We are delighted to start a new podcast series based on the Winners and honorable mentions from the APF 2023 IF Awards. Today we hear from Cecilia Tham, from Futurity Systems in Barcelona, Spain and their award winning work on the Plantiverse and Bronwyn Williams and the Gen Z Innovations Tour for corporate leaders developed by the team from Flux Trends in South Africa.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward with Maggie Greyson and John Sweeney
Cecilia Tham - Futurity Systems
Bronwyn Williams - Flux Trends
Transcript
Peter Hayward: Welcome to the FuturePod Spotlight Series on the APF IF awards for 2023. In 2022 the APF changed from the most Significant Futures Work Awards to the IF Awards. Let's hear from Maggie and John, what the IF awards. Are all about.
Maggie Greyson: The awards served as an invaluable resource for pointing clients. and the future's curiosity towards understanding the nature of work. If questions, What If X, then y, are central to what we do as curators, facilitators, and researchers in supporting communities, organizations, and institutions to explore the futures.
John Sweeney: In celebration of the APF 20th anniversary, MSFW was re imagined as the APF IF Awards to reflect the globality, diversity, transdisciplinarity of the organization and the futures and foresight field. The Reimagined IF Awards program recognizes the evolving excellence in futures and foresight work with an emphasis on key thematic areas such as impact, imagination, and Indigenous.
Peter Hayward: Those awards are done and dusted and now we are here to celebrate the winners and special mentions. So get ready to hear from people doing important futures and foresight work all over the globe that is innovative, inclusive, indigenous, and much, much more. So on with the show.
Okay. John, who is our next person on the Pod?
John Sweeney:Up next is Cecilia and the Futurity Systems team based in Barcelona. They're actually the awardees in the inclusive category for the really exciting project, The Plantiverse, which envisions an inter species digital economy. This initiative explores giving legal and financial rights and autonomy to non human living beings, specifically houseplants like Herbie using sensors to measure light, moisture and other factors.
The project actually allows plants to make decisions, move towards their needs, challenge the human centric worldview that, of course, dominates much of our lives. The plant verse whole system is actually about using and leveraging new and emerging technologies. So the team actually has, they call NFTs or NF trees.
These are carbon neutral on the Solana blockchain. Ultimately the funds raised from the sale of these NF trees were directed towards sustainable causes with the ultimate goal of establishing the world's first. First plant governed Dow or decentralized autonomous organization, which would actually allow the plants themselves to use the funds or understand how they might be distributed.
So this project is pushing all sorts of boundaries around interspecies communication through the development of things like Herbie GPT, which is a potential avenue for exploring plant human interaction. And what's most exciting about this project is clearly it's just the beginning. The Plantiverse really opens up new possibilities for what truly inclusive and sustainable futures could be like.
They have plans to extend the project to forests by placing sensors taking that information, looking at health data, and really trying to create, of course, an entirely new conversation about the possibilities for an inclusive and sustainable future.
Peter Hayward: Welcome to FuturePod, Cecilia.
Cecilia Tham: Hello. Lovely to be here.
Peter Hayward: I'll start with congratulations. You and the Futurity Systems team were recognized as, for doing a piece of work that's been identified as Most Significant Futures work for 2023 in the category of Inclusion. So congratulations on that.
Cecilia Tham: Thank you so much. It is an enormous honor to be selected. And yeah, we're very excited to, to be able to share this project to the world.
Peter Hayward: It's an amazing project. I've done a little bit of digging around in it, which is part of the fun of getting ready for this podcast. But for the listeners, Cecilia can you just maybe just take us back to the Genesis of the idea and why it came up and how you went about it?
Cecilia Tham: The project really started. I am not, you can't see me right now, but I'm always wearing these pins. And there's the crazy lady. Crazy Plant Lady pin because, who doesn't like having plants around, right? And so the project started with my love for plants and then we, we are an office that spent a lot of time in prototyping.
And so we had this idea of creating an autonomous plant. And the idea comes from what if plants can go around, fetch water when it needs water and seek light when it needs light. And they're there was a light bulb moment and we said, wow, what if autonomy means a whole lot more than just, taking care of itself?
What if autonomy means, the same as human autonomy that we have, why can't plants have the same? So it was really like a hypothesis that we have. What does that mean to give plants autonomy? What can they do? how can we test them with those ideas? And so that's the genesis of the project.
And we start building it and we started saying if human autonomy, part of human economy is our economic privilege, right? And to participate in the economic paradigm of our human society. And so we started testing what if plants have economic means?
And that stem from a deeper critique of our current human centric economy which very much prioritizes us humans. And we said what if we allow plants and other non-humans to have economic means, could they then prioritize themselves? So then it just went down the rabbit hole of exploring how can we test this particular idea of creating an interspecies economy?
Peter Hayward: It's really an interspecies ecosystem. And it's also, and it's eco as ecological, but it's also eco as economic, isn't it?
Cecilia Tham: Correct. Correct. In every sense of the word. And we started building, a whole entire ecosystems of different plants. We also wanted to look into, applying the same mechanics for, The forest as well as coral reefs and other ecosystems as well.
So even though the idea and the genesis came from one singular plant we could expand this into a much larger kind of perspective and understanding of an interspecies economy.
Peter Hayward: That's right. And I think the most striking thing for me is the notion that the plant can produce something that humans would value. And do you want to talk about that?
Cecilia Tham: Yeah, absolutely. I think before talking about that, I might want to seed our understanding of how we approach things, which is our human centric economy, the way we have been sourcing our resources, we take and take, we go and take from nature what we need for us humans.
And we are still operating on that front. So the whole premise was, what if they own themselves? What if they have ownership of themselves? And then those fruits and vegetables and things that they produce because they own it, then they can make their own decision, quote unquote.
To sell them in ways that will prioritize themselves so they would never oversell. So that was the understanding of putting plants and other non-humans on the same equality as us humans instead of us humans being a priority and that we source and extract from nature.
Peter Hayward: Nature operates with this notion of Reciprocity, where plants do take from other plants, but they don't take everything. The by product of what is used is then invariably picked up by something else.
Cecilia Tham: Correct. There is a natural equilibrium to the process in nature, and our human economy disrupted that equilibrium by a whole lot. It's hard for us humans to go back the way things were. So the idea, really, is on one hand, to bring awareness of how disequilibrated things are right now, but also to understand okay, moving forward, what can we do? How can we, reestablish this relationship with nature that we had before? And it's on much more of an equal footing.
Peter Hayward: When I studied horticulture and I was taught by my Tree Professor, what a great title, that he said, no tree intends to be a forest. In other words, the tree intends to be a tree. It's the combination. That produces forest. It's almost without intention. Humans, I gather, and I wonder if you're playing with this idea, Cecilia, is that we have intention, we could design things to operate as forest. We don't have to have purely exploitive economies and systems. We could build forest like systems.
Cecilia Tham: Absolutely. I certainly believe that way. And I am very much an advocate on building intentional futures, because so much of the negative consequences that we live in today is because we haven't properly done the exercises to understand the consequences that we will be having in the future.
So if you look at some numbers, for example I'm often very much bothered with the fact that on one hand, we have, children that are starving. And then on the other hand, we have a massive food waste problem. So it's not a question of the fact that we don't have enough food for everyone.
It's a question that we don't optimize the resources that we have. And I wholeheartedly believe that technology can help in the right way and, but also a change of awareness and a change of mindset that, we are, we're of equal to nature as a way to move forward.
So the mindset change in plant, the plantiverse you want to maybe just expound on, you've already said this notion that plants could have ownership.
They could be economic owners. Distributors of value, recipients of benefits, if it's an economic, digital economy.
Yeah. I have a training as a designer and for the last five, 10, maybe even 15 years, we talk Human Centric Design, and it worked wonderfully, because we need to understand our needs. We are, humans after all, we're not building, we shouldn't be focusing on, profits. And that was the premise of human centric design, but we've gone past that. And now we're going into a planetary centric design. Where we need to incorporate these other, species and things that we are sharing our planet with.
That transition is happening right now. And that transition, it's not going to be easy. How do we think from their perspective? How do we know what needs they have? How do we prioritize, their desire. And there's something super interesting that is that I'm seeing as a trend is that as we are moving towards this less human centric way of thinking about the world, because of technologies that we're having today, things like large language models and AI. Those things I think will play a very pivotal part because there are, scientists, for example, working on large language models, but for plants. So instead of using text and human language, they use biochemical signals, the way that plant would communicate with each other, instead of using, human voices, they use bio acoustics for animals to understand.
And I think that's fascinating. And I'm hoping, I don't understand the science fully, to be able to answer that question now. But I'm hoping that in the future, these technologies will allow us to understand their priorities better and use that as a way for us to build this equality and equity, monetary equity better.
Peter Hayward: It would seem Cecilia that having the beginnings of empathy for the other is the beginning of this ability to approach the most appropriate way to allow communication to occur between the species. And whether they're human species, plant species, non-human species, if we start extending into future generations, they're the people who in fact are not here but will be. And how can they be represented? Do we have empathy for them? Do we think of how we wish to communicate with them and how we wish them to communicate with us?
Cecilia Tham: Absolutely. There's a wonderful book called How to Be a Good Ancestor, and then if you extend that to not just human, being a good human ancestor, but a good planetary ancestor, then you're then all of a sudden you realize wow, there's actually a lot of responsibility on the decisions that we're making today on how that will affect in the future.
Peter Hayward: I do want you to talk to the listeners and explain to them about how these plants produce beautiful things for us to consume.
Cecilia Tham: In the beginning of the project, we have Herbie, which is our autonomous plant on wheels and with the sensor data of Herbie. We measure water, we measure light, pH so on and so forth which right now, I want to say the constraint here is the environmental data.
In the future, we will be able to use other kinds of the biochemical of the plant itself. So we use these data to understand Herbie’s condition and with that sensor data, we convert them into a data visualization of an abstracted tree, which allows us to understand the health status of Herbie.
And with that, we turned them into NFTrees. And we put it on blockchain. And so we sold these NFTrees. I believe we have about 2,500 follars of NFTrees sold and we put all that money back into the crypto wallet that we have set up for Herbie. I think Herbie is one of the richest plants in the world, about 2500 dollars in its account, but I don't know, it's something really hard to prove.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, I think there'd be a few saffron plants that probably got, but the look Herbie's certainly middle class. He's probably the most middle class and perfect. And the fact that he has wheels, then I think he's the coolest plant.
Cecilia Tham: And it's something really interesting. Also, we said what gender would Herbie be? So we decided that Herbie needs to be gender neutral. We have been calling they and them and that there will be an interesting question, right?
So from there, what we did was we sold these NFTrees and then we said what if there is a DAO which is a Distributed Autonomous Organization which is basically a company, but instead this company is being run by algorithms. And in this specific case, the algorithms are connected to the sensor reading of Herbie as well as the operations of Herbie so we have basically created a company that is governed by plants, a plant-based company. And with a little bit of human logic, because right now we're still working through what it means to have plant logic, but human logic apply to it. For example, if the water sensor is continuously low, Herbie and friends can decide to invest in a startup that works with water. And they're always prioritizing their own needs. And yeah, so that's a little bit the operation side of the mechanics of Plantiverse. Herbie and Minty are just the beginnings of the process.
About learning what you can do with this notion of the sensor feedback from the plants feeding into the production of both a visualization of that, but. Incredibly the very human aspect that we turn data into beauty.
Yeah. And a lot of people have criticism about NFTs and we're really trying to hone in on utility NFT.
I'm looking for use cases of utility NFTs, which is NFTd that have a specific utility function for it. And yeah. Now we're trying to extend to understand the same mechanics, but applying it for example, using a satellite data for a forest or ocean data for corals and reefs.
But the same kind of underlying foundation to see if corals can own themselves and if, the forest can own themselves. And from there, you can imagine the kind of use cases that we can extend to. Think about a new form of philanthropy that is traceable and trackable. You can think also about how these entities could provide services.
For example, Herbie could be an air purifier and provide services for humans and get paid for air purifier service as a plant. I think there's a lot of potential to it and I'm hoping that we could continue with the projects and explore more.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, I can fully understand why the judges were so swept up in both, this is an audacious project, but we are futurists. We embrace the audacious. We go beyond the probable, possible and we go to the preposterous and you're happily sitting in the preposterous, which is fantastic because you've seen the experience when you start to make something that is ridiculous seem possible. Then other things become possible, don't they?
Cecilia Tham: Yeah, absolutely. There's a word that I recently learned called hyperstition. And I love that word. And it's the opposite of superstition where, you see a black cat and all of a sudden you connect it with something completely, unrelated.
Whereas hyperstition is a positive feedback loop system where if you verbalize something, or if you create a seed for it, it might happen because now it's real. So you can say things like, an interspecies economy, allowing plants to have ownership of themselves. Then now you're opening up a possibility, that particular possibility to happen.
Peter Hayward: Once it's said, once it's thought, it can't be unsaid and unthought. So for the listeners to see it, I've, as I said, this, we will have links to your website and everything on your podcast, but. What do you want to say to the listeners about people who are intrigued by this? And, because I imagine people would be interested, but they'd be a bit nervous. What can you say to the listeners that this is actually, please, if you're interested to, to move towards it, try it.
Cecilia Tham: One of the things that I always advise and tell people is that fear and concerns and, all of these negative thoughts spring from when we don't understand something or spring from when we don't have a full picture of what comes from the unknown.
I'm a huge advocate that, the more we learn about it, the more we explore, the more we understand, the more that we are lowering the number of unknowns that we have, and the more comfortable. we are of that particular topic. So as futurists, the way we approach this is that every single exploration for us is a rehearsal.
And the more that you rehearse, the more you will prepare for both negative and positive futures that are to come. And the more that you rehearse, the more likely that the negative consequences will be lowered because you will be prepared for it. So that, that's what I say to everyone.
Peter Hayward: That's amazing.
Look, it's been an absolute joy to, to find out about Herbie and Minty and the Plantiverse and your work and the work of the Futurity Systems Team. So again, on behalf of really the Futures Community, again, congratulations for your audacious and wonderful Project and certainly deserving of the award of Most Significant Futures work for 2023 in the category of Inclusion. And thanks to, for spending a little bit of time with the FuturePod community. Can we close with this Cecilia? Are there things you've learned about. You just gave us one around fear, but are there other things that this has taught you about how we as humans can, be more open to try things or at least include things in our thinking that currently don't get included?
Cecilia Tham: I would love to. I think one of the things that I've learned. The most is that, us humans wehave a very limited ability to sense the world. Our real reality of the world is restricted in the frequency of light that we can see and the frequency of sounds that we can hear and the lifetime that we are very limited lifetime that we live in.
But the world is actually so much more beautiful and so much more expansive and so much more to experience. And by seeing through the eyes of Herbie, I've learned that, by incorporating those perspectives, we can actually become much better futurists because we're not just designing for an individual through our own eyes.
We are designing for everybody. And that to me is an enormous learning experience that I will forever treasure.
Peter Hayward: That's beautiful. Cecilia. Thank you so much and all the best in the future for you and Herbie and Minty and all the others. .
Cecilia Tham: Thank you so much, Peter. It has been an absolute pleasure.
Peter Hayward: I hope you are enjoying the podcast. FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We are able to do podcasts like this one because of our patrons, like Peter Black, who is coming up to his fourth anniversary as a Patron. Thanks for your continuing support Peter. If you would like to join Peter as a patron of the Pod then please follow the Patreon link on our website. And now back to the podcast.
Okay, Maggie, who have we got?
Maggie Greyson: This is an honorable mention with Dion, Bronwyn, Faiza, Tumilo, Chili, Cloud, and Bathia. Their project is called Bridging the Divide, and it's immersing business leaders in Gen Z innovation. The Flux Tour Innovation 2023 is an immersive tour for corporate delegates to foster understanding of the Born Free generation in South Africa.
The tour featured Gen Z innovators, entrepreneurs, activists sharing their stories in innovative venues like urban gardens, the African Leadership Academy and Nature Reserves. They demonstrated how Gen Z is recreating the world in their image. The judges say that the Flux Innovation Tour is an intriguing initiative to come to connect corporate delegates with Gen Z's innovative landscape.
Overall, the tour lays a good foundation of understanding for this generation and is a commendable concept. And what I think is cool about this is that people can people can learn that we can't assume that what the next generations want, need, and what their perspective is without listening to their voice.
Peter Hayward: Welcome back to FuturePod, Bronwyn.
Bronwyn Williams: Thank you so much, Peter. It's great to be here again.
Peter Hayward: Congratulations on your Honourable Mention with the IF Awards for the FluxTrends Gen Z Innovation Tour, which has got to be the coolest name I've seen on any of the projects. So well done on that regard. Can you talk to the listeners about what the Gen Z. Innovation Tour was all about, and then we'll just go from there as to what happened.
Bronwyn Williams: Sure. So the Tour was basically a culmination with two very long running pieces of work that we've been doing at Flux Trends. I've been full time with the partnership there since 2015. And in that time, my business partner and myself, Dion Chang and I have been looking very closely at the rise of generation Z. That's the first piece of work we've been doing for a very long time. And we're talking almost immersing ourselves in this really fascinating, critical, pivotal generation - our global first generation of so-called digital natives. They were born into a world that already had the internet, but they are also, critically, from a South African context, a literal watershed generation. They're the generation that was born after the end of apartheid. They were a generation born with huge expectations on their shoulders from our entire national consciousness. And so, really critical to follow. I've been following them since they were kids until now, 30 years on from democracy, the oldest ones are now 30 years old. This has been a long time of working with them, doing qualitative and quantitative research studies and really immersing ourselves in the changing conversation.
And there's really interesting things that come up, how this generation is so different to my generation, the one just on the other side of the line, the millennials, right? And with “expectations versus reality” where we had a deficit, they've almost got a surplus - and there is an increased pragmatism, but also an increased apathy.
So they've really been a fascinating study subject on the one hand.
On the other hand, another project that we've been doing for quite a long time has been running innovation immersion tours, which are where we literally go out to see the future: to see taste, touch the future, engage in all the senses, and we really do make sure that's a key part of the work that we do. So we get you experiencing new types of food, whether that be literally “eating the bugs”, in terms of when that was a trend or whether that be eating lab grown meat at the moment, which is a big thing now, like really tasting those things, but also seeing, tasting, touching, engaging with all the senses to get a sense of the future as it's unfolding outside of your general day to day existence, because we all exist in bubbles and biases, right?
And a lot of our clients, particularly in South Africa, which is again, a very unequal society, a lot of the power and privilege, the capital is still concentrated in quite a small amount of commercial hands. As we always say, one of our favorite statistics in South Africa is that our top tax tier bracket can fit into just one soccer stadium, right?
And these are the people that hire us. We are in the future space.
Let's be honest, as futurists, when we do get paid, we get paid by people who can afford us, which tends to be the wealthier people in society. We see it as our duty to try to connect them with their future customers, their future workforce, to see what's actually going on in the world that they're trying to sell things and create products for.
So anyway, the Gen Z innovation immersion was a combination of those two long running pieces of work. It was an innovation immersion tour that saturated participants on meeting generation Z. People, young men, young women from all over Johannesburg, which is where we are based. Obviously this was in a live environment, so we couldn't travel too far, but we found young people doing exceptional things.
Like the African Leadership Academy, which brings together from I think it's over 40 countries, across Africa, young, exceptional school age students, most of which are there on grants or bursaries, but all of which have a passion for becoming the future leaders of our continent. I think, to see what's going on there, how the teachers are working, how they are engaging concepts like foresight into their curriculum, it is just incredible to meet this next generational cohort of continental leaders.
And it's so critical because, of course, when it comes to looking at growth figures and population growth rates, and just the future of demography, which any futurist will know is one of those long running trends that we don't have much influence over as individuals (although we all do contribute in terms of our birth rates or lack thereof) these are the sort of big trends we've got to work around, understand, because they slow bending trends. When it comes to that, Africa is very literally the future.
This is where we've got growth. This is where the next crop of global leaders, just in terms of quantity, at the very least, are going to come from. We have to understand that, right? You have to understand how they are thinking, what they are talking about, what they're passionate about, because this is going to change the trajectory of the world.
We also saw young leaders doing things in the social entrepreneurship space, in the cultural economy space. In the actual economic space and in the NGO space, we did things like human libraries with these really exceptional young people who are part of the most exciting part of this generation - the activist part.
As I've said, this is a very Janus generation we're dealing with here. There's some apathy, there's some undercurrents of anarchy. In South Africa we've got so many anarchy movements too, but there's also this real passion for activism and pragmatism, and we'd really tried to focus on that on the young people who are using their agency, because quite frankly, they're going to have the biggest vote into what the future is - your anarchists and your apathetic components of this generation are not going to have as much of an impact as all of us should know, because if you don't use your agency, somebody else does, they get more of a share in the future.
It's just like voting, right? If you don't vote. The people that do vote, their votes count more than yours. And these are the sort of questions that we tried to unpack. We also work with a company here in South Africa called Student Village, who does a lot of qualitative and quantitative research among youth cohorts, and we put together panel sessions with them, did some research with them too. So we covered quite a lot of different angles. The Student Village research is centered around universities and young people not in universities. And there we met the more perhaps anarchist and even sometimes nihilist components of this generation, which of course scared quite a lot of the people on the emergent experience with us, who tend to be older, wealthier, very insulated, come from those sorts of communities that live very much behind high walls - and we force them to confront their future, even when that future is very confrontational.
So there really is a whole lot of labour going on there. And as I said, we also include things like food, and going to people's houses and going to people's businesses.
So it's very immersive.
Peter Hayward: Wow. We'll go deeper on what happened for the people, but on the first level, what did you see on both sides, both from the Gen Z people, what expectations did they have of the people who were coming to them? And then the reverse, what expectations did the people coming, the people with power, what were they expecting? What were the initial assumptions they had for one another?
Bronwyn Williams: I think the first thing to note about the young participants who we introduced our clients to is that they all have a very strong sense of their own self worth.
Like they were all compensated for being part of this project. There was absolutely no, there was no even conversation around volunteering their time, which is something people in my generation, because we've done these tours with slightly older entrepreneurs, are very almost have less self confidence to say “please include me you don't have to pay me”. That attitude is absolutely not there. They have a very strong sense of self worth and they have a sort of skepticism towards older people, which I think is important to note, and I think at a global level, this is probably one of the things that perhaps we haven't wanted to discuss, or we've skirted around - as older people, as people who are close to power and privilege, we haven't addressed this great global elephant in the room, but at the moment, there are more people around the world over the age of 35 and under the age of 35 and our life expectancies are growing.
We're getting older. And what that means is that we have for really the first time in human history so many generations competing for space - because life expectancies have increased dramatically. Just in my lifetime in South Africa. When I was born life expectancies were below 60. This was largely due to the AIDS epidemic. There's reasons for it, but there were low age expectancies and now it's pushing more towards 70. That's a big jump.
And that means as older people live longer and remain healthy for longer and remaining powerful longer, it means that young people are trapped in this perpetual, as academics in my part of the world, “waithood”, where you don't actually get to be a fully independent adult because you don't actually have power and agency and economic control of your own future.
You don't have jobs in South Africa. You don't make enough money to move out of your parents house. You don't get to, even though you've got a vote, your vote doesn't really count towards swinging the needle if there's more older people voting and sticking around for longer and outvoting you. I mean, it counts, but it doesn't actually change things in your time until you get much older, until your whole generational cohort actually gets to claim that power and their market share in the voting space becomes large enough to change the needle.
There's a sense of sort of impatience, young people know this. And we pretend not to notice, we pretend not to tell them because it's a really uncomfortable thing to say. You have to work in a company, until you are like 50 and 60 before you get to be in the C suite because the old guys are still going to be there when they are 80, it's a very long time to wait to get to the top of it, same with politics. Your current politician is 70 years old, you're 18, by the time that your generation gets to actually make the laws in parliament. You are probably going to be about 60 years old. Is that exciting?
Who has that patience? Especially when you've got energy and vitality when you're 18 years old, who wants to be told by the time you get to actually have the world that you want, your life's practically going to be over. You're going to also live quite long, but you're going to be old and you're going to be tired by the time you actually have power in society.
Young people know this. They've got a sort of skepticism around older people at the same time. Like our clients coming in there, as I said, we know South Africa has a very unequal society. Everyone knows that everyone knows our Gini coefficient, but what perhaps a lot of the international listeners don't understand is just how physically insulated South African society is.
This is not just a legacy of apartheid and spatial planning. It's also a very present reality in terms of our high crime rates. Societies and communities are very isolated from each other, quite often separated with very literal Walls around communities or boomed off gates that protect communities from society outside.
So there's this sort of sense of fear and distrust of the other and older people tend to be wealthier. Young people tend to be poorer. Younger people are more multiracial. Older people's little insular communities tend to be more homogenous. Again, the sort of legacy of our societal spatial planning and our horrible history that we have to still deal with.
But - as I always say, you've got to understand the world as it is, if you want to have any sort of hope of changing it. And these sort of very big divides, both literal and figurative, between ages, between races, between social and economic sort of groupings between wealth and privilege between the less wealthy, between the employed and unemployed, between those involved in the formal economy and those in the informal economy are a vast, and Johannesburg is probably the most progressive part of South Africa's community there, and that there's a bit of intermingling, but you've still got these huge divides in perceptions and the sort of reciprocal distrust of where the other person is coming from.
I think that's a global thing to at least at a generational level, all the generations are frustrated and distrustful of younger people who they often term to be things like “lazy” and “entitled” are often bandied about - but let me put that in the context of what I just spoke about this whole set of understanding that they know they stuck in perma-adolescence until late middle age. When are they're going to be able to afford their own houses and, be able to pay back the student loans and all of those sorts of things? The game feels rigged, so of course they don't want to play.
So I think that's the general perception that we're going into these things with, There's another thing that we can also say, which is less controversial, but also it's worth talking about is that there's a sense of bemusement among the sort of corporate classes when it comes to looking at younger generations, it's almost of them being an object of study and interest. There's a kind of morbid fascination with just how they think and what they do.
I think that came across most prevalently at the Student Village panel sessions, where we had, as I said, the less, shall we say “outliers”of young people (although we did find some really incredible young people are making such a difference to society, really succeeding in business and all the rest of it too).
At that panel session, we chose people who were influences who were engaging in things like doom spending and market nihilism and approaching the world from a Yolo kind of perspective, which is entirely disconnected from where corporate South Africa is looking at their future consumer and their future workforce.
So we had really big saucer eyes around those stations, but that was important. It's important to see what young people are thinking about, even if what they're thinking about. Is how to get another credit card or use buy now, pay later services to buy more fast fashion consumer goods. Some of them are thinking like that.
And when you ask them where and how they're going to pay back the money, how they're going to get it. They're like, don't worry about that. That's for the future, I have such confidence in myself. I'm sure the money will come even though I'm unemployed and I'm 23 years old.
There's a huge, there's this, there's these very different cohorts there and surprising people with the reality, both positive and shocking, is a lot of fun, but also I think it's a starting point for a lot of more meaningful conversations. among people.
Peter Hayward: So let's talk about the meaningful, because you coined a phrase of reciprocal learning. And that's the thing that I'm really interested in Bronwyn. So explain what you mean by reciprocal learning and given what you've described is that there's a relationship, a fundamental coupling between the generations and these leaders. And yet at the same time, there is many things that disconnect them.
Bronwyn Williams: Yeah, exactly. So the reciprocal learning thing is something we've picked up through a lot of our corporate works. We do a lot of future of work, intergenerational mediation, if you want to put it that way.
That way without corporate lines. And there's this idea, of course, and that's the way our society has been set up that the young learn from the old. It's very conservative values and it's like you respect your elders, they know best, and we will teach you and you must keep quiet and give your opinion to yourself until you have reached that position where you are now the elder and the authority.
I think it's also important to note that sort of elder respect is not merely just a Western construct. South Africa is at its heart quite a conservative country. There's a lot of generational pressure and respect kind of dynamics that come through in the other cultures in our society, too, that actually dominates South African culture.
I think that's an important proviso to have, that really up until now, we respected our elders. You refer to older people by certain words that denote respect and they are the teachers and you're the student. But as I said, when you layer it on with this thing that like adolescence is protracted often until middle age.
Now, when it comes to the actual markers of independence, suddenly you start to see a sort of skepticism among young people as to that default respect and default understanding of almost a subordinate relationship when it comes to generations. So that's being challenged. It's being challenged openly in the workplace at the moment, which drives a lot of our corporate clients and 50 year old managers absolutely crazy because they've never dealt with it before.
They've never dealt with a sort of 19 year old intern telling them that they're wrong before, it was just accepted that you listened to people that were authority that were older than you. So they are challenging that at the same time, when you're having to deal with four generations in the workplace at the same time, you can't only be listening to people of your own age, even if you are at the more mature end.
Let me put it that way of the job market, because you have to deal with other generations right now, not just within your office, but also in terms of your customers. If you are a 70 year old, 60 year old C suite executive, you're still selling to 18 year olds. You have to understand what they are thinking, what they're doing, and we often try and outsource that. To advertising agencies or to consultants like ourselves, “you understand the youth market just tell us how to make ads that will attract them”, but it's not enough. You actually have to build a cohesive team that is going to pull in the same direction so that you don't have these massive fractures in your teams and your organizations, your societies with different generations pulling in different directions.
That's where this reciprocal learning comes in and that we're starting to see from a trend perspective. There's these ideas of reverse mentorship programs or shadow boards, and that's where you'll pair some of your youngest members of your team together with some of your oldest team members, not in a one way apprenticeship type way of dealing with each other, but rather in a two way conversation where there's got to be humility on the parts of both parties, whereby there's something to learn by all of us from all of us.
Younger employees, younger team members, younger members of society need to have the humility to understand the previous generations learned some hard truths, whether that was through activism, through protest, through warfare, through revolution, we see this across the world, younger generations take ideas like democracy and liberalism and peace.
For granted, right? Because they haven't experienced that. So there's got to be this humility to learn from the experience of people who have been, they've done that, maybe been hurt, been wounded, be jaded in the process, but also in the more corporate prosaic sense, like they actually have some skills and they've done some things before, and they can probably tell you how to actually make money in the business that you might be in, that's the traditional way of information flows, but the humanity has got to go the other way too.
All the people have to understand that young people, Know some stuff about the world, even if it's just their own generation's mindset and the sort of technologies and ways of communicating that those younger generations have, it could be valuable to them in their own mission, right? So this idea of reciprocity between generations that there's learning to be had by everyone and that age does not mean superiority.
It just means experience in a different kind of domain, right? I think that's where it comes to. We also see it in things like shadow boards, where we get companies to set up essentially parallel boards, almost like a citizens assembly would be in a nation state parallel to work with the elected board, not to make decisions, but actually to challenge decisions by the older decision makers in the room.
And that becomes so important when we understand the power gap. Between, time preference and not to put it too finely, the kind of time you will have available to experience the consequences of your time preference, right? Or to put it in another perspective, in very simple English, basically : The oldest people in the room who are closest to dying, have the largest votes and greatest power to make the biggest decisions that are going to impact the future for people who don't get to be involved in the decision making process, right? So we see this in organizations all the time, the almost ready to retire CEO is not really interested in investing in long run ROI projects. He's interested in making sure that when he leaves his shares are going to be looking quite good, same with politicians who will put into place policies that will be horrendously destructive just 10 years into the future, but they don't really care, ‘cause they're already 80 years old. They're not going to be here to suffer the consequences.
So that reciprocity is, something that's like dual listening and essentially our immersion experience with the human library components, with the panel components, with the literally being lectured by teenagers at the African leadership academy, right? It was very much a, you had to learn from people who are going to be following you. In terms of generations that have such things that have relevance and resonance to you in your day to day life right now.
Peter Hayward: And what, fascinating I'm not going to call it an experiment cause that doesn't do it respect, but yeah, a fascinating experiential exercise. What did you and FluxTrends learn from that? Because I would imagine as the host there's learnings for you in that as well.
Bronwyn Williams: Yeah.So I think we were most impressed by the absolute resilience of the, shall we say, the more sort of commercially successful young people that we'd pick for the tour, people who had built businesses or built apps that are now being used.
To power our largest retail chains, the logistics in our country, which is just incredible when you've got like a sort of 20 year old girl, it's now on track wealthier than all of us put together because she's just saw a gap in the market and decided to solve it for herself. There's just a, there's just a huge amount of.
Pragmatism among the parts of the cohort that are just seeing problems and solving them and the tenacity too. Like on the one hand, it said some, one of the participants is now essentially a tech entrepreneur. She's on track to being like a “unicorn” if she wants to in her future. And that's sort of the most of Western idea of success, but at the same time, there are people like the rooftop farm market owner that we got to, who managed to negotiate with a mall to put up her vertical farm on their rooftop in exchange for pretty much not paying rent, but in exchange for allowing tenants within the mall to use their products for their restaurants and just the absolute hustle they've used in order to create jobs, not just for themselves, but for the communities just by working with what they have, which is often so much less than what we have.
And I think that's a sort of future orientated perspective of this project has led to some more research work that we're doing where we're trying to unpack that sort of that optimism and that pragmatism, even among very on paper, difficult conditions for young people where they have so such high unemployment, where all the economic figures, all the political indicators are nothing to cheer about. There's not good news in terms of forecasts coming from the economists. And politicians. And yet there's still that sense of pragmatism and practical optimism, which is, which really shows a maturity well beyond their years. But at the same time, there's this contrast, which I always talk about on the one hand, some of these 18 and 20 year olds are wise and successful way beyond their years, maybe beyond my years.
On the other hand, some of the other characters that we introduced our clients to were almost on the other end of the scale, like nihilists bordering on anarchists that are quite happy to let the place burn down. And that's like this tension of how the future, I think such a great metaphor in terms in general for humanity has always been on this knife edge.
Between progress and ascension and that constant threat of total destruction. And I think it's a great metaphor. Right now, nuclear warfare is back on the agenda. You got like NASA telling Europe to buy battery powered radios and in case of nuclear warfare with Russia, it's an incredibly precarious time, but at the same time, life's never been better for most of us in terms of progress.
Anyway, I think that's the kind of interesting learning to take out of that, how. Things could fall either way, but what are we paying attention to? Are we paying attention to the negative or paying attention to the positive? Are we investing our time and attention in backing people who are doing incredible things against all the odds, or are we spending our time and attention drawing further attention to divisions and perhaps inadvertently perpetuating some of the more negative cycles in our society of this, as always, the future is very uncomfortable because as soon as you start talking about the future, you realize, Hey, even if it's not your fault, it is your responsibility. And that's a very uncomfortable point.
Peter Hayward: It is. Yes. Congratulations. I think the work was fascinating, and the learnings are great. I would imagine there would be a bit of interest in doing it again, but it sounds like something that's got legs. I wonder if it's got application outside of South Africa as well?
Bronwyn Williams: We would definitely encourage everyone from other countries outside of South Africa to come on this particular tour. We host about one a year. They've quite a lot of work. They're intensive experiences that we also do slightly differently every time, but we are passionate about the point that in so many ways, culturally, economically, politically, socially, South Africa, even environmentally, is almost a preview rather than a throwback compared to the rest of the world.
We almost like this little Petri dish where sometimes extreme ideas, sometimes new ideas, sometimes very progressive ideas are implemented faster than they could be elsewhere in the world.
And as such, you can learn from us. What's working, what's not working in terms of progressive politics, in terms of regressive politics, in terms of, Certain cultural conversations in terms of education, how we educate our children or fail to, how we fail to both privatize and nationalize our healthcare rights.
And some of the learnings you can have there, we'd have so many of these conversations, but I think South Africa is a really valuable learning place as a data point that can have lessons for people everywhere else in the world. And particularly people living in the weird Western world. Which is very much where a lot of the ideas that are in theory in those parts of the world have been put into practice where we live in Johannesburg in this very intense city that we have.
So we can give you a crash course in the future. Very literally the other people that you would meet there will be your future. They're going to quantitatively be the future of the world. If you want to have a preview, we’re very happy to do that. The other thing we're looking at here is extending the It's extending the learnings we had from this particular tour into a much deeper research project with our partners at Student Village that I mentioned that were partnering with us on this, where we have done 30 very intensive qualitative research reviews with 30 Generation Z, South Africans, 30 years on from democracy, and that's going to be quite an intensive look at their optimism and agency levels, the good old Pollock game with regards to their personal life, the future of work and their future in society. And the lessons coming out of that are quite incredible. And again, doubling down on our thesis that somewhere in this generation, there's this difference between anarchy and activism and somewhere in between is the truth.
And what it's like, they're like the old adage about the two wolves inside you. The one that wins is the one you water. That's definitely what's coming through there. Who are we feeding? What are we feeding when it comes to this generation as a future, because that's what we're going to get.
Peter Hayward: Fantastic Bronwyn. Thank you very much and congratulations to the team. Great work and congratulations from the APF having a nomination for a piece of work in the Most Significant Futures Work for 2023. And thanks again for joining us on FuturePod.
Bronwyn Williams: It's been a treat. Thank you.
Peter Hayward: I hope you enjoyed hearing from Cecilia about the Plantiverse and Herbie and Minty and also Bronwyn about the fascinating Flux Trend Gen Zed tour. I'll see you again next time. But. I'll give John the last word on this podcast.
John Sweeney: Hi, everyone. Keep an eye out for the Association of Professional Futurists call for submissions for the IF Awards come August. If you have a futures project you're working on or considering, this is a fantastic opportunity to share it with the APF and the broader futures and foresight community. The IF Awards recognize excellence in futures and foresight work across nine themes, such as Impact, Imagination, and Indigenous. Stay tuned for insights from past winners published in Compass, And the upcoming APF membership events.