Latest / The Innovation Show / Navigating the Age of Chaos Part 2 with Bob Johansen and Jamais Cascio

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Navigating the Age of Chaos Part 2 with Bob Johansen and Jamais Cascio · The Innovation Show

• 0:00
  before we start, I want to thank our sponsor Kyndryl, who runs
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  the world's leading businesses.
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  You can find out more about Kyndryl@Kyndryl.com.
• 0:24
  I thought I'd introduce today's episode with a beautiful quote from Norwegian
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  scholar Evelyn Linder and Auschwitz survivor, Joe Linzer From 2004, "pessimism
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  is a luxury, affordable only in good times in difficult times. Optimism is
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  a duty because pessimism easily turns into a self-inflicted, self-fulfilling
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  death sentence." Absolutely beautiful.
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  A way to introduce our guests for part two of Navigating the Age of Chaos.
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  Bob Johansson and Jamais Cascio welcome back to the show.
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  Thank you.
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  Happy to you.
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  To have
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  you back, gents.
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  I
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  thought we'd start Bob with you because I wanted to share something that you
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  had introduced that a lot of people didn't know , which was VUCA Plus.
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  Which was going back a while, but I thought we'd start there
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  because you've worked a lot with the American War College.
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  You were there around the time they introduced VUCA, and you gave
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  an antidote to vuca, which was VUCA Plus, and that will actually
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  set us up nice for BANI Plus.
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  But let's start with this VUCA Plus.
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  So VUCA was a term, it was actually coined in the late 1980s.
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  It was post-Cold War.
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  So it was cold war framing.
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  I learned about it the week before 9/11 when I just happened to be there at the
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  Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with a group of senior executives.
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  And I learned about VUCA and I got intrigued by it.
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  I brought senior business executives to the war college a number of times, and I
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  then began working with the War College, and I've been promoted over the years.
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  So I work with the New Generals now, the new three Star Generals
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  on their first week in Washington.
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  And as a futurist, I felt like I knew.
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  To start from that frame, but flip it positive and bring it into the future.
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  And what we realized, if you think future back, the idea of
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  volatility yields to vision.
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  So in a volatile period vision gets disproportionately rewarded.
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  Uncertainty yields to understanding.
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  So in a VUCA period you wanna be listening to people not shouting at them.
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  That was a really important lesson that when you don't know what's going
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  on, you should be asking questions.
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  And then complexity yields to clarity and they have a whole language around this.
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  They call it commander's Intent and mission Command.
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  And my favorite flexive command, and we talk about this in our book because
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  it's still relevant and the message is command and control doesn't really work
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  in the VUCA world or in the BANI World.
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  Command and control just doesn't work in the same way.
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  You can't just tell people what to do, but what you can do is
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  be very clear about direction.
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  Very flexible about execution.
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  So we call that clarity.
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  We call that clarity in our book.
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  And then finally, ambiguity yields to agility.
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  So essentially we all have to be corporate athletes.
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  We have to be very flexible in how we respond to these situations
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  and not be stuck in this kind of assumption of certainty or the
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  quest for certainty if certainty gets dangerous in the VUCA world.
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  And it gets increasingly dangerous in the BANI future.
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  I love the Flexive control.
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  I sent it to so many leaders that I know as well today.
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  Hmm.
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  Expand on that because we've already piqued people's interest.
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  Yeah, , that's an interesting one.
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  It hasn't spread as much yet, but flexive command means continuously reevaluating
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  who's in the best position to make which decision at what time, based on
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  continuous after action reviews and continuous situation analysis where
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  you're constantly assessing what's going around on, around you in terms of
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  danger, but also in terms of opportunity.
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  But after action reviews are a big piece of that too, where another
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  big lesson for me is the military's much better at that than business.
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  In my experience, they're very good at assessing situations and figure out what
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  went well and what could be improved.
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  Fantastic.
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  So let's get stuck into BANI Plus and the B of BANI plus is bendable, but
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  I thought what we'd do is Jamais come to you to tell us about the B of BANI,
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  and then come to Bob to tell us about.
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  The b plus, and you get an a plus if you nail the B plus.
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  So the B and BANI refers to brittle.
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  That is systems that appear strong, that may even function well until they
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  don't, and they break and they break in a shattering way, catastrophically.
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  And there are a number of reasons for that, but it all boils down to
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  demands being made that are greater than what those systems can support.
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  Bob.
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  In a
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  brittle future, you want to be bendable, but not in the wishy-washy sense.
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  You wanna be bendable within a kind of envelope of clarity or a envelope,
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  a really of resilient clarity.
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  It's very important.
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  So you can't be certain in this kind of world.
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  Brittle systems look strong.
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  That's the really deceptive thing about them, but they don't fail gracefully.
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  So you have to be prepared.
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  So you go in with a strategy, first of all, that assesses the situation,
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  so your expectations are accurate and , you're better off if you're not sure is
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  this a resilient or a brittle system?
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  You're better off assuming it's brittle because if it's
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  resilient, you're gonna be fine.
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  But.
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  Your strategy is to be bendable as you're going in not rigid.
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  And then reminding yourself of your clarity because the clarity provides
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  direction for you and you don't expect, you don't expect certainty.
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  Mm-hmm.
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  I love that, Bob.
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  And you know, it reminded me of your book, full Spectrum Thinking, and I
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  think it was chapter eight of that book.
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  And I share this with so many leaders.
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  I've used it so many times.
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  Leaders will need to be very clear about where they want to go, but very
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  flexible about how they get there
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  exactly.
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  love that book.
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  One of the things, and I'm I'm probably dragging in here, some of the future of
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  this book, your final chapter, you talk about some of the skills that leaders
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  will need, and one of those skills that you've been a huge advocate for a very
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  long, long time is future back thinking.
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  So maybe I'll connect that here at this stage for people.
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  Sure.
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  it works well here.
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  It sure does.
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  And you know, most of us think from the present forward, it's just kind
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  of built in and, you know, it's not surprising that's the way we live,
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  you know, from the present forward.
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  So it's kind of the way that feels the most natural.
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  But in an increasingly chaotic world, and what Jamais first called the BANI
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  future you're going to see things that are very mixed up, very scattered, very
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  jittery very ragged in their orientation.
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  And in the present in that kind of world gets so noisy.
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  Just so noisy.
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  It's really hard to understand what's going on.
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  But if you think future back, you get a fresh take on where things are.
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  And one of the big surprises of the future's work we've been doing for
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  so long, one of the big surprises is it's actually easier to go 10
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  years out and think future back than it is to look from the present,
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  the noisy present out 10 years.
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  People are often saying to me in Silicon Valley, well, how
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  can you do tenure forecasting?
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  I can't even do one or two.
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  Well, the reason.
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  The reason is because it's easier.
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  Once you get a sense of directionality, you're not predicting outcomes.
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  That's not predictable.
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  And as you may said the first episode, we don't even use the word prediction.
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  But you can get that sense of direction and that's where the clarity comes from.
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  So you think future back for clarity.
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  We also look to history.
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  So in our framework we look at least 50 years back when we're doing a 10 year
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  forecast and we look 10 years ahead.
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  So it's like a 60 year swath of time and we think back for patterns.
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  We're always looking for patterns in the, we often see echoes of the past.
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  It doesn't literally repeat itself, , but certainly it echoes.
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  So you wanna look back 'cause almost nothing happens that's truly new
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  and almost everything that happens was tried and failed years before.
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  So we really wanna look at history.
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  And yet that future back view is necessary to get the clarity of direction.
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  Bob, I just want to throw in big shout out to your mom, the beautiful
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  motto that you shared in the book that I'll bloom where I implanted.
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  Love
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  Yes.
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  That.
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  That's another one I took away as well, Jamais, Bob made the comment in
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  part one about how you were one of the best scenario writers he's ever met,
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  or the best, perhaps he said the best.
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  this idea of future back is core to what you do as a scenario, writer as well.
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  I can't remember the term, but you talked about some type of predictive history.
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  I think that was the term.
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  Anticipatory, anticipatory history,
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  Let's share that.
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  It's
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  right,
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  term, anticipatory history and how future
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  so,
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  for that.
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  well, one of my undergraduate degrees is actually in history and I have found over
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  the years that the kinds of dynamics that we studied when we look at back at history
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  as historians, as his photographers.
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  Are precisely the kinds of dynamics that are in play when we look ahead.
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  And so rather than taking, just as if we would take the present and look back from
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  that to understand how we got where we are today, we, ima if we imagine ourselves
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  10 years out and then look back from that imagined point and think about how those
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  dynamics will play out over the, over that 10 year period, it's future back thinking.
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  It's also historian thinking.
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  It's really trying to understand how dynamics play together.
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  Seemingly disparate dynamics can intertwine to lead us to the world that
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  we have or the world that we might have.
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  So let's share a couple examples.
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  'cause in each chapter.
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  The book covers how organizations lean into these different elements and
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  then how an individual can as well.
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  You give the example of Blue Sky and it's actually something
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  I never really got into.
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  I started when it first came out and then I kind of forgot about it, but you
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  reminded me of it In this book and the AT Protocol I'd love you to share that.
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  So the at protocol, is something that was actually developed at Twitter
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  when they were looking for a way to essentially become more open source.
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  But then even though leadership changed and they decided to dump the
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  project, the people who were working on this project decided to stick
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  with it including the person who's now the CEO of Blue Sky Jay Grabber.
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  And they spun off into this system that essentially allows for social
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  networking without top-down control.
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  It still allows for server-based network, so it's not entirely
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  distributed, but it makes it so that all of the protocols are shared.
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  Such that someone could start up an alternative to Blue Sky or come up with
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  a pho photography version of Blue Sky.
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  And as a member of the blue, the original blue sky, I could just start
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  connecting to that other site and have all of my friend networks, have all
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  of my material, have all of my data.
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  I could move entirely, I could do both.
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  Basically I control my data.
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  And from the bendable and resilience point of view, what it means is that no
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  one is dependent upon the survival or the sanity of the leadership of Blue Sky.
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  If somebody comes in who starts to try to turn it into something crazy,
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  starts to impose their AI into everything or whatever, and I'm just
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  imagining that it's a possibility
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  you don't have to stick with it.
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  You're not stuck with it.
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  You can actually move to someplace else and still retain your network,
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  still retain your social, social,
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  network?
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  How does that work from a bendable perspective?
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  What are the core messages an organization can take from that?
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  Well, this is actually it.
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  It is resilience and bend ability for the for the user as
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  much as for the organization.
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  It means the organization does not have to retain, remain in the exact
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  same format, the, or the exact same structure the entire time.
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  It gives it room to expand and to experiment knowing that even with the
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  experimentation that people can, you know, it's, its membership can remain
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  or can move as needed for the members.
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  It means that they are not subject to the top down control of the
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  of the owners of that network.
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  They're allowed to try something new without losing their social footprint.
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  And , that's the really critical part and the re and where the resilience
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  comes from, especially for the users.
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  It is a, a.
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  It's a way to maintain your connections, and we all know how
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  important connections are for, from an organizational perspective.
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  You do that because it's attractive to users.
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  It may not be, it may not have an immediate short-term return
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  for you, but it will be something that users, that your members will
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  remember and will be attracted to.
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  Bob, this reminds me of your shape shifting organization.
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  I remember that from last time we spoke, and I constantly think
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  of the idea of a murmuration, an organization as a murmuration.
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  Companies like hire, for example, who flock around opportunities or threats, and
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  it links nicely to your flexive command.
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  Yeah.
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  No, it really does.
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  And that's the organizational model that I think you'll see emerging now
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  and, you know, we've been anticipating this for a long time but it's actually
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  taken longer to start to play out than we thought, and it's had.
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  Different wrinkles than we thought.
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  I first used the term fishnet organization, you know, years
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  and years ago, and the model was a fishnet on the dock.
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  And you pick up any node and a hierarchy foams and you put that
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  down, pick up another node that kind of increasingly distributed.
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  We did call it shape shifting organizations.
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  I like that with all due cultural respect to the term.
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  I also like the slightly spiritual element of shape shifting.
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  The in a recent issue of Harvard Business Review some authors use a new term,
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  the octopus organization which is.
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  You know, I don't know.
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  It's okay.
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  It's the same concept.
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  I don't particularly like it, but it's the same concept.
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  And it is, here's where I think as a humble futurist, I have to say that
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  I, kind of got this wrong, but maybe in the long run it will play out.
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  But I thought, you know, I grew up with social media, so I was, my first
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  professional paper was in 1972 when the ARPANET was publicly a announced.
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  And when I was a PhD student at Northwestern, I had my first
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  identity as an ARPANET participant.
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  And I thought that these networks would become increasingly distributed
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  that essentially anything that can be distributed will be distributed
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  and that these networks would accelerate that and that they'd be
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  they'd be democratically organized.
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  And even if they couldn't be forced into being hierarchical
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  because it's so distributed, there still is an element of that.
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  But I didn't anticipate how social media would become so
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  angry and so now more centralized.
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  I just didn't anticipate that.
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  And I hope that in the long run, maybe the core forecast will hold,
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  but you know, it's really been more complicated than we thought.
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  It is sometimes difficult to be a futurist when you are optimistic about people
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  Yeah.
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  There you go.
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  There's the fishnet.
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  Okay, good.
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  Thank you.
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  Yeah, I was actually, I was like going, I have that somewhere, and I just
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  looked at my notes and there it is.
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  For the people who are watching this on YouTube, you'll see
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  the fishnet organization, 2020,
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  Nice,
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  when we spoke.
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  It was, it was in the middle
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  nice.
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  as well.
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  So perfect
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  Nice.
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  about fishnet organizations.
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  Maybe not fishnet tights, but fishnet organizations.
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  Yes.
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  Yes,
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  Polymorphic.
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  polymorphic.
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  is the term that I like.
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  There you go.
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  Beautiful.
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  Beautiful.
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  I well, one last thing on this was how individuals can bend brittle.
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  So you talked
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  flexibility there and actually in a corporate athlete sense, and you talk
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  about this a lot in the book, which may surprise people that actually
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  looking after your health, looking after mindfulness, looking after
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  those elements creates a resilience in you as an individual as well.
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  We, it would be remiss of us not to, to cover that.
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  Yeah, I am glad you introduced that.
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  We were very lucky as we were writing there was a social psychologist
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  at Northwestern, Judith Moskovitz, right at the time we were writing.
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  She developed a series of methodologies for coping with
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  very stressful medical situations.
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  And she published those.
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  And actually, you know, this was in a very kind of beginning crazy period as
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  it seems like we've had so often lately.
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  But she actually produced those on public radio in the US to share
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  methods of coping with extreme stress.
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  And she learned those in the medical world.
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  So it was things like having, a partner with dementia or
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  a terminal cancer diagnosis.
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  So there were things that weren't gonna get better but you could
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  make a choice either to find.
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  What little joy there was in those situations or to be just pulled
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  into depression and despair.
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  And it was very interesting in those, so in the book we have those methods
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  and then Jamay and I and Angela added to them and stretched them and
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  made them more, more future back.
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  But a lot of them are not new like mindfulness you mentioned, or
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  gratitude journals, things like that.
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  But the important thing at the brittle level, you know, life can be brittle.
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  And if we can begin with an expectation that we need to be appreciative
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  of the positive things, even in the midst of all the negativity.
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  And if we can be disciplined in our approach you know, a phrase that's
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  used sometime is persistent prayer.
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  So it isn't just prayer, kind of asking God for stuff.
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  It's the discipline, whatever, however you practice it.
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  And whether God is involved or not, the persistent.
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  Practices of of faith in something better.
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  Those things have a real benefit.
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  And even though it can be hard to measure, but it really is important.
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  So in chapter six through nine, the Positive BANI Chapters, we have
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  examples of organizations that have flipped it positive of individuals
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  who have flipped it positive.
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  And then at the back we've got personal suggestions.
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  A lot of them come from cognitive behavioral therapy, you know, basically
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  the principles of pulling out positive emotions and exercising those and
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  trying to get past, and not to ignore, but to play through negative emotions.
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  Yeah, and you talk about some of the guests we've had on the show.
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  We've had Dan Siegel on the show before,
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  Mm-hmm.
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  Yeah.
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  have David Rock there as well with
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  Yeah, of course.
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  the, the reason, the reason I share that is this is such an important aspect and
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  one of the things that came to mind, Joe Dispenza, if you, if you ever read Joe.
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  Hands' work.
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  He talks about how when you, when you do future back thinking
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  as an individual, you actually rehearse those neuronal connections
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  Yes.
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  backwards.
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  So I often think about it like the idea , of firing an arrow into the
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  future, but this is more like firing a harpoon into the future that you
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  can actually bring that future back
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  Pull it back.
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  Yeah,
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  not always what Jamais's futures are.
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  Not all parts of those futures, the bani futures, but I just found it's such an
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  important part of the picture that's
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  it is.
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  about in the work of futurism, because it's usually a
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  Yep.
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  I.
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  It's in neuropsychology or neuroscience, but it's such an integral part of being
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  able to manage yourself in a BANI world.
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  Yeah, that's, that's right.
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  And you know, David and Dan developed this healthy mind platter too,
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  that they probably talked about in your show, but it's basically the
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  elements of brain health, of mind health that we all need to cope.
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  And I've done talks for David too and his audiences to try to bring
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  more of a foresight or future back perspective to that neuroscience work,
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  because a lot of that is very focused on the moment and the kind of present
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  conditions and clinical neurosciences, of course, treating them trying to
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  bring as a future back perspective.
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  But that stuff's very relevant to what we're talking about.
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  Jamais, I'm gonna bring you in here because I love this
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  piece that you talked about.
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  I, background's in sports, so my understanding of in order to build the
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  muscle, you first need to break it down.
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  So every time you do
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  Yeah.
• 22:23
  what you're essentially doing is breaking the muscle down, but also that scar
• 22:27
  tissue is stronger than normal tissue.
• 22:29
  And you talk about how , in a BANI world, in a BANI future, in a BANI present,
• 22:35
  that a leader that's had some type of.
• 22:38
  Crisis in personally an anxious crisis, for example.
• 22:42
  Or maybe they've had some type of breakdown or they suffer from bipolar
• 22:46
  disorder or something like that.
• 22:48
  And you mentioned a book that I bought straight away, A First Rate Madness,
• 22:52
  that book, but you'd also talk about, I thought about this, that having some
• 22:58
  type of struggle like that mentally is exactly the same as having gone through a
• 23:03
  lot of weight training to build a muscle.
• 23:05
  It builds the
• 23:06
  Mm-hmm.
• 23:07
  So I'd love you to
• 23:07
  share this before we move on to the next of the BANI Plus.
• 23:13
  Well, just the idea here is that when you as a leader, when you are, have grappled
• 23:21
  with issues like depression, you know, which is what I have personal familiarity
• 23:26
  with, what you are doing is you are building up the capacity, not just to see
• 23:32
  all the misery around you, but also to see through it, to understand where it's
• 23:40
  limited, to understand how you can make use of it and what you can do to adapt
• 23:47
  it to part of your reality and not let it be something that simply smothers you.
• 23:56
  It is in a way having a depressive disorder can make someone
• 24:03
  be, be more of an optimist.
• 24:07
  Because what you can do, you know that, you know when you have a depressive
• 24:11
  disorder that you are re, that you are able to grapple with, that you can deal
• 24:17
  with, you know that success is possible.
• 24:20
  You know that you, that you know, as cliche as it is, it gets better.
• 24:26
  And even it's something that you return to on a regular basis.
• 24:29
  Mean.
• 24:30
  That's one of the things about depression and a number of other
• 24:33
  disorders and other mental conditions.
• 24:35
  They don't ever really go away.
• 24:38
  But you develop a, the skills around grappling with chaos,
• 24:45
  really, whether it's mental chaos or
• 24:48
  environmental chaos.
• 24:49
  I, I
• 24:49
  do think that all challenges pay off in some way and sometimes not immediately,
• 24:55
  is either, I was telling my kids one day I was, I was bathing my son when he
• 24:59
  was a baby, and I, he used to love you.
• 25:02
  You know when you're in the bath as a kid and your parent might swoosh the water
• 25:05
  and you start to move forward and back.
• 25:08
  I was teaching them one of these lessons that at the time I thought was
• 25:11
  totally missed, which was when you have a body of water like that, it's the
• 25:16
  same body of the water in the bath.
• 25:17
  There's a high on the low at the same time, and that when you're in the
• 25:22
  low, there's a high coming and when you're on a high, there's a low coming.
• 25:25
  So prepare.
• 25:26
  Prepare for both, because that's actually what the, what life is.
• 25:30
  And a few days later, my son had broken his arm and he couldn't go
• 25:33
  to a party that he wanted to go to.
• 25:35
  And he said it to me, he said, I was just in the low of the
• 25:38
  wave, but I was like, oh, yes,
• 25:40
  nice.
• 25:41
  he listened probably the first time and only time he listened to me.
• 25:44
  But anyway,
• 25:45
  Nice.
• 25:45
  it's, it's, this is, I think this one was such an important one to
• 25:50
  call it, but let's move on to a, in BANI Plus, which is attentive.
• 25:54
  But I thought, Jamais, I'd love you again to give us a one-liner
• 25:58
  on what the A of BANI is.
• 25:59
  And then, Bob, if you take us away on what BANI plus A is.
• 26:03
  the A in body refers to anxious or anxiety inducing.
• 26:09
  And what we see around a, in a BANI world is a constant sense of dread.
• 26:15
  This feeling that there are no good options remaining, that we have nowhere
• 26:22
  to go that will make things better.
• 26:25
  And it's very easy to see that, especially when we have systems,
• 26:30
  whether they're social media or political systems that continuously
• 26:35
  push us to feel angry and upset.
• 26:39
  And it's really hard to escape that sense of anxiety.
• 26:44
  Bob.
• 26:45
  The beginning is to be recognizing of what's going on, to be attentive.
• 26:53
  And so oftentimes with people who are anxious, they're ignored.
• 26:58
  And to be anxious and ignored.
• 27:02
  Is to amplify the anxiousness.
• 27:05
  So beginning I think is to pay attention.
• 27:08
  But we also talk about active empathy.
• 27:11
  So you want to not only pay attention and acknowledge, but have a kind
• 27:16
  of empathy of what's going on.
• 27:19
  And asking questions can really help.
• 27:21
  Trying to understand, can really help to put yourself in that position
• 27:26
  to the extent you can really help.
• 27:29
  And as Shema said in the first episode, the.
• 27:34
  A and BANI the anxious is what we hear the most about when we give
• 27:38
  talks because there's so much of it around everybody gets this one.
• 27:43
  The function that feels most responsibility right now is the
• 27:48
  human resource function or the people function as it's often
• 27:52
  called in American companies now.
• 27:55
  But in fact, it's not the specialists in human resources or the people
• 28:00
  function, it's really everybody.
• 28:02
  So we all have a responsibility and.
• 28:06
  In, in these kind of weird times, even the word empathy is actually
• 28:11
  controversial in Silicon Valley.
• 28:13
  You know, does, does empathy make it look like you're feeling soft or you're not
• 28:18
  at your competitive best or whatever.
• 28:21
  So it really is a, an interesting and somewhat troubling conversation
• 28:26
  about what is the role of active empathy and how does that play out?
• 28:31
  But, you know, our forecast is that empathy will come back into fashion
• 28:35
  because it's so important to make sense out of what's going on, and it really is
• 28:41
  the motivation for making things better.
• 28:46
  Empathy is forward-looking.
• 28:47
  Yeah.
• 28:48
  one of the things that has always struck me about the people who are anti-empathy.
• 28:53
  You know, the folks out there who say who, or even saying in
• 28:56
  the last year, empathy is evil.
• 29:00
  For the listeners, I have a baffled look on my face.
• 29:05
  It is, the thing about empathy is it's reciprocal, and it may not be
• 29:11
  reciprocal on every single episode, but you are building out a network of
• 29:15
  people who have empathy for you as well.
• 29:18
  And so when I say it's forward looking, what I mean is that it's building out.
• 29:22
  As you move forward, as you continue to be empathetic as you continue to have
• 29:26
  people who have empathy for you, you're building out the, this set of connections.
• 29:31
  You are looking ahead to an a persistent connection as opposed
• 29:35
  to just a one-off interaction.
• 29:37
  That's so interesting, Jamais.
• 29:38
  And you're right.
• 29:39
  I think empathy is forward looking, but so is anxiety.
• 29:43
  You know, anxiety is forward looking.
• 29:45
  Depression is past oriented.
• 29:47
  You know, depression is looking back in effect, but anxiety is
• 29:51
  really inherently future oriented.
• 29:54
  Well, it's future oriented, but is only able to see one future often,
• 30:01
  Well, no future, but I'm thinking or a just a, a bunch of
• 30:06
  illustrations, a bunch of images.
• 30:08
  All a collage
• 30:10
  of bad futures
• 30:11
  is what, that's what anxiety feels like to me at least.
• 30:14
  And I, I think you're right.
• 30:15
  And it's, it's kind of what could go wrong,
• 30:18
  Mm-hmm.
• 30:18
  but that is future
• 30:19
  oriented.
• 30:21
  I had a, I
• 30:21
  Yeah.
• 30:21
  a a i, I shared this openly , a major lesson in empathy a show
• 30:27
  with a lady called Terri Givens on her book called Radical Empathy.
• 30:31
  in the middle of
• 30:32
  Huh.
• 30:32
  non not rehearsed in any way.
• 30:34
  'cause I would never do that.
• 30:35
  You know me, I don't do that.
• 30:37
  I prepare by reading the book and maybe watching some videos et cetera.
• 30:41
  But I'd read her book, radical Empathy and she's a black lady living in
• 30:45
  America and she talked about she's married to a white man and how so
• 30:52
  much difference shows up for her.
• 30:54
  And she said this in passing to me, she goes, you know, my kids were
• 30:58
  playing, I have two boys playing at the front garden playing cops and
• 31:02
  robbers and you know what that's like.
• 31:04
  And I was like, in my head I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, they must
• 31:07
  have hurt each other fighting.
• 31:08
  And she's like going, no.
• 31:10
  She's like, you have to be careful that they don't actually get shot for having
• 31:15
  toy guns in America 'cause they're
• 31:18
  Hmm.
• 31:18
  And I was gobsmacked.
• 31:21
  And that was
• 31:22
  Wow.
• 31:23
  if you're trying to be empathetic, it's still so difficult to get
• 31:26
  inside someone else's head.
• 31:28
  Jamais, you've struggled with depression, so you know what that is versus what
• 31:32
  we might project that it's like, and it's a totally different thing.
• 31:37
  Right.
• 31:38
  Right.
• 31:39
  And it's, I think it's incumbent upon people who have
• 31:44
  a higher position in society deserved or otherwise, to have the greatest
• 31:50
  empathy for others to recognize that things, you may be playing the world
• 31:56
  on easy mode, not everybody is, and you need to be aware of that.
• 32:01
  Absolutely.
• 32:02
  Absolutely.
• 32:03
  That's actually what there is , a South park game, and the way you de
• 32:08
  decide the difficulty level of the game is by how dark your skin is.
• 32:14
  So if you're playing as a white kid, you're playing on easy mode.
• 32:17
  You're playing as a black kid,
• 32:19
  you're not,
• 32:20
  Wow.
• 32:21
  Wow.
• 32:21
  It, it, I mean, anyway, it was, for me, it was a lesson that.
• 32:25
  may think you're being empathetic, but you, you can do your best,
• 32:29
  but at, but at least you're trying, which is, which is a big
• 32:32
  yeah.
• 32:32
  There was a couple of lines I
• 32:33
  absolutely loved from this chapter, and, and I it, it fits more into
• 32:38
  your bucket here, Bob, you said The best solutions are likely to emerge
• 32:44
  from those closest to the crisis.
• 32:45
  Trust is seeded before a crisis, but blossoms during a crisis.
• 32:50
  Perfect for what happened in pa, the pandemic, and then this one was even more
• 32:55
  perfect for what happened in the pandemic, especially when it broke out and people
• 32:59
  didn't know what the heck was going on.
• 33:01
  You said anxiety spreads fastest when leaders go silent.
• 33:05
  When nobody steps up to provide clarity in a world that doesn't make sense anymore.
• 33:10
  Those two together are beautiful lines to describe something
• 33:13
  that was very anxiety inducing.
• 33:18
  Yeah, it sure was.
• 33:19
  And here we talked a lot with Angela and about United Way and how they responded.
• 33:25
  There's a number of examples in the book about how United Way was able to be.
• 33:31
  There're with people in a firsthand way, and United Way is very distributed.
• 33:37
  It's not a centralized organization.
• 33:39
  And Angela is the CEO of United World, United Way worldwide.
• 33:44
  it's a federated organization.
• 33:46
  So the, the local organizations have their own structure and their own
• 33:51
  fundraising and some of their own practices, but there's a orchestration
• 33:56
  that happens at the global level.
• 33:58
  But I do think that principle of learn from the field and listen
• 34:03
  to the field , is so important.
• 34:05
  But that goes back to you wanna have that listening and the response be
• 34:11
  within your envelope of clarity.
• 34:13
  You know, what are your values?
• 34:15
  What's your mission?
• 34:15
  What's your vision?
• 34:17
  That carries your strategy out, but you've gotta have the empathy
• 34:22
  of what that's like from each of the areas you're trying to help.
• 34:28
  Mm-hmm.
• 34:29
  One of the other examples you give that people might be more
• 34:32
  familiar with is Airbnb and how they
• 34:35
  Yeah,
• 34:35
  enhanced, they actually enhanced communications that eased not only
• 34:40
  anxiety for guests, but also hosts and their own people as well.
• 34:43
  I'd love
• 34:43
  yeah, yeah.
• 34:45
  That was a surprise actually, that I didn't realize that till
• 34:49
  we were doing the research.
• 34:50
  But what, what they did was try to figure out how to respond to this situation when,
• 34:56
  when suddenly people weren't traveling.
• 34:58
  And there were a number of reservations broken because of
• 35:04
  fear of travel and, and the like.
• 35:07
  And what they did was try to look at it locally and figure out what was going on
• 35:12
  and try to respond to that anxiety both for the travelers and for the hosts.
• 35:19
  And then it turned out there were these interesting situations where once.
• 35:23
  It was realized that this was a long-term deal.
• 35:26
  Airbnb became a to help people relocate to a nicer place to live during that period.
• 35:36
  And.
• 35:37
  View it, but it's very different than the, the rental model that they had before.
• 35:42
  So I think the, the idea is just figuring out how to make it a better experience
• 35:50
  given what's given, what's going on.
• 35:53
  It's very interesting now in the sort of post pandemic period that
• 35:59
  they're, they're now offering additional experiences on top of this.
• 36:04
  So you, you know, if you, if you rent a, a place in the mountains for
• 36:08
  skiing they'll help you find a ski instructor or if you're renting a place
• 36:14
  for cooking, they'll help you find a chef or, you know, whatev whatever.
• 36:18
  But it's basically an experience economy play as Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore talk
• 36:23
  about it, where you're not just selling a service, you're selling an experience.
• 36:28
  And that same logic, I think, applied in a different way when they figured out
• 36:32
  how to flip the COVID experience into something that was, if not positive,
• 36:38
  at least viable for all the parties.
• 36:41
  You know, the, the communication as a way of pushing back against, against anxiety.
• 36:48
  I think there is an example that mo nearly all of us here, certainly all of
• 36:54
  us here, probably everyone or most of the people listening have experienced
• 36:58
  that If you are on an airplane and you're getting ready to take off and then you
• 37:03
  just sit there on the tarmac and sit there for an extended period without moving.
• 37:09
  And the pilot is silent.
• 37:12
  The anxiety builds.
• 37:13
  How long is this gonna take?
• 37:15
  What's gonna happen?
• 37:15
  What's going on?
• 37:16
  Is there an emergency?
• 37:18
  When the pilot, and I've had this a few times when the pilot says, just to keep
• 37:22
  you updated, this is what's going on.
• 37:24
  I'll check back in in 10 minutes to let you know what if
• 37:27
  there's any updated information.
• 37:28
  And basically that little bit of communication thatno that where the
• 37:32
  pilot acknowledges that the people in the tube are wondering what's going
• 37:37
  on are, have, are building anxiety.
• 37:40
  It's a remark.
• 37:42
  It has a remarkably calming effect.
• 37:45
  Even if the update is, there is no update.
• 37:48
  Right.
• 37:49
  No, that's, and that's just it.
• 37:50
  That even if the update is, there's no update being kept in the loop
• 37:55
  Yep.
• 37:55
  matters makes a big difference.
• 37:57
  Yeah, I agree.
• 37:58
  That's so true.
• 38:00
  You know, when I was, I, I've traveled a lot in my career and there was a
• 38:05
  technology, I think was in the days of the DC 10, the DC 10 aircraft,
• 38:10
  one of the first of the wide bodies.
• 38:13
  There was a camera, so you could actually look into the look into the cockpit as,
• 38:19
  as you were sitting there as a passenger.
• 38:21
  I found that comforting in the same way, Shema, to, just to see that they're
• 38:26
  all quiet up there and they're all, they're all kind of doing their business.
• 38:31
  They're not running around in a crazy way, you know?
• 38:33
  So, you know, there, there can be ways I think of.
• 38:37
  Pro providing that kind of comfort that there's something going
• 38:41
  on and, and it kind of relieves some of the anxiety, but I,
• 38:45
  Right,
• 38:45
  agree.
• 38:46
  Just having somebody
• 38:47
  tell you what's going on makes such a big difference.
• 38:49
  Even if, if they don't know what's going on.
• 38:52
  At least that's reassuring you that nothing bad is going on.
• 38:56
  right,
• 38:57
  about
• 38:57
  right.
• 38:58
  We're, meaning making entities.
• 38:59
  Humans are, and we'll look for a story.
• 39:01
  And the story is
• 39:02
  Yeah.
• 39:03
  one.
• 39:04
  So.
• 39:04
  You can make it up if you don't hear it.
• 39:06
  so give, give them a story because they're gonna make one
• 39:09
  Yeah.
• 39:10
  There's a great example.
• 39:10
  So I mentioned how you talk about organizations.
• 39:13
  You talked about Angela's organization, you also talked about
• 39:16
  Airbnb, but you also talk about how individuals can attend to anxious.
• 39:20
  And you gave a beautiful story here about Kate Darling.
• 39:24
  And actually, I have to tell you, I have a robot vacuum at
• 39:27
  home, and I've treated it totally differently since I read about this.
• 39:30
  But I love this quote that stood out.
• 39:33
  Ethical bounce ropes, love that term.
• 39:35
  Bounce ropes, and we'll come back to that later on.
• 39:37
  Ethical bounce ropes could keep technology and humans in a safe and ethical
• 39:41
  space, while also flexing to allow for surprises and to make unintended
• 39:47
  negative consequences less likely.
• 39:49
  This sets us up beautifully for this story.
• 39:53
  So the the idea is there's such a pressure now around AI and Jamais
• 39:59
  and I talked a lot about AI and we have somewhat differing views on it.
• 40:03
  But one of the places where I think we agree is that.
• 40:08
  We don't know yet what this technology is that we'd know what some of it is,
• 40:13
  but we don't know what all of it is.
• 40:14
  It's a phenomenon.
• 40:16
  So we have to figure out a way to engage with it.
• 40:19
  And I personally think it's too early for guardrails.
• 40:22
  That's the term that's being used especially by politicians who
• 40:27
  have different motivations or maybe unintended consequences.
• 40:32
  But, you know, most of them have very little information
• 40:36
  that they're running on.
• 40:38
  And they're obviously very polarized.
• 40:40
  So the kind of guardrails that are gonna come out of it are
• 40:43
  bound to be counterintuitive and probably dysfunctional.
• 40:47
  But it, we do need ethical concern and ethical, guidelines, if nothing else,
• 40:55
  but I think it has to be more than that.
• 40:56
  So the metaphor that w that I used in a separate book I did earlier this
• 41:01
  year called Leaders Make the Future, the third edition was bounce ropes.
• 41:06
  And it's like a wrestling ring or a boxing ring where you have you wanna keep
• 41:11
  people in the ring legally and ethically and safely but you also want flex in
• 41:17
  those boundaries that are holding it in.
• 41:21
  But the interesting thing about about Ro boxing rings and rusting rings,
• 41:26
  they've got four stanchions, which are the posts, and those are rigid.
• 41:32
  Think it's a good metaphor to say, well, if you're trying to figure out how to
• 41:36
  guide a technology, so it emphasizes the good things and tries to deemphasize the
• 41:43
  bad things think of it as a ruing ring and where do you want the stanchions,
• 41:47
  the things that you don't give on?
• 41:49
  And where do you want the bounce ropes?
• 41:52
  Let's share that lady Kate Darling, so people know what I
• 41:55
  was talking about with my robot.
• 41:56
  Vacuum cleaner.
• 41:58
  Yeah, so Kate Kate Darling's at the Media Lab, and she's got a book
• 42:02
  called The New Breed and she studied the ethics of how we treat animals.
• 42:08
  Mm-hmm.
• 42:08
  also in the media
• 42:09
  lab.
• 42:09
  So it's really an interesting background, and what she says is,
• 42:13
  we should treat these chatbots.
• 42:17
  Again, the language is not very good agents.
• 42:19
  I've nicknamed mind stretch, you know, because I use it
• 42:22
  only to stretch my thinking.
• 42:24
  I don't trust it and I don't use it at the end of projects.
• 42:28
  I only use it to stretch my thinking, but what she recommends is treat it like a
• 42:32
  beloved pet compared to like a machine.
• 42:37
  and I've tried to do that , and I'm, I'm very respectful in
• 42:40
  my interactions with Stretch.
• 42:43
  And I know it can be kind of anthropomorphizing and it's got
• 42:47
  dangers and all those kinds of things, but for, at least for me
• 42:51
  as a writer, I've found it really.
• 42:53
  Really useful.
• 42:54
  But again, it's really important to say I use it early in projects in
• 42:59
  constant conversation early in projects.
• 43:02
  I don't use it late and I don't trust it.
• 43:06
  So that's really a specific kind of application.
• 43:09
  But I do have a frieKyndryly kind of relationship and I really do find
• 43:13
  Kate Darling's book provocative about how do, how can we learn from how we
• 43:20
  treat, have treated animals for good or for evil and apply that to how
• 43:24
  we're treating this new generation of technology that we don't even have
• 43:30
  language to talk about it in the term.
• 43:31
  We have artificial intelligence.
• 43:33
  That's the worst term to describe an emerging technology I've ever studied.
• 43:38
  So it just creates all kinds of
• 43:40
  bad stories out of it.
• 43:41
  And some of those are worth.
• 43:43
  Worrying about.
• 43:45
  But we just don't have good language.
• 43:46
  I think generative AI is better.
• 43:49
  We use the term augmented intelligence where the human is in the center
• 43:53
  and it's about augmentation.
• 43:54
  But this is a topic in and of itself.
• 43:58
  Right.
• 43:59
  How do you remember, do you guys remember the big dog video from Boston Dynamics
• 44:04
  about, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago?
• 44:07
  Oh
• 44:07
  of their, their first, their first robots, and one of the highlights
• 44:10
  of the video is as this four-legged noisy critter is walking along one
• 44:17
  of the Boston Dynamics employees comes up and kicks it in the side
• 44:21
  and it scrambles its legs into main paint, maintain, bounce.
• 44:24
  For me, watching that video, it's okay, it's a robot.
• 44:27
  It's a robot, it's an animal.
• 44:29
  Suddenly, when it is moving, its legs around and reacting, reacting
• 44:35
  to a threat in its environment.
• 44:38
  It suddenly became organic
• 44:40
  Yes.
• 44:41
  in my mind.
• 44:42
  And it, I think we can, we can think of this as we, as we go forward, not just
• 44:47
  with the, you know language model AI that we have might have on our desk, but with
• 44:53
  the, you know, as, as agents suggests with the robots in our homes, or the ro the
• 44:59
  increasing number of robots and machine substrate intelligence devices around us.
• 45:07
  You know, treat it like you would a pet is actually a really good metaphor because
• 45:13
  as we expand our circle of empathy, you know, we exp expand, we've expanded
• 45:17
  it out to include domesticated animals and we expand it further and further.
• 45:23
  And I, I think that really is the best metaphor.
• 45:26
  I often think about the the scene from Terminator.
• 45:29
  You know, there's a scene where he turns his arm into a sword
• 45:32
  I.
• 45:33
  puts it straight through a
• 45:34
  guy drinking a carton of milk.
• 45:37
  I, I was thinking of that scene, and then a speech bubble coming
• 45:41
  outta the terminator's mouth going, you never said thank you.
• 45:47
  I'll have to share that in the show notes for people to make sense of it.
• 45:50
  We better move on.
• 45:51
  I just, I'll leave anxiety and I'll leave this idea of being attentive
• 45:55
  and Bob here, , you, this is probably leaning into your work.
• 45:58
  You talk about the importance of mindfulness, but then again, this
• 46:02
  military practice of situation awareness.
• 46:05
  And I'm gonna leave that as a teaser for people to read the book.
• 46:09
  And also the opposite is being tone deaf, where you are not in touch
• 46:13
  with what's going on around you, not listening to your people, not spotting
• 46:17
  and observing how they're behaving.
• 46:19
  But I love how you finished this.
• 46:21
  Chapter with a quote by Robert Rosen from the, just from the
• 46:25
  book, just enough anxiety.
• 46:27
  Anxiety is a fact of life.
• 46:28
  How you use it makes all the difference.
• 46:31
  If you let it overwhelm you, it will turn to panic.
• 46:33
  If you deny or run from it, you will be complacent.
• 46:37
  But if you use anxiety in a positive way, you will turn it
• 46:40
  into a powerful force in your life.
• 46:42
  I was thankful to know that from sports, and I taught it to my
• 46:45
  son who now reframes anxiety.
• 46:48
  I tell him, you need to be anxious.
• 46:51
  You need that nervous energy, but it's how you channel it because it's actually a
• 46:55
  Yes.
• 46:55
  You channel it well.
• 46:56
  So I love that and I just wanted to share that, and that's not taking away
• 47:00
  from anybody who's struggling out there.
• 47:03
  Again, as I said to Jamais, I have no idea what that is like, thankfully, but
• 47:08
  it is a challenge for people as well.
• 47:10
  But let's move on to n and again, Jamais, I'd love you to introduce the N of Bani
• 47:15
  and then Bob, you introduced the n plus.
• 47:18
  So N in BANI refers to non-linear.
• 47:22
  Nonlinearity.
• 47:23
  And that is, although it's a mathematics term, it's used more
• 47:26
  broadly in BANI in the sense of disproportionality in time or in scale.
• 47:33
  And so it's a way of looking at the world that says we are seeing
• 47:38
  small efforts or accidental actions that have massive consequences.
• 47:42
  We're seeing enormous amounts of effort and time and money put into things
• 47:46
  that have very little consequence.
• 47:49
  We are seeing massive lag between cause and effect in some really key systems.
• 47:56
  And all of this is happening around us and in many cases we simply don't know what to
• 47:59
  do 'cause we don't know what happens next.
• 48:02
  Bob.
• 48:05
  So the term we have played around with a lot is neuro flexible as a response.
• 48:11
  And here we're dipping into neuroscience again, which both
• 48:15
  Jamais and I have deep respect for.
• 48:18
  So sometimes they use the term neuroplastic that you want your
• 48:23
  brain to be more flexible in how you think about things.
• 48:27
  We've also just thought of it as teaching your brain new tricks.
• 48:32
  And the best way to teach your brain new tricks is to somehow gamify or game
• 48:37
  it simulated play in low risk ways.
• 48:41
  But the big advantage here is we've got this very, very rich history
• 48:46
  of improvisation and some of that links to gameplay and game full
• 48:51
  engagement, but also there's.
• 48:54
  Comedy improv.
• 48:56
  We've worked with the second city in Chicago.
• 49:00
  They have a a corporate group now that does corporate improv.
• 49:05
  And I first met them, I was doing a big keynote for an insurance company on the
• 49:09
  East coast and 500 people in the room.
• 49:12
  And I did the opening keynote and I was talking about the VUCA world at the time.
• 49:17
  And when I got back to my seat they leaned over and said, oh,
• 49:20
  Bob, we didn't wanna warn you.
• 49:22
  We didn't wanna tell you about this in advance, but we hired the second city
• 49:26
  to do an improv takeoff on your talk.
• 49:29
  So they then did a 15 minute improv on the VUCA world.
• 49:34
  And it was very funny, and I'm glad they didn't warn me in advance
• 49:37
  actually, 'cause I would've been more But that notion of improv it's
• 49:43
  exactly what Jamais was saying.
• 49:45
  You don't know what's gonna happen next.
• 49:47
  And what's your strategy?
• 49:50
  If you don't know what you're talking about what's your strategy
• 49:53
  if you don't know what to do?
• 49:55
  And it's not a good answer to say, well, I'll pretend that
• 49:59
  I do know what I'm doing.
• 50:01
  really dangerous in Avani future.
• 50:04
  But there are ways of engaging by asking questions, by using the yes
• 50:09
  and methodologies ways of engaging with uncertainty like that and
• 50:14
  sparring with it in a positive way.
• 50:16
  So we talk a lot about improv in this chapter, and how can you
• 50:21
  apply the techniques of improv?
• 50:23
  Most of the.
• 50:25
  Really good groups that we're working with right now where we're
• 50:29
  teaching them strategic foresight.
• 50:31
  Most of those groups are also doing improv training, and many of them had it before
• 50:38
  and they're just doing refreshing courses.
• 50:40
  One of the things you talk about here as well is a lovely term that people
• 50:45
  will know what it means but not have heard the term is orthogonal thinking.
• 50:50
  Yeah.
• 50:51
  Yeah.
• 50:51
  It's my favorite word.
• 50:52
  So I try to use orthogonal several times a year or a day rather.
• 50:57
  But it's basically means instead of a straight line, kind of what's
• 51:01
  coming across, you know, what's coming at a different angle, is it my non
• 51:06
  mathematical interpretation of it.
• 51:08
  And again, it's kind of interesting in the book we're using mathematical terms,
• 51:12
  but we're using them in a different way.
• 51:14
  But orthogonal means take a different tack, take a different
• 51:18
  angle at what you're looking at.
• 51:22
  But it's really important.
• 51:23
  Don't pretend you know something you don't.
• 51:26
  When we hire at the institute, we like people with deep academic
• 51:30
  background who then became irreverent about their original training.
• 51:34
  So they fail gracefully at the edge of their knowledge.
• 51:38
  And we like people who then have other disciplines.
• 51:40
  So IDEO uses the term T-shaped people where you want depth, but also breadth.
• 51:47
  And certainly all three of us are examples of T-shaped people for better or worse.
• 51:52
  But I remember we hired somebody in early in my career who had
• 51:57
  just unbelievable credentials.
• 52:00
  Had a Harvard undergraduate degree, had a Yale PhD, and also had some kind
• 52:06
  of law degree somewhere in the middle.
• 52:08
  And I thought, oh my, this is just amazing.
• 52:10
  But the guy.
• 52:12
  The guy pretended he knows stuff when he didn't and that just didn't work.
• 52:16
  It was just unacceptable.
• 52:18
  You,
• 52:19
  He was a living language model.
• 52:22
  yeah.
• 52:23
  That's,
• 52:24
  I think we have, I think we have a genuine detection for that.
• 52:27
  And, you know, if I owe anything to this show, it's actually from doing
• 52:31
  the work because you guys know it.
• 52:33
  Most people who interview you don't read the book and you know
• 52:36
  yeah.
• 52:37
  You can
• 52:37
  no.
• 52:37
  they haven't read the book a while off.
• 52:39
  And I just think it's an insult.
• 52:42
  Now you have to get some coverage.
• 52:43
  Yeah, but it, but if you pretend you do, like, don't pretend we know, we know it's,
• 52:49
  Yeah.
• 52:50
  but let's share how organizations can go selectively, non-linear.
• 52:54
  And I love what you write here.
• 52:55
  You write.
• 52:56
  Going nonlinear used to imply craziness and in the BANI future, going non-linear
• 53:02
  will most often be a signal of realism.
• 53:05
  And this is something then that segues beautifully to your work.
• 53:08
  Jamais attention to little changes, what you call distant early
• 53:13
  warnings, love that term, will often help you get ready to move.
• 53:17
  Let's introduce that and then the examples you give here are Legos,
• 53:21
  turnaround and Netflix, non-linear future.
• 53:27
  Well, the distant early warning is actually a term from the Cold War.
• 53:31
  It was in the 1950s, the United States set up a set of radar stations
• 53:37
  along the the northern part of Canada, along the northern part of
• 53:42
  Greenland, and it was called the do line DEW for distant early warning.
• 53:48
  And that, that, that term, since international politics is one
• 53:52
  of, was my graduate degree.
• 53:54
  It's always, it's stuck with me for years.
• 53:56
  And that really does, it is so provocative, but also
• 54:04
  it's intentional.
• 54:06
  You can see, you get that distant early warning.
• 54:09
  You're getting a sign of something.
• 54:11
  It may not be a real something, but it's something you need to pay attention to.
• 54:17
  You know, whether it's an article in, well for me it was an article in the be early
• 54:22
  January of 2020 about a flu-like disease spreading around China that they were
• 54:29
  mystified by because people were getting sick and they weren't getting better and
• 54:34
  it was not responded to normal treatments.
• 54:36
  And it just struck me as something, Hmm, I should pay attention to that.
• 54:40
  I actually put up a, I was on Twitter at the time, I put up a
• 54:42
  tweet about it in early January.
• 54:45
  Not because I thought it was going to be, I knew that it was going to be big.
• 54:49
  It's because, huh?
• 54:50
  That, that's funny.
• 54:52
  That makes it made me pay attention.
• 54:55
  And that, that, huh That's funny.
• 54:58
  Is actually a really good response to a non-linear situation.
• 55:03
  You know, that because it's not just about, you know, what you
• 55:07
  know and what you don't know.
• 55:08
  It's also what the environment is telling you, what the, the context is telling you.
• 55:14
  And yeah, I want to jump to an individual story.
• 55:16
  'cause this is the one that, that I, I brought into this chapter that I just
• 55:19
  love this story of Stanislav Petrov.
• 55:23
  It was an air defense officer for the Soviet Union back in 1980s.
• 55:27
  That means he worked at a station that basically monitored their
• 55:32
  own version of the do line, their own, their own warning systems.
• 55:36
  And he, in fact, was a fairly high, high level officer and wrote the book
• 55:40
  for all the other officers in the, you know, in the army or in the military.
• 55:44
  Probably Air Force that we're in that position of what to do when you
• 55:49
  get an alert, how to respond, what to look for, and he knew that if you
• 55:56
  got a an alert and sent it up the chain of command, the likely result
• 56:01
  would be because the Soviet Union had a strategy of massive retaliation.
• 56:06
  Basically, the moment they got an alert of incoming American
• 56:09
  missiles, they would launch everything back in the United States.
• 56:13
  And of course, the US would then retaliate with everything that it had, and it
• 56:17
  would mean sending up that message would mean pretty much the end of the world.
• 56:22
  So there's a responsibility, but there's also recognition that
• 56:25
  this is what you need to do.
• 56:27
  This is your responsibility.
• 56:30
  And so about a, there was an, an incident in 1983.
• 56:36
  The Soviet Union shot down a Korean Airlines jetliner, KAL
• 56:40
  double oh seven, over the Ka Shaka Peninsula, which is infamous if
• 56:44
  you know your ri your game risk.
• 56:48
  And it was, it was off course, it was over Soviet territory.
• 56:52
  It didn't move when warned and so they shot it down and
• 56:55
  it killed hundreds of people.
• 56:56
  So the tensions are really great.
• 56:58
  The US was actually running war games in central Europe, and it's,
• 57:03
  and the NATO allies along the border with the Warsaw Pact nations.
• 57:09
  And then Petrov got an alert, five incoming missiles from
• 57:16
  the United States just coming in, gonna hit the Soviet Union.
• 57:21
  And he knew that his responsibility.
• 57:24
  Was to send up that alert, but it just didn't feel right.
• 57:30
  It made him, gave him the, huh.
• 57:32
  That's funny reaction.
• 57:34
  Because his first thought was, if the US was going to attack, would
• 57:38
  they really only send five missiles?
• 57:43
  And then he remembered that the Soviets had just put up a new set of monitoring
• 57:49
  satellites to send those early warnings.
• 57:53
  And he decided contrary to his own rules from his rule book, not to send the alert.
• 58:01
  And about a half hour later it became clear that this was a signal from
• 58:04
  the satellite's mistaking sunlight reflecting off of cloud tops as
• 58:08
  the infrared signals of launches.
• 58:11
  And so his decision to break the rules that he himself had written
• 58:17
  to improvise in the moment by understanding the larger context.
• 58:22
  Saved, pretty much saved the world.
• 58:25
  And you know, for doing all that, he was reprimanded for not reporting it
• 58:29
  properly and was allowed to retire wi in a without an honor, without an honorable
• 58:36
  discharge, not a dishonorable discharge to a nice little place in the, in Siberia.
• 58:41
  And he died a few years ago.
• 58:43
  But
• 58:44
  Stanislav Petrov is a hero to me because of his ability to
• 58:49
  recognize that context matters.
• 58:51
  it reminded me of the semi vice effect.
• 58:53
  You know, the guy who discovered handwashing was what was killing
• 58:57
  babies in infant mortality, and he ended up in an asylum for being
• 59:02
  bullied or ostracized by his peers.
• 59:04
  The, I was thinking about that.
• 59:06
  I can't, I can't locate the quote, but I heard it once because everybody will,
• 59:10
  this will make sense to everybody.
• 59:12
  If you want to punish somebody, don't punish them for doing something wrong.
• 59:16
  Punish them for doing something right.
• 59:19
  Isn't that like horrible?
• 59:20
  I think that's just a horrible thing to do.
• 59:22
  Like somebody, you know yourself, you're trying to do something, you
• 59:25
  have the best intentions, and then the organization punishes you for it.
• 59:28
  You're like it just, it's non, it's, it's literally incomprehensible.
• 59:34
  Right.
• 59:34
  It's an absolute killer.
• 59:35
  I
• 59:36
  I thought we better share.
• 59:38
  So in that chapter, for those people who are interested, Lego and Netflix are in
• 59:42
  there turnarounds at those two places.
• 59:44
  Read the book to find them out.
• 59:45
  But some of the skills for thriving in a non-linear future, I'd love you to share.
• 59:50
  yeah, I really think gaming is, a big piece of that.
• 59:54
  It's how can you practice in a low risk way?
• 59:57
  So it could be role play gaming, or it could be improv training,
• 1:00:02
  which has a game full engagement.
• 1:00:05
  You know one of our colleagues, Jane McGonigal defines gaming , as
• 1:00:09
  emotionally laden attention.
• 1:00:12
  You know, what you really need is that kind of gameful engagement strategy.
• 1:00:17
  but again, in a low risk way.
• 1:00:19
  And for teaching yourself to behave in non-linear ways, you've gotta be,
• 1:00:27
  you've gotta practice responding to non-linear situations.
• 1:00:31
  And ideally you wanna do that in a safe way.
• 1:00:34
  So in the military, this is called war gaming.
• 1:00:38
  But it's it could be video gaming, it could be improv, it could be role
• 1:00:42
  playing it it there, but it's basically gameful engagement to practice.
• 1:00:50
  Responding in non-sequential ways.
• 1:00:53
  And this is it also relates to a leadership skill that I
• 1:00:57
  call dilemma flipping, where
• 1:01:00
  Hmm.
• 1:01:00
  we're a problem solving
• 1:01:01
  world.
• 1:01:02
  And problem solving is usually linear thinking.
• 1:01:06
  And, and many of our today's leaders are problem solvers.
• 1:01:10
  But what you need to do in a body future, there's more and more dilemmas,
• 1:01:14
  which are problems you can't solve.
• 1:01:16
  And they're not gonna go away, but you can make them better.
• 1:01:19
  So if you're not sure whether the challenge you're facing is a problem you
• 1:01:24
  can solve in a linear way or a dilemma which may not have a solution, you're
• 1:01:30
  better off assuming it's a dilemma, because if it turns out you can solve it,
• 1:01:34
  you get extra credit, it's really great.
• 1:01:38
  But if you assume it's a problem and you can't solve it, you're in a deep hole and.
• 1:01:43
  Politicians in this polarized time, they make this mistake all the time.
• 1:01:47
  They say, oh, we're gonna solve the healthcare problem.
• 1:01:51
  You know, nobody's gonna solve the healthcare problem.
• 1:01:54
  Those, that's a dilemma.
• 1:01:55
  And you can make it better, but don't promise something
• 1:01:59
  that you can't really do.
• 1:02:01
  And that expectation setting is such a big piece of this.
• 1:02:06
  The gaming thing , and I'm gonna bring it here to part one because in part
• 1:02:10
  one of the book, I was flabbergasted by this and I'm sure it was you.
• 1:02:14
  Jamais.
• 1:02:15
  2005,
• 1:02:16
  World of Warcraft corrupted Blood Pandemic.
• 1:02:21
  Yep.
• 1:02:21
  Take it
• 1:02:22
  Yep.
• 1:02:24
  Oh, that was, that was fun.
• 1:02:26
  It was actually one of it, it was a video game event that turned feral
• 1:02:34
  and also became a a lesson for epidemiologists around the world.
• 1:02:40
  So there was, at the time, in the game in massively multiplayer online game called
• 1:02:45
  World of Warcraft, a high level event.
• 1:02:49
  So they only expected the people who've been playing a long time to
• 1:02:52
  be able to get engaged in this event that involved an attack from the boss.
• 1:02:57
  The boss mob called Corrupted blood.
• 1:03:00
  Which would basically do a periodic damage to the victim player, and was
• 1:03:06
  able to spread to adjacent characters.
• 1:03:08
  And so it was essentially an effect infectious disease.
• 1:03:12
  And at the levels that of the high, these high level characters they
• 1:03:16
  could deal with being with the infection, let it, get it healed, let
• 1:03:20
  it run its course and still survive.
• 1:03:22
  But it turns out that for a variety of fiddly in-game reasons, there was
• 1:03:26
  a way to bring it to the big cities in the game where everyone, people
• 1:03:31
  of all levels would congregate.
• 1:03:34
  And for people who were not the high level characters, corrupted blood
• 1:03:39
  would kill them fairly quickly, but then it would also spread to everyone
• 1:03:42
  around them and would even spread to the non-player character merchants and
• 1:03:48
  the like, who could be infected but not show, but not get killed by them.
• 1:03:52
  So essentially would be
• 1:03:55
  carriers, non-symptomatic carriers.
• 1:03:59
  And for several days there was a situation where anyone who would
• 1:04:05
  come into the big cities with their characters, those characters would die.
• 1:04:09
  And so you, if you were a high level character, you'd go in there and
• 1:04:12
  survive, but you'd see this basically bodies all around in the cities of
• 1:04:17
  Iron Forge or storm wind or whatever.
• 1:04:21
  And they actually, there were people who set up as, essentially emergency
• 1:04:27
  responders who would go in and be healing, curing the disease as, as much
• 1:04:32
  as they could for people who were there.
• 1:04:33
  There were people who were going in and being, giving warnings, preventing
• 1:04:38
  others from coming into the cities, trying basically, it was a real world.
• 1:04:42
  A virtual world example of a, of real world responses to a pandemic.
• 1:04:48
  And it turns out that most of the modeling that had been done around
• 1:04:52
  pandemics involved essentially mass reaction of one type or another.
• 1:04:58
  They were undifferentiated reactions.
• 1:05:00
  And so this was the first time epidemiologists could actually see in
• 1:05:04
  real time in a non-fatal way, exactly what happens when people engage, are
• 1:05:11
  engaged , with a pandemic disease.
• 1:05:13
  And there were some people who were intentionally spreading it and they
• 1:05:16
  had to be thinking about that as well.
• 1:05:18
  So a corruptive blood story, this is from the 1990s or early two thousands rather.
• 1:05:24
  So it's been a while back, but it was, the lessons were strong enough that
• 1:05:28
  is actually referred to in various articles around COVID-19 and the
• 1:05:33
  epidemiological response to that.
• 1:05:35
  And Bob, just to close on this, thought about the importance of the leadership
• 1:05:40
  lesson here because many leaders, including Obama, who was president that
• 1:05:47
  in, and he was talking about he, the speeches of him talking about we need to
• 1:05:50
  build resources here for resilience in case there's another breakout like the
• 1:05:55
  Spanish flu, and I think you talked about that in like 2016 or something like that.
• 1:06:00
  But rewarded or being recognized for things that might happen is a
• 1:06:07
  Yeah.
• 1:06:08
  thing and averting possible futures.
• 1:06:12
  Where there's no credit for that
• 1:06:15
  Yeah.
• 1:06:16
  difficult thing.
• 1:06:16
  And, and how does a leader, if you're leaning into, say, scenario planning
• 1:06:21
  that Jamais would do, and you go, we need to do this now, in case
• 1:06:26
  that happens, a very difficult thing because it can be seen as a waste.
• 1:06:31
  'cause what if it doesn't?
• 1:06:32
  And should we
• 1:06:33
  Right.
• 1:06:33
  risk?
• 1:06:34
  What's the
• 1:06:35
  leadership skill there?
• 1:06:37
  Yeah.
• 1:06:38
  So I, I think it's it is a question of imagining and framing,
• 1:06:44
  and that's why we're using this framing of the BANI future.
• 1:06:49
  To me this is, it's gotten a lot easier in the last few years, Aiden
• 1:06:55
  in the sense that it used to be that you'd have to make a strong case
• 1:06:59
  for the VUCA world and or now we're making a case for the BANI world.
• 1:07:04
  But now you can see it all around you ways that we couldn't see it around us before.
• 1:07:10
  So it's actually easier than it used to be to get people to think about the future.
• 1:07:16
  The challenge now is they think about it, but you want to empower them.
• 1:07:21
  To imagine how to prepare preparedness.
• 1:07:26
  And our, our centralized approaches aren't working, , so preparing in a
• 1:07:31
  centralized way is very difficult.
• 1:07:35
  Preparing in a decentralized way or a distributed way is also very difficult.
• 1:07:40
  But the beginning of it is the mindset and then the tools and the models, and
• 1:07:45
  that's what we want this book to become.
• 1:07:48
  Right.
• 1:07:49
  old William Gibson
• 1:07:50
  quote, the, the, the future's not here.
• 1:07:52
  It's just not the future's
• 1:07:54
  Yeah.
• 1:07:54
  here, but it's actually distributing much faster than it used to be.
• 1:07:58
  That's the big difference.
• 1:08:00
  yeah.
• 1:08:00
  Yes.
• 1:08:00
  And yes, some of it is distributing it faster than it used to be, and some of
• 1:08:05
  it is slower than, than it used to be.
• 1:08:08
  So it's jagged in terms of the speed.
• 1:08:11
  But yeah, the Gibson quote we use is our definition of a signal.
• 1:08:15
  What are the real practical things that are happening that do hint
• 1:08:20
  at the future that is unevenly distributed and we map those globally.
• 1:08:25
  And that's one thing leaders can do is to map those signals and to track them.
• 1:08:30
  But it is important that one of the big things about being a futurist is you
• 1:08:35
  wanna look at what's changing, but you also wanna look at what's not changing
• 1:08:40
  and what's taking a very long time.
• 1:08:42
  And you know, people say about large language models in ai.
• 1:08:46
  Yeah.
• 1:08:46
  Oh, it's happening so fast.
• 1:08:47
  And that's true in a way, but the term artificial intelligence that was
• 1:08:52
  coined in 1956, it actually took a very long time to be an overnight success.
• 1:08:58
  And several AI winters in the interim as well.
• 1:09:02
  Yeah.
• 1:09:02
  the,
• 1:09:02
  Yeah.
• 1:09:03
  the feather in the cap I'll put on neuro flexible is when life
• 1:09:07
  doesn't follow a straight line.
• 1:09:09
  Neither should our thinking.
• 1:09:10
  Love that quote from the book
• 1:09:11
  Nice.
• 1:09:12
  I like that.
• 1:09:13
  Yeah.
• 1:09:13
  That's yours.
• 1:09:14
  The book.
• 1:09:14
  So last is then I, the Interconnected, probably my favorite actually the I,
• 1:09:20
  because it leans into beautiful concepts.
• 1:09:24
  But again, Jamais come to you.
• 1:09:25
  What's the I of Bani?
• 1:09:27
  And then come to you, Bob, for the, the i plus.
• 1:09:30
  The I in BANI refers to incomprehensible, which a lot of people assume, it
• 1:09:36
  means that , you can't understand how something works or what is happening.
• 1:09:42
  In BANI that incomprehensibility really refers to understanding
• 1:09:47
  the why of something.
• 1:09:49
  Why is this happening?
• 1:09:51
  Why are people thinking this?
• 1:09:52
  Why are people doing this?
• 1:09:54
  This is absurd.
• 1:09:56
  This is ridiculous or unthinkable or just extremely confusing.
• 1:10:02
  And it can sometimes be the result of having an overload of information.
• 1:10:07
  It can sometimes result from having a dearth of information.
• 1:10:10
  But it, the focus is really on the rationale.
• 1:10:14
  Why is this happening?
• 1:10:15
  This doesn't make sense, Bob.
• 1:10:19
  So the way to flip incomprehensible is to be interconnected with as many
• 1:10:25
  different points of view as possible.
• 1:10:28
  And here we do refer back to our concept of full spectrum thinking,
• 1:10:32
  which is thinking across gradients of possibility and resisting the labels
• 1:10:38
  and the categories of the past to try to make sense out of the future from
• 1:10:42
  an interconnected point of view, but without freezing that point of view
• 1:10:48
  or coming into it with expectations that, may in fact be inappropriate
• 1:10:55
  for the future that's emerging.
• 1:10:57
  So this is this is the most challenging of the elements of BANI
• 1:11:03
  because we're just puzzling about what is, what's going on here?
• 1:11:07
  How can we begin to make sense?
• 1:11:09
  Our subtitle in the book is, is a sensemaking guide.
• 1:11:13
  To a BANI future.
• 1:11:15
  That doesn't make sense.
• 1:11:17
  that's the reality we're facing.
• 1:11:19
  There's a lot of the stuff that we're looking at here.
• 1:11:22
  It just doesn't make sense.
• 1:11:24
  But we have to decide anyway.
• 1:11:27
  have to decide anyway.
• 1:11:28
  And that's the difference.
• 1:11:30
  Vuca, in VUCA there was an underlying assumption that if only we had
• 1:11:35
  the right data, if only we had the right expert, we could actually
• 1:11:38
  understand what was going on.
• 1:11:40
  In the BANI future Jamais and I and Angela are arguing, you can
• 1:11:45
  no longer make that assumption.
• 1:11:47
  You can't assume that you're gonna figure this all out, but
• 1:11:50
  you gotta make a decision anyway.
• 1:11:54
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:11:54
  line, and I'll
• 1:11:55
  bring in your term arrogant ignorance, which is a great term, but , you say
• 1:12:00
  , in an incomprehensible BANI world.
• 1:12:03
  The issue is not just whether you've asked the right questions, it's
• 1:12:07
  whether you've asked the right people.
• 1:12:09
  I love That that is
• 1:12:10
  Yeah,
• 1:12:11
  word that be branded in my mind from now on, but I up for that
• 1:12:15
  concept, arrogant ignorance.
• 1:12:18
  Arrogant ignorance really is a, you know, it, it's a way of saying, you know, it's
• 1:12:22
  sometimes called the Dunning Kruger effect of people who know just enough to think
• 1:12:27
  they know everything, but they don't know enough to know what they don't know yet.
• 1:12:32
  And so just something outta my own life, I learned enough about design
• 1:12:37
  theory to think that I could be a designer, and as I and I made some
• 1:12:42
  horrible mistakes with some of the designs I made, and as I learned more,
• 1:12:47
  I realized how much I didn't yet know.
• 1:12:50
  And what we're seeing all over the world is a rise of arrogant ignorance.
• 1:12:57
  Around truly fundamental topics, and that actually push back against the
• 1:13:03
  people who have legitimate knowledge, pushing back against, experts, which is
• 1:13:09
  a loaded term, but people who, who have done, who actually done the research.
• 1:13:13
  And more than just watching YouTube videos or stuff on TikTok, it is unfortunate that
• 1:13:21
  in much of the world, people who have, who are confident sounding, but don't really
• 1:13:28
  know what they're talking about, can be as persuasive or more persuasive than people
• 1:13:32
  who do know what they're talking about.
• 1:13:36
  And that legitimacy is in itself, seen as a sign of illegitimacy, that
• 1:13:42
  arrogant ignorance is truly dangerous.
• 1:13:45
  And it, it is so pervasive right now.
• 1:13:48
  That's a huge problem, and let's bring it to an organizational sense now as
• 1:13:52
  well, because you share how organizations can wrestle with the incomprehensible.
• 1:13:57
  Bob, when you first started working as a futurist, your best corporate
• 1:14:00
  clients, you say, used the 80 20 rule when making decisions when they didn't
• 1:14:05
  have all the information available.
• 1:14:07
  But I love what you say here today and maybe in a BANI future, increasingly it's
• 1:14:12
  more like 60 40 rule or even a 50 50 rule.
• 1:14:14
  When it comes to the decision making.
• 1:14:18
  Yeah.
• 1:14:18
  I first learned that at Procter and Gamble, which is one of the
• 1:14:21
  world's great companies, and I got to work with them early on in my
• 1:14:26
  career and learn the 80 20 rule.
• 1:14:29
  So the first takeaway from that is that it's always been hard to make decisions.
• 1:14:35
  So it's not like it used to be obvious what to do.
• 1:14:40
  It's always been hard but it's just getting harder now and you
• 1:14:46
  have to make different assumptions.
• 1:14:47
  So, the big assumption we're arguing in the book is you've gotta frame
• 1:14:51
  the word, the future as BANI Brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible.
• 1:14:56
  That's your frame, your beginning expectation.
• 1:15:01
  And that's much more chaotic than it used to be even a few years ago.
• 1:15:05
  So if that's your frame, then you've gotta discipline yourself to be ready to decide
• 1:15:12
  in a way that develops your clarity of direction, moderates your certainty, and
• 1:15:19
  prepares you through gameful engagement, through scenario planning, prepares
• 1:15:25
  you to be ready for situations that you probably have never experienced
• 1:15:30
  before, but you still have to decide.
• 1:15:32
  That's really important that even in a body future, we still have to decide.
• 1:15:37
  There's a couple of examples of organizations you give here shape shifting
• 1:15:41
  organizations like Wikipedia and Special Olympics, but again, I'm gonna leave
• 1:15:45
  that to the audience to read the book and focus lastly on the individuals
• 1:15:50
  and how they can wrestle with this.
• 1:15:51
  Because one of the things you talk about is a sense of purpose that you
• 1:15:57
  have something like this North Star that can guide you through the chaos.
• 1:16:02
  I'd love you to share this, and maybe this
• 1:16:04
  Yeah,
• 1:16:04
  final message for our audience.
• 1:16:07
  sure.
• 1:16:08
  So purpose or meaning that's what we referred to earlier as clarity,
• 1:16:14
  but it's a personal clarity.
• 1:16:16
  Why are you doing this?
• 1:16:17
  And as Shema was saying, with incomprehensible, the why is a
• 1:16:21
  mystery often of what we're seeing.
• 1:16:23
  They, we don't get the why, but as an individual, what you, the,
• 1:16:29
  you're much better prepared for the BANI future if you have a why.
• 1:16:34
  are you doing this?
• 1:16:35
  What's your meaning?
• 1:16:36
  What's your purpose?
• 1:16:37
  Why are you doing this?
• 1:16:39
  And if we.
• 1:16:40
  Are motivated by that we're much more prepared to engage.
• 1:16:45
  So the next book I'm working on is all about the concept of faith in the future.
• 1:16:50
  And, you know, we've always had, definitions of faith.
• 1:16:54
  You know, in effect what's your meaningful leap into the future.
• 1:16:58
  That's kind of the definition of faith.
• 1:16:59
  And usually that's come from religious quarters but not necessarily.
• 1:17:05
  You can have more secular faith too.
• 1:17:07
  But faith is essentially your.
• 1:17:11
  for making the future, for making the future a better place
• 1:17:16
  by your definition of meaning.
• 1:17:18
  What I think's gonna happen here is we're gonna have a re-imagination of
• 1:17:23
  what faith is because the traditional concepts of faith won't be enough.
• 1:17:28
  They won't be enough.
• 1:17:29
  We're gonna have to look at the variations of faith and reimagine faith,
• 1:17:34
  not just to not just to reclaim them, but to reimagine and to regrow them.
• 1:17:41
  We need new, more dynamic definitions of faith and meaning and purpose,
• 1:17:46
  that, that guide us individually and help us prepare for this kind of
• 1:17:50
  future and help us make it better.
• 1:17:53
  Beautiful.
• 1:17:54
  Jamais, you wanna come in there?
• 1:17:58
  Actually what struck me is, ha, have you seen the movie Deadpool and Wolverine?
• 1:18:02
  Which seems, I know this seems like a non-sequitur.
• 1:18:04
  I loved it.
• 1:18:06
  There is a scene where the character Deadpool refers to
• 1:18:11
  having made an educated wish.
• 1:18:15
  And then when we talk about hope, when we talk about faith,
• 1:18:18
  that really resonates for me.
• 1:18:19
  It's an educated wish.
• 1:18:20
  It's not something that is utterly baseless, but it's
• 1:18:24
  not something that's certain.
• 1:18:26
  It's trying to see where we go, trying to make that happen.
• 1:18:31
  Knowing that the pieces are there, it's possible to put the, put it all together.
• 1:18:36
  And, you know, for me that's that kind of educated wish, that kind of that kind
• 1:18:42
  of hope when you don't have everything, but you know that it's possible.
• 1:18:48
  That is a core driver for the future.
• 1:18:52
  That, for especially when thinking about what's happening at large systemic
• 1:18:56
  levels around the climate or around politics, around, you know, war.
• 1:19:02
  Knowing that a better future is not just possible, but it is in our
• 1:19:08
  hands and we can make an educated wish that we make it happen.
• 1:19:15
  There's a story I heard about Alexander the Great, and it came to mind when I
• 1:19:19
  read this chapter that he was great, but then the, when he had no more
• 1:19:25
  battles to fight, he used to ride around with his horses, with his
• 1:19:28
  mates and look for fights with people.
• 1:19:31
  Just , pick on people because he had no longer got any purpose.
• 1:19:35
  And you know, the, it's not about that.
• 1:19:38
  The story's not about that, but that's what I took for it was like, well that
• 1:19:41
  happens when people retire, when they don't have, haven't cultivated a purpose.
• 1:19:46
  It happens when you're in a BANI world happens when you're in a VUCA world that.
• 1:19:51
  need to cultivate that so much in yourself to have a purpose.
• 1:19:55
  And I think it's brilliant what you guys do, bringing people on those journeys,
• 1:20:00
  helping people understand the future.
• 1:20:02
  And now where your work's leaning more in that the answers aren't out there.
• 1:20:06
  The answers are in you and communities coming together.
• 1:20:09
  Bob and I can see how your work has come to the importance of faith.
• 1:20:14
  And it's not faith in an institution, it's faith, whatever that means
• 1:20:18
  in through your own lens as well.
• 1:20:20
  And I think just to share with our audience, there's two
• 1:20:23
  brilliant final chapters of the book that we're not gonna cover.
• 1:20:25
  'cause I'm gonna leave them to you because they're.
• 1:20:28
  They're like playbooks.
• 1:20:29
  There's one which is BANI world's, mapping new realities very much in Jame's world,
• 1:20:34
  and then Bani leadership charting the course, which is very much Bob's work
• 1:20:39
  and , a culmination of his work and also drawing on some of his other books there
• 1:20:43
  that are over my shoulder behind me there.
• 1:20:45
  But final words, gents from each of you for our audience as we
• 1:20:50
  increasingly enter into a BANI world.
• 1:20:53
  Well, my final word is that this bony future is, is different, but
• 1:21:00
  it is still possible to have these, I love the phrase educated wishes.
• 1:21:07
  It's different, but it is possible to have educated wishes, and
• 1:21:11
  that's what we're trying to seed.
• 1:21:12
  That probably the signature line of my role in the book is you, you've
• 1:21:18
  gotta think about this, BANI, future as a future that will, will reward
• 1:21:23
  clarity, but punish, punish certainty.
• 1:21:27
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:21:30
  I think the, you know, what I would wanna close with is just something I
• 1:21:35
  tried to emphasize at the end of, at the end of the book, in the conclusion
• 1:21:39
  is that the future is in our hands.
• 1:21:44
  We have, we have a responsibility, but we also have the power, the
• 1:21:48
  agency, and we can't let that go.
• 1:21:52
  It's so easy just to let go and let the, let things happen.
• 1:21:55
  But the future is, is the culmination of decisions we make today.
• 1:22:02
  And those decisions matter.
• 1:22:04
  We matter.
• 1:22:06
  Wonderful, brilliant gents.
• 1:22:07
  Absolute pleasure talking to you authors of navigating the Age of
• 1:22:11
  Chaos, a sensemaking guide to a BANI world that doesn't make sense.
• 1:22:15
  Bob Johansen and Jamais Cashio, thank you for joining us.
• 1:22:19
  Thank you Aiden.
• 1:22:20
  And I wish our colleague, angela williams was with us.
• 1:22:24
  She played an important part of this too.
• 1:22:26
  And I would encourage if you want to learn more And see about what we're
• 1:22:29
  talking about, go to age of bani.com.
• 1:22:32
  Thanks as always to our sponsor, Kyndryl, who runs and reimagines the
• 1:22:36
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• 1:22:39
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• 1:22:44
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• 1:22:46
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• 1:22:49
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• 1:22:52
  And don't forget, you can also find a huge amount of thought leadership.
• 1:22:57
  Many of the authors and speakers on the innovation show featured
• 1:23:01
  there at the Kyndryl Institute.
• 1:23:04
  You can find that at K-Y-N-D-R-Y l.com/institute.