Roger Spitz returns for a chat about his new book Disrupt with Impact. Roger is a Foresight advisor, venture capitalist, an expert advisor to the World Economic Forum's Global Foresight Network, the President of Techistential and he also chairs the Disruptive Futures Institute
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
References and Links
Spitz, R. “ClimateTech: system innovation (versus point solutions)”. illuminem, January 23, 2024.
Spitz, R. “ClimateTech: system innovation (versus point solutions)”. illuminem, January 23, 2024.
Wagner, A (2019) Life Finds a Way: What evolution teaches us about creativity, Oneworld Publications, London, UK
Suzuki, S (1970) Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Weatherhill
Taleb, N N (2012) Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder, Random House, New York, NY
Transcript
Peter Hayward: What sort of business strategy book would a foresight practitioner who was experienced in consulting to boards and also well versed in Zen Buddhism write?
Roger Spitz: So it's a book called "Disrupt with Impact", Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World. So there are three key words there. One is "Disrupt", which we use in a systemic disruption, nonlinear, complex change and that. The idea is that the status quo probably is not going to help us with the challenges we currently have in terms of societal or climate or emerging technologies.
The "With Impact" is a big evolution for me over the past few years. You need to move from the capacity building of foresight to really thinking of what is effective or not. How do you drive change in an effective way through systems? And how do you apply that to concrete real world? Do things effectively because if not, you're just ticking a box. You need to know how to operate in deep uncertainty because that's now a constant state.
Peter Hayward: That is my guest today on FuturePod Roger Spitz. Roger is a Foresight advisor, venture capitalist, an expert advisor to the World Economic Forum's Global Foresight Network, the President of Techistential and he also chairs the Disruptive Futures Institute and he returns for a chat about his new book.
Peter Hayward: Welcome back to FuturePod, Roger.
Roger Spitz: Great to be back on Peter. One of my favorite by far, podcast. It's just a such an honor, such a journey.
Peter Hayward: Thanks, mate. So what's been happening in the world of Techistential and Roger Spitz?
Roger Spitz: So four years ago, for me, having spent 20 years in investment banking, I was global head of M&A at the time, and probably when I joined your podcast, it was my first year of professionalizing full time foresight. I'd been studying it for five years prior, but that was the first year I took the brave or crazy decision of moving out of investment banking.
And it's a fascinating journey. Cause I was actually a bit nostalgic and moved as I was looking at the dates and the milestones, because at the time it was like, Oh my God, does he think that I might have anything to say that's relevant to anybody?
And, I was like, Oh my God, what a club to be in. And I still very much feel grateful and feel that way. But my own journey has really gone, from experimental, I would say, and, passion with a very specific subset of constituents and clients for whom I was writing and consulting and giving executive programs, to really scaling, but not just in the business sense, but in the breadth of people who come across the work, who read it, who come to talks from all walks of life and not just business. So for me, scaling is probably not the only word, although it is an extraordinary scale, I couldn't have imagined, but really the democratization and breadth and reach of the ideas and the Institute, of the Disruptive Futures Institute and our work and Techistential on the advisory side, which for me is the, I wake up every morning and still in slight disbelief that, we have over 100,000 followers, I think, and really some numbers that are very, interesting to me.
So that's great, because ultimately, you want that multiplier effect. That’s probably the big inflection point of the past four years is that broader reach.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. I go back to that first podcast and it was a delightful, I remember it cause I was surprised by, your deep philosophical ground to your craft and particularly around Existentialism.
And it was a delight for me to have people wanting to talk about emergence, but from a deep philosophical, personally held base. That was wonderful. And then in the 2022 podcast, I saw you pivoting into the role of educator. How, okay, we've got this information. We've got these ideas, but how do we reach out to people such that they can actually find this useful and in the process of doing useful work, the deeper, I think, agenda is the one of developing people, developing leaders, making us not just better organizational animals, but just better people. Would that be right?
Roger Spitz: Yeah. And you're right. On our first podcast with, existentialism, I was just like, almost ecstatic that are able to reconcile a sort of childhood and early years, study area, which I wasn't a pro on, I never did a PhD or anything, but working with Rauli, who is PhD level in pure philosophy, we built things.
And since then, the word Techistentialism is used quite a lot as existentialism in our technological world. It's used a lot, people write about it and we've written a number of papers and things on it. And so that's been interesting to see. And you're right. I think as, and this is probably the biggest focus in terms of, scope or is as you move from just okay, foresight, capacity building, and you know how it works and mindsets, it's how do you drive change through systems?
And what does that look like? And of course, anybody spends, even just a moment in time in it, or even just thinking about it, realizes that the, what we know is important of course, assumptions and, education and worldviews and how you see the world effectively affects a lot of things.
And that is education starting in the playground and all the way to the boardroom. And so it's funny because I - I'm not an educator. I come from a business background, which is, you can't probably find more, worse than investing banking into the food chain, maybe lawyers, I don't know.
But effectively, that realization that how you see the world will be instrumental to change and future preparedness meant getting a better appreciation of education and, the levers for change. And it's funny because, a few months ago, the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies asked me to give a testimony for an expert session on the future of education.
Peter Bishop kindly invited me a year ago to join Teach the Future on the board. I have a lot of initiatives which are related to education. In fact, the Disruptive Futures Institute is primarily a content and educational platform as opposed to Techistential, which is strategic foresight consultancy.
So that education side is a big change because although, when we first spoke and when I started in the field, I realized the importance of education because it's obvious. I hadn't realized to what extent it was absolutely essential and the role I could personally have as a multiplier.
So today, it's a significant part of my day to day directly and indirectly. Some from a business perspective, like executive education, and some from a, how to support changing education as through systems and more holistically.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, I think the thing that to me, educational transformation is the kind of thing we're talking about.
Because people think education's a product, and education is an institution. Which of course we've turned it into those things. But at its core, any study of literature would show you that education is about a relationship. It's about generally a person's relationship with someone who is their teacher, their guide, their mentor, their pandit, even their guru.
And of course, a relationship with reality in both the personal, internal, and of course the external. And to me, why I say you're an educator is you are. You've really done it in our podcast and in the guidebook series that you are describing the nature of that relationship that people need to have.
Roger Spitz: Yeah, you're obviously a true educator, right? You've studied education, you've taught at very advanced levels, PhD and all that. So there's a facet of education, the more conventional sense, which I don't have. The one thing I really appreciate in the way you're describing it is that word, relationship and, whether it's to reality to, teach a student, although I see it as a two way thing, you learn as much from, obviously it's a two way relationship, right?
And, but that relationship is an important word and coming back to our earlier discussion, maybe earlier podcasts on Techistentialism and existentialist philosophy, I feel that one thing that has evolved a little bit since we last spoke is GenAI. And when we're talking about relationship, it's also the relationship between our own beingness and existence with agency, decision making and choice.
And we're continuing to see decision outcomes being articulated independently from human decision making and which run the risk of not only humans no longer going through as much learning, but actually de-skilling in relative terms. You had very cleverly put your finger on it with language in one of our earlier discussions around it's drawing the parallel with Ricardo and economics in relative terms as machines continue to learn if humans are de-skilling.
And so that relationship with what is it to be relevant? What is knowledge? To your point, what is reality? I would throw in that mix the changing nature and value of knowledge and, the enhanced importance and risks around decision making. And in that sense, education, I think has that much more of a need for reframing because it literally, to my mind, puts into question what it is to be relevant in the age of AI.
Peter Hayward: I think you and I share this fundamental belief that at the core, we need a philosophical base for who we are. Whatever it is, because disruption, uncertainty, complexity, those things are givens, impermanence is the reality, nothing stays the same, and yet we have to be able to be both open to what is going on around us, but also know who we are when we ourselves are impermanent as well.
And that's why a philosophical grounding that continues to change, continues to evolve, but that is essential. Otherwise you are completely lost in a complex, uncertain world.
Roger Spitz: Yeah it's so true. And it's interesting when you think of the logical extension or kind of observe what you're saying, how some of this philosophical grounding is actually so paradoxical in terms of the progress quote unquote of technology and humanity and society and science and all that.
And yet. At its basic core. It's really coming back to, critical thinking and first principles and the Greeks and that even before that. And then there's certain cultures, we all praise the Western world and all these, perfectionism and science and the Newtonian, but ultimately, a lot of this is millennia, several thousands of years old, right?
If you think of, philosophy and Zen Buddhism, and I know that many of these concepts are very dear to you and you don't take them lightly, you understand how difficult they are, but I think that's the point, right? There's a, the paradoxes and contrasts and contradictions of our complex modern world, which is, it’a both very simple and eternal and transient and, some of these philosophical thinkings that existed before any of this technology or modern age thousands of years ago and how relevant and useful it can be. And yet at the same time, our complex world is not helping us, think that way.
And yet some of the most simple and eternal foundations can actually, to my mind, be very, helpful to stay relevant and to make sense of today's world.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, let's move to your latest attempt to both make relevant what has been eternal.
I did get a surprise when you told me that, I'm going to say this, you may correct me, Roger, that Roger has written a book on strategy. There was of course an eye roll when I read, Oh yeah, the world needs another book on strategy, I'm sure. But no, you have written a book and it's a very interesting book that, I had a lot of fun flicking my way through just recently.
Do you want to tell the listeners about the genesis and emergence of the book?
Roger Spitz: Yeah. So the boxing and labeling of books is always a tricky one, right? You work in earlier discussion around things needing to be simple. And, you always have publishers and commercial imperatives who need to put things in a particular way.
So I went indeed for business book, which I guess for want of a better word could be seen as a strategy. Although, we'd both probably you'll tell me, but from my perspective it's, strategy in the sense that we would use it in foresight and that, but we can come back to that.
I think that the genesis is the following. I'll say two things. The first thing is maybe what is it? So it's a book called Disrupt With Impact, Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World. So there are three key words there.
One is. Disrupt, which we use in a systemic disruption, nonlinear, complex change and that.
Disruption is not the best word because most people attribute a sort of technocentric meaning to it, which is not the one we use, but we can look at that. I haven't found a better word. So disruption is systemic change. And the idea is that the status quo probably is not going to help us with the challenges we currently have in terms of societal or climate or emerging technologies.
So we probably do need to change and there's change all around us. So we need to think about what that means. So that's the sort of disrupt element.
The “With Impact” is a big evolution for me over the past few years compared to some of the earlier thinking, which is, you need to move from the capacity building of foresight and some other tools to really thinking of what is effective or not.
How do you drive change in an effective way through systems? And of course, building on the ideas of giants and the systems thinking and that, but how do you apply that to concrete real world, sometimes business or other, commercial perspectives. So that's the impact element. It's the, do things effectively because if not, you're just ticking a box.
And the “Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World” is really that acknowledgement that it's the end of trends, acknowledging that disruption is a constant, acknowledging what we call metaruptions as opposed to metatrends.
So that idea that effectively you need to know how to operate in deep uncertainty because that's our constant state. So that's really the genesis of the book. And I'd say that two aspects which are maybe, new is a bit strong, but certainly, I've tried to mature over the past two years.
And in this particular work, one is to make it more accessible to the general public. It's still a business book and it's all categorized as such, but yeah. There was a huge effort to have it as a general trade book that you could pick up that will be eventually in audio books in different languages.
And that is not a guidebook, which is supporting executive education programs or for people who already tuned into these ideas. So new audiences, new public, new regions. So this is really my first book commercial book, as opposed to academic or textbook or guidebooks for educational programs.
And then the 2nd element is that idea of the “With Impact” that, what is, how do you drive change through complex systems, including for startup and climate tech and things which are, they seem self contained and discreet and just like a company or project, but they operate in a way which is systemic and where you need to think about them differently from, just a good startup that works and that people buy your whatever product or use your app or whatever.
So that second aspect is really thinking much more on systems innovation and transformational change. And hence our earlier discussion around some of the things which you wouldn't expect maybe to feature so much in a book on strategy, but around education, always in philosophy, all kinds of other things, which supports that idea of systems, innovation and transformational change, which go beyond just the kind of, quote unquote strategy.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. There's another important word for me, Roger, resilience, because when we have unlimited complexity, and we ourselves have to manage the complexity of our environment, the complexity of our organizations, the complexity of our relationships with people, and the complexity of ourselves, all of which can overwhelm us, all of which can just seem too much and can cause us to simplify or shut down rather than lean into.
And so I love to see it used: resilience. What for you is resilience and how do people and organizations develop resilience?
Roger Spitz: Yeah, pretty key point you're raising. And, not obviously the first nor the last to integrate that.
So the foundations is really, if you take it from an economic perspective and, like it or not, it is labeled officially as a business book, although, hopefully, as I mentioned relevant for everyone at any perspective, but you're going to have trillions of dollars of value, which are created or destroyed from change.
And at the end of the day, whether we like it or not, the money does drive a lot of things and decisions in our world. So we can't ignore and pretend we're in a complete, world, which is moving away from shareholder primacy, and which is purely, broader stakeholder economy or whatever.
The value creation and value destruction is a factor for many organizations and individuals, and we focus on what is sustainable value creation. And to do that, you're going to have both the opportunities and the shocks that can arise. And so the resilience is really a question of, if you're going to be future prepared and make future aligned decisions, and build future intelligence and drive change, you need to make sure that whatever you do has some resiliency in it. And of course you and I know, but not, even the US doesn't always fully understand.
And, when you take things that are so systemic, like even just information and that, and you're thinking about it more broadly in terms of cyber, and you're thinking about the dependency on information and connectivity and hyper connectivity. And you realize how easy it is to have single points of failure, how easy it is for bad agents or state actors to intervene in the systems in the US or part of the US and literally bring down health care or, God knows what, water supply, California depends on electricity, the mountains are not created in a way that brings the water perfectly. And, you need electricity to get water from A to B, a week without water, California pretty much dries up or any state. And so effectively, the resiliency is really appreciating that things that seem isolated or just technological or whatever, in a world of systemic disruption, they are extremely connected and interplay. And when there's single points of failure, basically you can have extreme damage very quickly. The Ukraine war was an interesting one, for instance, because the biggest satellite systems with Viasat were basically the old school, command and control.
And when Russia decided to invade Ukraine, it took them 10 seconds to deactivate Viasat, which is the biggest supply of military satellites in the world and effectively, for people love him, hate him. We can put that debate aside with Elon and with, his satellite low earth orbit satellites, Starlink, the fact is that two years later, because they're distributed, because there is no single point of failure, because they're antifragile, for want of a better word, effectively, they're resilient and that and if they weren't, I can tell you the implications. It's already not, extraordinary challenging situations. If there was no internet connection or anything, it would be even worse than it currently is. And so long story short, we know that, and in 2017, the US Army puts information as a seventh joint force and starts to understand what it means systemically, the opposite side of the coin is realizing that information is extraordinarily powerful and dangerous and can bring in single points of failure to systems or weakens democracy or break down health care, whatever, and therefore you need to think about resiliency and systems.
So resiliency is, of course, foundational, as you mentioned. And then the trickier thing to our broader discussion around impact and systems is what is it to bring resiliency in systems? And that's where I spend my time because it's different. and when everything is systemic and when systemic is also disruptive in a hyperconnected way, you need to think about resiliency like that.
What you can do about it Is really think about things systemically. So if you take information to our early discussion, you got to think about education. You got to think about, avoiding the single points of failure. You got to think about, beyond just backups and that.
So there's a, there are a million things which once you start looking at the chain of levers for change and also for things that can break, you suddenly realize that you need foundations that are almost like antifragile to use Nassim Taleb. And that are resilient and that actually improve with shocks.
A lot of the way our economic societies work, our government structures, incentive structures, all predicated around things that are actually not resilient and have incentives that almost push you away from resilience. So that's the kind of antifragility notion, which has always been very important to our frameworks, from Taleb.
And then the other thing is that for the past year or so, I've been fortunate enough to be part of the Global Foresight Network with the World Economic Forum, who has a lot of different constituents, which include governments, supranationals, OECDs, NATO, academics, and others. You're suddenly spending time with people that you wouldn't normally dream of spending time with, who all have the same considerations of moving beyond just futures intelligence and foresight capacity to that idea of systems and resiliency in systems and future preparedness in the broader sense.
And that also brings a lot of learning and areas where you suddenly realize that resiliency is not just a kind of a buzzword or optional or nice to have. But it's tricky, like all systemic things that the challenge is that, these are not easy fixes, right? Once you try to build resiliency and systems, it's not having a vitamin C in the morning, right?
Peter Hayward: I'm going to give you three of your little phrases that popped out in my reading of the book. I think they go to, I touch on what you've been speaking to and I'll let you elaborate them and relate them as you see fit. And the three were the notion of reversibility; passion is everything; and the third one is slack, boredom, and play.
Roger Spitz: Thanks for choosing those. They're nice and important. So reversibility, we take it on two levels. The first level, purely for decision making is really inspired by, again, love him or not is another matter, but it doesn't mean it doesn't have some good ideas from time to time, Jeff Bezos, in one of his shareholder letters, he talks about this idea of certain decisions being two way decisions, and others being a one door and two doors. Two doors means it's reversible. You don't need as much information. Maybe you can take the decision quicker. You don't mean as much diligence. The implications are not so severe, and that might be, I don't know, for him, he gave actually his own example, which is stopping his job as a broker or whatever in New York, setting up Amazon. If it fails, fine, you might not have a job or whatever, but you'd go back to doing something else.
So that was reversible. And, irreversible is a one way decision. So it has more implications. You want to do more diligence. You need 90 percent probably of the information to be there. The consequences are by definition, not the same. There are a hundred examples, but if you're spending, a hundred million dollars on something or building or whatever, things are less reversible.
So that's the first level, which I think is a quite a simple tool. It's quite intuitive, but I think it's quite actually helpful when you have decisions to make, to evaluate whether you're in that sort of reversible. More scary, and importantly in our underlying drivers of change, we have a category of one of our metaruptions, so our clusters of changes, which we call irreversibility.
And the features of that are effectively, but as the name indicates that they're very difficult to impossible to reverse if you reach certain milestones, and we put in that climate, tech, and AI, making the distinction between tech and AI in terms of the decision making outcomes, which can arise with AI.
And here, the reason we find that concept important is because if you can't live on planet earth anymore, because there's no oxygen or what have you, it's an irreversible disruption and change. And if you reach Singularity or artificial superintelligence, and it has ramifications that might not be reversible.
And so the appreciation that there might be these milestones for technology, climate, and AI that are irreversible, I think, is an important kind of cluster. As you think about policy, resiliency, and then future preparedness for, especially given unexpected, or anticipated consequences of some of these elements. So that's a sort of second level.
Moving to passion. Listen, it's, I stole that to be honest from people like Steve Jobs and many others, but I just felt it. It resonated for me the minute I found that I was able to reconcile the passion of my interests of things I was reading, the people are spending time with, the ecosystems, what I was doing day to day. I just felt it gave me a degree of ideas, of agency, of energy, of inspiration of all kinds of things, which were just not there if I wasn't as passionate. And so suddenly I had the lived experience of some of the means or the things that read and really just felt actually, you know what?
It's very correlated to agency. It's very correlated to how you see the world and your world views and therefore how you might prepare for the world and build resiliency and futures intelligence. And so that idea of passion, I just experienced it for myself. And maybe I'm lucky enough to have been able to reconcile that degree of passion with having something sustainable in terms of living livelihood and other things.
I just really think that it's extraordinarily important, especially in a kind of techno centric, automated, short attention span world. I think that idea of wandering and discovering and trial and error, not to mention that it's an ingredient for a discovery and emergent process, because as we both know, and many of your listeners, in a complex world, there are unknown unknowns. You can't just run a playbook or something. So what is that discovery process? What is the trial and error? What is that emergence that will allow you to stumble upon something that might help you understand that by amplifying that behavior is getting you to a specific orientation in that particular unknown complex predicament or paradigm. And so that passion is really what can help fuel that because you can't just tick the box anymore, follow a playbook, right?
And then the final one is the idea of slack, boredom, and that. I started reading a lot of it. Slack is an important idea just from antifragility and anyone who's read Nassim Taleb’s work, right? Because it's linked to resiliency. So resiliency is really a prerequisite for antifragile. So if you're resilient, it's like a rubber band, right? You get hit. It doesn't change its shape, it's okay, but it doesn't strengthen.
Antifragility, it basically reinforces and strengthens the more kind of shocks it receives. And the idea of slack is that basically it reduces the single points of failure in a sense. It's and the many examples, Zoom itself is an example where when the pandemic hit, and suddenly had to multiply 10 or 100 times the capacity, by having slack, it was able to.
And then a lot of the companies that keep cash on the balance sheet, it goes against the financial theory you learn at Harvard, which is useless because the problem with theory is that once it confronts reality, it doesn't always work. But, financial theory, in terms of capital allocation and balance sheet, tells you that you shouldn't have too much cash on the balance sheet, and you should have capital optimization, and there's some lovely equations and very clever people.
The problem is that when shocks happen to the system like COVID or 2008 crash, and you're an airline and you have no cash or whatever on your balance sheet. You go bust or you're a bank and you go begging to the government so you're down, whereas when you have cash, you have that slack and that resiliency.
So that's from a kind of business strategic perspective or technological scaling. But then, again, from my own lived experience, when you, when do you get ideas when you're in the shower, when you're walking around, when you know, and there's actually a lot of phenomenally interesting research.
I can give it to you in the notes for the readers if they don't know it. But people who study this and who see that animals that are more playful or more creative, the dolphins and the number of Poincaré when he discovered some crazy mathematical breakthroughs or Newton or Einstein that it often happens through situations of disconnect and playfulness and that.
So all that put together coming back to our complex world where you can't just follow a playbook where you can't just rely on known knowledge at that particular juncture, et cetera, that discovery process, that emergent process is linked with antifragility and with the idea of having some boredom because you're, and meditation, beginner's mind, Shoshin.
So that's a very important aspect to invention and to that discovery process, which can be more emergent than just applying knowledge or doing what you're prescribed.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. For me, the reversibility, irreversibility question is interesting. And I think often I see people arguing something is irreversible, when in fact it is reversible. True. And I see people completely oblivious to what is truly irreversible. And I wonder, and I actually think that your passion helps inform what is reversible and what is not. If you've got a decision maker and you're not passionate about the subject matter or the context area, then you're probably not in a good position to judge reversibility and irreversibility.
And you need to find a person who is passionate about it because I'll tell you why this cannot fail, or they'll tell you, you can't make it much worse. Go ahead and do your best. So to me, passion almost sets the context for you to measure the irreversibility, reversibility game. Likewise, play and slack with a core of passion creates what you described as the innovation and ideas. Play without passion, it can still lead somewhere, but passion, the grounding of why this matters, why you matter, why the task matters to me is one of those foundations that allows us to be more resilient and more effective in disruption.
Roger Spitz: It's beautiful the way you've connected them. I hadn't necessarily connected them in that way, but you're absolutely right. I see that, I use kind of different language and put things in different slots but I see what you're saying. If you're playing and developing a skill and improving your performance, to use Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework, that's the complicated, you understand the rules of the game, you're improving, you're either just killing time or trying to improve your craft and building skill.
It's linear, it's predictable, your outcomes, the more I play, the more I'll not be working, or the more I play, I will be improving my performance, or I will become number one. And that falls within that, if you're thinking more in terms of our complex world and play, which can lead to invention, which can lead to new things and that, then you need that passion to keep pushing, to keep new perspectives, to maybe go against the grain because no one necessarily has a specific answer and the outcomes are not necessarily known ex ante. So anybody who says this will happen if that, you need to challenge that, and that's not a given, we don't necessarily know it's not linear.
Yeah. It's not predictable. And yeah, as you say, you don't necessarily know the outcomes and people may not have a better answer for that. So again, it shows how much a lot of this is, even though we use language and we unpack it, it still remains extraordinarily subjective and personal because how complex world is not simple, predefined, equally understood by everyone in the same way, right?
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 our newest, The Voroscope who has just become a patron. Thanks for the support Joe. If you'd like to join Joe as a patron of the Pod, then please follow the Patreon link on our website. Now, back to the podcast.
Peter Hayward: Now I have, in our remaining time, I'm proud of myself that I've gone for almost 30 minutes and we haven't gone very far into philosophy, but I'm now going to jump truly into philosophy because there's a lot of Zen in the book.
One of your Zen concepts you borrowed was Shuhari, which is, as being borrowed by a number of business methods. Shuhari pops up in Agile. It pops up in a lot of things and people love it,because it simplifies this notion of first learn, then detect, then master.
It's step one, step two, step three. And people say, wow, that's, gee, that's good. We learn something, then we detach from it, and then we master it. That's fantastic. So I'm deeply cynical when I see people drop Zen concepts into pragmatic business. For the simple reason, do you really appreciate how much work and effort and discipline it takes to get any of those steps? And you yourself say that the third stage of Shuhari is probably the hardest. So I'm gonna ask you to lean into that one and explain to the listener what Shuhari is, and particularly why it's important to what you say, but also why you say the third stage is actually the hardest, but possibly even the most important one.
Roger Spitz: Yeah. First of all, you're right to be deeply skeptical about the ability to just take on these concepts and just, through read or whatever, apply them. I think, when you're looking at some of these philosophical concepts, some more than others, it takes literally a lifetime to learn how to control probably is not the word, but, to have that relationship with your mind and your consciousness, and different states to really do them justice.
So let me nonetheless answer your question in terms of what I understand of Shuhari and how we apply it, why we raise it at all. Because as you say, you put a page or two, whatever of these concepts, it's okay, thank you very much.
But, if it was so simple. It's like Vipassana meditation or other things, people go on 60 day silent retreats for 30 years before starting to get some sense of it. And it's extraordinarily difficult. So let's start with the beginning.
First of all, I very much enjoy the Zen master Suzuki Roshi. In one of his books, and he talks a lot about Shoshin, Beginner's Mind, is a compilation he wrote. And one of the basic concepts of Shoshin, which is Beginner's Mind, is in the Beginner's Mind, there are many possibilities, but in the Expert’s, there are few.
And, you and I have touched upon some of these themes now and in the past. And then what is Shuhari? There are three stages, as you indicate. The first stage is Shu, where the student masters the established fundamentals.
In the second stage of Shuhari, so the ha, the learner then starts practicing and experimenting with maybe novel approaches with its own perceptions or appreciations. And those are guided by those kind of unique personal individual perspectives. So that's where you have some sort of learned experience, perspectives, connecting with other things that I guess take place.
And the third stage the ri, Shu-ha-ri, then indeed the learner or student breaks loose from the confined kind of rule books to adapt freely to any situation. And as you correctly point out that Shuhari, it's a journey. So it's a continuous process of learning, experimenting, and letting go. And the hardest thing, is, all of it is hard, but in particular, the kind of, relearning and learning aspect, where you let go, and move to something which is not your habits or just what you've been taught that playbook, et cetera.
Now the importance of it to my mind, ties in directly with systemic change and complexity because to our earlier discussions, and, you have unknown unknowns, there are no rule books, it's a discovery process, it's emergent, et cetera. So you really do need to have that.
From my personal journey, it's been instrumental because I literally feel that's part of it. I spent five, 10 years learning, 20 years in boards and advising CEOs and boards and investors on certain strategies and that, and then probably a bit under a decade learning more about foresight and that. And at some point I developed my own perspectives, tried it, and then interestingly see how it's used or otherwise and the degree of effectiveness by organization. So that's where, to my mind, I live the Shuhari. Now, the way I introduce it in the book is actually more to illustrate a concept, which I brought in our work, which is called UN-VICE, which is basically a play on the word advice is to say, listen, in our complicated world, which we understand, and that's fine, it does represent a number of situations. You can take advice from people and that works. You understand it. It's the complicated and in the sort of Snowden Cynefin framework. For complex where it's not so simple and and all the features we know of complexity, you can't just rely on advice.
You need your UN-VICE. You need to be more resourceful, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a play on the opposite of advice. And the acronym is basically an update to VUCA. I observed that in VUCA, which is Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. It's a term coined by the military 50 years ago in a world which was less, maybe fast and changing and less connected technologically.
Two things I thought were missing from VUCA. One was intersecting because I think a lot of the changes are happening through the intersections of different fields and connections that maybe weren't the case half a century ago. And the second thing is I felt that VUCA didn't give a reflection of the speed, velocity, and journey, and trajectory of change.
And so I introduced the word, exponential to reflect that trajectory. And so UN-VICE is UNknown, Volatile, Intersecting, Complex, and Exponential as an alternative to the acronym VUCA, introducing the importance of intersecting and exponentiality and playing with the word advice. And so what I do with Shuhari is to say, in a sense, our UN-VICE draws from the three stages of this Japanese martial arts concept, Shuhari, because if you're not following someone's advice, it doesn't mean you're ignoring the learnings and the science and that. You still have it because you have the first days of the Shu, from Shuhari.
You still need the foundations. You still need to understand and appreciate science. You still need to listen to experts. The difference is that there are not predetermined answers to everything. And you need to go through the ha and the ri because it's emergent and there's a discovery process. And that is where I introduce it.
But you're right. If the idea is, listen, this is what it stands for. I hope that you enjoyed that page, and now you should practice it. It's going to be challenging. And so it's more a question of raising awareness of these ideas and that you can't rely so much on yourself and use to illustrate that.
Because foundationally, there's probably nothing more difficult than really that process of freeing your mind from everything or anything
Peter Hayward: You don't, apologies if I missed it in the book, if somebody wishes to improve, and wishes to become a better leader, decision maker navigator in complexity, then I'm going to arc back to my notion of relationship. I, Peter Hayward, does not believe that you can do that journey by yourself. That you need a community around you to help you learn about you. You don't know you well enough in terms of how you are, to how you feel, to what you do. You need others around you informing you, giving you information, giving you perspective on your effectiveness.
And you say in the book that really leaders have a responsibility to continue their own learning. And you cannot take expert advice as given. You have to basically not believe you have to both believe experts, but also unbelieve the experts and it's your responsibility to do that. And I'd like you to comment on this notion that it’s very hard to do this if you're trying to manage this whole process of your own development, you need a community of effectively the equivalent of the guru as a decentralized system, but you need to be taking perspectives of other people about you and your decisions.
Roger Spitz: Yeah. So you've introduced a few very important nuances here, which I tried to unpack in different ways and connect the dots and I'll mention the thinking around it. It doesn't mean it's the right answer. So I think, first of all, that observation is right. We do emphasize the decreasing value of experts per se, and that ties in with the idea of UN-VICE or even Shuhari.
Now where I would add a nuance to the discussion is that it's not because you appreciate that sense making of a particular environment is complex and you can't rely on just a particular expert or experience or what your CEO tells you for novel situation for which there may be unknown unknowns. It doesn't mean that you can rely on only yourself as an individual. You still need, and we have an entire kind of section on this around systems innovation. What are business models as a system? What are ecosystems? How do you harness all that? And again, if we look at the frame of complex and unknown unknowns, that process of emergence and discovery and trial and error is one for which you need diverse perspectives and diverse perspectives in the sense of complimentary views that may be divergent, that may be exploratory, that may be on the fringe, that may be not what you're accustomed to.
So I guess the difference I would say is you could be in a situation where you are taking expert advice, where you are relying on others, where you are doing all those things where you seemingly have a trusted network, but where you are in a sort of centralized command and control, hierarchical, surrounded by people that are thinking alike and for which that's not going to be helpful for complex, unknown, dynamic, environments, whereas you might be putting aside some of those hierarchies, centralized approaches, usual suspects and expert advisors, but indeed you will need a broader set of the diverse perspectives in order to collectively in a systemic way, benefit from different perspectives as you're in a discovery mode and you can't rely on that.
So it's that paradox, which is not necessarily alone versus with others, but more, are you more alone with a thousand people who think identically, who went to the same school, who produced the same report versus 10 people who might generally be more diverse and can help you problem solve a complex challenge in the novel manner.
Peter Hayward: Nice, you had a phrase in the book perfect imperfectionists, that the search for the perfect is crippling in complexity. Another thing you did in the book, which I was delighted, you took the word trial and error, which people often say, but they actually say it as one word.
And you said, no, there's actually two words there. Both are important. The trialing is important, but the having errors is also important. You can't. There really is no trial without error. And if we're not maximizing errors, then I don't know that we're trialing.
Roger Spitz: Yeah, it's always tricky because when you're based in Silicon Valley and you come from a kind of business or technology background and venture capital. You have a lot of the world who rightfully looks and frowns upon some of the memes around, move fast and break things and trial and error, but the truth is, if you think more fundamentally, and you put aside the sort of techno centric aspect of it, the truth is that it's so important, because if you come back to just thinking about our distinction, of complex and complicated and what's required to solve some of the complex challenges we have, they do require novel approaches and discovery processes, and they do require trial and error.
And so indeed, we try and unpack it and explore that from the broader systemic lens of what is effective change, what is impactful, as opposed to just, the more, technocentric Silicon Valley use, and that's very important. Then when you look at, it comes back, maybe to what you were saying earlier around, playing just for the sake of it or being better at math or being better at gaming or whatever, versus the real idleness and doing things gratuitously maybe, just trying things, whether it has an objective or not, as opposed to just trying to improve a craft or innovation. It's the difference between invention and innovation. And the reason why invention is important is because we require change whether we like it or not, because the status quo of our current problematics in the world are not finding pathways that are sustainable in terms of our futures. And so the status quo is not an option. So we need to change things. And then if we're just changing things incrementally through innovation, it's more of the same. And so that's where that trial and error aspect. It's the other side of the coin.
And the problem we have is the incentive structures, the governance structures, and especially the educational systems are focusing more on perfecting what you know, on improving what you understand, on answering better questions that are established. And they are not incentivizing that, the trial and error, the new ways of doing things, the wondering what questions you should be asking yourself instead of better answering questions that are known and established.
And it does go hand in hand, and not just again from just a sort of, VC value creation in Silicon Valley, but literally from how do you solve some of the challenges that we have a society and for humanity and for own sustainability. And that comes from not knowledge and not improving craft, but that idea of trial and error.
Two sides of the same coin, right? In a sense.
Peter Hayward: You've been a very generous guest tolerating my idiosyncratic questions, and I'll leave you with the last word. So to sum up the book, what you're hoping to achieve with the book. Because a lot of people who listen to FuturePod come from a foresight bent, from a foresight perspective.
If one of them was to want to lean into the book, what might they learn? But how do you want to wrap up this stage of your journey?
Roger Spitz: Thanks for the opportunity, Peter. There's nothing idiosyncratic around you. It's a complete privilege to have a kind of discussion so rich and, with your experience and perspectives.
I think you're right. Obviously the FuturePod audience is well tuned into, most, if not all of these concepts and that, and I'll leave it to everyone to judge, what they think of the outcomes from the work.
I think from my perspective, what I tried to do is really, kill some of the false dichotomies which exist in some of the debates. You think more anticipatory, long term thinking versus emergence or this or that. So I tried to say, okay, I have 20 years advising boards, CEOs, and investors on certain things. It's not the be all and end all, but it doesn't hurt. It's really the center stage of a lot of the arcane of decision making of the world. I spent time trying to connect the dots, including with some of the interests I have, which are not always connected in the same way, whether it's Zen Buddhism or philosophy.
I also introduced things which are sometimes either ors for certain approaches that can be more dogmatic. And introduce those in a way that I feel is tried and tested in the real world. I sit on a lot of boards. I spend time with a foresight practice. I'm a venture capitalist. So there's a whole side, which is a practitioner feedback loops informing very real world situations.
So I try my best to bring those with real examples and many case studies. If someone is looking for a very specific, narrow, academic, substantiated, new piece of groundbreaking empirical research, I think they can do without this book. If they're interested maybe in just, seeing how things are connected and different vantage points, then, hopefully, even people who are very well versed with these ideas and concepts might find something, of relevance, but I'll leave that to the judgment of the listeners.
Peter Hayward: Rog, it's been great to catch up. I wish you and Disrupt With Impact all the best. Thanks for catching up again, and thanks for spending some time with the Foresight and podcast community.
Roger Spitz: My pleasure, Peter. And please just continue. I just, to think that you're on your 200th episode, that I was a bit late, but early in other ways on episode 70, I know we'll be, we all look forward and just, you're almost synonymous with APF and WFS and the Foresight, community.
So just please you and the team continue. And, it's just really, extraordinarily good quality discussions that you're sharing with the world.
Peter Hayward: I hope you enjoyed my chat with Roger. His book is a great read and I recommend it. Plus Roger has given you a great set of references on his Show page on the website. 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.