a perspective of bringing folks together in participatory ways to design, whether it was products or services that were more environmentally sound.
And my professor, Elizabeth Littlejohn informed me of this strategic foresight and innovation program out of OCAD University in Toronto. And at the time, I'm thinking, great, I'll continue on this path with sustainable design, I'll get more tools in my tool belt, and I showed up and heard about this strategic foresight thing that I needed to study and foresight studio class that I needed to take. I was skeptical, I think, at first, of okay, I'll do this, it'll just be one of those courses, and then get back to the regular scheduled programming and instead I was met with a studio course led by Dr. Stuart Candy, Greg Van Alstyne, and this beautiful immersion into the world of foresight and all these interesting projects, but I think more importantly, provocative questions that were being asked through this field that I didn't know anything about, but was curious. And from there was able to really jump in with both feet and take on an internship with Andspace consulting. So this is Christian Crew's firm at the time. And while I was in grad school, had the opportunity to do some applied foresight work with corporate clients and really see the value that these kinds of conversations create for people coming across different silos or boundaries and actually starting to hear each other. Not in terms of what's not working today, but what's possible for tomorrow and what's uncertain for tomorrow. So it really piqued my curiosity from that point early on in grad school. And then, yeah, that's hard to believe it's been 10 years and haven't turned back.
I think something that I've learned about myself over time is I'm very curiosity driven. So picking up little pieces and morsels, different courses and trying to make sense of how these disparate ideas come together. When I was in undergrad, I originally wanted to be an art teacher. I had a very linear path for myself planned where I was going to go get my university degree, go back to my hometown and teach in a high school. But then I had to take a science course and so I took Earth Sciences thinking. Okay, I'll get my credit, move on, the same pattern here Peter, but instead was learning all about Deep Time and geologic time scales and recognizing the visible patterns in the physical environment.
I'd be remiss not to say that the community side of it was what really struck me. Christian flew all 3 of us out to an APF gathering, an Association of Professional Futurists gathering out in San Francisco back in 2014. And I was immediately met by this wonderful community of folks that were practicing Foresight and despite me being literally day one on the job, no experience except for one class that I took in Foresight, like Cindy Frewen was there, incredibly kind, generous and, asking about like how I arrived there and creating a space that made me feel really welcome in this new community that again I'd just found.
But I think what also really struck me was how curious all these other individuals were too. This like innate curiosity to keep researching, keep learning, keep digging, keep asking questions, and not being satisfied with whatever answers they were getting to. Just willing to challenge the status quo in a way that felt really productive, in a way that they were opening up their skill sets and sharing with each other, not just hoarding knowledge and competing with one another, but a group of people doing interesting work, bringing forward their own signals, bringing forward their perspectives and like FuturePod being an example of that too where each person who joins your podcast, they're willing to share "here's the question I'm tackling" or "here's a project I did". Or listening to Rowena Morrow's episode recently and hearing about her work on, the space of the Future of Death ultimately, which is such a vulnerable, but important topic and to hear about her trials and that too.
Peter Hayward: I remember meeting the community for the first time myself a long time ago. And there is that curiosity, but there's also an openness, an honesty of this is what I'm doing. The openness and acceptance that we're trying let's do this, and I was always surprised by, as you say, generosity, people sharing. I've always taken the view that none of these things belong to us. They're just things that we've picked up on the way and let's give them to someone else.
Kelly Kornet Weber: Ah, so beautifully said. Yeah, that spirit of generosity and just I think that's a really interesting provocation too, the things that we're not ready to share yet. And that idea of having, needing to have it figured out before you share it and seeing a big shift around like people sharing work in progress as a way to say let's iterate on this together and let's create something together versus I'm going to make my bit and then put it out into the world once it's ready.
Peter Hayward: So I'm curious, you had obviously a great generative experience through the educational side of it, and then you had to reckon with reality and you had to go out into the world. I'm interested as to how you and the world reacted when you went out there and started doing something. What was that like?
Kelly Kornet Weber: Yeah. So I had the great fortune of wonderful mentors and guides in this. So I mentioned Christian Crews who I was working with at Andspace. But right when I graduated, I had the opportunity to work with my advisor on my major research project. So Helen Kerr and Stuart Candy were my co advisors and Helen Kerr runs a studio in Toronto called Kerr Smith, which you may have heard about as you had Zan Chandler on your podcast recently.
So together with Zan and Helen I had two years immediately after graduating. The approach to foresight was so rigorous, thoughtful, intentional, deep research. It was about looking for evidence-based perspectives on what's shifting in the world around us. We were doing interesting projects on the future of land use and transportation with really long time horizons, about 50 years. We were doing research on creative communities. And how to create the supports for those communities. I think that experience and just seeing how the practice of foresight is designed as a journey, not just a moment in time, but bringing a group of people or a client and some cases, an ecosystem where it's multiple groups together, whether it's like an urban planning group and the Ministry of Transportation and bringing them through that process of co discovering, co learning, in some cases co unlearning, but really creating a container for them to grapple with the uncertainty that the future inherently brings. I'm so grateful for the time that I had with Helen and Zan and Nigel at Kerr Smith and getting a chance to have that.
Another thing that I learned having the time to do a six month investigation on one topic, just in signal gathering. That is incredibly rare in the corporate foresight world, but because of Helen's intentional practice around that, but also like Zan's really intentional facilitation around how do you create the conditions for people to come together and most importantly, hear one each other or one another, not get stuck in, what point of view they have to bring into the room almost as a political thing. There's no one singular answer. It's very much emergent. So yeah, I guess the thinking there is that having that opportunity right from grad school to get immersed in corporate foresight and then switching gears, I joined Christian over at Kalypso in the management consulting world, applying foresight for organizations in a much faster paced way.
We were still doing deep research, but in compressed timeline. So it looked different. But it was also very participatory. So we would do a lot of signal gathering and then get that out to the client, make sense of it together, tease out implications together. We would run a second workshop, building out scenarios together, bringing in a systems lens. So not just seeing these disparate signals on their own, but seeing, okay, what happens when you bring together, let's say a technical or technology based development along with a political change, like whether it's a regulation that's being introduced and seeing how those two things might come together. But doing that work together with the client so that they're grappling with the content, they're on that journey with you, but they're also contributing their ideas and diverse perspectives.
If you're an engineer, they might have that deep knowledge around, again, if it's in the built environment, building codes and how that's shifting or some of the challenges around a mismatch between the built environment and climate change that's growing because of the fact that some infrastructure has been around for decades and was built with different environmental considerations in mind. So that was always a treat is just being in the room and seeing those "Ah Ha" moments that the clients would have, or when they'd share something and. All of us in the room felt it like, oh, that's the big idea that we need to be moving towards or that's the question that everyone's been holding on to, but afraid to ask.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. Yes. And then from Kalypso, you moved again?
Kelly Kornet Weber: Yes. Moving around a little bit. So from Kalypso, I had been doing this work in the corporate foresight space and was interested in bringing my skill set to social and environmental causes. So I joined Coeuraj, at the time it was called Watershed Partners, and was building out a foresight practice there that really drew from the world of collaborative design. So my mentor there, John Hibble, is an expert steeped in collaboration design and there's so much rigorous process around that very lightly held content in the sense that you're bringing together a small sample of the group to design the process up front. Even before you get a contract in place, you're saying, we're going to have 3 workshops and we're going to do this focus question, you're bringing that small group together - reflective of the diversity of the wider system and you're engaging them to design the process.
It took me a while when I first first joined Coeuraj to wrap my head around that level of collaboration felt very meta. So we're bringing people to collaboratively design the design of the process. But after experiencing it, I really understand why that approach can be really appropriate to, again, make sure that the folks in the room are heard, but also that the intervention that you design, whether it's a foresight program or whether it's a policy innovation project is designed with the group in mind. And something that they actually value and need at this point, based on the journey that they've already been on and where they want to go.
It was a good opportunity for me to bring my skills and see how it could contribute to positive changes socially or environmentally, but also to create space for folks to have brave conversations around scary topics like climate change or reaching Carbon Neutral goals, which is so daunting in some spaces and again with so much uncertainty, but having this wide range and tools of foresight at my disposal and great mentors to, call up and phone a friend when I would get stuck, it really helped me to navigate that and have a lot of personal transformation along the way too.
For Autodesk, I got here just in January 2023. At the end of my time at Coeuraj I was supporting a professional group that represents engineering across Canada and realized through that process that I was ready for a change to go deep into one topic. I had done all of this consulting, had the privilege of getting exposed to so many different types of work, industries, groups, but was curious to go deep into one space. And when this opportunity opened up with Autodesk to join a foresight team. And to go deep in the space of really foresight for the built environment for entertainment and media for manufacturing. Three very big topics or industries, but have that container around, how we can influence that as an organization and how we can support our customers working in that space with the changes that they're hoping to reach.
Peter Hayward: I was just struck 10 years from when you thought you were going to be teaching art in a school, which was valuable and necessary, to now being working in these spaces, making a difference in these spaces. It is awe inspiring to look back to what we thought And what we now are.
Kelly Kornet Weber: Thanks so much, Peter.
Peter Hayward: So that's great as an intro. Now I want to dive into the Kelly Kornet bag of tricks, because you've worked with so many masters. You've seen the power of process and method. So what are some of your go tos? When you either want to help a group or want to support a breakthrough, what are the ones that you lean on, you enjoy?
Kelly Kornet Weber: This is such a generous question because it's... I don't think I've met a futurist who doesn't love geeking out around process and tools. But the first one came to mind is the most recent with Lavonne Leong. She had the beautiful vision of taking the Futures Triangle. And the way that I had seen it previously was on a slide in a very grounding resource where you have The weight of the past, Push of the present, Pull of the future and she had this idea of leveraging that triangle as a way to facilitate a conversation with a diverse group of people around actions. So what really stood out for me was there was a question that we had designed together around, I think it was the weight of the past and it was actually a more positive spin on that around values. What are the things that are grounding us from the past and inviting the folks across this group. So you have 7, 10 people in the group to really think about their values that they'd like to contribute to this conversation. And we gave them constraint of not challenging each other's values, but taking an additive approach if all of these things were to be true. Then what? So that was with the futures triangle as participatory method, something that was new to me, but Lavonne really has me thinking differently, but it's not just a model that lives on a PowerPoint.
Peter Hayward: I just ran a triangle as a participatory process in a prison. A couple of things. Yes, weight of the past, push of the present, pull of the future. The way I do weight, and this is what Sohail taught me, weight of the past is both burden and responsibility, so there's always a double question. Push of the present, of course, push can be both pushing you where you want to go or pushing you away from where you go. So resistance and engagement. So again, a choice. And the last one, of course, the pull, what is the future that either wants me or I want and the other thing I did with this one was there's a bit of research coming out about boys and men that men are more likely to have a vulnerable conversation sitting in a car or walking. If they can both be traveling somewhere and looking forward, they'll actually talk. And I thought it was an interesting piece of research because what I then got people to do was I laid the room out, I had a big room, it was a basketball court, and I had the corners of, past, present, and future. And I said, choose someone and walk it slowly. And what you do is you do a lap of the room and you each take it in turn that as you're walking up to the past, the other person says, " so we're coming to the past question. So what do you want to put down? What do you want to pick up?" And in other words, coach one another, but just keep walking slowly and walk the triangle and ask one another questions. And then when you're ready, sit down in the future. As a pair and wait till another pair joins you and keep talking. And it was a nice process, watching people walk the triangle, how slowly they did it because they wanted to have the conversational experience with someone.
Kelly Kornet Weber: Peter, that is amazing. It's so insightful to meet people where they're at. But also tune into that moving around, having that experience. Like it sounds incredibly meditative to walk in a triangle while processing together.
Peter Hayward: When we move, our body is different. When we move our body, our mind is different. When we move our body, our thoughts are different. Stillness is another form of where you don't move your body, and so we go inward, we go quiet, and it changes our thinking. And I think, flipping people between modalities and then saying, so what was helpful? What was useful? What came up?
Kelly Kornet Weber: I love that so much. Flipping between modalities.
Peter Hayward: So what's another Kelly Kornet fave?
Kelly Kornet Weber: Kelly Kornet fave would be Christian Crews, his scenario systems method. So bringing the rigor of systems thinking, developing those cause and effect relationships and using that as a method to build scenarios so that you're acknowledging, the complex relationships between the forces or signals that you're gathering around different possible futures, but it was also very intuitive. So we would do the work and research in a participatory way in the physical environment. When we were having workshops in person, we would develop cards and distribute them in groups in ways that allowed. Three different breakout groups to reach very different scenarios by mapping and connecting their cards together to build out these different systems diagrams and it was always so fascinating to, be like a 2 hour workshop where we would be. Inviting folks to build these scenarios, we'd explain that the task to them.
There'd be a brief moment of confusion and "you're asking me to do what?" An example of a systemigram with all these lines and yet, without a doubt, every time that level of systems thinking is so intuitive to folks where they just very quickly see the relationships and bring out new questions around. It's so fascinating to see when it happens in real time. Cause it's that almost like the dissecting between here's an idea I have about the future. And again, going back to values and character, it's, here's what I wish to see in the future. A colleague that I worked with at Coeuraj, Ayomide she used to talk about one person's utopia might be another person's dystopia. How do we grapple with that? We can't just assume that a shared vision that the majority might benefit from. Meanwhile, it excludes folks or in some cases harms folks, leaves them out, like just creating the space to have that conversation. And I think maybe in the last 10 years, I've become more sensitive to my role as facilitator in that. And when I need to step back more so that the group can not have that conversation, but I guess it's a kind of different tangent there, but just around the power dynamic as facilitator and navigating what's my role in this work when it's your future that you're building. So I'm there to support and there to guide, but sometimes I do need to step out of the way and create space for others to lean into it.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, and also that by their nature, futures processes are elite processes. In other words, the people that are invited into the process are given tremendous privilege and tremendous power to shape the future. And if you're parachuted in as a facilitator, then one of your roles can be to say who's not in the room? And what would they say? I think that's part of your job is that there's a group that might say, we have to work together. We've got to deliver it. The answer is, yeah, you're right. But one of the things I'm here to do is to tell you who's not here and remind you of who's not here and say, do they matter?
Kelly Kornet Weber: A hundred percent. I'm thinking of Prateeksha Singh's work. Are you familiar with her inclusive futures? Oh, so Prateeksha is another strategic foresight and innovation grad from OCAD. And she created this framework for exactly that kind of question, and it was something that was new for me when she developed it, and it still strikes me as such a helpful model for asking those questions around who's in the room. There's questions around what time is the workshop? Is it feasible for folks to be a part of it? Thinking about like the different needs of people in the room and how to create supports or address barriers to their participation, whether that's child care or are they able to take the time off work if it's something that's outside of work? And I think that you hit the nail on the head there with the elitism aspect and the privilege to get to do futures work. That's something that I'm still grappling with is. How to acknowledge that privilege and the power in being a facilitator and just having the space to create these containers for these conversations. I think you're spot on by saying that's part of our role to make sure folks that have a stake in that future are in the room. And if they're not creating that conversation to try to get there.
Peter Hayward: To me, it's about saying out loud what is not being spoken. So the fact that you say who's not present. Even if they, the group, move on, but they heard it said, they had to think. They may not take it any further in the workshop, but it was said and it was probably heard. And those are the questions that I think facilitators... Should ask and do it as part of service, because if it's not said, it can't be heard.
Kelly Kornet Weber: Wow. Yeah. That one just stopped me in my tracks. On the train today was speaking to a woman who, did you ever have those moments where like you meet someone in like a circumstance and they say something that really strikes you and you'll never probably see them again, but what they said just it sticks with you? She was saying how, sometimes when you're like, we're talking about foresight and the space of creating possibility in the future and recognizing our agency in the future. And she just casually mentioned that we're talking about intuition and trusting your gut. And she says, sometimes you'll have an idea that pops into your mind and you feel like sharing it, but sometimes you'll hold back from sharing it. Something that people, we do, you don't have to say everything that comes to mind.
But she said, sometimes that idea or that reflection isn't for you, it's for somebody else. And it was something that she had learned from an Elder, but when she said that to me, it was so out of context, but it just really struck me. I think that's a big part of the foresight work that you're talking about Peter is what we drop an offer into the room as facilitators. It's up to the room to make sense of it, to move forward with it. If they choose to pick it up and take it forward or to move on. But by not saying it, then we're preventing that conversation from even being considered.
So just with ethnographic experiential futures, this is something that Stuart and I have been collaborating on more formally since 2017, but it came about from my major research project where, in this case, I was inviting environmental activists to share their hope or fear, really trying to get a sense of what's their idea of the best case scenario for their community, the worst case scenario. Using Robert Textor's Ethnographic Futures Research Framework, and then through that research realized putting into a report wouldn't have done. Those stories, those reflections, justice, so ended up creating an exhibit that brought those images to the future images of the future to life. And from there, we started to see in the field. Folks, we're bringing that combination of ethnographic foresight.
So how do we lift up and elicit images of the future, make them known through experiential futures? How do we make them felt and how do we create the space for others to grapple with them? So we've been having a lot of fun just seeing where others in the field are taking it. There've been some really interesting projects like in Mexico, Diagonal Studio did a really interesting project on it was, I think it was like almost home living in the future, but in a participatory way where they brought together community members to think about how their homes would look different. In, I think it was, 2030 really interesting spaces where folks are bringing a wide range of foresight tools and exploring this hybrid design and ethnography format for bringing diverse images of the future to life.
Peter Hayward: Good. Moving on. Using your phrase, what signals are you gathering from the present around you? Not professionally, personally. What are the emerging things that are getting your attention, making you think. Possibly what's going into your choices machine as to what you are going to do or not going to do?
Kelly Kornet Weber: I think on a personal level, the one that's striking me the most is definitely eco anxiety and seeing the grieving that's happening in Canada in particular with the forest fires this summer, but also the really tough conversations looking ahead and trying to grapple with the uncertainty around climate change. We see these big numbers around projections, whether it's trying to meet the International Panel on Climate Change, their projections on temperature increases, but also climate change mitigation and feeling this overwhelming sense of doom and gloom.
So I recently picked up Brit Wray's book, Generation Dread. And it's really fascinating the research she's leading on how individuals across the globe are grappling with climate anxiety, but also how they're finding meaning in it in the same way that of, what changes can we be making today? Or how do you prepare yourself for a climate changed world? Asking a lot of really interesting questions along the way.
Peter Hayward: So what are you doing?
Kelly Kornet Weber: I'm so glad you asked me that question. This is another topic we could spend three hours talking about, but just a small window to influence the future is in the land that I'm currently situated on here in Haldimand Tract Territory in Ontario. Known as Waterloo, but my neighbors and I have been creating pollinator friendly gardens. So transforming portions of our lawn to host native plants, which then bring different insect populations to address biodiversity loss. That's been a big part of my personal sphere of the agency that I have. I feel a strong sense of hope around is seeing, between three of us in our little pocket here, supporting each other, exchanging plans. Just last week, I happened to be walking by a couple blocks away from here and a neighbor whose garden pollinator friendly, which I've admired for a few years now. She was outside for the first time that I happened to be walking by and I just complimented her garden. And it was so wonderful, Peter. She invited me for a tour of her garden. We geeked out about all the different insect species. She had these Carpenter bees that were pollinating a flower and we were just watching them for a couple minutes. And she sent me home with some False Indigo seed pods, which is a native species of Indigo for dying. But also it's a really beautiful and pollinator pleasing plant.
And this chance encounter where two people that happen to be interested in pollinator friendly plants has now led to her sharing all of these plants with me that I just planted in my garden last week. And we just met on the street quite, serendipitously. So seeing the generosity that folks in the community have towards supporting each other around addressing climate change and finding their sphere of influence, their agency and more importantly, I think, supporting each other to have a greater impact because maybe she could sell those plants and make some money, but she saw this as an opportunity. Oh, here's someone who's trying to tackle some invasive species in their yard here. Let's give them some plants to help contribute to that cause.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. I guess it's not either or, is it? She chooses to give them to you. If somebody else walks up, she might ask for $5. The choice is the choice. I think the nice thing, at a level of metaphor, that's gorgeous because you're both sharing a future without necessarily agreeing the future. You don't need to agree it to share it. They can be different, but they can be together. And when we're sharing the preferred future, then collaboration becomes natural. Easy. Don't need to compete. Why do we need to compete?
Kelly Kornet Weber: I love that, Peter. Really beautifully said and great way of weaving in metaphor too.
Peter Hayward: So for people, have you got any, I think this notion of how do I, how am I and how do I stand in a difficult emerging present, let alone the future? What, again, are there any useful practices, yogas that you can offer to people that, have helped you and might help them?
Kelly Kornet Weber: So this is a small one, something that I found particularly when I was at Coeuraj and just feeling the weight of systemic social and environmental challenges. The unequal distribution of privilege and power, but also the unequal negative impacts of who is benefiting from the present and who's experiencing harm or experiencing exclusion from the benefits of the present. But in trying to sift through that I really wanted to tune into positive signals and found myself working from home. Having the privilege to work from home in the first place. But I created a mural behind me filled with all sorts of images of hopeful futures or quotes that struck me from whether it's foresight practitioners or even artwork that spoke to possibilities in the future, but just finding ways to create an intention of combating.
Peter we were talking about this before the call, but with negativity bias, I think in foresight, it's so important to tune into when we ourselves are getting caught up in the negative signals and needing to balance that. So for me that looked like creating a wall around hopeful images, starting my day with some jazz or whatever it feels like for that day. And just like arriving to the day instead of just rushing into it.
Peter Hayward: I'm responding to the word, a very important word there, Kelly, which is this notion of intentional. Making intentional almost affirmations towards the start of something. It doesn't mean we're going to end up, and it's not even necessarily a destination, but it's a place that you intentionally start from and can return to.
Kelly Kornet Weber: Absolutely. Actually, it brings to mind, I have I'm looking in front of me right now, but there's a Maya Angelou quote I have. I'm just going to read it properly. "
If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude."
For me, that brings to mind the intention behind it and navigating. Maybe part of that's with agency too.
Peter Hayward: So when you stepped out after your wonderful educational experiences, or even during your educational experiences, when you had to explain what it was you were studying, where you were going, what you were excited by, you, you would have had those conversations with people. So what is it you're doing? So what is foresight? What is futures? I'm interested as to how you navigate those questions from other people who don't necessarily understand what it is Kelly Kornet does?
Kelly Kornet Weber: I'm still trying to navigate this one truthfully Peter. And I guess when it comes down to it, I do think it's really about preparing people for possibility in the future. Whether that's risk, whether that's opportunity, whether that's things happening in their organization, things happening in their community or in their personal life. It's accepting that by having these conversations ahead of time and trying to carve out what we wish to see in the future versus what we hope not to see. That we can, I really think it goes back to that word that you picked up on Peter, be more intentional about the actions and choices that we're making or not making in the present.
Peter Hayward: So what is the elevator pitch at the moment?
Kelly Kornet Weber: I would say that because so much of my work is participatory by nature, I help people come together, hear each other's perspective, and prepare for those possible risks and opportunities.
Peter Hayward: Here's one for you. Do you explain what it is you do differently now you are inside an organization, as opposed to when you were consulting to organizations?
Kelly Kornet Weber: So laughing because something that's Autodesk is I'm having far fewer of these conversations now than when I was in consulting. It's been a unique experience that folks within this organization for the most part are. It's not that it's everyone, but there's a lot of acceptance for it in the leadership team. So I'm not having to explain what foresight is and what the value of it is. It's already understood, but I think for folks that are outside of the group that we're engaging with regularly or that have exposure to it. I guess my pitch is more about helping both the organization and our customers to take time out of their day to day and have a different kind of conversation.
So one of the unique vantage points of being on a Foresight team is that we are bringing together those different groups that don't typically get to connect and collaborate. But we're helping to gather data from both within the organization around how change is perceived today, or which signals folks are tuning into, and also outside of the organization, and then presenting it back in a way that allows them to see the diverse perspectives that are held and the questions that are being raised. But I feel like that's not a very satisfactory answer to your question, Peter.
Peter Hayward: You've got skin in the game now. When you're a consultant, you've got a degree of skin in the game, but it's generally only skin in the game for a moment and then you leave. But now you've got skin in the game. This future that they're working towards is your future as well as theirs. Back to your person you met with the pollinator garden. You're building a shared future.
Kelly Kornet Weber: Definitely. Yeah. In that case it's something that we're often exploring is to which degree, to what degree is an organization like Autodesk impacted by the future versus to what degree can we influence it in a positive way? And what does positive mean for a company like Autodesk?
Peter Hayward: So let's pivot into the final question on this conversation. I'd love to go for another two hours, but I'm sure the listeners would have other things to do. So what has surprised you? What have you learned about yourself and the work. Transitioning from being an external practitioner, hired gun, so to speak, to an embedded internal strategic foresight practitioner in an organization where people already have an appetite for doing foresight?
Kelly Kornet Weber: Yeah. So quite a lot there. It's been, really encouraging just to think about the scale of an organization like Autodesk, where we make software for folks that make and design things. So whether it's built environment, whether it's manufacturing products or entertainment and media, just thinking about how extensively our tools can reach folks out in the world who are designing possible futures and bringing them to reality.
As part of the strategic foresight team, we're actually situated in a group called Autodesk Research, which the whole group function is looking 5 to 10 years out into the future. And what's been really humbling, I think to say as a practitioner is being aware that the folks that I'm working with are steeped in the future. These are engineers, technologists, circular design experts, that are actively tinkering, experimenting with this longer time horizon in mind. Finding ways to tap into the knowledge and expertise that they bring and create space for them to contribute to the foresight conversation while also recognizing that the skill set and the content.
I think the signals that I'm tuning into as a foresight practitioner aren't always as novel to a group that is already steeped in the future. So getting creative around, I think this is where, the difference between signal gathering versus scenario development, where you're starting to look at the complex interrelationships between ideas so that you can have a novel conversation around, possible risks that might be further out or might emerge versus just looking at what we can be doing today.
Peter Hayward: I would imagine if you're working with a group of people who are already pretty literate in foresight, then they may not need you, or they may not need you as a foresight. Person, the value you might add is by being something else.
Kelly Kornet Weber: That's fascinating. Yeah. It's, it brings to mind a couple of things. One of them is finding ways to lift up the work of our colleagues. We have folks in within Autodesk research that are tasked with Industry Futures. So they are steeped with a specific industry lens. Whereas we might be taking a broader look at how, whether it's policy changes might impact. Where the work gets done or how the work gets done and in some ways it's about, checking our egos aside to say, no these are the folks that are best positioned to do this work and finding ways to lift up their research, but it's also about finding those spaces where others may be beyond our organization. So in some cases, it's customers that just don't have the bandwidth to do this kind of research internally, where we're finding ways to support them to have conversations and to find ways to partner with each other.
We did some work with Contractors in Europe and finding ways to take the research that we do on we call it the Forces of Change - so that's our analysis of looking 5 to 10 years out. What are the major shifts that across all those industries that I named? Our leaders as well as our customers ought to be looking out for. So part of it is that capacity building work. So how can we share that content in a way that's, tailored to the audience, but also mindful of the different, whether it's the geography they're based in or the unique circumstances that their industry requires of them, but finding ways to support them in that moment, as opposed to just limit it to within our organization, having a point of view on the future.
One thing that has been really, actually, one thing that really drew me to Autodesk in the first place was the fact that so many folks in this organization are actively shaping the future in tangible ways. So to go from being an external consultant, while there are so many benefits to that. I think you used the phrase parachuting in Peter. And you don't have that same level of skin in the game around, around the results or the implementation. I'll say, actually of the work that gets surfaced something that has really struck me and encouraged me about Autodesk is the folks that are within the organization and the customers that we're supporting, how they're actually influencing the future in interesting ways.
So there was an example that I'll share a link to where we were helping Scottish canals in Glasgow to monitor a canal that had previously had a really important role in the communities infrastructure in terms of shipping canal to bring goods into the community. But over time lost that fit for purpose and they were using Autodesk technology to bring a digital to an element. Adding sensors to the canal on Forth and Clyde and finding ways to prevent flooding, but while there's a technical aspect to that, it's great to have that data and information, what was really interesting was the relationship that it brought about between the citizens in that community and this canal as an opportunity to have a renewed sense of understanding of the purpose that this canal might have for the community and in particular from an environmental perspective. But also just bringing that access to information in a way that makes it front of mind, right? If we can see the health of the canal, if you can see how our actions today are affecting it, maybe that might change, our ability to really manage that in a thoughtful way and bring a more preferred future to life.
Peter Hayward: Thank you. Kelly, it has been absolutely wonderful to meet you and have this conversation. Thank you very much for supporting Futurepod and reaching out to us and get taking some time out to chat and chat with the Futurepod community.
Kelly Kornet Weber: Thank you so much, Peter. It's been a real privilege to get to share this time with you.
Peter Hayward: I hope you enjoyed listening to my chat with Kelly as much as I enjoyed meeting her. I also hope that something she or I said was meant for you to hear.
Future pod is a not for profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the Pod please check out our Patreon link on the website. I'm Peter Hayward. Thanks for joining us today