Hello, this is Eva and you're listening to the In Between Tech
and Trust podcast. And in today's episode, we talk
about one of my favorite topics and that is the future.
And when we talk about the future, currently, there's so
much uncertainty. Like everyone that you ask, they
say they cannot plan more than five to six months ahead because
we find ourselves in this tech acceleration, like this
technological acceleration of times also with these rapid
innovation cycles and kind of information overload that
everyone just is a bit exhausted.
But at the same time, we do need to find ways to plan and we also
need to be able to trust into what we plan towards and to look
into scenarios of how it actually looks like.
And for that, I have one of the best experts with me in
conversation, and that is Professor Doctor Heiko
Vandekart. And Heiko speaks from more than
20 years of experience as a professor of foresight and also
as a business practitioner. And he shares with us of what it
means to apply a future's literacy of how we can also make
use to plan ahead and use foresight planning for actual
business operations and how we as leaders can prepare for the
futures ahead by making up our minds and think about different
kinds of scenarios. He also proposes for specific
ones, but I leave them for you to explore throughout to the
upcoming conversation. Hello Haiku, and welcome to the
In Between Tech and Trust podcast.
Hi Eva, Many thanks for inviting me.
Great to be here. It's so great to have you
because I was really looking forward to having the
conversation on the intersection of foresight, technology and
human systems with you. You've been thinking about like
these contexts for many like years and you've also followed
the trends and ecosystems for quite some time.
And particularly when it comes to trust and like these areas, I
would love your opinion on what has shifted most fundamentally
across the past couple of months and years.
I'm really engaged in the topic of future for many years, for
for more than 20 years now. Every day I try to look into the
future and do this in a very valid way, not only as a
professor in foresight, but also as a business practitioner.
But it's always the core question is what might be the
next big thing, what are very valid scenarios to work with?
And in essence, it's always about making better decisions,
right? So this is what the foresight
profession is seeking for. And we've seen that there is a
professionalization among young people.
So I was able to train over 9000 people over the past 20 years
and educate them in scenario planning, scenario techniques.
But that's not the only technique today.
If we want to plan for the future, then we know actually
more than 40 different techniques.
Yeah. And most organizations or
individuals, they like to plan with three or four of them.
So it depends on the context. And as a researcher, I would say
if you choose carefully and if you know the tools in place and
you can combine them, then this adds to the clarity for the
future and also gives you a better feeling and decision
making under in times of uncertainty.
So trust is always a central thing in in the scenario and the
projects we do because each scenario exercise where you
simulate, you don't want to predict the future, right?
But where you simulate multiple futures in order to see how
different strategies and actions play out in those scenarios,
right? It's really a very comprehensive
and network thinking process. So we tend to often first focus
on technology, but there are other dimensions we have to look
at equally. And this is the social dimension
that ecologic ecology that I mentioned, legal aspects.
Yeah, we have to look into economic things for sure.
Human people, society. And you can have in the end, the
best scenario analysis, but it's always in the end the human
decision, right? So it's good craftsmanship, but
we have to look about the human decision process and the biases
as well. So this is what I'm doing in my
in my profession and I'm helping I think people to, to enable
this organization to enable scenario planning, to foster
this scenario thinking and to professionalise.
And the interesting part of also the polls that you just
highlighted is on the one hand, side decisions under clarity in
terms of also providing context, and on the other side that the
context gets even more complex. How does that fit together?
And how do you also navigate as an leader, as an like also CEO,
for example, to bring that together to create clarity under
times of complexity and to also communicate it to your teams and
organizations for them to steer forward?
Yeah, that's, that's a good question because if you go back
to the 1970s, right, there's a very Seminole paper in in
research was published on environmental uncertainty and
the degree of uncertainty certainty we feel when we take
decisions. This is complexity plus the
degree of dynamics. Complexity means how many things
are there out interacting that I have to have on my radar and the
dynamics, how fast things are changing, right.
And we can say with international division of labour
and we have two big organizations, they have to
manage 304 hundred suppliers as a supplier base.
Yeah, this adds to complexity, right?
And if you look at the dynamics, we see that with different
communication patterns, things are going faster.
The communication is faster, see conversational AI, we will see
real time translation in the future much more.
So this adds to the dynamics. So we have a doubling effect,
right, in what we feel if if situations are uncertain and we
use acronyms, abbreviations for this the VUCA world from the
military. Yeah, this is volatile,
uncertain, complex or even Barney, which means more chaos,
brittle world. And this these abbreviations
describe the status we are in of many people feel right.
However, you have to take into account that there's a
difference between the, the subjective, the perceived
uncertainty and the true environmental uncertainty,
because this is also largely shaped by the media, by the
perceptions we have by our direct environment.
And there are studies actually researching cation patterns and
examining the voice, the tone of virus we use in in books and,
and and in newspapers, etcetera. And over the past 50 to 60
years, there is an index value. We lost 25% in positive
communication. So you see that we tend to sell
the news and talk in much more negative way.
And from innovation literature and and research, we know if we
are in a good mood right, then there is a greater output and
there's a greater sense of innovation.
Yeah, we have up to 25% more more capable of innovation.
We are. So this is important.
If we think about the future, and if you want to shape the
future, then a positive mood accelerates.
But when we talk about trust today, according to your opinion
and also according to your conversations that you have on
like the different futures that we're currently looking at, what
has shifted most fundamentally when we talk about trust?
Yeah, so trust in in easy, but I would I would say it's the
confidence in another, right and the belief that holds our
relationships together. And we we always think that we
are we live in the most chaotic times.
Yeah. But if I like to use historical
analogies and this is one of the 40 techniques of futurists and
you see that there is all has always been propaganda,
misinformation. You have seen industrial
revolutions going on. So people always felt some
uncertainty and drastic situations.
But what has changed is of course the pace of innovation
and the progress if it comes to technology and also the virtual
worlds, right Internet and the spaces that have been created.
So these spaces, they have new rules.
We see in those new environments their own incentives.
We have specific own physics and it means that we act in in
spaces which, which are faster, more anonymous, We see they are
more scalable and less accountable.
And those virtual worlds in region.
And if we compare them with the analogical society in real life,
yeah, they they really shape by shaped by anonymity.
So trust in our classic setting means proximity.
So you have shared norms and and institutions.
And this is shifting. This has shifts.
So there are different spaces with new rules and they open up.
I don't want to be only negative, right?
Technology isn't bad. Yeah, good or bad thing.
It's it can be used in either way, right?
Two sides of the matter. And those spaces, they can only
also enable us. They create participation, they
create network, they create the spaces for education all around
the world. You can have access to the best
education online and massive open online courses.
So two sides of the matter, right?
And in a more anonymous way, we have to counteract and find a
new mechanisms. And you talked about like those
spaces and the mechanisms. And in the work that I do and
the encounters that I have, I oftentimes realize that creating
those spaces, and I call them the so-called in between states
of like what is mutually perceived as real and what is
also served as a basis to debate the future.
It's free. It's become quite hard to do so,
but not because we don't do it, but rather because we are
challenged to embrace different kinds of opinions and also find
mutual grounds. And if I would put out the
hypothesis, we're not just debating the future.
We need to have the spaces to agree on reality while embracing
like different kinds of opinions.
Would you agree on that? This is a bold, very powerful
hypothesis, right? I wouldn't agree blindly, but I
have several things that come to my mind when when I listen to
you and your hypothesis. A key point is that over the
past years, we've seen dramatic increase in the knowledge
explosion, right. So this is really at sometimes
it's overwhelming. Analysts predict that over the
next years until the year 2050, everything we know today only
makes 1% of the overall knowledge.
So in 2000 and 5099% of our knowledge might be new.
Yeah. And I've also recognized this
over the past years in the established trend databases and
my futurist channels. We are also organized the
networks, right, the futurists around the world.
And you see that 20 years ago I probably spotted 10 or 20 or 30
very original new things, innovation, nice cases per
month, right In my work which I used then also my scenario works
scenario projects. And today there are 200 to 300
per month. Yeah.
So the, the trend databases are actually fluted by by insights
by cases, by crowdfunding platforms, etcetera.
And this yeah, this is a new situation, right, very drastic
in an innovation speed. So with all those massive
information and also in some cases misinformation, deep
fakes, fake news, etcetera, is it it has become harder to
create a shared common sense of reality.
And usually, if you plan for the future, you would say used to
have quite stable status quo situations today as is.
And we were then able to project into the future and draw the
different scenarios. But we've seen even with COVID
times that if the premises change fast from week to week in
between months, then your scenarios are already obsolete.
And this is this is a new challenge in an, in a world of
accelerated pace. So University of Oxford and
others, they have started to use actually technology as well in
the foresight discipline to make the projects and to make the
tools and techniques more agile and frugal.
They call it even the frugal scenario planning.
Why? Because you, you have to adapt,
you have to find mechanisms to be more adaptive to, to the
changes that you see. So scenario work has never been
a solo trip. It is always a strategic
conversation. This is really, really important
to consider. And if you see the history of
foresight, of future planning, scenario planning over the past
decades and from starting from the 70s, this was always about
plurality and what the different perspectives and the views of
the future. So we say we have different
thinking heads, right? As foresight professionals, you
not only look at the probable future, but there is also the
normative scenario, the desired future.
So the target, where do I want to be?
What is my, my North star, my desired future?
And there's also the space of opportunities, preferable
futures. You have the surprising future
and this has become a major part of today's foresight
professionals also to look at all those different future
perspectives. So surprising futures, white
cards, black Swans, surprising events.
This takes a lot of care today as well.
And the interesting part that in your work you not only look at
those like different kinds of scenarios and like also
different kinds of routes that you can take, but you also aim
and collaborate with organizations to build
resilience. Now we live in so-called times
of tech acceleration. So technology is an essence of
your work as well. On the one hand side, how do you
build resilience with those organizations and what has
changed through tech? Well, resilience means that you
learn from crisis, from drastic situations you you were in and
that you become stronger afterwards, right?
And this is, if important, yeah. The whole discipline of
foresight actually, yeah, adds to this, contributes to this.
As we've just said, there is uncertainty usually if you use
historic data and you extrapolate it, right.
And in many cases, we still do this.
But it's dangerous to do this if you live in turbulent and
disruptive times because future history shows that in most cases
it came, it wasn't different than the future.
And disruption usually comes from all the other industries,
not the industry I'm, I'm sitting in.
So the scenarios and, and the foresight discipline means to
prepare better for future incidents, for things that
could, that might happen. And this adds to the flexibility
of your organization. You can react faster.
You could even if you want to be a front runner, you could get
into alliances and you start shaping the markets.
So this is very, very powerful and therefore the whole thinking
of futures, futures planning that's to to make an
organization in the end more future robust or future ready,
right. That's to your future, future
preparedness. And we see there's been
empirical research of colleague on what makes it really a
sustainable organization. Yeah, a future proof
organization. And from an academic
perspective, you would compare organizations largely investing
in into foresight with organizations that don't.
And you would compare organizations that haven't done
so with their status later when they started to invest into
foresight, right? These are the classic
comparisons you do in a longer longitudinal study.
And this has been done over the past 10 years.
And we can now empirically prove that if you invest into into
professionalization of your planning practices right, then
this adds to your performance, to your growth, etc.
So it has a clear impact on your organizational performance.
And if you now trim that down a bit and if you would make the
profession of a futurist more tangible, could you share with
me and the audience what you're currently working on and what
also your expectations are regarding tech and intelligence?
And maybe if you may and want to also provide a glimpse into the
future for you think the next big thing's going to be?
This is a this is a good one what keeps me awake right night.
So this is a core thing to structure all the things I stand
across every day. There are so many reports out
there and very good ones. You might have seen that World
Economic Forum two years ago they founded the Global
Foresight Network. I'm also participating in and
UNESCO has the futures literacy chairs at university.
So a lot of studies and very helpful reports are being
published and they all have certain assumptions, right, and
network thinking and they come up with single point forecast
estimates. When is something mature?
What about adoption rates? And the timing is also the
critical one. So if you see put them, and I've
done this, put them on on a timeline, you can see that
there's a lot of discussion centering around when AI will
reach human level, right? Artificial general intelligence,
etcetera. Some proclaim this is in the
year 2045, Others state this is happening earlier.
It's it has also cultural component.
If you ask this in Asia, they usually tend to see this earlier
than 2045. N Americans have proven in in
most recent research they they expect this to happen later.
If you ask very visionary people, they would even say next
week or next year, yeah. So this there's also cultural,
normal cultural thing that we have to consider.
But I think the whole thing of artificial intelligence and the
work with agent and agent ecosystems, yeah, this is
accelerating very fast. Yeah.
So I, I could even see that in the next months, we would
probably eliminate the out of office mail and have our, our
own personal AI copy responding. If somebody wants something, he
or she can just speak to my personal AI copy and my avatar
might be able to answer already some of the superficial
questions. And I'm very frequently asked,
Haiko, you're doing this every day, right?
So from your perspective, what's the next big thing, right?
And over the past 10 years and even more, we've seen the smart
classic smartphone, right? And the question is, are we now
entering an era of augmented computing?
I think so. So there's a lot of debates
going on about smart glasses, right?
So they might even be from their weight, 100 grams.
So quite light in the future. And I really see a renaissance
of city centres. Why?
Because if I'm wearing in the future, if I'm wearing smart
glasses, the city, the city centre looks every day, every
hour, it looks differently. So you have all those promotions
then going on and you have a second layer, yeah, from
infrastructure and notifications and things popping up in front
of you. So I believe that this is will
be a game changer and how we how we go through environments and
experience them. There were also came across
several cases of ADN solutions with AI in science.
So this will be a tremendous push artificial intelligence for
for how we understand science and how we innovate from physics
experiments, we we can see that they are the experimental is
graphical, yeah, but we cannot explain the outcome how the how
this this worked. So they do now reverse
engineering in order to find an explanation for the phenomenons
going on there. And this, this might be a true
case in the future that there are certain innovations explain
things happening, working in science which at once we cannot
explain, right. So I I think this is also a big,
big change for science. And one of the big changes that
is in one of the reports that you co-authored, you describe a
sequence so-called fake news, fake reality, fake futures.
Can you explain that, Shane? Because it sounds quite drastic
and at the same time it also represents something that's much
like much deeper as a societal context and also in the way of
how we form reality overall in essence.
Yeah. So this is a very specific
report. Yeah, it's called fake futures
and we really looked at fake news, the digital identities and
the tech space. Yeah, virtual words and how they
change our interaction, the positive things, but also the
challenges. Yeah.
And there there are certain examples for this phenomenon you
you are describing. It's like a chain from fake
news, right? There is some facts are being
created. It can be something like a
manipulated reporting or quite an unrealistic beauty standard
in social media. And this becomes somehow a fake
reality. Why?
Because it, it makes us believe that this has to be the norm and
we have to work towards this, right?
We have to change our appear, our our look and feel and to
respond to those images. And then this fake reality
becomes finally a fake future. So it's a paradox because fake
inputs don't stay fake, they solidify in the end in real
world outcomes. And to stick with this beauty
example, in social media, you see that then there are virtual
beauty full images and we have the virtual influencers.
Yeah. They create then a space or a
certain reality which permanently sticks to those
images which had initially been created as a manipulated word.
So this is the chain we we were describing there.
And this was also the point from where we entered our scenario
planning to develop scenarios of fake futures and do this along
different dimensions. Because if you, that's a very
classic scenario approach where you determine two key
uncertainties, right? And with those key
uncertainties, you set up a plot.
Yeah, a scenario canvas. And this is like a scatter plot
or a portfolio. And in our case, we said for the
future, it's important. There might be an extreme future
where we have a high trust in technology and society and the
state. Or on the opposite side on this
axis, there might be a strong mistrust in those things, right?
So we made this one of the key uncertainty axis, and the other
one is the perception of the world.
There might be 1 extreme poet which describes the only truth.
There's only one reality. Or we might end up in in a world
where we say it's all fake, right?
For certain reasons. And if you combine now those
extreme developments, right, you end up in 4 scenario quadrants.
So you combine a word of one reality and the one, only one
truth with trust in technology, the state and society.
Or you combine it with a fake word and a mistrust, for
example, and we ended up in 4 scenarios.
So it's a very iterative process, this really strong
process of research, but also a lot of interviewing, refinement
and quality criterion is that in the end, your scenario as you
describe, and each scenario might even take one A4 page,
right? So it's like a script where you
read into a story describing the future as if you were looking
back from this future. Yeah, this has to be very
consistent and plausible, right? Because if there's something not
consistent then you you spot this and it doesn't make sense.
And you've now touched upon like trust and mistrust scenarios.
And I'm always wondering what happens to trust leadership and
particularly also democracy, because I think democratic
values need to be guarded and also enabled through technology.
However, technology accelerates the creation of parallel truths
and also of the opportunity that they don't converge anymore.
How do you see that? And was that part of your
navigation of those future like predictions, derivations, future
outlooks? Yeah, it's as we discussed
before, the technology itself isn't good or bad.
It is rather an amplifier, an amplifier of of the situations
and we are experiencing. So I think we we are living in a
very powerful time where we can enable a lot of good things with
digital technologies. So this sharpens collective
understanding, can strengthen the participation, inclusion of
people and we can build on new trust architectures, right.
On the other side, it might also be a challenge right, to
maintain trust in such situations.
If misinformation is spreading at an unprecedented pace, these
are quite hard times. And it has two components,
right? Always see the historical
analogy from viruses and virus scanners.
And it's a race. It was a race already 10 years
and 15 years ago with technology and we experience now this now
with fakes and deepfakes. Yeah.
So there's a lot Everyday there are new applications, new apps,
technology being in place to spot deepfakes and fraud and to
avoid this and to protect you, right.
So take for good against tech which is used in a in a negative
way. This is the one situation using
tech yeah, to to counterfeit. On the other side, it's the
human aspect. So there has to be an
immunisation of us as human beings as well.
We have to think, we have to critically reflect.
We don't have must not be very naive in applications and things
we do right. And this cognitive immunisation
is critical thinking. It's really important in ongoing
technological times. So it's, it's in any, any of the
studies and reports coming out on skills, on future skills.
This is usually one of the top three right critical thinking.
And the interesting part is, and we also talked about that in our
pre conversation that we tend to negatify futures or we also tend
to look into the way of how those scenarios could be the
absolute like hard cut, also like negative impact.
And if you now talk about the way that we frame it, if you
talk about positive outlooks, why is it so hard for us to
infiltrate that into the movement and also see the
opportunities and the change and we'll also modify futures in
that regard? Yeah.
So first of all, it's, it depends on the context and the
situation we we are in. If you are.
Actually, I was just, you know, overstating.
Yeah, yeah. If you're in crisis times, then
this also effects you that you think more negatively.
Yeah. And some psychologists even say
the way you are looking into the future in general is a really a
personal subjective thing. And it's like a personality
trait. Yeah.
So you are tend to be a visionary person, being more an
optimist or others seem to more be more sceptical.
And then there are certain types who want to shape and to do
something now, right. So this is can be like a
personality thing, a personality trait.
There is been foresight science, there's a research strand and
it's called science fiction prototyping.
And some tech firms, they have even institutionalized this as a
tool, as a technique, right? So they use artifacts from
novels and from science fiction movies and literature and use
this as a very strong trigger to innovate and to foster tech,
tech innovation. So we've seen from Star Trek the
communicator. Yeah, with a strong image and
analogy to to the smartphone. We have seen the replicator,
which you can see in 3DS printing today.
The jetpack from NASA used to be on a comic cover.
Night Rider with David Hesselhoff.
Yeah, it's autonomous driving and conversational AI
communication. There are many of those examples
we tend to over estimate. Yeah.
So this might be a bias. If we, if we look at technology,
we many cases think this is going to happen the next two
years. But we see lobbyism against it.
And in many, many cases, if something becomes then a mass
technology, it takes time, right?
Sometimes more time than we at first, Lance, think it takes,
right. And Terminator and all those
science fiction movies. Yeah, we have those images in
our head and we tend then to project those futures as well.
This is why. And I know we come now to the
end of our episode, but I do have like 1 pressing question
that I definitely want to ask. And it's about the four
scenarios that you stretched and the mechanism that you just also
provided to us. Because I think it's so valuable
to see if you use that like mechanism or also the tool in
future thinking yourself. And was that part of like,
deriving the four scenarios of Age of Enlightenment, Infinite
History, Truth Machine, and the end of the story yourselves, or
how did you approach it? Well, as I said, you always
start with two key uncertainties about the future.
Then you define the extreme outcomes that they might have in
the future. You think black or white.
And then you combine those extreme outcomes into plausible
and consistent scenarios. And as you said, one of the
scenarios was the Age of Enlightenment.
Why? Because then we combine the one
truth, there's only one truth, together with trust in
technology. And just imagine we we have
device ecosystems on us, on our body.
Yeah, the smart watch, we might have a necklace with sensors and
a live stream at with the sense of word models and physical AI
into the machine. And then somehow an AI
governance has the potential right to take all those snippets
and pieces from the billions of people and combine this into the
one single truth. You see the same situation from
multiple angles. So this is the one scenario.
Then another one is infinite history.
It doesn't matter for for us. So maybe young people.
Then whether this is is a fake reality or whether this is the
true reality, we could see metaverse words emerging,
exploding. Billions of new words are being
created. Well, this is it fulfills our
desires in those virtual worlds, we can imagine and and see what
we what we like to experience. And then there might be the
third scenario word which describes something different.
There is a very absolute control of government or media
monopolies. So you have the one single
truth. And this comes from this such a
monopoly, right? And it's about an influencing
principle. So it's a very uniform world
where you have a mistrust in technology, but it's shaped by a
very strong monopoly, only one reality for all.
And the society in such a scenario is missed as a strong
mistrust, but it's also uniformly united, right?
And then there is a very crazy chaotic one.
This is the last scenario, right?
It's the end of the story actually, where you have an all
fake word. And this might be due to AI
spamming the word. Yeah.
Just imagine out of an AI, out of control, spamming all the
communication channels. And we have a strong mistrust.
And in such a situation, we cannot trust some information or
any information anymore. And it becomes that this is for
us, maybe then for us as humans, a new normal.
Yeah. So we are looking for protective
zones in such a scenario where we have off time and where we do
not use technology as extensive anymore.
So four different scenarios and the core question is always what
if? Yeah, the truth is probably
somehow in between. But scenario thinking helps you
to think out-of-the-box, right? And always to discuss things you
would normally not discuss. And that's also the purpose of
the fake future scenarios. Yeah, to extend our thinking, to
shape a debate and to get into a strategic conversation, as I
just said in the beginning of our talk.
I appreciate that so much and I would love to have you over and
like due time to also see if where we're headed and if we can
already derive off like some of the in betweens of all of those
scenarios. But for now, thank you so much
for sharing that. And lastly, and I do that with
every of my guests, we briefly have some in between moments.
These are short and intuitive reflections that I would love
for you to just answer in a word or a sentence from the top of
your mind. And I would want to start with a
statement. According to you, a future we
underestimate is. Set the power of AI to push.
Science and a risk that we misread.
Also linked to the scenarios that we are stumbling silently
into an autocracy so that the way that we might be manipulated
by agents and AI to live in a better way.
I need to do just a whole episode on that word, but thank
you for bringing that to the table.
And then thirdly, trust in 2023 fields like what according to
you? Renewable resource.
Very powerful, but it requires a constant cultivation.
And a word that you currently are in between.
Oh. Yeah, I'm talking a lot about
digital aura. In the future, if you have the
devices connected on your body, smart clothes, your smart watch,
your smart glasses, etcetera, then you have somehow a digital
aura. And if you connect to others,
then the agents behind are connecting and doing things.
Yeah. So this is this is something I'm
really into at the moment. Such great jump of pints.
Thank you so much for sharing those with you with us Haiku.
And thank you for joining the podcast episode.
I really appreciate it. Yeah.
Thank you very much. If much fun, much appreciate.