We have reached the end of our podcast series based on the Winners and honorable mentions from the APF 2023 IF Awards. Today we hear from Radical Norms and their ‘Signs of Change’ processes through which participants imagine climate change effects through public signage and Ben Holt from Solferino Academy and the project envisioning future humanitarian aid.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward with Maggie Greyson and John Sweeney
Daniel Daam-Rossi - Radical Norms
Ben Holt - The Solferino Academy
About the Solferino Academy
The Team
LinkedIn: Sarah Gullet - Innovation Specialist, IFRC Solferino Academy
LinkedIn: Patricia Mugenzi-Seurat - Foresight Consultant
LinkedIn: Yuve Guluma - Senior Food Security & Livelihood Resilience Specialist, IFRC
LinkedIn: Priyanka Patel - Innovation Manager, Kenya Red Cross
LinkedIn: Derrick Mugasia - Innovation Lab Coordinator, Kenya Red Cross
Other team members
Gilbert Phiri, Senior Coordinator, Regional Africa Zero Hunger, Programs and Operations Department South Africa, IFRC
Tawona Matenda, Senior Livelihoods Officer at International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, IFRC
Photos: They were taken in Zambia, during a three day foresight and innovation workshop. The two in a meeting room show people from different parts of the Red Cross Red Crescent network using rich storyboards to illustrate possible futures for their food security and livelihoods programmes. They are using a set of ‘icon cards’ which I created for this kind of ideation session. It really helps people explain their ideas and bring their visions of the future to life.
The picture under the tree is a community engagement session where we used storytelling to speak to different groups about their experiences of change in the environment, livelihoods and food security, and then to discuss their hopes, fears and aspirations for the future.
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 have we got next?
Maggie Greyson: We have another imaginative project winner and it's each one of the imaginative projects is thrilling. This one has a. An extra element of surprise and carefulness to it. It's called Envisioning Climate Futures Through Everyday Artifacts. This interactive installation, Signs of Change, turns abstract futures into accessible platforms with imagined public signage depicting future impacts of climate change.
It turns global climate issues into relatable human scale events and scenarios. Sign up And I'm going to add the word whimsy in there to sign represents potential policies, etiquette values across different locations and time scales for collective meaning making about climate impacts and value shifts.
The judges unanimously recommended this project for the If Award, praising its innovative and accessible approach to promoting futures literacy through thought provoking public signage and installations across four continents. They commended the project's clever blend of foresight methods, public art, and community engagement, crediting an inclusive dialogue around potential futures in a playful yet impactful way.
The universal language of signage made the concepts understandable to diverse audiences unfamiliar with future studies. Overall, the judges celebrated this highly scalable and compelling effort to make futures thinking engaging and participatory for the general public. What I think is cool about it is that it led to developing assessment tools for evaluating speculative signage.
And we don't often measure the impact of design fiction. So I'm going to come back to this one when I think about how did we do?
Peter Hayward: Welcome to Future Pod Radical Norms. Winners in the APF's IF awards for 2023 in the category of Imaginative.
Daniel Daam Rossi: Thank you for having us.
Peter Hayward: Daniel, we'll start with you. Radical Norms. Who are you? Who's involved in this and what was the. What was the piece of work leading up to that you got involved in?
Daniel Daam Rossi: Radical Norms, actually, Signs of Change, the project that we were awarded for is a collaboration between Radical Norms, a Speculative Design studio based in Toronto who are here on the call, myself, Daniel Daam-Rossi, Angelika Seeschaaf-Veres, and Koby Barhad, and also a very close friend and collaborator, Bettina Schwalm, who is a design strategist based out of Stockholm and whom we've been collaborating with for a while.
Bettina and I met when we were doing our grad studies in Stockholm at Konstfack. She was studying experience design and I was studying storytelling. We had collaborated a lot on the past and so I brought her onto the team. From there ‘Signs of Change’ blossomed and flourished. But before that 'Signs of Change’ began 2020 during DesignTO, which is Design Festival in Toronto that began as an off site that has now become the official design festival here in Toronto. We popped up as ‘Signs of Change’, as a Radical Norms project with our main objective being to make futures and foresight methods more accessible to the general public.
Peter Hayward: Yep,
Daniel Daam Rossi: We popped up in a shipping container at a place called Stackt Market. It's still around and is a collecton of shipping containers stacked one on top of another, each shipping container hosting a little world unto itself of somebody doing something, from a pop-up noodle bar to a nike AirForce 1 shoe customisation pod. We were one of those shipping containers in which we popped up with these then, wooden signs, with a vinyl cutter, and we created a collection of signs that we're exploring the future of Toronto from different perspectives whether it was related to tech disruptions, climate crisis, new ways of living, exploring new behaviours in relation to these disruptions. We created these signs and invited the public to stop by, engaging in many conversations that explored the impact and effect each sign might have on the individual experience..
From there, we started to build and respond to people's reactions to the signs, growing the collection even more. That's where it all began. This was also supplemented by a workshop which leveraged simple futuring methods to empower citizens to envision new futures of Toronto. This process of foresight was made as simple as possible, from which more signs would manifest.
After this initial forray the project went a bit dormant until we brought Bettina on board and where we partook in an open call to fund the development of the project. The call was called ‘Future Prototypes’ put out by Vinnova, who are Sweden’s innovation agency and who have a very strong feeling about Speculative Design and how it can inform innovation processes. It was through this process that ‘Signs of Change’ was formalized and expamnded on together with Bettina after the project received significant funding from the open call.
This sort of literal ‘What if’ idea turned into something more serious where we wanted to explore what happens when it doesn't just pop up once, but pops up many times. So we popped up in Stockholm and we'll get into that, but we ended up, popping up in many different places around the world.
We were, we started in Stockholm, we then went to Palo Alto as part of the BiFrost Summit. We then went to Singapore and ran the ‘Signs of Change’ experience with the Singaporean government’s ‘Center for Strategic Futures’ and their own innovation incubator hub called ‘SGInnovate’. We also created some signs for the Israeli context, and there are a few more places in the works, but that's essentially where it began.
Peter Hayward: The thing I see with this kind of work, and I go back to, the seminal work of of Stuart Candy and Jake Dungan in Hawaii, when they were putting the blue line, where the sea level was going to rise. What I call guerrilla foresight of where you confront people, ambush them with a future that they never ever thought of. Is a very different way to do foresight when we invite people in with this lovely seductive notion that they can Build the future you're almost coming from the other side of where you actually get, slapped across the face by the future.
Daniel Daam Rossi: We're Designers first and foremost. I wouldn't say we're traditionally foresight practitioners, but we leverage foresight tools and methodologies to inform the things that we Design, and design for us is a tangible practice. It's a practice of creating physical objects that exist in space and that confront people, and therefore instigate reaction.
And I belive there to be a beautiful synergy happening when you have design or speculative design, that is narrative building, future making, making objects and prototypes, beging to merge with foresight practice where you methodically unpack the layers of future. When you merge these together all of a sudden you have something that is steeped in research and insight and foresight, that manifests into something very tangible. These tangible objects, these ‘archetypes’, make these concepts of ‘future’ resonate because we're contracting the distance from now until future by realising them. Future isn't a state of becoming anymore.
Future has come, it is here, and that's why I think the signs resonate.
Koby Barhad: There's also an aspect implementation. So a lot of times we're dealing with strategic foresight that is very top level, almost like a bird's eyes view. And the idea is yeah, we can, we can make new policies. We can develop new rules and laws and things like that. But the difference is how do you implement those things? And what does it mean for me when the house of parliament comes up with this amazing initiative, what does it mean for me when I'm getting out of the house and I have to walk my kid to school? What happens when I'm getting, a new type of insurance? So it really goes into these types of resolutions, which at the end of the day, this is what people or a normal person would care about, and that's all. That's where we feel it's very impactful in that sense.
We learned so much every time we're presenting these things just by those reactions. So it's more than, I think for me at least, it's like with ‘Signs of Change’, tt's more than just getting slapped in the face with a future, but you get slapped with a face with 20 different futures and then you're building your own world and you're choosing what you would like from those 20 different events and things that are happening and what kind of path you would take between those changes the signs are posing.
Peter Hayward: Angelika, can you tell us more about the ‘Signs of Change’ project and particularly what parts you focused in on?
Angelika Seeschaaf Veres: Coming from a, or bridging foresight and innovation with design for us, the decision making is around what will be the most impactful and accessible artifact to land this future to the audience.
And in our first iteration, it was the public, the general public is a big consideration in the work that we are doing. So it could have been a lot of different artifacts, from products, services to systems, but we chose signs deliberately because there is a layer of authority in them; a layer of policymaking in there. There is also a layer of guiding behavior in the public. And signs are interpreted differently in different cultures. They hold different meaning in some cultures. In some places they are more like general guidelines, and in other countries they are followed to the dot and are very much part of everyday culture.
For us, it allowed us to distil down all the trends, big drivers, small signals that we found into a format that is a accessible and immediate and is universally understood. To a certain degree it lifts foresight out of the report and the written word and into the public realm, opening futures up for interpretations. Hence ‘Signs of Change’ as a foresight practice manifested nicely through the ‘Signs of Change’ street signs.
Also, the craft of sign making or in our first iteration, we actually popped up as a sign making shop where people would create their futures and manifest them through a workshop process that is deeply informed by foresight methods - the questions being posed to participants were: where would you put the sign? What does it communicate? Whom does it communicate to? This process of signs making gave a sense of agency to participatns that ‘I can shape the future’, ‘I can shape policy’. And I'm becoming an activist and I hold agency, from, for example, my nine year old son who wanted to have special crossing for robots, to someone that comes from a completely different background and life experience.
At the time, in 2020, there was a big discussion here in Toronto around the Google Sidewalk Labs and the private ownership of public land and all the surveillance Data structure that would come with it. This was top of mind for a lot of people and ran through and manifested in the signs that were developed.
Questions were being asked: what do we want here? What do we not want here? How do we alert people of entering a highly data surveillance zone in a public space? That for us is why we chose the sign artifact, which for any Speculative Designer is a very big decision in what chosen artifacts activate, how it activates and how it can invite people to the future making process.
In regard to the signs, they are not something that reside in a gallery space. No, we want to have them in the public space. You want to have them also activated in organizations where there're various levels of signs that we encounter and surround us that allow us to play to these different spaces and behaviours that are occupied in that landscape of and that guide norms, policies, and so forth.
Peter Hayward: The sign is an artifact that wants to evoke a social response from the viewer. And the power of the sign is either to mandate how you will behave. Or to give you a piece of information that you will make a wise choice of your behavior. And that's a very interesting way to explore the future, because to some extent, We see the future is open, but the sign itself is signifying that maybe the future is not as open as you thought it might be.
Angelika Seeschaaf Veres: Yeah, and it's also this change and shift in behaviours in relation to each sign that is so interesting for us and that brings in this mundane and that brings in how we as people move in possible futures. Yeah, so there's a really strong current that runs throughout all our work, I think. But yeah, you stated that super well.
Peter Hayward: So how did you make these signs?
Koby Barhad: From 2020 and 2022, we developed this or streamlined our process where we first, depending on the context and the place and the participants or audience that we're going to engage, do very basic secondary research. Then we interview some experts and we extract key insiughts that we feel will be the biggest or most radical change. After we define a big shift in values that might happen: moving from a society that really value ‘A’ to a society that values ‘B’, for example a society that values security to a society that values something completely different. As soon as we have this tension defined we try to ground them in a specific daily mundane situation. Sometimes it's going to be related to something economical, sometimes it might highlight a social issue.
Something that also came up with thequestionnaire that we usually do after the project is that there's a lens of social justice that always underlines everything that we're doing and that invesitigates perspectives that might not traditionally be heard or centered in converstaions.
The signs are very much adjusted to the local signage language. So we did a series for Stockholm and everything looked like the city of Stockholm, even from working with the sign manufacturer for the municipality of Stockholm. Same thing when we made signs for the Singaporean context that holds multiple national languages.
Same thing in Isreal, considering three different langauges and logics, where suddenly the signs became very political and very divisive in a way. Also with the States, like very, yeah same thing where there are various neighborhoods. It’s interesting to see how each one of those workshops is becoming, a new thing unto itself, where even the same sign might work very differently or might be seen very differently in different places. So I think, this is very much to do with how the signs are both conceived and then made.
Peter Hayward: and can someone talk about what they saw or what you learned through the use of the signs and how people engaged?
Daniel Daam Rossi: I think we all have our own different experiences because not everyone goes to each location. Budget-wise it’s just not possible. The common denominator has been Bettina, who has attended each and every one of our pop-ups, accompanied by another one of us.
Speaking to the Singapore experience, we present usually 10-ish different signs, that as Koby mentioned are developed using local knowledge in conversations with local stakeholders. All 10 signs never resonate with all participants, in fact it’s usually two maybe three that really pop out, whether it's a hot button topic or it's something that maybe is culturally significant: for instance in Singapore social currency was a really big issue.
Another sign that resonated was ‘regulated climate’, which had to do with geo geoengineering. There was a lot of discussion around the manipulation of climate in the area and for various political reasons, where certain nations are taking over and altering precipitation, so questions of having agency over your own natural climate systems emerged.
Depending on where we popped up, certain sign would really hit the mark, and usually it would be tied to two or three different signs out of the collection.
Peter Hayward: If you ran these workshops again, you would be designing a set of signs, research based on what you find out about the place and people, but as much as possible, you're trying to get a spread of technologies, social values, hot button. How do you set the spread?
Daniel Daam Rossi: It first started primarily as investigating climate-based disruptions. That was the thing. That's the undertone. Then it starts to get into different technologies, whether it's mixed realities or algorithms, and then there begin some overlaps when you start to see technologies become things that aren't maybe enablers of just, living life, but become a currency that challenge how we exchange value and even question what value is? What are new markets that might be built from these technologies thatperhaps weren't obvious in the beginning. So just depending on the audience and which futures each sign is activating, different applications and interpretations emerge.
Climate and tech touches pretty much everything, right? I think that's pretty much the red thread.
Peter Hayward: where to next? There's certainly a workshop and a process here to really bring this notion of, design artifacts and, crystallize it to help people anticipate futures.
Koby Barhad: I think the nice thing that we're discovering now about ‘Signs of Change’ and the way it's being used is that there are a lot of different ways for using it.
The first one is education: future literacy or strategic literacy and so on. Giving a way for people to understand those methods of future thinking and making to inspire and so on.
Then there is the very commercial use of it: helping companies and organisations break through very rigid ways of thinking about the future, going beyond four years forward and beholden to the current rules and anchors, and to really step out of those limiting parameters. This might mean stepping outside of the company.
‘Signs of Change’ is also becoming a very big collection of signs from all over the world. So we immediately see how things are perceived in a lot of different ways from a lot of different places and communities.
The third direction for ‘Signs of Change’ is that of policy and implementation of policy that really helps organisations that are thinking about change or thinking about transformation, to really understand, or at least have another layer of understanding for what the implications of those futures might actually mean.
Of course there's also the cultural nuance. To spread ‘Signs of Change’ through the world and have as many people engage with it; to think and get mad and get super excited or happy and which is another very interesting quality that this project has when focused on the public domain.
Peter Hayward: Awesome. On behalf of the APF, again, congratulations for producing one of the most significant pieces of futures work for 2023 in the category of, ingenuity. And also thanks for spending some time with FuturePod.
Daniel Daam Rossi: Thank you so much for having us.
Angelika: Yeah. Thank you.
Koby: Thank you so much. Okay.
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 Kieran Murrihy. Kieran has been a patreon since our start. Thanks for the support, Kieran. If you'd like to join Kieran as a patron of the pod, then please follow the patron link on our website. Now, back to the podcast.
Okay. Maggie, who's our next guest
Maggie Greyson: up next? Ben Holt and the team received an honorable mention for envisioning future humanitarian aid. This strategic foresight initiative is a practical application of foresight to frontline humanitarian programming as requested by the Red Cross National Societies in Zambia, Malawi, and Kenya.
This group recognized that the future held new challenges and opportunities, which could fuel innovation for a portfolio of future ready systems level innovations. You will hear how they combine systems, mapping strategic foresight and design thinking in a highly inclusive creative process with local communities, experts, entrepreneurs and academics.
This creative process embedded foresight capabilities to ultimately transform global programming, increasing community resilience and dignity. The judges appreciated this project's integration of foresight methods to tackle complex humanitarian problems. They praise practical application of foresight skills towards ambitious relief outcomes and the use of systems mapping for interventions.
Peter Hayward: Welcome to FuturePod Ben.
Ben Holt: Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me
Peter Hayward: Firstly, Ben, congratulations for your Special Nomination the work of you and your team Envisioning the Future of Humanitarian Aid: Innovating Food Security through Foresight. Well done. Ben, the Red Cross Red Crescent is a massive organization. And do you want to just maybe just talk about how you and your academy sits in this massive global organization and provides a suite of services to Red Cross Red Crescent?
Ben Holt: Yes, I should say it's big. Complex, sprawling organization. It works in 191 different countries. And in those countries, the national societies are providing services.
They are working as an auxiliary to government and they are mobilizing volunteers and staff from their own communities. They're from those countries. Largely, they work with communities, they build services and respond to the needs and challenges there. But then there's also the need to collaborate, coordinate, share globally.
So we have the secretariat. Which is what most people would call the IFRC, so the International Federation. That's actually a kind of catch all for all of these different national societies. But the Secretariat sits there to connect, to collaborate, to share across this network. And then the Solforino Academy sits as part of That central body, but we're like a little agency.
So we will work across that network as needed. And at the request of those national societies, which is great because people come to us with ideas, with challenges, with questions, and they actively want us to work with them to help them pick that and find new solutions, which is brilliant, we're not banging on doors, asking for people to want to do new stuff.
We we get to work with people with brilliant ideas and lots of enthusiasm.
Peter Hayward: I was going to ask you about the appetite for foresight in Red Cross, Red Crescent. There will be places that love foresight and parts that just haven't got time for it I imagine.
Ben Holt: Absolutely. Yeah. So there is a bit of a track record with it has been used in pockets and particularly it was used as part of the design of our global strategy 2030. So that was before my time, but it was a deeply consultative process that spoke to thousands of people around the world.
They looked at the kind of issues and the challenges that we faced as an institution, but also in the external world. And that leant heavily into. Foresight landed very well, woke a lot of people up to the potential, but was focused on producing that global vision. Yeah. I came in and really I was tasked with kind of picking up.
The legacy of that and expanding it, making it an ongoing usable and useful capability for the network. And like you said, there are some people who are usually skeptical. There are some people who really buy into it. And we've been trying to build that momentum by raising awareness, by working on some very tricky, practical, classic humanitarian issues.
So working with, the Ukraine crisis, for example, and then also on this food security program, and then also have helping to train and build capacity and then connect because there's already pockets as people doing some amazing stuff around our network, and they might not know about each other. Kind of part of the beauty of sitting in that central agency type role is to be able to connect stuff.
Not to be telling, to be learning, to be sharing, to be going, Oh, you guys should speak to these guys because you're both approaching the same problem from different angles. So yeah, the appetite is growing and I see more and more demand for it as part of organizational change programs thinking about how we might transform to really make sure that our principles and our services are going to be fit for the challenges that we face in coming years.
Peter Hayward: You mentioned that you're a little bit over halfway through the 2030 vision and that is that, the Academy and you are involved in that kind of midpoint, assessment as to where the strategy is.
Ben Holt: Yeah. It's a really interesting point to be at because I think that any futures work.
Any good strategic foresight has to look backwards and understand the past and where it's come from and the systems and structures that we are rooted in to understand where we might go in the future. So it's actually a really nice process to be part of. You think about the fact that. Strategy 2030 came out right at the end of 2019 into 2020 and then.
Three months later, COVID hit, right? Now, pandemics were mentioned in there. Yeah, they were. They didn't say you've got three, three months. And so the process that we're going through now is twofold. We're working with our colleagues in the strategy and planning teams to analyze what's happened.
So looking at how the ambitions, the transformations, the challenges that we called out in that strategy have been implemented, have they influenced the way that our national societies are thinking, acting, planning, allocating resources? If so, like what's enabled that, contextually, what's helped good change happen, or what's perhaps stymied that?
Some of those ambitions. Can we learn from that so that we can help to accelerate change or focus on the stuff that enables good change? We also need to look beyond just the kind of reporting and the strategy and the documentation of what we've done. And we need to look beyond the leader's views of how we're doing and to get down and to talk to and to connect with them.
Amplify the voices of the people who are part of our global network. So within the Solferino Academy, that's a large part of our focus is that deep connection with people all over the world, amplifying voices, listening, seeing the differences of opinion between people at different places in the organization and different points of the world, and then also looking forward, because.
Obviously a 10 year strategy calls out some things that may happen over those 10 years and some priorities we might need to focus on. So we need to analyze if those are still correct. Do we really need to reorganize some of our change and planning? Are there new challenges that are emerging quicker?
Or fresh ones that we didn't think about at the beginning of this. Sometimes it feels like a massively overwhelming process, looking globally over 10 years with all these different stakeholders. And sometimes it feels like a massive privilege to be able to do this.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. It strikes me given the scope of the organization, you've almost got a kind of microcosm of the world in so many respects. Given your involvement with the Cambridge Center for Existential Risk and the IRC, is there a kind of a relationship between the work you do there and the work you do at the IRC?
Ben Holt: Actually, the work with Cambridge has just been a kind of visiting position to go in and tap into their knowledge and connect with them and bring ideas to them. And that's happened as I've been working for the Red Cross.
My background's actually, I originally began in the humanitarian sector, 20 years ago. As a logistician, moving trucks, equipment, supplies around in preparation for kind of classic disaster responses. But I left to train in the media because I'd always liked writing, storytelling, I've been fascinated by that world.
And I went to do quite an old school apprenticeship with the intention of coming back into the humanitarian world with those skills. But I just happened to time it where that industry got completely sideswiped by the arrival of digital tech changes in consumer behavior. When I started, there was a printing press in the basement and loads of people in inky overalls.
And by the time I left three years later, that was gone. We'd been given cameras. They had this new website. And actually that's what got me into this. Field of thinking about the future and how organizations do or don't prepare for it. And what happens if you're not prepared. And ever since then, when I came back in, I worked for Medicine Sans Frontières (MSF) for a long time, really leading through a digital lens on change and transformation.
Both within their kind of offices where they recruit and advocate and fundraise, but also out in their projects around the world. So Myanmar, Pakistan, South Sudan, where again, shifts in the context were massively challenging the way that they were set up to respond. And on and did various other things, a master's in innovation and creativity, and it all came together in this role because I've always said that what I do is evidence based or evidence enhanced storytelling.
I'm telling people stories about the future. This might happen. We need to change like this. And here's some evidence to suggest why that's important. And then translating that into actual change in these organizations, which is really hard. And just, yeah, I was lucky that this role within the IFRC pulled all those threads together and it's been a real pleasure to find that space.
Peter Hayward: And digital has fundamentally disrupted the way that large organizations would operate. That once upon a time you could imagine an organization like Red Cross Red Crescent would have been a command and control where information was passed down but with this notion of digital, in my experience, Ben, it's actually turned a lot of hierarchy upside down, there's actually more intelligence at the bottom of the organization and the ends of the organization than there is in the top.
Ben Holt: Yeah, I would completely agree with you. Yeah, certainly there's some very traditional hierarchical models. In the past of all of these humanitarian organizations and we have that legacy still there, there are some very steep hierarchies in some places But you're right it's impossible not to Hear or be aware of or have the opportunity to connect with everybody else For me.
This is something I've always been champion in this foresight role There's absolutely no way we should be sitting centrally telling people what the future is going to hold and the challenges they should prepare for. In fact, the opposite. I see a huge potential in the IFRC's global network to be this sensing network.
Effectively, we can get right down into The real world, anywhere in the world, we've got volunteers and staff working everywhere, drawn from those communities that they support. We can speak to them in real time. We can hear them. And I also think that raises another really interesting issue is that you can almost time travel within that network because some countries are dealing with issues which will become much more prevalent and important for other countries.
So how do we connect them together so that they're learning? And you're absolutely right that it flips the hierarchy and it flips the narrative. We've had some really interesting stuff because obviously, you've got like a big Office in Geneva with lots of very smart people from all around the world working hard to help lead and coordinate this organization.
But then there were people in different places facing and trying to deal with some challenges, which are perhaps not front and center in some of those discussions where they don't feel that they are. And that's always fascinating to hear that challenge. How do you become a good support system and coordinating body without listening and having a place for those kind of ideas to surface and be challenged.
Yeah it's really important. There's huge power there and it's untapped. Really? We do it. We're trying to move towards it. We are tapping into it and building this capability, but there's, a long way to go to make it super high functioning.
Peter Hayward: I was looking on your LinkedIn and I saw, and people who know me will know the chuckle I had when I saw you'd done a survey on people's attitudes as to whether yeah, they felt agency. They felt that they felt an ability that they felt positive towards the future or, negative towards the future and of course, the thing I was chuckling at as we had a bit of a laugh offline was you using the Polak game and watching people move into essence optimism and essence pessimism and all that kind of stuff.
But there's a serious question there because in that data you collected, there was this, I thought interesting point about the optimism of people who were volunteers in the organization, relative to people who were in the organization as one would imagine embedded employees. And I was struck by that because I, it did seem to me to be that people felt more empowered in non Western countries that they felt in Western countries. And they felt more empowered as volunteers than they did working inside such a massive organization. And it's a tough question, but in terms of the sort of role of digital communication, listening, why that might be?
Ben Holt: Yeah. It's a very good question and hugely grateful for the Polak game. Cause we've done it all around the world in workshops online with different groups. The results you're talking about were part of this wider survey.
We were doing to understand people's hopes, fears, aspirations for the. For the future, in general, I think people working in the humanitarian sector or civil society writ large, whereever I've done it, they tend towards feeling a sense of agency in general, the degree of optimism or pessimism about the future will alter quite dramatically depending on time on place and potentially position.
I think there's something very powerful about joining an organization like the Red Cross Red Crescent as a volunteer. Because often you're stepping into a role within your community when you begin, right? You're doing something which is going to help people in your country. Around you, you're actively taking a step to engage with some of the issues that you see around you, and that can give people a real sense of purpose and space.
Now, that's not to say that the volunteer modelis in any way perfect. I can see ongoing and deep debate about how do we keep that voluntary role relevant. How do we make sure that it's suitable for younger generations? How do we make sure that people in it are empowered to bring their ideas and their self to it, rather than just being somebody on a call list who may or may not, go out and do something?
I think perhaps then if you go looking up through the hierarchy, you get tangled up in the kind of the deep, difficult overlapping issues that these organizations are there to try and cope with, coupled with the challenges of actually making the organization function and ensure that the money is there for stuff that's needed and to protect the fundamental principles.
So I know that those things can bereally hard at times to unpick and very difficult to see a way through. Sometimes… we were actually chatting yesterday about how interesting it would be to track people's sense of optimism and agency over time within a role or within a particular thread of work.
Because I think it does shift., That report that you're referring to, we've been working with various aspects of the response to the Ukraine conflict. You can see a marked difference for the people who are inside Ukraine who responded to that survey in terms of their sense of agency and optimism, obviously, right?
I think the other thing that comes out when we have used this is that, you often do get people saying they do feel that they have an ability to influence that future by dint of the fact that they work for an organization or volunteer for an organization like ours. Bu they’ve not necessarily always thought about what the communities they work with feel about the future.
And how did they feel a sense of hope and optimism and agency over that future? And if not, how do we build that into our programs? I will genuinely think that giving people some hope for the future is, a key aspect of humanitarian response work, we should be giving people a sense that things will improve, they will be safer, their families will have space to resettle or to find security or to improve their, living situation over time.
But also there are people with loads of brilliant ideas, genuinely trying to have an impact on the future within their community or their country or writ large. And perhaps part of what we do should be finding that and amplifying it and listening and connecting it into the resources and the space that we have.
Yeah, I always, I encourage people to keep using that activity in their own work as well. Yeah, it's a hugely powerful one.
Peter Hayward: I wonder too, also, Ben, that Solferino Academy has three levers that you lean on, Foresight's one of them, but the other two are also important, both in terms of their own change, but also how they work with Foresight. Do you want to just talk briefly about what the other two levers of what you do are?
Ben Holt: Sure, yeah, so we're there to help different bits of the organisation as they face complex challenges, tricky problems, or they want, new ways of doing stuff.
So, the three levers that we use are Foresight, Leadership and innovation, and like I said, there's really good links and crossover between those things. I think that looking to the future, to the challenges, the opportunities, the change in context is a really powerful fuel for innovation. You need new and useful ways to do stuff in that changing world, and that's exactly what we did in thisfood security and livelihoods program which led to us chatting today. We connected that foresight piece to the innovation piece to come up with concepts that we think have a chance to grow, thrive, and impact that, that changing world over time, but for that growth and impact to happen, you need leadership buying as well.
You have to be realistic. You're going to need resources, permission to do stuff, access to projects or people or all the rest of it. And so, we work actively with leaders to understand the challenges they face, what they think, the kind of leadership qualities and culture might need to be over time and also to understand the differences.Globally, there's very different leadership styles in our organization. So there's been some great work done by colleagues in the team where they've been connecting leaders from different parts of the world to talk about. These things openly and honestly, and then to visit each other's countries to see what's going on and that can sometimes get lost in these big, federated organizations.
It's sometimes you're focused on the stuff you do, and they're building those connections is really important.
Peter Hayward: One of the themes in the in the if awards that the APF put together, one of the issues that it certainly has come up in a number of the award winners and special nominations is this notion of decolonizing the future. A lot of futures concepts can be seen as an imposed thing. A Western thing based on Western values and a number of advocates and others have been nominated and won awards for how they've tried to decolonize the future space and to truly open the space up. In a massive organization like you're dealing with, this notion of opening up the future so it's not simply through the eyes of London or through the eyes of New York. Has that been another thing that you have been an active process that you've been doing?
Ben Holt: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Very much and it's an ongoing debate within the organization writ large anyways.We said earlier, understanding where, how you need to change and what the future might hold requires you to look at the past and understand where you've come from. And obviously these are institutions which are deeply rooted in a particular period of time and a particular political set of assumptions.
And so, there's really interesting debate going on around that across the organization. Now, given that we then workacross all these countries, embedded within those countries, drawing on the communities and supporting and staffed by people from vastly different perspectives and traditions, that is a powerful asset that we have.
The Solferino Academy itself is globally staffed.
So, the people that we worked withmost closely on this project, within my team, were based in Nairobi and Abidjan. And Then we were partnering with the Kenyan Red Cross, the Malawi Red Cross and the Zambian Red Cross, and with other team members in Zimbabwe, to ensure that the perspectives, the potential of the future was debated and discussed from very different angles, right?
I was there to provide some structures and activities, some workshops, but it was very much rooted inthe ideas and the aspirations of those countries and the work was done by those countries. So, we worked in a very nicely asynchronous way where we set the framing and people went off and did their own investigations, built their own scenarios.
So that's again us in more of the centre, listening and learning from what's going on there. So yeah, hugely important. And also, a thread of that work that I mentioned around revisiting strategy 2030, because that has to be something that we are looking at as an institution and in how we use foresight and other work globally.
Peter Hayward: Ben, it's been a very brief chat. But again, I'll congratulate you for the special nomination in the APF IF awards for Most Significant Futures Work, 2023. And also to congratulate you on the work you're doing. You are in some ways modeling the future that a lot of us would hope for in managing complex issues across the whole planet. Thanks for spending some time with me and the FuturePod community.
Ben Holt: It's been an absolute pleasure and thank you. And I just want to give a huge shout and support to all the people that worked on this project that we've been given the award for. They've not been able to join us today, but I've been chatting to them this week and the work's still carrying on.
I feel hugely privileged to have supported the beginning of their journey, coming up with these innovation concepts and the taking them and running them now. And if people wanted to find out more about how we're doing this globally, we published a book at the beginning of the year. It's called The Foresight Book.
It's on the Solferino Academy website. And that kind of captures what we've learned doing this stuff over the last few years. And it has some case studies and stuff in the back that explain how it's being applied.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, it's a good little book. I had a quick browse of it online. It's a free download. People should certainly go and grab it. Thanks again, Ben. Congratulations and all the best in the future.
Ben Holt: Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.
Peter Hayward: Well that's it. We have finished the special series on the 2023 IF award winners and mentions. I hope you enjoyed the series and found some inspiration in there. Thanks to Lisa, Maggie and John for helping out with this series. And thanks to the APF for giving the Pod the chance to feature these guess. We will return to our ususal podcasts now. This is Peter Hayward saying bye for now and I will see you later. I will let John have the last word on the series.
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.