Episode 5: How Self-Awareness & Inner Dialogue shape the future, Safe Space for Play & Creativity, Foresight as a Company Hygiene

Future Intelligent Leadership Podcast: Exploring Foresight and Leadership for an AI-Augmented World

In todays episode of the Futures Intelligent Leadership Flowcast I am joined by John Sweeney in Kazazstan and Philippe Guichard in Australia.

John is an assistant professor of futures and foresight at Narxoz University in Almaty Kazakstan and Director at the Qazaq Research Institute for Futures Studies and a Foresight advisor for Interpol. John has organized, managed, and facilitated workshops and seminars, multi-stakeholder projects, and foresight gaming systems in both the public and private sector in over 45 countries in around the world.

Philippe Guichard is the founder and creative director at D2 Design and Development. He is an Award-winning international industrial designer with over 20 years of industrial and product design experience. He is also a TED x speaker and presented on the topic “Re-designing our world. Small Changes = Big impact.”

Todays dialogue seemed to focus in on the importance of the inner narrative and how that shapes lens and values through which leaders see the future. One point that John makes was in reference to a study that demonstrated how the narrative and metaphor frames choices and future possibilities.

In the study titled "Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning" (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0016782), for half of the participants, crime was metaphorically described as a beast preying on the city, and for the other half as a virus infecting the city. The results revealed that metaphors systematically influenced how people proposed solving a cities crime problem. When crime was framed metaphorically as a virus, participants proposed investigating the root causes and treating the problem by enacting social reform to inoculate the community, with emphasis on eradicating poverty and improving education. When crime was framed metaphorically as a beast, participants proposed catching and jailing criminals and enacting harsher enforcement laws.

In the dialogue John and Philippe also discussed the importance of self awareness for foresight, creating safe spaces to experiment through play and creativity, why command and control no longer works, the importance of collaboration for future leaders, and why foresight needs to be part of a companies hygiene.

Listen and Enjoy.
www.haku.global