A conversation with Patricia Lustig and Gill Ringland about their new book, The Possibility Wheel.

Interviewed by: Peter Hayward

Links

Get the book here www.global-megatrends.com

Transcript

Peter Hayward: Ian Wilson famously said that all our knowledge is about the past and all our decisions are about the future. And if the future is not much like the past then who would want to a decison-maker. Still it is good when people take the trouble to write a book to help decison-makers out.

Patricia Lustig: People are more and more compressed in organizations and individuals because they're frightened because of uncertainty the decision making that comes out is very short term and that isn't going to help us. We need. Better decisions, decisions that work both today and tomorrow and tomorrow being further out than 10, 20 years

Patricia Lustig: so we thought about doing something that would set the scene and then help them by giving a tool that would make it easy so that they could look at a future, not just business as usual, but something else that made sense that would give them a view of how thinking a little bit differently about the future and a little bit further out, gave them more choices so that the decision was better at the end of the day.

Peter Hayward:Those are my guests today on FuturePod. Patricia Lustig and Gill Ringland who are returning to the Pod to talk about their latest book, The Possibility Wheel.

Peter Hayward: Welcome back to FuturePod, Patricia Lustig and Gill Ringland.

Patricia Lustig: Nice to be with you. Good to see you as well.

Peter Hayward: We chatted in podcast 122 a bit over three years ago when you two had just written your latest book called New Shoots, and you've written a new book, which is not surprising because you obviously enjoy writing books together, but I'm going to ask you the first question, which is, what was the motivation for you to write another book, given you'd written the Megatrends book and then you'd obviously did New Shoots about the things that were happening that people weren't aware of. What was the motivation for this new book called The Possibility Wheel?

Patricia Lustig: It's really about the fact that people are more and more compressed in organizations and as individuals because they're frightened by uncertainty. The decision making that comes out from them is very short term and that isn't going to help us with what is needed today. We need better decisions, decisions that work both today and tomorrow, with tomorrow being further out than actually tomorrow; I mean 10 to 20 years out. People also don't want to spend the time that it takes to do a proper foresight project.

Patricia Lustig: So, we thought about doing something that would set the scene and then help people by giving them a tool that would make it easy so that they could look at a future - not just business as usual - but something else that made sense and that was localized to their context. By comparing the Business-as-Usual Future and the future developed with the tool, they will get a view of how actually thinking a little bit differently about the future and a little bit further out, will give them a better decision, will give them more choices. It is very much about creating opportunity and choices so that the decision was better at the end of the day.

Patricia Lustig: Did I miss anything?

Gill Ringland: If I can add to that in foresight speak, what we realized was that because of social media and the defuncting of the normal press and all sorts of other forces for change, people are not able to get a view of what's happening, they get snippets and they only get tailored snippets, so one part of the book is actually restating the global trends that are happening.

Gill Ringland: The second thing that we realized was that there's a lot of thinking about trends, but actually at the moment people are really concerned that there are disruptive threats around. And we looked at three disruptive threats, all of which are going to hit us in some place at some time. And those threats are global pandemics. breakdown of international relations, which is happening, but is affecting different parts of the world in different ways and finally, of course, global heating, which we're seeing in terms of real changes in weather. From Bulawayo, to Latin America, to Northern Europe, to Australia, we are seeing weather, extreme weather.

Gill Ringland: So, trends and threats. And then, we get asked, okay, that's great. How do I use this? And that's where the Possibility Wheel comes in. And so, the Possibility Wheel integrates trends and threats to help people come to the sort of decisions that Tricia was talking about.

Peter Hayward: Just before we dive into the detail of the book, I'm interested, given that you have been, I'm going to say, not writing about the same thing, but you've been writing in this space of giving information to decision makers so they can profit from the future, or use the future, or make wise decisions about the future, do you think we're dealing with, sorry I'll start again, Is, is uncertainty more ramped up for, for decision makers, you think now than what might have been the case 10, 15 years ago, is it actually that the, the uncertainties are greater, the pace of disruption is greater, or is there somehow a lowered capacity for people to think their way through uncertainty and disruption?

Patricia Lustig: I think it's more that it's more visible. You know, there's so much media, it gets around the world so quickly. It's very hard to unpick. It's like a great big messed up ball of yarn. And how do you unpick it and figure it out and make sense of it?

Gill Ringland: I think there is more, as well as people feeling it more. I think both are happening. I mean, at the moment, for instance the tectonic plates are changing in the Middle East whereas for about 50 years we've had relative stability. You know, we've had countries with regime change, but there haven't been big political changes across the Middle East.

Gill Ringland: We've obviously got an American government that's behaving erratically, though there are forces that are containing that, and we've got the uncertainty around the eastern edge of Europe, in Ukraine, and Poland, and Romania, and Bulgaria: for about 20 years, that had been relatively settled as well.

Gill Ringland: And we've also got China. Making more and more, “Well, it is obvious, Taiwan's always been part of China” statements. Which they hadn't 20 years ago, it's always been part of the background, but it hasn't been in the foreground. So, I think we have got more threats to stability than we had 20 years ago.

Gill Ringland: As well as, as Tricia says, the fact that most people get a distorted picture of what's happening through the tailoring of which media response they get to the question they've asked last time. And this is frightening because it's so difficult to see unless you are aware. We are seeing this, for instance, as in the UK we have now a Labour government, and we have a mostly Conservative press.

Gill Ringland: And so, there are maybe five newspapers with a negatively slanted headline over everything that the Labour government does, and one newspaper with a neutral or positive headline. How can you steer through that, unless you've got the time and interest to dig into the facts, and most people don't. So, we have a large problem with disinformation in a way that is more extreme, I think, than before, because people had more informal contacts around news, whereas now it's more tailored and focused.

Peter Hayward: Because, it's puzzling to me. I mean, I'm a child of, you know, the limits to growth, the development of systems thinking all that work through the late 70s, 80s, 90s, where we were introducing concepts of complexity, emergence, wicked problems, and, and I, I'm kind of, I suppose I'm a bit puzzled as to, we have been talking about our ability to imagine and work with complexity, emergence, disruption for almost a generation and a half, but I'm not sure that we're building a social capacity or even an individual capacity to actually bring it into the political systems.

Peter Hayward: In Australia, we famously had a political figure called Paul Keating, who talked big about Australia's future, its relationship to Asia, its need to be a republic. And at the end of their political process, when they, when he was kicked out, it was almost, that this idea of having vision became a political liability, and we don't see in Australia political figures with big ideas of what is possible.

Peter Hayward: So, it's almost like the culture went from holding big ideas, maybe people believed they could have Grand ideas, and then reality caught up with them, and it's much better to just be focused on three months, six months, and don't, you know, don't lift your eyes up.

Gill Ringland: Well, I think there's some interesting work by Timothy Snyder who is saying we actually haven't had a coherent view of what Freedom means, of what a liberal democracy is about. Views of liberal democracy have been defensive and people have enough defensiveness around all sorts of other things.

Gill Ringland: It's hard work to actually create this coherent positive without being frivolous and, you know, happy clappy. So it's a work in progress. But it may well be that the stimulus of Trump in the States does pressure enough people to start that thinking, so that we start to get some coherence and positive views of the future as pushback.

Gill Ringland: It's too early to tell, but you know, Tricia and I are both incurable optimists.

Patricia Lustig: And there's another piece to that, which is people are still sort of grounded in this thinking about nations and national boundaries; and we have to solve these things ourselves as a country when what is needed is to solve them as a collective of nations.

Patricia Lustig: All of the big threats we talk about are global and they have to be handled globally and therefore they need to be addressed globally, and that is something that we're going to be emerging into. Not yet there, only little bits of it happening.

Gill Ringland: And of course, that's where the “a-ha” that we hit in writing the book comes; because a lot of the mechanisms that we have expected to start thinking about these things, you know, like whether it's the World Trade Organization, WHO, UN, or NATO, most of those backbones, those sets of shared assumptions and ways of making things happen, a lot of them are fracturing or fractured.

Gill Ringland: And, so, one of the big, if you like, conceptual insights I suppose we came to in the book, was that underneath the threats were all the mechanisms (or many of the mechanisms) that previously we would have hoped and assumed would start to tackle these threats. We realised that these backbones needed to be recognised and nurtured.

Gill Ringland: We found this to be a really useful concept that communicates with people in our network. But we haven't yet found a way of building on the concept to communicate with, if you might say, politicians or senior civil servants. They don't quite recognize it. And any help you can provide, or any help listeners can provide, in a language for building on, would be helpful because, you know, fractured backbones is negative.

Peter Hayward: I do want you to go into this because, I'm looking at this book and going back to Megatrends before that. You've, you've obviously updated trends and you've updated, the forces for change, but the thing that jumped off book for me was you, was you added this notion of the backbone and the state of the backbone, I think you actually call it the broken backbone.

Peter Hayward: So, do you want to just explain to the listeners, because why you added this to this book?

Patricia Lustig: I think it was because when we were looking at the three original threats, we figured out that there was a thread that connected them all: it was part of what was happening with why they were going, let's say the wrong way and becoming great disruptors. It is because there was a missing piece which we later defined through our research and decided to call “backbones”. We found that it either didn't exist or if it did, it was not working well.

Patricia Lustig: There's not enough inter-governmental stuff going on that's working well, or it was broken. And without that, if you're trying to look for a way to address some of these things, and fix them, or mitigate them, or adapt to them, you need those agreements about how things work between different parties. And many either weren't there, or they were broken.

Peter Hayward: Yes, if I go a little bit amateur historian, sociologist, you know, one of the great achievements post-World War II was the attempt by the winning nations of World War II to start to build some international frameworks, rule of law, human rights what is referred to as international law, international ethics, international behaviors.

Peter Hayward: And people assumed that those things were real. And then I suppose if you look at recent behavior. We're starting to see people saying, well, do these things really exist or are they just polite behaviors where we agree to agree?

Gill Ringland: I think you're right, that the set of shared assumptions were not really shared. They were convenient and so as China was rebuilding, it was convenient for instance, not to visibly challenge things like IPR and the role of the courts and the role of individuals. And so, it is one of the things that we discuss, not in detail, but we start to touch on in the book.

Gill Ringland: What the post-World War II consensus was built on what you might call an American, Western, liberal set of assumptions. Not all of those are valid, you know, internationally, globally. What are the set of things that people can cooperate on, can create shared assumptions around? And one of the things that we've noticed is that sometimes on a specific topic, people can agree how to proceed without actually having other assumptions in common.

Gill Ringland: So I think it's still holding: an agreement around the handling of the seaways around the Arctic, in spite of the fact that two of the nations that share that waterway are actually pretty much at loggerheads. So, I think it's what one of the positive things that we thought coming out of that analysis was that looking for these specific islands of needing to cooperate being stronger than differences in assumptions and comfort zones, because all people will need to move out of their comfort zone to cooperate on some of these things.

Gill Ringland: And the need has to be visible and stronger than the discomfort. But we do have to recognize that it's a poly world. The FT has good Big Read sections on it. And, everyone is just agreed. That's it. No matter what number 47 does.

Patricia Lustig: You can develop backbones, these agreements, on a very clear and limited space. So, within boundaries, so that where you don't agree is outside that. And the agreements and the laws, if you will, are just based on whatever the issue is that you're working with.

Peter Hayward: In your introduction, you describe yourself as pragmatic optimists. You are, and the research you did for New Shoots and in this book, indicate that if the backbones are broken or not in the greatest shape, they can be made stronger or they can be repaired.

Peter Hayward: Is that the case?

Patricia Lustig: And perhaps reworked, because things change over time, so, you know you have to maintain them, but you may need to rejuvenate them.

Gill Ringland: And they may be based on a different, a smaller set of assumptions or a different set of assumptions. There may be a time in which the West has to create to agree to work under a different set of rules in order to make something happen, even if it's not the same rules that they operate domestically.

Gill Ringland: And I was reading while I was in Goa about the history of colonial Goa. And how the various countries of Western Europe adopted elements of Indian culture and where they didn't and how the different cultures adapted to create business and create education, create health using very different models.

Gill Ringland: There are examples all the way across Asia, Latin America, Africa. So, there are lots of examples of Western countries working within different frameworks in order to get things done. And we have to get back to that mindset.

Patricia Lustig: And the whole thing behind the backbones, is that they are there to help you work effectively and efficiently together.

Patricia Lustig: And, if that no longer is the case, you need to change them. You need to maintain them; you need to update.

Gill Ringland: And the overwhelming need is, it's getting things done, how do we get things done, which bits of old backbones are getting in the way, which do we need to drop, how can we modify the rules and so on, so that we can get things done, because there's a lot heading our way.

Peter Hayward: Your book is not saying until the backbones are fixed, we can't do anything about it. The challenges, you're actually, I think, saying, accept that the backbones might not be there to help you in the short term. The longer term, they can be made stronger, notwithstanding the state of international law or whatever else.

Peter Hayward: Decision makers still have to make good, wise decisions about the future. They have to have a mindset and they have to base decisions on good information.

Gill Ringland: And I think the good information is one of the things that we're really, really, really concerned about. And so, the trend information, for instance. It’s really important that people realize what is happening and what they can influence and what they can't. So, for instance, we went to run an event for Save the Children.

Gill Ringland: All their policies were based on the assumption that Africa is rural and children have access to extended families. Well, actually, the facts are, Africa is now urban. Children have access to electricity and water and education, but they don't have access to extended families quite often. And so, the policies for saving children need to be totally different.

Gill Ringland: And right across the world, there are boards and trustees, I guess of our generation, who haven't actually looked around and realized that the world has changed, or is changing.

Peter Hayward: I was going to touch on that. You say early on in the book that a lot of decision makers are using outdated paradigms. upon which to make sense of the world and to make decisions about what they can be done. I mean, Gill's just picked up one there, there's an assumption that Africa is a rural country where it might've been 40, 50 years ago, but it certainly isn't now.

Peter Hayward: It's the fastest growing, fastest growing population, fastest, fastest urbanizing. You know, plays on the world stage. So, what are some of the other paradigms that your research say that decision makers have to just get used to the fact that they're not, they're not suitable for the 21st century?

Patricia Lustig: Well, one is a unipolar world. It's not anymore. And you know, part of that, the post-World War II agreements, was democracy is the best and it works and everybody needs to have a democracy. Not everybody agrees with that anymore. There's not a right or wrong.

Patricia Lustig: There's what works and what doesn’t; and whatever works is the thing you need to go for. And right now, that's sort of falling apart, I think.

Gill Ringland: Yes, and people at different stages, with different social assumptions are prepared to make different trade-offs from people in the West. And so, if you're hungry and have no water, you're actually prepared to pay a tax, or even sell your daughter if it will get the rest of the family out of poverty.

Gill Ringland: So, across Asia, you can meet women who have been sold in marriage in order that the rest of the family can pay off their debts. I don't approve of it, but it's a decision that people have had to make and you have to recognize this. And that's not going to go away. Well, it may reduce actually because of the decreased family size.

Gill Ringland: And selling your granny is probably not as profitable as selling your daughter. Sorry, that was in bad taste.

Patricia Lustig: Also there's a lot less poverty than there used to be. The poverty, the number of people living below the poverty line is still a large number, but it's much, much less than it was. And as soon as people have a bit of income so they can pay for what they need - we certainly talked about that in the previous book - people have more choice.

Patricia Lustig: They can start thinking about other things, their choices broaden out as do the choices that they make about what they do and how it happens and what they're willing to trade for something. Because a lot of life is about trade-offs and these will change when they have enough to eat.

Peter Hayward: I've kind of kept you away from talking specifically, specifically about the possibility wheels. Do you want to just sort of briefly explain. the way the book kind of operates, who, who the book is really aimed at and how this kind of idea of within this world with, you know, wobbly backbones and broken backbones, there are still possibilities.

Peter Hayward: There are still things that we can decide to do. Do you want to just explain how that works for a reader of the book?

Patricia Lustig: Right. Well, we do set the context in the beginning: that it's really important to make sense of what's going on. And so, the first parts of the book, part one and part two are about how you make sense of your context and the world around you.

Patricia Lustig: But like with our previous books, we are always looking for examples of people handling these things well, wherever they are. So that you start with some ideas. While remembering that, just because it works for so and so in Nigeria, it doesn't mean that the same thing will work for you in Germany, but you might get some ideas to build upon.

Patricia Lustig: That was our idea. Having gone through parts one and two, you can start to make sense. You start to see how these things are so interconnected and that when you do something in one area it will affect things in others. The Possibility Wheel tool gives you a structured way of working through a question that you have, that you've got to make a decision on. The tool makes it local for wherever you are, wherever your organization is working; and you choose the threat that is the biggest to your setting – locality, type of customers and services, etc. for that particular question.

Patricia Lustig: . The biggest threat may change as the question changes. It's not necessarily the biggest threat for the organization, but any decision you're making will have a most important threat; one that's got a greater threat value to you than others. This threat tells you which are the most important forces for change. And through that you can develop a picture of a future, see what decision you would make in that future, and compare it with Business-as-Usual.

Patricia Lustig: And you can learn a lot from that comparison and see whether or not you would make a better decision having a potential future to compare with one based on Business As Usual. You can even do it more than once, change your assumptions and develop a different possible future. Even just one gets more perspective than just the Business-as-Usual future. A range of potential futures is a help if you're going to make good decisions.

Patricia Lustig: Even two potential futures doubles your possibilities. And we're about possibilities.

Gill Ringland: And building on that: the value of having a tool is that for people who are not used to doing this stuff, it reduces the fear, uncertainty and doubt. And it provides a framework for a discussion. And it's the discussion that's important because we find time and time again, people say, “You know, that was really useful. We'd never had that group of people in the room before talking about where we were going as an organization”. And so we keep getting people who come have come to such a session, getting in touch with us for something else saying, ”We set our strategy after the discussion with you five years ago and we're halfway through it: because it was a 10-year strategy. It does work and quite often, the discussion doesn't go the way the facilitator thinks it will, or they pick up an issue that they hadn't thought of before, or we hadn't thought of before. The important thing is, that it's a framework for allowing people to go, “okay, we all understand what this is about and why we're doing it, so let's go do it”.

Gill Ringland: And that's brilliant. If you can get people in the room together. And what we found is that originally, in the days of scenario planning, there was a strategy department who would get people in the room. Now there are no longer strategy departments, and so you're trying to provide something which is low key, that maybe a head of HR can use, because, for instance, they've got a problem with recruitment.

Gill Ringland: Or maybe something a head of technology can use because they're trying to get an investment program to go. So different people need to get people together in a room, but finding an engaging question to get the right people in the room is part of the process. So, it's about, not just the intellectual bit, it's about the social aspect of sharing information.

Patricia Lustig: And learning from each other. And I think that if you have convened that conversation - which is really important - it starts to become clear what you can do something about and what you can't. And that lowers that feeling of uncertainty. Because it becomes clear what possibilities you've got.

Peter Hayward: Yeah, so the Possibility Wheel provides the ability to have a conversation about something which is uncertain, possibly even scary or worrisome. To have a conversation amongst the people you work with, the people who, matter to you in, in your work. To have a conversation, which might well still leave you with difficult decisions to make, but you've actually been able to build a sort of shared mindset of both understanding what the issue is, and also that we can see things that we could do.

Patricia Lustig: Absolutely.

Peter Hayward: And of course, people aren't seeing much of that in media, and they're not seeing much of that amongst their political leaders. So, maybe that's the other thing, perhaps this is more important right now to have, to demonstrate it's possible to have these kinds of difficult but necessary conversations and to make them civil and make them interesting and make them so we learn.

Gill Ringland: I think that's absolutely right and I think you posed the question who is the book for? And we can see three separate constituencies. One is the government arena. Another is, the NGO social movement arena. And one is private sector organizations. We've tried to frame the case studies in the book so that there's one out of each of those sectors so that you can see how it would have an effect in each of those sectors.

Gill Ringland: So, for instance, one of the case studies that we look at is using the Possibility Wheel for the Minister of Health (public health in a country), looking to check: are what departments are involved in government’s ability to deal with a pandemic? Perfectly reasonable question. Except what the question turns out to be is, are the departments able to operate under failures of the critical infrastructure – e.g. internet?

Gill Ringland: So, it changes the agenda. So that's just a sort of Mickey Mouse example, but it's actually pretty near to what happened during COVID.

Gill Ringland: There's another one with a company just trying to work out where to expand in Asia. Where are the demographics, where are the political problems? Now, a big organization would probably have thought of that a generation ago.

Gill Ringland: They probably haven't rethought it - however big the organization - recently. So, re-asking that question. You know, the Shells of this world were really good at understanding the political forces, the international arena and so on. That's got lost. So where is this thinking? Well, again, there's lots of biased thinking from people with agendas to punt.

Gill Ringland: If you do it internally, you can decide who to listen to. Whereas if you get a package, you know, where a consultancy comes in and says, “Okay, this is now 2025. So, what we do this year is we warn you about China or 2024, we warn you about the Middle East, or 2023, …” because what is important to organizations will be different depending on their business.

Gill Ringland: And so, putting people in a room to discuss it, they may not come out with the right decision, but who is to say what the right decision is? If the decision is comfortable to them, and it's coherent, and they can explain it, that's as good as you can get.

Patricia Lustig: In some of those examples, as Gill was explaining, it's a way of uncovering the paradigm you work under and how it needs to change. So in the Minister of Health example, he thought something was working in a particular way and then discovered - when he went looking - that it wasn't. Because they had that discussion.

Peter Hayward: Yes, I was just going to say that a good friend of mine used to say that organizational culture is built through people doing important work together. That's what builds strong culture, and I think the chance is to bring people in organizations, whatever is the nature of the organization, to have people work on difficult topics, but work and do it well. So they have a sense that we saw some possibility, or we might have just simply widened our perspectives on it, but also widened our perspectives on one another. That becomes that building of a form of, you know, collective resilience in the organization. I think that is another one of those things that's a backbone: the ability to do this respectfully with learning, with patience, and do it well.

Peter Hayward: Yes, and if you, I was going to say, if you are going to run several three-hour sessions, then you have to make sure the first one is good, because if the first one is not good, there won't be another one. So people have to get a sense that in three hours we can get somewhere. In three hours, that was a worthwhile use of time.

Peter Hayward: And then there's the motivation to come back and do it again and do it again.

Gill Ringland: Well, or it could be a sequence where you build on the first run. So, it's not a repeat. We have built into what we do our knowledge of what does seem to work now in organizations, which is so different from even a decade ago.

Gill Ringland: So, the scenario planning book, for instance, happily assumed that there was a horizon scanning group, and there was a strategy group, and that they could do things. Similarly, you know, in Tricia's foresight book, it assumes that there are people in organizations who can read and understand tools.

Gill Ringland: With the Possibility Wheel, what we've done is we've not dumbed it down, but we have simplified it. And we've given enough worked examples that people who are not used to thinking about tools, and not used to thinking about how to engage with groups, can actually say, well, here's a recipe, and let's try it.

Gill Ringland: Because, as you said, if the outcome of the first engagement is waffly, or destructive, then you won't get another chance. And this stuff is too important to mess it up the first time.

Peter Hayward: I want to ask you a challenge. You're both futurists. You're certainly strategists. If you were going to write a follow up to this book in three or four years’ time, which is about how often you two write another book, so what are you hoping the next book you write is about? Do you think we are talking about the same threats just in a different you know stress level, or are we talking new?

Gill Ringland: Well, I guess the immediate thing is we will probably need to do a second edition of this book just to update the international environment, to into to update the AI section, to update the biology section, and the connected world section. I think most of the rest stays, but we probably do need in about a year's time just to do an update, which is probably those chapters.

Gill Ringland: I think those are updatable, whereas the threat chapters are much more generic, and they will exist in various forms and to various extents, which is what we say. And by the very nature of the threats, we're never going to be able to say much more than that, I guess.

Patricia Lustig: They're so changeable They're much more fragile than some of the forces for change and they change much more quickly. But I think that's right. I mean, when we are at this stage and we've written several books together we have no idea about another book yet, really, to be honest, because we're so worn out by the past one and then something will happen that means that we need to.

Patricia Lustig: Tweak something and we're off; there's no telling what that'll be.

Peter Hayward: Yeah, I think, I mean, my back of the envelope possible future for you is as the backbones get wobblier and more broken, then. Eventually, there will be the girding of the loins, because I was going to ask you this. Did you use the term backbone to talk about broken backbones?

Peter Hayward: Partly to talk about the state of the international processes and institutions that we rely on, but were you also asking something about leaders to show a bit of backbone?

Patricia Lustig: Indeed. I don't think it was the original idea, but it became the answer as we tried to find a word that would fit.

Gill Ringland: I'm not sure I agree with the question, so sorry. I think that for instance the leaders in the U. S. - though I disagree with them, are showing backbone. They are doing what they think is right. I think in a lot of other countries people are trying to make things happen through a set of messy changes.

Gill Ringland: And it's not necessarily right or wrong to make strong decisions and stick with them. Because sometimes getting 80 percent done is better than not getting 100 percent done. So, I'm worried about the question. I don't think we should diss people. Most people are good and are trying to do the right thing.

Gill Ringland: They may be trying to do it a different way from how I would want to do it. But, you know, mostly I think you have to assume that about people. Until proved otherwise!

Peter Hayward: I take your point, Gill so let's, let's draw this to some sort of finality for the listeners.

Peter Hayward: How do I get the book? What is the book in terms of how do I get it? And also, what else might be out there for people? If there's other resources, they'll be on your show page as part of the podcast, but what else is out there for people if they're interested?

Patricia Lustig: Well, the book is available on Amazon or through the publisher, Triarchy Press. It's available in electronic and. paperback form. It will be out in the rest of the world other than Europe in March, I think they said, but electronic form is available now.

Gill Ringland: And I guess in terms of other follow ups Tricia is being very modest, but you know, she's just retiring from the board of the Association of Professional Futurists, and APF has a vast treasure of thinking about the future, and if people are provoked to think about the future, coming out of this, that is something they should really go look at joining.

Peter Hayward: And Gill, you've also done some blogs on the context of trends and threats, and the Possibility Wheel.

Gill Ringland: Indeed. That's right. The blog is through Z/Yen and its Long Finance and if you just put in Lustig Long Finance, you will get a list of the blogs.

Peter Hayward: Right.

Patricia Lustig: Then, of course, I'm always open to facilitating things or training facilitators or coaching facilitators if people are interested or curious to learn more and can be contacted about that.

Gill Ringland: And, of course, it's always possible to do a half hour sort of presentation of the main ideas to a more sort of foresight-oriented audience, but I think Tricia is right to emphasize facilitation as the route forward within organizations. People find it hard to relate to foresight and futures until they start to discuss what those could mean for them.

Peter Hayward: Yep. Well, congratulations on the book. It was part of my Christmas reading. I did enjoy it. I, as I said, I did find the backbone stuff fascinating and I think it was a real value add in terms of helping people understand to some extent the world we're in and what's available to help us.

Peter Hayward: So, congratulations for both of you on the book. Well done again.

Peter Hayward: And so, all the best for the book and thanks for spending some time on the pod.

Gill Ringland: Enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much.

Patricia Lustig: Thank you, Peter. It's been great.

Peter Hayward: Thanks to Patricia and Gill for coming onto the Pod and also thanks for the book. If you or someone you know could be helped by a book like the Possibility Wheel then check it out. There is a link on the show page to where you can get the book. 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