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 Mikko Dufva from the amazing SITRA and their work with Weak Signals and how they make them ‘real’ and Valery Wichman and their work in the Cook Islands to shape a hundred year vision anchored in collective wellbeing.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward with Maggie Greyson and John Sweeney
Mikko Dufva - Expanding Imagination
Valery Wichman - Intergenerational Wellbeing
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.
Okay, Maggie, who are we getting next on the pod?
Maggie Greyson:We have one of several winners for Imaginative futures work. This one is called Expanding Imagination of Everyday Futures.
The weak signals work aims to stretch thinking about possible futures through a set of what if questions and short stories to broaden futures thinking. Expanding imaginary of everyday futures brings futures to life to increase the capability for everyone to think about potential futures.
It moves beyond just reporting signals to making futures more concrete and accessible with stories that matter. tools, artifacts, and an exhibition at the design museum in Helsinki. They're showcasing possible future objects in everyday places and situations like home, work, and nature. The judges praised this project for its innovative approach to futures work, particularly the focus on weak signals.
Which could foster anticipatory thinking. What I think is cool about it, is that by looking for weak signals in everyday life, we get into the dusty corners of the future, which are often omitted when we think about a generic unknown.
Peter Hayward: Welcome to FuturePod, Mikko.
Mikko Dufva: Thank you so much.
Peter Hayward: Firstly, congratulations, a winner of Most Significant Futures Work 2023 in the category of Imaginative and the piece of work called Expanding Imagination of Everyday Futures. So could you perhaps start for the listeners with just a little bit of description of what the piece of work was, Was this a normal thing for you to do at Sitra or was a special place of work?
Mikko Dufva: Yeah certainly. I think it's both normal and special for us, I would say there is no kind of normal work at Sitra. It was normally in the sense that this is the second time we did a project on weak signals and the more surprising things, more surprising emerging issues.
So this is the second time we did it, but this time our approach was a bit different. The project that won the award consists of a report on weak signals and then an exhibition that was based on the report. And the report consists of - of course, there are several weak signals, that is more surprising things and interpretation and analysis of them, or what would this mean - but there's also many different stories based on this analysis, trying to really bring the future more to the everyday level and trying to inspire people to think about alternative futures. And also the exhibition could be seen as a as a kind of a continuation of this, trying to make futures more tangible and especially trying to make these kind of different and perhaps surprising and unthought futures more tangible.
We did the exhibition in partnership with the Design museum in Helsinki. We had a bunch of workshops open to everyone where we started from the stories in the report. And then thought that, okay, what could be some future objects that exist in these stories. And then we commissioned some artists and designers to create some of those objects.
Or actually they had the artistic freedom to morph the ideas into whatever they saw was good. And the exhibition is based on those works, but the process didn't stop there. We also ran some workshops during the exhibition and there were a lot of different discussions during the exhibition.
So all in all, I see this project as a a set of interventions and kind of provocations for people to think about alternative futures and ask the “what if” question more.
Peter Hayward: That's appropriate given the, one of the premises for the if awards is of course the what if, so they'll be delighted to know That their name was part of your design.
Tell me, Mikko, the Sitra and doing this kind of, what I would call futures literacy engagement and futures literacy outreach, trying to make it a more public and human process rather than a technocratic aspect of futures and foresight. Is that Kind of caught to what Sitra is about, or was it a bit of a change for Sitra and maybe just for the listener's benefit, you might just tell them a little bit about what Sitra is.
Mikko Dufva: Yes I think that's a good place to start because I think there isn't quite anything similar or anything quite like Sitra in anywhere else in the world.
Sitra is originally a gift to Finland. So when Finland turned 50 years old, the parliament decided that Hey, wouldn't it be good to have this organization with the sole task of creating a better future for Finland? And and so this fund was created with this task. And that was over 50 years ago. And the mission has stayed the same, but of course, the way of working has changed quite a bit during the 50 years.
But future orientation has been there from the start and it has been more this technocratic or what I would call more traditional foresight, but we are constantly evolving our foresight process and seeing what is needed now.
So when I joined Sitra over six years ago we were already shifting from knowing the future more towards helping people think about futures, and you can see that in our work. We do megatrend reports as basically every future organization I think, but the focus has shifted more from saying that, okay, these are the trends to that this is the big picture of change and this is how you can use it in order to influence futures. So this is part of our philosophy of what does it mean to create a better future for Finland - who gets to decide what the better future is. We can't dictate the better future, but we rather want to increase the capacity for futures thinking in Finland.
And this weak signals project arose also from that approach. How can we get people to think not just about the trends? We do quite a lot of work on that and how can you interpret the trends, et cetera and we have done work on visions and how can you create reasons, but this whole section of futures thinking on how to get people to think about more surprising things. How can we get people to challenge their existing ideas about futures? I think that is a key part in creating a better future in this kind of - I like to term postnormal times - so in these times of surprises and where things are really in flux and it is more and more important to pay attention to what is outside our normalcy bubble, so to speak.
Peter Hayward: So I was going to ask you, why do you think Sitra started to make this change from the more formal, what I'd call technocratic, expert driven futures to one of, as I say this does seem to be more of a literacy outreach to the community, why that change?
Mikko Dufva: Sitra has always changed with the operational environment and we are constantly looking at what is happening within the futures field. I see this as a part of that, that we are evolving together with the futures field. And we have also done projects on how to make better decisions, because we are basically advising everyone, but of course we do have a mandate because we are a fund under the parliament.
We do have a mandate. When we say something, our voice is usually heard. So we have thought about decision making also in broader terms and there has been a kind of a shift from trying to inject knowledge into the decision making situation and more towards how can we create a process where we bring together knowledge and people and decision makers, et cetera and let them stew a bit in one pot. So this kind of idea - and I think this is in line with the idea of increasing futures literacy as well -so I think it comes from our analysis of what is needed in the Finnish society.
Peter Hayward: And I've heard you use the word surprising. And again, that's not an unusual term for us to talk about, the future surprising, but. You have spoken about this, trying to get people to be surprised by the future and surprise to me is one of those things that's both delightful.
It's actually yeah, it's exciting. It's also something that, you know, Again, what I'm hearing, you can tell me if I'm wrong I'm hearing this process of leveling it because you know who you are and where you are dictates what would surprise you and what wouldn't surprise you. Have I got that right?
Mikko Dufva: Yeah, for sure. We say this quite frankly in the weak signals report that it is highly subjective what is surprising. And what is a weak signal to one person isn't necessarily a weak signal to another.
We can debate on, is this a weak signal or not for as long as we want. But I think the benefit of weak signals is in the capacity to help us challenge our own mindset. And therefore the focus on what is surprising for you is relevant because it helps you to think about something you haven't thought before.
In our first weak signals work we used heavily the quote by Jim Dator that any useful idea about future should at first appear to be ridiculous. Because those are the things that help you think about more more surprising futures and something that hasn't been thought before. So that has been one, one key key idea also in this project.
Peter Hayward: So for the listeners, could you maybe take maybe one of the weak signals and just work it through about, okay, it starts off as a weak signal, but then you locate it in everyday life. You take it from being just a thing that is weak, but possibly changing, and then you crystallize it as a change in everyday life. And then can you even take it through to the artifact that emerged from that?
Mikko Dufva: Yeah. One thing that comes to my mind - and often these are a groups of signals and before I get into that, I'd say that it's good to look at a lot of different signals, but it's also good to do a lot of different interpretations of those.
And all of this requires, of course resources. So you can't do everything. But keep that in mind. One a set of signals that we spotted had to do basically with workers surveillance.
For example, Canon the camera maker had - I think it was a kind of a funny gimmick that they had these face or gesture recognition cameras installed in their doors. And if you smile, the door opened. So smile, you're in the camera The workers weren't necessarily that happy with this, they saw this going a bit too far. But that is just one kind of more visible form of surveillance. When we are using different digital tools, of course, all of that information is collected and there has been a couple of, I don't know if a scandal is a good word, but these concerns about, for example, the Microsoft365 gathers a lot of information can, and can do a lot of useful synthesis on those, but sometimes it has gone too far and the supervisors can basically police their workers. And then if you take a look into the future, for example, what can be done with nanosensors and smart tattoos, et cetera, there is an article which considers that, okay, if these become more commonplace, what does that mean for worker surveillance? What would be the ethical way to use them?
And all of these signals combined created this what if question of what if worker surveillance becomes more commonplace and more effective. And then we did story based on that where basically a person - it's in the first person format and the person is coming to work and trying to fool his or her smart shoes that are tracking everything and trying to dodge the different cameras that are there, but then thinks that, okay but perhaps my smart tattoo is still recording that I'm not performing at the one hundred percent level.
And moving from these kind of different signals into the analysis, okay what would this mean? What if this would happen? And then trying to create the story out of this was the kind of process for the for the report. There wasn't exactly any exhibition object on this in the exhibition. Through several steps it morphed into more of this what if there would be a four day work week type of art piece.
Peter Hayward: I wonder, Mikko, on this notion of the weak signal and your interpretation of it, is there a bias to people responding to disruption as a negative, and they find it hard to imagine it as a positive, and yet hindsight tells us things that we went through that we might have thought we wouldn't appreciate, often looking backwards, we see the beneficial aspects of it. Thanks. in hindsight, but we possibly see the problems in foresight.
Mikko Dufva: There is definitely this bias towards thinking or the things that first come to our mind or things that we pay attention to tend to be negative ones. And also the interpretations we do tend to be more biased towards the negative.
What we did in the report was we used the Dator’s four futures frame when doing the analysis. So there is the collapse scenario, but there is also transformation and also with the collapse, we tried to do it like a collapse and a new beginning. But we use those both in terms of trying to challenge our own interpretation of the signals so that we could get more diversity out of those but also to counteract the tendency towards the negative.
We also explicitly ask that, okay what would be a signal that gives you hope? For example we have this sense breaking exercise. Basically, it's a set of different questions and one of the questions is exactly this, that what would be the signal of hope? What gives you hope? And I think it's also good to pay attention to those, especially in these times.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. The there was a game I was involved in designing called the Polak game, which of course is based on the work of. Fred Polak and the notion of Essence Optimism, Essence Pessimism, whether people feel they have agency or they don't have agency. Have you got a sense in terms of this process of interpretation where you're trying to give people A sense of agency over the future, in other words, okay, we're not in control of it but we still can choose to respond to it.
Mikko Dufva: Yeah, this has been a major focus in our work and it's part of why we are focusing on also creating the capability to think about futures. I see that part of that is the increased sense of agency over futures. I feel that people tend to get paralyzed with all of these kind of doom and gloom depictions of futures.
But if you work through them, you can perhaps find some source of agency also in them, not to mention that the different kinds of possibilities that exist can be exhilarating. We have a workshop method developed called futures frequency where people go through challenge, imagine, and act parts.
And what we have learned from that is that just thinking about futures, challenging your ideas, asking the what if question, can be empowering. And even though it's not connected to any decision making process, so people don't have direct influence on what will happen, but they feel that, okay, they are more able to identify the different opportunities that are presented to them in other contexts.
We are, of course, also focused on trying to say that there are different opportunities or visions. We are not trying to dictate a vision, but we are encouraging people to do visions. But more and more, I think the second axis of the Polak frame - the agency axis - is in fact even more important than what we think is the future better or worse because that is also highly perspective dependent.
Peter Hayward: Well, that is the axis of our own control, so to speak, in other words, we can't choose whether the world evolves in particular ways, but we can choose our response to that. Exactly. Yeah. I wonder, did you get a chance to collect any observation around the age of people and how they responded to the the weak signals And the things in the design, I'm particularly interested as to older people, younger people, possibly even gender responses. Have you noticed anything about that?
Mikko Dufva: We didn't collect collect the demographic information. So I can't say about that, but based on the feedback that we got, one lesson that I learned is that what is surprising for some isn't surprising for others.
For example, the four day work week that I mentioned. I was advocating that perhaps that shouldn't be one of the exhibition objects because four day work week for me is something that we discussed I don't know, 20 years ago, or it's not a futures idea, but actually it was something that arose a lot of discussion and it was more approachable perhaps than some of the other other exhibition items, for some at least. I'm not sure how that differed depending on the age or other demographic variables but at least it's good to keep in mind that we do approach futures in very different lenses.
There have of course been different surveys about how people think about futures. At Sitra we do a futures barometer, where we ask Finns what they think about futures. And there are some some differences between genders and age, but the key variable is your socioeconomic status.
If you're better off, you see the future more brightly than if you're worse off. It makes sense, but I think it's good for futurists to keep in mind that who are we doing this work for and whose agency are we trying to increase.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, I know when I played the Polak game and when I facilitated groups in the game, you often get decision makers standing in the upper right where they have positive ideas about the future and they have agency because they're the leaders. And I often ask them the question, who in their world is standing in the lower left? Who is standing in the left where the world is tough and I don't have agency to at least, if it's not you, But it's someone who's there and the notion of, as you say, putting yourself, the oldest idea of all is to put yourself in someone else's shoes and see how they see the world. And if you don't know anybody like that, and if you're a decision making group and don't know anybody like that, then it's your job to go and find people like that.
Mikko Dufva: Yeah, exactly. We are now working on a project on democratizing futures and who has the power to define futures. In January, we published this futures lens that especially helps the people who have the power to identify the power they have and identify also what kindw of future are they talking about and to whom. Is it preferable? Who benefits? Who is the loser in their preferred future?
Peter Hayward: It's been great to catch up Mikko here about Sitra and your report. By the way, is the report we're talking about the 2022 trend report? Is that the one we're talking about?
Mikko Dufva: Yeah, the 2022 weak signals weak signals. It's available in English and it's available for free as well as all of all our different tools.
Peter Hayward: Yes, I saw it on the website. Again, congratulations to you and your team. There is a team. Do you want to do you want to just call out and acknowledge other people engaged in this work?
Mikko Dufva: Yeah, certainly. I wrote the report together with Christopher Rowley. And then especially in the exhibition part Lilli Poussa and Terhi Ylikoski were the key persons. Anna Solovjiew-Wartiovaara, futures communication expert slash guru has been making everything understandable for everybody. Also people at the Design museum, other colleagues… The future is a team effort.
Peter Hayward:Absolutely. Again, congratulations on the award and all the best for the future. Thanks Mikko.
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Okay, Maggie, who have I got next?
Maggie Greyson:This project by Valerie Wichman is charting intergenerational wellbeing from the Cook Islands. received an honourable mention. This Indigenous framework challenges Western approaches by valuing traditional knowledge to shape a hundred year national vision anchored in collective well being.
Well Being for Life project aims to establish a gold standard for well being measurements and implementation. Valerie says, in simple terms, being can be described as judging life positively and feeling good. Albeit well being may seem more subjective, it is our job to measure the best way possible so that we can track attainment of well being for all across the nation.
The judges 100 year outlook grounded in Indigenous Maori worldviews and intergenerational wisdom. They appreciated the integration of futures tools like scanning and scenario planning into the evidence base. The ambitious allocation of multidimensional well being metrics across initiatives was seen as pioneering.
The cultural contextualization of anticipatory governance through this long range, genealogically aligned national planning was praised. Overall, valorizing Indigenous knowledge systems to shape national futures was a pioneering highlight.
Peter Hayward: Welcome to FuturePod, Valery.
Valery Wichman: Kia Orana.
Peter Hayward: So congratulations for your honourable mention for your work. And so let's go into that work. Can you maybe explain to the listeners what you're doing? What was the idea? Where did the idea come from? And what did you do?
Valery Wichman: Yes, thank you very much, Peter. Firstly, kia ora tātou katoatoa kotou tei akarongorongo mai i runga i te mareva. Tōku ingoa ko Valery Wichman. Ko au te maine Akatereau no te tuanga ropi’anga Kaveinga I ko te Koutu mana tutara o te Ipukarea. Turou!
Valery Wichman from the Cook Islands. My mother hails from the islands of Atiu, Aitutaki and Rarotonga. And my father comes from Rarotonga with links to Tahiti and also to Samoa. Thatplaces me smack bang in the middle of the Pacific. I currently live on Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, a large ocean nation of 2 million square kilometres. In the heart of Polynesia and the Pacific, although Samoa tagline is that they are the heart of Polynesia. I guess in terms of my work, I came into my current role as Director of central policy and planning office at the office of the prime minister in 2018 and a part of my office's work was to focus on our nation's national sustainable development plan and the monitoring of it
And so up to 2020 we had threeIterative five year development plans that we had gone through. Obviously before 2015, the whole world was focusing on the MDGs, Millennium Development Goals, which had a heavy focus on poverty alleviation. And then post 2015, the whole world shifted towards the 2030 Agenda or the Sustainable Development Goals.
Now I came in halfway through our 2016 to 2020 sustainable development plan, and we did a review and I thought to myself, you know what? I think we need to do something a bit different here. For a long time, we took the direction of different countries and looking at the U. N. And what they were doing. But I thought, let's take a step back.
Let's reflect on it, oneverything that's happened, and then let's go deeper into our own indigenous knowledge, our Māori knowledge, to see if we can find solutions for us in terms of sustainability. But as we progressed along in terms of the research, Turanga memeitaki, which in English is roughly translated to wellbeing but as the years have progressed and more research has been done by my office, we're starting to understand that maybe wellbeing isn't quite the word and that's because Turanga me meitaki, if you (I'm not going to go into the semantics of it) break it down by the words, Turanga is about being at a sort of standard which may move with time and the situation.
And me meitaki is the plural of being good or better. And so the understanding is that there may be a standard that fluctuates and that the perceived state of being good or better by different people. Obviously, there's subjective aspects. But there's also objective aspects, which I'll talk on a bit later in terms of how we pulled it all together or the glue that that brought this Agenda all together.
So in terms of the understanding of Turanga Memeitaki, it's evolved over time. And we're finding that in understanding what our people were actually talking about when we were doing our consultations and what it's panning out to be is quite cool, quite amazing. And that's the work that I'm doing now.
At the end of the sustainable development plan five year period, around 2019 or2020. we started doing our research. We looked at different future studies aspects. We looked at doing some scenarios up to 2050. And we did three scenarios. One was the healthiest population in the world.
One was around a livable income and the other one was on climate change and what our country may or may not look like by 2050. And those were interesting exercises. It was the first time we've done it for our country. One point or the scenario around climate change was actually a really hard one.
It was a really sensitivetopic when we were going to at all islands. So there's 15 islands in the Cook Islands and 13 are inhabited, but our northern group of islands are coral atolls. So when we went up to those islands and when we started talking about possibilities.if there was a scenario where islands were not liveable, those werereally sensitive conversations and people were very adamant, thatthey will not leave their homes. So the discussion became how can we best become more resilient or adapt tothe changes that are inevitable.
By 2020, which was just about the COVID-19 timeI had put together a National sustainable development steering committee and I had presented some of the research and one thing was very clear.
We wanted to make a plan that was, people centred, values based, but which came from our own knowledge. And the anchor that we chose was Akapapa'anga, which is broadly explained as genealogies. It connects every being every living entity and non-living entity together.
So that was an important point because firstly, I think a lesson learned is that when developing these types of. Plans. We didn't call it a plan. We moved it to an agenda. It's important to have something that brings everyone together because there will be conversations that may be divisive. There may be conversations that are deemed too sensitive.
And so focusing on more on the similarities and what connects us together was important for us.
Peter Hayward: Valery the different timeframes, is this what you weave into what you call this, genealogical approach?
Valery Wichman: Yes, definitely. So one generation according to us is about 20 to 25 years. So we pitched it at 25 years. And in our traditional understandings, we look towards four generations. So that's 100 years. So the discussions that we were having or that we started to have after we got agreement by our cabinet ministers was talking about our great grandchildren. And so we were talking like that in terms of, okay what's the world that you want to leave for them and what do we need to do now to make sure that is so. That was the starting point, but just backtracking a bit. Because when I went to cabinet in December it was it was a no. And only because I think I may have not explained it well enough to our Ministers at the time.Especially whenthe emphasis by a lot of countries is more neoliberal economic aspects as being priority.,
And so that took a while to talk to different members so that they had a clear understanding based on the research that we had. And coming to an informed decision. So that was over three sittings. Before COVID it was a no, and then the next sitting, it was like, Oh, maybe we can have a look at this.
Then COVID came into the picture and about March 2020. And I thought that there was an opportunity. Cause the whole world was falling apart. And tourism, which accounts for nearly 80 percent of our GDP all of a sudden was gone.So I tabled it again in April or May 2020, and it was a yes.
Peter Hayward: That's the saying in change management, Valery, you never miss the opportunity provided by a good crisis.
Valery Wichman: Yeah. And have you heard about Naomi Klein, she talks about the shock doctrine, when big events in world history where governments have the opportunity to make certain decisions that can transform countries. Some are not good and it sometimes goes the other way. But there is opportunity there. So I think maybe I was reading authors like her and took that opportunity.
Peter Hayward: I think you're right. I think the thing is that, not surprisingly governments and a whole lot of institutions tend to think in terms of the status quo. And so they like planning over one to five years because the status quo. Is always going to be here. And then something comes along like COVID and the status quo completely evaporates and it can give leaders, if it's not courage, they realize we can't bank on the status quo. We have to become more reliant on ourselves to create the future.
Valery Wichman: And yes, you've just hit it right on the nail, Peter. That's definitely what happened andbecause even when we took this conceptto our finance ministry, they questioned that we didn’t have the data past 2028 or 2030. So how can you predict things? You know what I mean?
Not their fault but everything was just all based on the numbers and the data and we can't project beyond 2030. So we must stick to this three year or five year plan because that's how we can plot things. I guess it does show a maturing in terms of our knowledge and valuing the Maori knowledge that we have.
So I think that was one thing that was a real positive for us as a nation. And I am so glad that our leaders took that opportunity.
Peter Hayward: So what was it that emerged when you got the permission to start embracing your Indigenous approaches to building this future that was both about being and balance, but also containing the notion of change and growth or development?
Valery Wichman: Yeah I guess it's firstly having good people. Secondly it's about. Lessons learned from the status quo from the things that we were doing, which were more like tick box exercises and, lovely for regional and global reporting purposes, but In terms of impact onour people, that was something that was very vague.
And I must admit, even now, I don't know if this is the solution, but it's definitely on the right track. Going back to that idea of looking towards the future and also our responsibility. We have a term called tiaki and New Zealand. Maori also say Tiaki is a custodian, someone who looks after something now for future generations. And so that concept was central as well in terms of ensuring or the understanding that we all have that responsibility in terms of our sustainable development going forward. And also our 100 year vision.
Towards well being which we attempted to define, and we've got a definition there. And at the time when we were doing the discussions or the consultations around 2020 through 2021, that's what came out– that wellbeing fluctuates and changes over time.. So over the five year periods that we have or even the 25 year generational period, we have opportunity to change what that definition may be.
And I think that's something that's important in terms ofthe planning and policy world, because a lot of things that come out, are quite stagnant. There's the standard and you have to reach it and there's no flexibility to incorporate the changes and dynamics that are present.
So incorporating that into planning is really important and something we've learned and something that we got from our traditional knowledge. Understanding that it's about creating enabling environments. It's about the journey through life, not getting to a certain state. It's about the journey through life and equipping people with those skill sets, or resilience.
We haven't defined resilience yet in our country yet, but we know thatit is generally to make you stronger or bounce back up, but it's a bit more than just bouncing back up because there's also aspiration involved. Yes our framework was something quite new and. We now have a 100 year vision towards wellbeing and under that 100 year vision, we have the 15 star pledge, which is a play on the 15 islands we have, which sets out the thematic areas.
We changed values to shared understandings, and that's only because whilst we were going through the consultations, there was some understandings of values or interpretations, which could be harmful to certain demographics in our society. And so we settled on shared understandings or, that we can all agree to disagree on certain things.
Peter Hayward: That's very important, Valery, that, we, in order to move as together towards somewhere, we don't have to agree on everything, but we have to agree on enough. Just so we can move together and so for example, you talked about the islands that are the atolls and I'm and their context and their vision about what a good future and well being might be dramatically different to the larger island, but the conflict and the empathy for the other has to come with us.
Valery Wichman: Yes, definitely. And that's what the 100 year document isreally about. If you've ever had time to read it it's a light read. There's a couple of maybe five pages in there.
But it succinctly just sets out the direction. Our shared understandings gives a really broad definition of what tūranga memeitaki iswas to us at that point in time but that will change over time. And we've built that into our planning. And then we come down to the 25 year, which is the generational outcomes.
There's a few targets we have in there about six and two of them are global targets. One around the Paris agreement, 2050. And then there's NCDSs because that's the tsunami in the Pacific.there's also targets aroundwaste and also our language and knowledge.
Ensuring that we protect it, but also pushing to innovate in that area. Yeah so those are some of the targets and then it sets out some projects which government agencies can pick up over the next 25 years. And the beauty about that is, and I'm not sure how much you know about funds like climate change funds, like GCF, Green Climate Fund, a proposal can take up to 10 years.
So if you have a project which you aim over 25 years, 10 years of that is actually just getting the money sorted, you have 15 years to try and implement it, which you cannot do if you have a three or five year plan. So I think just a bit more flexibility and planning, but pushing things a bit further because the practicalities of the situation are such.
That's another lesson we've learned. And then coming down to the five year because everyone wants to make sure that everything's being measured and everyone wants to report on all of this. So we've got a five year scorecard and we call it a scorecard because it's not reflective of performance.
What we're trying to do now is trying to refine our wellbeing indicators. So those are the really hard ones.. Most other things you can put it in a box and we can measure these things. But the wellbeing ones are proving to be quite difficult a big part of it is because of our data and information systems which is a global issue, I guess.
And so we're trying to find ways of how we can just do things better.
Peter Hayward: Valery is there also a plan or an attempt to start a conversation with the citizens of Cook and particularly the young children in school about what their aspirations are and they understand that this journey that we're starting, which is five, 25 and a hundred years time, this notion of intergenerational?
Valery Wichman: Yeah, definitely. That's all part of our communications plan. And we haven't gone into the primary schools yet, but we definitely, in our consultations, we had the college students.
We just wanted to gauge what their thoughts in terms of their future, and if they had thought about their great grandchildren. So that was a really interesting exercise because obviously I wouldn't say different values, but different perspectives in comparison to the elderly, and there's also different perspectives when you're talking about the main Island and what we call the Pā enua or the outer islands. So that was all part of the learnings for us. But to answer your question, definitely in the works, it's part of our comms plan. And because I'm developing the next phase of all this work looking at an approachfrom cradle to grave. And what are the interventions, what andwhere are the places during our lifetime that we can create enabling environments for wellbeing to flourish.
So from the research, first 1000 days of life, that's important.. If we're going to spend our limited fiscal space anywhere, it should be on the first 1000 days of a child. So we're talking about the children, but we're also talking about families, homes, daycare etc.
Education and health systems focusing on the first 1000 days and then ECE early childhood education and setting the foundation because once you set a foundation, then theoretically, it should be better, they should be more well equipped going into the future. But. When you're a country that has limited fiscal space, then, the question is always okay, Val, you're talking about wellbeing, you're talking about from cradle to grave, where should we be focusing?
And so my answer is, our babies. Early childhood and the most vulnerable in society
Peter Hayward: There's always the leverage on the early intervention. Yes. You get a bit of bang for your dollar. Yeah. The earlier you get in.
Valery Wichman: Yeah. But that can only happen if they understand, it's not going to happen overnight.
So I think one thing that's beautiful about this is that because governments can come and go, we have elections every four years, but if you have a strong plan, which looks out over a longer period of time, then, Successive governments can add to all of that.
Peter Hayward: It's only a short chat but I have really enjoyed the chance to hear about your work and congratulations on your honourable mention. I hope that your work being recognised by the Association of Professional Futurists as, work that is really good and both good for Cook Islands, but also good for practitioners elsewhere to learn from you. And so I wish you well in your journeys. I hope to be able to talk to you in the future. Maybe we can do this again and we can see how the five years has gone and how the next part has gone. But Valery, congratulations again on behalf of the Association of Professional Futurists and thanks for spending some time with me and the FuturePod community.
Valery Wichman: Thank you very much, Peter and thank you to my central policy and planning team at OPM and as we say in the Cook Islands, Kia Orana e Kia Manuia.
Peter Hayward: I hope you enjoyed my conversation today with Mikko and Valery. Both are approaches to Foresight that should give us hope for better Futures for all. In Sitra we can see foresight playing a valued role at the highest level of policy development. In the Cook Islands we have the evidence that done well foresight can work within the dominant economic paradigm plus using indigenous and cultural knowledge can unlock change.
I will let Maggie close this podcast out.
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.