A chat with Gareth Priday who is lead Foresight practitioner at Action Foresight and a Director at Living Labs Innovation Network and Ethical Fields. His interests are many but his passion is how people think about the future and how, as professionals, we can best work with that.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
Participate in the Mind Time research
Contact Gareth
Links
Action Foresight http://actionforesight.net/
Living Labs https://www.australianlivinglabs.com.au/
Ethical Fields https://www.ethicalfields.com/
Transcript
From Living a life Wrong to Mind Time
Peter Hayward: Do we think about the future in different ways? And if there were modes of futures thought. Then would that have implications for how we run workshops and plan futures interventions?
Gareth Priday: Past thinking is about looking for evidence, looking for certainty, data. This is the realm of research and science. Present thinking that's about creating the future by action.
So
it's about probability, creating that future by control actions, making things real. And
then
Future thinking is about possibility,
so
imagination. How the world could be different, creation, opportunity. But again, these are all ways of thinking about the future. I think this has implications and opportunities and challenges. It could be lots of layers, but I'm going to say four.
Peter Hayward: That is my guest today on FuturePod. Gareth Priday. Gareth is a lead foresight practitioner at Action Foresight. And a director at the Living Labs Innovation Network and Ethical Fields.
Welcome to FuturePod Gareth.
Gareth Priday: Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.
Peter Hayward: It's great to talk mate. Gareth Priday. What's the Gareth Priday story? How did you end up a member of the Futures and Foresight community?
Gareth Priday: It started with the words, "You've been living your life all wrong." My first kind of career I've been working in banks. In banks and the IT and operational bit of banks. And looking back, I didn't realize at the time, that the role, title, and the work didn't always match. I had an ability to be engaging in interesting work or doing things that are a bit different, a bit innovative. They're a bit more entrepreneurial within these kind of contexts. And then I moved to a place, it happened to be project manager, and the activity matched and that didn't work very well because that is not my natural tendency. So I ended up seeing the psychologist and doing the battery of tests and I went in and she said the words "you've been living your life all wrong". And you should have been doing something around strategy. And so we cooked up this plan. I ended up changing job but as part of that I negotiated that I could come on the Master Strategic Foresight. I did look around at other kind of strategy things. And they felt a bit like traditional project management, whereas Strategic Foresight felt very different.
Peter Hayward: Can you look back to your upbringing, to that sense of what you've found yourself in. You found yourself in the project management, IT space, and yet that really wasn't what you wanted to do. Was there things earlier in your life that you think were playing out?
Gareth Priday: So this isn't necessarily something that quite led me to futures, but it's something I have in my mind that I can't quite make these things touch, which is comedy. So when I was in my teens and early twenties, and everyone was going off to music festivals and having a wonderful time, I just saw a lot of comedy.
Yeah, very uncool. I, preferred the sort of the more clever word and the twist. That makes the kind of everyday seem a bit absurd. Not the slapstick stuff, that kind of comedy. And there are no jokes coming, I'm a terrible joke teller. But I do think there's a sort of nice symmetry with Jim Dator's idea that anything about the future should at first seem ridiculous and the idea of this absurdity or strangeness in the present.
And recently I came across a thing that sort of starts to make them touch, which is by association. So the idea of creativity comes from smashing together different frames that are unrelated. I think that it's a guy called Costler. And he talks about, comedians and scientists and artists in this theory.
And maybe we can add futurists to that as well, because that kind of creativity is part of the work, when we're smashing these different things together and seeing the sparks that fly. And this also comes with a bit of an apology to Reanna Brown and Bridgette Engler, who have occasionally been cornered in a cafe somewhere and listen to me patiently, very having very bad ideas about futures comedy game shows and things like that.
There we go.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. We're both creative in how we think about the future and we're also creative in how we think about ourselves.
Gareth Priday: Yes. There's something about those things that doesn't, there are a few, I think even quite recently, there are a few things out of comedy shows and radio shows, particularly in the UK, that are starting to play with the kind of the future and the present.
So I think there are some things out there, but I think it's maybe, it would be interesting to see how that could look as a futures project. Yes.
Peter Hayward: You were a very successful student in the Master's course. You left the Master's course with a newly minted Master of Strategic Foresight, and how was Gareth in the world with that?
Gareth Priday: It's almost answering one of the later questions now. I've never quite been comfortable with the Futurist title. Yes I tend to talk about foresight practice. The advice I give other people is to relate it back to the work that you used to do and because I was disillusioned with that Industry. This is not advice I have personally followed. I work a lot with Jose Ramos and I've been very lucky enough to work with quite a lot of people, it has been this kind of patchwork. I think it's in some ways it's a bit like teaching, that you're always learning, as much as your students are. There's always this sense of fascination and creating new ways of looking at the world even when it may seem something reasonably familiar.
Peter Hayward: I don't want to give it a hard edge, but have you rejected the commercial approach to Foresight? And you've tended to use your commercial knowledge, your business knowledge, but you tend to move to the edge of even who wants to do this and why they want to do it?
Gareth Priday: I think I haven't been pushing towards that very commercial edge. I'd agree with that. I've had a number of other kind of initiatives fall out during this time as well. I'm one of the co-founders of the Australian Living Labs Innovation Network. I also went off and did the little startup thing that sort of failed horribly, so I, I think I'm two failures away from, graduating in that startup world to success. I've had a couple of parallel interests, but it means my time has been split. One of the challenges for me at the moment is trying to do is see the connections between those. And they are connected for me because a lot of the things that I'm interested in, there's a sort of relocalization of things. That comes across in the Living Labs. It comes across in something else I'm involved in which is Ethical Fields which is about localizing the economy. And then we have the kind of foresight and the connection is that sort of dynamic between thinking about how the future could and should be and the mechanisms that mean we can create that and have the entities that can hold the future image as well as co design and participatory development of those as a cycle and that's how I see them is that, there's their cycle working together.
Peter Hayward: I'm hearing that yours has been quite ecological in the sense that you have almost tried to foster distinct, but related processes, and then you have explored and allowed them to co evolve.
Gareth Priday: I think that's a very much a fair assessment and they have often come from some degree of Futures work. The Living Labs was an output of a scanning process for a piece of futures work in a CRC as a research project. And that just hooked my interest. And then, that evolved because there was someone in Swinburne who I still work with, who's interested in Living Labs. And we did a project that led to, helping her create her Living Lab. Led to going along to the ceremony where they get certified in Europe that led to meeting another person who was doing that, that led to the creation of, the Australian network. So very much they co evolve, but they are related. Holding on to the strands from a personal point of view so that I can pay enough attention to all of them and keep the sort of the common threads between them.
Thanks, Gareth.
Peter Hayward: So let's go a bit deeper into the bag of tricks, the go to frameworks, the kind of approaches to your craft that you want to explain and talk about with listeners.
Gareth Priday: Sure. This one that I'm going to talk about, I wanted to provide a little bit of context. During COVID, I was noticing sort of some of the posts and things around things like Future Proofing or I had a pandemic card in my workshop or whatever. And I noticed myself reacting to some of those things. Given we were in the middle of this pandemic, and at the same time, the algorithmic overlords were sending me kind of papers of dismal theory and methodological chaos in scenarios.
And I was noticing sort of that, and I was noticing in my own work that there was a sort of message signal that I wasn't quite getting. And one of the things that it nudged me towards was going back to my thesis. It's 10 plus years old, but I was looking at Mental Time Travel and its relationship to Foresight. And one of the things that I needed to do in that was to look at, okay, I've got all these sort of bits of the brain that are flashing on and off and how to translate that into something outside world things that people are more familiar with in terms of personality traits. I ended up using this thing called MindTime to do that. Because that could be used make hypotheses were validated by the matching correlations with the big five factor personality traits and Zimbardo's time perspective inventory, which were more well known at the time. I went back to this and going back to it I think it becomes more interesting because what MindTime is a theory about how people think about the future. That sounds like something that should be interesting to people whose job it is to help people think about future.
The theory is the idea is that there are three fundamental thinking styles. No prizes for guessing what they're called because they are Past, Present and Future. But they are all ways of thinking about the future. Past thinking is about looking for evidence, looking for certainty, data. This is the realm of research and science. Present thinking that's about creating the future by action. It's about probability, creating that future by control actions, making things real. And Future thinking is about possibility, imagination, how the world could be different, creation, opportunity. But again, these are all ways of thinking about the future. So how that plays out for me for example, because we're all a blend of these, is that I am a Future Past thinker with very low Present thinking. When they said that I was living my life all wrong because a Project Manager would be at the top of that triangle (present-thinking). Because I have very low Present thinking and that need for control and being able to do those and make those things concrete is quite difficult for me.
The way this plays out is you take a survey and you end up as a dot on this triangle. That is the point where the different thinking styles would tend to be a blend. I've pointed out I'm near the bottom line between past and future because I'm very low present and I'm just on the right hand side because I'm slightly more future thinking. I think this has implications and opportunities and challenges. It could be lots of layers, but I'm going to say four.
The first one is the kind of workshop prep and activity layer. People take the test and become dots on this and you can start to say, well, okay, I'm here project manager up here. We are going to be quite different in the way we're thinking about the future. And I may not, as someone who's quite happy in this abstract piece down here, be meeting your needs in terms of the concreteness and the activities and actions. We can think about creating psychological safety. We can also think about clusters in teams and how the team dynamic might work. You might think about if we had a group that was really strong past thinkers, how that might play out. You can start to think about it, those sorts of things.
The next layer is things like language. We can maybe adjust some of our language and maybe we even adjust some of our methods. So maybe we pick and choose methods that we think may appeal and work better for the people on their own. And this is what I'm going to call the Hate Mail line. Okay so I think, this is, I could be the first person on, on FuturePod to get hate mail. When we cross the line now, we can ask questions because before we're really playing around in the kind of current paradigm now we can ask questions. We can ask as a collective, are we located in one particular thinking style? Are we (futurists) dominated by one particular thinking style? My hypothesis is probably. I think we're going to be a collective that has future thinking as one of the dominant factors, because I think if I look over the last 10 years in particular, there's been probably a movement towards that imagination component and that visioning component. But the point is we don't know, but we could, and I could be wrong. And that'd be fantastic. It'd be really good to be wrong about that. But we can also ask questions about what's the relationship between the practitioner and the outcomes for the people in the room? Are there methods that actually work better for different thinking styles, mediated by the practitioner? We can start to look at that. And some of these kinds of things that there's similar questions for education and work and all the rest of it.
But for us, I think this is something that could really influence and be exciting and change our practice, but it means we're building an evidence base. And I think that's where I might get the hate mail because I think as practitioners, we like to have a special things that we use. Never the same recipe twice and tailor things all the time. And in some ways the question that you've asked is what's in Gareth's toolbox. The question that we might be able to ask is, so Gareth, for these kinds of people in the room, you're a specialist in past thinkers. So you can't talk about the future and imagination. What tools and techniques do you use for those people?
I think there's that kind of that layer and then the final one, and I've got to hand all the credit here to John Furey, who's one of the founders of and runs the MindTime foundation ,is there's an aspect of culture as well. Different cultures have different time perspectives as well, So it means if we're going into a culture and we are using our methods without acknowledging that, and I think this is what I was noticing when I was talking before in my practice, and we're using methods that don't meet that culture, particularly if we're training people, then we could leave them at risk of being ostracized in that culture because they may be too extreme, for example. I think there's a few layers here of building evidence, creating different ways of thinking about how we might educate and introduce these into different places. But I think it's exciting.
Peter Hayward: I can imagine when you talk about groups and the thinking style dominant in groups, and I was wondering about the effect that power and position has on the style that a group employs, and particularly if there is a leader of a group that is respected to be powerful, and they have a I would have their own way of thinking about the future, whether that would shape what groups allowed the group to do.
Gareth Priday: So yes, and I think part of being able to show that map is to be able to show those different styles. There's one point here is, I think, is that I may not be the good project manager, but I need people in the world to do that, to be able to make those things complicated. I need people who can do the past thinking. So revealing that in itself is useful. I think what I might do is give you an example of this in practice is to see, so to just illustrate. I created a sort of a strategy day for a group and what happened was they had the group, most of the group were in that sort of future space, except for one person who was in this past present space. Having seen that they were able to go through that process, giving that perspective and they're thinking about is that perspective more time to balance out the kind of otherwise potential group think of a futures group. The way that played out is yet, it can be difficult because you're being pulled back to where's the evidence was, how do we make this concrete. The difference it made is when they came up with that plan, having done that, and took it back to the wider team, and then they mapped out the wider team, and there were more past present thinkers in that team, they were in a better position to adopt it. And that, particular strategic plan was executed very well. Lots of other factors went into that. But there was an acknowledgement that MindTime played a pivotal role up front because otherwise that particular dominance from that collective rather than an individual, but you could see it as an individual as well, could, was balanced out because they could see it and they could recognize the value that the other thing created.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. And that's, the cultural space that it's about groups. Working with difference constructively rather than suppressing difference or using difference destructively.
Gareth Priday: Yeah, and this, I think, in some ways, because it's fairly intuitive, which is one of the things I find appealing and like I said, if you look at it, you can't you don't want to cross any one of these out. You don't want to say, Oh the world can do without, imagination. It becomes fairly obvious that we need these different perspectives and we can even just say actually there's no one representing this point of view as a group.
That can be quite powerful. There's no one representing this point of view, right? Okay. And I think, that came across a little bit in Richard Slaughter's idea. So there's the opportunity and implement kind of culture, that Silicon Valley that it was talking about, move fast and break things and no kind of pause to be able to say hang on a minute. What are the implications here? Let's slow down. Let's think about the constraints. We want to put on some of these things or the evidence that we want to build all those sorts of things. And that's one way of thinking about. This is the right hand side of the triangle. You can think of as a, it's like an accelerator on the left hand side.
You can think as a brake. Now, if you have just a brake you just don't go. If you have an accelerator, only an accelerator, that's going to end badly, right? It's going to end badly. There's just no way it doesn't end badly. It's the movement between them and it's just that kind of explanation that I think can be quite powerful. And then, we can think about how that can play out if you're using three horizons, for example. We can think we can really start to tease out those iterations more carefully as we're thinking about that systemic change, what are the different roles in a more nuanced way.
I think in my work, the other kind of influences at the moment and the ways that I'm thinking about this is comes from going really back into some of that sort of systems dynamics and systems thinking. So there's quite a lot of work going on around Systems Innovation and I've really in some ways gone back to one of your favorites, which is VSM. I know that there's the kind of tension around, complexity versus systems, but I actually think this still offers, a really good way of thinking about where the future sits in an organization. Probably the way that I've changed it is I now start with that relationship of, the outside world and the way the organization is organized. That's the starting point. Working from that.
Gareth Priday: I was talking to someone in a hospital setting and we're just talking about this and said okay, another way of organizing is to say, the variety in the outside world is, there's quite a lot of cultural differences. You could have organized the hospital around that. Now that creates some benefits because there's culturally appropriate things. You can have language, those sorts of things, but of course you need an A& E department for every single one. So it's probably not a good way to do it, but just the fact that you think you can think about that way of organizing, I found it's quite powerful because then when you talk about with the future and you say how does that then change the way you might think about organizing yourself? It seems to make it more quickly, more relevant than thinking than just saying the system for, that's looking at the future space.
Yep. Good point.
So that's one of the key things that I'm bringing back in because it's just this fractal nature. Cause it's a thing that operates at different scales all the way down and all the way up. And of course, you can imagine the MindTime operates at those different scales as well. They overlap. Very nicely.
Good. Thanks Gareth.
Peter Hayward:
Around you there are lots of things emerging. What are the things that you notice emerging around you that are getting your attention and why? What things are you noticing because they excite you, or what things are you noticing because they concern you? What are the things around you that are getting Gareth's attention?
Gareth Priday: I think one is a conversation around sovereignty. There are some limited data points, but there's this idea on one hand of the citizen sovereign citizen movement. Then when we look at some of our Pacific neighbors and islands. Last year, I think, a couple of entrepreneurs turned up one of Vanuatu's islands and said yep, we're going to set up here. And so there was a bit of a discussion around were they going to get kicked off and how would that work? And I think they were allowed to stay they actually had to assert that this is part of Vanuatu and you have to obey Vanuatu laws. And at the same time, we've got something like Tuvalu. Tuvalu is the island that gave us 1. 5 degrees. Originally it was going to be 2 degrees. And Tuvalu said no, if we go to 2 degrees we're underwater. And there are rules about sovereignty as a nation state. You have to have land, you have to have control of it. And if you don't have people who are resident. Don't have some kind of control over it if you lose that nationhood. Another data point was from the AI world, a group not wanting to be subject to constraints in the state saying, we're going to get on a ship, we're going to go into the middle of the sea, we're going to drop anchor and we're going to call ourselves a sovereign nation.
And so on one hand, we have a world that is moving towards sovereignty being lost by nation states, that culture being lost by nation states and thinking about Pacific Islands in particular, that's the second oldest continuous culture on earth. Losing those to climate change. And not changing the rules to enable that sovereignty to be maintained, because this is not by any means any fault of the other nations but the same time I think we'll find that the ship with the AI on it will get more time and more credence about whether or not it should have sovereignty or not. There's a real sort of tension there around media commercialization versus longstanding culture. This idea of particularly these islands and islands across the globe, but particularly these low lying islands, are going to lose their sovereignty and lose also their economic exclusion zones.
If we look at, let's say Kiribati, that's another low lying atoll. Because they're spread out the economic exclusion zone is about three and a half million kilometers. The land mass is only about 700. The orientation of some of these nation states is about the water and the ocean. Not about the land. Because we're talking about an ocean, that economic exclusion zone that is essentially the size of Western Australia. But every time one of those atolls goes and we lose control, then that shrinks, which I think maybe difficult for land based states to get. I think we're looking at this kind of loss of culture and sovereignty on a massive scale and a world that actually doesn't really want to address that and be able to provide. Even if that land comes back, it's just too late, you've lost it.
The charter cities idea and the notion that money and entrepreneurial capital can be attracted to I suppose you'd probably call it this kind of libertarian philosophical space is another one of those weak signals that indicates that, yeah, there are entrepreneurs who either leaned libertarian or want the chance to go somewhere that seems to be fresh and without past.
Yeah. I think it also leans in a little bit to that sort of digital nomad idea. As well, that there's, that there is this sort of group that can be very mobile and go to these different places and still be connected to work. Also this idea that the entrepreneurship is just good and that there are no consequences from that. So we talked a little bit before about my own experience with that and the thing that I was trying to do in that was focus on one of the negative sides of entrepreneurship. Which is the vast majority of businesses, whether they're genuine startups or whether they're just small businesses fail.
So yes there's money that goes with that and there's all those sorts of things, but one of the really important things is relationships go with that. Because usually people have been working together very closely. The thing falls apart. And the relationships go between those people. Or between the family that lent you the money. And that doesn't get talked about. That doesn't really get talked about very much. It's just Oh yeah, that just happens, but actually there's a relationship cost to entrepreneurship. We were looking at trying to have ways of making agreements up front so that people were addressing some of these things up front.
Peter Hayward: That's the work with the lemonade traders, is that right?
Gareth Priday: That was right. At the moment it's mothballed to be honest. And what happened with it is I didn't follow my own advice. So the one person I didn't make the agreement with was the one person who it fell apart. I lived through the experience. I was trying to prevent for other people and, it was just devastating. It was absolutely devastating because I really trusted this person. They weren't on board, wanted them to come on board, but there we are. So that's, one of one of the unfortunate things. But there were lots of other things that were good that came out of it. At the moment it's there sitting on an Amazon server, mothballed at the moment.
Peter Hayward: Will it might, so the lemonade trader might become the Phoenix
thanks Gareth. So how do you explain to people what Gareth does if they don't understand or know what it is that Gareth does?
Gareth Priday: So the way that I tend to talk about it is really in relationship. So I tend to talk about the future's work being exploring what could and should happen. And then on the other hand, with things like my Living Labs and Ethical Fields, it's about trying to have the mechanisms to co create that future and to make that future come to life. And those things I see as a sort of cycle as the way they work together. And probably the other thing that's part of that is that there's this localization component that runs through it. Thinking about how we can make these localized in a way. And that's partly because I think I've got a philosophy of, we need to have these combination of skills working together for resilience.
It's back to the kind of fractal ideas that we need to have these working at different scales and a rejection of the idea that just going into cities will be the answer because we need, in particular, rural communities to exist because we are not going to be able to just do it with city islands. And again, that kind of goes back to that notion that you talked about. The cities being these sovereign sort of almost states as well. But I don't think that can be the whole answer. We have to have vibrant rural communities as well.
And again, thinking about this so it's the fractals of scaling up, then the sort of tessellations of repeating patterns and borders next to each other and how we navigate those borders. We might think of borders as biosphere, or maybe it's sometimes it might be councils or whatever it might be that there's these borders, but we can also think about it in terms of futures. Because our preferred future over here may not be the preferred future next door and we've got to negotiate some of those borders as well. About how they transact with each other and how they support each other.
Nature. There are no borders. Everything is porous. Everything exchanges and resists the notion of a border. It is a construction. Whether it's a line drawn on a map that says you're a different territory, or us deciding things are inside or outside. You could argue is just because we're not prepared to scale it enough.
And one of the other people that I'm quite inspired by is Patrick Hovister. Particularly some of his work around strategy. And he talks about strategy as being that relationship that you have with the external environment and how one affects the other and how they grow together. And that's from a kind of biological underpinning concept that escapes me at the moment. But it's the idea of the horse and the grass. They formed a relationship together over time. And then we have lawnmowers because the grass needs to be cut back. And the horses used to do that or the sheep used to do that. And now we have lawnmowers. And I think that goes back to that notion of not so much thinking in borders, but in relationship becomes really more and more important and that's the thing that gets you to scale because become porous and shape each other.
Part of what we were just talking about there is that idea of the preferred future. One place or one scale may be different to another place, a different scale and where those boundaries lie. One of the things I try to do is open up this idea of the preferred future and try to look at it with a more soft focus lens. So open it up rather than try and be really specific and hard and like where that the resolution is very precise. And part of that is about trying to think about the preferred set as a sort of a bigger set of possible futures that can fit within maybe boundaries that are more defined by principles rather than the way things must be in terms of practical application. Because that doesn't leave you much room to move if new technologies or social practices or combinations come along.
And a different way to think about this, because I think we tend to gravitate towards a singular future is to think about this from the lens of something like morphological analysis or a spooky box. If I asked you to say hey, Future pod, what's your preferred future, you would come up with something if we agreed on a set of different factors in different states. Maybe some of those in the outside world, and some of those are about, Future pod more specifically. We very quickly come up with potentially thousands of different scenarios, right? Now I think this is maybe somewhere where AI could be useful. I was playing with this, with 12 things, three different states. So that's about half a million scenarios.
Now, if I brought those over to you in a big truck and Peter, just work through these and pick your preferred one. Now you'll probably go through and emerge a month later or whatever. I doubt you'll be holding one thing, right? You're probably going to be going. Here's a set actually that they're okay. There's this set of them that are okay. And then there's probably another conversation that is, wow, look at these. The outside world elements where maybe I don't have as much agency over as Futurepod. These states seem less likely. So if we pick the ones that seem more likely as possible future states this one is my preferred within that kind of group. This is the sort of the least bad future. If that happens, if there's some of these other things happen, at least bad futures probably don't sell very well. So we'll still call it a preferred future, but within that context. And I think that idea then opens up the notion of the preferred future. From being a kind of a singular kind of thing to being a more of a, an open thing and an open thing that we can start to manage, try and think about in terms of managing trajectories of change, rather than trying to hit a very precise future target state.
Peter Hayward: We can understand why people want to nail down their preferred future because they think it makes it easier to plan for or to build but you're really I'm hearing saying by trying to nail a preferred future down to something that's concrete ish you actually are missing out on some of the richness and some of the possibilities that is there because of what's going on in the world?
Gareth Priday: And the permission to change. So we tend to be dealing with reasonably extended timeframes, so it would seem incongruous to pick a preferred future that was very defined whilst being in a place where we know that there's going to be change that we haven't anticipated in the meantime. And not giving yourself permission to change and being able to give yourself a big enough target to say we're still within the boundaries of our core values and principles and the key things that we want, but we may be able to do them in a slightly different way.
Peter Hayward: I'm hearing a dialectic process here, Gareth, because if you go to what Hegel talked about in terms of synthesis, and the synthetic ideas tend to be more principle based, because they have to some extent, honor the earlier states that seem oppositional. And I That's what I heard you talking about, was actually having preferred futures that are not about the way they are, but important principles about how they can become.
Gareth Priday: Yeah, And again, I think it's this idea of trying to manage trajectories, and let's think about by jumping through hoops. We want to jump through hoops that are moving towards this preferred future, but also leaving the maximum number of options open. And we're not jumping outside of the hoop or running around the hoop in a way that means we can never get back in that sort of trajectory of change within our principles. We're not going so far out so we can go to the edge or to the middle. But we need to stay in a certain kind of channel or pipeline, if you like, where we can manage that trajectory and we can go to some edges, but there are some boundaries we don't want to cross.
Peter Hayward: We're going to close this one off, Gareth. You are going to make an offer. An invitation to the listeners of the podcast.
Gareth Priday: So yes, so going back to MindTime. So the invitation will be we have a small survey. That we will publish on FuturePod and in a couple of other places. And the invitation is take the survey. You'll find out your MindTime type, but we'll also ask you some additional questions. And some of these questions will be about practice and some of these will be about your view for the future. What we'll do is we'll make sure that we take those and we publish that in a open forum so that people can access it and provide some information back so you can access it directly via FuturePod.
The second part of this is we're going to launch a global initiative. And this will explore some of the questions we talked about earlier at scale. So if you are interested in futures research, education, or practice, and would like to have some influence and collaborate over the questions and help promote it, then we're offering that collaboration.
What it also means is you'll be able to get some of these heat maps and cut and tail towards your audiences. So if you're just interested in the Americas or Europe, you'll be able to have some sort of tailing way around that. So if you're interested in these things and you would like to participate, please reach out, we'd love to hear from you.
And I also just want to thank the MindTime Foundation for their enormous generosity in supporting this initiative and supporting the smaller one that we're, pilot one that we're doing on FuturesPod.
Peter Hayward: Sounds exciting, Gareth. it's been great to catch up. It's been a while since we had a chance to have an in depth conversation about our craft. Thanks for thanks for spending some time with the FuturePod community.
Gareth Priday: Thank you very much. It's an absolute pleasure. Great fun.
Peter Hayward: I hope you enjoyed my chat with Gareth. And I would like to encourage you to participate in Gareth research into MindTime® just follow the link that's in the Show Notes page. FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the Pod then please check out the Patreon link on our website. I'm Peter Hayward thanks for joining me today. Till next time.