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 Petranka Malcheva about their double award for the project embedding long-term thinking in Welsh government and Laurie Smith and the work of NESTA and Prospect magazine around a Minister for the Future hypothetical.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward with Maggie Greyson and John Sweeney
Petranka Malcheva - Long-term thinking in Welsh government
Laurie Smith - Minister for the Future
Minister for the Future publication and event series
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, so Maggie, I'm pretty sure this next one is special because they actually won two awards.
Maggie Greyson:I am so pleased to present. The winner of both implementation and inclusion categories to members in the Welsh government, Jacob Ellis, Derek Walker, Marie Brosseau, Navarro, Petrenka Malcheva for their project embedding long term thinking in Welsh government.
This project is part of a multi year initiative embedding long term thinking in Welsh government. The maturity matrix can help public organizations assess where they are on implementing long term thinking. Legislate the maturity matrix can help public organizations assess where they are on implementing long term thinking legislation and consequently recognizing if they're not. This is a global best practice for institutionalizing intergenerational stewardship with the independent commissioner's office upholding accountability.
What the judges said, and I hope so too, is that it could inspire similar innovative policies worldwide in support of challenges of operationalizing such visionary principles over time. The judges commended Wales pioneering Well Being of Future Generations Act that embeds long term thinking across public bodies, setting an exemplary model of anticipatory governance.
They praise the comprehensive progress review and practical maturity matrix tool developed to guide implementation, the valuable capacity building resources provided, and the ongoing commitment to monitor ethical adoption are noteworthy.
Peter Hayward: Welcome to FuturePod Petranka.
Petranka Malcheva: Hello, Peter. Thank you very much.I'm very glad to be here.
Peter Hayward: I'll start Petranka with congratulations. You and your colleagues were dual winners in the IF Awards for 2023 Most Significant Futures Work in the categories of Inclusive and Implementation. So congratulations. How does it feel to be recognized by professional futurists that you are doing some of the most significant work in the field?
Petranka Malcheva: Thank you very much, Peter. We were very thrilled to receive the email telling us we have been successful because we have been doing a bit of this work for a while in Wales and Wales tends to be a small country, not always put on the map. So we want to really establish Wales as a leader in sustainability and in long term thinking.
So it was absolutely a big step for us in the right direction in terms of Wales being internationally recognized. Beingrecognized by an organization of futurists as doing something very interesting and very innovative in the field of implementation in particular, because that's always our goal - to do something practical that others can learn from and use.
We're, we're over the moon really with it.
Peter Hayward: For the listeners, can you maybe just take us back and paint a little bit of the background leading up to yourself, the team and that kind of thing.
Petranka Malcheva: Absolutely. The bigger context in which the Office of the Future Generation Commissioner operates is that Wales has this piece of legislation called the Well-being of Future Generations Act, which was passed back in 2015.
So we've had it for about nine years now. The legislation is the first time that a duty has been put into law specifying that public bodies in Wales, including Welsh Government, must carry out sustainable development. It's a duty on them to improve the economic, social, environmental and cultural well-being of the people of Wales now and in the future, and to meet the seven well-being goals that we have - these are based around the UN Sustainable development goals, but set out in a Welsh context. As part of that legislation, we've got what we want to achieve in the future, which is the seven well being goals. But the legislation also sets out how we must go on about it and what are the ways of working really that we should use in order to achieve the seven well-being goals.
They're really common sense - stuff that you and I probably do in our day-to-day life. But for some reason, institutions and big organizations do not always manage todo them very consistently. The ways of working are:
• long term thinking - the idea that we should not be sleepwalking into the future and that we should all be thinking of the consequences that our action will have on our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and the planet in the future
• Involvement – the idea that you should be involving a diverse set of the population in decisions that will impact them
• prevention - addressing the root causes of issues rather than the symptoms
• integration and collaboration, which are very linked and aim at not duplicating efforts between organizations, but also not impeding each other's efforts and going against what someone else is trying to achieve.
As I said, they're really common sense stuff and you wouldn't know why people are not and organizations really are not doing them already. But the Well-being of Future Generations Act sets them out and people working in public bodies in Wales have to consider these ways of working in order to show that they're complying with the legislation.
Our job at kind of the Office of the Future Generations Commissioner is to promote the sustainable development principle, to advise public bodies and help them think longer term and to get on that journey towards sustainability, and move along it.
So how can we do that? The project we are being awarded for came about from the fact that we were seeing a lot of progress in the office of the Future Generations Commissioner in terms of the decisions that Welsh Government was making, we were seeing a lot of good practice in terms of, longer term policy and planning in transport, in employability and so on, but we were not seeing consistency all of the time.
We wanted to explore what is the machinery of governance behind all of these great looking policies and find out what are the things that help great policies be made and implemented.
And what are the things that need to be discarded in order to, get to the vision that the Act sets out. So, we undertook a review into Welsh Government's implementation of the Act within the Machinery of Governance and this is how the whole Maturity Matrix project started , which we were ultimately awarded for by the APF Awards.
Peter Hayward: I imagine, Petranka, that one of the challenges for governance is working across the breadth of government that often agencies can say we're responsible for this part of, education or service or whatever else. And so they can think that they themselves are being sustainable, they are thinking about future generations. But I imagine you're looking across the overall situation of the Welsh community, of different parts of the community, different ages, different social groups.
Petranka Malcheva: One of the challenges is absolutely siloed thinking and lack of integration.
And that's what the integration way of working is really trying to address alongside the other four ways of working. The way that the progress towards the Act is being measured is through, 50 national indicators. None of them is around GDP.
They're around things like educational attainment, fair work and living wage, around global responsibility, biodiversity targets and so on. These get measured by Welsh Government, who produce every year something called the Wellbeing of Wales report, which looks across short-term trends around these indicators and in relation to the seven well-being goals.
But it alsolooks to the longer term. For example, how is the Healthier Wales goal looking in the long term? And sometimes it is for the long term trends, it says it's too early to tell because it's only been 8years and we need more information to be able to say whether there's been any significant change.
But in other times, there is a supplementary report - for example, last year a deep dive was undertaken into a More Equal Wales (another one of the seven wellbeing goals) – this explored the reasons behind how the indicators were going and what might be the barriers to achieving that goal.
There is a whole infrastructure surrounding the Act with ourselves in the Office of the Future Generations Commissioner, Audit Wales and Welsh Government all playing a part in measuring and assessing how well the overall implementation is going. But then obviously Welsh government is one of the public bodies as well that needs to be assessed.
We independently assess their use of the act and how well they're doing against their own targets. And then Audit Wales assesses how they're using the five ways of working as well. We try to be really collaborative so as to not to duplicate what someone else is doing and to ensure that all of our work is informed by the others.
Peter Hayward: So can you talk about this Maturity Matrix, which sounds like it's something to help people understand where they are developmentally on the path towards becoming, sustainable, focused, long-term thinking organization.
Petranka Malcheva: Absolutely. And the maturity matrix came out from the review into Welsh Government’s implementation of the Act, which I referred to above.
The review was on how Welsh Government is implementing the Act in their machinery of governance. We needed a criteria to enable us to assess where Welsh Government are and how well they're doing.We also needed to be able to say ‘this is where we think they need to go next’. And we didn't have one at the time.
We set out initially to just create a short criteria, but as we tend to do, we overdid it, potentially. We looked at different papers from the UN, from the OECD, from Audit Wales, from our own previous work on what does good governance look like in relation to long-term thinking, involvement, collaboration, and so on.
And we ended up with a 70-80- page document at the draft stage where we had many characteristics and many things we would like to see organizations leading the way do and we had structured it in levels. For example, long-term thinking. If you have not changed, we would expect to see no long-term vision, no investment in training your staff in foresight techniques, no budget set out for long-term projects and so on and so forth.
And that would mean you are not really trying to implement the Act in terms of that way of working. Then it goes through levels. So simple changes, which would be things like having a 10 year vision, for example, starting to think about the long-term trends a little bit rather than just the short-term things affecting the organization, but it's not really consistent and no one's been trained up. The next level is More Adventurous - ey members of your staff are starting to get trained up and to try out a couple of new things and new methods. Then you go to the next level - Owning Your Ambition, which would mean most of your staff now is aware of, what long-term thinking is, aware of a couple of methods, and is really trying to do something different. And then you would have an amazing, more than 25-year vision developed collaboratively with your staff being very confident in applying long-term thinking and the organisation setting aside budgets to ensure that this continues.
The matrix takes you through all of these five levels for each of the ways of working. It's also split into three parts because we considered these are the key themes that we would like to see addressed in order for the Act to be implemented. These three areas are Processes (the idea that to embed this legislation and these ways of working you really need to have them truly integrated within your existing process and within systems, like integrated impact assessments and so on and so forth); importantly, People and Culture - culture eats process for breakfast.
Peter Hayward: That's pretty much what Mintzberg said all that time ago.
Petranka Malcheva: Yes. It's very important for organizations to be creating a culture of innovation where people are feeling safe to be bold and to try out new things and sometimes to fail but to take that as a learning opportunity.
The People in Culture part of the matrix is all around the skills that your staff needs, the trends around workforce and what you're going to need in the future as an organization.
And finally, Public Sector Leadership because if you're doing something well, why are you not sharing it with other public bodies, so they can duplicate it or adapt it for themselves.
The matrix then is split into these three parts and each of them has what we would expect to see in relation to long-term thinking, involvement, collaboration, integration and prevention.
And it's the beauty of it, I think, but I'm very biased, is that it helps you assess where you are. You can look at it and go, “Oh, we're doing this. We're not doing that. We're roughly over here”. But it also gives you the next steps and what you should be aiming for next, because you can always look to the right hand side of the matrix, which contains the next level.
And then once we all get to leading the way, hopefully we will move the target even further away and go, ”Okay, this is the next level.” But at the moment, I don't think we're there. I think we can still use this tool for a couple of years before we have to update it.
Peter Hayward: I wonder, Petranka, given, if I take Wales as a special case that you have got legislation, you have got obviously a high level of commitment, you have done all this work to prepare a kind of measurement and strategy.
If somebody wanted to lean into this, possibly not duplicate the 78 page report but where do you think a group would start? Now you talk about the three areas that are important in terms of processes and culture and leadership. Where are the low hanging fruit, if I can use that phrase, to just start a group of people on this path.
Petranka Malcheva: There is so much in the matrix that I will not go over, but the simple changes contain a whole host of characteristics and advice in there in terms of where you can start.
Our experience here in Wales has been to start with the willing and there are a lot of champions in every public body in Wales that are really keen to be driving this work forward. They're sometimes impeded by the system and impeded by the, the process or someone above them that goes, “No, this is not the way that we’ve done things so far.”
It's a complex issue that needs attacking in multiple levels, I think. So, we are working both with government in order to ensure that the policy and the guidance that comes out of government is aligned with the Future Generations Act and is enabling all of this to happen and to be implemented.
But we're also working on the ground with public bodies trying to determine where the blockers are for them. And hopefully the truth will be somewhere in the middle and we'll manage to align these two efforts somewhere and in the middle.
But there are so many steps. Someone starting on the journey can take the first step. The biggest thing I would say is just ask yourself, “Am I doing everything that I can be doing? Can some of this be better? Can I think slightly longer term when I'm doing this strategy? Can I involve even ten more people in it to get more diverse perspectives? Can I collaborate with one other organization? Am I truly addressing what's actually the issue rather than the symptoms? And am I integrating with all of my other work? Am I duplicating something? Am I doing something again? Will what I’m doing make an actual difference on the ground?”
As a bit of a self-promotion potentially, we have loads of other tools on our website including frameworks that help people think in that way, to ask, the right questions.
People can head on to our website to check out the maturity matrix or our frameworks. We very recently published a new resource, which is specifically around long-term thinking, and which combines in a very simpleand straightforward language, a couple of different starter methodologies that people use, alongside case studies from across Wales of where people are using these methodologies and how they're using them exactly.
It also has some contact details in case people want to chat to anyone a bit more about the different projects. So, we have loads to start with.
Exciting news about the maturity matrix. It’s name has now been changed the Ways of Working Journey Checker, but that doesn't matter that much.
We've turned it into an online tool so people don't have to read through the long document and all of the tables. You can register for the tool, you can answer about 40 questions: 20 for processes, 20 for people and culture. We've left out Public Sector Seadership because that was very specific to Welsh government.
People can go in, answer these questions and then the tool gives them a nice spider diagram to tell them, “this is where you are in terms of each of these ways of working and here are your next steps”. And it produces a mini report.
We are starting to use this now inWales with public bodies. We have asked them to do collaborative sessions, ideally with their staff, with their leadership team, maybe with their partners, in order to determine where they are as an organization, where the gaps are in terms of the implementation of the ways of working and what should they do next.
We've asked them to run a session with their teams and send us back the report to get an overall picture of where people and organizations are across Wales, because that will then help inform our work going forward. For example, we know the long-term thinking tends to be a difficult way of working because you need to be in the right mindset for it.
We will know whether to focus our efforts in that area or whether they're doing worse in their processes and we really need to help them embed all of this within their processes. We're going to be getting results in September from that exercise.
But we've had a lot of keenness and excitement from a couple of public bodies.
Peter Hayward: Have other countries or other groups been coming towards Wales to get the ideas about how they might do it?
Petranka Malcheva: Yes - not just the maturity matrix in particular, although that as well. We're actually doing a session with the OECD on the 25th of April in their foresight conference promoting the maturity matrix because we've had interest from them.
In general, in terms of the Well-being of Future Generations Act, that has gained a lot of attention internationally over the years. We have been talking to Canada, Australia, as well as to Scotland, Ireland, and Gibraltar.
I recently ran a session with Italy, Lithuania and Malta around the approach that Wales is taking. And where Wales can really share lessons is the practical implementation.
We are a small country with a lot of will to be leading the way in sustainability. So that's a great spot to be in and a great combination of things to try out new ways of working and to innovate. If there is an idea out there about how to better do sustainability and how to take our efforts further, we're willing to try.
The UN are also holding a Summit of the Future. There's an interest in in developing an Envoy for future generations on a UN level.
There's a lot happening, I think, at the moment and we welcome that interest because one of the well-being goals is a Globally Responsible Wales. We don’t want to keep these lessons to ourselves. We want to share them with other people. So, people are welcome to come to contact us and ask about it.
Peter Hayward: It's really a privilege to talk about the work you've done and the award you've been given. It's certainly well deserved. I think the notion of Wales being an inspiration for other groups that, a lot of people talk about future generations. It's actually rare to find people prepared to take it and both enshrine it in both legislation, but also put in place the governance.
To promote and support. I think I I'm delighted that the a, that the APF saw fit to award you two awards in the, if awards for 2023 and produce a piece of work that quite rightly is a significant piece of futures work that really the, everyone in the world can learn from. So congratulations.
Petranka Malcheva: Thank you very much. We are also delighted and we hope that more people will go now and check out the maturity matrix and the online tool which are on our website. These are not Wales-specific, so anyone from any part of the world can go in, try them out, tell us how it went, and hopefully it helps them on their own journey towards sustainability.
Peter Hayward: Thanks Petranka, and thanks for taking some time out to have a chat to the FuturePod community.
Petranka Malcheva: Thank you very much, Peter. It was lovely speaking with you.
Peter Hayward: I hope you're enjoying the podcast. FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We're able to do podcasts like this one because of our patrons, like Rowena Morrow. Rowena has been a patreon since our start. Thanks for the support, Rowena. If you'd like to join Rowena as a patron of the pod, then please follow the patron link on our website. Now, back to the podcast.
Okay. Maggie, who's up next?
Maggie Greyson: I'm really excited to present the envisioning radical solutions for a ministry minister of the future project, which received an honorable mention. This is a collaborative project between Nesta and prospect magazine, bringing future focus discussions to mainstream audiences via publication and events.
This thought experiment modeled openness to fresh perspectives, highlighting the need to shape change proactively through plurality and imagination. Its aim is to spark debate and inspire long term thinking admits, admits crisis and short termism. The judge's view. The minister of the future framing as creative, engaging and valuable ideas for prompting social societal dialogue about the future outside of the typical retrospective approaches.
They commend the multimodal approach through articles and public events to push broader engagement and raising awareness of important trends and issues. What I think is super cool about this is that. Engaging the public in the conversation about the future is critical, and they've done this in a accessible way that just peels back the curtain on the fact that there is a way of thinking about the future.
For yourself with agency beyond what other people tell you, they want the future to be
Peter Hayward: Welcome to FuturePod, Laurie.
Laurie Smith: Thanks very much for having me.
Peter Hayward: Starting with a congratulations for your Honourable Mention for your work, on for a Minister of the Future. So first question, Laurie, for the listener's benefit, just talk me through what the project was, who was involved, what the purpose of it was, and how it went.
Laurie Smith: Yeah. this was very much a team effort. So there was a partnership between Nesta, which is a social innovation foundation based in the United Kingdom, and a UK public affairs magazine called Prospect. So it's very much a partnership and there wasa a team of people involved.
There's myself, but there's from same team as me: Celia Hannon and Florence Engasser , and we had a contractor helping us called Rhys Howell, as well as our Comms team and various editorial staff from Prospect. So it's very much a sort of team endeavor.
What Minister for the Future was about was
we imagined a fictional minister for the future. And what we did is we got doers and thinkers to propose solutions to big long term challenges for the future. So this wasn't about advocating for a Minister of the Future,we're neutral on that. It was essentially using the idea as an interesting way of opening up discussion about future solutions rather than just future problems.
Peter Hayward: And this was was it actually couched about this was a UK minister for the future as it was it was it actually around UK futures issues or did it step out into, Europe and the planet and that kind of thing?
Laurie Smith:Nesta is a UK based charity and Prospect is also a UK based magazine.
So the focus was more domestic, but inevitably many issues are intrinsically international. So for example, climate change, the UK has lots of leading work in that area, but it's only sort of one medium sized country, in the whole world.
So there were some issues like that, or there are some issues around, say, competition around digital markets as well, which are international because, lots of the companies involved are American, so at least in parts are intrinsically international .
So it's mainly focused on the UK, but in the same way that, say, the UK has a Ministry of Foreign Affairs and deals with international issues. We imagined a UK Minister for the Future might do the same.
Peter Hayward: And of course, under the Blair government, of course, you had a foresight it a, like a unit or an institute which worked for quite a while with Tony Blair. So were you commissioning people to suggest things or were you canvassing from readers of the magazine or people that you knew for them to suggest what the issues were that we had to put to the Minister?
Laurie Smith: So we were commissioning people to suggest things. Our starting point was thinking about what are some big challenges that a minister of the future might consider. We decided to focus on issues that would be a challenge, for the next sort of generation or so.
We also wanted to look at the collision of trends, where trends came together.
So an example of that might be one of the themes we looked at was the Anthropocene Diet which is looking at what we eat in the future. And there are lots of dimensions to that. There's a dimension around cost particularly in Britain, where there have been issues around the cost of food, particularly recently, but that's also a longstanding issue. There are issues around the environment because our farming system has a big effect on the environment. There are issues around health as well, because the UK and many other countries have a significant challenge with obesity. There's also issues around food security as well. Britain imports, I think, at least half, if not the majority of its food.
So we've got issues like that. Wethen did some digging around for people who might propose interesting ideas. In some cases, we went to people where we didn't necessarily know they had a particular idea in mind, but we just thought that they're the sort of person who'd come up with something interesting.
Other times we were aware that someone might have had the idea or the seed of an idea, maybe they published it in a blog or in a book, and we ask them to work that up.
We tried where possible not to focus on ideas that were well established. So we tried to get people to try to develop new ones or build on existing ones.So we added something a little bit original.
So sometimes they might say: “Oh here's a particular issue I want to discuss”. They might have mentioned in passing a particular theme, but hadn't gone into detail. So we got them to flesh that out.
Peter Hayward: And you weren't so much trying to solve the issues as get them. But basically to, to brief the minister on these were the things that the minister needed to be considering?
Laurie Smith: Actually it's both. We're very much focused on talking about solutions rather than just diagnosis.
So I'm sure you've read 101 nonfiction books where 95 percent of it is diagnosis. And there's a little bit at the end where people feel they have to add in some solutions. There aresome exceptions but that happens quite frequently.
What we were keen on is actually seeing if people could propose radical but practical solutions. So something that could, even if it was challenging or politically difficult, actually be done.
For example, it's all very well people, in a well meaning way, saying we should tackle climate change. But, what do you do tomorrow, next week, the week after to tackle that?
Having said that, we weren't about producing a manifesto. So this wasn't a coherent position where everyone had to agree with each other. Some of the ideas were mutually exclusive. One person would say one thing, one person would say something else, they didn't necessarily have to add up.
So I suppose it's about having a platform for ideas. And that speaks to one of Nesta's reasons for existing. Nesta's an innovation charity and we're very much about that. New, big, long term ideas is, a way of showcasing that
Peter Hayward: I might suggest to that part of the purpose was to start to have a conversation on these topics, rather than just have people run along and say here is the answer?No argument. This is obviously the best thing to do. You actually. We're looking for things that possibly had varieties of approaches, maybe moving in different directions, but again, trying to get a kind of rich conversation and have that conversation in a civic manner rather than a shouting match.
Laurie Smith: Yeah , you're absolutely right. So we did an initial publication with Prospect Magazine at the end of 2022. Then after that we did an event series as well where we did deep dives into some of the ideas to have conversations around them and stress test them a little bit.
The proposals were relatively short. They weren't 20 page detailed policy proposals. They were more like half an A4 side. A sort of big narrative.
And the events allow one to dig into some of those ideas. In fact, they're available online now done, also in partnership with Prospect Magazine.
Peter Hayward: Can you maybe just say for the purposes of just the listeners, just spin through what were some of the other areas of inquiry that kind of were covered in this process?
Laurie Smith: Yeah. So we looked at eight different themes. I won't go through them all, but examples include tech monopolies. There's a big concern around large tech companies dominating the digital space and there are some sort of intrinsic structural problems there because the nature of the way digital technology works.For example, things like network effects.
So say, you're a member of asocial media channel, it's important that all your friends are members too. And so once a given social media channel or group gets to a certain critical mass, they can steam ahead of others because of this sort of network effect.
It's a bit like a telephone network. There's no point having a phone if no one else does or your mates don't all have phones.
And there are other structural issues in there as well. Data is another one where the larger tech companies are, the more data they receive. And because some artificial intelligence is so driven by data there's this flywheel effect whereby they get more and more powerful.How does one practically change that?
Another one of the themes is about reengineering the climate. How does try to tackle climate change? How might we tackle l known challenges and trade offs between ourenergy supply, which is fundamental to our economy, and risks from extreme weather and to health.
There are also issues around health how people could live longer but also live better in the future.
So that's some of the themes we talked about and the various other things as well.
Peter Hayward: So I suppose my first obvious question was that, was there any political interest in what was going on?
And I don't mean necessarily the, that, the ruling party invited you in, but you, were you aware of any interest, inquiry or position coming back from the actual established political. processes in England.
Laurie Smith: This wasn't a policy output. So we weren't saying this should happen and therefore we weren't doing some lobbying.It was more a sort of space for discussion.
So we had lots of civil servants and policy makers come to our events and got really positive feedback from them. In fact, some of the people who were our contributors themselveshad lots of sort of experience politically. For example, Geoff Mulgan he is one of the contributors. He used to be very senior in the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit in the UK about 10, 20 years ago. So there was lots of interest there.
Our goal was a,is to for the work to be read. Prospect magazine has around
45, 000 subscribers. Those people aren't necessarily totally representative of the population. They tend to be people who are interested in policymaking and government. Peter Hayward: So can I ask you to maybe now step back? Because obviously you went into this thinking this will be interesting. We'll see how people respond. We'll see how people think these things and approach them. If I ask you now, stepping back and looking at it, what are the lessons that you take out of this regarding this question of the ability of societies or parts of societies to take long term perspectives on things?
And the other one that I, that is dear to my heart is this notion of people's appetite to do this kind of work, whether people are enthusiastic or it's so niche and so particular and most people would prefer to pay attention to what's playing on the football or whatever else.
Peter Hayward: So where do you stand in, as in what you learn through the exercise?
Laurie Smith: There are two parts to my answer to that question. There's one part which is about what I felt we learned about the methodology and how we did it. And there's another really interesting debate about the role of long term thinking in society.
Should I’ll start with the first and then move on to the second.
So on the first, I think one thing we learned was an exciting imaginative concept gets you a long way. The idea of a Minister for the Future as a product captured the imagination of our authors and our partners, internally and externally.
So a really good idea, which I can only come a modest amount of the credit for, gets you a very long way.
It's a simple idea:people get the idea of a minister of the future. That was powerful.
And also the fact that it was a platform for ideas, so it could be used for lots of different things rather than just being one rigid product.So that flexibility was powerful.
And also it got around some potentially political (with a small p) challenges because we weren't trying to advocate for one position or the other; so people weren't fighting about whether we should say this or we should say that because actually we could say all the things.
Another thing is the role of partnership. So I think it was great to have Prospect as partners because I think we had complementary skill sets, audiences and networks. And I think our capabilities multiplied each other rather than were simply additive. So I think that it was important to get them involved early and that very sort of deep involvement was really powerful.
I think working with externals, with doers and thinkers, can be tricky at times, some people have more or less time than others and some people have quite particular views. But that did allow us to have more freedom because it was the contributor saying something not Nesta .
Many of them also have quite substantial followings onsocial media, For example, Cory Doctorow, the science fiction author, has hundreds of thousands of followers so those networks can spread the word, . And the other thing is the importance of good design. And I think our contractor, Rhys Howell, added much there, but also, Prospect’s design team. I think making the product look beautiful was really important
We've tried to make it look like a sort of ministerial briefing paper and something a minister might take home and ithad some sort of cartoon like illustrations in it. And I think that makes a really big difference, almost as much as the intellectual content.
There's something about building internal support as well. We needed to make sure there's a link to Nesta's missions because we're a mission driven organization, which broadly covers health, climate change, and education. It's basically a good opportunity to showcase Nesta's innovation credentials as an innovation agency.
Peter Hayward: Can I just jump in there, Laurie? Was it like a Delphi process where you had experts making contributions and people reading the responses from other people in order to do their response? Or was it actually being done where a person basically was given a brief, gave you a response and you collated the responses?
Laurie Smith: It wasn't run as a Delphi exercise. It had some similarities in that we talked to many experts, but it wasn't run as a Delphi exercise. We're more tailored than that. Partly because there were some limitations on time and resource and we were covering a very wide range of topics. And partly because I think, interestingly, there aren't as many novel ideas out there as you might as you might expect. Often ideas are repeated, and essentially are slight variants of the same sort of thing.
And while it is about the idea,it’s also about the person as well, because the way one writes and articulates an idea is important.
And that person's background and status can be important as well. We had contributions from the former chief medical officer to the United Kingdom, the former chief scientific advisor to the UK, and obviously they're very able people who bring a certain status and cashe. People take them more seriously than if, say, I wrote something.
One thing is we were clear that, as I said at the start, we weren't trying to advocate for a Minister of the Future as such, but we were trying to advocate for, the idea of long termism, in government and policymaking in particular.
That's because we feel that it's got more short termist of late. And that's challenging. That doesn't come down to particular individuals. I think it just comes down to the system that people work in. Because all the incentives, essentially, or not all, but many of the incentives, point very much in the other direction
So there are very rapid media cycles. Everything's boiled down to 140 characters on X or Twitter, whatever you want to call it. So the system pushes people in one direction. And I suppose what this activity got us doing is thinking about are there ways in which the system could be tweaked to make it be a bit more long term.
I'm not saying it should be wholly long term, because I think being wholly long term is equally as much a sin as being entirely short term. You need a bit of both. For example, sometimes there are emergencies, we need to do something right now, and it needs to be tackled straight away. But it feels like our system is in very much in the short term camp, rather than the long term camp, so we started doing a bit of thinking about that.
In fact, I published an article in the APF magazine Compass to try to start mapping some of these instruments.If you imagine the Minister for the Future is one instrument to encourage long termism, because if you've got a minister who's responsible for long termism and then they've got a place in the cabinet they're going to be championing that idea.
There are other ways as well. And some of those ways are already being used. So an example of that might be independence of central banks. So in the UK, our central bank is independent from government and has particular targets around inflation in part to stop government being tempted to play around with interest rates just before an election, which will cause a mini boom, but wouldn't be good for the economy in the long run.
So that's something that's being done now in Britain, I think in Germany's been doing it since the 50s, and I think many other countries, I think America and various others, do that as well.
There's even more radical ways of doing it. So one could do things like try to enfranchise future generations or younger people, for example.An example of that might be an idea from a political scientist based at the University of Cambridge in Britain who wrote a really interesting article on votes for six year olds, which sounds like a very out there radical idea. But actually when I read it I was more persuaded than I expected to be.
What we've done so far is map and try to create a very loose taxonomy of some of these instruments. In fact, I'm doing some work now with another publisher about how to visualize those bymake a visualization of those different instruments and organizing them in some way. And I suppose the next step after that, should we decide to do it, might be to analyze those instruments .
. So there are all these instruments. There are examples of real policies people can have implemented to encourage long termism and there are hypothetical ones that people have proposed but not implemented The next question is how useful are these instruments and what evidence is there for them? So that would be a sort of subsequent stage to that.
Peter Hayward: No, it's, no, I think it's a good answer. I'm also, you know Obviously you'd also be aware there are, I think I'm trying to think which of the Scandinavian countries has got the equivalent of a futures commission inside the library of the political house.
So they actually, and it's considered to be a bipartisan, they are not in government, but they are there to advise whichever government is in and they carry the responsibility. For the bipartisan issues, because of course, by their nature, long term issues by their nature have to be bipartisan, because if there's a change in government, one would imagine you aren't necessarily changing holus bolus, these long term issues.
Laurie Smith: Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if this is quite the same thing, but there's Sitra , which is an innovation agency that reports to the Finnish parliament that does that. And I know that might be the one.
I know Sweden for a time had a role that might be described as a minister of the future, , I think Hungary did the same, possibly Israel too, and in fact Wales, which is one of the constituent parts of the United Kingdom, has a Future Generations Commissioner, which, whilst not a minister, has a rolenot unlike that - they've got the bully pulpit. And also there's some legislation called the Future Generations Act, which they help to champion and take forward.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, they, actually won one of the IF Awards and I'll be speaking to them in a podcast in another week's time.
Laurie Smith: Ah, fantastic. Fantastic. There are lots of instruments out there.
And I suppose most of the takeaway is that our current system seems to push towards short termism, but it's not necessarily an individual's fault. People behave according to the environmental incentives in which they find themselves.
How do we tweak the system a bit, so it can be a bit more long term? But not totally long term, because there's some downsides to being purely long term.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, the systems have taken long term policies. Traditionally, of course, in the In tremendous stress, all political systems during World War II took a long term bipartisan view to dealing with issues. Wars are fairly, standard one of how you find issues that everyone agrees, this is the issue. And then as soon as, The war's gone away, everyone goes back to short term and partisanship again. That's probably just the nature of human nature. I also wonder too, this is just me speculating, Laurie, this thing of, when you look at how it seemed to me, at least school children were getting more political than I was when I was 13, 14, and 15.
And we already saw pre COVID, we saw the, the 12 and 13 and 14 year olds walking out of school and basically demanding climate action to be taken. And notion of the franchise being changed, there is nothing written in stone that 18 is the date that it's always been that a person had a vote once upon a time, it was only men, only property owners.
And yeah, I think I, again, like you, I wonder whether in fact, political franchise bringing the age down because do you think that younger people are, have a more preparedness to take long term because they understand that this long term future is actually going to be what they inherit?
Laurie Smith: You can certainly see the case that they've got more incentive to pay attention to the long term. If you know you're going to be alive in a certain period of time, you may then bemore likely to care about that sort of time frame. So I can certainly see hypothetically how that's the case, because there are some cases where the age of voting is a bit younger.
In Scotland, one of the constituent nations of the UK, I think for certain elections, it does have voting at 16. I don't think they go quite as low as six.
I'm sure you're aware of this work being done in Japan called Future Design, where they try to represent as yet unborn generations.
I If you're asking a child to vote, you've got the child, so you can at least hypothetically ask what they want. But for future generations you don't have those people yet. And there's this approach called Future Design in Japan where when some policy decisions being made, certain people are asked to represent future generations, obviously, they're not literally from them, but I think there's some research evidence to show that when that happens, decision making is a bit more long term, and there's some prefectures and towns in Japan that have adopted that approach.
Another organization in the UK, the Royal Society of Arts and Commerce, has talked about whether you should have a third chamber, so in Britain you've got two chambers of Parliament, you've got the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and they've talked about whether you should have a third chamber of people somehow representing future generations.
That's a speculative idea. The future design idea has actually been implemented in some places.
Peter Hayward: I was going to say, there's another angle too. It's not exactly what you're talking about. But in New Zealand, they've just given legal rights to a river. And so the notion of giving the environment legal rights, we're, yes, it could be future generations, or it could be actually the environment or parts of the environment, the water system, the air system, possibly those things which are, they provide services to All people whether they can somehow be represented again it's abstract, but it makes a degree of sense that they have a stake.
Laurie Smith: Yeah. And interestingly I I wrote an article on this a couple of years ago on rights of nature and it's called law for the land. I think there are quite a large number of countries with at least the hypothetical rights of nature. I think it's like 19 or 20 or more, and these are at different levels of government: , national, local. I know Columbia's got it built into its constitutions, and has had that since 2008.
And I think one of the advantages of rights of nature over and above human rights is because you could argue that lots of the way nature is protected is if you harm the environment, you harm people.
And that's the rationale for protecting the environment. But by giving rights to nature, that gives an intrinsic right to nature, and you don't need a person to be harmed directly or prove that, which allows an extra instrument. It's going to have to be people who actually do the legislative legwork, because obviously a river can't practically do that.
Peter Hayward: So what's next? Is this going to happen again? Is it sense that you tweak it and do it in a different way or something? Yeah.
Laurie Smith: Yeah, that's a really interesting question. So we've done the publication. We've done the event series.
We're looking at whether we do some more events perhaps maybe with some of the regions and nations of the United Kingdom. That's a direction we could take things.
Another thing is I'm really interested in exploring is these long term policy instruments and how you actually practically change the system because there's lots of well meaning hand waving about us being long term. Butpractically, what do you do?
And I suppose there's another interesting connection because in Britain, I don't know about Australia or internationally, there's lots of interest in mission oriented government. So that's an idea where government has these particular missions that are long term and it declares that they're important. That seems to have an important long termist element to it. Is there a way of using some of those policy instruments to make missions a bit more long term?
So there are some things we're thinking about. We haven't. We're a sort of a point of making choices.
Peter Hayward: It's been great to catch up, Laurie. Congratulations on your honorable mention. I think the stuff you're doing was very interesting and thought provoking. I encourage the FuturePod listeners to to dive into the things you've done and read more about it and think about it. And thanks for finding some time to spend some time with the FuturePod community.
Laurie Smith: Wonderful. Thank you so much for having me.
Peter Hayward: I hope you enjoyed my conversation today with the Petranka and Laurie. One using the idea of a Minister for the Future to create policy conversations and the other actually working in that future now as they embed long-term thinking in Wales. And I will let John close this podcast out. I'll see you next time.
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 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.