266 Mastering Foresight and Becoming Future-Ready: Strategic Leadership Lessons for the Future with John Smart | Partnering Leadership Global Thought Leader

***DISCLAIMER: Please note that the following AI-generated transcript may not be 100% accurate and could contain misspellings or errors.***

[00:00:00] Mahan Tavakoli: , John Smart. Welcome to Partnering Leadership. I'm thrilled to have you in this conversation with me. 

[00:00:05] John Smart: Mahan, it is an honor, it is a blessing. Your podcast is amazing. I love your learning orientation and the way that you just engage and draw out all your guests.

So thank you so much for having me on. 

[00:00:17] Mahan Tavakoli: John, I love your work. So it's gonna be mutual admiration society, including the book that you wrote, introduction to Foresight, executive Addiction Personal Team, and Organizational Adaptiveness. What an outstanding book with so many frameworks for thinking to help us as individuals, teams, and organizations become adaptive in this more uncertain environment and faster pace of change that we're experiencing. 

but before we get to that, John, we'd love to first find out a little bit about you. Whereabout did you grow up, and how did your upbringing impact who you have become? 

[00:01:02] John Smart: I guess my origin story is I was born in Canada, and my dad had an opportunity to start his own business in California in computer apparel management, basically creating programs for apparel businesses to run their companies inventory management and such.

 So I got my exposure to computers quite early. We moved to Los Angeles and I spent most of my formative years there in a little town called San Pedro. And I just got to see the astounding rate of improvement of these computers. Started , in many computers. And then, ended up, he was doing personal computers, which blew up of course, in the eighties.

And I just got to see this incredible acceleration in the digital space. Started in computer science at ucla. And then ended up with business administration as my degree because I realized maybe I want to start a business like my dad. And started a couple businesses.

They didn't work out so I had a little moment to say what do I really care the most about? I care the most about understanding the world, and I didn't understand biology at all. I'm a biological system and I didn't understand it. And I was just born with this luck of having indulgent parents, we had enough money from the companies that my father started. And I went back to school at uc, San Diego after Berkeley to get a second bachelor's this time in molecular biology. Because to me it was obvious that was the central science, right? How is this built from these simple molecules we can't even see?

 Then I started a business after that in test prep. So if Princeton Review, Stanley Kaplan, those kind of things we started one and that was my first successful business. So I learned a lot about entrepreneurship there, and we sold it to Princeton Review. So that was lovely. I got a nice exit and then I had to figure out what do I really want to do? What's my next act?

Now that I've built a business do I wanna just do another one? But what I realized was since I was in high school I've always considered the game of thinking about the future, the most interesting game that I can play, and it was in college that I learned about this group of people that you can get a master's or a PhD in.

It's called Strategic Foresight, so I went and got a master's from the University of Houston program, which is the oldest of the 27 places around the world. You can get a degree in strategic foresight. That was in the early two thousands. And that's been my passion if you will ever since.

There's a really good book that I wanna recommend, by the way, by Cal Newport. The book deep Work. He talks about the importance of focus and digital minimalism. This is called So Could They Can't Ignore You. It's one of his older books. And he basically makes the case that when you're in your twenties and thirties, you can't really know what your life passion's gonna be.

So build a bunch of useful skills cuz you can know what those are ones that you can actually do that people will pay you good money for. You take that strength and then you bridge into a bunch of passions experimentally, as side hustles. And he gives great examples in this book of people who do that and other people who say, oh no, I'm just gonna jump right in.

I know what my passion is. And then they like crash and burn and realize, no, actually that wasn't my passion. And so it's a really great example of how we integrate this kind of logical knowledge we have and our emotional self, which isn't necessarily something we are truly going to understand until we've had enough life experience.

 So I had the good fortune to define my foresight, passion, if you will, after I'd. Done my bonafides in the entrepreneurship space. And then I've started communities that like to explore foresight and how to improve it. And that's been satisfying my management and leadership side, 

 We have this nonprofit that focuses on that Acceleration studies foundation is the name of our nonprofit, focuses on understanding accelerating change, and then how we adapt to it. Because we live in a world where things just go faster every year, and we have to respond to that.

And foresight, of course, is a big piece of that. 

[00:05:14] Mahan Tavakoli: And that's what I would love to find out more about. First of all, John, typically at the end of the conversation, I ask for book recommendations. One of the things I love about you is that you read so much that you. Make recommendations all throughout, and I appreciate that.

Cal Newport is a professor at Georgetown University. That's where I went to business school. Oh. And nice. I love his work. And that's an outstanding book. Now, you mentioned that you got your master's in foresight. People hear about foresight, futurists. What is a foresight? What is a futurist? What is the difference between the 

[00:05:58] John Smart: two? So the field of looking to the future breaks into two basic areas. There's foresight, which are the methods we use to look ahead and there's futures. And those are the stories that we trade about the future in various areas.

And. Futurists are people who like to tell futures stories and whether you want to be called one or not. If you do that enough in public, people can say, oh, you're a futurist, right? Fore siders are different. Fore siders are people who are tasked by someone to look to and analyze aspects of the future. It's in your job description or you're even being paid for it.

You might be doing trend analysis, you might be creating crafting scenarios for what might be coming. You might be looking at emerging indicators, sense making. It's often called anything where you're trying to grapple with the uncertainty of the future, and you are being tasked to do that. That's foresight and that's a huge field, , much larger than the futurist field, the people who are professionally paid to trade stories about the future.

But they're both really important. So I wrote this book six years. It's been in the writing with my two young kids at home. It's gone a little longer than I thought, but I've got a three-year-old and a seven-year-old. I loved him to death. And it's called Introduction to Foresight

this book is part of a two book series. The second book is gonna be future Stories about the future of society and the Planet. But this one is called Introduction to Foresight, and it's about the methods people use to look ahead three different levels for ourselves, for our teams, and for our organizations.

Now, most people think when they think of a professional futurist, they think of somebody who is helping organizations make better strategy. But there's a huge literature in psychology on personal and team foresight as well. And one of the most useful things in my book, is sharing some of these methods that people use to look ahead better personally and immediately because the time horizon for foresight.

Breaks into four domains very nicely. There's today's foresight. Now until you go to sleep. There's the teases, which is tomorrow to the next three months, tomorrow to the next quarter, there's the fours, which is the next quarter to the next four years, the next election cycle. There's a lot of people doing foresight in that space and being paid to do it, like a political strategist or whatever.

And then there's everything after four years, which is long-term foresight. So today's short-term, mid-term, long-term, and one of, one of the things I try to stress in my book is foresight is a cycle. Learn, see, do, review. That's called the do loop. And learning is not about the future, it's about the past and the present. People in the intelligence communities are doing a lot of learning, but then they have to look ahead and that's foresight. They have to imagine, okay, given what we know about the past and the present, where do we see things going?

What are the predictable and the unpredictable things? Those are the two most important. And then once we've done that, we have to decide what do we want to go toward and what do we want to steer away from? The positive and the negative of sentiment, and our values that come from sentiment, 

and then we do, and then we review. So figuring out our strengths in each of those is really beneficial. And there's a wonderful book by near ael, called Intractable, and it has a bunch of great tips for today's foresight, for how we get better at planning our day and staying on track for the things that our foresight told us we want to do today.

And then at the end of the day, what do we do? We review, where did I fall off of that? And he's got a bunch of really powerful, simple tips. One of the great ones is start your day with a schedule. Don't start your day with the task list. There's too many things on that list. Start your day with at least two things that you put on your digital schedule.

 So you're gonna remain time aware throughout the day. When is that time box, as he calls it coming up. And then when that time box finishes, you ask yourself, before the end of the day, as soon as that time box is up, you say did I get what I wanted done in that time box?

Why not? How do I fix that? He's got lots of little tips for that, and that's all an example of today's foresight. And the big insight from my perspective in writing this book and reading the literature is, the better we get it today's foresight, the more constantly we're doing it, the better we get it tomorrow and the next couple of days.

And then. Suddenly , we're running review cycles on the end of the week, and then we're actually taking seriously these end of quarter reviews, which a lot of people shrug off, but they're really valuable on teams and organizations. And of course, as managers, we're not evaluated on today's foresight.

We're evaluated on the next quarter or the next four years depending on where we are in the hierarchy. And then when you do those will get you better at long-term foresight, which you don't need to do very often at all. There's a power law for these things. Almost all of your thinking in the future for an ordinary human being, psychologist tell us is now to the next few minutes, and it's mostly unconscious.

So pulling that stuff into consciousness and playing that game is so important. And we haven't talked enough about sentiment. We just barely. Mentioned it, but there's this new book called Dopamine Nation. You might enjoy this book. And it's all about how easily we are distracted by all of these little shiny bells and whistles that are out there, right?

And the basic insight there is we care about rewards and there are intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. And if we can attach intrinsic rewards to the things that we know, really help us adapt, right? Learn, foresee, do review. If we can attach intrinsic rewards to all four of those steps, we squirt our own dopamine into our own brains.

And we take that short moment and we go, ah, oh, that was great. I did that thing. And as neer would say if I'm squirting my own dopamine, and I'm recognizing that I'm rewarding myself and I'm doing that within an hour. Suddenly I am running the flywheel, as they call it, 

 Listeners, I would ask you, how often do you reward yourself for reviewing what you've done in a time box in a particular day, or do you skip that whole step and you just move on to the next thing on your list? Oh, I have so many things. I'm so anxious, I must get more done.

If instead, you are not just looking ahead, but you're attaching your sentiment, your passion, your emotion to those key steps in the flywheel, then you're adapting. And on those four steps I would ask you grade yourself. At the end of appendix, one of the book.

I have this series of worksheets where you can grade yourself on those four steps A to F, I'm an A for learning my friend. And I'm probably a strong B for foresight, for seeing ahead, for action. I can often be a C and for reviewing, I can be a D very easily.

So that's my problem, I know other people who just jump right in and then they think about the consequences. So they're fantastic executors and I want to give them things that need to be executed, and I know other people that are fantastic reviewers and critics, and I need those on the team too, right?

A learner can spend so much time learning, they'll stop in a moment and they'll say, Hey, am I ever gonna use this? Is this ever gonna be useful? Whoops. Whoops. And then they'll pull themselves back to reality, hopefully, so I think these are the kinds of checks we have to do cuz we have to ask ourselves where do these things fit?

And where does foresight fit? Organizational foresight fits at the front end of strategy. If you just do strategic thinking, that's really only the last step of foresight. Turns out foresight has another set of four steps, and the four steps of foresight are we anticipate what's predictable.

We innovate or imagine around what's uncertain and unpredictable. Then we craft strategy around what we prefer, and then finally we think about all the ways that we could fail and not get the things that we prefer. So these are called the four Ps, and my colleague, art Shostak came up with him in 2001.

We think of the probable future. Then we think about the possible future a little bit. We imagine alternatives and wild cards and things like that. Then we think about the preferable. We generate a nice vision. Hopefully we get shared vision from the team. Then you better go into the preventable.

That was his new contribution. The great 20th century futurist, Alvin Toffler in 1970 gave us three p probable possible preferable Art Shatick said, Nope, gotta have the preventable two. The dystopias , the traps that we might fall into. And if we do all four of those Ps on a daily basis that a psychologist named Gabrielle Ogan and a wonderful book called Rethinking Positive Thinking.

She describes a technique called Whoop Wish objectives, obstacles Plan. So you have to think through The obstacles as well before you go to your plan. So you put on your positive hat, you imagine what can come, then you put on your negative hat and then you make a plan. And in randomized controlled studies, she has shown that if you go negative first and then positive, you're 50% less accurate in your forecast of what you're gonna get done that day, that week, whatever it is.

So you lose half of your foresight if you go negative first. But like I say in my book, we actually live in a society that goes negative first on all the big media that's coming into us because that's what's creates the greatest engagement for people, so we have to actually disengage from that kind of media if we haven't balanced it first with what is the positive.

The positive through line for the society at large from the biggest picture. How are things getting better? Cuz they are when you take the big enough picture and then the positive through line for my organization and for me. And once you've got that, once you have your anchor where you want to go, then okay, throw the negative at me, see if my strategy is robust to them.

So she actually has done these wonderful studies where she's shown, for weight loss for s a t practice, for reading for all kinds of things, students and adults in these randomized trials that you wanna start with the positive, think of the negative, and then make the plan.

And your plan should have one if then statement in it. If this problem comes up, then I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna take a little break, I'm gonna stretch my legs, I'm gonna call my lifeline my friend who helps me deal with this prob, whatever it is. But you've actually. Anticipated in your head and suddenly you are gonna get more of the things done that you planned.

And there's one other thing I wanna mention that's really helpful from the psychology. As we get older, all of us need to think about the past, the future, and the present. And the psychologists tell us the past and the future as constructs are only useful if they impact our present in a positive and an adaptive way.

So what happens as we get older? Do we spend more time thinking about the future? The present or the past? The past, my friend. We just pile up all these past insights and hurts and experiences. And we ruminate, right? We ruminate on all those things and they pop up and they jump right into our present.

We're looking at this that reminds us of that. And the big insight is the past is only useful when it's organized to help the present, thinking about the future, we can daydream too, especially when we're kids. Oh, we daydream. If I had this, I'd be present and I'd, start the whatever.

And many of those are not gonna be useful, just like learning too much, foresighting too much can be very quickly a waste of time if you're not organizing it and bringing it back to the present. So my great tip for you, this is one of my most fun tip for people who are over 30, particularly over 50, okay?

Where I am. Is every time you catch yourself ruminating about some past thing, flip it. Flip it, and make yourself at that moment, think about the future. And I don't care if it's the next hour or the next few minutes or the rest of the day, or what you're gonna do tomorrow or even longer. It just has to be something.

And the most useful to you is gonna be the short term, right? The today's, but just flip it and make yourself think about the future. And you know what you'll do? You'll actually snap outta that reminiscence and then you won't spend too much time in that future because it's so opposite from what you were doing.

And then you'll pull yourself back in the present and suddenly whoa, here I am. What am I doing? What do I wanna do? And then that gets to, our great friends, Steven Covey, first things first, , how to prioritize, what to do next and his great matrix, 

do the important but not urgent up in that one corner. And we're constantly being pulled by fears, fires, and fancies. The three Fs pulled out of the thing we should be doing. We fear it. So then we procrastinate or some little fancy grabs us and we do dopamine squirting from some other thing and we binge on that thing and we shouldn't be binging on.

Or spend time you're rearranging our desk and we should be whatever. Or fires, right? If we're managers of any type, we're constantly being pulled away, but if we can just get to that most important thing that we planned ahead, and as near says, can you give yourself a little dopamine for actually looking at your schedule in the morning, first thing before you do anything else?

Ooh, yeah, I'm looking ahead. Oh, wow. It's like these simple habits. And then suddenly you're riding the dragon and you're not feeling like you're, a boat drift in the storm. 

[00:21:13] Mahan Tavakoli: I love this, John, so many different strands to pull on. I wanted to underline a couple of things that you mentioned.

First of all, the fact that foresight is a capability that we can develop and if we work on our foresight, even for the day, that can help us with foresight into that longer term. Now, as a fun, aside near his first book had been hooked, partly based on the help that he had provided to some technology companies to make sure we get those alerts at various times.

So they 

[00:21:50] John Smart: derail us. He wrote this book as penance for that first book. Yes, that's right. And that gets to values. Hopefully at some point we're gonna discuss values. The create, the adapt, and the protect being the three fundamental kinds of values. I think he realized it's not adaptive.

It's not adaptive to just create these things that hook people in and distract them from themselves. And so he wrote this other great book on the protection side. How do you protect yourself from that? You have to have both of those. You have to have the distraction, and you have to have the focus.

And then together that leads to a network that is much more adaptive. What are the values of a social network? Their empathy and ethics. That's my personal view. Now, Jonathan Ha has written a wonderful book, the Righteous Mind, and he and many other collaborators have this model Moral Foundations Theory.

There are several models for what are culturally universal values. I recommend the readers who are interested in that topic look at hate's book, the Righteous Mind and look at this moral foundation's theory and also look at the values model that I have developed in my book.

If you're curious, which is based on these two fundamental. Qualities of living systems, evolution and development. Evolution is that creativity we talked about. If you look at my hand here I'm holding up one hand go from the palm to the fingers. It's constantly experimenting and creating variety, 

development is doing the opposite development. If you hold up your hand and you go from the fingers down to the palm, it's converging. Development is a process that takes a complex system and keeps it on a life cycle. And so everything about humans, that is same from one to the other within the species.

The reason you and I can use these words to talk to each other is because development has created these standards and it's keeping those things the same in every cycle. Everything about our children, that's different from us. Is an evolutionary process, an experimental process.

Everything that is the same is a developmental process. And so creating and protecting the things that have worked in the past are two fundamental goals, if you will, of living systems. But then there's this network layer on top of that, groups of living systems work as a superpower, as a team that has more capability than any single individual, 

the emergent power of the team. That model is called head, hand. In heart humans have these three unique capabilities. John, good enough's book head, hand in Heart, he's a social activist, is a great overview of that. We have these opposable thumbs that can manipulate technology. So technology has always been the human story from the very beginning.

We have. These heads that can think ahead. That's the foresight, that's the unique ability we can imagine into the future, and create strategies to try and get what we can think. That's the head, got the head and the hand. All right, let's talk about heart. Heart is the way that we use ethics and empathy to work together to create these strong, bonded relationships that are going after something that the whole group cares about, 

and then the human acceleration happens from there, it just take off cultural and technological acceleration. And today it's digital technologies that are the leading edge of that acceleration. So whereas many things in the human environment are actually slowing down, for example, all of the big coordinated actions that humans take, like to build a bridge to create a new Institution of learning there's a famous observation that you get half as many drugs outta the FDA per a billion dollars that you spend.

Every nine years, and it's been true since 1950 cuz there's just more lawyers. The value of human life goes up, the conservatism, the testing goes up. And human population is decelerating, 

since 1960, the second derivative of human population growth has been negative. And now everyone knows it's sometime in this century, we're gonna hit nine, maybe nine and a half billion max. And then we continue to decelerate because having more kids becomes a liability in an urban digital environment.

And so most people choose to have less than two kids for every, two people who can have kids. And so what's accelerating? Only these very special set of tools, these digital tools, and some of the things we can do with them, like secondarily biotechnology the things we learn from this accelerating digital environment.

But unfortunately, and I say this really with heart, unfortunately. That acceleration seems baked into the structure of physics, of the way the universe works. There's so many benefits to accelerating these digital technologies. We all want to accelerate 'em and our ability , to slow down the beast, if you will.

Maybe we can slow it down a little bit, but no, it's gonna keep happening. So all the things we saw, with PCs in the eighties, and then internet in the nineties, and then smartphones in the two thousands, and then ai, real biologically inspired, neuro inspired AI starting in 2010 with deep learning.

And now we have this thing that synthesizes human language, these large language models called chat, G P T. And then these image generators like Dolly and Mid Journey kids are using these things to create just crazy. Crazy synthesis of human language that are incredibly powerful. They can write their own essays with these, 

but the thing itself is not intelligent. It's not ai, it's amplification of human language and summarization of human language. So it's basically making the some total of all the knowledge that's available on the planet, more and more accessible to us. And a lot of disruptive and bad things can happen with that as well as good things.

So the human machine teaming. Is really the central issue 

 my friend Gary Marcus, wrote a book called Rebooting ai. It's a fantastic book on the future of AI that some of your people who care about that field might wanna read. And he has a subset that I recommend on the same topic. CK is a really nice platform for newsletters and what he basically says is, these things have no self-knowledge, 

no world knowledge, no logic. So you have to be very careful in how we use them and realize that a lot of what they're gonna say is gonna be very convincing sounding bs. Because all they're doing is synthesizing all this language that we're all using to talk to each other. And so we're in this moment where we're seeing these accelerating tools and at some point the algorithms that we care about the most, the ethics, the empathy the wisdom that human brains have.

At some point, those kinds of things will be baked into these digital technologies and we'll be able to trust them at least as much as we trust us, and the majority of us are trustable. Take the big picture, go back to MLK's. The arch of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice in the big picture. The system is ratcheting towards a better future. And it takes some moral courage, right back to the ethics and empathy. It takes some moral courage to decide what is that protopia that I want to move toward? 

[00:29:38] Mahan Tavakoli: John, as we think about it from the team and organizational perspective, when you look at those as also complex systems and try to use the avo devo foresight tool. How can that be used in the team organizational complex system framework? 

[00:30:02] John Smart: Let's start with teams cuz that's maybe the easiest for us to see. Teams have these fundamental values. The creative folks are really interested in I call them goals.

The goals, if you will. So there's three actors we want to consider. A individuals are the primary evolutionary agents, and groups are the primary protectors or developmental agent, and in the middle are networks. So if you ask what really survives in life as a system, it's not individuals and it's not groups.

They're constantly being selected in or selected out, depending on how well they're doing. The network always wins. The network of life has been immortal since the first cell life is constantly improving its capabilities and its diversity. And so we can start off by taking a very strong diversity oriented perspective.

And I'm not just talking about the diversity we find in say, the diversity equity and inclusion activities which are commendable in the way they're implemented in most organizations. I'm talking about diversity from a complex systems perspective. So there's a wonderful book by Scott Page who's a complex systems researcher at University of Michigan, just down the street from where I am in Ann Arbor.

And it's called The Difference. And the subtitle is How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, firms, schools, and Societies. And what he shows is this network perspective is recognizing the power of the network and keeping network. First is that for all complex questions that are not easily understandable, the tough questions like what my strategy should be next, you want a cognitive, diverse group inputting into that foresight process.

And so what is cognitive diversity? What is skills diversity? What is experience diversity? I think you want to start by asking that question, what are the different skills that I don't have that I need in my network? That's how you create a powerful team or a powerful organization, and this leads us to probably the most.

Well known book that we'll talk about today. And that's Strengths Finder. That's Gallup Strengths finder, by Don Clifton, the psychologist who created this tool for helping people hire better for their organizations. And he was so successful that he bought Gallup, the polling company and created Gallup, the management consultancy.

It's a great business story on Clifton. And so what did Gallup's research figure out? They polled, three, 4 million people and they came up with 34 strengths in the workplace. And these are unique skills that are useful, many of which are not your strengths. There's a diversity of workplace strengths that are worth knowing about. And you can take the $50. Test online, the Clifton strengths finder, which I recommend you do at least once every 10 years, and it will sort your strengths from top to bottom. And one of the first things you'll discover is the ones that you're weakest in, you don't necessarily even think of them as strengths, like the bottom five.

You might actually ridicule them. And so you'll go and you'll read the page, on that particular strength, whatever it is, activator or developer or, connector, futuristic command. And you'll suddenly realize under certain circumstances, wow, that would really be a useful skill for me to have.

And what I've done in my book, As I've related the 34 workplace strengths to these eight skills that I think all teams need to have, and four of them are foresight skills, and four of them are action skills. Now, Gallup takes action skills and breaks them into executing, influencing, and relating.

Those are the three actions they consider really important. So as leaders, we can say how well am I executing and how many people do I have on my team who have execution skills? How well am I influencing? Am I recruiting others, the stakeholders that I need to make my strategy actually work?

And then finally, do I have enough relators on my team? Because we all know good bosses who get a lot done and they burn their people out because they never take breaks after the sprints. They never figure out how to keep those teams strong, they're great executors and influencers and they socket relating, 

so we gotta have all of those. But then if you remember the do loop, you gotta have good reviewers too. The auditors, the accountants, the people who are saying, how close am I to the mark? And if not, how do I get back on the mark? And then, if you remember, our learners, the learners actually come in front of the foresight 

they're good at knowing history and the current state of things. So the strengths are learning, anticipation, the probable. Innovation, which is the possible strategy, which we all know. It's the heart of foresight. It's the last step. And then execute, influence, relate, and review.

So the laser skills those eight skills, you can actually, like I showed the appendix of my book, you can figure out your capacity across all eight of those skills. And like Gallup says with their buckets of these skills, they have a four bucket system for them the future is just strategy.

And they don't create a separate bucket for learning or reviewing like I do. But whether you use their four bucket model or my eight bucket model, the same thing is true. You need diversity across all the buckets. You need to recognize the importance of them all on your team. If you don't have enough people on your team in one of those buckets, bring in somebody who has that skill and then you'll be able to run that flywheel, learn, foresee, do review, and you'll constantly be running that.

But the most important thing to remember is you're not running it yourself, my friend. It's the network that's running it. We all know the great management books that say we wanna become a servant leader. We wanna make ourselves redundant as soon as we can. It's the network that always wins.

It's the network that's always advancing. And so recognizing the power of the diversity of that network. In all the situations where diversity matters. Now, it doesn't matter if you're building a bridge, you need the people who know how to apply the known engineering principles for that bridge.

It matters if you're trying to decide where to build the bridge. If you're trying to decide how you're gonna fund the bridge, there's all these human issues where the wicked problems come up, and you need the diversity there. Yes, you're not gonna have the diversity all the time.

You will focus, but in general, the network is always the most adaptive thing. So knowing what your network is and knowing how to keep reaching out to people who have the skills you don't have, these are huge issues that will help people adapt. And that's really the biggest insight of this Evo Devil model is 

living complex systems need evolution and development, and I say empathy and ethics are the fundamental values of adapting for networks, for groups. I put them in that order for a reason.

You don't understand what your ethics are gonna be without first trying to empathize with all the diversity that's already in existence.

[00:37:44] Mahan Tavakoli: John, in addition to adaptiveness, which you say is important and is based on that empathy and ethics. A couple of other key competencies you talk about are creation and protection.

And how they are a necessary part of this process as well. 

[00:38:05] John Smart: I think that the ethics of adaptiveness does break into these two fundamental drives. We have this drive to experiment to try different things and to be individuals to individuate and.

Some of the goals around that are innovation and intelligence. If you think of what intelligence is, it's a very unique and personal thing. Each of us has a self and it's unique Myself, is unique from yours. My experiences, even though we have very similar structure from a developmental standpoint in, when we come out of the womb, right?

We individuate and that's a very creative thing and a very valuable thing. Do you want keep people the freedom? The west is so good at understanding the value of the freedom of creation on that side. On the other side, the things that have been proven successful in the past, we wanna protect those.

We wanna keep those. Around. We want to make sure they don't fail. And so sustainability and strength, just the general strength that we have of that system, it's ability to withstand, forces that might degrade it. Those are fundamental values on the protection side, and I would put it to the listeners to think about this.

Political parties in liberal democracies very often split those two values. In many cultures, the liberal left is. Creative on the social stand perspective, and it's protective on the economic dimension. So we want the freedom to try new things in the social and cultural sphere on the left.

And we want to protect , our rights protect our industries on the economic side and the right flips that the right wants, freedom of entrepreneurship and economic experiment. And it wants to protect social and cultural traditions, things that have worked in the past.

 So I think every value we care about, we can think about from this evolutionary or developmental perspective. And the deepest thing that I would say to try and justify why this EVO perspective seems to be a universal one, is the physics of the universe seems to sort, at least the way I see it into these two fundamental approaches.

So maybe the big takeaway is, is your team thinking about these things? And a really good book that I do recommend people who are interested in learning more about leadership. A really nice book by Jan Benedict steam Camp came out a couple years ago called Time to Lead, and he actually takes this Evo dev perspective, this create, protect, adapt perspective.

And he says, there's a kind of leader that Isaiah Berlin identified in the fifties called the Fox. And the Fox is. They see many options and they don't have any clearly defined overarching goal very often. Mostly you can observe them as being very flexible and very opportunistic.

So they have great ability to try different things based on the circumstances, and you can't really pin 'em down to what their top strategy is at any point. The hedgehogs are the opposite. The hedgehog has a top strategy. You pretty much know how they're relating things to that, and they're often shutting down the.

The other things that could distract them from that strategy, so they're very much in the protect mode for their strategy versus the create mode. And then sitting on top those two is the eagle. And the eagle is somebody who, they try to take a big picture of you and have a strategy, but they're also very much into tactical agility.

So they try and integrate with a big picture, but then they also want the tactical agility of the fox, and you can't really do that without having that big picture view, that's why the Eagles flying at the 64,000 feet or whatever. Very often now, most people are eagles to various types.

They might be taking the big picture view for a particular thing in a particular group. But they're not necessarily flying high enough or taking a big enough picture. That's one of the big insights of being an eagle is if you have enough empathy for all the different views that are out there, you really can take that big picture view.

You could say, yes, it's not working now, but it's working here in this other location. That's benchmarking we found best in class. Or it's worked here in the past. Or I think it'll work here on a bigger time horizon than we're looking at. So we need to secure these new resources.

We need to stretch our plan a little bit and backcast, it's called Backcasting from the Preferred Future. And see what are the steps that'll take us to that. So you do whatever you need to get that big picture integrated view, and then that helps you manage the fox and the hedgehog that are, on your team.

Now what Steam camp shows, he covers I think 20 different leaders in this book. And they're all famous people military, political and other historical leaders who have these fox hedgehog or eagle characteristics. He argues that you can be a great leader in any of those.

There's a fourth type called the ostrich. And we all know this too, the leader who is not foresighted and whenever conflict comes, they are very unpredictable cuz they've been trying to avoid it their whole lives and suddenly hears conflict. And he gives you some examples of ostrich who don't necessarily put their heads in the sand, they try and bite the head off of the messenger or whatever, right?

They're just chaos agents when the conflict happens and in between they're monkey see, monkey do, they just don't want to hear anything. And he even gives examples that ostriches can be good leaders. And you might think for a moment, how's that possible? Because you understand the system, you understand that the good leader is a fox, a hedgehog or an eagle.

So you delegate your leadership to one of those. A great book by Korn Ferry for your information, this is probably the most expensive leadership book that an ordinary person would buy that a couple hundred bucks, 300 bucks maybe, if you buy the latest edition of FYI for your information, it has all of these self-awareness tools like questions you can answer.

But it's actually based on this idea that there is thought leadership, results leadership, people leadership and character leadership. Those are the four types of leadership, the four competencies. And the big insight for me, in a complex world is that the best leaders they're more and more forced into the people oriented ones.

People leadership and character leadership. So they're forced into working on themselves and being an example of what good behavior's gonna be in the organization. And they're forced into becoming developers. In complex organizations, great leaders give up , performance leadership and thought leadership.

They give them up to their deputies in the same way that an ostrich can give up. Creativity, protection, and adaptive leadership to a deputy. So where are we? We're back in network thinking, right? If we truly are network thinking, if we truly are recognizing, okay, I'm one individual, what's really powerful is the human network, the pro-social network, the one that is working with me on whatever the thing is, we can recognize the critical diversities that we need to recognize and we can make sure that we have a good example from one of those 

now, everything we've been discussing are simple models. And it's possible that we are oversimplifying, and this is where I think the review step comes in constantly. We have to constantly ask ourselves in a cognitive, diverse, critical group, what are we missing, 

because at a certain point, your system is gonna be too simple. And this comes back, in my opinion, to the fundamental ethics of evolution and development. Development is cutting everything out and keeping the system predictable. That doesn't work all the time at a certain point, sometimes some new thing that isn't, that thing is gonna be better adapted, something on the evolutionary side.

So we've gotta be humble and realize that we may think we have the best models, but they may be only useful for a particular context. And maybe they're useful most of the time, but maybe there's some thing coming that no one's seen yet. And so we have to be comfortable being creative and being protective.

And many people who are in HROs, high reliability organizations we know where they sit on that triangle. Creative protection and adapting. They're way off in the protective corner, they need to focus on, creativity and how they get that freedom back in and how they empower subgroups at the very least, to do like the skunk works of Lockheed Martin, 

something that has that license to disrupt, and at the very least, you gotta at least be willing to go and find it. If you're not doing it internally, you gotta find out who is doing it. I have an updated version of swat, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And mine is called aor.

Our group decided that a better set of four steps is advantages, scan for advantages and disruptions in the external environment. Advantages are good things that are not happening to you. So positive hat you put on your positive hat and you have your team look for advantages relative to whatever the task is that you want them to get something done.

Make 'em spend a little time looking for advantages that are out there, some new tool, some new example, and you're not getting it. And then you go to disruptions, which is force changes that some people don't want, but there are opportunities for others, right? Disruptions can be great opportunities. So you put on your negative hat and you look at the disruptions and you see who's really, thinks them negatively and you see what the opportunities are within it.

Like all the opportunities of covid, all the silver linings that some people got, and then after you've done the advantage disruptions, you do opportunities and risks. And then risks. You have to split that into risks of action and risks of inaction.

Cuz as we all know, Jonathan Ha coddling of the American mind, his book, very often we don't qualify risks of inaction. We decide on safety, we decide on helicopter parenting, we decide on too much protection, and we don't realize the risk of not acting, of not giving the kids the freedom.

What are we losing there? So we really want to see both sides. And, sentiment really does break down into those two things, in my opinion, what we want and we want to move away from 

this is the pleasure praying principle, which believe it or not, some life scientists think that animals as simple as single-celled animals have that so a permium, cuz they even, they have genetics that push them towards or away from stimuli and that bind the bad things to the cell wall so they can't hurt them and then move them toward the thing that they want.

[00:49:56] Mahan Tavakoli: I've found thinking about it through AOR with some of the executive teams that I've had conversations to be really helpful. Thank you. And something that has impacted my own thinking a lot is thinking more about networks.

As you say, John, great leaders learn to keep their people and their networks at the center of their values. The importance of the network and understanding that network power. As opposed to any one individual, the network has much more capabilities. 

A lot of times people look at the individual pieces rather than network. 

[00:50:35] John Smart: Yeah. It's such a good way of looking at it. And if you ask yourself the difference between the network and the group, the group are all the things we agree upon, those are those developmental commonalities. The network's a different thing.

The network is a collection of individuals and groups each with their own unique goals, values, skills. And so you gotta have some empathy to see all of those differences. And, in a world of accelerating digital change we need to come up with models that will keep us adaptive to my way of thinking.

There's just nothing. It's clear there's nothing more complex in the known universe than biological systems, and in particularly the human brain. A hundred trillion unique synaptic connections. Wow. Wow. And there's more than 7 billion of them on the planet. Each unique. Wow.

Okay. That's a powerful network. Maybe I wanna, remember my Dunbar number, there's 120 people or so that I can deeply model if I took a pad of paper out, could I write down the 120 people that are in my tribe by the ones that most, that I depend on or work with are the ones that I am most influenced by.

And if not maybe I need to think a little harder. Maybe I need to go back to the notes, right? I have this wonderful book journal to the self about self journaling, maybe I need to do a little more journaling. Look back on who influenced me in the past. And that's how we'll find that spiderweb of that central network that we want to really keep strong.

That's why I'm gonna make sure I have those 120 birthdays on my calendar so that 120 times a year I'm sending out a nice little email to that person. These are not just gonna be necessarily people who are gonna be most helpful to us.

They're people who are at the center of our tribe, , they inspire us. They help us realize just how amazing. The world is 

[00:52:35] Mahan Tavakoli: John, I know you are also working on some other projects your Good Foresight newsletter, the Wiki you are working on, you're doing a lot of great work on helping people become better at foresight for themselves, their teams and organizations.

[00:52:53] John Smart: Thank you, Mohan. I would say, to start there was an organization called the Association of Professional Futurists. If you were really interested in this field and how people do foresight work prior to strategy, the associated professional futurists is a wonderful little organization.

Seven 800 people global now. Started in 2003, that you could look at what we're trying to do at Foresight University. Which is the educational arm of our nonprofit is we're writing these two books, which are an overview of Foresight and Futures.

The Foresight book is now up on Amazon, and we have a free version of it@foresightguide.com. So if you want a simpler version of what is in the book, you can go to foresight guide.com and read it there too. And then we have really, basically one big project, which is a future Pia 

nobody has yet made a nice wiki with structured speculations on the future, and Wikipedia unfortunately does not allow you to do that. They wanna focus on the past and the present, organizing that, and making it very, understandable. And so we think there's a need for this. There's a need for a wiki that describes foresight methods.

The foresight piece and a wiki that gives nice summaries of future stories, the big stories people are trading on the future of AI or, the future of air taxis or whatever it is that the topic that you're interested in. We know that a crowd can build a nice summary that doesn't currently exist.

My vision is, in 20 years someone types future of X and there's a nice future PIA page, with just a two page summary at the top. And for those visual oriented people, just a two minute YouTube, clip that gives you the four Ps in that space, what we think is probable possible, , what various groups prefer.

And then what are some of the dystopias that people have discussed? The traps and the problems. And so we would like to see future Pia in multiple languages exist, and that's our big project. So if you have an interest in that our newsletter at foresight u.com.

You can subscribe to our Good Foresight newsletter or you can go to ck and find us there. Good foresight. So that is our attempt to, provide something valuable. 

[00:55:14] Mahan Tavakoli: I definitely recommend the newsletter outstanding content, love the book, and can't wait for the next one in the series to come out and really excited about the Wiki you are working on.

 There is power in the insights of the network, even Phil, Ted Locke. Looked at the fact that groups in many instances, come up with better forecasts than individual experts. Yes. Come up with it. So this is a way of tapping into the intelligence and foresights of a group of people about the future.

Lots of exciting things, and I can't wait to have conversations with you about those. Thank you so much for your insights and your foresight john Smart, thank you for joining me in this 

[00:56:11] John Smart: conversation. Mahan, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.