A 15 Minute Foreplay™ Conversation with Scott Smith

In this conversation Bronwyn Williams and Tumelo Mojapelo talk to Scott Smith about the importance of building anticipatory teams and organisations.

Bronwyn Williams: Hi, I’m Bronwyn Williams. We are back with the Flux 15 Minute Foreplay™ Conversations. We’ll be talking to leading foresight and futures thinkers from all across the world to get their very best ideas. And today we’ve got with us Scott Smith to tell us a bit about how to build a future culture. 

In other words, how to instil a culture of anticipation within your organisation and to hopefully break out of some of these, kind of a, minimum effort Monday trains that we’re seeing all across the world. So you’ve got your entire company or your entire organisation all aligned in the same direction, which is hopefully looking towards some kind of a shared future. So Scott, give us your best advice. What do you do to build a future culture in your team, whatever team that might be? And how would you describe what a future ready culture or team really is? 

Scott Smith: Well, that’s a really big question. You could almost write a whole book on it. I think I kind of start with the second question first in a way because I think the book kind of came about from a number of years of, kind of, teaching futures and foresight and basically, kind of, consulting, doing applied futures work inside organisations. And we kept, kind of, seeing the same patterns over and over again. You can teach a room of 30 or 40 people to bring foresight into their work and then they go back to their organisation and maybe they’re only one or two from each organisation and suddenly they’re these stranded loners who know how to do something quite differently. They’re sort of trained and wired culturally differently than the rest of the organisation. And the organisation itself continues to think on a, kind of, present, presentist basis, worrying only about, kind of, current problems. 

And so for us, a sort of future-minded organisation is one that puts that kind of… gives equal weight, equal balance in its considerations, both to its sort of present responsibilities, whether those are sort of financial or other responsibilities and an equal amount of weight to the future. And we see that kind of thing beginning to emerge sometimes in certain governments around the world that are starting to…  government bodies that are building, kind of, future generation commissions, in part because they want to pass laws that not only, kind of, speak to today’s issues, but also taking into consideration, kind of, future needs. 

And I think it would be wonderful if we could just wave a wand and create a future-ready organisation, but I’m sure you have much the same experience that often the roles of consultants or trainers or people who are trying to help an organisation is to sort of come in and address a fairly discrete problem. And then that scene is being job done, that someone came in and taught us a workshop on how to think about the future and we’re fine, except it… we’ve done nothing to wire it actually into the ways of working and the kind of deeper level culture and sometimes they use the term folklore, the way that an organisation thinks and talks to itself. And so that kind of move to begin to build a future culture is almost like a counterinsurgency. You have to sort of start with various beachheads and various kind of areas of traction and foothold and begin to flip teams, individuals, groups, departments, layers to make that shift more kind of wholesale. And so it’s a kind of waves of progress in the approach, I guess, is something you change over time, not just through one magic intervention. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: You mentioned that it takes, like, waves or groups and stuff like to mobilise people. So how would you then, if you’re a leader and you’ve had this great session, you’re all leadership, you’ve been in a room, everyone’s excited about the future, they’ve rechecked their strategy and then they wanna go back to the team, right? How do you start? Like, what is the first seed you plant? What is the first pebble you drop to create that ripple of change? What would be the first thing you do when you get back? ‘Cause I think that’s really the struggle. 

Scott Smith: I think one of the things we’ve seen be most effective is a kind of top-down permissioning because often someone will get an idea in a department and say, let’s have this workshop or let’s do this training or let’s bring in the sort of approach. And it’s happening without a kind of larger switch being flipped inside the culture. And so it reaches a sort of level where it bumps up against the current risk model. And everybody says, wait, stop, you’re making change too fast. My compensation is tied to this, our productivity is tied to this. But if you can kind of change the voltage and have top-down permissioning, even if it’s not detailed, even just a general permissioning that says, look, this is what we’re going to do. This is the mission. We’re going to change things. I don’t know exactly how that’s going to happen, but we’re going to begin to make progress in that direction. It seems to have an effect because people look to leaders to kind of set the rhythm and set the kind of culture. And the two examples I’ve seen this in most clearly has been…  we’ve worked a lot in the UAE and it’s in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. And for all of the kind of issues there and various faults that there may be, the fact that the leadership of the country, both kind of culturally and governmentally, have laid out this kind of objective, this mission that this is the way it’s going to be. And we’re going to approach things that are sort of future focused. 

That has a very powerful effect of rolling downstream and forcing cultural change from the top down because now you have a responsibility to a much higher authority to make that change. We’ve seen this in some NGOs that we’ve worked with where after a point, the leader of the organisation again says, look, we need to be anticipatory. We can’t just continue firefighting. I don’t know what that looks like exactly, but I’m trusting the people underneath me to define that, to implement that and to roll it out. Again, it sort of creates a pressure release in a way that allows people to start kind of moving more freely as opposed to kind of worrying that they’re going to bump up against a kind of friction above a certain level in their pay grade. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: So, like, so I can watch you saying…  so basically I just wanted to ask another question and I’m just not sure how to phrase it. How do you, and this is something, how do you transfer the skills or the tools that you’ve gotten as a leader? So signal scanning, horizon scanning, all of that, right? Spotting trends and stuff, like, how do you, ’cause now you said, basically you’re saying leaders should create an enabling environment that allows people to actually join in, having room to create vision, but let’s say they don’t know the how, right? How would you then transfer all those skills over to the rest of the team?

Scott Smith: I think the way that we’ve found is most useful is there’s kind of talking and doing and it sounds really simplistic, right? And I mean, I’ve always had an issue, for example, against kind of the phrase future thinking. It’s too passive for my taste. It sort of allows people to kind of look out the window but not do anything about it. And literacy, I kind of put in the same category. Futures literacy again is sort of like, well, I’m a literate person, that doesn’t mean I read books. It doesn’t mean I put that capability into action. And I know that’s the intent, but language matters, right? 

And so I think putting people’s hands on things and making them practically applicable, the mouthful, in ways that they can be used immediately and not sort of expecting people to come to the method or come to the tool, but to move it as close to them and their work and their processes and their everyday kind of actions, I think is a really, really important element of that. And I feel like we’ve seen success in doing that by trying to kind of not water down the approach, but find ways to insert bits of it into people’s everyday activity. ‘Cause one thing you don’t wanna do is go into an organisation and say, surprise, here’s a whole new area, the things you’re gonna have to do, that you don’t really understand, and you’re going to be judged on it. So instead you find ways to say, well, here’s a practical way to do something that looks like horizon scanning in your daily work. Now let’s do a little more, a little more, and you start to kind of bring it in, appeal to what people already know how to do. And humans are great horizon scanners, only wake up in the morning, but people don’t realise that…  credit them with that, and they start feeling confident that, oh, actually, yeah, I know what you’re talking about. I can recognise that in my own behaviour. 

And so I feel, like, making…  kind of lowering the bar or lowering the barrier a little bit and making things that people…  or suggesting things people can do a bit at a time and kind of incrementally add that to their practice is really, really useful. And horizon scanning being one of them. It’s…  you need to create a place to put things that are seen, things that are noticed. You need to create a basic language so people can describe what they’ve seen and noticed or found, and then you need to create a place to put it. Simply teaching people to horizon scan without any of those affordances is just kind of teaching an abstract concept, I think. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: So basically you’re saying you must bridge your vision or your ideas with your people, so you must create a bridge. Now, I just want you to…

Scott Smith: Yeah. No, I was just gonna say, a bridge is a great, a great kind of way of thinking about it. You’ve got to give them a way of getting there instead of creating a frustration that they can’t possibly do it. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: I wanted to ask you, within your work that you’ve done, have you ever seen this kind of approach? So I’m trying to build, not ’cause you said you don’t like future thinking, but forward moving businesses and companies, right? That are more proactive or teams that are future thinking, but also proactive in the way they reach their future goals, right? Have you ever seen anything go wrong? ‘Cause I think with most leaders, especially with uncertainty, there’s a bit of a trepidation, like, we’re coming in with this new way of thinking and doing, we’re introducing it a little bit here and a little bit there. It’s literally like going into the unknown. And I mean, obviously I’m misunderstood because the weight on the shoulders of the leader is quite great, right? Substantial, and anything that could go wrong normally ends up, like, the buck stops with the leader. Have you ever seen anything go horribly wrong with actually enabling your team to join in this journey of scanning, of collecting, of co-creating or moving towards a future goal together? 

Scott Smith: Hardly wrong is an interesting way of thinking about it. I think we’ve seen a lot of initiatives just fail because either the assumption that, well, we did the thing and now it’s going to work on its own and it doesn’t need any kind of nurturing or expansion. You don’t have to change norms or rules or other cultural aspects to fit it. Well, we did the kind of finite snapshot kind of view about… we’ve done the activity, let’s move on. So there’s that aspect. 

I think there’s also the…  there’s a kind of failure through reversion sometimes by saying, well, we’ve now, we’ve gotten this far by doing this kind of applied kind of learning and kind of action learning but we’re now going to, kind of, swap back to a really passive mode of activity or bring in other practitioners who aren’t really on board with that way of working. I’ve seen this happen multiple times recently where we’ve been involved with organisations and then they’ll kind of go, well, this engagement ends here but we’re going to go find these academic experts and bring them in to, kind of, carry the ball and you think you’re jumping into a very different way of working and that doesn’t seem obvious at first if I’m making any sense. You’ve started kind of swapping methodologies and approaches and kind of philosophies and sensibilities then you’ve not really got…  it’d be like changing doctors from one, from sort of homeopathy to a highly technical intervention to something else, spirituality. Like you’re jumping all over the place and something that’s all intended to help the body but your philosophies are all kind of mangled. And so, I feel like that’s where things just kind of get back off the track again and then they think, well, okay, this is just too hard, forget about it. 

So that I guess the cultural change thing to me, the important aspect of it is putting the responsibility, yes, on the organisation but handing it to individual people across a whole cross section so that they’re able to carry it forward collectively and not just put the burden on one team, one manager, one leader, et cetera. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: I like that idea of shared responsibility, having, like, I’ll call them futures champions but like futures champions, like, scattered across the organisation so that they can always, like, keep their eye on the ball, right? 

Scott Smith: We had a great conversation when writing the book with a team inside, like, a UX team inside IBM, huge old organisation or sort of historically old organisation that’s gone through a lot of different transformations and one of the things that we found interesting about it was, it started with a small team of, like, three or four people who had been exposed to futures work and decided this was something they thought was important, and some bright person who they worked for basically said, great, I’ll give you a little bit of space but we can do this the IBM way and by that I mean they could use a system they already had in place for introducing new cultural waves and so they have a… think of the guild system that people of a common interest can, kind of, join this guild. It sounds very medieval, but they use an already existing structure to allow the entry of this new way of working and then allow those groups to kind of build the IBM flavour of it rather than trying to, kind of, impose an external culture. So by doing that, they showed that they could connect it already to something that needed to be protected, they could carry it forward and start to kind of propagate and grow new groups, build, expand these guilds internationally so that you have lots of little teams and clusters and cells, kind of building it organically themselves. 

They were able to address some issues that were really challenging, some technical, some cultural. They introduced small writing workshops or graphic novel development, different modalities that appeal to different people’s tastes, but they also found some sponsors that would kind of create cover inside the organisation so they were able to, sort of, build these cells out in different ways. That’s exactly how, when you’re trying to rapidly grow a new type of organisation, happens these days, you start in a kind of cellular fashion. And that way the culture is kind of leading the propagation instead of some technical mandate. And it’s worked really well for them and they’ve been really happy with it, but we were just fascinated by the way they talked about kind of organically growing it. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: I like the talk about organically growing it, about organically bringing in anticipatory thinking into your organisation and marrying it. What was already… works structurally in your systems and your protocols and however you work and… watching it slowly just blossom and become something else. And I’m taking it back, but you mentioned that there’s a… ‘Cause this is something I think you just actually wanted to… I think they would want to address, but you spoke about how sometimes you come in, you do great work, everyone’s excited, it’s great. They start integrating the sort of thinking of doing into their companies, having anticipatory culture. And in some way they bring in someone else, right? And that person comes in with different way of thinking and doing, completely polar opposite, right? Why do you think leadership reverts to a previous way of doing things? What is it about it? Like why do they boomerang to a past way of doing things? 

Scott Smith: It’s easy. It’s easy just to let something go and release that risk. And you’ve created… You invited something in, that’s inviting a risk into the organisation. Most leaders and organisations aren’t necessarily familiar with this. And so they’re… By bringing it in, they’re automatically raising their head and saying, “I don’t know.” It’s an admission of… Or seen as an admission of… Kind of lack of knowledge in some way. And so it’s really easy then to kind of dismiss it when it doesn’t seem to stick quickly. It also takes effort by leadership, right? They also have to go along with this and change their ways of working. And everybody’s busy. There are a lot of responsibilities. And so I think it’s just… It’s very easy to let it go again and just let it slide because… Even… 

We saw this boom in, kind of, groups bringing in foresight specialists or creating their own futures departments, post-pandemic, because everybody was still feeling the intense pain of this disruption. And it didn’t take much time to start seeing the budget for those groups fall, roll back. I know a number of people in this field who have been complaining in the last few months that there’s a kind of project freeze going on because… Weirdly, because of a huge amount of uncertainty ahead of us. It’s like, that makes no sense. So it’s very easy for people’s attention to just kind of… Or organisations’ cultural attention to kind of revert to ways of working that everybody’s familiar with. 

It’s much harder to kind of introduce something new and then make it stick over the long term. But we’ve done it. We’ve done it with things like diversity. In some cases, although that’s hitting a lot of headwinds, you’ve done it with other kinds of initiatives that are seen as being absolutely necessary to the functioning of a modern organisational culture. You wouldn’t keep those values from 20 years ago today. The law wouldn’t let you keep those. But also, newer generations of workers won’t let you keep those. So I think it’s very easy to kind of fall back into old ways and old habits. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: Would you say then it is quite important, actually, if not pertinent, that companies actually focus on building into their culture,  anticipatory culture as an element of that, right? Because you just mentioned future generations coming in, future workforce coming in. I mean, we call them future, but they’re current, but they’re younger, right? And they’ve got different expectations about what an organisation needs to do, right? Do you think it’s an imperative point to actually start thinking about adjusting or evolving your culture towards anticipatory thinking and doing if you want to actually be relevant or if you want your organisation to survive, especially in uncertainty, because you just mentioned budget cuts in uncertainty where you actually need people who can help you chart through uncertainty to make sense of all the uncertainty? 

Scott Smith: Absolutely, and I think it’s getting easier to make an actual hard financial argument. You can point to cost of disruption. You can point to cost of failure. You can point, I mean, this has been going on in… Bronwyn, you know this is sort of in the NGO space. The shift towards anticipatory culture is in part a financial shift because the cost of responding post-crisis is much higher than the cost of investing and mitigating the crisis or at least moving assets into position before the crisis. So we have things now like anticipatory finance where you can actually say, look, we know we’re going to have forest fires in this area. Let’s bank some resources and money and people now move them forward towards that crisis before it emerges. So our cost of response is lower and the damage is lower. And I think that’s the case because you can argue that there are a half dozen imminent risks and disruptions kind of hovering over us right now at any given moment, whether it’s fascism or epidemics or climate or infrastructure failure or whatever. It’s getting a lot easier to reach out and, kind of, put your hand on the threat.

And that makes it easier to then, kind of, connect anticipation to outcome, to positive outcome. And if you’re able to, kind of, go to an organisation and say, look, we can actually help you get a sense of the kinds of things that are coming and also develop a point of view and a posture towards those issues in advance, that is seen now as being much, much more valuable than it would have been, say, 15 or 20 years ago.

Tumelo Mojapelo: Thank you so much, Scott, for your time. I mean, this conversation could go on forever because it’s quite fascinating, especially around building cultures within organisations and in society that actually have an anticipatory nature. For those who have been following the 15 minute conversations, please look at our previous conversation because it links very well to this one. We’re gonna have other ones that follow up. Subscribe, share with those who you believe these thinking models, these frameworks, this way of approaching anticipatory futures, actually we’ll work with them and join us for our next 15 minute four play conversation. Thank you.

Scott Smith: Thank you very much. 
By Flux Trends

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