We can't predict the future, but we can learn how to make choices
that shape the future we all want to be a part of.
At the D school, we spend time helping students learn how to embrace their
agency in order to bring about the future that we all are excited about,
that we all wanna be a part of.
That is inclusive, and that's representative of all of us,
this is what it means to lead like a futurist.
We spend our time teaching classes around creative confidence,
helping students learn how to navigate ambiguity.
How to learn from others, how to move between abstract and
concrete and how to communicate deliberately,
this is what we call design, we often think of design as products,
particularly technology products like an iPhone.
These products enable experiences that allow us to do things
beyond the product itself.
Increasingly, these products are being enabled by technology that is getting
increasingly more powerful by the data that we are creating and using every day.
That require systems to support it, that ultimately has implications for
all of us, we consider all of this design if you find yourself making
decisions somewhere on these different levels, then you are a designer.
And because of the fast paced nature of technology, it's making the world
feel faster and faster, change seems to be accelerating at an even more rapid pace.
And I fundamentally believe, that in a world filled with volatility,
uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, the world that we live in every day,
leaders need to think of themselves more like designers than mechanics.
Being willing to imagine new ideas, bring those ideas to life,
to test them, to get evidence if that's the right idea or
to change it if it's not, and to do it all over again.
This is a very different world when we would have known answers to
known problems that we would just repeat and scale, I believe that
we are all capable of learning the skills to lead like a futurist.
It starts first with learning how to see the future,
how do we move beyond what is right in front of us and expand our realm of
imagination, we have to learn how to imagine the unimaginable.
So let's take an example of something that we know will be
a part of our future near term and long term, driverless cars,
a topic of hot debate and analysis these days.
What is the impact of driverless cars?
Well, let's take a look, let's go from what we know to what we don't know.
If there's more driverless cars, there's gonna be less accidents,
less accidents lead to less fatalities,
less fatalities lead to less perhaps organs being available.
And ultimately that could lead to perhaps a black market,
perhaps an opportunity to accelerate 3D printing of organs we don't know.
Another implication of driverless cars is reduced auto repair shops,
or the reduce risk of accidents which we
know the insurance company is looking at very, very closely.
We can see other ramifications of driverless cars,
enforcing the rules of the road, ultimately impacting the amount of
tax revenue that we collect, or the need to stay awake.
And if you're in the business of selling something that has caffeine,
this is something that you are tracking pretty closely, we can also look at
traffic flow going up, traffic speeds going up, ultimately faster short haul.
And if you're in the business of regional flights or trains, you're gonna be looking
at this too, so there's lots of ways of taking something that's in plain sight and
asking ourselves, what's the next consequence?
And what could happen then?
Mapping out a whole range of possibilities,
even ones that are far out in the future, taking a central event and
allowing yourself to expand the realm of possible.
It allows us to take a signal,
maybe a plant based burger that we might have just seen as a experiment and
wonder what could happen, and then be a little bit less surprised when
we see that Burger King has taken it up and is now going nationally.
Another thing we can do once we've seen the landscape of possible
futures is to ask ourselves,
how do we put investment in the future that we'd like to see come to life?
How do we shape the future, one way is to look at the external driving forces and
say, what is inevitable, and
what could we possibly influence to go towards a different future?
One of the most inspiring examples I've seen of this in the last few years,
comes from an historic grant given by the MacArthur Foundation a few years ago.
In $100 million given to Sesame Street and
the International Rescue Committee, to create a new kind of
education focused on helping children of the refugee crisis,
a population often overlooked by humanitarian aid.
So looking at this through the lens of the futurist, we could say,
what do we know about children?
Well, we know that they grow up, they don't stay children forever,
what else do we know?
We know that children that have been exposed to chronic stress have slower
development than other children.
We also know, that education is vital to helping children become
thriving members of their community.
So with this in mind, Sesame Street took their 50 year history
of creating programming for young children, not just for their ABCs,
but also for their social and emotional literacy.
And partnered with the IRC, that had local resources on the ground that
could deliver that education in ways that were connected to the community.
This is what it means to shape the future, in February of this year,
they actually launched, called Ahlan Simsim, Welcome Sesame.
They even created new characters to represent this population, and
they're shooting on location in order to make sure that the programs feel
authentic to the community.
At the Disco we're asking ourselves who shapes the future,
we're asking how do we create empathy for
the future, what is inevitable, and what can we change?
Just recently I launched a new effort, trying to help voters get
back to the foundational principles of our constitution and
thinking about what they care about in our next US president.
Reminding voters particularly new voters, that we all have agency in the kind of
leader that we'd like to see in that position.
Instead of, reacting to what the media wants us to believe,
we all can do some thinking, about the qualities and characteristics,
that we care about in order, to shape the future we wanna be a part of.
So once we've seen the future, once we've identified the future we wanna be
a part of how do we share that with others to get them excited.
One of the most important things we could do is create narratives about the future
create stories that engage us emotionally, one of my favorite examples of this comes
from Meredith Hutchinson and her project vision, not victim.
Meredith is a photographer that went to refugee camps to help children see
a future for themselves that was different than their current environment and
then have the ability to get others in their community on board to make
that vision happen.
So they would take pictures of children in their profession, which changed
the conversation from when I grow up, I want to be, to I am a doctor, and
I decided I wanted to be a doctor, because what I experienced in my childhood.
And because of that embodied narrative, and
the artifact that brought that narrative to life,
it changed the conversation that these children would have with their parents and
with their communities, to help them make this vision come true.
So instead of saying well, then you shouldn't get married when you're 14,
instead, you should go to school so you could be the teacher that you want to be.
In the class that I teach at the D School, called Inventing The Future,
we ask our students to create a debate 50 years in the future on the utopian and
dystopian effects of emerging technologies.
We've covered autonomous vehicles, AI doctors, in this picture, we
see a dystopian team warning us about the potential downside of mining asteroids.
And what happens when our efforts unintentionally create more
havoc back here on earth,
we're essentially rehearsing futures that we want to either create or avoid.
And in the process, we're becoming more flexible, more resilient, more able to
navigate all of the change that's coming our way, and be more proactive in bringing
about the change we'd like to see, how do I know these works?
Because I've seen the kind of changes that our students experience
from spending time thinking of themselves as futurists.
Here's one example, I used to think I had no say in the future I will live, and
now I think I have the necessary tools to shape it, or, I used to think
that imagining the future was the gene intrinsic to people like talent.
And now I think there are many valuable tools that anyone can practice,
we e can practice the things that we want to get better at, and I fundamentally
believe we are all capable of leading like a futurist, thank you very much.