Cat Tully, Founder School of International Futures, with Futurist Ian Khan
In this episode, i speak with Cat Tully, an accomplished Futurist and Educator.
Bio
Cat Tully is the founder of SOIF, the School of International Futures. Cat has extensive experience as a practitioner, helping governments, civil society and businesses to be more strategic, more effective, and better prepared for the future. She is motivated by a focus on social justice and the importance of multi-stakeholder approaches to the challenges of the 21st century world.
Prior to setting up SOIF, Cat was Strategy Project Director at the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and Senior Policy Adviser in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Before working in government, she worked in strategy and international relations across the not-for-profit and business sectors, including Christian Aid, Technoserve, and Procter and Gamble. Cat has also worked for the UN, the EU Commission and the World Bank.
Cat has degrees from Cambridge and Princeton Universities. She is a trustee of the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development, a global board member of Academics Stand Against Poverty, a member of United Nations Learning Advisory Council for the 2030 Agenda, and a member of the Advisory Group of the British Foreign Policy Group.
About After Shock
The world’s foremost futurists reflect on 50 years of Future Shock—and look ahead to the next 50
Contributors include:
Alan Kay
Aaron Frank
Adrienne Mayor
Alexander Mankowsky
Alexandra Ivanovitch
Alisha Bhagat
Amy Zalman
Anders Sorman-Nilsson
Andra Keay
Andrew Curry
Andy Hines
Anita Sengupta
Anne Lise Kjaer
Aris Persidis
Aubrey de Grey
Barry O’Reilly
Barry Vacker
Bill Davidow
Bill Diamond
Bryan Alexander
Byron Reese
Carlos Osorio
Carver Mead
Cat Tully
Cindy Frewen
Clem Bezold
Daniel Burrus
Daniel Levine
David Brin
David Guston
David Krakauer
David J. Staley
David Weinberger
Deb Westphal
Diane M. Francis
Donna Dupont
Eleanor “Nell” Watson
Eric Daimler
Erica Bol
Erik Qualman
Fotis Sotiropoulos
George Gilder
Grady Booch
Gray Scott
Hannes Sjoblad
Harish Natarajan
Hazel Henderson
Helen Messier
Ian Khan
Ignacio Pena
Jack Uldrich
James Canton
Jane McGonigal
Jason Jackson
Jason Schenker
Jay Gambetta
Jeff Eisenach
Jeffrey C. Bauer
Jerome Glenn
Jerry Fishenden
Joe Dispenza
Joe Tankersley
Joel Garreau
John L. Petersen
John M. Smart
John Sack
John Sanei
John Schroeter
Jonathan Venn
José Morey
Kaitlyn Sadtler
Kirk Borne
Klee Irwin
Kris Østergaard
Lisa Bodell
Maciej Kranz
Martin Guigui
Martin Rees
Maggie Greyson
Michael Tomczyk
Michel Laberge
Mick Ebeling
Moon Ribas
Naveen Jain
Neil Jacobstein
Newt Gingrich
Patricia Lustig & Gill Ringland
Paul Saffo
Paul Stimers
Po Bronson & Arvind Gupta
Ray Kurzweil
Rebecca Costa
Richard Browning
Richard Slaughter
Richard Watson
Richard Yonck
Rodrigo Nieto Gómez
Rohit Bhargava
Ross Dawson
Ruth Miller
Sanjiv Chopra & Pankaj K Vij
Sohail Inayatullah
Sridhar Mahadevan
Stan Rosen
Stephanie Mehta
Steve Waite
Tanya Accone
Terrence (Terry) Sejnowski
Teun Koetsier
Theodore Jay Gordon
Thomas Frey
Timothy Chou
Vikram Mansharamani
Wolfgang Fengler
Zoltan Istvan
Publication Details
ISBN Print: 978-0-9997364-4-9
ISBN eBook: 978-0-9997364-5-6
Full Transcript : Hi friends this is Ian Khan and you’re watching the Ian Khan show today. It’s a special episode of The aftershock series where I interview a co contributor to the recent book aftershock. In today’s episode, I’m speaking with Cat Tully, who’s the founder of the School of International futures, running strategic foresight projects and retreats across the world with 600 alumni in 50 countries. Let’s speak with Cat.
Cat welcome to the Ian Khan show. I’m so excited to have you here today. First of all, you’re incredible. Your work is incredible. And also you are a contributor to aftershock. Now, let me give a quick overview to our listeners and our viewers on what aftershock is 50 plus futurists off today’s era came together and wrote their thoughts and ideas about the book, Future Shock, written by Alvin Toffler, one of the greatest visionaries of the world and in the past, and he wrote a book called Future Shock 50 years ago in which he predicted the future talked about tomorrow talked about the current era today. And here we are talking about him in this book, thank you for being on the show. How are you? I’m very well, thank you very much. Thank you so much for inviting me to join you. It’s great for me, thank you. It’s our pleasure. Let’s do this help us understand what you do. Who are you as a futurist and and what domains Do you work in? Because your bio is so impressive, I don’t know which parts to touch in which not to? Let’s hear it from you? Well, first of all, I’ll probably say that I wouldn’t call myself a futurist. And I’ve been lucky to spend quite a lot of my career working with futurists, but I’ve worked mainly in strategy and decision making, and particularly in governments. So I’m really interested in how you use insights from futurists about thinking about the future to make better decisions today, and especially in the government space, whether it’s national security, proliferation, climate change inequality, how can we actually create better policy decisions as governments as communities, at the city level, but also at the UN level. So that’s very much my area of focus. I used to work in the UK government, in the Prime Minister’s strategy in it, and in the Foreign Office, policy planning staff, which is the equivalent of your State Department. And as a result of that, I’ve always been really interested in the interplay of looking internationally, and about how the world is changing geopolitically, but also with developing countries, and how that interplays with our experience as nations, as people in the UK, people living in the States, and how those two levels work together, incredible. And there’s so much happening when you look at governments globally. I mean, you’ve touched on something so incredible that it touches all of us, we all are somehow connected to a government or some government, because we use their services, we are part of a country, and so on and so forth. I do a lot of work with governments, myself, I work really closely with the government of the United Arab Emirates. And that’s Dubai, that’s Abu Dhabi and other seven emirates altogether for our listeners who don’t know, and looking at how they run things, and how things are run in the West, how things are run in Estonia, there’s a huge difference in how governments are run. And one of the things that’s very challenging, or I think we need to maybe could create more clarity is government is not necessarily the people who are elected and who are running things right now. But it’s also that framework, the foundation that has been laid down for the last 50 or 100 years. And that’s kind of I always look at things in you know, in that way that government not necessarily is the ruling party right. Now, let’s talk a little bit about strategy we are living in 2020 2020. year is the year of COVID-19 is the year of disruption, where all business models have fallen flat on their face where all strategies have gone through the window. What are you seeing as the disruption that COVID-19 has caused the pandemic has caused from where you see things. So I think that there are different tribes, and how people look at what COVID-19 actually means for the status quo. There’s a group of people that see this as being a huge disruption, the big defining moment of the 21st century that probably is going to take us into the 21st century, it’s the end of the 20th century, beginning genuine beginning of the 21st century, and that this moment is something special, and that what we need to do is repair and go back to the new normal to a form of normal. And then there’s another set of people that I think, see this is one and probably a minor, one of emerging, and subsequent major issues that are coming down the pipeline towards us over the 2020s and 2030s, whether it’s issues around migration, climate change, various kind of geopolitical instabilities and crises, and that it’s the beginning of a new form of sets of insecurities that we’re just going to have to engage with and respond to differently. So depending on how you frame it, I think both your concern, and your responses look very, very different. So what this there’s a concept called the official future in futures work, which is like, what official future did you have in your mind. And very frankly, I personally because of the work that looking at the Sustainable Development Goals, looking at some of the ecological trends that you if you kind of looked at the failure of nation states to grip a lot of these problems, we were on a very bad trajectory. Indeed, in terms of 2030 2040 kind of crises that might be occurring in places like Bangladesh, in across North Africa, the kind of scale of human loss, because of environmental and different crises that we’re facing us could actually genuinely made some really big crises that dwarf COVID-19. And this 2020 is an opportunity for us to think about how we want to build the governance structures at an international and national and especially local community level, to perhaps respond to these kinds of crises in a different way. And really said there’s more than we, honestly, this is mind open conversation here. There’s more issues in the world than we consciously know on an everyday basis. We all know the big ones climate change, yes, of course, pollution. Yes, of course. But there’s issues such as human trafficking, there is issues such as the flesh trade, and so many others that are happening at an invisible level that are connected to all of us, and we all should participate in these issues and try and help and solve and do do what is needed. And the UN I believe, has, I think they have 20, or 21 sustainability goals, I think 17 Sustainable Development Goals. You’re absolutely right. Yeah. interdependent, that interdependent, universal. And they’re basically, I think that the SDG framework, which was developed over 2013 to 2015, including an outreach a public engagement exercise internationally, which was the first of its kind, but also had member states, during some of the framing, it was the first approach to create at a global level, a global vision for what a future of the world might look like if we decide to try and not drive our planet off the cliff, ecologically in terms of rights in terms of inequality. So if you like it’s a kind of aspirational vision for us to try and achieve. And it is universal. It’s interdependent. And it’s complex. It’s a complex systems approach. And I think the UN is, to a certain extent playing catch up around such an ambitious framework. But certainly it’s been I, you know, I see excellent work in New York, for example, they do their city planning around the 17, SDGs. A lot of cities and a lot of regions in Brazil do the same. So it’s a way of making sure that citizens business, civil society, look out to 2030. And instead of just letting governments dictate a straight line and a business as usual trajectory to what the future looks like, it gives them an opportunity to kind of say, Okay, well, if we want to achieve zero hunger, which is one of the goals, how do we Marshal some of the synthetic biology innovations and some of the potential changes in the food sector in order to enable that? What are some of the regulatory innovations that we might need to start thinking about to enable the benefits of this new emerging technology in this field to be distributed? So there’s how do we design supply chains and intellectual property arrangements to ensure that that happens effectively? So these are really interesting. It’s a really interesting and exciting framework within which if we all agree that we want a peaceful, secure, and prosperous future as a globe, and one that’s environmentally secure, not just physically secure, how do we work together to achieve it? Thank you In aftershock I want to talk a little bit about your piece in aftershock this so first of all, I really recommend everybody to get a copy of Aftershock. I believe it’s available on Amazon. It’s 20 or $30. And it’s really an investment that you can do in understanding what’s going on. Everybody in aftershock has a different background, some people are medical doctors, some people are scientists, futures, everybody’s doing something different. And the amount of conversations I’ve had are incredible. So I’m really humbled by what I have seen and what I have talked with people about. That’s part number one, I want to talk about your piece. You talk a lot about philanthropy, you talk about, you know, saving the world, of course, but philanthropy has a big role. Now, in today’s era 2020 COVID-19 crisis has been happening for months and months. One particular person has been surfacing to the top of the news is Bill Gates because he wants to come up with a vaccine. He’s a philanthropist. He’s committed all his billions and trillions to finding a cure. Amazing. I love the story. You’ve got people like Warren Buffett who were committed and they give money. And there’s tons of philanthropist who are literally pouring money into different things. Is that enough? Is the question and what is your take on how philanthropy can help us get better as a world as not just with COVID-19? Absolutely. Thank you for the question. And also, let me just say perhaps now, what a privilege it was to be part of such an illustrious group of futurists. And we are very much a hodgepodge of heterogeneous, perhaps a little bit misfits. What I think what’s interesting about doing futures work is that you had a great quote from Gaston better, you use the future in order to disrupt the present. So I think there’s something really interesting about this interest and yearning to kind of create and understand drivers of change in order to create more opportunities today, and to listen to different voices, who are often at the periphery, seeing weak signals of the future much better than at the center of power. People in their boardrooms, or at number 10, or in the White House are often the last ones to really see the signals of change. So this is I think, what’s exciting about being part of this book, and I really do urge people to read it, because it’s an exciting and extremely varied. Read on the philanthropy piece. First of all, I think it is really interesting to see the roles that philanthropists can have at being the seed funders for structural and systemic change, if you like one of the defining features in a world of uncertainty is paralysis. It’s about overwhelming uncertainty, not knowing what to do apart from continuing with the status quo. And I think what is out and what’s also the case is in a time of crisis, you often have lack of budgets to actually invest to doing new and exciting and different things. So I do think that at this precise moment, but also for the past 10 years philanthropists have, and some of the forward leaning ones have really done a really interesting job at leaning into their potential role for seed funding, systemic change over the long term. What do I mean by that? So you have different organizations and different foundations. And Omidyar network is a really interesting example of that, who like, Well, you know, we want to bring people in a system together, let’s look at water, and what’s happening with water security, all sorts of different actors, from engineers, to the lawyers, to the people who actually the Fisher community, to the people who actually use it for agriculture, and how to actually look at what a sustainable use of water in a certain area might look like, in 1520 years time, and actually funding the system to get together as a whole. And to exchange their views not just on what the problem looks like now, or in the past, water, remember, can often be a driver of conflict as well as other as well as business innovation. But if you actually look at what the potential drivers are looking forward, and develop an approach that a common vision together, as well as be aware of the alternative things that might happen and what your contingency plans collectively as a system might be, then you actually can get some really quite interesting and exciting change. So that’s the kind of potential Another example is I think it’s climate watch, you did some really nice work about bringing together the different foundations that work on climate change, and scientists together globally. And they were like, well, if we’re trying to get to a net zero goal in 2050, what might that glide path look like? How can we get all the different foundations and key actors to think about it and come up with an approach that actually is coordinated and potentially tips the system and innovative approaches? Amazing, I want to read a passage from the book from your chapter, you write that philanthropy now has not just an opportunity, but a responsibility to think and act for the long term this the will to do good in the world is no longer good enough by mainstreaming foresight practice, the sector can make a future friend, not a full in these unquiet and exciting times. And when you wrote that we were not going to the pandemic. So but right on with the future, thinking there that, hey, we’re looking at, we’re living in an quiet time. It’s a time of disruption in many, many ways. You are a practicing futurist, although you don’t like calling yourself that you run the School of International futures. Tell us a little bit about that. What do you do as part of that? institution? So we’re about 25. Amazing and very passionate, committed futurists who want to use foresight approaches to make a better world and to actually embed that into projects and decisions and organizations today, we have some team members in Trinidad and Tobago, all the way through to Asia. And so we are a virtual 21st century organization, but our focus is doing better policy. We are practitioners on policy planning and strategy for future generations. So we’re hoping that by enabling current current decisions makers engage and understand future trends and under put themselves in the shoes of future generations, they can actually act much better to date as stewards for well being in the future. Now, this can take very different kind of forms. And I’d like to share with you perhaps a few examples of some of the work that we’ve done to kind of give you a little bit of flavor of what we’ve done. So you can probably tell by my accent that I’m British, and there is another B word that comes associated with British, which is Brexit. And so about three years ago, we sat down with the Royal Society, to look out at what Brexit different Brexit scenarios might be, for the innovation, the research, the knowledge economy, and the higher education sector in the UK. So at that time, everybody was like, no deadline in three months time, no Cliff in six months time, but we actually looked out 10 years out to 2027. And what’s really valuable was, how interesting that, you know, people were like, these things are definitely not going to happen. And actually, the kind of scenarios that we laid out, were very helpful for the people involved to realize actually to challenge their official view of what they thought was going to happen. And actually, as things progressed, the cone of possibility is actually only increased, didn’t didn’t decrease. We’ve also worked you mentioned UAE, we’ve also worked with the government of Oman, to develop participative scenarios with the Supreme Council of Oman, to develop participant of scenarios for the future of Oman out to 2014. So going around engaging different communities, youth, women, old people just thinking about what’s the desirable future that they want to have on? What’s the alternative possible future given the geopolitical changes? what might happen with the price of oil? what might happen in terms of demographic shifts and shifts in values and beliefs? Now, how can a government both plan for the best and prepare for the worst, if necessary, similarly, we’re doing interesting work with the Gulbenkian foundation in Portugal, looking at intergenerational fairness, and intergenerational fairness is something that is of growing interest. And I think that COVID-19 is just going to put that whole conversation on steroids, which is that there are different countries in which the younger generation feels as if they are hard done by they are on the losing end, or in terms of pensions, inheriting debt, and also in terms of the ecological crisis that they’re facing in the future, and that they’re going to have to clean up. And then if you put the COVID-19. On top of that, where there are heavy economic burdens and costs to restarting the economy that are probably going to fall on the young again, that’s going to be quite problematic. So how do you when a government comes out with a policy? How do you ensure and how do you ask that government, whether that government is is mortgaging my children’s future, or whether it’s a fair policy, in terms of paying for those costs today, that’s what the project is doing. Incredible. And that’s such exciting stuff that you’re doing across the world. And I’m sure there’s many, many others, that’ll happen through the years, I’m so excited to be speaking with you, because I think we’ve captured something that you haven’t been able to talk about before, which is government and how things work within the sector that you mentioned. But I know we’re also out of time cat as an ending and as a parting gift to our viewers, give us maybe one or two points give us maybe one or two or three, whatever you like, how can we create a better future? What’s the easiest process for us to say, Okay, I’m going to think about future scenarios. How can people just do this, I’ve got two points, really, one picks up on your point around government, and one and us as citizens, and one that picks us up as humans, I guess. And in terms of, I think what’s really important is to kind of, we can look at the future as a shiny ball for us to explore and examine and analytically analyze through our through our magnifying glass. But in fact, I would like to put forward a different metaphor, which is the foresight endeavor is actually much more a mirror where we can clearly see ourselves and also see bits of us that we don’t always look at, and in particular, invite people on the periphery or things at the margins to come more clearly interview and speak truth to power. So I think at the end of the day foresight work is actually about power and voice and representation and agency. Because of that, and this is my second point, I actually believe that the capacity to do foresight is a deep capability that is necessary for policymakers. And it’s something that is integral for us to kind of as we’re refreshing democracy and what representative democracy and deliberative democracy looks like in the 21st century as it’s kind of a little bit failing, and it hasn’t quite gripped new potentials to do with technology, as we reimagine what a profound radical democracy looks like the capability of coming together to systematically understand alternative futures, and then build them collectively as a community is a deeply political and empowering act, and fundamentally at the core of the Democratic endeavor. So that’s what we really focus on. And I guess my final points to you, but thank you so much, again, it’s been an absolute pleasure. It’s amazing. Thank you so much, Kat, and where can we find more about you and your work? Is their website? www.sf.org.uk. And please reach out? Yes. Oh, God, org.uk and I’m hoping people do reach out to you, or at least, you know, out of that region to learn more, but folks, please reach out to Kat and her and her team. If you have any questions or you’d like more information, Kat, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. And I wish you an amazing journey had in 2020 and beyond any thanks. It’s been a pleasure. Hey, friend, this is Ian Khan. If you liked what you saw on my video, then please subscribe to my YouTube channel and be inspired every single day with innovative content that keeps you fresh, updated and ready for the future. For more information. Also visit my website at Ian khan.com
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