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The Future of Work Starts Now: What You Do Today Shapes Tomorrow | Reanna Browne, Revisited
01:08:42
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- [00:04]
A
Eckhart Tolle. He has this beautiful quote, I hope I get it right. He says that the power for creating a better future is contained in the present moment. So we create a better future by creating a good present. And all futures work to me is about how do we create a good present and then thereafter a better future. And that is a big shift. It's a shift from saying this work is out there and down the track, I've got more important things to do to saying we never get there. It happens via action in actions. How do we keep the lights on and think about creating a good present, a more viable present?
- [00:43]
B
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. This episode with futurist Rhianna Brown influenced my work and the work here at Work for Humans by giving hope that it's possible to keep driving toward a better world, even when current events may make it feel like we're moving backward. One of the first things Rhiannon will tell you is that the future does not exist. It's not some fixed thing out there waiting for us to arrive. There's only the present. And the best way to create the future we want is by acting out that change right now. Rhianna is a trained futurist, former professional cricketer, and the founder of Work Futures, a global consultancy specializing in strategic foresight. She holds an MA in Strategic Foresight from Swinburne University and a postgraduate qualification from the University of the Sunshine coast in Australia. She's a leader in her field and has earned recognition as one of the world's top female futurists among her fellow practitioners. In this episode, Rhianna and I talk about the field of futures and foresight. What exactly is the job of a trained futurist, and what are the biggest misunderstandings that we have about the future? We also discuss how to act in the present to change what lies ahead, what led Rhianna to specialize in the future of work in the first place, and how she personally navigated the existential despair of that many futurists face, as well as the largest changes we see emerging in the field today and other topics. So make sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss on future episodes and to help the show grow. And now. I hope you enjoyed this deeply thoughtful conversation with Reanna Brown. Rhianna Brown, welcome to Work for Humans.
- [02:39]
A
Thank you, Dart. Pleasure to be here.
- [02:41]
B
So a lot of people use the phrase the future of work. Very few of the people who actually use that phrase are trained futurists like you are. And honestly, I don't really know what it means to be a trained futurist. And that's one of the things I want to understand when I'm talking to you today. But what I do know is that in conversations with you in the past, you surprise me more often and create more aha moments for me per word than almost anybody else I talk to. Your perspective is deep and it's clearly quite different. And you do specialize in a couple of different kinds of futures, but you do specialize in the future of work, and I want to dig into that today. What is the field of futures and foresight, which is the field that you are in? How does one train for it? And what is the job of a futurist?
- [03:38]
A
I feel like we've started with a very contentious question inside the field of how do you define the work? What is the work? What are the boundaries of the work? The way that I make sense of it, and I feel like, to be honest, it's an evolving idea, as it should be, is I distinguish the notion of futures and future studies as a research discipline. So I've studied future studies. And then we might hear the distinction with terms like strategic foresight, which for me is more about the application of those future studies methods by organizations and individual to help better prepare for, anticipate and shape change. So there's two distinct terms that are really often used interchangeably, but to me I think they mean something different. Defining what a futurist is is a really hard thing to pin down. I also run a podcast with a couple of friends called FuturePod and we interview futurists and we ask the very question, what do you think a futurist is? You know, how do you describe what you do to others? And I think it's the trickiest question of all when I think about. Richard Slaughter, who's a well known scholar in the futures field, describes the notion of three different types of futurists. And I think it's a really interesting way of thinking about the spectrum of the work that we do. So he talks about pop futurists. So superficial entertainment, very tech centric. I think a lot of people have experienced pop futures work. He then talks about this sense of a pragmatic futurist. So we might start using more empirical methods and training, but it's still a real focus on practicality and utility inside settings like corporate planning, organizations. And at the other end of that he talks about the idea of critical futures. So again, still an empirical basis, but that's the Biggest civilizational conversation where we challenge the status quo, address big fundamental issues and societal issues. And for me, I tend to swing between the last two. I do a lot of work inside organizations, but also I think a good futurist is also a good provocateur. We should be challenging and asking more elegant questions about the present and the way that we think about things. For me, when I think about the work of futures, we often split it into two things. There's people that tend to talk about the content, which is code for change. I think all futures work is always just about change, not managing it, anticipating it, navigating leveraging change. But I think there's another side to the work which I really love, which we might call more futures literacy. But for me, it's actually teaching people to think differently about the future. There's a distinct career changing moment many years ago when an executive said to me, I hope you're ready for Argy Baji, which is like an Australian term for confrontation in this executive workshop that I was running and I said, why? And he said, well, this is a really common dilemma. The head of finance is more likely to say, we can't change anything, we need to keep the lights on, we can't do anything differently. And we'll hear also from the head of strategy that says if we don't change, there will be no lights to keep on. And for me, that was a distinct moment to say that my work, although I do a lot of work around trends and signals and change, it's less about the content and trying to influence through an evidence base of what's changing. Because I just think people don't really do anything different. I think the acupuncture point is more upstream and say first we have to blow open how we think about the future and then that shapes how we think about these potential changes in the actions in the present. So a lot of my work, I think is really about changing perspectives, challenging how we think about things with the view of shaping how we act in the present. The last thing I'd say too is the most fundamental things that I think good futures work is about is agency and pathways. So we should be able to have conversations about existential challenges. Depending on the context, it could be climate, it could be concussion in sport. But for me, people should be able to leave with a sense of agency. They feel like they can influence the future and there is a pathway from the present to something more preferred from a training perspective. So I studied two post grad qualifications here at the Sunshine Coast University and Swinburne University Masters. Also some time in Finland, which is incredible because I think you're just born a futurist over there. It's not that novel. This is so implicit in how they see the world and understand things. So there is an academic discipline that you can study from, though. There's something really ironic in that in 2019 they closed a lot of the programs down in Australia. And kind of my assumption was that it was based on the notion that it was too boutique as a program, which is the most ironic timing ever, given what has ensued in the last three or four years.
- [08:34]
B
What are some of the misunderstandings that we have about the future? You say let's blow up how we think about the future. One of the things you've said to me in the past and to others is the future doesn't exist. What is that misconception? And are there others?
- [08:46]
A
Yeah, as I mentioned, I think the real acupuncture for this work is what I call unlearning. It's a clumsy term because it's not really unlearning, you're just learning, but it's just this sense of. I go back to that point and it's the underpinning principle. All my work. When we change how we think about the future, we change how we think about action in the present. And that's the frame of any piece of work I do. You have to go through this unlearning experience with me. And a lot of it is based on challenging these core assumptions. So there's a few that come to mind. Firstly, we usually see the future as some kind of an end state. You know, it's something objective. The future of work is everyone's remote or we arrive at some end state, or it's some kind of technology. But I use the quote often of Jim Dader that you mentioned that the future of anything, it doesn't exist. So there's no future facts because the future hasn't actually happened. So we can't really predict the future in a way, but we can imagine it and shape it in the present. So when we're talking about the future of work, let's say what we're actually talking about are our ideas and images of a time later than now. Part of the provocations then is whose ideas and images are they? And I talk about the notion of the politics of the future, right? So those with the loudest voices shape images of the future, and then thereafter they shape us. Who's not in the room. I always use this provocation that when we're talking about, let's say, the future of work, who are the loudest voices and what future are they shaping and how neatly does it align to the services that they provide today, for instance. So that's a big one, this sense that the future doesn't actually exist. There are no facts, so we can't speak about it from a sense of facts. The only bit of data we have on the future is data on what's happened in the past and what's happening today on a particular topic. And the other bit of data that we totally underestimate, that I think has more influence over how actions occur, is the ideas and images that we have about the future, the assumptions that we have that then shape our action in the present. For me, I feel like it took a master's degree and over 10 years in this space to get this one tiny sentence, is that the future isn't actually out there. And then the future of work, let's say it never arrives because we're always in the present. And yet all of our logics and decision heuristics, if you think about the way we plan even our own lives, let alone inside organizations, we talk about medium term and long term and short term, and those terms are still relevant. But when we talk about the long term, we're talking about something that's out there and then. But of course, we never get there because we're always in the present. I feel like my brain is totally unlocked in that moment. So for me, the big realization is that the future hasn't happened. We have some agency, but also that it's shaped by our actions, action and inaction today. So the things that we do today of course shape our future. But I'd say equally, the things that we don't do shapes our future. Every time I think about my own career, right? Every time I think I'm too busy to do that, I call it the tyranny of the urgent. I'm too busy to do that because I've got all of this stuff going on over here. That's a decision towards a particular future, which I think is a really provocative one that brings a bit of change, energy to people when they hear it. Also, the sense of the future doesn't happen to us. It hasn't happened yet. So we do have some capacity to shape the future. What I got really early in my career was a lot of notion and this sense that this work is about prediction and what might happen down the track is literally the questions of like that must be so interesting. But we've got important work. That speculative stuff must be interesting. For me, at least. The future is about action today. It's only ever about action today. Eckhart Tolle, he has this beautiful quote. I hope I get it right. He says that the power for creating a better future is contained in the present moment. So we create a better future by creating a good present. And all futures work to me is about how do we create a good present and then thereafter a better future. And that is a big shift. It's a shift from saying this work is out there and down the track, I've got more important things to do to saying we never get there. It happens by action and inactions. How do we keep the lights on and think about creating a good present, a more viable present? The other two that really quickly come to mind. Dart, is this the most common thing? I think Andy Hines has this line and he says that the future's not as fast as you think. And just this notion that change, I think, seems fast because we're not paying attention. And good futurists look at those bits of evidence of change, right? We're always looking at the pockets of the future and the present. So a good example of that might be automation is a really old idea coming from the Greek gods. AI is a very old idea. I think of examples of the notion of remote work feeling very new and trendy. IBM had 2,000 workers working remotely in the 80s. If we look back in time, change isn't necessarily as fast as we think. Part of the work is to say we're not paying attention probably just on that. This sense that when we talk about the future of anything, we tend to talk about it as a straight line. It's a projection of the present. We use the term the future in the singular. And one of the big flips for me is to say that the future doesn't happen in a straight line and that there's more than one future. There's a range of things that are possible, right? There's the futures that we project. But there's also futures that are probable, plausible, possible, even ridiculous. You know, things that we consider to be ridiculous are actually, in my view, probably the better indicators of what might likely be part of our future. So that last point to share is that back to Jim Dader, I tend to say, is that we instinctively dismiss the ridiculous because we don't think that that's probable. And Jim Dader talks about the notion that any useful statement about the future should at first appear ridiculous. Otherwise, we're projecting the present. The best way to get our heads around that notion that the future will likely appear ridiculous to us today is to look back in time and just like, I just can't believe we used to have those beliefs, you know, use that technology, whatever it may be. So that notion that the only time really that makes sense is the present, and how do we hold space for things that appear ridiculous to us today?
- [15:25]
B
That is a complete reframe. It is. You used a word which I'm going to misremember. It was something like micro activism. That's not exactly what it was. It was a statement that you used in. I think it was in Sydney. You were essentially saying, there is no future. The future's not there. Right. The future doesn't exist. All there is is now. And what we do right now. And what we do right now can be activism. Like in the micro action. Was that the word you used?
- [15:58]
A
I think I did, and I think it was, if I remember correctly, I think it was inside the context of talking about if the future never arrives, we're always in the present. How do we bring the future into the present? We're so busy. But I talk about this idea of small bets in a long game. So unless you're in a crisis and you have to radically change things, that's very different. But if you have a choice, of course we have to keep the lights on and continue the viability of whatever our own career, our lives, our organizations. But what are the small bets in a long game that we're taking? How are we looking to the changing environment around us and saying, if I'm thinking about work, how am I looking at the changing environment of work? Whether that's technology, whether that's shifts in social attitudes, a whole bunch of other things. And what are the small bets I can make in the present? What's one thing I can do come Monday? That's another one of my bents as a futurist. And I have a background in org design and workforce strategy and development. And I got really interested in the futures space. I used to find it really interesting, but never important. And I just thought that the action space, what we do come Monday, is actually the most powerful part of futures thinking. How do we tie threads from that's interesting to that's important. How can I actually do a thing? And I use that analogy of thinking about a plane on a trajectory that changes by one degree and it may end up somewhere fundamentally different. I mean, the fact that I'm an academically trained and professional futurist and have been working in this space for 10 years. Really boils down to one coffee that I had a long time ago. I was working as a public servant in the top end of Australia. I now live in Melbourne, the other end of Australia. And a futurist came along by the name of Steve Tye, and he gave a presentation over breakfast. And I said, that's really interesting. Do you have time while you're here to have coffee? And he did. And for me, that was the small bet. And then the small bet that leads into a different position to make very different decisions. He then let me know that you can study this. And I said, well, maybe I'll look into the study and you can kind of see, right, how that trajectory changed over time. I think I used the term micro activism in the context of small bets when we were talking about gender equality. And through that conversation of there are a lot of women in the room, I was saying, what are you doing right now in terms of the micro actions of where you choose to work, how you speak to your children? A whole bunch of things. What are the small things that you're doing right now to shape a future that you want to be a part of? Because we're all inhabitants in these futures. You know, we talk about particularly the future of work as if we're not going to inhabit it. It's like, what do we want? Because we're going to be living in these futures. So let's actually have that conversation.
- [18:47]
B
I find that very empowering. I could bring the future into right now immediately just by knowing what I want the future to be. Recently I interviewed Meg Wheatley and she said some things about the future that really challenged me and made me feel pretty bad, honestly, which is, first of all, she's a very deep systems thinker. She's got a background in the sciences and she sees civilization as a system and she sees that system as having rules for how it progresses. And this is based upon the work of Tainter and Ophel and Lord, somebody who, I can't remember their name, who basically have looked at a lot of civilizations that have risen and fallen and said, there's a pattern and there's a duration. What's your perspective on that way of looking at what might be?
- [19:46]
A
Firstly, I love Meg Wheatley. She was such a big influence on my career. I think I mentioned that one of my favorite bosses early on, like 20 years ago, maybe longer in my career, put a Meg Wheatley book on my desk and said, read that I've really followed her work over time, and it's been interesting to watch her navigate the future as she moves through the future in the sense and how that shifted her perspectives. I go back to that notion that how we think about the future shapes how we act in the present. And there is a sense. There's this really infamous game, if you like, based on Fred Polak's work, created by a very good friend and mentor of mine, Peter Hayward, and he gets you to orient to the way that you think about the future. Are you optimistic? Do you think that people can influence things? Or I'm optimistic but think it's up to bigger forces. Or I'm pessimistic, but we can still act. Or I'm pessimistic and think there's no hope, we cannot act. And it's a really simple. Of course, it's a simple heuristic, but a useful one. And it helps us give a sense of an orientation and how that orientation shapes how we act in the present. And I give this example because I ask everyone in the room all of the time, you know, who puts their hands up and watching how people orient differently, the sense of agency that they have over the future or otherwise. And I'm interested in that because I think about my own journey. So I probably started high agency, high hopes. Then when I studied my master's degree many years ago, I moved what we call to the bottom left of the Pollack matrix. No sense of hope, no sense of agency. I don't think we can do anything because it was like existential dread. And for me, I could also see why a lot of my very good friends and mentors have some spiritual practice to kind of even out the work. But that became a very static space and a really unhelpful space for me to orient from. It's almost the space of depression, in a way, to be honest. I'm definitely not suggesting that's Meg's perspective, but I just use this orientation as a really interesting way of thinking about how we act. So I've probably moved further because it became such a depressive state for me, and I lost agency and became apathetic. I've probably very intentionally moved further to the bottom right, pessimism, but with a sense of agency. And it comes back to that notion of hope, not optimism, not blind optimism. So I think what Meg is sensing is some of these existential crises and challenges. And that's kind of what tipped me into the bottom left. Right. And I don't disagree with her in many of her observations. I think we are really ignoring critical tipping points, whether it's climate, whether it's health, whether it's democracy, whatever it may be. But in my own personal view, I needed a sense of agency. So I can still feel pessimistic about things, but I still need to act with some sense of intentional hope. And I find that really interesting because that's a personal perspective. But this also plays out collectively. So I use this example of there was a study of 12,000 young people and I'm really concerned about this as a futuristic. And it was like 56 or 60% of them said that they felt the future was doomed, mostly around climate inaction. So we'd say that they're bottom left on this matrix, right? And for me, that is a scary space. What happens when young people feel apathetic? No hope, no agency, no pathways. For me, I just don't think anything useful can come from that, from just a human thriving perspective. So we can do both. Both things can be true, right? We can reckon with the realities that are around us, but still act intentionally with some sense of hope, even when we feel hopelessness.
- [23:37]
B
One of the things, sometimes there's the wish at the bottom of the stair where you said, I wish I'd asked. I wished I'd asked Meg this question. If you look at the work of somebody, for instance, like Steven Pinker and his book Enlightenment now, in which he shows that on almost every, every measure of human thriving, the trend is up. Less violence, longer lives, better health during our lives, more education, more democracy, and obviously not equally spread out, but in aggregates, moving toward a better direction. His argument is it's always gone up in the past. Basically, I think it's going to keep going up. How's that for a way of reasoning?
- [24:20]
A
For me, it comes down to how we individually perceive the world. Because you could really easily build an evidence base that's counter to that. I feel like it's the wrong dilemma to solve. In a way, it's more about how do we actually reckon with realities of what's in front of us. Because when we spend time debating my perception and experience of the world, and if I perceive it to be better or worse, we're kind of moving away from. But what are we actually doing, regardless, based on where we are at right now, to what I call more of a directionality, it's less about what's this specific perfect end state that we want to get to, but a shared sense of what would we want to see More of and less of. When we're talking about the future of work, I might want to see a lot less precarity in exploitation. I might want to see dignity and good quality jobs. I'm obsessed with job design being a critical enabler of a good future of work that we all want to be a part of. And where does that cross over and how can we get around that? So again, that's back to my natural instinct for some kind of action orientation to act with some hope, but also reckon with the reality of what is around us.
- [25:31]
B
Yeah, when I look at Pinker's work, one of the things I get out of it is, yes, there's been an enormous amount of progress on almost every time scale. It's been largely made by people who were very unhappy with the present and wanted to make it better and did so in the present. And so looking at those graphs that Pinker gives can give you the opposite of pessimism, which is, no, everything's going to be okay and I don't have to do anything. And that is sort of the opposite end from pessimism, which is, there's nothing I can do that can help. And so both of them may be unagentic.
- [26:08]
A
Yeah, I could really see both extremes in a way. I just go back to the question, though, of what's helping us shape a good present and whether we argue of whether the present is better than it used to be or not. Is that a useful dilemma to spend our energy in solving? And my sense would be, no, we are where we are because that's where we are. So what does that mean for what we need to do to create a good present now?
- [26:33]
B
So let's start talking about work. The groundwork we just laid was super important, which is now as we talk about work, there's going to be examples of thinking about the future the way we were just talking about. So why do you study the future of work?
- [26:49]
A
Most futurists that I know, we're kind of generalists in a way. Right. We're experts in the thinking and the methods, but we can apply that in a whole variety of settings because any decision that you make at all in your life, in an organization has an orientation and a consequence in the future. So you'd argue that futures work is kind of relevant in any setting. I do work with future of sport farming, engineering work, but most futurists, I'd say, have an area that they're really curious in. And for me, it's always been work and workers, and I very intentionally elevate the future of workers. Because when we only elevate the future of work, we tend to talk about things through a very structural lens. It's objective, it's about the technologies, it's about the structure of work, it's about where we work, whatever it may be. When we elevate the future of workers, in that conversation, we elevate the human. We talk about health at work, we talk about changing attitudes to work, what motivates people at work, why we work. And for me, I think I'm interested in that. I always say to people when I do career sparring with them is if you look back at your career, there's usually a thread that's tried to break through. And it's like, that's a weird thing because I played professional sport, then I worked in the public service in org design and development and works planning. Then I worked in this startup and private sector space in kind of hr. It's like, what's that got to do with work and workers? But I actually think the thread was the interest in centering worker voices. You know, Anab Jane has this quote and she says, those with the least power to shape the future suffer its worst consequences. And I also come from a regional remote Queensland, so work has a whole other different meaning. Work is centered in your life. For a long while I was called the work dodger because I kept studying, which is like a. Just a hilarious idea, right? I mean, of course I was working, I was playing professional sport, working and studying full time. But work is so central to your life that they never even talk about their jobs because you just keep working. We work on weekends. The kids go to work with you on holidays. And I think for me there's a bit of a social justice part that comes in through the work that I do. Who's not in the room when we're having these conversations? But then it's also just work for me is a setting that I think we can have really important conversations about the lives that we want to architect. And it was so central to me as an upbringing of how integral it was to life and how important it was. My parents will never stop working. They've said that explicitly. They will literally work until they just physically or mentally cannot work. And I think there's some of those personal reasons of why I'm so interested in work as a setting and a conversation about the future. I just think it's also. It's such a downstream space of where we see a lot of things play out around our lives and See things that are happening inside workplaces that are very good indicators to what's changing around us. We're talking about trauma inside the workplace. We're talking about menopause leave inside the workplace. Like, it's a setting for very important and powerful and influential conversations about, like I said, the futures that we all want to inhabit.
- [30:19]
B
What are some of the actions that you do see people taking right now that are making the future today?
- [30:30]
A
In what way? Tell me a bit more about that.
- [30:33]
B
Okay, I'm trying to say. It's a complicated phrase. I'm trying to say it like I think you would say it. So I'm going to say it a couple of different ways. What's emerging in work today that is in the direction of the future is representative of the future, is people actually creating the future in the present. So micro activism would be one way to talk about it. Another one would be positive deviance, where there are people who are doing things that are quite remarkably good, which we could all potentially achieve. Hey, everybody. On June 16th, I'll be speaking at one of my very favorite venues. It's the Future Talent Summit in Stockholm, Sweden. To get Tickets, go to futuretalentsummit.org that's all one word, and enter my speaker promo code elevenfold, which is eleven fold to get a big discount. If you're in the area, I would love to meet you there. That's futuretalentsummit.org, promo code elevenfold.
- [31:43]
A
Yeah, okay. In a way, I see the story of change as a very dynamic one. Things just don't arrive and then we inhabit it. All of a sudden, we're in a different space. So imagine the metaphor of a set of dials, and it tells a more dynamic story of change. Not just what's emerging, but also what's declining. And they tend to go hand in hand. So if I think about work, I'm always looking for signals and evidence of both what's declining and what's emerging. And that gives a richer picture of what's changing. A lot of the guests on your podcast would be talking about these very things, right? They'd be talking about what's hitting an edge, but also new insights, new ways of perceiving and seeing the world and work. In a way, I usually ask the question of myself, of what am I paying attention to right now? Anytime a futurist gets put on the spot around what we think the future of X may or may be, it's kind of a weird glitch moment. So I ask a more Gentle question of what are the things I'm paying attention to if I'm thinking about what's declining? Oh, just literally off the top of my head. I'm obsessed with language and culture and that being a critical lead indicator to change. So I won't look into technology as much. I'll literally look at language. I spend way too much of my life on Reddit. I'm looking at subculture, language. You know, the microforms of activism are a way of enabling that resistance, enacting on that resistance. So I think it's a really good indicator. Then I look and see in this instance, when I'm thinking about work, what are the dissidents saying or what are young people talking about when they're talking about work? I get this strong sense and it's a generalization, but that the jig is up in a way. The old notion and the priorities and the motivations are no longer there. And younger people are asking very big questions of work, its value, its benefit. I absolutely reject the notion of young people being lazy. That's been going on for generations. My parents were called lazy by their parents. I take a more critical lens of saying, what are they talking about? What's the language that they're using? We're using anti work, we're using lying flat in China. We're pushing back against hustle culture. We're lazy girl jobs, like in isolation, they mean nothing. But as a collective pattern, there's a whole vibe, there's a whole thing going on there. And it's like any good futures work, we need to always connect it back to the present. We need to say if that's the change. So what now? What. What does that mean for us, whoever us is, if we're hr, how might we rethink and challenge our assumptions about young people's attitudes? Or what does that mean for job design? That's just one. There's. There's so many. I think in many ways, the thing I'm paying attention to also is at the macro level, this sense of old logics, processes, systems declining, new ideas, logics, process systems, visions emerging, but hasn't fully manifest. So I feel like we're in this messy middle of whose way is the right way? The pullback to the offices versus no, we want to think about work fundamentally differently. That in between space Ziyasada characterizes as the three Cs. So that messy middle is complex. No right answer. It's like, I don't know, what's the right answer for you and your organization? It's a bit chaotic and it's contradictory. So it might be like we're asking leaders to do this, but we're doing this. It's like, yeah, contradiction is just an implicit part of this. If I think about work, this in between space. So as some things are decreasing, other things are emerging. The thing that's front of mind for me, you could ask me this in three months and it'll be something different. But both, I guess the idea of it's a provocation of work becoming a public health issue. And this is a big provocation. Like I said, good futurists are provocateurs and it helps us to step away from the present and ask more elegant questions about, well, what do we want? And for me, that's me watching a bunch of independent little signals of change. So little concrete bits of evidence, again in isolation, mean nothing. And seeing them aggregate. Yesterday I was reading a research piece, I think it might have been on a Stanford website, just to give some credibility to that, connecting mortality and layoffs. And it was like a 20% increase in the chance over the next 20 years. And you juxtapose that next to Australians are the most burnt out workers in the world. And we're starting to connect work directly with health issues. The who, the World Health Organization now in their international classification of disease, talk about the notion of burnout and connect it directly as an occupational phenomena. So all these independent signals, right, they don't mean much. We joke that in the spare room I used to have like a Mel Gibson wall of all of these thousands of sticky notes and the string and my partner just said it's too much for visitors. But then the provocation is don't just stop at the critique. We need to challenge what is possible. And I think that's moving into this hope space, right, of how do we act. What if the workplace was a critical determinant of health? How can we challenge the grammar of what is possible and then work back to create a better present? So I see these two dynamics of what's declining, what's emerging, and we're in this messy middle. And I think people are looking for neat, concrete answers and there aren't none. I imagine that almost the assemblage of all of your guests over time probably having this conversation.
- [37:13]
B
You're right, it's so funny. I always am connecting conversations that I'm having right now with people who've come on the show. Christine Maslach came on the show. She's the person who got burnout into the Who. And I have also heard someplace along the way that. And I think it was in Australia, that a company was sued for mental harm to somebody who worked there and won, or the company was sued and lost. The person who sued them won. And so once you start seeing instances like that, it starts to look like. So work is the new smoking, powerful provocation.
- [37:51]
A
That reminded me. Sorry. Of a signal of. I think it was a French company a few years ago where the CEO actually went to jail as the result of suicide from an employee inside the organization. And that's interesting. Dart for a few reasons. Part of my job is looking for patterns, not to map reality, because we can't do that, but literally look for indicators of change and say, what does that aggregate in terms of an overall pattern? What you've kind of shared there is really interesting because it moves from something on the fringe, like a radical organization says, blah. All these weird, tenuous links to work and public health, to a legislative conversation that means we're swinging really into the mainstream. So recently in Australia, we've just passed, I think, a piece of legislation around the idea of the right to disconnect. You have a legal right to not be contacted after hours of work. I don't know the specific implication of that. That's an old idea. They had that in France years ago. But again, in isolation, it doesn't really mean much. We might ignore it. But if we look at as a whole bunch of indicators both of protecting workers, health and space, but also the implications of technology, we start to see a very different present. Again, it's not about what might happen, it's about what is happening today. That's the only bit of data we have. What's happened in the past and then connected to what are those images of what is possible. And I think one of my jobs is to challenge the range of thinkable futures that people have about what is possible. And I'll give you a really basic example of that. I do a lot of work with sport, which I love because I used to play sport. So it's a cool thing to go back and talk about sport. I played cricket for many years and worked in that space as well. And in Australian culture, like work, sport is a real setting for social change and public health intervention. And what's going on in sport is a very good barometer of where we're at with things. And I give this example. So women's football, AFL football, so Australian Rules football is kind of emerging here and it's growing and it's really, really exciting. And for me, we've had a long conversation about maybe it'll be good when we get some decent crowds. And I sit back and say to them how we think about the future now. So If I think 20 plus years ago, when I was in sport and I was saying, there's no way this could be professional, how that constrains what is possible in people's minds and then thereafter shapes actions, took 20 years to fundamentally change those things, but also what I remind them of. So part of it was what is possible? What is the future that we actually want, not what we're projecting today. And don't borrow it from men's sport. What is the future that is possible here? How can we expand our range of thinkable futures, not only by looking at what's emerging, but also looking back? So as futurist, a good futurist is a good historian, we're taught to go back as much as we are. Not that necessarily change will be straight line, but in many ways, if I did a quick search to, say, AFL women's football, the big assumption is that it's slowly progressing and improving. In 1929, there was a crowd of 45,000 people that watched two pajama factory workers of women workers play at the Adelaide Oval. So part of it is, how do I expand the range of what people think is possible? Because that shapes and constrains thereafter how they act at the present.
- [41:22]
B
A part of what you did in that story was you looked for a positive deviant, not in the present, but in history, which is it is possible and it's not the future. It's been the past, so it can be the present. It opens up the range for what is possible.
- [41:41]
A
The only time that makes sense is the present. The past feels as ridiculous as the future does. And for me, that's a real provocation to orient both ways for inspiration in decisions and the way that we frame those images of what is possible today.
- [41:57]
B
It was interesting what you said about looking at language as somebody who is acting now myself, to change work. There's a language from the past that frames workers and work a certain way, and there's no language to replace it. And I feel like it's a funny conundrum. Do we have to change the words? Like, is that an activist thing to do? And does it help? I always wonder whether or not changing the words helps if we're not changing the mental models or something deeper.
- [42:32]
A
Oh, that's such a good provocation in a way. I mean, ideally, yes, both. I'm a Huge believer in the power of metaphor and a brilliant mentor of mine, Sahel Iniatullah. When I first got into the space, I found his work very powerful because he works a lot in myth and metaphor and how that shapes, again, what we perceive to be possible in the present and how sometimes I think, dart, even the metaphor can implicitly reorient the mindset or the mental model that sits behind that. Our brains just do these amazing things when we can talk about a shift in a metaphor. When I think about an example that Sahel used to share in terms of how reclaiming language and understanding things through the lens of a metaphor can be very powerful in shaping action and what's possible. He gives the example, and I think it was a research study, and they had two groups and it was about crime in a society. And they had two different titles to the study, one along the lines of Crime as a Beast, one along the lines of Crime as a Virus. And they asked people to read the same data, and they said, think about the types of interventions that you might consider. And of course, the crime is a beast. We read it through that idea. And so interventions were very punitive. You know, it was about quite reactive punishment. The Crime is a Virus asked people to think about interventions, implicitly asked them to think about interventions through a more connected perspective, a system. So interventions then started to shift towards community engagement, mental health, a whole bunch of other ways. And the only shift was thinking implicitly about how those two metaphors shifted. And for me, I think part of it is how we powerfully use metaphors to shape different stories about the future and what is possible. And you might also say language as part of that. In the same vein, in a way, some of it might even be reclaiming language. When I first started this work, I never referred to myself as a futurist. This is a whole background conversation about that. And then part of the provocation someone was saying is, you need to reclaim that. And then how you present is indicative of what a futurist is, and you need to put that position out to the world. I thought that was a really interesting frame. But back to that notion of language and metaphor. For me, I think it's some of the most powerful, even at a personal level. The most reorienting moment in my career was talking about a process of thinking about my current state as a metaphor and then thinking about a desired state. And the state at the time was that I was. I can't remember the language. It was like outside the arena, looking in. It's easy to critique. You know, it's an easy to be perfect and critical outside the arena. And the shift was to say, what gets you inside or at the edge of the arena? What are the actions? And just implicitly my body knew the suite of pathways that I needed to follow. It was small experiments, starting to partner with people, going and watching things early on of how other people did it. Find a mentor that you really admire, a whole bunch of those things. So I couldn't agree more with the notion of language and metaphors shaping what we see as possible, but also reorienting how we act in the present.
- [46:03]
B
What proportion of the future of workers is in the hands of the workers. So what you just said right there is you told a story where you realized you're outside the stadium, you're outside the arena, and you said, okay, I'm going to find a path in. And so you changed your work by making it so with small steps. And because of the way you talk about the future of workers as being something that is micro, you know, it's a micro activism. Is it so micro that only individuals can do it?
- [46:40]
A
Oh, what a good question. I mean, it's kind of unearthing a bit of a theory of change in a way of saying, well, how would change happen from a perspective of a worker? I guess my starting point is to say over the years, we know just factually that we've seen solidarity movements deteriorate, we've seen unions decline, a whole bunch of things. All the reasons that we used to come together and congregate and be able to share our experiences have really dissipated across a lot of Western countries, particularly here in Australia, but also elsewhere. And part of it for me is thinking inside my little sphere of influence, what are the small things that I can do? I have no interest in being a union representative or going down that side at all. In fact, I think some of that is losing a lot of relevance for workers. And young people are setting up their own configurations of worker solidarity. I'm really interested in that. But in a way, I guess it's a theory of change and a tipping point. Right. Does an accumulation of individual action contribute aggregate to a tipping point? I see signals in the present where I think it's a bit of and both. Right. I don't know. It's a bit chicken and egg of does the individual action then shape the collective or vice versa? I'm not sure. But what I can see is Australians are striking at the fastest rate in history. Teachers are striking, Childcare workers are striking. There's a term called employee activism. It's happening inside of organizations. My favorite weird thing to do is to get on Reddit and people will screenshot things from the CEO's message. I'm not advocating this, but it is interesting viewing. It's its own form of micro activism and they're shared collectively in these underground communities. So to answer your question, I'm not sure, but I am seeing patterns where these things go from a weak signal to a broader pattern that's starting to play out and normalize in society. And if we're thinking about workers involvement and advocacy in shaping the direction of work, I think I'm starting to see a tipping point. Things push to the right. A really practical example, not work. But to show how that individual signal can turn into a significant movement is to think about Greta Thunberg, non work related. At one point she was just a kid that sat outside of school and that meant absolutely nothing in terms of a global shift of young people's attitudes. It was just a kid sitting outside the school. This is a perfect example of you start looking at a very weak signal and how it shifts. Then it was like, hey, there's a bunch of kids around her. Then it was like, hey, there's a lot of kids doing this. Now it's like there's kids in Victoria with their parents going on a Friday to do this. And it's tipping into a mass movement and a shift from the perspective of young people. That's a good example of how small changes can shift into how they get there. I don't really know. I just watch the changes and notice when the change changes.
- [49:42]
B
One of the really big movements right now in work, and I just became a lot more educated in it because I just interviewed Bart Houlihan, who is the founder of B Lab, which is the certification body for public benefit corporations, which actually recognize employees legally as a stakeholder, as opposed to simply shareholders being the only stakeholder. And first of all, I was very impressed that there are thousands of companies that are taking essentially an activist role and it's an activist role in opposition to how other companies are run. I'm very impressed because companies are quite powerful and if they start doing that, that's a quite powerful thing. But it leads me to ask the question, if I'm a leader, what is my job? How should I look at my role in the future of workers? I kind of had the answer to that because it's kind of like, well, what do you want the future to be? It's, you know, you should activate for that. But I just think that there's actually something going on that is giving leaders an opportunity to take on a status quo that's been there for at least, especially in the United States, since 1979.
- [51:03]
A
Yeah, and it's a good question. And instinctively I say take it personally. You are an inhabitant of this future of work. What do you actually want to be inhabiting yourself? And through your actions, you are shaping the experience of and the future of work for many people around you. I always have that provocation with hr. It's like even the banal things that you do actually shape the future of work for many people in this organization. I think part of it is, and I have this experience sometimes of it can be difficult to push up against a dominant paradigm inside an organization. Meg Wheatley talks about that notion of creating islands of sanity. And that's what I used to almost use as a framework and a framing for my own leadership practice inside an organization where I felt some difference in terms of competing images of the future, what we'd want around work. There's that in between time, old ways kind of bumping into new ways. And we might see pockets of people experimenting with that in an organization, but it might not be fully manifest. So not everyone can work over in these other spaces. We do have to navigate the system as it is, and we have competing images of the future. That's attention. What one leader wants or one organization or the CEO wants may be different. I feel like some of those tensions are starting to manifest. I feel like the organizations that are transcending this are actually having more participatory conversations about the future of work. Like you mentioned, the shift from shareholder to stakeholder and the role of workers in that. In a way, I think we have to take it personally. As leaders, what is the future of work that you're perpetuating? How are you creating a good present? And sometimes that's in your own micro activism. Can you do that inside the organization that you're in now? We all have different change thresholds too. Some people can't leave the current environment that they're in for a whole variety of reasons. So part of it is, how do I navigate that and what are my tipping points? And for me, that notion of islands of sanity was one way of navigating that. Well, maybe I don't feel like I have a lot of agency to have significant influence over the organization, but I can create a space and an experience of work for the people around me that is aligned to the future of Work that I want to be part of where people are safe and cared for, like basic human tenants of just. And we know that people do good work when they're inside of that. So I guess the long answer was that the short answer is sometimes we're inside a space where there's resistance and we have to try and find small ways of creating agency and pathways. Sometimes we need to make a decision of, is this where we want to spend our time? Are we pushing against a system or a belief that doesn't align with me that has health consequences too, when we sit in that space for too long? So it's a good question.
- [53:54]
B
It does. And this is one of the things I've learned. I used to say it one way and now I say it another way. The way I used to say it is, as someone who is a worker, the dominant paradigm will not pay you to overturn it. The dominant paradigm will not pay you to subvert it. But what I realized is it's subtler than that. The dominant paradigm will pay you a lot of money to support it. And as long as we take the money without recognizing what system we're supporting, we will be creating the future that we're paid to create. And I'm one of the people who was paid to create a kind of work that I now don't believe in. I have a house and my kids went through college, and I did that with taking the money. But I will tell you that in the middle, I did not know. I. It took me a decade of working in the model to say, wait a second, this is constantly going against my values and causing me moral injury. And that the logic that underlied the decisions I was making was entirely internally consistent. Was entirely internally consistent. And so I could follow the logic and it would take me back to, oh, no, this is what my job is to do this. And it wasn't until I stepped out of the local paradigm far enough that I could see, oh, I'm in something. So that was a long story. But it's this thing which is that the dominant paradigm will pay you a lot to support it.
- [55:27]
A
Yeah. And some of us, you know, there's a luxury of choice of being able to say, sometimes I want to sit outside of that, sometimes not. Sometimes people just have a strong sense of that. But you're right that there's a consequence of that. The notion of moral injury for health practitioners and doctors, particularly in Australia, I'm not sure about over there, is so high. It's like one of the most significant Health issues related to work. They think that they're entering the field for a certain reason. They get inside the system and absolutely exhausted and not just physically kind of burnt out. It's that constant. Gabor Mate talks about a lot, that challenge of authenticity, of why am I here? But I've actually got seven minutes to respond to this person's existential health crisis. So I keep going back to that notion of I really think that. And again, it's complex, right? And there's corporate profits and there's power dynamics, there's all of those lenses. But this is why I fundamentally believe that work can be a setting for such a rich life and good health. And that requires some expanding what we think is possible of work. I think it's hitting a threshold in many ways. Physical, emotional, mental health is one threshold. But there's such a big opportunity where workers are setting for better futures.
- [56:41]
B
So I want to get to the closing questions that I always ask. You've heard me ask some of these questions. I believe one of them is, what do you hire your job to do for you?
- [56:50]
A
I think it's learning and creative problem solving. I think there is a real part, and I'm not sure if this neatly answered the question, but this sense of, I don't know how it fits Dart, you might be able to work backwards and find a way of how this fits, but I've found a space in work where I can build agency and pathways for others. And the most joyful thing I get from my work is when someone beams up to me after a session and says, I'm excited or I have energy, or give you an example of, I ran a session with grads I'm really big on. We need to create more optimistic, hopeful, sorry, futures for young people. And the way to do that is to get them to think differently. Don't convince them with evidence otherwise. And I ran this session with grads and it was like unlearning the future, teaching them to think differently. You've got agency, you've got pathways. And I got a text message from one of them afterwards, which firstly was intriguing because I don't know how they got my phone number, but that's also an amazing thing that young people can do very quickly. And the response was, I had been feeling really depressed about work. I had been feeling really stuck and I don't know what to do. And now I feel like I've had a big shift. I feel excited for the first time and I don't know how to encapsulate that but in a way, that's why I hire my job to do for me.
- [58:19]
B
I will tell you, there's a couple of different things there. First of all, a phrase came to me that I just love, which is that this person who came to you said, I thought the future was happening to me. I'm happening to the future.
- [58:30]
A
Nice.
- [58:31]
B
Well, I'll tell you, there's a couple things in there. It is to help others, but it's not exactly that simple case because it's helping others to help themselves. It's much more a teaching to fish situation. And you also love the detect the moment when you can tell it's happened. And so reorienting people to possibility talk about a way to change lives. If you can be that cup of coffee that you had 20 years ago with that one person for other people, that's a big deal.
- [59:09]
A
I think it comes back to that idea of how we can create impact in the world. And what is it that I do that can have some utility in the world? And for years early on in my career, I used to think it was my responsibility to change organizations, which is an absurd idea now that I'm much older. And when I really let go of that and reframed my work as my job is to work directly with this person that's brought me in if I'm doing consulting work and to actually frame this through the lens of how do I create shifts, agency pathways, sense of energy for change in individuals. And when I reoriented it that way, I just got so much more enjoyment from my work and I could see and start to connect firsthand the impact of what I do with an individual's life. I ran a session a few weeks ago and I do this work. So I do a lot of corporate work and it's about strategy and planning and business. And then some of my most favorite work is what I call Futures View. It's taking tools that we use for organizations and strategic foresight and futures thinking and applying it at a personal level. And that was the session I ran with the grads. Teach them to think differently about the future. Give them these tools to actually start to find pathways in the present and leverage change. And I ran it with some really senior women a few weeks ago. And again, it's just my favorite moment in this work where one woman text me after because we always get to a point where they say, what happens come Monday? What are the three things that I'm going to do come Monday? We need to commit to something is she texts me after and she said, after doing all of that work, I sat back and I just realized I need support. And she said, I cried at the realization of that. You know, I call it like an acupuncture point. Right? Like a strategic acupuncture point. She could do a million things, she could go and study again, she could do whatever. But she said, actually the acupuncture point is I need help, I need some support. And what that released in her and the sense of energy, I think to change, to do anything different, you need energy that is greater than the energy to sustain and the stasis and the sense of energies that she got from that, I just think that's cool. That's the most enjoyable part of my job, those one small changes, because I fundamentally believe that they create significant deviations and open up other pathways for people in the present.
- [61:41]
B
Right. And it's not just a new direction, it's a vector, it's a quantity in a direction. A new quantity in a direction.
- [61:48]
A
Yeah. And that sense of possibility, it's like, oh gosh, maybe, maybe it isn't as big. Like I'm really big on don't make it big unless you have to. When you don't have a choice, how can this be small? And we've got no excuse. Then literally, what's the one thing I'm going to do? As I mentioned, probably the two points of my career were the cup of coffee. And a few years later I decided to work a nine day fortnight and it became known as Rihanna's Friday project. And I didn't really know that literally the intervention was to just take time, reclaim some time. And I just used that time to do whatever I wanted to do. Actually trusting an emergent pathway rather than trying to control it, allowed me to catch up with different people. It allowed me to go to exhibitions, it allowed me to see talks that I wouldn't have seen. So what I ended up doing was actually being able to be more involved and doing some early futures work and practice, started to integrate that into my work and then felt confident enough to move into consulting. And that's like 10 years ago.
- [62:51]
B
What does your work cost you?
- [62:53]
A
That is a very powerful question. Mental health. I think this is useful to share that a part of what attracts me to futures work is the constant scanning for change. I have constantly been a person that is always looking to what's changing around me. And I remember a few years ago a therapist said to me, you are so hyper vigilant and you're just constantly aware of everything. That's going on. And I said, well, I'm a futurist. And she said, of course you are. Of course you've created an entire profession around that. But there was probably a period about five or six years ago where that hypervigilance and scanning has a downside. And I think it was a lot of what Meg Wheatley shares really resonated with me, particularly at that time, because I was really depressed. I was only scanning, and it was mostly things about the massive existential crises. I was going through the master's program, a lot of friends went through the same process. We hit real mental health bottoms, and it was something significant. My partner just said, it's just like, enough. That's the only thing you're looking for. That's the only thing you'll find. So that hyper vigilance and that really skilled ability for pattern matching and looking at change has a downside if you're not very intentionally looking for hopeful futures. So I've had to change my whole practice to not default to all of the things that are declining, decaying, collapsing, but also where are there pockets of the future and the present where there is hope? I have to really intentionally do that and to balance things out. So I'd say that's one of the consequences is that you're hypervigilant to the environment around you.
- [64:40]
B
That makes a lot of sense to me. It takes a degree of intellectual rigor to keep looking at the existential threats as long as you did. I look at the existential threats and I can look at them for about 30 seconds, and then I'm going to think about some ice cream. I'm going to think about something else. So it takes a certain amount of toughness to really, I think, look at those things long enough. And it takes discipline to look at the hopeful things.
- [65:12]
A
Yeah, that's a very intentional practice for me, the hopeful things. But what you reminded me of then, Dart, is that it's not just an intellectual process. It's not just that I read about a whole variety of things and make connections and patterns. What I didn't realize, and this was my own existential crisis point, was that my nervous system and my body takes in that information as well. And that the more time I spent in the space of only looking for signals of collapse, the more my nervous system became very dysregulated. I think I mentioned earlier that a lot of mentors also had some kind of spiritual practice. And I found that really curious as a young futurist a long time ago, and now I can really understand why. I mean, that sense that we feel the future through our bodies, like the sense with young people of feeling depressed, you know, lack of agency, is that I've had to be very intentional in knowing that it's not just an intellectual process. This happens, this shows up in my body. And what are the practices that I'm doing, not only to intentionally look for more hopeful futures, but to literally constantly regulate my nervous system in a way that allows me to thrive in a life. But it's a strange downside of the job is that I've had to be much more intentional. I can't intellectualize them away because it comes out in my body.
- [66:40]
B
That's fascinating. Thank you very much for coming on the show today. Where can people learn more about you and your work?
- [66:47]
A
I'd say LinkedIn is probably the best starting point. Just Rhianna Brown and also on Instagram, so futuristreanna R E A N N A I'm a real nerd and love geeking out. So I really encourage people, even if it's just a curious question, to contact me directly. I get a real joy out of that. I'm sure in an accumulative level, it's not necessarily the best use of my time from a business perspective, but it's the joy I get from doing this work. So please contact me directly. I really enjoyed this part of the conversation. Can you tell me more about that? Because for me, this is futures work and that sensor building, agency and pathways is what I think is one of the most powerful interventions that we can do in society at the moment. And I have a bias for obvious reasons, but I think it's. One of the acupuncture points is when we change how we think about the future, we change what we think is possible in the present. And our work is to create a good present and how can we feel hopeful and a sense of influence over that? And when we do that, our actions look very different. So that's part of my mantra, putting that out there to the world. If anyone's interested, please reach out to me directly.
- [68:01]
B
Thank you very much.
- [68:03]
A
My pleasure. Thank you. Dart. Such a joy.
- [68:08]
B
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.