EP 174: Trans Normal Futures - Christopher Jones

 
 

Christopher Jones returns for a chat on all things Post Normal and Trans Normal. Chris is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Post Normal Policy and Future Studies and Executive Director at the Trans Normal Institute.

Interviewed by: Peter Hayward

References

Transcript

Peter Hayward:

The present is no longer normal. Nor can we expect a return to normal any time soon? No matter how hard we might wish for it. Some call the present Post Normal times. Fair enough. So what comes after that?

Chris Jones: I've been a part of the PostNormal Network for now six or seven years. And a lot of it is, PostNormality, as I said last, isn't a bad thing or a good thing necessarily, but I think we tend to see some of these changes in a negative way. And TransNormal is the notion of a better world. It's Eleonora Massini's idea of visions of a Desirable Society. People have been talking about the new paradigm for maybe two generations or longer in the future space. So what we're interested in doing is trying to map what that area is, what is TransNormal? What is a new paradigm to what extent could we as a human society agree on anything and values, particularly what are. The base values that might form the essence of a new worldview or a new paradigm that would give us a new normal, some sort of society that is not constantly changing, constantly in motion.

Peter Hayward: That is my guest today on FuturePod. Chris Jones is a returning guest. I spoke to Chris previously in podcast 92. Chris is a Senior Fellow at the Center for post-normal Policy and Future Studies and is Executive Director at the Transnormal Institute.

 Welcome back to FuturePod Chris.

Chris Jones: Aloha. It's good to be back.

Peter Hayward: Great to speak to you again. It's been a couple of years since we chatted. I just re listened to Podcast 92 and you used the pandemic as an ongoing metaphor for what the world was going through. Where's your thinking now and where's your interest and what's got your attention?

Chris Jones: fAntastic. Yes, COVID has waned and to some extent we try to ignore that it even happened. It's the story of Post normal times that there's this rubber band effect that tries to take us back to the familiar, back to normal. And yet it continues to be the case that those communities that have been marginalized, Indigenous folks don't want to go back to normal because normal wasn't very good for them. So by the same token, if you look at how politics has shifted in many parts of the world towards a more Authoritarian regimes normal has become problematic, but I'm happy to, for my case to say that things are going really well.

I have done a lot of futures work finally in the last few years, I left my position at Walden University where I was teaching Public Policy and Administration and I've been working pretty closely with Zia Sardar and the Post Normal Community Post Normal Network out of the Center for Post Normal Policy and Future Studies in London. And have had some exciting work in the last year in the future space, a project in Bosnia, some work in Malaysia with the new Ibrahim government in Kuala Lumpur. We've been working on further developing the Post Normal game that I spoke about when we last talked. And a new Non Profit here we're starting in a foresight and future space called Trans Normal Institute. Cool. So there's been a lot going on.

I'm really delighted to say that the workshops and work we did building policy in Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo canton has gone really well. I have had a chance to work very closely with some of our colleagues on the ground there. Mirza Sarajkic who is a professor of Arab Studies at the University in Sarajevo and his work representing the Malik Foundation. They supported us in an effort to build policy for the Ministry of Education in Sarajevo around the ideas of sustainability and future studies, futures literacy, and that went really well. We had meetings, preliminary meetings in the spring, and then formative meetings in the early summer. That has actually made policy for the government of Sarajevo for the Ministry of Education. That's promoting what we are calling SAFER education or SAFER learning. And it's an acronym. It stands for Sustainability, Awareness in the broad cultural sense and global awareness, Futures Literacy is the F,

E is for ethics, and R is for resilience. Which the Sarajevo folks really embraced the idea that we need to be resilient in the face of driving social change, climate change, and the like. And of course many of the folks that we worked with having gone through the siege of Sarajevo in the mid 90s were very sensitive to the conflict going on in the world. That was one of the best sets of workshops I've ever done in the future space because they were very engaged, very little resistance to some of the disruptive changes that we suggested may be coming on the horizon.

Peter Hayward: That's fascinating that it happened in Sarajevo. And I'm again reminded back to the one of the questions I had in the previous podcast with you and I talked about what do humans have to become in order to best navigate post normal times. That was a hard question to answer, but I'm wondering the siege of Sarajevo was obviously a pivotal point for those people. And yet, they had a choice as to how they responded to that. And the path they've chosen is the safer path. It didn't have to be that, it could have been something else. What are your thoughts on that? Again, just back to this notion about how people can be in the dross of post normal times and can still make wise choices?

Chris Jones: There are certainly cultural forces that resist that. I think Sarajevo, the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is still very fraught with cultural conflict and differences between ethnic and religious groups. My experience was with one man who was a tour guide at the Srebrenica Memorial. I spent the day in Srebrenica where 8, 000 Muslim men and men and women and children were killed. And, the man who gave me the tour was able to escape the massacre and marched for, I think, two or three days to his freedom. But he is now working with Serbs and other groups in, in that community. Even people who were part and parcel to the traumas that he went through. But he's able to work with them on a daily basis. So I think it's that ability to be resilient, to continue to have hope and find the better part of people. And work with them. It really is an individual basis that people decide to be open and work with others that may have harmed them in the past. So I think it's that notion of resilience, of being able to change that was very hopeful for me.

Peter Hayward: That's lovely. So what you did the work with the department. How does SAFER get rolled out? How does it actually land in curriculum and in schools?

Chris Jones: We're at the very beginning. Yes, this is just beginning to roll out. There's been a report produced, a little booklet towards safer learning that lays out the recommendations. Some policy recommendations along those five different levels. How to make schools more sustainable. And how to build in futures literacy so that the next steps will be working with the shareholders in the school system to use their ideas about how to move forward and not impose our ideas from the outside. But to develop domestic ideas and projects and strategies to implement these recommendations. It is now part of policy. It's a formal process. Part of policy. We have the support of the minister Naidi Hota-Muminovic. And she was in both of the workshops that we held there in Sarajevo. So it was really important to have leadership there and committed and and working with us. She's fairly new in her position as minister, I think has another three or four years in office.

And so we're. Indeed hoping that we can roll this out to, particularly around climate change, that it's no mistake that sustainability is the first word in our acronym, and that resilience is at the end, is it's all about adapting to climate change, which is real every. Sarajevo is a very interesting mountain city, surrounded by mountains, and yet it's becoming increasingly warm and challenged with floods as well as droughts occasionally. I suspect climate change is one thing that will be on everyone's mind in terms of moving us forward. The other point, I think, is also looking at the global environment as well. Countries across the planet now are embracing futures literacy and foresight. It's not just in Sarajevo.

We're working also, as I noted, in Malaysia. It's a worldwide phenomenon. I think they're sensitive to the fact that this is an emerging way of dealing with the challenges to education. I'll say very briefly what partly drove our work there in the beginning was the sense that they needed to do some reform. They needed to make some changes within their system. And so we're hoping that futures literacy will help. Help inform that and the work in Malaysia. So this is the irony. The interesting part is that the safer acronym was in some senses, a few senses inspired by a similar project that the Zia Sardar and other members of our group Scott Jordan George, these Sarah in helping the community. Then leader of the opposition, Anwar Ibrahim, who was elected now a year ago as Prime Minister. So they were working on a strategy that they called S. C. R. I. P. T. Again, another acronym that sta this one stands for Sustainability, Caring and Compassion, Respect, Innovation, Prosperity, and Trust. And if you compare SAFER and SCRIPT, you'll see there's some parallels about ethics and awareness and embedded in SCRIPT is a clear awareness if you look at the document, as you read the document in terms of the Post normal analysis, the realization that our systems, our social systems, our technologies are accelerating in their scope, speed, and scale of change, and that we need to respond to those.

Prime Minister Ibrahim is struggling with an economy that is has forces driving it that are somewhat beyond his control, but he is a reformer, has been part of the reform movement in Malaysia, and so we're very hopeful that these concepts, these values embedded in script can be can be leveraged to improve the life of all Malaysians. They have, since the script document was drafted, they have adapted it to the Malay language and it is called Malaysia Madani in Malaysian, which means civil Malaysia. So the basic idea is to try to make a society that's more respectful, more compassionate, as well as innovative and prosperous and in a way that improves people's basic standard of living. So we took the script concept basically and said what would, what similar process might work for Bosnia and thanks to the workshop participants. So it became safer.

So script is now, as I said, a major policy initiative within the Malaysian government and it is being implemented at the Ministry level, while we were there in September and October part of the Center for Post Normal Policy and Future Studies and the Institute International Institute of Islamic Thought called IIIT. Were responsible for an exhibition that featured different aspects of Post normal times and what that all means, and we are trying to connect that to what that means for implementing a Madani, the script approach for policy reform in Malaysia. What's striking to me Peter about both of these initiatives is that they very much both have a futures orientation. They're very much about foresight, about looking ahead, more than looking at the past.

Peter Hayward: Yes, Chris, the thing I'm hearing from both, and this is one of my ongoing sensitivities, is this managing external complexity, but also managing internal complexity. And I'm delighted to hear that people are looking at both. In Ken Wilber language, the external quadrants, but also the internal quadrants, the culture, the ethics. The moral basis of our civil society and how that manifests and reacts to external conditions that are very turbulent and largely beyond anyone's control.

Chris Jones: Absolutely. I think it was Johan Galtung who talked about the the tension between centrifugal and centripetal forces of change. That is very easy to look at the external changes, but we need to be very attentive to what's going on with our personal values. And that couldn't be more clear here. The US with the political fragmentation and intolerance that seems to be bubbling up and it takes concerted effort to try to see other people's point of view to understand where the MAGA people are coming from for example, in order to find a way to compromise to meet halfway or to move beyond.

Yeah.

Peter Hayward: I'm also, again, I don't want to overstate the scale of what Sarajevo and Malaysia are trying to do, but it also strikes me that for the large First World countries, and I include Australia, England, America, in other words, the countries with invested success in the past and the old normal are finding it harder to adapt. They're finding it very hard to manage their internal narrative of what they are. And we're seeing, and I think America's just the extreme example, but it's not the only example of uh, a First World society that was a winning society, if you want to use that terminology in terms of the economics and everything else, that is now finding it very difficult to find a narrative that they can hang their idea of what they are and what they want to become.

Chris Jones: Oh, yeah. Oh, that's a very rich comment because there are a number of things going on with that. The narratives, the size piece of it. The other tension in my life is I'm still very intrigued with and spend a lot of time looking at collapse images of the future and the collapse narrative. And so there's a real tension again, between big and small because many of the collapse folks, the just collapse collective, for example, will say some of those countries are too big not to fail simply because the forces of complexity and technology and growth have simply got the better of them. There's no way to sustain that. And maybe that is one reason why I have some hope working with these smaller qualities is the chance of leveraging that to larger ones. That's another piece of the Sarajevo Canton um, initiative because Bosnia and Herzegovina is a collection of of federated entities. And so the real task I think will be to see once it's successful in Sarajevo will it be something that can be taken to the other cantons? To other parts of Southern Europe, the rest of the world.

 So as I said there's been a real tension for me in the last few years. People who've heard this heard me before will know that I've been really intrigued with collapse scenarios and collapse possibilities. I did spend some time this year pushing that a little further and even spoke to that point in Malaysia, because they're very concerned there about the South China Sea threats to the ocean. Many parts of Malaysia and Southeast Asia are dependent on the ocean environment. So those threats continue to be real. Let me turn though to some positives. Again, the dealing with collapse and doom and gloom scenarios can be a bit oppressive, and I'm generally an optimistic person. So one of the things that I've really had a great time in the last year and a half or so with is the Post Normal performative game.

For some years in the Post Normal network. We've been talking about different kinds of ways of bringing people into Post Normal thinking. And one of the ideas that we had was to do a simulation and we came up with a Post Normal performative game. We have beta tested this in the Anticipation 22 conference last year in Tempe, Arizona. Arizona State University. We also did a beta test at the Turku Futures Conference in June in Finland. I did a number of sessions on Post Normative game in Kuala Lumpur last month and also at the World Future Studies Federation Conference in Paris in October. I am very grateful to Wendy Schultz and Maya van Lemput, who've been my colleagues in developing the the game over the last year. And I'm very pleased with how that is rolling out. In fact, there are a couple of US agencies we also believe are likely to be using the game. And it's basically a water planning, a water scarcity planning exercise that asks participants to role play, they are given different roles in a small community. They're asked to plan for reductions of 10 percent in water use every 10 years until 2040. And then they are faced with some disruptions to their process of mapping. We bring in some environmental, social, and technological disruptions. And then towards the end of the game, ask them to do a scavenger hunt to see if they can identify some of the different aspects of post normal analysis in the process of playing the game.

For those of folks who aren't familiar with that, there's the four S's, Speed, Scope, Scale, Simultaneity of Change, the three C's, Chaos, Complexity, and Contradictions, as well as Ignorance and Uncertainty that seem to be growing. As we move forward in these interregnum years between paradigms, if we can survive to the next paradigm. So that's been a blast. It's been a lot of fun. We've done that both with non futurists and futurists, and it seems to be a successful effort to help folks understand how those dynamics, those Post Normal dynamics, make it difficult to do decision making. Yeah. And that's increasingly true for all public policy makers.

Peter Hayward: I love a game. I've played with quite a few. I got a chance to give a little brief video introduction to Fabienne and Tamas Gaspar's game in Paris as well and I talked in that about the notion of Serious Games. You can always use games for learning. There's nothing particularly profound in, we've always done gaming to learn. But Serious Games take the learning to a deeper level. And I wonder, in the vernacular of the Post Normal, whether we need to game more? Maybe gaming is something we do occasionally, and maybe it becomes something that we have to do more and more of? That organizations have to build their own games, their own Serious Games, to play and to workshop their decision making.

Chris Jones: I couldn't agree more. I know, particularly in the futures space that is clearly a desire and need on various listservs over the last month or two, the number of people that talk about gaming, what's going on in the Middle East and Ukraine and China. And elsewhere are keenly of interest. One of the things that's pretty clear, working with public policy folks, is that they don't get to do the alternatives part. I think, I have the same feeling, Peter, about the use of scenarios, and scenario development and visioning. That we need to provide ever more opportunities to look at alternatives because we need to think outside the box to, to use a trite phrase to get folks to understand, particularly in a rapidly changing climate environment that we need to be able to think on our feet and prepare for the consequences of the catastrophe, as well as for golden opportunities that may occur.

Peter Hayward: We see that Chris, and you work with policy people, and I've worked with policy people, and the policy people fully understand the need to do the gaming of the alternative scenarios, but they are scared, in my language, to have these conversations if word of it gets out to their political masters, that they're even talking about these things, as if to talk about the devil is to invite the devil into the room.

Chris Jones: We've got some real cultural barriers. This whole notion that, games are fun, and that's what kids do. One of the things that's pretty obvious is using the word simulation seems to fly a little better in a corporate and and management environment. But I think actually the truth is we need to play more. In terms of the broadest sense of that word, play the variety of variance in how things might turn out and, that we need to have fun with this. It's the other element about actually seeing professionals do gaming is that they often do have fun. And it's a, it's just a switch from the normal work environment.

Peter Hayward: And the whole point of serious gaming is to fail and learn by failing.

Chris Jones: Exactly. And I think we talked about this last time. One of the things that is very sad to see in the governmental space, particularly is this fear of failure and for all of its weaknesses, Silicon Valley culture and behavior seems to reward failure as a rite of passage. And I think we need to embrace that more. I couldn't agree more. Yeah.

Peter Hayward: Let's talk about space and AI. Certainly AI has been a live topic on FuturePod. I've had a number of speakers in, I won't say camps, but people who are taking an interest in the AI space. Where are you in that?

Chris Jones: I'm following it. It's, I don't even know how to put it, it's a overwhelming cultural phenomenon and certainly at the beginning of the year to see the growth of Chat GPT and Open AI and how the the number of members to with access to Chat GPT grew faster, I think, than any other recent application or social media channel. So it clearly shows that there's a lot of interest in it. I've been following a number of Futures listservs. Been particularly keen on the Millennium Projects uh, efforts because of Jerry Glenn and others trying to encourage the UN to look more seriously at Generative AI, but particularly the distinction between narrow AI and and General Artificial Intelligence or Super General Intelligence that may emerge. And my sense again, I follow Dator's first law, I wouldn't predict, but it does seem that it's likely that we're not quite to Artificial General Intelligence yet. It may be 3 to 5 years off, and that would be a turning point. I would imagine in our understanding of how AI works and the point at which it would exceed human abilities. It already exceeds human abilities and speed in some areas, but in terms of consciousness perhaps even sentience, uh, within three to five years.

I tend to be scared of this. I think that is that is dangerous. In fact I wrote a small piece, a list in a recent issue of Critical Muslim that argues that it's an evil that Artificial General Intelligence, if it is not carefully regulated may get out of hand really quickly. One thing that struck me though, Peter was a comment, I don't remember the author, but the idea was that this current hype or overexcitement about Artificial Intelligence is similar to the Y2K phenomenon that was touted as a potential disaster and ended up being much ado about nothing. Perhaps because we were prepared behalf, perhaps because there was such anxiety about the switch in numbers for the new millennium. But so my sense is that the concerns are perhaps a little overblown, over exaggerated and yet because of where we're at today, but potentially in 5 or 10 years, it could be so far beyond our capacity to control that that we'll be in deep trouble.

Peter Hayward: I think I'm much like you. I'm certainly following it closely, but at some level just a little bit unsure as to where it's going. And yeah, I do have my moments of fear, but one of the things that I think I would describe as a concern, again, back to what you talked about, we have this wish to go faster and faster on the outside, and yet, there is this wisdom in going slower and slower on the inside. One of the things just read recently was one of the AI large language models is called Claude. And Claude is now got enough in its browser that you can put an entire book in there and it will give you a summary of the book. And I can see quite quickly people are going to go, oh great, that means rather than sit down and read a book, I can just buy the book paste it into Claude, and Claude will give me a thousand word summary, and so I'll be able to stay up to date on all the books. And people are going to do that, but that means they're not going to read, they're not going to take the time that it took to read the book. That's another example of us trying to run faster and faster on the outside when we're wired to go slower and slower on the inside.

Chris Jones: That's a great point in a way it's feeding on this assumption that we can know everything that we can be a Renaissance person and somehow by summarizing. That'll solve it, despite the fact that there's probably a doubling now, I think we talked about this last time, doubling of knowledge in two years or so, in terms of the total number of scientific publications and print publication. So I'm not sure that's even possible to summarize things such that you you could know enough to survive in the world that's coming. On the other hand, I think that is, AI is purported to be the potential answer to part of that problem to sort out for our individual needs and values. If we have an assistant. Basic computer assistant that's AI driven that will know us well enough to know what we need, then potentially that might be a solution. My concern of course, is about the assumptions, and reading about how how the programming and so much of the algorithms that have come out of Silicon Valley and elsewhere are racist or male oriented and have these very subtle assumptions embedded in them that we're not even aware of.

One more point there about slowing down. I was fascinated a decade or so ago with the slow food movement and other attempts to push back against the acceleration of change. We have established a new non profit here in Santa Fe, the TransNormal Institute. We were finally incorporated in August. And I say finally because it's been a year long process of building a board, getting folks to know each other, getting our bylaws and all our ducks in order. And actually, it's been a rather slow, plodding, deliberative process that feels out of whack, out of sync with the rest of the world. We ought to be hurrying up so we can go out and save the world. But we've been very deliberate in realizing that we're building an organization of human relationships. And connections and that those are important foundational elements to begin with before we worry about, when we're officially a nonprofit and all that sort of thing.

 The TransNormal Institute, it's again inspired by Zia Sardar's work. I've been a part of the PostNormal Network and his center for now six or seven years. And a lot of it is, PostNormality, as I said last, isn't a bad thing or a good thing necessarily, but I think we tend to see some of these changes in a negative way. And TransNormal is the notion of a better world. It's Eleonora Massini's idea of visions of a Desirable Society. People have been talking about the new paradigm for maybe two generations or longer in the future space. So what we're interested in doing is trying to map what that area is, what is TransNormal? What is a new paradigm to what extent could we as a human society agree on anything and values, particularly what are. The base values that might form the essence of a new worldview or a new paradigm that would give us a new normal, some sort of society that is not constantly changing, constantly in motion.

And that may be a vain, glorious goal or idea that we can can get there. But it's a lot more hopeful than being just in the post normal. Space dealing with this constant drumbeat of disruption and turbulence that characterizes these post normal times. So even if it was half as tumultuous wouldn't that be a better place to be? So we're looking at ways to find projects work with communities in order to build a better paradigm.

Peter Hayward: I was going to ask you who the constituents would be for an Institute like that?

Chris Jones: People who have no money, probably, so that, that's probably the first challenge, but we're interested as we are in the Center for Post Normal Policy and Future Studies to help marginalized communities, populations that have not had a voice promoting the notion of polylog, including voices of those who have not been heard, who are marginalized, And I think a lot of our work really is in this space of our third tomorrow. We've come up with a scenario building approach. That's a little different from the three horizons. It looks at our extended present, our familiar futures, the four futures and other futures that we commonly talk about in the futures movement and then the third tomorrow really is those unthinkable, unthought futures.

Those may be the ones that we're most likely to end up with. And what would those be? So that's a lot of fun, too, because it's that kind of space where we need to take leaders to think about the unthinkable, to imagine the unimaginable, so that we can maybe find something less extreme, but something plausible for to continue human existence.

Peter Hayward: Your experience in Sarajevo and Malaysia will suggest to me that you'll find people more readily able to think openly about different cand desired and futures because they won't have any real investment in maintaining the present.

Chris Jones: Moreover there's this dominance of Western culture and civilization that is, is abrasive for a lot of folks in the rest of the world. And the having an opportunity to look at non Western futures and indigenous futures is a lot easier. You're absolutely right.

Peter Hayward: So Chris. Where to next?

Chris Jones: So where to next is hopefully more international work. Really hoping. that our work in Sarajevo Canton will bear fruit and that we can do more work there and in other parts of Asia and the Pacific. I have had a chance over the last few years to reorient myself more to the Asia Pacific region. It's continuing to leverage to make use of the Post Normal analysis to understand what these forces of change are that we are living through now. And Post Normal is so much about the present that It often doesn't really bring in a lot of the future's literacy and foresight elements. That we are working very hard at our center and the new TransNormal Institute to integrate into the process. And as I noted earlier, move towards more of a transnormal orientation. It's so easy to be thrown off, discouraged, made hopeless by the doom and gloom that surrounds us. I don't think that's going away. Climate change is only gonna accelerate. We're looking at increasing evidence of global weirding, as John Sweeney puts it. The work that we're doing is designed to help communities, individuals, and organizations navigate these uncertain times, and to look for better futures beyond the turbulence and disruption of social, political, and technological change. I'm very hopeful particularly about the growth in the futures field itself. I see a lot more interest, a lot more folks involved that brings both challenges as well as issues for the field. But I'm really excited about the fact that we're getting more attention now. About future studies than we have for many years. And again, thank you very much, Peter, for all the work and your team are doing and FuturePod and making sure that the voices of futurists are more accessible across the planet.

Peter Hayward: Thanks, Chris. That was very kind. Appreciate that. I send my muscles and my strength and my wishes and prayers to you. I think the the work you're doing in places like Sarajevo and Malaysia are inspiring. I love the work of Post Normal Policy. I think that group of people have done fantastic work, and good luck with the game, and good luck with the Trans Normal Institute and working with disadvantaged communities. I'm sure you'll find enthusiastic people trying to build better futures for themselves, and thanks for taking some time to spend some time with the FuturePod community.

Chris Jones: My pleasure, Peter. Aloha. Thank you so much.

Peter Hayward: It was wonderful to catch up with Chris again and hear the tales of his work to build part of the next paradigm. It is a powerful antidote to the disaster porn preferred by the commercial media. FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the Pod then please check out the Patreon link on our website. I'm Peter Hayward. Thanks for joining me today. Till next time.