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SBP 247: SBP Interview - Foresight Doesn’t Get a Free Pass, with Jo Lepore. · Sleeping Barber - A Marketing Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sleeping Baba podcast.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_05: Fundamentally, I believe that of any function in an organization that no matter what team you're in, you're constantly thinking about your KPIs.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_05: You want to add value to the people that you're working with.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_05: You want to up aid the business growth and its ambitions.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_05: And Foresight should be doing that too.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_05: But it for whatever reason it hasn't had like a stringent, it hasn't held itself up towards the same stringent responsibilities.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sleeping Barber Podcast, a place for business leaders to get the best and most credible information on marketing, strategy, and innovation.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Your hosts, Mark Binkley and Vasili Stouros, share their experiences as they gather insights from the world's leading experts.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now, on with the show.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_03: Marketing Science says that buyer behavior barely moves.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_03: And Byron Sharp, we've had on the show before, along with a few other people up here for Fast Institute, has been a few decades showing that the same patterns show up over and over again across categories, countries, and decades.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_03: Today we're going to talk with somebody who's a futurist, foresight expert.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_03: And typically they would sell the opposite.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_03: They sell change, they sell direct disruption, a thing that nobody saw coming.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_03: And so we're sitting here wondering can both of these things be true at the same time?
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_03: And so our guest today is one of the people who can help us referee that.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_03: Joanna Lapore has built the foresight function inside of Mars Wrigley and then at McDonald's and co-founded a network for people doing that kind of job with some of the biggest companies in the world.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_03: She's now the global foresight strategist, leading foresight at Dig Insights, among a whole bunch of other things that is really incredible.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_03: We're going to get into in a minute.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_03: Also hosts a podcast called Looking Outside.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_03: She's written that her own field doesn't get a free pass on proving its value, which isn't something you hear often from anyone about their job.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_03: And so, Joe, I would really like to welcome you to the Sleeping Barber podcast.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_05: Thanks for having me.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_05: And excited to have this conversation.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_05: I was telling the guys this is my first time being interviewed by two hosts.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_05: So I feel double lucky today.
• 2:08
  unknown: Yeah.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_03: That's good.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_03: We're better together, I would say.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_03: So let just to tee this off, you sent us this piece that I thought was really interesting, the business of foresight.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_03: And the first line is that every business needs foresight, but not every business needs a foresight function.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_03: And so we're before we really kind of dig into that, can you just give us the nuts and bolts about like what is foresight and what does a foresight five foresight team actually do?
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_03: Because it's not something that is common to a lot of organizations, I would say.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, for sure.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_05: And it it's it's a growing field.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_05: So actually, it's in 40% of organizations in Europe and the Americas as a dedicated function, but that can be one person in a tiny team.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_05: It can be a team of 80 people.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_05: So it really differs and it's grown, grown quite exponentially in the last 10 years.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_05: And I think the first thing that we always say is that we're not futurists.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_05: So we're not here to predict the future.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_05: We're not going to tell you what's going to happen.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_05: Sorry.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_05: Except that we're going to have an awesome podcast that I can uh that I can put money behind.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_05: But yeah, the whole purpose of Foresight is really to help you to foresee possibilities.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_05: So not to foresee one thing that you should be doing, but to open your mind to the fact that there is no way to predict the future, that linear forecasts are not accurate, they never have been, and that the best thing that you can do is to think like an anticipatory leader in preparing for multiple possibilities.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_05: So if you, for example, think of something like scenario planning is laying out four different pathways that something could go, and then thinking, well, do I have the systems in place to be able to react to that?
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_05: Do I need to change anything?
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_05: What should I be monitoring?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_05: So it's all about preparation.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_05: And, you know, I think that the most impactful thing from a corporate setting, from a brand setting, particularly for marketers and brand leaders, is that it really helps you to set a vision for the future that's much further out.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_05: Because you know, like many of your audience members will, that all of our brand plans are really anchored in kind of a 12 to 24 month planning cycle.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_05: And then we might have a vision for three to five years.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_05: Anything beyond that is a little bit of a stretch for the organization.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_05: And yeah, you look at someone like Ehrenberg Bass, and they're measuring long-term brand equity and sales outcomes for 10 years.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_05: So we should be looking that far out.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_05: We should be building towards our future consumer base and we should have a vision for where we want our brand to go.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_03: Uh just a just as a preamble, thanks for that.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_03: I know you said to call you out if there's something that sounds like bullshit.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_03: And so I just want to call that out right now because there might be a lot of people.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_05: Already what's it like two minutes?
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_05: Two minutes.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_03: Well, no, because like when you first said you're not a futurist, I'm like, and then I listened to what you were saying.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like, okay, okay.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_03: Kind of get the distinction.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_03: It's a bit more about probabilities of outcomes, as opposed to like throwing a dart on the board and saying, you know, that's what I take the future is, like the whole crystal ball thing, right?
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, exactly.
• 5:17
  unknown: Okay.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_05: Is that okay?
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_05: Do you disagree?
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_05: It sounds like you agree with me then.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_03: No, I do.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_03: I just but I just wanted to say like that might happen later, right?
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_03: But I totally dig I totally agree.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, for sure.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_05: But but there is a distinction between throwing a dart to where you think something's gonna go and and putting all your resources and money behind it, and throwing a dart towards where you want to go.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_05: And that's often what we talk about in foresight is the preferred future that you you're building your company towards.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's interesting.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: Well, obviously, like I also agree, but I think I'm sure there's gonna be people out there that are gonna have an obvious objection to this.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: And are we basically relabeling something that was just market research with a longer time horizon?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: Or is this fundamentally different that augments maybe an already insights team that exists in organizations today and gives them different toolkit to leverage to help build out some of these things?
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that's that's a really common question that we get.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, one thing just to frame it up is that most foresight teams or teams that are looking longer term or doing scenarios, et cetera, they don't sit in insights and they don't sit in market research.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_05: They sit maybe in a growth, growth function.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_05: They might sit in corporate strategy.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_05: If you think about annual planning and strategizing, they might sit in something like risk management or UX.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_05: But that's not to say that pockets of this kind of thinking don't exist in organizations and there definitely is a role for insights and particularly, you know, understanding culture and consumer and translating that to innovation.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_05: That's definitely a key area where you can embed foresight.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_05: But it's different because if you think about it, like you can't go and ask a future consumer anything today because they don't exist, right?
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_05: They're not here right now.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_05: You can't bank what people are saying about the future really, because there's already a say do gap about the present moment, let alone something I'm gonna want in the future.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_05: Um, so when when we talk about gathering intel and evidence about the future, we're looking at weak signals and we're weighing them really, really carefully and we're weighing our assumptions about them carefully.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_05: So, what often tends to happen is, you know, like we we think of something like uh market research or in the a kind of brand development process, really understanding the lay of the land and the context and the environment.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_05: But all of that is kind of here in front of us and is based on the past.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_05: You can't use the past as a predictor for the future.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_05: And so you're looking into the things that are just emerging, that are showing up in fringe places, maybe in adjacent categories, in very emerging consumer behaviors.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_05: And you're also looking at those all of those external factors that might come in that maybe aren't exactly in the realm of brand planning, but might impact it, like geopolitics or scientific discoveries.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_05: So you're you're kind of observing things, but like I said, weighing them really, really lightly because you're trying to get an idea of possible future pathways.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_05: And that's obviously very different than market research, because you're not presenting any facts.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_05: Your insights about the future are assumptions about the future.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_05: And so much of the job is then helping your leaders to understand how things might move in a different direction and why it's better to rehearse for every future than to bank one future.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_03: As you're talking about that, like I this isn't a bullshit moment.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_04: I was just thinking about like sensing up.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_03: I could like, don't it's okay.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_03: But I like I partly because I watch a lot of sky TV, like Sky News, and they have a couple guys on that are talking about the war in Iran and stuff.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_03: But they're there and they always talk about scenario planning for war games and the Straight of Her Moose.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_03: Like they've war game that like hundreds and hundreds of times already.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_03: And so it's it sounds to me like it's that scenario you saw this play out before, and people have prepared for these kinds of opportunities.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_03: But there's war games, but then there's business.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_03: And I think one of the things that's interesting, uh given your background also in marketing and strategy and and innovation, it's hard to get people to buy into the thing to see the vitamin as value instead of just dealing with the painkiller for today.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_03: So, how how what kinds of things have you seen about that in terms of getting buy-in for even doing the scenario planning?
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_05: It definitely is an area that you you really need to work hand holding in a way, but really sell it into the business as something that's going to impact commercial revenue and strengthen your strategy.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_05: So I think where something like war gaming or scenario planning fails in the business is where it's pontification about the future.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_05: It's painting scenarios that are so extreme or so out there that they feel so disconnected from your business and where your company is at right now, particularly when it's fighting fires.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_05: But I often say, you know, nobody gets rewarded for preventing a fire, but for uh putting out fires.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_05: So, how can you be a part of that firefighting team in your organization and use foresight to aid that?
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_05: And so here we're talking about, you know, like if you're assessing something that's happening right now that your business maybe is really, really sure about, it's just kind of weighing the assumptions and saying, you know, what all things being equal, we assume that this is going to happen, but nothing is ever equal, right?
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_05: Uh the forecast constant doesn't exist.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_05: So, what is that one big assumption that we're making about this plan or this strategy or this initiative that might fall over?
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_05: And if it does, what do we do about it?
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_05: You know, it's a very, very kind of tactical lens on foresight.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_05: And I think maybe that's a miss representation of the field, is that because it is expansive and it does help you to think long term, people feel like it's really not about today, but it is all about today.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_05: It's about the present moment because you're working backwards towards making decisions right now, but weighing what might happen in the future.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_05: So I can give you an example.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_05: When I was at McDonald's, all of the GLP one stuff hit our shareholders and our brand teams.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_05: And we as a foresight team were tracking that six months before.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_05: We could have been doing it longer, to be honest with you, but we were looking at rise of metabolic disease, longitudinal studies, all of the impending regulation around different parts of the world.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_05: And then we saw this like little medication that was starting to pop up that could solve for very specific health issues.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_05: And so we did implications assessment on that six months before, right?
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_05: To say, well, if this become becomes mainstream, or if this moves into a pill format from an injection, or if this becomes more affordable, you know, this is potentially how it could impact how people get together and eat a meal, or, you know, what choices they make about their health, what they're willing to trade off, what consequences they're willing to put up with.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_05: And so if you present all of that to your stakeholder, it can be really, really useful so that you're less surprised in that moment when all of those eventualities start to pop up.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_05: And it's not to say all of those things will happen, it's more just getting them into that state where they're rehearsing, you know, this really critical thing that's coming.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_05: Can we just explore it to understand how we might react in that moment?
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_05: So we're less surprised.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_05: And maybe like one final point on that is that all of the studies tell us that we make worse decisions when we're surprised in business, right?
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_05: We're reactive, we're we're much more willing to kind of go back to what we think has worked in the past, we're risk averse, and that leads to poorer commercial outcomes.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_02: That's uh that's a great example.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_02: You won't know this, but I was working for an airline during COVID, and you're talking about having an entire industry being.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: A little bit, yeah.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: No, no big deal.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh planes stop flying.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, it's which airline was it?
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_02: It was WestJet, yeah.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_02: So Canada's second largest uh airline.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_02: But the the interesting thing about that is that teeters what would be crisis management.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: But I think there would be something interesting here now that as you kind of replayed that example in my head, it's like, well, where does a role of say a Foresight team help with potential or the, you know, when the when we first heard of you know the first outbreak, that no one really put a label on it at that time?
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_02: There was something, but it was almost like a five to six month window that I think from the first instance till when, hey, everything just became a big deal.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_02: Have you seen any other examples like that where you know you've been able to not only I I want to be careful not saying predict the future, but have a team prepared for an actuality that did actually happen?
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_05: Mm-hmm.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_05: So uh I mean Airlines is a really interesting example because I have a friend who did a foresight scenarios exercise right before the pandemic hit.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_05: And one of them was around, you know, like what if all the planes got grounded?
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_05: What how would we react to that?
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_05: So I think it's uh it's actually like a perfect example of where you throw out there kind of these risks and and it's all about crisis management in the moment, and that can be very complementary to foresight.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_05: So I'm I'm just gonna use the the pandemic as an example.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_05: So I was at Mars at the time.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_05: We were starting to see at the start of the year all of these signals around this becoming much bigger than what we had thought.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_05: And uh, you know, like let's not go down the path of talking about whether the pandemic was a black swan or or um could have been predicted, et cetera, because all the signs were there.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_05: It's just no one was taking it seriously.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_05: But in the moment when it hit, you know, really working out timing and impact, magnitude, probability, how far reaching is this going to be?
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_05: Is it going to change people's behavior permanently?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_05: How long might that last?
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_05: Going back to psychology and rituals and behaviors, how long does it take, 12 weeks, for someone to change their behavior permanently?
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_05: That needs to be highly rewarding.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_05: Just understanding the psychology of this is happening to someone in that moment, is this likely to stay?
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_05: And if it does, what does that mean for how people are consuming an afternoon chocolate in the office with their friends?
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_05: Maybe that behavior no longer exists because they're at home.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_05: We we did a piece of work at Mars, uh, which we were really proud of.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_05: And it was just deeply impactful to be able to say, based on prior pandemics, based on prior global crises, like we looked at the global financial crisis, the Spanish flu, 9-11, how are we likely to see this kind of proliferate across our categories in consumer behavior, in potential innovation we'll see from competitors, and and basically mapped out like a timeline of uh the next two years, how we think this is going to play out.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_05: And that was really helpful.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_05: Now we did actually a post-assessment on that to say how right was that, which we hate doing in foresight.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_05: But that was helpful too to be able to say, you know, actually a lot of the cultural shifts were so much more macro, you know, they were kind of accelerated by the pandemic, but they weren't caused by it.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_05: And those were the things that we were already paying attention to.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_05: And they were the things that played out really, really accurately.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_05: And that helped us to then figure out, you know, where we should be playing, where we should invest, what might happen next, and how we innovate off the back of that.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_05: So I guess yeah, that that's I hate to use the pandemic as an example because it's just such a like obvious, obvious one.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_05: But I think it just points to the fact that you're not really predicting the outcome of the event.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_05: You're trying to understand all of the ecosystem around that event.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_05: And if you're observing that, then you can apply that same theory to anything.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: And sorry, Mark, I'll just be quick here.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, you go.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: The reason why I ask is you highlighted it as well.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: Like the airline industry was truly unique in that moment because a lot of disruption happened to not only the operating model, but just on how people like it actually became uh public enemy number one, that the airlines became the carriers of the disease, if you will, right?
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_02: So, like there was this uproar that was from the consumer side.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: And then when the organization shifted to just literally crisis mode or crisis management, the decisions that were being made were literally being made for the moment in time without thinking about the future, uh, or a little bit further down um down the line.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_02: So I just find it fascinating because again, you've written that you know sometimes these teams already exist in organizations and sometimes they're hiding because they're maybe they're just a slide somewhere.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_02: I just feel like maybe it sounds like there is a larger adoption in other areas of the world.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_02: I honestly I don't think, Mark, unless you have, I don't think I've ever come across a foresight team um in any of my experience here in Canada.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't know.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_03: I haven't the only the closest I've ever come is and and this is gonna sound stupid, but I was real-time right-time guy.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_03: And so for scenario planning, like in the possible permutations and combinations and producing creative for sporting outcomes.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_03: So that's about as close.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_03: That's really short term though, but in order to go into like a month and anticipate all the possible outcomes of what happens and to be able to post stuff in real time, it's it's a it's a similar kind of thing to some degree, but it's not anywhere near the extent of what Joe's talking about, with like the full scope of all the factors at play.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_05: Well, a part of the reason is that many organizations do have it in pockets, like you referenced that I wrote, but they don't bring these teams together.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_05: And that's what we call systematic horizon scanning.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_05: It's a key thing that we always recommend you start with when you're setting up a foresight function.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_05: So bringing these teams together who are observing, like RD is only observing ingredient, you know, scientific innovation.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_05: Your crisis management team is thinking about the next geopolitical crisis, and your marketing team is looking at how synthetic data is influencing content creation.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_05: When you bring those teams together because they're looking at such different things, you actually start to see patterns.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_05: And because of that, you can spot more easily the things that might become bigger that you can flag to your business because they're impacting multiple sectors or multiple parts of your organization.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_05: So setting up a horizon scanning practice is a really, really great starting point.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_05: And, you know, like just touching on the point you made about Canada, Canada has one of the world leading foresight education programs, actually with OCAD.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_05: It's one of the rare institutions in the world that teaches like a master's, I believe it is, or a PhD in strategic foresight.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_05: So um hopefully more more and more of that will filter through into how it can be used in business.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_05: Because it's I think right now it's very much being heavily leveraged by government and and public.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_05: That's fair.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_03: So there's like 800 questions I want to ask you about right now, but I'll have to pick one to start.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_03: Just start with one.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, okay, thanks.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_03: So there's a there's a pattern that that an expectation that businesses like.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_03: And and and so the certainty of things like, you know, we can expect this type of revenue this month, this quarter, that kind of thing.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, the idea if that gets disrupted really isn't the focus very often until it becomes a problem.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_03: It's more the painkiller thing instead of the vitamin.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_03: And I guess my question on that front would be more about how do you get like kind of in the same line of thinking with the a couple questions ago, not just like to avoid becoming chicken little, like the sky is falling kind of person.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_03: And it could be productive and not just the the person who's raising a flag every time and then becoming tuned out because you're always raising problems, but it could also be raising opportunities.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_03: Like it it it works both ways, I think, probably, right?
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_05: Absolutely.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_05: And it needs to because you know, you don't want to become a risk function and you don't want to just be going out with a fear story, which is a lot of what we see in futurist circles or even like, you know, economists and geopolitical commentators, etc.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_05: It's this narrative that VUCA, you know, like the world is so volatile, uncertain, ambiguous, complex that it makes it feel like it's it's too hard to manage.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_05: And actually, what we're seeing is a response from leaders that you're right, I'm just gonna react in the moment.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_05: I'll just deal with it when it comes because it's Just it's just too hard.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_05: And that's exactly what we're trying to avoid with foresight.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_05: And so part of that is actually recognizing that, yeah, things are really hard right now, especially in business.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_05: Growth is harder to attain.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_05: The world is more complex in many ways.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_05: Pace of change, particularly with technology, is quite fast right now.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_05: But our ability to be able to adapt to that exists.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_05: So we can navigate that better than we are right now.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_05: There are a lot of really great studies around this, kind of like linking to what you said, right?
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_05: The pill, the cure versus the prevention is in business.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_05: Short-termism is in growth.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_05: So it's kind of like leaning into just being reactive.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_05: But when we've done studies on prior crises more than anything, we can see that those organizations that are thinking longer term, that are thinking in a much more expansive scenario type of way, are the ones that benefit commercially.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_05: They're able to weather a lot of the storm a lot better because they have investment in the future that helps them to navigate whatever crisis comes up.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_05: So there is that element of it.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_05: And then there's also, I think, what benefit what business leaders really benefit from right now, which I'm calling and what we talk about quite a lot in Foresight and with the Copenhagen Institute as anticipatory leadership.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_05: So a lot of organizations think, well, I just need to be more resilient.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_05: Like I just need to build some sort of a buffer to withstand whatever comes at me.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_05: That's resilience.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_05: That's not enough.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_05: So now organizations are talking about adaptability.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_05: Like I need to be able to pivot when something happens that I don't want.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_05: How do I move right into a different place?
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_05: Um, that's really not enough.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_05: So, really, what we need is anti-fragility is the Nasim Talib uh, obviously, concept around whatever comes at you, you're gonna be stronger for it, right?
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_05: You're gonna not only be able to bounce it back off, but you're gonna absorb it as a learning loop.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_05: And that's really hard for an organization, particularly one that is so caught up in the short term and just trying to get through this present moment and just trying to find growth desperately anywhere.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_05: But that happens through scenario planning, through modeling different possible futures, through making small investments into what might happen in the future, so that you're ready to activate it in that moment and that you have these teams in your organization going back to horizon scanning and bringing in various parts of your business that are looking further out.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_05: It's building that systematic view of anticipating what comes next.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_05: So it can absolutely happen.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_05: It can absolutely be hugely beneficial from a commercial perspective.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_05: Um, and I think, you know, the the big the biggest barrier there is just it's people run businesses.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_05: Businesses don't run themselves, at least not not yet, with AI coming, right?
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_05: So it's really about understanding your leaders and what's keeping them up at night, what are their concerns, what do they care about, and really just starting there.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_02: Mark said he had 800 questions.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_02: I have 799.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_02: So like um we're working down the list.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_03: We're working down the list.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_03: Only be six more hours, Joe.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_03: I hope you're okay with that.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_05: Well, you're gonna go to like 6 a.m.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: then let's do it.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um the marathon episode, that's right.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um let's assume that every organization has bought in the bought into the idea that we need to help or we need to build future demand.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_02: And let's just say there's no everyone believes in that, and that's what every organization does.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_02: How does the business uh tell or know that it actually needs a foresight function versus just a better marketing planning execution?
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_04: I feel like thanks, man.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_02: 799, 798 to go.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_02: Let's go.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_05: I think every business benefits from foresight.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_05: But what I always say is that not every business is ready for foresight.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_05: And we have seen this happen where they implement a foresight team, and then that like nobody knows what to do with that team, or they don't know how to measure the success of them, or they don't really know where to place them.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_05: They get moved around, and then people become disillusioned and leave, and then one person leaves the foresight team disappears.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_05: That's generally kind of what happens, right?
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_05: And also just with business cycles, right?
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_05: So you you every two, three years you go through a re-org, the business assesses, you know, what do I do with this foresight team?
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_05: Where and and that generally creates a little bit of that instability.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_05: And so I think foresight needs to be a mindset and a capability inside of your organization, not inside of one team, not inside of a brand team or insights team or risk management team, right?
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_05: It needs to be, it needs to be a leadership capability so that we can adapt our brand plans or we can run scenarios on a variety of different parts of our organization.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_05: That's where I've seen it work the best.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_05: And that's where it impacts the most in terms of market cap and top line performance, et cetera.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_05: But I do think that it's really helpful to say, you know, we don't really if we need foresight right now, or we don't know if we can afford it or we don't know where to put it.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_05: But let's just start with one thing that we can do that is a foresight exercise or is a future readiness capability that we're wanting to build in.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_05: So you can run like a readiness assessment to see where where is it most needed, where would it be most beneficial, um, and then run an exercise on that and see if that's helped, see if it helps people to think differently, generate better ideas, strengthen your brand plan, maybe think differently about execution.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_05: And for me, that's always about your strategic plans.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_05: Every organization has a strategic vision that has underlying pillars.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_05: So take one of those pillars and pressure test.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_05: If it went a different way, what would you do?
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_05: Because your entire growth strategy relies on that succeeding.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_05: So it's a worthwhile exercise to do to be able to kind of plan for the uh the alternative.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_05: There are there are other ways though, you know, if we're kind of like leading this podcast more towards marketing, that marketing specifically can uh enact foresight capability that is also equally powerful, but kind of takes you down a slightly different uh direction.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_03: I so there's like there's so many interesting uh connections between and I don't know enough about the practice of foresight, but it does sound like a genuine discipline with tools and and develop and skills that you're developing.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_03: And there's a lot of uh in what I'm hearing and the connections I'm making to innovation to to brand for sure, to V mentioned future demand.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_03: But not exactly those same skills, but there's a there's a bridge, I think, maybe between some of the more familiar marketing terms with foresight.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_03: And then the other thought that's going through my head is I keep thinking seeing this idea of I don't know if you know this framework from Roger Martin called the possibilities outcomes.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_03: But there's just a bunch of different tools.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm wondering, like, uh if marketers are wanting to do this, do we have tools that we can use to be more strategic in our approach to brand building?
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_03: Like you were talking about making that bridge to marketing.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_03: Can we look Yeah, for sure.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_03: Like, can you help on that front?
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, for sure.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_05: Uh we love Roger Martin in Foresight.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_05: And you know, like if a lot of these things sound familiar, it's because, you know, like the marketing discipline was really created what in the 20s strategy in the 50s.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_05: And so it's very much linked into enhancing existing frameworks and methods and thinking, which is why it's so easy for anyone to adopt, obviously when it's applied in the right way.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_05: I think a really um helpful one for brand marketers.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_05: And I say this having um actually I just thought of another one.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_05: I say this having started as a marketer.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_05: I did marketing for 10 years.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_05: I went, um, I think General Mills was my last kind of traditional marketing role.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_05: And then I moved into Mars and I did more like marketing innovation and marketing effectiveness, worked with EBI a ton, love Byron Sharp and everything that he does.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_05: So that was really my starting point is to say, well, how do I strengthen my brand?
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_05: If I'm pushing towards a new category or an adjacency, how do I figure out which one is the right one and what's the right timing?
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_05: How do I sell in a case for investment into the future that doesn't exist?
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_05: So that my stakeholder signs off my capital.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_05: How do I understand how culture is changing so that I can, you know, have a brand ethos and a DNA that really resonates with my future consumer, not just my consumer of today?
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_05: Like all of these questions were in my head as a marketer that I think are in a lot of marketers' heads, particularly when it comes to it's a changing media landscape and how do I know I'm investing in the right areas?
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_05: How do I build space for experimentation, but also in those things that I know are going to continue to work.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_05: All of that relies on you having that lens into the future and asking those questions around where things are headed, which marketers should be asking.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_05: They should be more stringent and evidence-based and holding themselves accountable, which is why I say foresight doesn't get a free pass, neither does marketing, right?
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_05: Marketing needs to hold itself accountable too.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_05: So two ways that I I think is a really easy connection point between foresight and marketing and brand building.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_05: One is around backcasting.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_05: So backcasting being the foresight method where you you work towards a future state based on where you think the world is going and you place your brand in that future, right?
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_05: So you're making educated assumptions around where things are going.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_05: And you can you can run six of them or you can just have one.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_05: I used to do this at McDonald's quite a lot.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_05: We just had one.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_05: We worked with the marketing teams, and we said, based on where, for example, Canada is moving and some of the factors that we think are going to influence the world 10 years from now, here's the landscape.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_05: Let's plonk our brand in the middle of that and see how it reacts.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_05: And then you work backwards from there to say, well, based on that, actually in five years' time, we need to have this machine set up to build this product, or we need to have, you know, a completely new distribution route to be able to reach this different, you know, sales channel.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_05: And therefore, because of that, actually tomorrow, we need to go and meet with our, you know, chief innovation officer and get them on board with this vision that we have.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_05: It just allows you to kind of work backwards from a preferred future state.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_05: And it's it's a really kind of natural, fun, I think familiar exercise that you can run that I've heard a lot from marketers just helps them to clarify where they want to take their brand and helps them with a starting point of what do I do about it right now?
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_05: That's maybe kind of outside of the traditional brand plan.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_05: It's a little bit further out.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_05: And then the second one is with innovation.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_05: So, particularly with innovation roadmaps, innovation growth terrains, figuring out how do you protect your core and grow from within your core out.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_05: Um, where can your brand stretch?
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_05: What are the growing consumer behaviors?
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_05: Where do we see culture shifting and how is that showing up and potentially what people are going to be buying in the future?
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_05: Using foresight in that process is really helpful.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_05: We have something like a three horizons model, which is basically the S curve times three, where we're mapping three different kinds of evolving time horizons to understand, you know, if if you're seeing, for example, like protein is everywhere right now, fiber is the next thing, what's after fiber?
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_05: So you're plotting all of the things that are kind of emerging.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_05: Sugar, like anti-sugar?
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_05: Are you reckoning like a return to like it's gonna come more?
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: Return to Skittles.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: Return to Skittles.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_05: Yes.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_05: Have some more Skittles.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_05: It's bad.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, yeah.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_05: So it it helps you to it helps you to plot all of that.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_05: So I've those are the two that I've used most often with my marketing team.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_05: And I think they're probably more connected to if we take away all the fancy frameworks and the complex methodologies and the fancy foresight terms, these were the questions that I was asking when I was a marketer.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_05: It's like, I'm building an innovation pipeline.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_05: What should I be looking at?
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_05: And what's worth investing in?
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_05: And how do I sell that into my business?
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_05: And where do I want my brand to go as a result of that?
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_05: What am I really trying to achieve longer term beyond this brand plan cycle that I'm presenting?
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_05: So they're very natural questions marketers already ask, and they just allow you to answer them in a different way.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um I don't do this very often, but you said something that I want to bring it back quickly because I want to make sure our listeners caught this.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: You said foresight does not get a free pass.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_02: I'd love for you to kind of dive into that a little bit deeper because most functions that we've come to know will always do the opposite argument.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, well, hey, this is not me.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: This is X function needs to make sure that they're pulling their weight here.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_02: Why do you believe that foresight doesn't get a free pass?
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_05: I don't think any function gets a free pass, and therefore foresight is no exception.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_05: A lot of the times when foresight's placed in business, it does approach it in that way, like, oh, we're doing something so different, and not many businesses have this function, therefore it's an experiment, and we're here to open your minds and help you to think of inspirational, possible future, you know, like whatever jargon.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_05: Um, you're running a business.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_05: Your business runs on commercial success.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_05: You are there as a function, you're an overhead in that business, and you need to prove your value.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_05: Fundamentally, I believe that of any function in an organization.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_05: And I think you guys will get this, the listeners, I think, will get this, that no matter what team you're in, you're constantly thinking about your KPIs, you want to add value to the people that you're working with, you want to aid the business growth and its ambitions.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_05: And Foresight should be doing that too.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_05: But if for whatever reason, it hasn't had like a stringent, you know, it hasn't held itself up towards the same stringent responsibilities.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_05: I think maybe because it has this reputation of, you know, like a futurist in residence where you're really there to provoke.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_05: But you're not really there to provoke, you're there to help the business to invest in the right areas for the future through better preparation.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_05: And all of that is is is measurable.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_05: And if we don't have an answer for that right now, then the least we can do is try.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_03: So to build on that, because there's there's the on the brand side, the marketing innovation side, there's always the the long-term question around, well, what's the ROI in that?
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_03: And then that's where I think short-termism kind of wins because they can go, well, look at my ROLAS numbers on these ads and the campaigns that I'm running.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_03: How great is that?
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_03: But so I'm wondering, like, if you are asked the similar question in the line of thinking around you, you're kind of it sounds like you're inviting that kind of a conversation to ask the about the ROI that I can deliver.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm I'm curious what how you might answer that question.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_05: Well, you know, I think what I used to absolutely hate being in marketing was being laughed out of the room or like appeased, or maybe maybe not even invited to the room, right?
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_05: Because they don't do serious work or they're just interested in, you know, social media or influence and marketing, whatever.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_05: Like the company doesn't really understand what marketers do.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_05: I know you guys have had Byron on the show, and you get this, but being taken seriously means that you have to be able to face criticism and you need to understand where your stakeholder skepticism lies.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_05: So creating a space for that and really being bold and brave and facing into that and and maybe then trying to build your plans and your arguments with that in mind, as opposed to saying, oh, they just don't get it.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_05: Like they don't understand marketing.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_05: That's our job.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_05: Leave that to us, which is generally kind of what happens.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, we had, they'll hate me for saying this if they're listening, but we had a marketing team at Mars who I think were were right on the line between doing really, really great breakthrough creative and abiding by the EBI principles as best as they could.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_05: Um and then you had you had like a a center of excellence for marketing effectiveness, which told you the rules as as per the laws of growth.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_05: And these teams would always be at odds with each other and you know, but behind the scenes.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_05: Oh my gosh, those guys are just like they're stifling our creativity and they're, you know, they're giving us too many guidebooks and they just don't understand culture of consumers and what resonates, blah, blah, blah.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_05: And then on the flip side, those marketers are just wasting money and we've already told them this doesn't work.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_05: Why aren't they doing it?
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_05: And the truth is somewhere in the middle, right?
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_05: And those teams just need to come together and actually just battle, battle it out a little bit because we all want conviction with what we're doing in our work, and that comes from airing where the the skepticism comes in.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_03: It's just so fascinating because it's like exactly there's so much in the way you're describing foresight that's recognizable and yet it's still somewhat so foreign.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_03: And and that's the part where I'm fascinated about it.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_03: Like I want to scratch on that a little bit because I I see so much of the value in in what you're doing, though I never've technically worked with anybody in that role or know anybody in that role.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_03: So it's but there's clear advantages for having that function in the business.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_03: And it I don't know if it's always like to your point, it doesn't always live in marketing.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_03: It might be in risk management, it could be in acquisitions, like there may be those skill sets somewhere else, but it's not yeah, but it's familiar probably to a lot of people in a business.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_05: Mm-hmm.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, for sure.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_05: I think maybe marketers would be most familiar with it if they think about their creative agencies, because a creative agency has a chief, obviously chief strategist, and their role is to understand where the world is going, right?
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_05: And how culture is changing and bring that through ideas.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_05: Um, so they actually do a ton of foresight, which we call cultural foresight, which is kind of like one, like a slightly more isolated kind of area of foresight, focused on sociology and anthropology, how people are changing, how culture is shifting, and uh where those flux zones are, as Andreas Crasser calls it.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_05: So all of that comes in through like an advertising communications lane, um, maybe through brand building kind of lane.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_05: And so generally that's maybe without without knowing otherwise, brand teams might feel like that's what it should be, you know, is really understanding the future of people, the future of consumers, the future of culture, media, et cetera.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_05: Um but imagine if you if you had that uh that line of sight of where culture was shifting and you threw in there everything that your regulatory team is telling you about how you can package your product and where you can sell it and what the retailers care about.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_05: And then you threw in there also your sustainability team and everything they're telling you about.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_05: Actually, like coffee is gonna become in a pretty dire shortage in 2050.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_05: So you're not even gonna be able to source the ingredients.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_05: And here's how supply chains are becoming more fragile.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna start hoarding.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_05: True story.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_05: Start stocking up your bunker.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_05: Thank God I don't drink.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_05: You can imagine, like, you know, when you layer in these things, it creates a richer picture of what might happen in the world.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_05: And all of those, you know, ingredients, if you will, are really important um part of that.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_05: So you can go down a very singular path and look at just culture and marketing and media.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_05: But when you layer in those other aspects, it really paints a picture of a more real world, which is what you're trying to do with Foresight, is simulate a more real environment of the future so that you can see how you'd react.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_04: Mm-hmm.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_02: You brought up the conversation kind of went into like marketing effectiveness, where you have the creative teams, market effectiveness teams, they're always at odds with one another based on the laws of growth and things to that effect.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I think both Mark and I have seen this as well as you know, market effectiveness, advocates, disciples, call it what you will, in our respective areas.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's very often one of those things that people will be quick to dismiss as academic or something that doesn't hold up in the real world, or you know, you're completely out of touch.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_02: And you mentioned it yourself, like cult the culture side and why we may be missing the point.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_02: I'm curious, like, have you seen the function of foresight almost be treated the same way?
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_02: And saying, like, hey, cool, but really you're you're we have to deal with today, right now.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_02: How can you help us do that?
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_02: Do you get drawn in those kind of conversations at all?
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_02: Or what does that look like on your end?
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, all the time.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_05: And actually the variety of labels that foresight has, which is you're way too academic, like dumb dumb it down for us, simplify it, right?
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_05: You're too altruistic.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_05: That's the other one that we get a lot, because sometimes foresight is associated with advocacy for a better world.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_05: And so you're giving us all the things like, okay, that's a that's a really nice idea about you know individualism and people buying against their values, but like that's not reality.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_05: So come back down to earth.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_05: Or you're too fluffy, you know, like you're you're too focused on inspiration and storytelling and like let's see some numbers, you know, what is this actually worth?
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_05: Um, you know, or you're yeah, you're kind of like weighing in between all of those things, depending on the stakeholder that you're speaking to, because they all have a conception around what foresight is.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_05: Again, I don't think that's hugely dissimilar, yeah, to to marketing, marketing effectiveness teams.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_05: You know, it's like depending on who you speak to, they might have this perception.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_05: That you're just all about theory or you're all about pie in the sky creativity.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_05: And this is why when I think it was when Ritson came on my show, he said this that marketing is art and science.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_05: Obviously, we talk about that quite a lot.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_05: I feel like that's very similar to foresight, is it's art and science, because you don't you don't know what's gonna come.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_05: That requires imagination, it requires deep curiosity and a deep engagement with uncertainty.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_05: Like you have to be really comfortable with the gray.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_05: And I think a lot of those skills are actually shared with marketers.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_03: I feel so at the beginning.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_03: At the beginning, you had said too, like you're talking about the future where there is no data.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_03: But he's like it, it is something that just stuck with me, which is part of the reason why I brought up the possibility outcomes.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_03: Like in any scenario where it's not about the hard numbers of the past, you're it you have risk the you run the risk of being labeled with fluffy or too academic or you know, things that aren't the norm.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_03: And I and so I I I also kind of wonder like if you are you sometimes the victim of your own success.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_03: You had a good example of a project you work on.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_03: I wonder if there's maybe another project you could speak about, but you did a great job with with one thing, and then they're like, oh, just do more of that.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_03: I really like that.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_03: Like I don't care about all the other things that you could be doing.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_03: Like, do you do you kind of get typecast in a role in a way if you've delivered something really productive for an organization?
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_05: Uh I would say what what tends to happen is that they that it takes a lot more effort to be brought into different types of work streams for you to demonstrate that you can add value to different things.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_05: And it just requires more selling, you know, more um building conviction and proof points.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_05: So an example is, you know, I spent a lot of time at McDonald's when I first started, focused on consumer tensions, shifts, working with the marketing team.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_05: And I just noticed that our impact team, which is sustainability, crisis management, commute corporate communications, they were doing amazing long-term work.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_05: And I'm like, can I get can I get in on that?
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_05: Because I think that that's actually super synergistic.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_05: So when they started crisis managing the next, you know, geopolitical crisis, I had to do a little bit of convincing to say, I actually think foresight could be hugely beneficial to you right now.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_05: Which obviously, like, if you're sitting in the marketing team doing cultural insights about the future, why would you get invited to a geopolitical crisis scenario session?
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_05: You know, but I did that successfully, you know, it just required a little bit more of helping people to understand how foresight is a capability versus a specific function.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_05: I would say though that, you know, like another another example of where it worked really well and required again, like a lot of convincing was in McDonald's we built a generative AI center of excellence.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_05: And that came in part through a partnership with the Foresight team and our data science and technology team, which is again another stakeholder who, when I first met them, uh said to me, Oh, I thought your job was a joke.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_05: Like I thought it was gonna be just like a waste.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_05: Like, what is this?
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_05: What is this made up thing that you're doing?
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_05: You know, which I still get today, by the way, for people.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not a good thing.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_01: With this conversation, yeah.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_05: It's and it's fair, right?
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_05: It's like who does this work?
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_05: Who gets paid to think for a living?
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_05: It's pretty amazing.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_05: But uh yeah, I I had to kind of like work with them for quite a while to tell them like here's here's how we're gonna bring in emerging side like technology, here's how we're gonna run the scenarios around generative AI and how it's evolving.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_05: Here's how we're gonna link it to potential pathways for the business so that we can make some recommendations.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_05: They had the expertise in the technology.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_05: We had the expertise in probabilistic analysis and implications assessment.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_05: So actually, that was a beautiful partnership that then ended up in the creation of the Center of Excellence for Generative AI, which then led to pilots for how do we roll this out, how do we scale it, um, which a lot of organizations are doing now and is ultimately leading to, you know, a lot of the things that you see in market right now.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_05: Um, and it's a very big example, but I think the the one caveat that I always say is it's not because of the foresight team that that happened.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_05: Like that project probably would have run without us.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_05: But what did what did we gain from having foresight in the room?
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_05: Not me, not Joe from Foresight, not the futurist, but from a foresight methodology and a process.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_05: I think it strengthened our plans.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_05: It helped us to foresee some risks and hurdles and uh a really great example of how we can partner with maybe surprising parts of the business to get a better outcome.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we always try to do with this podcast for any of those that are listening is try to give them something that they could potentially action on a Monday.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_02: Listening to you, I think I can start seeing some of those things that you know we can probably take back.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_02: But I'd love to hear from you.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_02: Because most of the people listening probably will never get a foresight function.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_02: That doesn't mean though they can't look for it in the organization or look for pockets of it or ask the questions.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_02: So, what is that one thing say a person can do at their desk Monday morning when it comes around?
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh to at least get them, I don't know, maybe there's an arbitrary percentage here, but saying 80% of the value.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, 80% of the value.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_01: Right, is it high?
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_03: Give me 20.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_03: Give me 20.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_05: That's high.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_03: Give me one step in the right direction.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, uh there's a few that I can give you.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_05: One easy one is you are probably in your business looking after like one big project or initiative.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_05: What assumption are you holding about that?
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_05: You know, it probably has an end state that's reliant on external factors staying the same or or a view of how the world is shaping up for this specific thing.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_05: So, easy example if you're investing in a content creator strategy, how is that potentially going to change with social media regulations, with the backlash against AI and synthetic content, with the the decline in trust and influencers, with emerging tech platforms, et cetera, et cetera, right?
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_05: So what assumption are you making in that that might not be true?
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_05: And if it isn't true, what happens to your plan?
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_05: That's a really, really easy just question that you can ask yourself against your priority initiative.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_04: I like that.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_05: Another one that I think is really useful is a lot of our business plans rely on our leadership teams' decisions.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_05: Their decisions are made through shareholder considerations in many cases.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_05: So what do your shareholders care about?
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_05: What do your leadership teams care about?
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_05: What's keeping them up at night?
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_05: Do you know that?
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_05: If you don't know that, that's probably a really good place to start.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_05: You can have a look at what their biggest priorities are and then say, am I feeding that into my plan?
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_05: So we know from all of the CEO surveys, for example, that there are generally three big things that are that are on their minds at the moment.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_05: And they're very influenced by shareholder considerations and returns.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_05: So just playing that back to yourself to say, well, you know, this seemingly has nothing to do with my function.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_05: But actually, if it does impact me, right, geopolitical uh uncertainty and instability feels really, really disconnected, I think, from a lot of teams in a business, especially in marketing.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_05: But it impacts supply chains, it impacts reputation, it impacts boycotts.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_05: So it actually might.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_05: So just playing that back to say, um, am I just kind of pressure testing what my leadership team cares about that might be much, much more macro and long term and how it might impact my plans and my the the plans of my team and my my function?
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_05: Can I give you one more?
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_02: Of course.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's a three-hour marathon.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_02: We got it.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, good.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_05: Give you like 50 more.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_05: No, I'll just give you one more, which is if nobody, if nobody gets rewarded for preventing a fire, then how can we better put out the fire that's spreading?
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_05: So there's a really, really beautiful MIT study that came out really recently around anxiety in leadership, where a little bit of anxiety in a crisis is actually quite good.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_05: Crisis or transformation, right?
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_05: But it's when it gets out of control that it's an issue.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_05: So actually, if you focus on what your business is kind of like freaking out about right now, and it might be in your specific function or it could be in the broader business, it's trying to contain probably a fire.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_05: And maybe again, that feels quite unconnected to what you're working on.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_05: But what if that fire spread to where you are now?
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_05: What if it had a bigger impact?
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_05: In Foresight, we do an exercise called Futures Wheel, which is an implications assessment, second order effects, third order effects, right?
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_05: The world that we live in is not isolated.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_05: A crisis happens and uh it spreads to other areas.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_05: So how can you just think about where the fire could spread into your team and function?
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_05: And again, what could you put in place now or even just to start to think about to make sure that you're prepared for when that happens or if it happens?
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_05: Wow.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_05: That's probably three, like I think pretty easy.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_02: Gold.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_02: Starting.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_02: That's three gold nuggets.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, good.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_05: 80% of the value of foresight right there for you.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_02: Should we see?
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_02: Should we call it accomplished?
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_02: To honor your McDonald's pastor, we call him three gold golden McNuggets or something?
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_02: Does that I'm a Big Mac gal.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_05: I'm not a Nuggets nuggets gal, but that's okay.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_05: Three three Big Macs?
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_03: I'm there, I'm there with it.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_03: Triple Patty Big Mac right there.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, I go for uh Big Mac No Meat, actually.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_04: A Big Mac is really weird, but it's delicious.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_05: Big Mac, no meat.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_05: So you just like bread, lettuce, mayo.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_05: It's delicious.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_05: You have to try to make it.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_03: I'm calling bullshit.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_05: Well, now you have this is an experiment we can play out in the real world, not a hypothetical.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_05: So your your task is to go and get a Big Mac, no meat.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_03: I'll try it.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_03: I'll get a Big Mac with me too, just to see which one.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, probably we live in Alberta.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's like we're known for meat.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's hard for us to ever say no meat.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, okay, fair enough.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_02: But anyway, thanks again, Joe.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_03: Really appreciate your time.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_05: Thank you.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_05: Thank you.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_05: It was nice to spend time with you guys.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_05: And yeah, thanks for the opportunity.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_05: Let me know if you need anything else.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_03: We'll do.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_03: That's sounds good.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks, Joe.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_05: Good night.