Peter’s guest today is Trish Lavery who is an academic and policy expert working with the School of Cybernetics, Australian National University. Her work places human behaviour at the centre of strategy, futures, and strategic foresight.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
Pieces by Trish
Transcript
Peter Hayward: I don't think anyone really thinks that 'Death by Powerpoint" is an effective strategy to create behaviour change and yet I know I have been guilty of trying to encourage changed behaviour by the brilliance of my presentations. And then I am surprised that nothing changed. So what does work?
Trish Lavery: I've just done a paper on the better integration of behavioral insights principles into the foresight process. Behavioral insights, often called nudge theory is about how you change little things to influence people's decisions.
One of my favorite examples is a nudge unit was called in to encourage people to take the stairs rather than the lift to reduce energy. In the building they were working at, you came down the stairs and you could turn left to the stairs or right to the lifts.
And they put little footstep stickers on the floor pointing toward the steps. It was so successful at changing the proportion of people that chose the steps even though a lot of people didn't report seeing or noticing. So it's this little nudge, this hint, that gives people a slight nudge in the direction you want them to go.
And so thinking about some of those behavioral psychology principles, they have been criticized quite rightly as simplifying human behavior. They don't explain all human behavior all of the time, of course. But I think that simplicity is the beauty for people that don't want to do a PhD in behavioral psychology, but just want to use some of those principles in their work to think through how humans actually respond to change rather than how we think they might respond to change.
Peter Hayward: That is my guest today on FuturePod, Trish Lavery, who is an academic and policy expert working with the School of Cybernetics, Australian National University. Her work places human behaviour at the centre of strategy, futures, and strategic foresight
Welcome to FuturePod Trish
Trish Lavery: Thank you
Peter Hayward: so we start, Trish, with the story question. what is the Trish Lavery story, how did you get involved with the Futures in Foresight community?
Trish Lavery: great question, and I think like a lot of people in the Foresight community, I got involved by a very, circuitous route.
It wasn't something that I imagined myself doing, to be honest. back as a kid, I was that, kid that madly wanted to be a marine biologist. I wanted to study whales and dolphins as the dolphin man kid. I went off to university to study, and bless my little 17 year old heart.
I wanted to study the social lives of whales and dolphins because they're mammals and they have quite a rich social life. So I did a double degree in, environmental science. And behavioral psychology in the, it's going to be a dolphin psychologist, if you like, over time I found the psychology particularly fascinating and found myself being more and more, captivated by that world. I did my PhD eventually on a form of, geoengineering. My husband was a microbiologist. I was looking at whales and between the two of us, I started, my husband was always banging on about, the importance of microbes and how they drive global carbon budgets and influence, global climate patterns.
And I started thinking about whales who are quite unique in that, unlike fish that defecate a fecal pellet that sinks down, whales are much more, Watery. It's like a big plume of diarrhea seats on the top of the ocean. And by doing so, I worked out that it would be able to fertilize the microscopic plants of the ocean, cause them to grow.
And by doing so they would draw in carbon and that would change carbon balance between the ocean and the atmosphere and cause atmospheric carbon to be drawn into the ocean and sunk to the depths of the ocean and removed from our atmosphere for the millennia. So I thought this was a pretty nifty, thing to study, certainly, a great PhD topic for getting media attention because it had whales, poo and climate change all in one headline.
Lots of media experience as I went through this process. but I think, there was a really formative experience. I was chatting to a stockbroker on a plane one day. I was pretty keen on getting stock tips from him. So I was chatting away and asking him about his work, but he was really interested to hear about my work and what I was doing.
I explained my PhD and how I'd found that if we hadn't removed whales by removing stock tips. In some cases, 90 percent of them, we would have much less carbon in our atmosphere. And he said to me, never look behind. Anyone can look behind, look in front.
That's where the money is. I reflected on that. I was really heartened to think that, thankfully the math stayed the same. what they could have done in the past or were doing in the past is the same as what they could do if we restored Wales to their former abundances.
it was a very small framing tweak, but I really stuck with me as being very, a very sexy way rather than looking back I'm not sure if the money is in looking forward, but it's certainly, the sexy angle. I really carried that forward.
eventually, I got married and was going to have children at that point I was spending time in Antarctica researching whales. I wondered where on earth I was going to put these children, when I was off gallivanting down and living on ships.
Because I can tell you the child's care facilities in Antarctica are really not up, up to pace. So I joined the Department of Environment The behavioral insights movement was really kicking off. about nudging people, for more sustainable behaviors.
And I could mix and match my climate background and behavioral psychology and spent a lot of time doing that. But those teams, wax and wane and change over the years. So we were often behavioral insights slash innovation, or, for a while behavioral insights slash foresight.
And I trained under a really amazing woman, Dayle Stanley, who taught me a lot about, the art of strategic foresight and structured analytic techniques. Thanks. And she and I just had this wonderful time running these processes, under her guidance. I fell in love, with that field and the power of it to, get the right people in the room and have a very deep conversation.
I eventually had the opportunity to work in the OECD, which was fantastic. I was a strategic foresight counsellor there at the office of the secretary general. we were the OECD's, central strategic foresight function. The OECD has pockets of strategic foresight excellence across its policy directorates, but we were the central team, tasked with looking after cross cutting policy issues that don't neatly sit in one policy directorate.
as part of that work, we looked at, futures of existential risks associated with both artificial intelligence and engineered pandemics. We looked at net zero transitions, climate work and other interesting pieces of work.
coming back this year, I just landed back in Australia. I've taken up a role I'm very happy to be working for the department. I'm also a visiting fellow of the school of cybernetics at ANU and I think I'll hark on a lot of that work today.
as a biologist by training, the idea of cybernetics. cybernetics. Everyone I talked to has a different definition of that. But for me, it's really about navigating the way forward. in systems where emerging tech and the lines between humans and tech are increasingly blurring.
we're now, I'm sure there's many people like me who feel They have to work without, LLM, such as chat GPT. They're working with one hand, tied behind their back. We're already augmented, by some of these systems. So really navigating to think through, not only the tech and what it can do, but the broader implications on society is something that I find really fascinating and, and, certainly Huck's back to my behavioral psychology route.
So I try and bring that, I find that sometimes I see people doing really amazing things in this space, and they're often dragging along another discipline or another application of foresight, with them. That's allowed them to have a bit of a unique perspective.
Peter Hayward: Can I ask a question which has always fascinated me when I look back at the history of our field?
one of the pivotal moments in our field was the limits to growth paper by the Club of Rome. when that came out in the 60s, parliaments around the world debated the Club of Rome. it was considered important enough to have a discussion on the public record about what was in the limits to growth.
And that is, over 60 years ago. If something like limits to growth was to land now around the world, generally it's a double question, Trish, why then was that the response that this has to be talked about as a public conversation and now.
Would that be the case, or would it be just, oh, that's so technical and so specialised and not? It's a great question,
Trish Lavery: Peter, my initial answer is biased by a paper that I'm writing at the moment, in the past, we really valued access to information it was hard to come across, You had to go to a library or somehow other gather that and it was, we valued that access to information.
Now we have the internet on our fingertips at all times and we're just overwhelmed with information we can't process it all. so we're looking for insights and there's just so much part of the paper that I'm doing with a couple of my colleagues. Is looking at how do we stop these, strategic foresight or, strategic intelligence or other information strategy products.
How do we stop them being shelved? How do we stop them being that well, this was really interesting and we're just going to pop it on the shelf here and, move on with what we were doing. we've been looking at case studies of, different ways that different organizations, have their systems, set up.
To really encompass those. I think it's something that is sometimes skipped over, in, books about foresight, it often stops at scenarios drives me wild. I was like then what that's just a pretty story. we need to know what to do with that.
We need to know that next step. What is the organizational mechanism that will make that really get resonance and different organizations that we've looked at have different ways of doing this. NATO has an incredibly mature function where, they have a whole system where things are bought in at exactly the right time for the right person to influence a certain decision
So they're very mature in this function. I've got a colleague at the OECD who's looking at how strategic foresight processes feed into risk registers, which I think is really interesting because we have a very mature function about how to deal with different risks in a formal way in organizations Part of this paper is looking through, what are some of the avenues where we can, when we're designing these processes, make sure that they're going to end up changing a behavior.
That's what I would like to see. What behavior are we trying to change and, generate a greater awareness of like we're really actually going to see something happen as a result of this work.
Peter Hayward: I recently did a podcast with Doris Viljoen from Stellenbosch University in South Africa one of the points I brought up was when I taught scenarios at Swinburne University, I used to always lean heavily on the Montclair example as those very interesting set of scenarios at a very interesting and pivotal time in South Africa's formation.
the way they framed it as the series of decisions that were or weren't made, but through the language of birds. And one of the, one of the impacts of Vontfleur was how it crept into political language where people started to say, I'm not an ostrich or I'm not a whatever else.
it was a formal set of scenarios done by a bunch of socialist accountants.
But it was framed in a way, both became vernacular, and it had cut through to the people. It was almost a non elitist way. And again, from your perspective of how people respond. To information this way or make decisions. Montfleur's famous, probably completely unique set of circumstances. But is there something in that it did the magic?
Trish Lavery: Yeah, it's an interesting question, isn't it? And I think, part of it is that simplicity. one thing that I'm really passionate about with all of my strategic Foresight work is making sure that we're planning processes to respond to the way that people actually act to change and not how we think they should act.
this is such an important distinction. when I first started, hanging out in the foresight circles there's a lot of real tech lovers and I'd hear them say something like this tech is going to come online and it's going to change things like this,
And I think, humans are weird. We have weird and wonderful ways of behaving that, don't seem logical at first. First, that might change the way, we don't actually know how humans going to interact with this tech and drive it in different ways. one of my favorite examples to make this really clear, although it's becoming a less favored example, and because I'm realizing that I'm super old and that I can remember a time before Facebook, whereas often people in the room are just looking at me when I say things like that, but, thinking back to a time before Facebook, if you had said to me that, almost everyone I know, including my dad, is going to sign a contract they haven't read and don't understand, even though they've been made aware that there's some things in that contract that make them uncomfortable.
And they're going to do that in order to share photos of their lunch I would have said that was not logical human behavior my dad would never sign something he hadn't read and understood because he had, warned me about this many times.
And yet, within the space of six months of a year, that exact situation had come to fruition. So although it doesn't seem logical, it is logical when we think about the way that humans actually behave rather than how we think they should behave. we generally think that humans will stop and consider every decision.
they will look at the pros and cons and make the best decision for their circumstances. We rarely do that. We're very driven by what other people around us are doing. We often think that people around us have thought through things in more detail than we have had time to do.
I think one of the greatest examples of this is solar panels on your roof. the biggest predictor of you getting solar panels is not the local state or federal policies, which change the climate. Cost benefit, analysis of those solar panels. It's the number of people in your street that have them.
So you look around and see other people and you think it must be a good economic deal and that you should get along with it too. we take the easiest option. we're very social animals. We don't like to miss out. when you start to think about all of these, behavioral, indices of the way that we act, then you can more accurately, predict what humans might do in response to change.
And, that Montfleur example, it's simple, it's easy, we can remember it, so I'm not surprised to hear it became part of the vernacular of, having this shortcut way of describing, A fairly, complicated process, but in simple language.
Peter Hayward: So let's pivot into your practice. Aspects of the way you practice foresight, but what do you want to talk to that's core to you and the work you do that you want to explain in a little bit more depth to the listeners?
Trish Lavery: one of the things I found, and I'll hark back to my OECD roots as an example is that, when we're doing foresight, we're often called to help build capacity and others around us for doing that work.
It's hard to hold stuff on him. You might be in a situation where you're building capacity across an organization. one of the firmest ideas that I have is that you don't learn four sides by sitting in a classroom. I'm watching, having death by PowerPoint and watching about it.
You learn it by doing rolling up your sleeves. and doing it. So we had a small team for most of my time at the OECD. And, we would be writing our own products when we came to a topic That we didn't know enough about, green finance, for example, the capacity building light would shine on our environmental directorate.
And all of a sudden we'd be saying, we're going to run you through some foresight processes, and they're going to be all about green finance, and we're going to explore that together. these, teams, sometimes can be, a little bit light on the ground.
You're asked to do a lot, and you're asked to deep dive into things and be an inch deep and a mile wide. building your community around you and having people that you can offer training to in exchange for getting their insights, can be a great mechanism for doing that.
the other thing I have a long ongoing, debate with some of my colleagues about should a foresight practitioner be sitting there and holding a space and allowing, the people you're working with to think through an issue. Or should you be bringing the content? I can see both sides to that argument, but I think over the time I've fallen heavily on the, you need to bring some content to that, they often don't, the team, people that you're working with often don't have time to be scouring the latest technological developments that don't seem relevant to you.
I think it is a bit of a, I might be biased because it's the funnest part of my job is keeping up with all of the latest, weak signals and trends and being able to apply them. you don't want to just add to the deluge of information that people, are facing, but really try and synthesize and apply these in ways that, might result in some novel concepts.
So I often find, that's a really important part of my role too.
Peter Hayward: I think it's emerging, with the LLMs, large language models, that unless you have enough context, the LLMs can be truly creative and they can also produce fantasy. That you won't know is fantasy unless you have contextual knowledge.
I wonder whether LLMs might encourage us to move outside of our dominant paradigms in order to use them usefully.
Trish Lavery: So I'm quite bullish on, LLMs. I find them, quite a great tool to use, and, I do read a lot about, people having concerns about, the potential for hallucinations and the ideas that, can return wrong information.
And we've seen some pretty amazing cases. of that happening, admittedly, but, I think we had the same conversations when we were learning to use the internet not once have I ever quoted a 4chan blog in one of my research papers, because I learned how to use the internet in a safe and responsible and ethical manner.
And I'm really confident that we can do the same with large language models and free up a lot of productivity, I've been getting them to, make me some PowerPoint slides. I give it the text and it does all the pictures I think, Oh gosh, all those months that I spent moving pixels around in a PowerPoint deck, that's now obsolete.
Peter Hayward: I think you touched on this when I asked you about the response to limits to growth and you said that was in a time when information was scarce someone going to the trouble of crafting a narrative. was considered invaluable and helpful enough for people to put it up as a public conversation in a parliament.
And yet now we are flooded with information and that is having an impact on how we have discussions around what is reality and what's not. LLMs are one attempt possibly an early attempt As to how we might manage that information flood We still have to manage how we navigate information when there is so much, if we have to generate agreement?
Trish Lavery: Absolutely. who knew that the language of coding, for example, would be English. I wish I'd known that when Python was making me cry as I was trying to learn coding.
I'm working with this amazing organization called the Sympodium Institute for Strategic Communications that looks in, looks about strategic communications and helps government communicators to prepare for foreign interference in their information products.
as I've been doing a bit of research, looking through, a behavioral psychology perspective how can we best craft our messages to make sure that they resonate with people and that they're simple and easy to understand? But how can we also understand how those same behavioral insights principles can be used to twist and turn information around us?
as I'm thinking through this issue and doing a deep dive in this research, I can't help thinking that we're moving into a situation where your truth will depend on, where you accessed it, where you went to look for information I think we saw that in the U.
I was reading an article that, said at one point newspapers used to call who won the election, the debate, whereas now who won the debate will depend on which newspaper you Want to read on the answer will be different. I see that we're increasingly moving into this post truth world.
that raises some huge, issues and dilemmas to think through. someone was, Speaking to me the other day about post truth science for me, science is a methodology. it doesn't actually claim to have the truth, but it has a robust methodology to get as close as you can to the truth, while leaving things open for future developments.
the idea of post truth science I'm not sure where I sit on that one, to be honest.
Peter Hayward: I wonder, Tricia, I can fully understand why we want to get better at agreeing what reality is, so we need to get better at sense making, but I also wonder whether we need to be working on how we handle disagreement, are we getting better at understanding how we work with people who might see things differently?
In other words, is our standard solution to disagreement? Let's give it to the strongest person, the person with the gun, the person with the money, the person with the
Trish Lavery: I wonder whether we're
Peter Hayward: But our conflict resolution agreement seeking processes go back to earlier centuries and we're not actually getting better at that.
Trish Lavery: it's a really interesting perspective. I'm working on A project on geoengineering futures with a think tank based in Brussels at the moment for any listeners that might not be aware of geoengineering, this is the idea, solar radiation management in particular, this is the idea that we're going to send rockets up into space and release sulfur dioxide that sulfur dioxide will cause more sunlight to be reflected away from the globe and out to space.
And this is a fascinating idea. we are pretty sure on the science. the scientists are fairly sure that this would work and it would reduce global temperatures quickly over the course months. And quite effectively too. in terms of affordability.
I think the latest, estimates of the cost there was 18 billion per degree per year that you want to reduce. So it's well within the realms of most developed economies and even some, particularly high net worth individuals but when you start to think about this, I'm fascinated in this issue because there's a lot of unknowns.
we do know that it will reduce global temperatures. we don't know what other effects that technology might have. There is some information to suggest that it will change the patterns of rainfall and precipitation across the globe, but we don't know how. that's a fairly big one for me.
how is that going to pan out? this is the bit that gets me really fascinated how on earth are we going to have a robust policy debate on this issue where it has. So many unknowns. We just don't know. And we probably won't know until we do it, because you can't research it in a lab somewhere.
say this is what's going to happen. You're going to research it by doing it at a smaller scale. we just don't know. I'm thinking through how we have a robust policy debate, how we include all voices there's a real concern that this could be a next wave.
we're going to have climate colonization now and some countries or some individual will make the decision and control the global thermostat one of the real kickers with this technology is that once you start, it's hard to stop. if we as a society agreed, for example, next year that we were going, it just looks like we've just smashed past 1.
maybe we all decide that's not what we want and we're going to use geoengineering to bend that curve and reduce temperatures and keep them within the 1. 5 degrees, Temperature range that we committed to as part of the Paris Accord. so we might go along and do that for sort of 10 or 15 years, for example.
If, for example, then we decided we weren't going to do it anymore. It got too expensive or there was a, political will change and we stopped doing it. very quickly over the course of months our temperatures would jump to where they should have been if we had never started that biological systems can't cope with that kind of a change in temperature, so that's quite a worry, I think. I did some work on part of on this as part of the O. E. C. D. Like looking at scenarios of how this might pan out. one of the scenarios that captured everyone's attention, was the idea that, perhaps there's, and perhaps I think the scenario was a vulnerable, island state that was facing existential risk from climate and paired with then a, an individual that, already had rockets available to him, and they were able launch and control the global climate thermostat as it were.
that's a pretty, terrifying idea to start to think through this. I just cannot fathom how we're going to have a robust policy debate about this. There's so many unknowns. And it's really hard, we talk a lot about mis and disinformation, but, I think mal information, which is true information that's twisted and shared for a particular purpose, could be the biggest threat.
how we'll engage the community so that they can have this say in a meaningful way. is a big question for me. I've been following all the contrails, community, if you'd like to call it that.
And they've all, I'm fascinated by the idea. I was like, do you still think that it's mind control now that you're now calling it geoengineering? So it used to be a few years that contrails were chemicals released. In order to control our minds. Whereas now it's all geoengineering and people in these communities know quite a lot about geoengineering, and they know that there's a global conversation about this, and they're seeing the contrails in the sky thinking that this is already happening.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, and also if you were to take a broad sweep across politics at the present, you would say international law, is struggling for credibility in a lot of people's eyes, institutions.
to try to span, territory, or sovereignty, are also not highly respected, their respect levels are going down. The actors themselves and their credibility, and then the political flavor that says, why do we even need to talk to them?
Trish Lavery: yeah, absolutely. it's a real question about who would govern this. And, even a bit of a question of given that this is a long term commitment, are democracies best placed if you started with the fences, no, then that raises. Some really interesting issues too.
it's a very meaty one. for me, I'm seeing this as the perfect case study of emerging tech, the interaction between people and human behaviors, the rising geopolitical tensions, because the sort of like minded countries are not like, the like minded countries are not like minded on this issue.
it's. I can see your fan on in the background. We have cameras, even those people at home can't see them and I'm sitting here sweating, as we're all sort of feeling the impacts of more severe climate, it's certainly not an issue that's going to go away.
Peter Hayward: So let's just we're already skating on this one, but I'm going to ask you, this is, I'll talk to Trish's mother, partner, privileged member of a privileged white culture in a pretty old country. How do you, as a person, how are you responding to the emerging futures around you?
What are you leaning into personally? And why?
Trish Lavery: Fascinating question. I'm always thinking from the perspective of my Children I've got a 13 year old and an 11 year old and what advice I can give them in terms of future careers and future studies. And, it's something that's been on my mind almost years.
Since they were born of just, with such a fast paced world and so many things changing, how do you give your children that steer and help them navigate through this when they are in all likelihood, they will work jobs that aren't invented yet. And then I don't even, I can't even conceive of in my mind.
the way we're doing that is with our children, really exposing them to an entrepreneurial and continuous learning mindset. It's, being sure that, you can put your mind to something and master it if you really need to. My son and I just got a great mark on our science project on, how can we trick chat GPT?
one of the questions that, trips it up. instead of, the other harking back to a neuroscience interest, the rise of neurotech is something that's really fascinating me at the moment. linked in with this is a I, of course, but thinking through, as we're starting to blur the lines between computers, and human cognition, what that might look like and what risks.
that brings is something that I've been doing a lot of reading recently. So I was just, reading a fascinating study done out of Stanford that looked at people using a commercially available, computer brain interface. it's a noninvasive thing. Put on your head.
It measures your, spikes of neural activity and you can control a computer with that. they were using this to control video games. while they were doing this, Stanford placed, subliminal messages in the video games and without the participants knowing managed to get their full name and address in one point, in one case, someone else's social security number, someone else's pin number for their credit card.
And this is just commercially available software that you can buy right now I think as we're going into some of these neuro technologies, it's going to raise some really fundamental questions. Already we have, Fatigue monitors that we use here in Australia for miners and truck drivers and the like.
And I think we can all agree that's a, an ethical use of these technologies to make sure that people aren't endangering themselves or endangering other people. But the problem is there's not a fatigue. Brainwave that you just measure you're measuring all of the cognitive patterns.
And so as a result of that, you're privy to a lot more information than just fatigue, So for me, this raises ethical questions around, if you have a, an employee that are still showing signs of, early onset of cognitive decline. should you tell them? Are you obliged to tell them?
Can you make employment decisions based on that information? yeah, I'm aware that in some countries they are already, quite far down this path of measuring people's individual Health indices and making employment decisions based on that. harking back again to that mis and disinformation angle, as we're blurring that line between the computer and us, I think that has the potential to raise a lot of issues.
So it's a lot of fun, deep diving into this and thinking through, as we're using these systems, we might set them up ethically and be comfortable with all the processes and safety we have built into a, generative AI product, it's generative, it changes, how do we know that it's still, conforming to the ethical standards.
we originally designed. So it's going to be a ton of careers for our future children on, auditing these and understanding. And, I had the, fascinating opportunity while I was at the OECD to talk to some people from META and I said to the gentleman, tell me the truth.
do you want governments? setting policies for you. or are you happy setting your own policies? he said, I'll tell you the official version and unofficial version. The official version is that yes, we would like. Governments around the world to make their policies so that we can just conform to them.
the unofficial version is yes, we would like governments to make their own policies, but you will never catch up to us. So we will always have to do this. So it was a really interesting, insight and it didn't make me wonder how on earth we are going to catch up with these things.
And I was involved in some work at the OECD looking at anticipatory governance of emerging technologies. So really thinking about the outcomes rather than the technical specifications that you want to regulate. often these technologies, the impacts don't become, we look at them and go, Oh yeah, it's an app to share, pictures of your lunch with your friends.
What could possibly go wrong? And then we've got democracy almost bought to its knees. That could go wrong. And so we need to be thinking about, regulatory, structures, and this is the work that the OECD is doing to be agile. So as things are emerging as implications that we might not have first thought become clearer, the regulatory process has the flexibility to be updating as a result of that.
Peter Hayward: Trish, you're a thinker through uncertainty and possibility. this is from a girl who was fascinated by whales and dolphins. I would imagine someone in your early years, assisted by giving you a book or taking you to a film
You talked about how you parent your children to best build capability to deal with a world that for us is very different, but for them will just be the way things are. How do you think you could parent, advise, and assist your children to make sense and navigate through the world that is possibly coming?
Trish Lavery: That's a great question. I'm not claiming to have any great expertise in this area. I'm just trying my best, but One thing I'm really passionate about handing over to my kids, I was telling my son who's 11 the other day, you could be a chat GPT expert.
It was only invented last year. There's no one more than a year ahead of you. If you start now, this could be your thing. You're like playing with it. having that idea that you don't have to be an expert to jump in, to things and that you can learn as you go. And I think that model that might go away and do.
for example, you've got enough knowledge that you can contribute. I think that model was broken in this world. the best way is to just jump in. when my son was, born, I was off. I had an 18 month old daughter. The new baby son. And I announced to my husband that I was going to do an MBA cause I knew nothing, about, any sort of business or, investing.
And I thought, while I was off on that leave, I'd put that time to good use and I'd do an MBA. my husband, who's quite used to talking me down from ideas like this said, that sounds like a lot with a baby and a toddler. Why don't you just start a business? See how you go.
And I think we had our life savings for about 20, 000. He said leave a little bit of that. even if you lose most of it, you will have learned more than if you'd done an MBA through the mistakes you make best case scenario, maybe you don't lose it and maybe even make a few dollars.
And I couldn't do a service based, business because, baby and toddler. So I started, I was like, okay, I'm going to sell products. I jumped online and I soon worked out, wait a minute, if you can buy it from Alibaba and I can buy it from Alibaba and we're both selling it on eBay.
There's no margin in that, that's not a great business model. so I was like, okay, I need to find a product that I have import rights to. To learn about import rights. I started scouting around and eventually, found a product and, managed to, email to the, the, suppliers of that product in Europe and managed to convince them to let me import it into Australia.
And so I made a website and I set up a Facebook page. And at that stage I was studying a master's in data analytics. with my behavioral psych background and the data analytics. I was like, Oh, look at this. Facebook lets you do AB testing overnight. And it was super cheap back then. It was like 4 and I could hit thousands of people.
I was high on the power of not having any kind of bureaucratic structures around me. So I was like, tonight, let's try shame they're little swim rings for babies. Are your babies Still not swimming. Oh dear. I said, Oh no. And wake up in the morning. Go on. Oh, they don't respond to shame.
Let's try something else. and all of a sudden, the business just took off. My husband had to cut down work at his work to help. And we used to walk around with the pram filled up at night with all these, Swim rings that we were selling, walking around the streets to every post box, trying to shove them in until you just couldn't shove any more post boxes in.
And then you'd move on to the next post box. eventually we got a knock on the door from Auspost who said, you need to stop doing that, please. we'll give you a business account and then we'll come and pick them up. I remember saying to the guy, you'll pick them up. That's gotta be so
So much easier. And then, I got to June 30 and I rang the tax office and said, I started a little business this year and it hasn't gone too badly and I'm ready to pay my tax. she said, you don't need to do anything. you would have been paying your tax through your quarterly bass statements.
And I said, my quarterly, what now, every step of this business, I was just falling over and having no idea what to do. But, you just. Figure it out as you go. And that's a valid, method. you look at Uber, we crawl, we walk before we can crawl, we break the rules as we go.
I think a lot of people are stuck on the sidelines thinking that they have to have some sort of expertise. Whereas, I just jump in and see how you go. I think that is going to be more of a model for this future that's changing.
And, I might be encouraging my son to be the chat GPT expert today, but who knows that it could be completely gone and superseded by something within the next couple of years. you'll just have to jump on the next thing and hit the road with it.
Peter Hayward: Thanks Trish. So the communication question, how does Trish explain to people what Trish does when they don't understand what it is that Trish does?
Trish Lavery: I think it comes back to that idea of, we're drowning in information. So I usually describe it as trying to synthesize and make sense of the things that we're seeing today and how they might influence the future, but always with a laser focus on decisions for today.
So given that, given this uncertainty, given these different ways that things could pan out, what is our best plan of attack today? sometimes that's. putting a pin in things and I often think of this when you're making a document or, policy or something, which I often do at the OECD, we're making policy guidance.
It's nice to put a little flag in that Document to say, when we were doing this foresight, we realized that a couple of futures, this is not going to be pursuable for, so if you're sitting in a future reading this document and X, Y, and Z has happened, this is not the document for you.
We know that doesn't work in this future. sometimes things, sit on the shelf get pulled out as the guide and off people go, there's not that sense that, this was The best guide for what we thought on the day was going to be the future.
And, as part of this, we looked at different possibilities and some of these, this is not going to work for, so be aware of that. And, have that flexibility built into some of these products.
Peter Hayward: How do decision makers still are concerned that I have to act as if I know what is going to happen when we know we cannot say with confidence what will happen?
How do we encourage decision makers to make commitments as if they were certain, but also hold their views as provisional, open to change? that's a tricky leadership space that most leadership models say, if I'm the leader, I need to be sure. people need a leader who is sure.
I don't need, as Harry Truman said, a three handed economist. On one hand, on another hand, and on a third hand.
Trish Lavery: Yes, absolutely. How do you juggle that? it's interesting, actually. Last night, I was at a seminar by, a US academic, Mary Uhl-Bien, and she looks at complexity leadership.
she made a great point that I hadn't, it's pretty simple when you hear it, but I hadn't thought through it in some systems, they're complex, there's a lot going on, but it's not complicated. she described, the need for rich interdependence.
in some cases, we're just getting on with it and don't need adaptive and innovative sort of leadership styles, for a lot of cases, the old sort of waterfall hierarchical structure gets us through for me, what I took away from her presentation was knowing the difference.
Knowing when you're like, Oh, you can go there. And yeah, we do need a leader. That's sure about this. And, off we track as composers. Actually, this is one that we need a more adaptive leadership style and we need to investigate the different and we need to have a real sense of the range of possibilities.
And, when we're making a decision, out of that range of possibilities. this might be the best decision for three of them, but we're going to be really explicit that, there's a future possibility where, if it comes about, we need to change things, I think just putting those markers in, many of us have been in situations where, you've got a strategic plan or a guide and It's got dates on it.
And we all now realize this is not ideal, but until the dates run through, we're stuck with that. It's a terrible situation to be in. So I think, being open about, what this was designed for, what the assumptions are that we made in designing this product. And if they failed, being really open that's the time to rethink it.
It's like a gift to future users of that product.
Peter Hayward: Thanks, Trish. is there a way for listeners interested in the ideas that you've touched on that they could find just a bit more and lean into on your reference page on your show notes? What kind of things could a person follow up?
Trish Lavery: Ah, great question. Yes. I think I've just done a paper on the better integration of behavioral insights principles into the foresight process. behavioral insights, often called nudge theory is about how you change little things to influence people's decisions.
one of my favorite examples is, the, a nudge unit was called in to encourage people to take the stairs rather than the lift to reduce energy. in the building they were working at, you came down the stairs and you could turn left to the stairs or, right to the lifts.
And they put little footstep stickers on the floor pointing toward the steps. it was so successful at changing the proportion of people that chose the steps. Even though a lot of people didn't report seeing or noticing. So it's this little nudge, this hint, that gives people a slight nudge in the direction you want them to go.
And so thinking about some of those behavioral psychology principles, they have been criticized quite rightly as simplifying human behavior. They don't explain all human behavior all of the time, of course. But I think that simplicity is the beauty for people that don't want to do a PhD in behavioral psychology, but just want to use some of those principles in their work to think through how humans actually respond to change rather than how we think they might respond to change.
So in that paper, I have a prompt just to think about, what Humans are really responsive to defaults. Is there going to be a default option in this future? who controls it, what's their incentive, what are most people going to do?
What are the easiest things to do? and it looks at all the human biases, my absolute favorite human bias. It's called the Rhyme is Reason Effect. We're much more likely to believe things are true if they rhyme So an apple a day keeps a doctor away. If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit.
And they study this by, getting laboratory participants To rate how true a statement is, is the statement anger held back? Is wisdom gained? Is that a true statement? And people are like, nah, that sounds okay. But anger restrained is wisdom gained. Everyone thinks that's a true statement, even though it's exactly the same thing, but it just rhymes.
So thinking about, who is going to be messaging to people about this issue that you're looking at in future and what The language that they're going to use, how, what are their incentives? Who's going to be the trusted messenger that people look to, to navigate this change. so I think, simplicity is its beauty because not all of us have a chance to do a deep dive, but I've been using this at that divergent part of foresight processes.
So when I give people a trend, or a weak signal and think, and we think about Could pan out. They go through a bit of brainstorming then I, remind them of this and give them this little, prompt and it does result in a, quite a change in direction in how people think humans might respond to that change.
So if you're interested in that, it's in the behavioral economics guide of 2023. under my name, I'm the lead author of that paper. you should be able to find that or it's on my LinkedIn. I just find that the strategic foresight community is such a beautiful community and I have the most wonderful conversations with people.
Please do look me up on LinkedIn, reach out if you're in this area, I'd love to hear what you're doing.
Peter Hayward: Trish, I think we've had a lovely conversation. on behalf of the FuturePod community, thanks for taking some time out to have a chat.
Trish Lavery: Thank you so much for having me.
Peter Hayward: That was a fun chat. I hope you enjoyed it. Trish certainly has a refreshing take on how we might get more impact from our work. 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