Transcript
Transcript: Futurism for Policy Makers
[00:00:00 The CSPS logo appears onscreen.]
[00:00:06 The screen fades to Paul Pilieci sitting in a chair.]
Paul Pilieci (Director General, Canada School of Public Service): Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome. My name is Paul Pilieci. I am a Director General of Policy here at the Canada School of Public Service, and I have the distinct pleasure of welcoming you here to our event today, Futurism and Public Policy. Before I get the opportunity to welcome our distinguished speaker today, I would like to take an opportunity to acknowledge the land that I'm on today. It is the land, the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe peoples, and I want to sincerely thank them for the stewardship of this land for generations. I know that folks are joining us today in person as well as virtually, either in Canada or abroad, and I would ask you to take a moment to reflect on the territory in which you find yourself today. In terms of today's event, we've got a really great one for you. I'm really excited about it. As a policy practitioner myself, it is something where I think we're going to learn a whole lot, especially for folks that are involved in medium-term planning work, whether you're an old hat at it or you're new to it, I think we're going to learn a lot in terms of new tools, and perspectives and how to do that particular job a lot better, and I hope that you can take something away from this event that will help in that type of work. In terms of the format of the event today, Dr. Khayat will present to us for approximately 20 to 30 minutes. We're going to engage in a question-and-answer session as well as, for those who are lucky to be with us in person today, a 30-minute workshop. I now have the pleasure of introducing Dr. Khayat.
[00:01:41 Dr. Zayna Khayat is shown standing at a podium.]
She is a Vice President at Teladoc Health, she is an Adjunct Professor at the Rotman School at the University of Toronto, and it is our distinct pleasure to have you here to talk to the subject today. So, please join me in giving her a round of applause and welcome here to our event today.
(Applause)
Dr. Zayna Khayat (Adjunct Professor, University of Toronto): All right, everyone. Thank you. We're going to hang out in the future for the next hour or so. I'm going to open with a story. So, I'm a professor. I teach in health sector strategy at the University of Toronto, and I was at a mentoring session with one of my students and she sent me this picture. She said, "This is what's on my desktop right now." And I said, "What's that about?" And she's like, "I just, I heard your title. You're a futurist, and I've been wondering for a long time, what do these creatures do? How do I become a futurist?" So, if anything, all you could do today is at the cocktail party tonight or at dinner, you can tell your friends and family you met a futurist today. And so, just a bit of what that is. Officially, as a futurist, as an applied futurist, that's my role, about a day a week as the Health Futurist in Residence at Deloitte, in Canada with their health care team, but I thread that into some of my other gigs as a professor with Teladoc and a few other tech companies, but I kind of built my chops on this. I was working in Europe, in the Netherlands, with their health system and I got recruited to Canada to a large national social enterprise in seniors care, Saint Elizabeth Health Care, SE Health, and they were asking me to come and be their Chief Innovation Officer. And I said, "No, I don't want to be a Chief Innovation Officer." I hate the word innovation because we use that word to describe everything that's slightly different from the status quo. But I will be your Chief Futurist, because I believe the future of health care is at the home, in the home, and I want to have a platform to create these new futures, new policies, new payment models, new care models, new businesses, as we emancipate kind of from facility-based care." So, that's a bit of where I built my chops. And so, we wrote a book called, "The Future of Aging," to help us be anchored in where aging and seniors wealth and health is going to inform our work day-to-day. So, we we're kind of doing futurism through our book and then a few other projects and things like that. I'm now part of, there's actually an association of professional futurists, super dork fest, but it just helps to kind of hone the craft. And so, I'm going to bring a little bit of that to the question that the School asked me to kind of explore with you all, is, the time has come for futurism, is at least my hypothesis, to be a core competency of the work you do in policymaking at every level of government, and I'm going to talk a little bit about why.
So, a big part of futurism and futurist work is spending time to understand signals, trends, shifts and sense make them. You don't know how they're going to play out, but it will inform choices you make. So, for example, coming out of COVID at Deloitte to help all of our clients around the world figure out what are we going to be when we grow up coming out of this thing, this is an example of how we organized and helped people sense make pretty macro societal, geopolitical, demographic trends. We basically said there were shifts and trends happening before COVID that are still there around climate, around our demographic bulge, around lack of economic productivity of nation states, and this kind of, at the time, growing trend, maybe it's continuing, around populism. And then there were other things that were happening in our world that accelerated coming out of this major event. Governments, citizens took on massive debt. I think in Ontario we estimate it's going to take 15 years to kind of recover from the amount of spending that was done without the taxation coming in. Digital, obviously, became ubiquitous. Work changed, home changed, the role of home, and wow, did we shine a microscope or a sunlight on massive inequities that we knew about but we didn't really have them in our face. And then, of course, after this cataclysmic event, new things came on the scene that we were not contending with before around supply chain, around industrialism, protectionism. Provinces were fighting with each other, we were fighting with 3M, but then we also had new types of solidarity. Of course, government stepped up its role and all of us changed as consumers, every single one of us.
And so, that's kind of an example of a way to understand all these shifts. What are they going to do to whatever I do today? The reality is this is happening all the time, not waiting for a major event. So, if you think about the world is changing all the time, all these vectors, geopolitical, sociological, demographic. Canada is impacted by all that normally, but then within Canada, we're going through our own thing all the time because of a bunch of unique shifts, vectors, trends, etc. to our country on all layers. And then whatever department, division, agency, government body you all belong to, it's got its own stuff happening. Education, agriculture, health care, finance, mining, whatever it is, defence. So, if you think of all these layers of vectors, and forces, and shifts and trends coming at you, they're coming kind of in every direction transectorally. And that's kind of the work of what futurists do. We sense make around that. Back in the 90's, no business school would do a course, or a text or a lecture without a quote from Jack Welch. Do you guys remember Jack Welch? He was the famous CEO of this company called GE, which was not ready for the future, if you follow what's happened to that company. But he was the guy that everyone quoted. And so, I think in the 70's, he had made this statement, which was part of the philosophy of GE and their longevity, that if the metabolism, if the rate of change of all these things outside of whatever you've got your sphere of influence, let's say your policy arena, is faster than your ability to kind of keep up with that change, the end is near, right? And the end doesn't mean overnight everything collapses, or if you're in the business world, you go out of business the next day. But it kind of makes the point around, given that the only certainty is the number of forces that are going to kind of change your status quo, the velocity of those forces, the magnitude of them, is the only certainty. There is no status quo option in anything, right? So, you either be future ready, and that's the bit we're going to talk about, or the end is near. You go, you obsolesce. Now, obsolescence doesn't necessarily, again, mean you close up shop. I would suggest in my sector, health care, we're obsolesced. Our business model is broken. We have failed to be able to deliver on the contract we made with Canadians that you pay us taxes, we'll organize services and meet your needs in a timely and affordable way. We can't do that when six and a half million Canadians don't have primary care. Just to calibrate that, that would be the equivalent of your little kid starting grade school and then the government saying, "Sorry, we don't have enough teachers. So, you just don't get to go to school." That's the equivalent of not having primary care. Other countries baffle that Canada has not been able to figure this out. It's like a basic contract of society. People are waiting 18 months to four years for surgery, etc., etc. So, how do you get around that?
[00:09:29 An opinion piece from Financial Times titled "CEOs forced to ditch decades of forecasting habits" is shown.]
Well, there are some signals that accepting and relying on traditional, what I would say, industrial era norms of management, of strategy making, of organizing yourself, diminishing returns for this kind of new world environment, and a sign that we, I think we've inflected, was kind of this piece that came out in the Financial Times. So, IKEA, we all know this brand, we probably all use it, and maybe I used to have black hair before trying to build IKEA for all my kids. When a little boat got stuck in the Suez Canal, it almost shut down their operations, right? So, they were like, "What are we doing, doing five-year forecasts?" And I've been in the for-profit companies where literally, the head office is like, give me your revenue projections by product, by geography, down to eight decimal points in five years. I'm like, "Really?" But that's what we do. We do forecasting, right? We do planning, etc., maybe three years, and they're like, "We're shredding those plans. We're not doing it anymore because there is nothing that is consistent in the world that suggests any of those plans have any stability." And so, they've literally changed to a kind of strategy process of every few months they have four or five scenarios that could play out based on their best knowledge, and then they're like a rolling scenarios and then a rolling strategy. This will just become normal. So, what is that? So, if you think about, kind of, traditional planning, call that strategy making, whatever you do in policy strategy, it's worked for us quite well in the industrial era. We get all the data, we have a current state, we have a future state we say we want to get to, and we figure out what will it take to get to that future state in three years, in five years, even in ten years. That's traditional strategy. What it does is it kind of gives you some confidence that I can kind of meticulously plan into the future. And all I have to do is get good data to plan and have incredible execution, right? And IKEA just said, "That doesn't work for us anymore, and we've got incredible data and execution."
[00:11:45 A slide is shown with the text:
"Strategy and planning becoming systems- and future-oriented"
"Strategy: Present Forward considers the current state, recent past and internal/external scans to plan into the future … limited to the near future (3-5 years)"
"Strategic Foresight: Future-Back enables you to look further into the future (5-10 years out) … empowers decisionmakers to use new ways to develop (and implement) the near-term strategy … that are compatible with the unfolding future".]
So, kind of the new methodology is what we call strategic foresight. And basically, the biggest difference is instead of going from here, present and going forward, I'm going to go to the future and work backwards. And usually, that future to do good foresight, you want to be five years at least. We typically say ten years out. I've done stuff 60 years out, but 5 to 10 years is a good start point. And it's not to predict the future, to pontificate about the future, to say you were right or wrong, but it's just a different methodology to empower you, whether you're a policymaker, a decision maker, somebody who's allocating resources or developing strategy, but to make sure that the bets you're making today are compatible with this ever-unfolding future that has so much uncertainty. That's all of foresight.
So, just a quick kind of, Futurism 101. So, imagine wherever you are, here you are today with your policy area of focus, and you want to start this exercise going out to 2035. So, easy-peasy is just looking at typical shifts, and drivers and trends and just projecting them out. We do this with demographics, we do this with kind of looking at how technology is going to evolve, population growth, migration, blah, blah, blah. Okay, that's easy. That's straight-line forecasting. The next layer of kind of uncertainty is, kind of, predicted futures. So, you kind of, you forecast out from today and you model out things with maybe a little bit of some buffer, and that gives you a little bit more space to wiggle in, upon which you can make strategies. Okay, now you're in futurism when you're going another cone out of possibility, called plausible futures. So, plausible futures are scenarios that might play out if based on kind of pretty known trends, precedents. I think Canada is, benefits greatly from plausible future making because we tend to be 10 to 15, if not 25 years behind most other jurisdictions. We are rarely first. And so, it's going to be very easy to say, "Well, Netherlands already legalized marijuana," or, "Australia already gave patients all access to their data," or whatever it is. So, we can kind of see that we're going to catch up and get there or we can have some kind of certainty around trends, that they're going to materialize based on other precedents. So now, your cone of possibilities is getting wider, but the ultimate power of futurism is possible futures. So, now you're suspending too much anchoring in what you're fairly confident in, and you're playing out what if all these things could have played out? So, this full cone of possibility. And then, in my view, if you want to do strategic policymaking or strategy, do you have a point of view on your preferred future? What, given your mandate, our values in Canada, do you want to happen for Canadians, or Canadian society or whatever it is? And then, when you can see the full cone of possibilities, your ability to do a preferred future that stretches a lot further than just execute on what we know from today, that's kind of why you do it. So, that's kind of Futurism 101.
So, how do you do that in practice? There's a few methodologies, a lot of tools, and those of you in the room, we're going to practice some of them, but to do a true kind of, give yourself a good shot at it methodology, you kind of, to get those full cone of possibilities, you fan out a bunch of possible scenarios. What drives which scenario takes you to this end of the cone or that under the cone is what we call critical uncertainties, big vectors that you really don't know how it's going to play out. I'm sure any of you could think about a couple of them going on in the world today, around is it going to go this way or that way, right? So, it just gives you some space to play, if this uncertainty goes this way, what scenario emerges versus that one? It's very systematic. It's just as systematic and methodological as doing, a three-year budget for your department. There's a methodology to this, and it's highly participatory. That's the beauty of this. If you think of the policy arena, there's nothing you're going to work on in policy for your little department or your division that isn't intersecting with many, many other departments or divisions. So, the methodology accounts for that. It has to because of how big your cone of possibilities, and it's really what I call future intelligence gathering so you can mobilize for today. So, when doing those scenarios, there's a very simple methodology, and we're going to practice it in a pretty benign use case in our workshop today, but this was from (inaudible), he kind of developed these. They're basically for: fixed scenarios. We've got some wrapping of the text.
So, a continuous scenario, which is everything as happening today just continues on the rate it's continuing, that could be in a decline path, in a growth path or a flat path, whatever it is. There's a collapse scenario, which is every worst thing that could happen materializes, and then you play that scenario out. The discipline scenario is maybe, let's say in climate change, we are on a path if we keep doing, continue, but we find a way to discipline and steer the ship and at least keep it flat, which is still a ton of work from a policy perspective. And of course, the transformation scenario is where we reimagine our ways of being, our ways of knowing. We kind of reinvent ourself. It gives you a lot of place to play. So, this is one technique we do. So, imagine if you played out these scenarios and took some space, there's a ten-minute version of doing this, there's a three-hour version of doing these four scenarios, there's a one-week version, there's a six-month way to do this, that, there's all ranges. But that's kind of your question, is, once you play out how, what would this world look like, or Canada look like or my domain, then you ask yourself, "Okay, what can I do now from a policy perspective that can maximize the chances that Canada, or Canadians, or whoever is your stakeholders, thrive the most in any of these scenarios?" That's kind of the work to be done because none of the scenarios will actually be true. They'll be a mix of all of them.
I'm going to show you an example. So, this is a big academic health centre, multi-site hospital network. This was 2015. They had already done strategic planning the way you all do. They hire a consultant, they spend lots of money, they have lots of workshops. And you guys have seen strategy plans, there's like usually three pillars and four or five actions under each, right? And that's the five-year strategy. If you took off the name of any hospital in my world, they all look the exact same, right? But anyway, so they had done that and then they thought, are we pressuring, pressure testing and pushing ourselves enough? So, they brought in a group to help them kind of put their strategy through a foresight. And so, back to those uncertainties that I talked about. In their case, to come up with their scenarios, to just widen up the periscope, there were two big uncertainties at the time of what direction health care might go in the world and in this country. The one on the vertical is are we going to keep centralizing everything in these big hospital centres, because they have all the expertise, they have all the equipment, they have a lot of money, they have a lot of knowledge, etc., or is it going to move to a much more networked, decentralized model, which as a futurist, that's what I believe is the direction things are going to go. It's going to have to. But that was a big uncertainty, especially for a big academic medical centre, let's say like the Ottawa Hospital. And then, the other big uncertainty for them was we know that keeping running health care as a sick care model, a treatment-based model, we will never have enough resources given our population's staying alive a lot longer, growing. But are we finally going to shift how we allocate resources to a prevention business model of health care versus a treatment model? Because there are some signals in other countries that they are doing that, like the Netherlands and parts of the US. So, those an example of the two biggest uncertainties.
What they chose not to map as an uncertainty is things like digital and data ubiquity, because that's kind of certain. We're just talking given our health care system's run on carbon copy paper, the kids, you don't even know what I'm talking about, what carbon copy paper is, pagers, fax machines and CD-ROMs, we know it's going to go that way, as an example. So, that wasn't, technology wasn't even modeled here. So, you kind of agree with all your stakeholders, you get all your uncertainties on the table, and usually in a foresight exercise you're going to have ten or 15 and you pick the two that are your biggest uncertainties, and that's what we did, and then you look at all the trends.
[00:20:49 A slide is shown with the text:
"More tailored foresight methodology: Specific scenarios that may play out"
"Step 1 – Identify two of the most critical uncertainties that can fundamentally impact the future of your [dept/org/ecosystem]
"Step 2 – Trends and signals out 5-10 years, color coded by type (society, tech, people, etc)".]
So, these are colour coded. You don't need to read them. Think of a PESTEL or STEEP. You guys do these types of analysis? Political trends, technology trends, environment, social, blah, blah, blah, legal. You map them all out and you get good evidence, it's a very rigorous research, and then you start to see which trends push you more into one or more of the four kind of quadrants or scenarios. And then, in a fulsome foresight effort, you start to create what I call a narrative, a story. You literally write a story about what the world looks like in each of the four scenarios. You give it a brand. So, in this scenario on the northeast, if everything's centralized and we're still obsessed about sick care, not preventative care, you become a super specialized centre, right? You become the Mayo Clinic or the MD Anderson of cancer. In the northwest corner, if we're going to, now we're about prevention but we're still centralizing, now you become the hub of wellness and health for your whole community. That's a very different strategic direction than you go today, etc., etc. So, that's kind of a more detailed version than those simple four scenarios. And you can do any of these.
So, you do all that, and then the final kind of couple steps, it's not forecasting, it's back-casting. So, you've got these kind of scenarios, whether the you do the simple four ones or a much more sophisticated one, and then you come back to today because you're about to make policy or set strategy and you say, "Okay, out of those scenarios, which one do we want? What's our preferred?" And you say, "Okay, well, if that's our preferred, what choice, or bet, or investment or direction did we make today to get us there?" Right? That's back-casting, or if you know the scenario, you definitely don't want, you don't want it to transpire, what choice, or investment or bet do we make today to get us away from going in that direction, to the extent you can, right? And that's basically the methodology. I just did a five-minute version of what I often teach over a week. Another play of that, so, let's say you do that and you end up with ten possible choices you could make that would make up your strategy. The last step is then you do this, a technique called wind tunneling. So, you guys know when you make an airplane? Right, so Boeing or Bombardier. Do they make airplane? I don't know. Yes? I should know. Sorry, Canada. So, they go design some new aircraft that has maybe some new paint, or different bolts, or a different shaped wing or whatever. In wind tunneling, what you do is you take the airplane, or the, whatever it is, and you put it through literally a tunnel and you: put birds at it and see does that kill the plane? Like that movie from a few years ago. Snow, hail, burning atmosphere, whatever. That's what wind tunneling is. And you're like, "Wow, in every scenario, the fuselage performed very well. Let's keep it. But in three of them, the wing design didn't work very well, right? So, let's maybe adjust it." So, that's kind of where this came from, was more from kind of manufacturing. So, that's what you do if in your scenarios or your possible futures you now have, in your case, maybe a set of potential policies, maybe policies you guys decided you want to push forward a year ago, now you can pressure test them against these possible scenarios. But if you didn't do the work to really look at all the possibilities, the quality of these choices you've made today are very, very weak. So, that's kind of what you do. And that's kind of, in this example, in this case, they already had a strategic plan. Those little boxes in the middle was their 20, 25-year strategy, and they went back and they mapped and they're like, "Wow, out of the pillars of our strategy, these ones down the middle kind of fit, no matter what scenario transpires. The ones at the top get us more towards the direction of that world and the ones towards the bottom get us more towards one of the other scenarios." That's basically the methodology and that helps you make some better choices. Okay, so that's kind of Foresight 101.
Last thing I'll just kind of leave you with, and I think we'll get into it in the discussion, is how do you start to do this? What tactics, what methods, what can you start to do to build some of these competencies in whatever it is in-house, in your department, with yourself personally, maybe in all of government? Today you're doing number one. So, just literacy, just spending some time, and I applaud you, probably a million things you could be doing in your lunch hour today, just get some exposure to this methodology, to futures thinking, having a guest speaker, going to a conference, going to a webcast, subscribing to a couple of futures newsletters. That's how I kind of started to get into this. So, check, you've done the first tactic. A couple others, you could take it one level further and actually practice. So, build some of these competencies in yourself. Those of you sticking around for the workshop, we're going to do step two, a little bit. Again, you can take courses, I'll share a couple, you can go to a foresight workshop, you can train mini futurists on your team or in your department and have a little army in your organization.
Okay, level three is now we're getting a bit more serious. I'm going to have either a dedicated person, like what I am at Deloitte, I'm the only health futurist in the whole 80,000 person corporation, or a small unit. For Deloitte, globally, we have a Chief Futurist for the whole corporation, an amazing guy, Mike Bechtel. He has a whole team, but for everything Deloitte does, not just in health care. But that team then has a mandate: scan the trends, get the signals. Maybe if one department or one team wants to now go through a foresight, go in and help them out a little bit. So, a bit of capacity building, but also sometimes kind of like an in-house consultancy. That's the team I led at SE Health. We were a futures team, we were 16 people, just to give you a sense of the scale. Okay, the next level is you actually go through and do the methodology. You actually maybe take a futurist approach to a set of policy decisions or strategies, so you might hire a consultancy. And we're actually starting to get a pretty good cottage industry of little firms that do this. They usually work with public goods because that's where there's the most possibility, I'd say, of futurism. Or you embed a Futurist in Residence for a time period. So, there's a whole program funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in the US that will pay for a major unit of government to have a six-month residency of a futurist. That's a great way to get a good bolus, but you're not committing to the kind of the opex permanently. And then, that person would facilitate all the steps, one to three, above.
The next level is appointing an actual role, because it's so important, called the Chief Futurist or some version of that. Singapore is the most famous, their government, for having an in-house futures capacity or capability, reports to the Prime Minister. That's how vital this is to the prosperity of their country. This is since the 80's. And then finally, the last is you actually build what I call a futures operating system. This is not a one-time event that you do and you dabble, it is just how you are all the time. That's IKEA, if I'd say, and I'd say to some extent, Deloitte. In many ways, our futures team is constantly looking for ways to basically completely disrupt our entire business model, because if we don't do it to ourselves, somebody will do it to us, yeah. So, those are some of the techniques. And I'll just end with, just to show you a smattering if you want to know more of some of the places I go that I think you might find some interest in. I subscribe to a newsletter called Future Good. So, this is all news stories, examples, techniques for any public good, not just in health. The Institute for the Future is kind of, probably, the OG Futures Institute for the World. There's also the Futures Institute. A more tech-focused futures team is the Future Today Institute. So, that's Amy Webb. Every year she gives a spectacular keynote at South by Southwest, it's on YouTube, which is her point of view for this year of what scenarios might play out if you play out all the tech trends, biotechnology, things that affect military, privacy, security, it's, you hear it and you're changed forever. Dubai, the whole Gulf area, because they are pretty, they have a lot of capital and they have very big ambition for their prosperity, I think they're leading the world in creating conferences, destinations, sites, placemaking to have conversations about the future, some massive, incredible conferences of all the army of futurists. And then here in Canada, two of my favorite that I work with, OCAD University has a master's in Strategic Foresight. So, you can actually take this as a master's while working full-time. I've overseen a few theses there. And there's a great non-profit consultancy that has brought me into some of their futures work with government called Creative Futures.
All right, last couple of things. So, Amy Webb, who I had just mentioned, she posted this this week, and I thought it was just timely for me coming here today. So, she reminded us that when Biden became President of the United States, she wrote this policy brief to make the case of why the US needs to have an office of strategic foresight, just especially because of what was going on with tech and those kinds of things. And she made a pretty bold statement that the absence of this systematic kind of operating system around futurism is a big reason why we have a lot of the challenges today. So, she kind of dusted that off maybe in time for the next one. Another great technique if you want to have a little bit of fun, because you guys seem to be edgy with your lunch hours, at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation when they build capacity with their own people who work at the foundation, so reminder that this foundation is bigger than most economies because this is the Johnson & Johnson family's endowment, they changed their mandate as a non-profit foundation that disperses money to solve gaps in society that government and private markets don't know how to solve, they change your mandate every five years. So, they're constantly staying on top of the future. I have never seen that. Most non-profits have very stale mandates that haven't changed in 50 years.
So, one thing they do to get all of their staff activated about the future, not just a little team, is they have hunch lunches. So, all day when you're out and about, you're reading stuff, you get a hunch. You're like, "Wait a minute, I just saw that. What if?" And then you just dump it in this kind of salesforce site, and then at these hunch lunches, they kind of get them out and they talk about them, right? These are little ways to start to change your mindset around futurism instead of now-ism. And wow, are we wired for now-ism, kind of everywhere. One thing I do, every morning I wake up, I've got 11 Google alerts for these words, because at least that way I wake up and I know the state of the status, who said something about the future of cancer, the future health, whatever I'm working on at the time. So, that's kind of a technique that I use, among many. And then, the power of bringing in outside guests like you're doing today, it can really help a lot with quickly ramping up instead of you learning it all on your own, like kind of amateur hour. So, I talked about guest futurists, but other versions of that, guest ethicists, speculative fiction writers in residence, I'm going to talk about that a bit more, entrepreneurs and residents, etc.. Another great technique is just go out there and see what's out there, right? So, probably the best conference that has the most accumulation of, kind of, the people that are moving the futures industry is South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. I went for the first time, believe it or not, last March. Like, brain guts everywhere. That means my mind was blown. Okay, so this is just an example of one of the sessions that explain why every organization, whether you're a six-person non-profit or an 80,000-person government agency, needs to have a futurist in residence.
Okay, last couple examples. So, I talked about speculative fiction. So, speculative fiction, I mean, you guys all know speculative fiction, that's Space 2001 The Odyssey, that's Star Trek, that's Star Wars, that's The Handmaid's Tale. I remember in grade ten reading that book being like, "She crazy. This is never going to happen." So, I've been doing some work with the BC government on their future of cancer for their residents. They've, because of some choices of government, some of the outcomes are not that good, especially for Indigenous people and rural people. And so, to help them do their work in a future-back instead of present-forward, which wow, do our policymakers love to look at all the data and the political pressures and make policy, I put the group through a speculative fiction. I wrote this scenario of this woman in Squamish, BC, who's a single mom, very poor, rural, who develops breast cancer and all this stuff. You don't have to read it. And whoever translated it in French, genius, because this is very, this is like two-point font. Anyway, so I had fun with this based on all the trends I see and read on the future of cancer around what therapies are coming down the pipe, what new diagnostic tools are coming, what's going on with funding, etc. etc., what's going on with patients, with families. And in it, I kind of laughed at myself. I'm like, "Zayna, you've gone too far." Because in my story, after she gets through her cancer treatment, because she has basically an N-of-1 therapy that gets invented on the spot, which we're not that far away from, in it, I said, "After, for her surveillance, after the lump, after removing the cancer, Lululemon has a bra that she's going to wear that's going to detect if there's any lumps forming, and it's got built in ultrasound." And I was like, "Zayna, you've gone too far." And literally the day I was presenting this, it was published that there is such a bra that measures small lumps in the breast, better resolution than an ultrasound machine. I was like, "Pshhh." So, don't be surprised. Speculative fiction is very, very powerful. And now, with ChatGPT, you can really create narratives of these scenarios that are not just words on a page, which as humans we don't learn very well that way. We didn't evolve with words, we evolved with story and visual, so you can really immerse people in a story about the future and it changes their neurons. It changes your neurocircuitry. You can't unsee that and unexperience it. It's very different from reading a report with a lot of numbers, yeah?
So, this was an example and I want to just play with this one. We're doing a speculative fiction right now. It's 2040, this Government of Canada announces that everybody who works in Canada has to complete one new training course a year at a publicly funded secondary institution. Okay, so that could be, in a way, to just start to have a conversation. So, imagine you did this at a Town Hall or at the dinner table tonight with your friends. What is your reaction to this thing, this scenario? What do you feel? What do you say? What are you starting to think? Right? That's an example of futurism. The work that could have been done to lead to this being a potential scenario is everything I just told you, right, of what could play out. And that's what we're going to practice with. All right, so I'm going to kind of stop there. Let's get in a conversation. If you want to go deeper in this, we have an incredible shop here in Canada, Policy Horizons team. I really like some of the tools, and primers and toolkits the Australia government very recently put out. They're kind of one of the first countries to make this a core competency like decades ago. UK has a great toolkit, what I love about theirs is they update it every year as the methods get better. And then my friend Jerry Koh, who's from Singapore, and Singapore is the first government in the world to make this systematic, he's curated a bunch of stuff in a Google sheet and I credit him for that. So, all right. I think we're going to stop there. Thank you.
(Applause)
[00:38:09 Dr. Zayna Khayat sits down next to Paul Pilieci and Josianne Paul.]
Paul Pilieci: So, we're going to have a moderated discussion. I'm going to ask Dr. Cunningham to get a drink of water. You've been talking for a while. I failed one of my primary jobs as a moderator. I forgot to introduce my co-moderator, Josianne Paul, Director of Policy and Strategic Relationships here at the School, and I'll pass it to her to ask the first question.
Josianne Paul (Director, Canada School of Public Service): Yes, it was a fascinating presentation. You talk a lot about how we make it in practice. So, stories, methodology and things like that. To start, I would like you to speak to us a little bit about the reality. Do you have any example for us about, examples where futurism have been applied and it have led to a better outcome for citizen or a change in governance, for example?
Dr. Zayna Khayat: Yeah. So, I mean, I think if you guys could think about it, the first applications have been in defence, like going back to World War Two, Cold War, because you could start to play out some scenarios that might happen and then directly policies got made as a consequence of that. In the business world, the tools we all use actually came from Shell, oil company, because they knew back in, I think the 70's, they formed a team called the Shell Futures Team because they knew there will be a day that old sunshine from the ground won't be taken out of the ground and the world is going to need energy. So, they knew, so they already had started that. So, those are kind of the first couple originally. As I mentioned, Singapore has been doing this since the 80's. Their centre for, I think it's strategic, I forget, research or futures, reports to the Prime Minister. What Singapore has done is embedded futurism in every government body, agency and every person. To give you an example, when they interview people to work for government, for the public service, they say, "Throw to me some scenarios that might play out in, whatever, pick your area of policy." And if that interviewee could not imagine some futures that might play out, they're not a good fit for the Government of Singapore. Now, their driver was economic wealth and prosperity for their country, right? And you guys could see what Singapore has done. It's really reinvented itself. So, they're the first. And there's a couple more I kind of noted. UK kind of started their unit in 1994, the Government of the United Kingdom, and a lot of it was more capacity building, kind of like Policy Horizons does here in Canada, but they've got decades behind it. But they won't say one specific policy came out of this work. But the fact that there's kind of this confidence in policymaking, that they had a way to systematically incorporate the future, and I'll just give one example. Some work was done in 2007 projecting out obesity rates. So, you guys all know how bad obesity is. It leads to diabetes, it leads to kidney failure, it leads to mental illness and most cancers. So, we now estimate 84% of disease is because of obesity, and if you look at the obesogenic environment, people aren't walking. They played out back in 2007 some scenarios of what could happen and what are some policy choices now, and they will credit that ten years later, obesity rates have dropped significantly. Nothing like the projections they thought played out and they credit some of this work. I think that's a great example.
Josianne Paul: Thank you.
Paul Pilieci: I get to ask the next question.
Dr. Zayna Khayat: I won't answer with a ten-minute answer.
Paul Pilieci: Fair enough. Take the time you need. I started my career working in data, working in performance measurement, and I can tell you, for some folks in government, myself included, it can be tough sometimes to measure for impact, especially given sort of where some government policies are basically aiming to have that impact. With respect to futurism, you mentioned success. We're looking sort of ten plus years down the road, it might be difficult to see what success looks like. I'm kind of wondering any sort of tips or tricks in terms of how we measure for impact, what a policy's impact for the futurism?
Dr. Zayna Khayat: Yeah. So, there is a lot of published research on measuring is all this future work doing anything? And if I have to sum it up in general, and again, if there are some future experts better than me, you're going to: pile on. But if you think about it, your outcome goal of building this competency is on two planes, as I've talked about. One is you're building the competency so others can raise everyone's boats, right? That's a bit of what the UK example is, a bit of Singapore. So, there are ways to measure that, and that's already a means to an end, but it's enough of a kind of indicator. The second is, no, you actually made policy because of this work. And so, there's two metrics that are generally accepted given the impacts are, one, are so multi-modal and multifactorial, and two, so much more long-term. One is the speed at which policy got made. That's a pretty measurable impact, that, were you so motivated by what you saw in these futures that you finally: made some pretty bold decisions that you wouldn't have done were it not for this methodology? I'll give you an example of that in a sec. And then the second is, of course, the impact, like that obesity one, which, those are fewer and far between, I'd say. It's much more kind of process measures.
Paul Pilieci: Okay.
Dr. Zayna Khayat: Yeah. So, one example of the speed I'll just give you, so the reason we have a lot of the health care we have in this country was because some religious orders, as part of the colonizing, were here to spread mission, and the Catholic health, the Catholic orders spread mission in two missions: education and health. And if they didn't do health, only rich people got health care back then, right? So, it was a really, really important gap in society that this kind of non-profit fit. Well, dial it forward to now, a lot of people can start a hospital or do health care. We don't need this mission to do that. And so, it's on the decline. It used to be: something like 80% of all health care was Catholic health care, now it's like in the 30%. And then there's this other shift, as you can know, of any government moving to more secular kind of use of allocation of resources, that you can't use public money for a public good, that's got a religious orientation. And there are signals. Some countries overnight got rid of the ability to have, let's say, Catholic health care. Anyway, so we did a futurism exercise around that, and what came out of that was the governance bodies of some of these kind of organizations that do Catholic health care, they decided this is so imperative to our role as governors, think of a board of directors, let's say, that kind of has the responsibility to watch out for whoever has a stake in what this is, that they were going to make what we call generative thinking, or generative discussions, or what I call futurism, 33% of every board agenda. If any of you have been at a board meeting, what is the meeting? Money, problems, risks, legal, the (inaudible), and then it's time to talk about something interesting, like AI, they're like, "We're out of time." So, they're like, we're going to make a third of the agenda, which is earth shattering, I've never seen it, and it's always going to be first on the agenda, right? That's an example where seeing these futures was scary enough that they had to change their behaviour pretty quickly.
Paul Pilieci: Excellent. Thank you.
Dr. Zayna Khayat: That was a ten-minute answer. I'm sorry.
Paul Pilieci: It's all good.
Dr. Zayna Khayat: I'm (inaudible).
Josianne Paul: I see that we have a question from the audience.
Dr. Zayna Khayat: Yes.
Question: My name is (inaudible), I work at the School. This actually touches on something you just raised about resources, and I was thinking back to your slide where it talked about pressure testing. So, I guess the question is kind of how do you use pressure testing appropriately, because often we're driven to go in certain directions based on what we have available. How do you guard against that, and what are some of the, kind of like, mindsets and skills you should have to kind of make sure you don't close off certain avenues?
Dr. Zayna Khayat: Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, there's a whole other thing I do called smashing orthodoxy, which is the: wet blanket right away of any: sexy, important policy that could really impact lives, is, but government and but we have no money. Okay? So, that's now-ism, right? That is now, that's why now-ism is very limited, because you're going to think with those constraints because those have been your constraints for the past five years. In futurism, particularly if you choose to use the methodology to put a stake in the ground around your preferred future, but you don't always have a preferred future, you just want to see the scenarios sometimes and play around with your thing, but if you have a vision of what you want for your society, so in the UK they wanted zero obesity. That was their preferred future state, right? You galvanize whatever around this vision that you want to create and then you got to suspend all those constraints, because usually what's going to get in the way of the really messy problem you want to solve is going to be money and policies that make no sense for the future you want. So, then you do the hard work. I'll just give an example. I'm on the board of a non-profit that we want, we've got land in downtown Toronto that we want to redevelop for deeply affordable housing for our community, because we're non-profit, that's what we do, we fill externalities. We did all the pro forma, how many units, and we're going to be short $14 million in capital. And of course, the board and the executive team is like, "We don't have the money, we can't do the project." I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no. Go get the money!" Like, we're here for a mission. So, I think it's just sometimes seeing the scenarios and getting the energy around the one you want can be enough to galvanize and put the preservatives at bay, and I don't mean thing that preserves pickles.
(Laughter)
Josianne Paul: So, one of the question I want to ask you, it's about ethical considerations.
Dr. Zayna Khayat: Yeah.
Josianne Paul: So, when we think of futurism, how can we integrate ethical consideration into our thinking?
Dr. Zayna Khayat: Yeah. So, one thing, I get a lot of parents come to me and ask me, "What's your advice for my kid? What job should they have in the future?" I'm like, "We're going to need an army of ethicists. Go to ethics master's." So, first of all, so, I am an amateur at aspects of ethics, but I'll just share a few that I've seen emerge in a little bit of this work. First of all, based statement is none of your values around integrity, ethics, etc., they don't change when you're doing futurism. So, hopefully you've got a good foundation and then you just respect those things. But an example in that Singapore example, right? They've been doing this since the 80's, they really led, let and allowed their bias around economic prosperity dominate choices they made from their futures work, and inequality was not front and centre, okay? So, you guys, if you know some of what goes down in social policy in Singapore, so that's kind of now come to bear and there's a lot more awareness around a brighter set of values around that. So, I mean, that would be my biggest one, is you got to, because you're making long-term bets, you got to have every check and balance around your biases or preferences, which is why these methodologies are so participatory, because you got to have a little bit of everybody there to have some integrity to the process. And the other part is this is as research-intensive and evidence-based as doing your policy briefings and getting data, right? It is a data, intelligence-intensive, so you have to have some integrity to that process, which is usually why you'll involve an outside party.
Paul Pilieci: I see we have another question here from the audience.
Dr. Zayna Khayat: Hello.
Paul Pilieci: Go ahead.
Question: Hi, my name is (inaudible), and I'm here with the School as well, working with Digital Academy, and I would like you to comment on the role of fears, hopes, emotions when it comes to deciding on preferred future. We are growing up with many stories from science fiction that might not have much to do with the real capabilities when it comes to technologies. So, how much, and what's the role of the futurist to kind of acknowledge that some of the choices that we make are motivated by these factors?
Dr. Zayna Khayat: So, first of all, they absolutely are. That's the power of fanning out all the scenarios because then you have, you figure out what is my visceral reaction to that? And like I said in my one example, when I did the work with Catholic health care, the collapse scenario, just talking about it and telling a story in a collapse scenario, fear was enough to motivate action, and I'm happy about that, right? It took that, because it was years of kind of crippling stagnation, not being able to make a decision. On the other hand, one of the kind of ethical challenges, back to the question earlier, and the risks, is actually more the opposite. You get so emotionally attached to the scenario you want, or functionally attached: if in that scenario your unit will be very successful (laughs), so catching that is a really big, important part of the design of the approach, and that's, again, where having an intermediary facilitate can keep the checks and balances.
Paul Pilieci: Going to take an opportunity to ask a question. I'm not sure if it's a good thing to quote your boss or not, but Taki often mentions that the pace of change is never going to be slower than it is today, time will never be slower than it is today. And you put it to slide from Jack Welch, and I don't know about anyone else, but when I look at a slide like that, when I look at some of the possible futures you illustrated as well, it seems overwhelming. We're struggling to keep pace with change as it is today, let alone what it will be in five years. We were talking about, before, about how you speak on AI and technology quite a bit. So, I'm wondering if you can speak to the role of the AI technology in futurism and policymaking?
Dr. Zayna Khayat: That's actually the keynote I'm giving tomorrow, is this exact topic, so it's very top of mind. So, first of all, it can be very overwhelming, especially given the way media, we can access. You see a headline like, "The Doctor Will Be Replaced by AI," or, and so actually, the power of this is you create space, it's evidence-based, you have much more comfort hanging out in the future because you've seen it all. So, I think it actually can be an antidote to some of those aspects of the overwhelm. Specifically about AI, and really, in my view, any software-based technology. So, software scales exponentially, okay? So, as humans, our entire biology, the way we've evolved is not exponential. It's linear and local, right? First, we had to like, there was no more food in this land, and then we'd go somewhere else, and then we'd wait for mutations, and a whole generation had to be fit from the mutation. Very linear, very local. So, our velocity, back to Jack Welch, is on this linear glacial pace, and the world's coming at us like this. And so, our brains just, we don't have it in us to project forward exponentially because it's just not in us. Those of us who hang out in the future, we're a little bit good at it, but we're not good at it. So, AI and really any software is on this curve and we just don't have the capacity, right? So, again, that's the power of create some space to play it out. So, I'll just give you one technique we do a lot. I'm not going to do that one with you, but it's a really good one. It's called futures mapping. Well, what you do is you just unpack the overwhelm a little bit, so I'll just give an example. So, I did one this one time with 200 hospital execs. You put a thing that we think might play out, self-driving cars, okay? That that will be the dominant way we move from point A to point B, and then you fan out, what's the, if that was what it was, what does that change in the world? You have a stream about insurance, property and casual insure. Well, if it's all self-driving cars, where's that industry, going to happen to that industry, right? What happens to our roadways, all of our gas infrastructure? Like, you start to play it out, and that's a way to kind of sense make when like a bunch of these AI and tech-based signals are going to converge into one big thing. So, that's kind of a technique we do to just give people some space.
Paul Pilieci: Thank you.
Josianne Paul: So, I think we have a question. We have two questions. I think we will…
Dr. Zayna Khayat: Why don't you ask them?
Josianne Paul: I think we will try to do two. Maybe we will run out of time.
Dr. Zayna Khayat: Yeah, yeah. Ask them back-to-back and then I can answer fast.
Josianne Paul: Perfect.
Dr. Zayna Khayat: Her, then him.
Question: Okay. I'll go with mine. I just was interested to hear some of your thoughts. Sorry, Nicole from TBS, central agency land. And so, I'm interested just to hear your thoughts on futurism and policymaking and its relationship to the election cycle. So, I feel as public servants, there's this kind of line that we walk in terms of serving Canadians, and serving our ministers and serving the government. That's the two sides of our jobs. And I, at times I feel conflicted with the serving of Canadians today and serving the ministers today, but my thoughts on, "Well is this actually good 20 years from now?"
Dr. Zayna Khayat: Yeah, yeah, okay.
Question: And so, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Dr. Zayna Khayat: And sir?
Question: Thank you. My question is basically, today, if you look at today, public service is a mix of almost three generation. We have the baby boomers, are still today our key decision maker in the policy, we have the after baby boomers and we have the Generation X. Of those three segment of the population within public service, don't see future as the same thing. How do we find consensus when we determine what future should be on the policy decision, on the policy that we want to develop? One work I'm doing, I'm from DND, I come from DND, one of the work I'm working is to define family. What family would look like in 2050, to include that definition in the family, so to get buy in from the policy from the decisionmakers.
Dr. Zayna Khayat: Yeah. So, quickly, the work you do as policymakers today because of the election cycle: what monkey wrench just got thrown in all of your operations, what, two weeks ago? And maybe it could have happened yesterday. Like, that's what you do all the time. That's not futurism. That's just a consequence of, let's say you're now-ism. But it is kind of a hybrid, so I don't think that's linked to what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is in the old days, again, UK government pioneered this, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Netherlands, is what we used to call long-range planning for your country, right? Being, again, futurism just as important as now-ism, and then you got to figure out your balance. Is it 30% future and 70% now? Is it 50/50? Whatever. To your point about consensus, so again, because the approach is participatory and you're not there to solve anyone except for the citizens of Canada, like that's your beneficiary of the work you do, so you do have an anchor point, and maybe you don't agree what thriving is in 2050, and maybe what a family is, but that's why the methodology works, because you lay it all out and you fight it out. Maybe you have a preferred future and then your colleague is like, "I don't prefer that future. I prefer this future." But the methodology lets you say, "Okay, well, what are the choices we're going to make today that are the best fit across any of these?" So, that the methodology is very democratizing, I'd say. And by the way, if you look at the Sustainable Development Goals, exact same methodology, right? The first two: zero hunger and no poverty. Not decrease hunger, zero hunger, zero poverty, big, hairy, audacious goal. And who are their stakeholders? Not your friend one department over that's a Gen-X or a Gen Z? Every country in the world is the stakeholder (laughs). So, if they can do that, then we can figure it out. And by the way, in most workplaces there are now six generations. That's never happened in the history of our species. Okay, lots of truth bombs.
Josianne Paul: (laughs)
Paul Pilieci: Yeah.
Josianne Paul: And I think it's what we'll wrap up the session today. Thank you very much, Zayna, for being here with us. It have been a pleasure and a delight to hear from you. I would also like to thank every learner that we have here in the room and also those who are online. I invite you to browse and look at the website of the School for our future events. One of them will be the, Explaining the Polycrisis with Thomas Homer Dixon, on October 29th. So, pretty close to your topic today, so you're welcome to listen. So, thank you everyone, and have a nice day and thank you for joining us.
(Applause)
[01:00:04 The CSPS logo appears onscreen.]
[01:00:08 The Government of Canada logo appears on screen.]
