How do we explore the future if we are tethered to today? Framing our foresight efforts can be a challenging balance of the "right now" and the "what's possible." Hear Frank and Yvette share how they've helped clients expand their vision beyond the obvious.
How do we explore the future if we are tethered to today? Framing our foresight efforts can be a challenging balance of the "right now" and the "what's possible." Hear Frank and Yvette share how they've helped clients expand their vision beyond the obvious.
Frank Spencer: Yvette, we've, over the years, had some unusual clients to say the least. I think most people when they think of the work that we're talking about, they're thinking of these big corporate Fortune 100s and 50s and such, but there's been some unusual, and the ones I love it, they're unusual.
Yvette Montero: Yes, you might even say we've had lions and bears.
Frank: Tigers and bears, oh my.
Yvette: Yes.
Frank: It's a Wizard of Oz reference.
Yvette: Oh.
Frank: You look like you were wondering where that came from.
Yvette: Yes, I was, perpetually. I'm perpetually wondering how every saying that I say wrong comes from. I think that because everyone can use strategic foresight, we have had the privilege of working with a diverse set of clients.
Frank: We have. One of the things that comes to top of mind is we got to work with the individual who was responsible for saving the cotton-top tamarin species of small ape, small monkey.
Yvette: Yes, we did.
Frank: Save the species.
Yvette: It makes you feel kind of insignificant when you work with people like that.
Frank: Yes, it's like I did foresight, but you save the cotton-top tamarin from extinction, so that's awesome.
Yvette: We've worked with the top handful of rhino experts.
Frank: Oh, yes. Actually, right here to Florida, and people might not know this, but they have a rhino conservatory in Jacksonville, Florida. It's a very strange place. Rhinos are not native to the United States if anybody doesn't know, which I know you all know, but it's strange to drive to Florida and see a rhino. It's strange to drive to Florida, period. [laughs]
Yvette: Yes, that's true. We have all kinds of species here-
Frank: Yes, that's right.
Yvette: - and many of them vote.
Frank: Ooh, ouch.
Yvette: So there's that.
Frank: That's good.
Yvette: There's that. No, I was just trying to think, going down the animal line, we've actually delivered, this is another podcast topic, so I don't want to steal the thunder, but we've actually delivered foresight to poodles.
Frank: Yes, at a pet food company that shall remain unnamed for their and our protection.
Yvette: [chuckles] We're going to use that as another podcast topic.
Frank: That's right.
Yvette: So we don't want to steal that, but yes, the animal theme is pretty common. We've talked to nature conservationists.
Frank: Yes, we have.
Yvette: Folks thinking about the future of children and their relationship with nature.
Frank: Another type of animal.
[laughter]
Yvette: Yes, that right if you have children.
Frank: We are definitely in rare form today.
Yvette: Teenagers are their own type of animal if anyone has that.
Frank: I was going to say because you weren't going down this animal line that. I said unusual clients, but they are some of my favorite clients-
Yvette: Oh, for sure.
Frank: - because we're impacting the future of these species in some way. Foresight is powerful, it touches a lot of things, so when you hear us talking about clients, we may not be talking about somebody making a widget or a product, but we're actually talking about lions and tigers and bears.
Yvette: Yes, or stretchy pants. [laughs]
Frank: Right. As a matter of fact, you spoke at a keynote yesterday and you put together two clients, and I wrote in our slack channel to the rest of the team "stretchy pants on rhinos."
Yvette: Nobody really responded to that because they're used to our ridiculousness.
Frank: They didn't think it was funny. They didn't know what it was, but we put some weird things together.
Yvette: One of those special and unusual clients of, in fact, the animal kind is the one that we're going to talk about today and you may have guessed that with the title of our episode being Where Are The Whales?
Frank: Yes, you didn't know this before you tuned in today, but it was actual whales.
Yvette: Yes, sometimes we trick you with the titles, right?
Frank: Yes.
Yvette: No, this isn't like a take on Moby-Dick or some literary reference, this is literally a client said to us, where are the whales?
Frank: Whales. Killer whales.
Yvette: Yes. No, actually, killer whales. Was it specifically killer whales?
Frank: It was.
Yvette: Okay.
Frank: On Orca Island.
Yvette: Oh, yes.
Frank: Because, you know, orcas, Orcas Island.
Yvette: Right.
Frank: It's really Orcas Island.
Yvette: What we're going to talk about today is this idea of how we can successfully explore the future with clients that are particularly tethered to today, which basically describes every single client, but that can be challenging, balancing right now with the what's possible. This is a dance, an intricate dance we do-
Frank: A delicate dance.
[laughter]
Yvette: - pretty much every day.
Yvette: We want to tell you of how we've helped a client expand their vision beyond maybe the obvious.
Frank: As a matter of fact, I would say a whale of a tale.
[laughter]
Yvette: People, I want you to know that that's not in the show.
Frank: [singing] It's a whale of a tale, a tale you like, a whale of a tail or two. It's from 20,000 Leagues or whatever, it's 30,000 thousand leagues.
Yvette: Okay, mark that.
Frank: A Disney movie, it's a Disney movie.
Yvette: We have a podcast sing-along. You could determine that Frank does have a beautiful singing voice.
Frank: A Disney futurist, Disney movie, Disney show song. That's great.
Yvette: I know, it's the Disney podcast.
Frank: It's the whole package.
Yvette: The whole podcast.
Frank: Hi, my name is Frank Spencer.
Yvette: Hi, my name if Yvette Montero Salvatico. I almost forgot to introduce ourselves. This is the The Wicked Opportunities Podcast and we will be discussing where are the whales.
Frank: Yes, we will, and as Yvette said, how do we stretch clients beyond where they expect you to come in and say like, "Look, we're going to give you the top 10 trends on whales," which there almost none, right?
Yvette: Yes.
Frank: Why is it important to talk about when you're thinking about the future of whales, to talk about everything but whale? As our friend at Ford Motor Company would say--
Yvette: Sheryl.
Frank: Sheryl Connelly, she said in our foresight work, we talk about everything except cars.
Yvette: That's right. Anyway, if you're just joining in, if this is your first podcast, The Wicked Opportunities Podcast, welcome. Where have you been? We love to have you either way. This collection in the year 2022, we are exploring the wicked problem of foresight implementation and foresight capacity building. Through the Future School, our mission is to democratize the field of foresight and we do that through programs and offerings and inspiration like The Wicked Opportunities Podcast which Frank and I have the honor of hosting every week.
If you caught us last week, we were live in our once-a-month live dream that we're doing. Once a month, this podcast goes on YouTube so you could see our pretty faces. Although if you tune in last week, you only saw me because we had a bit of a quarantine issue.
Frank: I think you saw my face, but it was frozen on the screen.
Yvette: Yes, it was just a picture. We had some technical difficulties. I promise, next month, we're going to kill it. I think next month we're talking about make the metaverse great again.
Frank: Oh.
Yvette: Yes, so join us in a few weeks.
Frank: The tech issues will be all worked out.
Yvette: Yes.
Frank: I don't know why I'm saying that because we don't know that.
Yvette: We don't know, but we're hopeful. If anything we're sure of in the future is that they'll still be technical issues.
Frank: Absolutely.
Yvette: This Wicked Opportunities Podcast like all the others is brought to you by the Year of Free. If you're not aware, we've declared 2022 to be the Year of Free, so if you're interested in getting free tuition in any of our global programs or free access to our natural foresight framework or free inspiration like this or other monthly offerings, just check out our website at thefutureschool.com/yearoffree. Okay, let's get into it.
Frank: Yes, so this particular client, where are the whales, was in animal conservation. We had actually worked with him previously in another engagement.
Yvette: With the sponsor, let's say.
Frank: With the sponsor, that's right.
Yvette: We've worked with her, and that's important because I think a lot of times, those doors get open by an individual who's a friendly who knows us.
Frank: That's actually a very interesting point because we had worked with her on a different engagement for animal conservation previously, and she already knew, I'm doing the air quotes here, nobody can see me,-
Yvette: I can see you.
Frank: - that you're supposed to look from the outside-in.
Yvette: She forgot.
Frank: Here's the point, she had a board working for the where are the whales thing on Orcas Island that didn't know that, and I think she remembered, but she got scared when she was in front of them.
Yvette: Yes, so we're jumping ahead a little bit, but yes. This is real-time we're thinking through this because clearly, I think we went in there assuming that she knew what she was going to get because, again, she had partnered with us in the past, so we really didn't go in. Sometimes we go into engagements and we are like, "Okay, this could go sideways." We sort of, in our intake calls and through our discussions, we know the foresight readiness may not be 100%.
Frank: Exactly.
Yvette: That's fine, we sort of know. Here, I think we were lulled into a false sense of confidence.
Frank: Yes, I was too excited.
Yvette: Yes, because we're going to Orc Island, we're going to talk about the whales, it's going to be awesome. This was someone we had worked with before, she had us fly in for a very short engagement with the board. We could have a whole podcast just talking about foresight for boards-
Frank: We could.
Yvette: - and it would be incredibly boring.
Frank: Or an entire podcast on timing when to get on the ferry and not eating chocolate ice cream right before.
Yvette: Oh my God.
Frank: I know.
Yvette: Really.
Frank: You said, "Don't do that on the podcast," but I feel like these are my friends who need to know the ins and outs. What is the date of a life in a consultant and a facilitator? Look, timing the ferry back to the mainland and making sure it's not a long period of time between that and when you ate the chocolate ice cream. [laughs]
Yvette: Also, being aware that your lactose tolerance-
Frank: Intolerance, yes.
Yvette: - is going low, is low.
Frank: I’m not saying anything bad happened, but it did. [laughs]
Yvette: Yes. No, and there's a whole discussion about how when we arrived on the island, there was no taxi. There's one taxi company run by Larry.
Frank: Larry loves the funky weed. [laughs]
Yvette: He's a fan. Anyway, oh my gosh, none of this was in the script. She was trying to, I think, impress upon the board, this desire to look to the future around whale conservation. This is the setup. We had a short period of time. If you're not familiar, we actually don't know anything about whales. We're not whale experts.
Frank: No, I'm not a biologist or a marine biologist. I wanted to be one actually when I was younger. My dad and I had all these talks about me being a marine biologist.
Yvette: That’s awesome.
Frank: Then I went out on his boat with him multiple times.
Yvette: You got sick. [chuckles]
Frank: I was like, "That's all over." The sea and me are not friends.
Yvette: So no chocolate ice cream.
Frank: No waves.
Yvette: No waves. Chocolate ice cream plus the ferry, well, you all can do the math there. That day ended poorly.
Frank: I'm going to say it was before the ferry I had the problem. Once I was on the ferry, the problem had passed but remained with me.
[laughter]
Yvette: Oh my God,
Frank: It's a good podcast. Everybody's going to love this. I'm thinking of my friends in the Philippines, they're going to really love this. This is great.
Yvette: We are not whale experts and we don't need to be. This is how we work with so many diverse clients. We don't have to be the subject matter experts on a topic, they are.
Frank: We don’t want to be.
Yvette: They already know so much about it. Nobody needs to come and tell them more about whales. Literally, we were sitting with the worldwide experts on whale conservation.
Frank: On whale conservation. Also, I think it might be important to say that, not only were they looking at the positive aspect of whale conservation, they were also looking at negative press around whale conservation because, in specific, are the people who are trying to do the right thing about whale conservation and there was a lot of negative press.
Yvette: We don’t want to give away who the client is.
Frank: No, but I'm just trying to point an angle.
Yvette: I’m just trying to give a little bit of context here because I see where you're going. We won't say who the client was.
Frank: No, or who might be giving negative press. Clearly, from the outside, people are thinking--
Yvette: They were activists. They were activists involved and they were concerned about the activist message.
Frank: Sure, and if you're dealing with animals in any way, shape, or form, activists who might not have the whole picture are thinking, "Just leave the animals alone. Let them swim."
Yvette: Brought in two futurists known to the sponsor, not to the rest of the board, we fire up the PowerPoint ready to go, we're going to talk about emerging landscapes of change. If you've been to any of our sessions, whether it's training or client work, you've heard us talk about patterns of change, emerging landscapes of change. This is what happens when trends collide and you get to see, bigger than trends, bigger than megatrends, which we hate that term. These are really broad, emerging, as we say, landscapes of change, and they result from the confluence of a lot of individual trends and values and implications.
Frank: I'm glad you brought that up because spending just 30 seconds on that maybe, if you aren't aware, and we do this in all of our trainings, we train on pattern making. Pattern recognition, and pattern making. I can’t explain what that is in this podcast because this podcast is not about that, but I love that you say we don't think patterns and megatrends are the same thing. We really don't even the idea of megatrends because I think it's such an easy out to say, "This is a big trend or a megatrend that oversees sub-trends."
That's not really how the real world works because in the real world, all of these things collide for these larger, you just said it, emerging landscapes or islands of change. A pattern is quite different than what you might think of as a megatrend. We'd love for you to know more about that. Maybe at some point, we'll get to talk about that, but it's something for you to investigate.
Yvette: Absolutely, there's tons of resources in our resource center and the guide to the natural foresight framework provides some information on patterns. Come to one of our programs and you’ll learn how to make a pattern. Anyway, so we presented some of our research including three of these emerging landscapes of change or patterns, and it really delves into that broader macro environment. There wasn't a picture of a whale, the word whale wasn't uttered, and we were plugging along. Again, I thought we’re reading the room pretty well.
Frank: I thought so. It looked like people were engaged.
Yvette: Minute 43 of a 45-minute discussion.
Frank: Far into it.
Yvette: Yes, far into it, our sponsor shyly raises her hand timidly.
Frank: Straight line of view all the way down to the other end of the table.
Yvette: She was raising her hand, but almost like not wanting to raise her hand. There this whole like, "Yes?" I almost said her name. [chuckles] I was like, "Yes."
Frank: Yes, sponsor.
Yvette: She famously said--
Frank: Where are the whales? Because there had been none in the presentation for 43 of the 45 minutes.
Yvette: Oh, God.
Frank: We had made it pretty clear, we started the conversation off, there's not going to be necessary whales in this.
Yvette: I don’t know, did we really say that?
Frank: I'm sure that we said.
Yvette: I’m sure we said.
Frank: I don't know, we belabored it, but we said it.
Yvette: The reason I don't think we said it is because we talk about--
Frank: My memory is terrible.
Yvette: No, your memory is way better than mine. We don't typically go in and say, "This is not going to be about your focal issue." We usually say, "We're scanning the external environment, we're going to look outside your industry."
Frank: "Give us a chance to explain to you in the presentation over why these things relate to."
Yvette: We didn't get to that part.
Frank: We didn't get there.
Yvette: Where are the whales? Speeching halt.
Frank: As a matter of fact, I think it's fair to say because we like to talk about the down and dirty here that the presentation was over at that point.
Yvette: Oh, no, when you're 99% through your time and she's asking you, "Where are the whales?" clearly, the expectation that-- Again, I've gone back to this day a million times. Her knowledge of our experience thought that we were going to present something about specifically whale futures-
Frank: Yes, she knows a lot more about whales than I will ever know.
Yvette: - in a 45-minute conversation. We certainly could do a set of scenarios around the future of whales, we will work alongside them to do that. Even then, it wouldn't just be about whales.
Frank: No, it would not because it would be about the future of activism and it would be about the future of-
Yvette: Climate change.
Frank: - the climate change and landscapes and city building near coastlines and all kinds of stuff.
Yvette: Technology-
Frank: Fishing.
Yvette: - like augmented reality and how people relate to-- No, let's not even go there. That sets up the situation. Clearly, we always want a successful outcome. We don't want there to be a client that is disappointed. That's not to say that we don't challenge our clients. That's what we do. We've talked about this in other podcasts, but we want to talk a little bit about what were the lessons here and how you can ensure that even if you have a known quantity with a client or a sponsor that you always remind them and always remind yourself of how important it is to not stay tethered to the present, and explain the business rationale and the business case for ensuring we're looking externally to that macro-environment, right?
Frank: That's right. I know in our show notes, this might not be in exact order, but actually, I think it works better the other way around-
Yvette: Yes. No, it's fine.
Frank: - because yesterday you gave a brilliant keynote to a group. I got to be there.
Yvette: It was so weird. I don't know, it was like in-person, like in the meet space is what Frank likes to call it.
Frank: I love that he said that to everybody too, you're like, "I'm in the meet space". They were like, "What are you talking about?"
Yvette: Actually, that client's going to be the subject of a podcast later on in the year, so we don't want to give away too much. I love them, but they're very unique as well. What were you going to say about how amazing I was at that keynote?
Frank: A, and number two, as I like to say, or B, there was this great slide that you show all of our clients, but the way you formed this keynote yesterday was really brilliant. It was like, "You don't know that I'm leaving you something, it's all going to tie in," and boom, at the end, it all tied in. It was very elegant the way you presented it. Right in the middle is the famous slide of the three concentric circles.
Yvette: The three environments of foresight.
Frank: Three environments of foresight. In the middle is your organization or your focal issue or maybe you, second circle is an industry circle, the meta environment with the stakeholders and regulations and all of that good stuff, competitors. Then that outer circle is that external environment, social, technological, economic, environmental, political, drivers of change driving forces, and the trends that are outside your industry, and as you always rightly say, your biggest disruptors, threats, and opportunities are not going to come from inside your industry, but outside your industry.
Yvette: That's right.
Frank: I think that you'll do a better job of explaining this than I will about how working from the outside circle in instead of the inside circle out, changes the inner circles, right?
Yvette: When you work from the inside out, even if you are looking at that external environment, you're looking at it from the vantage point of who you serve today, who you employ today, the species you save today in the context of that in this case. While you might be thinking, I'm looking externally, you're just looking at it from that keyhole of a present that we like to say that's right or from the standpoint of educated in capacity.
Which is knowing so much about what you know that you're the last to know that things are changing. In this situation, our client had so much educated in capacity to see what we were presenting to her, which was the outside-in approach, and that outside-in approach is much more powerful.
Frank: It's sad to say this is a great example because it didn't end so well, but it's a great example of defining the outer circle by the inner two circles. She was literally standing in that inner circle and we were saying all this amazing stuff and she was like, "Where are the whales?" because she could only see whales from where she was. As you just said, when you're in an outer circle and you look inward, you redefine your industry, you redefine your focal issue, your problem statement or whatever, you look at it different, it's a reframing. You don't say, you don't do the forecasting thing, "I'm looking from the inside out, and therefore, I'll determine what trends are important and which aren't." Outside-in, you're like, "Here's the world,-
Yvette: I look through everything.
Frank: - I look at everything," and that redefines what I thought I was even tackling.
Yvette: Look, and we're not saying that eventually, you don't get to the whales. Of course, you get to the whales.
Frank: Yes, but what does it mean once you get there?
Yvette: Right, you have to start from the external environment and then drive inward, and she's just is not comfortable in that ocean space.
Frank: That's right. Hahaha, blue oceans renditions, yes.
Yvette: See what I did there?
Frank: What I was going to say is, and I'll just let you riff on this, is we often use this analogy of a rubber band, and I think because we talked about the outside-in, it's like this rubber band analogy, is it not?
Yvette: Yes, so we often talk about our mental models being like rubber bands and when we go in to do a client engagement or we do training with participants, we're trying to stretch that rubber band in such a way that when it recoils, because it always does, it at least recoils to a place that's broader, bigger than where it started from. If you just do a little bit, if you just go plausible, if you don't really stretch out or burn that much, it's going to go right back to the exact shape and size it was at the beginning, you're wasting your time. You're better off not doing anything because you're wasting everybody's time.
You've got to stretch that rubber band a lot knowing it's going to bounce back a bit, but again, that ending state is going to be bigger than where you started. Those mental models, those mental landscapes will be broader than where they started. So far we have outside-in thinking as one lesson, the rubber band analogy is a second lesson. What's our third lesson.
Frank: I was going to say really quickly too, I'll get to the third lesson, that I think yesterday I was reading to you a set of scenario blurbs from our good friends Sohel in Itala. Comments on his thread were, "Which one of these is the most plausible," and, "I think number three is plausible," and, "I think a mixture of three and one are plausible."
Yvette: We've got a podcast for that as well.
Frank: That's right.
Yvette: I choose scenario B.
Frank: Yes, Sohel rightly said back in his very diplomatic way because he's one of the most difficult people.
Yvette: I need to learn from him.
Frank: Diplomatic but not weak.
Yvette: No.
Frank: It's like, "Diplomatic, but as I corrected you."
Yvette: I know.
Frank: Which is we think that's awesome. He said plausibility basically isn't what foresight's going for. I know we always say there's one scenario's plausible, but really we're not trying to be plausible. I'm not trying to get you to guess which one of these is the most plausible, we're always trying to stretch or advance, so plausibility is not what foresight is about.
Yvette: You already have plausibility with your forecast. That's what you already think is plausible.
Frank: You're walking a plausible life. [laughs]
Yvette: Yes, you are plausible.
Frank: Yes, so I think that's a great example. Then our third really the outcome here is this idea, and I love everything about this, this is my favorite one of all of these, and this is this idea of the three horizons. We've had a lot of clients actually over the past two years that we've had a ton of success with this. We always have, but some of my favorite ones have been over the last couple of years that I'm really thinking about where we said, "Look, this is your problem statement, the future of X." So simple because you do X, so it's the future of X.
Yvette: The future of automotive.
Frank: Yes, you're an automotive company, so you say, "Can you tell me about the future of automotive?" If you really think about the future is working three different horizons, we're looking at horizon one is who you are. That's right where you are. Horizon two is a little bit more provocative, and then you've got this speculoos space horizon three. If you were just to land there, you probably would lose most of your clients, right?
Yvette: Yes, if you went only to horizon three, the provocative space, yes, you would lose a good number of the people that we work with.
Frank: I think that's what might have happened that day in a way because maybe this was our fault, but there was a disconnect between the client and us because we were like, "We're definitely taking horizon three, but don't worry, we're coming back," and we never got back.
Yvette: Oh, no doubt.
Frank: We never swam back to shore.
Yvette: Let's be clear, and I hope it comes across in these podcasts, whenever we talk about a misstep or a failure, we own it, but that's one of the reasons why we want to take away this negative connotation of failure. This is part of the reason why we're in the predicament we are and why we need so much foresight is because we've built our systems, our structures, organizations to be, if you don't get it right the first time, you're done. You've now built into the system or built out of the system constant trial and error and testing and non-quantifiable approaches.
Everyone takes it safe, everybody has a risk management attitude, and so we want to normalize the idea that everything doesn't go as expected. I still think it's likely that there were people in that room that were impacted by what we shared.
Frank: Yes, because we don't talk about that very much, but I remember a couple of people saying like, "I was really into it."
Yvette: Yes, so three horizons, you don't want to just throw them into the deep end, haha. Throw them into the deep den-
Frank: Metaphors.
Yvette: - for H3, but you also don't want to stay in the H1 space, so it's like that balancing act and we often say the sweet spot is that H2.
Frank: Yes, I say to clients all the time, it's like, "If I can get you to do a good job with H1," which I think none of us are going to have a problem with.
Yvette: No, that's where they come in.
Frank: As a matter of fact, that gets you away from that more than anything else. "Get you to do a good job with H1, then what we're going to do is we're going to be iterative about this too and we're going to land on that sweet spot in the middle of the H2." Oftentimes when we work with clients, they say, "Do we have the right focal issue here?" We'll say, "Probably not if you're an automotive company and you want to know about the future of automotive" because everything that went before in this podcast to explain why that is, you don't want to look at that.
Sheryl Connelly, we look at everything but cars because we've got to look from the outside-in. What would be an H3 if I were an automotive company? The future of automotive, H1, the future of what would be an H3 maybe, mobility.
Yvette: I was thinking mobility could be an H2. I'm wondering if H3 could be like the future of interconnected opportunities or something even broader.
Frank: I love that one because it's like, what is transportation or automotive do? It connects us and all that. When we start thinking about driverless cars being spaces for meetings or work, it's about interconnected opportunities. If I really think about that and I said, "Oh, interconnected opportunities has more to do with cars, it's about the internet. I don't have to move physically to be mobile."
Yvette: It's about social mobility.
Frank: Yes, then I can land on this middle space where it says that's what we should be looking at and I start from there and I work from the outside-in to redefine what the work that we're doing is.
Yvette: Yes, so that's just, again, thinking in three horizons is often really helpful when you have clients that are tethered to the present, you could stretch a rubber band, get them thinking outside-in and you will hopefully have a successful outcome and you won't have people asking, "Where are the whales?"-
Frank: That's exactly right.
Yvette: - in minute 99 of your presentation, so excellent. We have a quick shout-out, and then we want to just, again, plug Year of Free. Our shout-out today goes to?
Frank: Lori Hainaroya and she is one of our wonderful best friends. We worked with Lori when she was R&D at Diamond Trucks North America.
Yvette: Diamond Trucks North America.
Frank: All kinds of roles that she's had there. She had a long and story career with them. She has since moved on and now she works for another company and she still works in the-
Yvette: Autonomous.
Frank: - autonomous space and innovation and connectivity and she's just amazing. I think one of the reasons that we gave her the shout here today is because she is a great, not just a client but partner in helping the Global foresight advisory council and others in her organization and her sphere of influence to understand the outside-in.
Yvette: Yes, she really gets it. When we were working with her at Diamond Trucks North America and we were talking about autonomous vehicle, I remember her saying, "Maybe we should be an entertainment company. If our drivers aren't going to be driving trucks, what are they doing instead?" She's always been a really provocative thinker. She really figured out in her career how to talk to leadership that wasn't as transformative as she was in their thinking, and so she's really a good bridge-builder between the provocative and the more plausible.
Frank: A brilliant person and if you get a chance to talk to her, connect with her in any way on social media or anywhere, do it.
Yvette: Yes, absolutely. All right, well, that brings us to the end of another podcast. Where Are The Whales is complete. Just a reminder that this podcast, like all of our others and the live stream associated with it, is brought to you by the Year of Free. The Future School has declared the year 2022 to be the Year of Free, so you'll be able to use our frameworks for free with commercial or non-commercial use. You can get free inspiration through these podcasts or the Global Foresight Advisory Council or some of our on-demand offerings that are already available all the time, 24/7 on our website.
Of course, probably those popular feature of the Year of Free tuition at all of our global programs. We've had such an incredible response to our Year of Free. So many lives already changed,-
Frank: It's crazy.
Yvette: - both the folks that are receiving the tuition, but those that are nominating them as well. Not to mention our lives at the Future School. When we hear their stories, when we hear what people are doing and want to do with strategic foresight, it inspires us a new, it fill our cup, and this energy is coming to us tenfold. We want to thank everyone that's participated in the Year of Free. If you haven't, please do so. We want to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to experience the future and has agency to create better more equitable futures for all.
Frank: Absolutely, and it wraps up another week. I did just write an article recently why freedom demands or depends on foresight. If you want to look that up, it's on Medium and Linkedin. The reason I mention this is because we're in a time where freedom is advancing, but freedom is also under assault around the world. I really believe that if you read the article, that foresight drives human freedom forward in the future. That's one of the integral parts of the Year of Free is that you nominate someone, it's a collaborative aspect and true freedom is an individual.
It's collaborative, it's cooperative. That's why we made it that way. We want people to cooperate and love, care, and empathy towards freedom. Go read the article and you'll see why the Year of Free was so important to us.
Yvette: All right, excellent. Thank you for joining us once again, we'll see you next week. Thank you, Mr. Spencer.
Frank: It's always a pleasure and I'm so glad that we get to do this podcast. I'm glad about this 52 weeks of podcast. They're a really exciting way for us to go. I look forward to next weeks.
Yvette: Yes, if you haven't already signed up, sign up for our newsletter. That's how you can keep up to date on everything Year of Free and get free resources as soon as they're made available in our resource center. Take care, stay safe, and we'll see you next week.
Frank: Aye, aye.
Yvette: [laughs] I see what you did there.