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Insights Unlocked
Imagining the future: Why leaders need more than vision to succeed with Lisa Kay Solomon
00:46:27
Discover how futures thinking and imagination can empower leaders to navigate uncertainty and design better outcomes with Lisa Kay Solomon.
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- [00:02]
Jason Giles
Welcome back to the Insights Unlocked podcast. In this episode we're joined by Lisa K. Solomon, futurist, educator and designer in residence at Stanford's D School. Lisa and host Jason Giles dive into how leaders can build resilience through imagination, scenario planning and long term thinking. It's a fascinating look at why anticipating change matters more than ever in today's world. Enjoy the show.
- [00:28]
Aaron Diocampo
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concepts to execution.
- [00:47]
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Aaron Diocampo, brand content production manager at UserTesting. Joining us today as host is Jason Giles, User Testing's vice president of design. Welcome, Jason.
- [01:00]
Jason Giles
Hello everyone. Good to see you, Aaron.
- [01:03]
Aaron Diocampo
Our guest today is Lisa K. Solomon. Lisa is a visionary strategist, bestselling author and designer in residence at Stanford's D School where she teaches futures thinking and helps leaders navigate the uncertainty with imagination and foresight. Known for her expertise in strategic design and leadership, Lisa co authored Moments of Impact and Design a Better Business and her work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review. Welcome to the show, Lisa.
- [01:31]
Lisa K. Solomon
Erin, thanks so much, Jason. Excited to be here with you.
- [01:35]
Jason Giles
It is such a pleasure to meet you. I'm really excited about our conversation today. So to kick it off, you have been helping leaders navigate uncertainty design better futures. As you look back on the past few years, what would be one of the shifts that you've seen on how leaders approach change and kind of what does that tell us about where we might be heading?
- [02:05]
Lisa K. Solomon
Love that softball opening, Jason.
- [02:07]
Jason Giles
I know, right?
- [02:11]
Lisa K. Solomon
Listen, I think the easiest place to start is of course Covid. I think looking back, we've just really had the five year anniversary of COVID Global pandemic that pretty much shut down the world over overnight. And that I think alerted leaders everywhere to just how vulnerable we are to abrupt disruption. And it's not like the leaders weren't dealing with uncertainty and complexity and ambiguity for years before. But I think that acute, non negotiable everything has changed for everybody, alerted all leaders across all industries and all sectors that this can happen. This sort of unimaginable future is only unimaginable if you don't allow yourself to imagine it. And I hope we get into the importance of imagination as a leadership skill because it's rare that we find an MBA program where many leaders come from that actually has a class on imagination or even ambiguity or Uncertainty. So I think the biggest surprise really marking five years ago. But of course that wasn't the only uncertainty that has come our way. There's lots to talk about regarding what happening on technology and global policy and in our environment. But I think that moment hopefully marked a wake up call for all leaders that it wasn't like we were just going to get through that pandemic and be done and go back to normal. We need to retool how we think about what is going to be our new normal.
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Jason Giles
Yeah.
- [03:44]
Lisa K. Solomon
And I'll just even put a finer point on it, Jason. I think about all the time about 10 years ago when we wrote Moments of Impact, which was really a guidebook to help leaders have conversations about the future, how to bring multiple perspectives together to discover the future so that they're not blindsided by the present. We opened up by defining this term vuca, that you hear quite a lot these days, which stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, coined by US military planners in the early 90s. And I often think like we thought we were VUCA then. This is like peak vuca. And one more point on that is that this today, whenever our listeners are listening, could be the most simple VUCA of days to come. So again, just pointing out that we can't expect the world to simplify. We have to adapt and change.
- [04:43]
Jason Giles
Yeah, that's really powerful. It's interesting because I think you've been at the D School for almost seven years, is that right?
- [04:52]
Lisa K. Solomon
That's right.
- [04:53]
Jason Giles
And so you're trying to like make a case for, hey, this is really important to think about and start planning for this and then you have this moment where it becomes very real very quickly.
- [05:04]
Lisa K. Solomon
Yeah, can I just build on that? I mean, so I've been doing, I've been doing scenario planning for over 20 years and design for almost 30. And it was a big revelation for me when I started to do scenario planning work with this wonderful organization called Global Business Network that no longer exists, but really was a gathering of some of the the big thinkers in scenario planning. Peter Schwartz, that did his scenario planning work at Shell, is now the head of futures at Salesforce. Stuart Brand, that created the Whole Earth catalog, started the Long Now Foundation. So huge thinkers in the movement of futures thinking created this firm called Global Business Network where I did my work. And it was a huge revelation for me to realize that designing conversations about the future was really a design practice around conversations towards the future. And when I was brought into the D School seven years ago, it was because our Executive director saw she had the foresight to see that increasingly we were going to be designing with new mediums like algorithms and other kinds of emerging tech. And so she brought me in to help infuse a futures lens to our already well established design practices. And that was a wonderful experience. But I will be honest to say, Jason, that most of my colleagues didn't really understand the work until the pandemic hit.
- [06:29]
Jason Giles
Right.
- [06:30]
Lisa K. Solomon
And then I ran an internal scenario planning exercise for my colleagues to say, wow, in this moment, March 2020, how should we, as a small community of teachers and program leaders, how should we be thinking about this moment of extreme uncertainty? And it helped us understand how we could support our students, for example, that abrupt in 24 hours needed to leave campus, many of them international. And I think that that opportunity to run the internal scenario planning process allowed my colleagues that I was working very closely to better understand exactly what I was doing, where I was like, oh, I get it now. And of course, in a scenario planning, as with a lot of strategic foresight practices, the goal is not to predict the future, but but is to unearth more robust moves we could do even amid that heightened uncertainty. And so from that, for example, one of the things that we did was realize, wow, we need to reach out to every single one of our students. That's something that was in our control even though the uncertainty of the pandemic was not. So all of that is to say, I think that was a turning point, even internally, for my colleagues to be like, oh, wait a minute, this is really helpful.
- [07:48]
Jason Giles
Oh, totally. You know, you work a lot with businesses and think about, you know, how to influence leaders. I also know that you work with educators, which I think is amazing. Could you just kind of outline some of the core skills that you are basically teaching to have this thinking about these future states?
- [08:10]
Lisa K. Solomon
Yeah, it's a great question, Jason. And I often even get from my family, what do you do? What do you do? So I get that it's fuzzy, and I really try to have a lot of empath for leaders that really want to be better prepared for the inevitable, more uncertain futures ahead of us, but really haven't had the training. And so I try to even design my own design work. I know that's a little meta, but really try to make it pragmatic and not filled with jargon. So you can check my jargon here, Jason. Okay.
- [08:39]
Jason Giles
Okay, I'll call you on.
- [08:40]
Lisa K. Solomon
But the first thing I'll often say is, I'll say, okay, let's say I have a group of 30 leaders in the room, or 300 leaders, whatever it is. I'll say, okay, show of hands. How many people here have taken a class in history? Now, inevitably, everybody's hand goes up. And often there's masters in history, PhDs. It's a known discipline, it's built into our core curricula, often wherever you are in the world. And then I say, okay, great. How many people here have taken a class in futures? Maybe maybe 1%, maybe a little like hand to the chin, like, kinda. And then I say, well, which one of those can we influence? And then it goes, what? Wow. So a couple things in that one is what I'm trying to say is it is not your fault if you have not gotten exposed to some of these practices that again, are not about predicting the future, but about helping us have a more proactive and positive stance towards the future. So how do we learn those practices? Just like we learn how to do some other things, not only studying history. And by the way, I should say citing note, some of the best futurists are historians. Mostly because history, when taught well, teaches us to be better critical thinkers, teaches us to find patterns, to understand context. Right. When we look at an artifact from the history to do it well, it's not like an artifact in this present moment. It was what was available at that moment, which is also a form of perspective taking of that moment or in empathy for where people were also understanding what were the anthropological elements happening in that. So what did society look like? So again, all of these things help us travel back in time. Those same things can help us project the future based on unfolding trends of today. So put more simply, when I try to teach futures at its baseline, I try to say, listen, we cannot predict the future, as I've said, but we can be better at anticipating it. So this notion of anticipatory leadership. Oh, what does that mean? Well, that means looking at trends not at its face value, but as a baseline to say, if that's the probable future. How might we expand that to think about possible futures? Well, what helps us think about possible futures? Oh, the practice of imagination. Again, how many leaders are like, wow, I really loved my class on daydreaming at my mba. That really made me a much more adaptable leader. So what I'm trying to do is really break down the barriers for understanding that in many ways these gifts that were bestowed to us as human beings are exactly the kind of thinking processes we need to unleash in this moment of heightened uncertainty and ambiguity. And then what I'll do is I'll take, take them through a number of different modalities to get them to practice. So whether that's rapid fire scenario planning, which we can do by just identifying trends that are in plain sight, projecting them out, exploring what the world might look like and how that might open up a gap of opportunities or vulnerabilities from where we are today, or even a basic futures implication wheel where we'll take a single trend in front of us and we'll just build that out about first order implications, second order implications, third order implications, to go from the known to the unknown, not to critique it, but to become more aware of the surface area and things we need to research. So there's a lot more we could add into there. But those are just some baselines of how do we get more comfortable with anticipation, more comfortable with imagination. And then the last one is more comfortable with our agency in bringing something to life, even if all the information is not available to let us know if we're going to be successful or not.
- [12:50]
Jason Giles
That's fascinating. And I think what's interesting is because of your background also in design, when you think about coupling this projection into a possible future, it must allow you then to then, well, if this is one possibility, what is the opportunity here? Hence the agency, what are the risks there? So can you talk a little bit about some of the practices or something practical that a team might do in that context of, okay, so we've done this exercise, we see this kind of potential state. What do we do with that?
- [13:27]
Lisa K. Solomon
Yeah, it's a great question, Jason. And I think for me, when futures is embedded into leadership teams, what it really means is that they've learned how to learn forward, that they are again learning how to live in the future and come back and say, what are the implications? And they're not doing that in an episodic moment when they do a scenario planning and they're like, okay, here are the four scenarios. Just like we do a strategic plan and then it sits on the shelf and we feel like we get a check mark because we've done it. No, what we're doing is we're heightening our sensitivity towards looking for those early signals or something that looks a little anomalous. I'm like, oh. And then the activity is, wait, let me go call that. Let me go learn. Let me go see that. That. William Gibson, who's a famous science fiction writer, has often said, the future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed. And so the Question is, how do you go and visit that future if it's already here? And that's about your relationships, that's about your tenacity, that's about your willingness to go where the action is and visit. Which is why many years ago when the first kind of tech bubble was on its rise in Silicon Valley, you would see these influx of global leaders to come to Silicon Valley, as if they could sort of get me some of that innovation just by being. If I just visit the HP garage, that'll come back changed. No, I think it takes like identifying like what were those conditions? How might you adapt it back to your organizations? And this is where, Jason, to make it even more concrete, why I love teaching classes because I get to really break down what these disciplines are. For many years I've taught a class called Inventing the Future. And the idea is to teach these students these various modalities and methods of touching the future, whether it is scenario planning or challenging assumptions, or really trying to extrapolate the legal or ethical boundaries of an emerging tech by exploring what the longer term implications are. But my favorite part that always makes it more real. And a leadership team listening to this could do this, is we'll identify an emerging tech, let's say it's lab grown meat or something, or materials that learn concrete, for example. Then we say, okay, say let's project out 30 years, some like far stretch. And we'll say, let's now have a debate around the utopian and dystopian possibilities of how this emerging tech might unfold. Not a prediction, but let's do some world building where we have a group of four being like, listen, this is the future. This is the utopic future of unlimited energy. And then a dystopian team will say, this is the dystopic future of unlimited energy. Which is surprising. Like what? There's a downside. And again, the purpose is not to predict but to unearth assumptions that we might have been overlooking or the interconnectedness of how different layers of a society might unfold to better visit that future. And my favorite part about that is not only the creativity of what the students do, but we often invite an expert in the field to come and listen to the debates and then they give their own critique and observations about what's unfolding now. And I think almost without fail, the expert often walks away with new questions. Which is my favorite, you know, they're like, oh, I never thought of it that way.
- [16:57]
Jason Giles
As you were talking, I was thinking like, okay, if I'm going into a room of leaders and trying to facilitate a conversation like. Like versus going into a classroom. I could almost imagine that possibly in a classroom they're more comfortable with allowing themselves to go into that space or think about is that the experience or is that kind of an assumption I just would throw on it?
- [17:21]
Lisa K. Solomon
Yes and no. I would say when you go into a classroom of younger students who are actually some of the best futurists around, yes, unfortunately, Jason, at least this is true in North America. And a lot of the circles that I work in, education has gotten quite narrow. And unfortunately, a lot of education systems are designed towards right answers because those are easily measured and the measurements are then easily evaluated. That then allows you to understand acceptances to college and even college, and particularly at a university like Stanford where CS majors and computer science and engineering are very strong. They're very problem set oriented. And so students are very much geared towards performance versus stretch. And so one of the gifts of a classroom environment, of course, is to make the invitation to say, look, if you're going to take an elective class like Inventing the Future, or a class I'm teaching now called View from the Future, which is where we bring in industry experts on the edges of their fields to help expose students to a wider range of how these industries are emerging, the most important thing that I can do as an educator is to create the conditions to take those risks to stretch. And so when I say on opening day, look, this is not your problem solving class. This is a class for you to stretch. This is a class for you to make, to get more comfortable with being uncomfortable. About 50% of the students are like, yes, this is what I've been waiting for. And another 50% are like, who's this crazy lady? I don't know what she's talking about. Is she for real? Can I trust her? That has so not been my experience and that just breaks my heart. Because we've conditioned these beautiful minds to be more connected, conforming versus more divergent. And then, guess what? We lack imagination. And even worse, we outsource these disruptive ideas to a small few versus democratizing them to many. And my favorite part and why I love teaching so much is at the end of a quarter when we ask them to reflect on their experience and we say we do it because there's no metric on imagination really, or transformation. So we say, look, do a simple reflection. I used to think and now I think. And my favorite is when they say, I used to think that imagining the future was a Gene like talent only for a select few. And now I think I have what it takes to practice and get better at this. And when you hear that, you think, yes, this is about practice. This is about flight hours. You know Malcolm Gladwell famously said, right, we need 10,000 hours. Well, if we're starting at zero hours, we can make a dent in that.
- [20:10]
Jason Giles
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so then how does that compare? So I think about your characterization of how we or maybe educating our young. But then as you're talking, I'm thinking about leaders who are also focused on short term deliverables. They're thinking about the here and now, maybe an 18 month product roadmap. How do you, how do you get them in that place where they can start thinking about or incentivize them to kind of dream?
- [20:43]
Lisa K. Solomon
Jason, that is such an important question and such a layered question. And I will say 10 years ago when we wrote Moments of Impact, we actually have a whole chapter towards the end called yeah, buts overcoming the yeah, like yeah, but that would never work here. And we identify three patterns within almost every organization that creates in some ways a best case scenario, a reluctance to do this longer term exploratory thinking and in most cases, frankly, antibodies for like, listen, we don't have time for that. Nice to have, not need to have. And the three are first of all exactly what you name. This short term is right, that all of our metrics and planning at best are around three to five year strategic plans. And then we break them down. Okay, great. Well, what are your annual targets? Okay, what are your KPIs and your OKRs? Okay, what did you do this quarter? What are your results? How do we atomize that and measure it? Because that gives us a sense of comfort. So our institutions are organized for that. So that's the biggest one that you're asking about. The second one, as we've been talking about, we've never been taught how to do that. This. So okay, let's say that there's these systems in place, but we also know that these skills are important. What if we don't really have those skills to even pull on? And then the last is that we have political competition in place. And by here I don't mean the polarization I'm talking about, I'm talking about the fight for resources, the fight for talent, my team, my initiative. So that creates competition as opposed to the collaboration. So what we say for leaders to learn how to take a futures orientation, a longer lens, which there are some strategies on how to do that the ability to create a culture that rewards learning, that rewards growth, not necessarily only performance and getting right answers, and that we create the conditions for people to build this capacity. Right. To be stronger in doing that, that turns that do loop. Right. When you have the short termism, politics, capability, gaps in play, you get a disruptive moment like Covid, oh my gosh, it goes to. You're scrambling at best versus a learning org that has the robustness that not only has the capability to really work with a challenging problem, but to get stronger as a result. So I think obviously there's a lot of work to do there, but that would be the hope. But getting back to your core question about how do we take a longer lens? I think it takes someone that is able to incredibly say, this is why it's important to take a longer lens. This is why it's important to. Here's a great metaphor. Think like a good ancestor. One of my absolute favorite books that I recommend all of our listeners to explore is Roman Krasnarik's the Good Ancestor that came out a couple years ago. He is a beautiful writer talking about the importance of what he says, having a legacy mindset, really thinking as a seed planter. Again, very hard to do when you're working in org that supports it. But then we could sort of say, well, what are some other examples of longer term thinking? You know, if we take a look at John F. Kennedy's first moonshot speech is a great example in 60s, early 60s says we got to put a man on the moon in the next decade. Now, even if he lived and was not tragically assassinated a decade he would have been out of office. Right. So this, even if he was elected a second term, so this ability to put a courageous longer term idea out there and then catalyze diverse groups to work towards it for a larger purpose, that's the kind of leadership that we're learning, that we're looking towards.
- [24:44]
Jason Giles
Well, and that's a certain type of leader who is interested in that kind of long term impact that they have. And I think that's a. It must be very cool to work with folks, folks like that who are reaching out to you and being like, look, I think that there's an opportunity or for. For much broader impact long term thinking.
- [25:07]
Lisa K. Solomon
Yeah. And Jason, I'll give you another like big example. I've. I've the great privilege of recently joining the board of an organization that was started about 26 years ago called the Long now foundation by Stuart Brand, who famously created the whole Earth Catalog. And the Long now foundation is dedicated to long term thinking. So again, for those listeners interested in this, they have a treasure trove of talks of various long term perspectives to long term, about time, about society, about biology. And the Long now foundation was created in part to help fund the creation of a 10, 10,000 year clock that is nearing completion after 25 years. And the idea behind the 10,000 year clock was to spark the imagination in a bold but concrete way of what we're capable of. So again, I think that there's lots of ways in to wedge open a longer term conversation. But it really starts with the leader recognizing why it's important and why it's important to do when we feel so strapped for time, when we feel like we're on the back foot. And then the last thing which is worthy of mentioning, and it's coming up more and more in my classes and right now I'm teaching a class called View from the Future. Where we're getting to hear from a lot of different perspectives of visionaries across different industries is the importance of carving out time and the importance of being intentional about our attention. So this idea that our attention span, not just our incentives and the short term is, but now attention is the most sought after marketplace and we have companies that are monetizing our attention and are getting rewarded for splicing it in the smallest amount that is totally destructive to long term thinking and the ability to focus and hold onto a big idea. So there's again, there's a lot of work to do, but the good news is people are actually naming it as an issue. There's some great scholarship around it. Gloria. Mark, for example, it's just one of the many scholars that are very focused on attention.
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Jason Giles
Yeah. When I listen to you and I've also done read some of your great articles and stuff, there is a sense of optimism that kind of comes through. I think you talk about this, I think you mentioned it earlier around restoring the sense of agency when we think about the future. And I find that incredibly exciting and powerful. And I feel like, you know, coming. I'm a, I'm a designer by trade, by heart and I think about the importance of inspiring a vision for what could be and how it unlocks creativity as well. You know, one of the tools that we bring to the table is prototyping, you know, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the role of prototyping in this future casting.
- [28:17]
Lisa K. Solomon
I'm so glad you brought that up, Jason. Yes, yes and yes. And thank you for sharing that. You have felt a sense of optimism in the writing that is intentional. I try in the way I teach, in the way I write, to be grounded in my optimism. Not a Pollyanna Positivity person, but someone that reminds us all of the wider range of choices that we have. And even in acknowledging that is about hopefully getting people to rethink what they can do. And just put a little note in that. Just yesterday in my class, View from the Future, we had Dana Cowan, who is a food icon. This woman literally invented the idea of celebrity. She. She was the editor in chief of Food and wine for over 20 years. As she said when she took it over, it was like a pamphlet. But she took her own background and realized there was so much storytelling to be done about these chefs and food and were they. And you know, fast forward to where we are. She said at the same time, the Food Network was just emerging. And, you know, my gosh, it's not even just an industry, it's an aspiration. And then she took some time off and now she just launched a new initiative, initiative called Progressive Hedonist. And that is her attempt to ignite agency among anyone that loves food, to do that in the form of finding joy in a dinner party, in a potluck, and in that igniting a sense of what we can do against this enormous challenge called climate change. So all of this is to say, I think that there are a number of fellow travelers that are not just trying to shake their optimistic pixie dust about, just feel better, it'll be fine. But no, being like, here are micro moments, here are ways that we could actually come together to make a difference. Small differences make a larger difference. And even that, getting back to your question, is a prototype. I don't know how we're going to fix climate change, but I know that we can bring something new to bear, even if we don't know if it's going to be successful. But that action of trying will help us learn something. And the action of action will make us feel better than sitting there and waiting. And this is where for years, Jason, before even I started teaching at the D School, I taught at the California College of Arts in their MBA in design strategy. And that was a revelation to me around the power of design to be this leadership force, in part because designers are more comfortable asking new questions, coming up with a hypothesis and then giving it form, not waiting for months until the statistically significant market research firm validates. And I know they're like, how quickly can I get Some data on that. How quickly can I create a prototype? What is the most important thing I need to test and learn from so that it can inform the next rev. So there is, you have cycles of experimentation and learning and gathering data because best practices don't exist in the future, so we have to invent them. And so that practice of designing for the intent of advancing is critical.
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Jason Giles
Well, and it's so interesting now you're speaking my language, right? Like, prototype, get feedback rapid. It's so often. So I'm in digital design predominance, definitely have been for a long time now. And we talk about this kind of agile mindset of like, let's put something out there and get this kind of feedback loop so that we can kind of adjust. And so often we don't apply that to some of the problems that we're trying to solve here. And I think, you know, are there, like, do you have examples of how you might have build some feedback loops into some of these, these prototypes or innovations for yourself?
- [32:19]
Lisa K. Solomon
Oh, my gosh, yes, Jason. And, and it's true, like, you know, it is always funny to me how designers kind of get used to doing it across a different process. Like, hey, we need to redo our website, or we need to create a mobile app, or, okay. Versus, like, hey, we need to figure out what our hedge is against a potential recession. Oh, well, okay. What are the. You know, in many ways, scenario planning is a form of prototyping. You're prototyping how the world might unfold, but it's really based on looking at trend analysis or inputs. And even calling things out as a prototype is a helpful way of acknowledging that we're just trying on new ways of how something might unfold. And again, designers, the ability to give it form a concreteness taps into another foundational human operating mechanism, which is our wiring for visualization. Right? Like, we take in way more information visually than we do by word or even by language. And so it's always interesting to me that someone is like, oh, that's a great idea. Can you write a memo? Versus like, oh, that's a great idea. Can you show me the picture? And again, hopefully, designers and really all leaders are now using some of the new tools that are available to create visualizations to foster learning, learning to foster faster advancement of the idea. So I think that there's a lot of opportunity. But I'll give you just a very concrete example, Jason. Last year I've been doing a lot of work around civic futures. May have noticed we're not having the most robust democracy these days. Yeah, I never felt ever the tinkerer. Right. I mean, I don't want to just teach classes. I also want to learn myself. I've been asking for, for the last five years across a number of different initiatives, what might design or the discipline of futures thinking, what might that offer strengthening our civic communities, how we think about civic engagement. And last year I brought together about 150 people at Stanford for an event called the Future's Civic Edition. Because of course, the future is happening. And what I noticed was again, this sort of from a futurist standpoint, so much of the conversation was around repair, defend being distraught, feeling like agency was being removed, and for good reason. I mean, I understand that, I'm not downplaying that, but my point of view, and maybe that's this optimism coming through is just negating the bad stuff will not get us to that longer term future of where we want to be. So somebody had to carve out space to say, well, what if this goes right? How do we celebrate the bright spots that are unfolding today in order to inform the kind of tomorrow that we actually want to be a part of? So I created this gathering of what I call democracy makers, movers and multipliers. So makers were folks that were doing innovative things around civic engagement, whether it was amplifier art that use uses art as a way of galvanizing connection and learning experiences. Or Shemichael Hallman, who is the director of civic health for the Urban Libraries council. He oversees 2600 public libraries, which in many ways is still the beacon of where trust actually resides. And think about the power of space and place in these communities we brought together. This is one of my favorite ones ones, an incredible new professional sports league called Athletics Unlimited, which is focused on women's sports, softball, volleyball, basketball and lacrosse. And they have a new business model where they're infusing civic engagement into their athletic model, where they will match. If an athlete has an organization that they're passionate about, about, they will match funding. So all of these movers and shakers that didn't quite know about each other, right, these were the makers. And not only did I have them there, I celebrated them. I created these huge posters, the Democracy Makers. And instead of just being like this is Athletes Unlimited. We designed them intentionally to have a future focused question, right? How might professional sports contribute to a thriving civic community? And before anyone could say, ugh, that would never happen, we're like, well, here it is and here's the QR code. Now, no one told me to do that. These were not sponsored. This was me noticing. Across the broad ecosystem called our civic society were all of these incredible innovators that could benefit from knowing each other. So those were the makers, the movers were teachers. We had K12 teachers there, we had higher ed, we had community leaders there. And the multipliers were funders or network conveners. And the whole idea was to come together to share stories of possibility for a longer term lens of what better civic futures could look like. It was magical, Jason, and I'm delighted to say that there's a whole website that people can take a look at, including all those posters called Futures happening dot com. And I'll just share one final thing that happened again. All of this was, was prototyping, by the way. We're just making it up. I had the mayor's wife of a city in New Mexico, Albuquerque, call me up and say, Lisa, I've been following your stuff on LinkedIn. It's incredible. We know the fall is going to be filled with lots of very tense civic engagement before the election. We want to infuse civic imagination and joy into as many of them as possible. How do we learn from your futures happening to create it in our communities? And that inspired me to be like, you know what, let's create a playbook. So I created a civic imagination playbook that's also available for free to provide guidelines for anyone, school teachers, community leaders, coaches, to infuse better moments of real connection and authentic joy, joy into what they're doing. If you're gathering, gather more joyfully. And now that's available for anyone.
- [38:43]
Jason Giles
I, I love that. And congratulations. That is, that's pretty cool. Wow, time has flown. All right, so you teach a class called Inventing the Future and so it encourages students to imagine and design for long term possibilities. How could a business leader apply that same mindset to their customer experience, especially when all these short term metrics are dominating their decision? What are some practical things that me as a leader can start doing now that helps me kind of maybe change my mindset a little bit more?
- [39:26]
Lisa K. Solomon
Yeah, it's a great question, Jason. And I think first of all, it starts with saying, hey, this matters and I'm going to out allocate some time to it. You know what I often say is we can't become expert at anything if we don't allocate practice time. That's just like I wasn't born knowing how to make a spreadsheet. Were you? I don't know I had to learn and then I had to practice and then I had to get some coaching. And you know, same with public speaking, same with, you know, so, so really saying like, wait a minute, this matters. And then there's a number of ways you can do it. You can allocate, start to allocate. Let's, let's just say, let me, let me just siphon off an hour a week, let me find an hour a week, start working on longer term things. So that might be reading some new things and sort of whether, starting with trend reports and saying, wait, how might that apply to what I'm doing? Let me give you an even more practical example. This is one of my favorite assignments in inventing the Future. We typically teach it in the winter. So January of course is when all the forecasts for the years come out. And so last year in 2024, somebody, not me, organized over 250 trend reports into a single Google folder. It was like future of travel, future of wine, future of VR, future of AI, future. And I mean like people have done amazing work that's already available for you. When I started doing this work, you had to do the trend report. Now you can just take one. And so this is just something that every leader can do. This was the assignment. Go find a trend report. Pick anyone that interests you, your topic of interest, interest, and look at that trend report. And I want you to do three things. One is identify a trend or signal within that report and talk about why it's important and why it's important in the context of your own work. The second one is I want you to find a trend that you thought was silly, that was like off or weird or surprising, and then reflect on why it might not be. And the third is to try to identify something that was missing. Missing again, to make sure that we're not getting sucked into these experts, that they are the only ones looking right. So what we're trying to do in that assignment, of course, is widen up the scope of how to think about it and at the same time deepen the thinking and apply it. Any leader could do that, right? Just go on LinkedIn, there's like a trend report a day. The purpose is to apply it and to say, wait a minute, are we prepared for this? What would happen if this were to come true in the most extreme, extreme form, how would that change our business? What would we do for our customers if we knew that that was the future? What would we invest in? And at the very least, who should we start talking to? Right now, what should we be following more closely? So at least you are planting the seeds for how to take advantage of it.
- [42:01]
Jason Giles
Well, and I imagine because just even as you talk, I'm like, oh my gosh. And I'm feeling some gears grind a little and this, this must. And then immediately I think, think this is another muscle. Right? You're developing another muscle. And so practical ideas like that just. I'm so glad we're recording this because now I can go back and oh, I'm so glad you've been taking notes.
- [42:24]
Lisa K. Solomon
And it's so rewarding too. I mean, I. Gosh, you know, Jason. And this is, look, selfishly, it's my own personal resilience strategy to work with these young people who then come back and tell me how it's changed their lives, how that gear, changing that. And by the way, it's often just like uncomfortable. We have them keep a futures portfolio for their weekly assignments. So just the way that we've run class, we'll introduce a couple of different tools or methods and then we ask them to apply it to something out of class to give them more flight hours, more practice time and then reflection, which is so critical. And then they have this living library of what they've done. But I love it when students come back to me a year later, several years later, and they say, you know, Lisa, I just did this summer internship in Japan with the government and they're really worried about their aging population. And even though I'm still a student, they had me working on this really important thing about how do we support our seniors. And normally I'd be like, I don't know. But then I thought about the futures wheel and so I put that in the middle and I tried to use that as maybe the highest impact thread that I could start to work on. And then that gave me direction and then I took the next step and then I prototyped it and then I challenged bunch of assumptions and all of a sudden they're the ones that are a getting the return offer and they're creating value and they just. That to me is the flywheel of better. And I think that's what I'm after.
- [43:44]
Jason Giles
That is amazing. I mean, investing in the future leaders, right? Like such a rewarding investment. We could talk for hours. I'm sure if folks wanted to find out out more about you've got your fingers in so much so more about all that you're doing or around other more practical resources that we can use to like start our practice and really think about how we enable both ourselves, our businesses, our teams to embrace this kind of more futures thinking what's the best way to learn more?
- [44:23]
Lisa K. Solomon
Thank you so much Jason for asking a question. I think think the place to go right now is LinkedIn because that's the easiest place where I'm trying to post, for example, weekly summaries of our View from the Future class. We have rock stars coming in and they share the most amazing things. And we're just in week three. First week was Mike Maples Jr. Talking about pattern breakers. He's a legendary VC. Last week was on AI platform. So go to my LinkedIn because that's the best I can do right now. You're right, I've got my hands on lots of things so that's the best I can do right now. I'm not on all the platforms. LinkedIn is the primary one for more resources. I actually have a class on LinkedIn called Leader as Futurist and I really encourage people to do that. I think we've had over 125,000 people take the class since it's a lot of practical tools there. And then I will be when I finally maybe don't know while I'm still teaching, but I do hope to get a substack out there so I have a little bit more of a lasting legacy of some of these articles and a redo of my website which is coming so, so soon, which is lisaksolomon.com but right now LinkedIn is the best place to go.
- [45:32]
Jason Giles
Amazing. Thank you both for the conversation, but for also the work that you're doing. It's very inspiring. I've been looking forward to having this conversation all week, so it was a real thrill for me. Thank you once again. It was a pleasure and and the best to you on all your continued endeavors.
- [45:51]
Lisa K. Solomon
Thank you Jason. That was great, great fun.
- [45:55]
Aaron Diocampo
Want to keep the conversation going? You can find the show notes@usertesting.com podcast if you haven't already. Don't forget to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast or Google Play so you never miss an episode. And if you enjoyed today's show, please share it with a friend or leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And until next time, this is Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing.