We are delighted to continue our new podcast series based on the Winners and honorable mentions from the APF 2023 IF Awards. Today we hear from Petra Hurtado and her work integrating Foresight into the planning field and Mike Jackson and his venture, Preempt, an AI Foresight platform.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward with Maggie Greyson and John Sweeney
Petra Hurtado - Navigating Community Change
Mike Jackson - AI Enabled Foresight
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 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.
Thanks, John. Okay, so who am I going to be talking to next?
John Sweeney:Up next, we have Petra and her team from the American Planning Association's project, and she was actually the winner of the implementation category for the really exciting initiative called Navigating Community Change Through Foresight.
This project really showcases a comprehensive approach to integrating Foresight into the planning field. There's an annual trends report for planners that serves as the cornerstone. The report itself features 100 trends across three timeframes. It's the result of a collaborative effort. 30 plus people were involved.
And what really sets this award and project apart is its commitment to inclusivity. It's recognition of the importance of trends outside of the planning field and specifically the intention to engage a diverse community, to have people from different disciplines different spaces really try to ultimately create a place.
To imagine and then decolonize the future overall, Petra and her team really have something that represents a comprehensive and forward thinking approach to integrating foresight into the planning field and by combining awareness, education and guidance, the initiative aims to promote the global adoption of foresight practices and empower planners to proactively shape the future of their communities
Peter Hayward: Welcome to FuturePod, Petra.
Petra Hurtado: Hello, thanks for having me.
Peter Hayward: Yes, great to talk to you and I'll start with the congratulations because your Trends Report was awarded one of the Most Significant pieces of Futures work in 2023 APF competition in the category of Implementation, so well done.
Petra Hurtado: Thank you. Yeah, we're really happy about that.
Peter Hayward: It's a great accomplishment. I did similar things in a past life, but at a much smaller scale and apart from the foresight needed the coordination necessary to pull something like that is to me, it's breathtaking.
Petra Hurtado: Okay. Yeah. It takes a lot of people and a lot of thinking and Yeah, but it's a lot of fun too, I feel.
Peter Hayward: I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the American Planning Association know how to plan something.
Petra Hurtado: You thought you shouldn't be, but in the end while planners are planning for the future of communities, they're not always using the future and doing that. And that's actually one of the reasons why we started this Foresight Initiative at APA.
Peter Hayward: Okay. So let's maybe just for the listeners, a quick sort of taken back to the Genesis of the project. Where did it start? Who was involved? And go from there.
Petra Hurtado: Yeah. As I just mentioned, one of the shortcomings that we really identified in, in planning and urban planning is that while we plan for the future of a community We don't really have a process in our planning methods that, that, helps us include the future in, in that So in most cases, we reach out to the community.
We have these community engagement processes to understand, what are the current needs, what are the things, the challenges that we want to overcome. And then, planners also collect a lot of data. We use data in our work, which is already in the past by the time you collect it. So planners are really combining the past and the present when they make plans for the future.
And that's obviously not ideal. And realized we need to, think about how can planning be done differently? And obviously strategic foresight as a method. Got to our attention. And so we realized that could be a good thing to combine with existing planning processes to make planning more dynamic, more agile, and really allow for.
Allowed to pivot, when change is necessary while the future is approaching and, we started this about four years ago, which is really when COVID hit and the timing couldn't have been better because with COVID we also realized this is a way now to, to showcase, during COVID a lot of ad hoc decisions needed to be made and a lot of plans that were made.
pre COVID became obsolete. And so it was a good obviously there's a lot of negative a lot of negatives attached to COVID having happened, but it was for us a good way to really explain to everyone involved why it's so important to, to practice foresight and include it in the work that planners do.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, it changed the world and we'll live with those changes really for the rest of our personal life and working life.
Petra Hurtado: Yeah, absolutely.
Peter Hayward: So in terms of pulling this off what were the real in house challenges, logistical challenges without the point of doing the foresight work well?
Petra Hurtado: I guess the good thing or where we were lucky was that it was really, Driven by our CEO.
So we had the buy in from the top. And so at that time I was leading the research department as the research director in the organization. And I had, a little bit experience in that arena. And so he asked me, Hey, how about you, you try to develop a foresight practice for our company?
And I was like, yeah, sure. Let's try it. And we started in the research department. And, but quickly realized, it can't just be five, six people in the organization doing some trend research and then running with it. We realized we needed more diversity in terms of diverse perspectives.
So we started including different members. We are a membership organization. So we have over 40, 000 members and so we were like, okay let's Grab some people from that pool and see how they can help us pull this off. And so we started our trend scout community which really was mainly based on what we call our divisions.
So we have over 20 different divisions at APA, which are different planning fields. So we have a transportation planning division. We have a technology for planning division. We have a rural planning division. So We asked representatives from each of these divisions to join us in our trans scanning trans scouting activities to create more diverse perspectives.
And after a year, we realized it's nice to get all of these different perspectives from different planners, but But it's not just planners. We for example, no one talks about artificial intelligence. We need some tech people. We need, so we expanded that group and invited other professionals from, computer scientists, sociologists, we had public health professionals multidisciplinary group.
And then after that year we realized this is still not enough. We were missing, we're missing people from outside of the U. S. because it was very U. S. based. So we went out and recruited people from And then we also realized we're talking about the future, but there's really, we were looking for these thought leaders and people with experience and we were really missing the younger people in that group.
So we also then reached out to students and younger professionals and younger people to really also have a conversation. All these age groups covered. So it's been a an evolution. It's, I always say that the process will never be final. There's always something to improve and develop. But when it comes to who, who has been doing it, it really started with a handful of people in the research department.
And now we have this big group working with us on this effort. That's awesome,
Peter Hayward: Petra. I wonder, one of the challenges of diversifying scanning networks is how do you then, two things. One is, all scanners are idiosyncratic. In other words, they see things and they don't see things. And they don't always communicate what they don't see. So you don't, so you don't know the blind spots. And secondly, how do you, how difficult, how do you manage to bring disparate scanning networks together?
Petra Hurtado: Yeah, that's, that's a great question. And, we always say, we publish this annual trend report, but it will never be exhaustive.
So that, that's really important to, to mention there. But we do have our processes in place on how to narrow it down to, what we see seems to be the most important items for the planning profession for the year. And so these Transcout community meetings, as we call them one thing that was important for us was to really avoid the loudest voice in the room issue.
So how can we make sure everyone in the room has time and space to share with us what they are observing? And so what we do there is everyone gets four minutes. And if someone wants to talk more than four minutes, we just really cut them off. And if something is like something where we feel like, okay, we really need to dive deeper into this topic, then we can always individually reach out to that person and say, Hey, would you be willing to talk with us a little more about this?
And then obviously not everyone is a foresight specialist or knows exactly what we're looking for in these meetings. And so we don't give any rules in terms of what they're telling us, but it's later than our work to filter that out. And to give you an example some people are just ranting about a topic for four minutes that it has just been on their minds and they just want to get it out of their system.
Others are more like, okay, yeah, let me talk about some new trends or emerging things that I see in the profession. But what we found out is some of the actual, trend stuff we already have covered somewhere with our, more like research type work that we're doing, but the rants are sometimes the ones that are really giving us the nitty gritty insights that we wouldn't get to otherwise.
So for example, one person was telling us that community meetings have gotten totally out of hand and completely uncivilized because of this. Polarization that we're experiencing in this country and really the societal division that is here. And so we were like, okay, that like this person was essentially ranting for four minutes, but in the end we looked into it.
I'm like, you know what, that's a real problem. And there's a real threat to public officials that are connecting with the community because there's they're exposed to violence and other things and have no tools or skills to handle the situation. And so that was for us. Obviously then something that made it into the trend report, but then we even based on that created skills trainings for planners and, for example, how can you do conflict resolution in a community meeting, stuff like that.
So that's how we digest that information and really filter it and analyze and see, is there something, is there a signal or a trend that, that is actually. important to mention or is it just something that It's interesting information or an opinion, but we're not really going to use it for the report.
And then what we also do is, usually we end up with a super messy list of different observations and trends. And you obviously have to prioritize because not everything can go into our trend report. So usually we look into obviously the impact and how universal is it? Is it something that applies to Pretty much any community or is it something that's very specific to maybe rural or maybe urban communities?
and then we also look into How prepared our planners so if it's a topic where we already? Have provided a lot of education and training for planners And we know planners are already working on a lot of things related to that trend Then it might not be that important to point it out because it's already covered you versus if there's a trend or a topic where we see, okay, this is new and no one is actually thinking about it right now in the planning profession.
And that's the kind of stuff we want to have in the trend report.
Peter Hayward: I wonder too, Petra, when you went to bring this information into organizations and put it in front of planners, did you have resistance or did you have to have strategies for how busy people. Had to find some time to sit down and think about things that possibly they had thought about before.
Petra Hurtado: Absolutely. There is, we got a very, Broad mix of feedback and response to this kind of work. So obviously there are people that say, okay, I don't care. Are you guys crazy? Why is APA talking about artificial intelligence suddenly? I have no time for this. I'm busy as it is. And then there's other people that were curious and interested okay, yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense.
We planners are supposed to plan for the future. Yeah we should understand these things. And what we heard there is also that. they were thankful for the resource for the trend report, because they don't have the time to actually do the trend scanning themselves. So okay, this is a tool now that I can use in my work.
I might need to, do some additional digging there. What's really happening in my community which trends are really relevant to my communities specifically but the bigger work in terms of Seeing those things and sharing that information is already something where a lot of planners said, yeah this is a great tool that I can use.
And thanks for doing this pre work that I need to then be able to do scenario planning and other methods with my community.
Peter Hayward: I imagine this was not just a big report that you sent to people and said here you are, here's the trend report. Did you do other things to help people understand how they could use the tool?
Petra Hurtado: Yeah. So at APA, we love building the ship while we're flying it. I'm talking spaceships. So this has all been happening in parallel. We, when we published the first trend report, we, Also rolled out some webinars to just talk about what is foresight? Why is it important? But then after that, we got requests of okay, so now I really want to know how to do it.
And can you guys provide some trainings? And so we did start putting together training sessions in different formats. So we have currently on our learning system which is called passport. It's like a Netflix type subscription that planners can subscribe to. We have a six hour self paced online course that people can take online which is interactive and they can, start it and do it for, I don't know, half an hour and then continue the next day or however, which pace they prefer.
And in addition to that, we do in person trainings at our annual conference, as well as at conferences of our chapters. So we have almost in every state a local chapter. And so they have their, Local chapter conferences. And so we've been going to some of those to do in person trainings in addition to our annual national conference.
And then one effort that we're currently Working on is we reached out to all of the components within our membership. So we have the division, as I mentioned earlier, those topic based groups, and then we have the chapters and we have the student groups. And so we're currently in, in connection in contact with them to really figure out what do they need from our side to, first of all, be able to communicate it to their members.
In a way that it makes sense for them, but then also where can we collaborate with them? So we, as a first step there, we created a media kit that helps them to just, easily find a way to put it in their newsletters, social media, all of that. And the next step will be an open forum with everyone where we will elaborate on what is needed.
What else can we do to support the spreading of that work, because as I mentioned in the beginning, we really see that as a shortcoming in planning that foresight is currently not the state of the art of planning and we think it should become that and we want to recruit people in the different groups that we have here to really help us spread the word, but also help us give training.
So there will probably be some type of. trained a trainer thing or whatever else is needed. And so our next step is to find out from our component leaders. What other things that you need, what other things that would be helpful here, and then create a, an action plan based on that.
Peter Hayward: Yep. What I'm hearing Petra is there's actually a significant amount of work that's gone into developing and supporting the community group to get the information and a tremendous amount of thought and ongoing engagement to make sure that the work is useful. And then there's the core of the Foresight work itself.
Petra Hurtado: Yeah, it, it was important. Because obviously our members are also critical with, what they see, what we're doing and what they're receiving from us.
And so it was just really important to make them feel that we are, creating this together. It's not just APA national doing something and then just throwing it at them and saying, run with it. So it's a co creation process. And then we also realize if we want this to, spread across the planning profession, if we want this to make the state of the art of planning, then we need to listen to What do others need to make it happen? Like really meet them where they are and start from there.
Peter Hayward: What's the future of this for you?
Petra Hurtado: Oh, there's so many ideas and things where this could go. This is one, one pillar of what we're doing there. It's obviously, Figuring out how to integrate it into the process of planning and really making it something that is part of the future of the planning profession.
But the other pillar how we also use foresight at APA is really also for APA's own development and the strategy for the organization. So we're using the input For that as well. And so we just created a whole process in terms of how does foresight feed into our strategy cycle.
And our how that influences the way we do our work, the operation of APA, as well as, what's the scope of work for every year. So that is something that we've been Doing as well in parallel and obviously that can be refined and evolve over time. And, it's, I just just this month I got actually promoted to, to, to a chief position because it we saw that this is an important role and an important input to where the organization is going.
So my new title is now chief foresight and knowledge officer. Because of the importance of, integrating foresight into everything we do at APA. But then, I can see this, going so many directions. And I think right now the most important thing is really to make planners feel comfortable with this as a method that they may want to consider in their toolkit.
And to find the best ways to get the word out and provide the trainings and education for it.
Peter Hayward: Thank you. If listeners were interested in either seeing the trend report or seeing more about the process and that information can be made available via the podcast?
Petra Hurtado: Yeah, absolutely. So we have our foresight webpage. It's on planning. org slash foresight. And the trend report is open access. It is generously funded and elaborated in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. And so that's why we can provide an open access and it's on that website, you can download it for free.
And there's also many other resources that come out of our foresight work. We every now and then also pick specific trends or topics that we want to do deep dives on. So for example, artificial intelligence was a big one there. So we published Three years ago, a white paper on how artificial intelligence might impact the planning profession and the work planners do, which at that point, I think it was one of the first publications that looked at that combination.
That was not an academic journal publication. And so it got a lot of attention. And yeah, there's just other topics where we just really looked at some of these emerging trends and. Try to translate them to the planning profession and all of that can be found on that web page.
Peter Hayward: Great. Congratulations for the promotion and the really cool job title. Well done. Thank you. Also, congratulations for you and your group getting the most Significant Futures Work for 2023. And thanks too for finding some time to have a chat with the FuturePod community.
Petra Hurtado: Thank you for the opportunity to be on your podcast.
Peter Hayward: Thanks, Petra.
I hope you're enjoying the podcast. FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We are able to do podcasts like this one because of our patrons, like Ruben Nelson, who has been an active patron for the last four years. Thanks for the support, Ruben. If you would like to join Ruben is a patron of the Pod then follow the Patreon link on our website. Now, back to the podcast.
Okay John, so who are we hearing from next?
John Sweeney: Thanks, Peter.
I'm delighted to share that Mike Jackson was recognized with an honorable mention for his project, democratizing foresight, AI enabled participatory scenarios for all. This groundbreaking platform is the world's first free web based participatory foresight service, offering a digital strategic advisor tool that generates comprehensive strategic analysis reports in just 90 minutes. By leveraging AI and machine learning, the platform reduces the time and cost of generating in depth reports. It covers about 21 chapters spanning past, present, and future, and it can access and use about 150 Foresight tools. What really sets this project apart is its accessibility and innovative approach to future studies.
Ultimately, it democratizes and scales access to futures, and really it can be a guide for anyone, anywhere, who really maybe doesn't even have prior knowledge of the field or specific methodologies. The platform seamlessly integrates multiple features, methods, tools, and frameworks into one system, utilizing systems thinking, design thinking, decision sciences, and strategic questioning.
It does, however, retain the human role for critical thinking by allowing the users to interpret and build on the AI generated outputs. Overall, Mike's project represents a groundbreaking effort to open up and democratize access to high quality strategic foresight capabilities by creatively integrating AI, digital platforms, and futures methodologies into a first of its kind solution.
Peter Hayward: Welcome to FuturePod, Mike.
Mike Jackson: Pleasure to be here, Peter.
Peter Hayward: Congratulations on the special mention for your project for Preempt.
Mike Jackson: Yes. Thank you. And thank you to the APF for awarding us so early in our journey.
When I last spoke to you, Mike, quite a few years ago, of course, Shaping Tomorrow was beginning its journey and now Preempt, Artificial Intelligence is beginning too. Did that just come out of nowhere or is there a story as to how it emerged?
Mike Jackson: Shaping Tomorrow started in 2001 and launched in 2003 and it's now celebrating its 21st birthday tomorrow. And I never expected it to last that long, to be honest, given that most people's websites in this day and age, last only a few years, but they've been going for 21 years now, which is fantastic. And they have morphed from early beginnings to a really smart, technologically advanced system.
Around November 2020. I'd already retired from Shaping Tomorrow because I couldn't see very well which subsequently got itself fixed by my ophthalmist rather than my doctor. And at that very point in time, after having had a couple of years off, Matthew, my joint founder at Shaping Tomorrow, called me and said, “GPTs are out, we're starting to work on them, but we really would like to develop a new strategy for Shaping Tomorrow that uses GPTs.”
He asked “Would you come out of retirement to help us?” So, since my eyes were much better, I said to him, “Yeah, I'd be happy to do that, but I don't want to do it the way you think I'm going to do it through continuos improvement.” And he said, “What do you want to do? I replied, “I want to actually design a business that will put Shaping Tomorrow out of business.
And then I will help you to become that organization, because if you don't, somebody will.
I don't know what that looks like yet, although I have some ideas. But, over the next couple of months, I'll build a strategy for you.“
Around February of 2023 I finished the strategy and shared it with Matt.
I said to him, “One of the things you've got to realize is that the stuff we've built over the last 20 years, is almost all redundant. You've got to change the way you do everything.”
And they have changed the way they do things. They've done a great job of improving what Shaping Tomorrow does.
But there were two things that I particularly wanted to do that no one else was seemingly doing and that could only be delivered by GPTs.
He wasn't ready to do those, but he gave me a lot of help in terms of the original software that was built on Shaping Tomorrow to test it and i'll just go through those separately
So the first was that I felt that there was a need for us to move away from linear forecasting. I could see that because I still kept reading the strategy and foresight stuff even though I'd retired. I could see that there was a move away from linear future forecasting outputs to holistic thinking outcomes, and I didn't think that Shaping Tomorrow, or any other organization today, was delivering a digital and holistic Reimagining of tomorrow. And none was really integrating foresight, systems, design and critical thinking except in theory, books and discussions.
They are all doing very much a linear process. So I suggested to him, we needed to find new ways to use GPT's to do holistic thinking and we started building it. Then out of the blue the Ministry of Defence in the UK put out an ITT for precisely what we were trying to build.
So I recommended to Matt, we should build this for the MoD. He was not in favour. I said, “Look, we have to try, because if we don't try with somebody that actually wants it, we're going to be struggling to develop something for somebody that we don't even know yet that's on tgecsame train as the MoD.”
We agreed we would experiment.
I started building it at the same time as writing the ITT. Now, the ITT was due a couple of months later and we usually went through a process together of deciding whether we would bid, having written the bid, because we didn't want to make mistakes by going with the wrong organizations.
And we came to the conclusion that we didn't want to go with the MOD because they wanted their own in-house machine, which wasn't our bag. They wanted to do it over a period of eight or nine months, and we thought we could do it in four. And then the next important one was we thought this was too important to give it to one organization and not to share it with globally.
We made the decision we'd go it alone. We wouldn't bid for the MoD business and build one which was generic. In fact, we were able to put the business up in September. So it was delivered six months ahead of the ITT timetable for completion. We were live in September as a beta and and now we're about to hard launch this week, our hard so that we can start advertising and generating more customers and foresight.
So what does it do? Basically we're using GPT prompts to use 350 proven foresight, design, systems, and critical thinking tools and to use those tools in an integrated fashion.
So if I might give you an analogy, which will help your listeners to understand what I just said. I'm a woodworker when I'm not doing foresight and genealogy, which are my other two hobbies.
And my tool shed is different from most people's because when you go in mine, everything's organized. Whereas if you go into most people's tool sheds, the tools are all in a heap in the middle. Only the top ones get used. Most of them are getting broken underneath or never used, et cetera, et cetera.
And I would liken that to my experience of foresight over the last 25 years. As you well know, as a practiced expert and teacher, there are hundreds of foresight and design and critical thinking tools, but they're not linked together in any way. And there's no way to choose which ones are the right ones for the job at the right time.
So I've long thought about, and long wanted, even back 20 years ago, that there must be a way of actually linking these all together in a way that's integrated. And, that they can provide a 360 degree view which is something that Wendy Schultz taught me, back in 2002. She said that you've got to look at the philosophy of things, the aesthetics, you've got to look at art, music, et cetera, et cetera, you can't just look at a trend and say, that's the way it's going to go.
So I've always been interested in how you get all of these tools communicating with each other in a way that one can see the future better and provide automated scenarios and alternative futures. So we're now able to do that. And we produced PreEmpt right up to the scenario stage.
Then it was Peter Black, who I'm sure you know is a veterinary futurist in Australia, who gave me the key to saying, here's how you actually get the AI to make a decision and determine the best strategy going forward: much like a Chess player would. And we were then able to say to the machine, look, you've got all of this information that you've put together. We want you to decide for us what you would recommend as the right way forward based on what you know now.
So now it will not only deliver a humanistic and holistic process, but it will also deliver an answer. We no of no other foresight service that can properly do that.
One of my friends who's an innovation broker and is out selling it for us right now said in a recent interview I did, “Mike has turned the strategy on its head.”
What he meant was at PreEmpt you don't start with nothing and try to invent a strategy. You start with a straw dog produced in detail, and summarised by our AI, which says, look, I've done all the horizon scanning. I've done all the literature reviews. I've done all the evaluating of everything that's out there. And these are the scenarios that I came up with.
In fact, it generates 16 scenarios, but it comes down to four at the end. And then of those four, it finds the sweet spot between the four. Not to choose one of the scenarios, because you know as well as I do, that's very bad, because you're choosing an extreme. It's designed to find a balance and the sweetspot, and therefore you could move in any direction depending on what the scenario turns out to be.
It does all of that, and then it self critiques itself. It uses about twelve models, some of them well known, some of them not, to look at itself and say, did I get the right answer? Did I miss anything? Are there things you should have asked me differently that I could have answered better if you had given me a different question, et cetera?
So that allows the users to rethink, learn from and adjust their initial query to do a second more focused run.
Then a university professor in America. I shared it with said, “Mike, you've just put me out of business in terms of teaching strategic foresight.”
I said, "That was never my intention, David.”
He said, “You have, and I'm very pleased because I don't like teaching. I prefer to do research. I said, okay. I said, “What will you do then? He said, “I still have to teach so I'll teach critical thinking.”
I replied: “Oh, that's interesting. Shaping Tomorrow has long had critical thinking tools available in its system. And I think I could redo those at Preempt.”
So, on Preempt, you can now go there and can answer some pre-formed survey questions to start with, without running the reportor afterwards if you choose. And then you could run the report with the survey questions, and the machine will take into account the human element of what you're saying about what you know about your own particular or team circumstance.
And then the machine will run it with the human and AI process. Then I went further than that and said, Ah!, this synthesis ought to be the meat in the middle of a sandwich, controlled by humans.
So because it's the meat in the sandwich, we need another piece of sandwich on the other side, which is the critical thinking tools, They run after the synthesis runs, to be able to ask human questions like, “What do we think about this?” “What makes us excited?” “What are the roadblocks and how to overcome them? about what the machine has said?
So it's a human and artificial intelligence led machine. That allows fast decisions now.
Yesterday, Richard Hames, who is an eminent futurist called me. You probably know him, Peter? Richard asked me to do a very fast urgent request for a big company, because he got an urgent call to be a keynote conference speaker as the first one wasn't available.
He asked if I could run the AI on a topic neither of us knew much about. It was done in two hours. The machine produced a 275 page Foresight report in two hours at a cost of 190 USD Dollars. If I had tried to do that when I was a CEO, it would have cost me 50,000 US Dollars plus, at least in external fees, plus all the time, and all the argument and debate inside the business.
And it would have taken me at least six months, maybe a year to get what the machine produced. We can do it in two hours, or Richard could do it himself in two hours.
I shared the synthesis with him and showed him how he could interrogate the report so he could ask any question he liked to make a slide presentation, an academic report out of a video, et cetera, et cetera, all in the space of about three hours.
This is still amazing to me. I still get shocked by what it can do. I still find it incredible that I can ask a question and it will go further than the question I asked and answer questions I never even thought about, which is unbelievable to me.
Peter Hayward: Thank Mike, for listeners, you are free to engage with Alexis on the question of My Life. And that's the entree where someone goes in and can actually use it to talk about their life. And an interesting thing you do is you start with the person giving their Dream, their Vision, their Story of where they will be in the future and what that future will be like. And that then primes the machine to generate scenarios around those pathways towards that. I'm very interested in the use of what I'd call a Normative Future to drive the analysis.
Mike Jackson: Yes, Peter, that's the second idea I took to Matt and said, “I think that in the 25 years I've been in this business, and the many years I've known you, that most futurists need to make money.
Most futurists concentrate on those who have money. And there's a big gap in the market for individual foresight, which we all need and have, and there's a big gap in the market for small and medium size enterprises where they can't afford it, or they haven't got six months to wait for a report and uncertain about what might come out of such an exercise so they don't do it.”
So I said to him, “I think we need to find a way of developing a My Life process where I can go on the service and I can have the machine act as a strategic coach.
What My Life does is it allows one to present your life and dreams with a default scenario which you can change in all sorts of ways in terms of which country you'd like to live in, which age group you are, what topic you're interested in, et cetera.
And then you write a very short, honest story about yourself.
What the machine will then do is it will take your story and the robot will act as the executive coach. And it will say to you, “I don't think you should be a coal mining engineer. That's not a particularly good job to be in the future, but looking at what's going on, you might want to be a materials engineer and you've got the skills and the traits to do that.”
So it takes a very positive view. Richard Hames, I mentioned him already, but Richard actually is on our board and he went and used it about three or four months ago and didn't tell me he was using it. He came back and said, “This is phenomenal. It's incredible just what it knew about me from 300 words and its excellent response.”
And I'm getting that from everywhere. People say, wow, it's really helping me to think about my dream. So this is the second part: helping organizations, helping people, helping teams to think about their future and dream about what they really want to do.
Now the one thing I didn't tell you yet is that the reason I went in reverse is because I ran Preempt through our own robot and asked it what we should be doing. And it came back and said, you should link up My Life to the Our World synthesis.
Once it's got those stories, it'll aggregate them. So we're now working on the process of aggregating the stories through visual knowledge graphs. And we plan on making them part of the robot's synthesis.
Now you've got humans all over the world able to put in their stories and then the AI saying there are people in the Philippines who hate electric vehicles because they can't afford them, with the government insisting on their introduction, whereas in Canada, they love them, right? So that will help our clients to understand better about, probably not offering electric vehicles in the Philippines right now. It's not going to be worth it for a long while, but we should be selling them in Canada. And so therefore the machines outputs will be better from crowdsourced stories.
Peter Hayward: And that reminds me of Shaping Tomorrow, Mike, because, again, the crowd itself becoming a data source was something that you built into Shaping Tomorrow all those years ago.
Mike Jackson: Yes, but this one's better, Peter. This one's better in that it's really looking at people's dreams. Rather than commenting on just the current situation they find themselves in.
To just finish, just one more point. Okay? The robot then said not only should you add that in, but you also should then go to people like Shaping Tomorrow and integrate their forecast databases. And we have another one, which is a patents database we're working on right now, where you should be able to look at that patent database and add the latest ones into the AIs story.
The object is now to go further than ChatGPT. For example, our very first client said to us, “I'd like to put in my hundreds of thousands of innovative comments from people we've gathered through crowdsourcing. Could we do that?”
So what we're effectively trying to do is build a strategic analysis that's taking into account all parts of society and using that to improve what ChatGPT does.
These were the two ideas that I had and the team is fast changing my own dream into reality. They don't exist on Shaping Tomorrow. They don't exist anywhere else. No one has them. We have to build them for the benefit of all humanity..
Peter Hayward: So again, I'll be getting you back on the Pod in the future to go into this in a bit more depth, but in terms of where Preempt.life is going or could go, what's your dream for it?
Mike Jackson: Oh, I'd like to think we have at least a million members, at least a million. We've got 10 million people potentially signed up, but they won't all come, I believe. I'd like to get to a million real and active users. Because that's going to make a really powerful statement about what people think around the world.
And I'd also like to think that we get every single organization, futurist, strategist, designer, ctpritical thinker and change agent, in the world, using it. But we've made it cheap enough that it's no excuse not to have it. And a lot of startups have said to me at this price, I can afford that. I can afford 190 USD as an insurance policy to say to me don't do that.
And on the other side it's re imagining tomorrow, it's not just projecting forward. It's good for traditional organizations because it's helping them to see that maybe they're part of the problem and that they could be part of a muvh better solution.
Peter Hayward: So for people listening who've never heard of Preempt.life, and that's the whole reason for the podcast, so what should people do? Obviously go to the website and sign up and use My Life. That would seem to be the starting point.
Mike Jackson: Yes, Peter. Right now it's more true that the larger organizations are coming to use the system. They're generating syntheses on all sorts of material. It's quite interesting about the sort of questions they're asking. It'll go down to one I did in the Philippines for Peter Black, early on, which was on ‘Veterinary service services in Cebu, Philippines’. It’s only a small city, but it did that with no trouble at all. And it can get down to really low levels of granularity that you can't get by doing a lot of foresight studies. So a lot of the big clients are coming and they're discovering My Life and asking us to put their staff and customers on. They'd like to put their customers into the service and ask their customers to use it. And they're quite happy that it's free and anonymous.
They don't want to know who said what. They don't want to know that you, Peter, said their company stinks. What they do need to know is that you think it stinks so they can fix it. That was their comment when I first showed it to them. And we want to know how to fix it. Not who said it. We're not after shooting the messenger.
It sounds fantastic. I'm like you with GPT. I've been playing with it and using it to generate scenarios. But what you've done, I was really struck by the use of the normative dream to trigger the robot to start the analysis.
Thank you, Peter. We haven't finished yet, if we ever finish. We've seen some other ways we can use the robot throughout the system. But we haven't got that far yet. We've got so much to do. But it's really quite exciting at the moment. There's not enough hours in the day.
It never is Mike.
Peter Hayward: On behalf of the FuturePod audience and also the APF again congratulations for your recognition. I love the breadth and the synthetic nature of your thinking at PreEmpt.life.
Shaping Tomorrow has been very successful and you have really gone much, much further and it's surprising how different PreEmpt is to Shaping Tomorrow’s service. I can't wait to see where this turns up. Thanks for taking some time out for this brief chat and we will have a longer chat on FuturePod in a few months time.
Mike Jackson: Thank you Peter, and for those who are listening thank you too.
Peter Hayward: I hope you enjoyed my conversation today with Petra and Mike and two quite different and well executed approaches for making Foresight more accessible to people. For Petra its how to work successfully with a large and diverse group of people. For Mike its about embracing emerging technology. And I will let Maggie close this podcast out. I'll see you next time.
Maggie Greyson: 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 IFF 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.