What Can We Do In These Powerful Times?
What Can We Do In These Powerful Times?
Richard Sandford
Richard Sandford is Professor of Heritage Evidence Foresight and Policy at the UCL Institute of Sustainable Heritage (Twitter, LinkedIn). He interested in how we think about the future and how we connect it to the past.
We discuss in depth how heritage can be a source of useful and productive stances towards the future. Key line from Richard for me:
"Change s coming...If you're looking at the future, perhaps our job now is to preserve that sense of identity that allows us to act without reifying the things that we do need to let go."
Links
Richard's key paper (£) laying out how he thinks lived futures should be the focus of futures researchers and heritage, rather than history, offers the context for developing lived futures.
UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) on Futures Literacy.
Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies.
Stuart Candy on Design and Futures.
Rodney Harrison and "future-making".
Rupert Read on the need "to build lifeboats to carry as many as possible of us through the storms that are coming".
Gillespie and Zittoun -- Imagination in Human and Cultural Development
More on Three Horizons method here.
Courses at UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage.
Link to get Richard's email address.
More on Tony Hodgson here.
Timings
0:50 - Q1 What are you doing now? And how did you get there?
11:10 - Q2. What is the future you are trying to create, and why?
27:33 -- BONUS QUESTION: Is the rise of imagination activities a sign that we have run out of road and trying to imagine something different?
31:10 - Q3. What are your priorities for the next few years, and why?
38:14 - Q4. If someone was inspired to follow those priorities, what should they do next?
41:45 - Q5. If your younger self was starting their career now, what advice would you give them?
43: 34 - Q6. Who would you nominate to answer these questions, because you admire their approach?
46:06 - Q7. Is there anything else important you feel you have to say?
More here
Twitter: Powerful_Times
Website hub: here.
Please do like and subscribe, to help others find the podcast.
Thank you for listening! -- David
Welcome to What can we do in these powerful times? I'm your host, David bent. And I've been working in the field of sustainability and climate change for 720 years, feels that the need for change is growing faster than the impact we're delivering. So I'm wondering, What can I do next that is useful. Speaking with others, they have that same challenge, which is why I'm doing this interview series in 30 minute bites, I asked some brilliant people what they're doing now and why, or to inspire and enable the audience, which may just turn out for me to be me through stories grounded in experience. And let's just say we're joined by Richard Sanford, who is the professor of heritage, evidence, foresight and policy at the UCL Institute for Sustainable heritage. Hello, Richard. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. So, first question, what are you doing now? And how did you get here?
Ricahrd Sandford:Well, I am exploring the connection between heritage and a future, I'm really interested in the fact that heritage, so there's things from the past, or the very recent present that we care about enough to think about preserving them, or protecting them, or making sure they endure in some form for the future, has a very necessary connection to the future. But within the field that's not often dwelt upon, we don't really think of heritage as something connected to the future. At the same time, when we think about the future, it's very tempting to start at the kind of from the present as kind of t equals zero, and not think about what's come before us and how that's shaped, the choices open to us, the values that we're trying to project forward, into the future, and so on. And so what I'm doing here is trying to, I guess, advocate for heritage as a source of useful and productive stances towards the future. And so that's kind of standing inside heritage, looking out towards the community of futurists and foresight, professionals who I think, should be interested in that message. And then also going to the heritage sector and saying, Actually, you guys, the future is fundamental to did you know, there are all these different ways of relating to the future, there are all these different practical ways of thinking about how you get from here to the future that might be useful for people who think about risk, and decay and change, and, and so on. So bringing together the past. And the future, I guess, is what I'm trying to do. I think the second part of your question was, how did I get here? Yes, right, well, quite a winding route. So before I worked here, I was a civil servant. I spent four or five years in the UK civil service working first for government officer science, as the head of horizon scanning. And then after after that short Department for International Trade, and that was set up in post Brexit, I think a number of different foresight teams. And so I suppose there I was the kind of professional Strategic Foresight person looking at trends and identifying future risks, opportunities, really helping people improve X words represents the presence and trying to get people to think outside the kind of very well trodden policy narratives that tend to shape the responses that people see it as available to the farm. By no means the only person doing that. In the UK, there's a number of people across government trying to do that kind of work. And it really taught me an awful lot about different cultures, looking at the future that exists across the Republic that exists even within one organisation, that also really got me thinking about why thinking about the future doesn't necessarily have the impact that we might expect it to. So I guess there's a kind of a standard model, which is if we can imagine a future, then you know, that's a necessary first step to the future happening. Or if we only knew about the threats approaching, we would obviously take steps to avoid it. And I think recently, history illustrates that neither of those things are really true, that decisions are taken on autopilot. And threats require an awful knowledge of threats isn't enough to make sure for example, that budgets for PPE are maintained. And so I was kind of interested to think well, what is that disconnect between how we think the future works and how it seems to work? Before that, I was doing various kind of independent bits of work around the future and policy principally with to UNESCO and Rael Miller. I did a lot of work with him, helping a lot with a whole team of people to develop his notion of futures literacy, and thinking about how people can develop the different ways that they think about the future. And before that, I was education researcher, working with a spinoff from Mr. called Future Future Lab and Bristol River was looking at educational change. And I suppose that was really where I encountered everything Nature. In that we were looking at education and how it might change technology and things natural in the end that would come in, we'd encounter future studies and foresight and development projects in that area.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Cool. And I think it's worth saying for people that there is a whole field called futures, or perhaps foresight studies, depending on, of course, the names matter. But for an outsider that matters quite so much. And there's a whole huge range of tools and methods and processes and approaches, which if one wants to move on, can go off and get a master's or get trained in it in various different kinds of ways. And as you say, I have a little bit of this from my time in Forum for the Future. As with a lot of strategic planning, there is an unwritten assumption that if you are rational and look at the future, then you will take into account what you think about the future when you make decisions. Next, and often that is not the way that things play out that you produce some nice set of scenarios which show, for instance, we should act on climate change. And then nothing really happens.
Ricahrd Sandford:Right? Yes, great summary. So there are lots of different groups of people or fields or disciplines or practices, which name themselves in various different ways in the industry, quite bright, rightly. And, finally, hopefully, so. Except that given that the interest, whenever the interest in the future arises in a different field, or discipline, it's normally sparked by an awareness that there are changes coming in, they're not necessarily good. And so every failure to think well about the future is wasted time. I think that's none of it matters. But it seems as though as you're trying to think about the future in order to take steps to make it somewhat better. reinventing wheels, or asking questions that have been well examined in other places, is something you might want to do that you've got more imperative to have to avoid given your subject matter. And so the fact that there are these differences between future studies, which is an academic field that grew out of kind of nascent sociology of the future developed in Hawaii in the 70s, but which, frankly, has become, some people hate me saying saying this, but there are some people who consider it, perhaps slightly into not as plugged into other emerging areas of interest in the future as it might be. That's a source of this kind of very traditional look at the future. So principles like think about more than one future, the future is not fixed time goes one way that we also use the future to bring about the best possible future we can. But you do this by thinking about things that aren't changing equal and drivers, things that do change in various different directions. Because there's a trend, there's a whole variety of vocabulary that has been developed by future studies. And it is an interesting and rewarding field to engage with. There's also over the last probably 40 years or so within teachers, that sort is the emergence of perhaps I think, maybe more academically minded are gonna get in such trouble
David Bent-Hazelwood:version. Don't worry, nobody listens to it, it's fine.
Ricahrd Sandford:Critical for you futures studies, which pays more attention to maybe the underlying ideas, attitudes, that drives people's engagement with the future, separately to that, within kind of mainstream academic, social sociology at various points there have been flowerings of interest in the future, which generally unaware that there's this disability to stuff that is, there's, in anthropology recently, there's been a real resurgence of interest in the future, post COVID, everyone's suddenly realised the future is a thing. It's a social fact. It's a it's an element of our lives. That deserves close, close attention and understanding. And because of my kind of jack of all trades background, I suppose. One of the I don't know if it's hubristic or just foolhardy to take take this on myself, but I'm interested in kind of charting the different schools that are interested in the future and trying to see whether a commonality is where people are repeating work that's being done where people are trying to colonise areas of work that are already well established, which voices are heard, regularly, which aren't, every time someone pops up and says that for example, in the field of design, in the maybe 2010, I suppose, a much more mainstream the work of people is to candy develops experiential futures. Gave momentum to the current arising within design proper, speculative futures. Do you have a whole bunch of designers trained in design who worked with works with other people trained in design and spoke design, saying it's our job to think about the future and very few of them seemed aware of design don't heritage in this respects that people aren't tiny fry. But also think in a way that there are a bunch of people who had been doing just that for many years that they could learn from. So, anyway, that's rather sounds. But yes, you're right there lots of different ways.
David Bent-Hazelwood:And and for most people who are listening to this who have experienced some of those approaches, they'll often be a very technology driven notion of the future, as in these technologies are changing, and therefore the future will look like this. And that's, that's often the main way of talking about it. And I think what's interesting, listening to you also is I mean, you've given a lot of different academic fields there. But of course, a lot of your background you described is not academic. And there's lots of uses of futures, which are beyond academia, to the scenario planning, from Shell and so on. There's like this whole domain of things which are in play, and what I don't want one of the things, what reasons why I wanted to talk to you, because I don't think I know anybody else. Who is saying back to where you started, in your answer to the question about, well, the stuff that futures can bring to heritage and the stuff that heritage can bring to futures. So, which I think what I want to unpack that with the next question, which is sure, what is the future you're trying to create? And why why why are you trying to bring these two together?
Ricahrd Sandford:Well, I should say, first of all, I'm not the only person who has no connection between the future and heritage. There are a number of people around the world, I do think I haven't yet come across anyone who has had the good fortune to be exposed to future studies, and perhaps sociological takes on the future. To that extent, I think I'm trying, perhaps more self consciously to reach outside of heritage as it feels to come to some conclusion about the future. But I wouldn't want anyone to think that I was the only person who made that connection. It is not widespread. Isn't, I think, probably, for two broad ways of answering that question, I suppose. Firstly, I think heritage is an example a source of examples of how to approach the future, through care. That heritage embodies practices, things like maintenance and stewardship, which are orientations towards the future, which are fundamentally starting from a relation of care that they are objects of the event, but our practice is something that matters to everybody, or some people think it should matter to everybody, or it just matters to a small group. But it's something that's important. And it's that important that meaningful as that is the catalyst for this, this wider practices of maintenance and stewardship and protection and so on. My experience of futures work in conflates all those different things in the general umbrella term. It's often a very technocratic approach. And because of the context, it works in and often has to pretend to a kind of a scientific objectivity. It has to be, you know, the number of times I've framed the work of my team, this is robust. It uses evidence, good in favour of evidence and in favour of relating what you think to the empirical stuff you can you can say about the world. But it's very easy in this world of foresight to start talking about trends and drivers and the forces that act upon us, as if you weren't that and more importantly, if they acted as if everyone else around the table wasn't? Yeah. And I think what I guess I'm trying to explore as a way of writing the subject in people, you know, actual the ancient people doing this into the practice of looking at the future, the kind of thing I'm trying to avoid, I guess is I'd often convened a meeting in silence with people from different departments coming around, it will be very, very difficult to reflect on how the work of that department has gotten us to the point where we're starting from inside the past. For the sake of the conversation taking place, it was convenient to pretend that there wasn't really a pest involved. Law will say that explicitly, of course, but that's that was the results. And it was also very difficult to talk about the future of the 30 or 40 years time, but hadn't in some way arisen through the actions of that. If you're a company, if you're taking the shelf corporate thing where you're, you're pivoting, you're doing incremental futures, even though there's our firm continue to exist and thrive and make a profit in this context or that context or this context or you're smaller, possibly. It's possible to entertain the consumer But you don't have much impact on the world. If you're a national government, the idea that the Society of 3040 years time isn't in some way the product of your action or inaction, it's clearly a fiction. And it's very hard to talk about that when they're in the room, because then the kind of natural, small politics of these kinds of meetings comes into play, and everyone suddenly clams up, because you can't say anything that might lead you to be being held to account or that might suggest you take any any other choices, you would make any decisions that were not the correct ones. You know, which, of course, if you're talking about future possibilities, you have to think about different decisions being like so. So I was really interested in developing ways of I guess, I just want to see if you can have policy futures conversations that are grounded in what matters to people that start with that layer that don't see bringing what matters in as a loss of objectivity. And somehow cheapening things, but instead actually strengthening your work that you're doing. I think that's also important, because the kind of the second strand I'm interested in, is whether you can think about the future in a way that leaves it uncertain. That might sound a bit counter productive. What I'm getting at is if you maintain something, if you do the work of keeping it in good shape, and something wrong before it goes too far, and making sure there's a succession plan in place for someone else to couple of culture and all that kind of thing, you are making the future and Rodney Harrison's phrase its future making. You aren't being quite agnostic about what that future is. And perhaps you're making certain assumptions about funding, or about there still being a sanitarium to value that. But you know, what, if there isn't something and there's a society, then your licence has come to an end anyway. So there's a way in which heritage practices can be oriented towards the future can contribute actively towards the future, while remaining agnostic about what it is, that's in contrast to the kind of the modernist approach of drawing a straight line out from the present and picking a spot in the future, describing it in detail, and then working on to bring that about, yeah, sometimes that works, although often does the expense of many other possibilities. It's kind of a blink of the world. Often it doesn't, because the world is complex, it's very hard to anticipate the emergent things before they've emerged, that the world is not made of those kinds of straight lines. So how should we think also offers a chance to step out of the kind of modern historical time groups and start thinking about the future is something that's latent, that is around us, that we can help, we can watch as it kind of continually emerges?
David Bent-Hazelwood:Yeah, and I think on that last strand, it's making me think about or it's reminding me about some of the work of fairly radical environmental philosopher and politician, Rupert Reed, who's a feeder into extinction rebellion, though he's now and sometimes spokes person for them, but it now maintains a bit of a distance. And in the past, he's written about the two he believes that some form of personal societal collapse, but certainly extreme pressures on our ways of life is is inevitable. And therefore, we need robust lifeboats to for the things about, that we care about, and that we want to receive the world, or at least to be the building blocks for any future world when when the disruption is less acute. I'm sure we will be able to say it a bit better. But in a way, that's one of the ways of reading that. Having care for the things you value about in a way which tries to make them available, whatever future comes about, and that you are transmitting to the future, the values as encased in whatever it is, you're stewarding in the hope that that will influence the rest of what happens in that future. Is that a fair way of describing it?
Ricahrd Sandford:Yeah, well, I think it's one way of describing it. And actually, it illustrates a number of kind of current debates within heritage as a field. So I suppose let's imagine that kind of a lay idea of heritage as a bunch of stuff, material things being deemed important labelled heritage
David Bent-Hazelwood:country houses, statues, country houses,
Ricahrd Sandford:statues, these kinds of flags, maybe, but also natural landscapes. And the idea is to preserve them because a world without them is bad. And therefore we should anticipate risks and take steps to prevent them or mitigate them. And hopefully, that'll work and they'll continue on into the future which is just a good in itself. There are lots of other voices that have been for a number of decades now who points out that General room I can feel we've recognised that heritage is not a thoroughly the values that makes me heritage to not reside in the thing itself. But in what it means to the people that call it heritage. That many forms of heritage are intangible, and use the jargon to define the UNESCO World Heritage site lists a staggering array of practices and songs and things that you can't touch. But I still think people are much better. But also, there are a number of people arguing that heritage, we ought to be less precious about heritage that we all recognise that things decay, but you can't stop things. I mean, it's been fascinating work with chemists in our team, we have a lot of heritage science scientists with an institute, who whose work is charting, the chemical processes that underpin the degradation of, for example, are made with Bakelite nearly aren't in 10s and 20s. That, really, if you're trying to protect heritage, the best you can hope for is to kind of intervene and the rate of change. You're trying to arrest the processes of decay. And there are a number of very influential voices in heritage, saying, Well, what would be what would be so bad about that? Yeah, would it not, in some ways be healthier, if we could live with, with decay and change that we can understand the heritage might have other forms and go into other ways of being, and that sometimes particularly, some, you know, maybe. So that's, that's a kind of a conversation about the material side of heritage. But you can also say that might be true. So attitudes might be certain fixed ways of imagining what it means to be British, for example, but it would be nice to see fade out, it'd be constructive that there might be certain fixed ideas about gender or about households or about who has power or authority, that it might be necessary for us to let them fade away, if we're going to take the steps we need to exist in the kind of world that Rupert Reid articulates. So this is relevant to this idea of stances towards the future, I think. So you can imagine what you might call this is kind of based on work from real metal, but also other people who have kind of propose their own different versions of this, but to that and amalgam of a bunch of people, that you might think that there's a kind of a planning approach to the future. That's one stance, I can point in the future, set it out in detail, work backward spoken on that path. As a single future vision that you're working towards, you might think in terms of risk, contingency, that's a different stance towards the future. That's about anticipating many different features, understanding their possible impacts, you're kind of waiting for the future to come to you. You're going to hunker down and I'm ready. I'm going to shield in case it falls from the sky. I've got sweets in case it needs modifying. And it's a threat based approach risk and threat that's very prevalent in heritage, of course, yes, the heritage, which are real and manifests themselves regularly in substance see what happens when there's a conflict like Ukraine currently to see that. That's not, I'm not dismissing that as an important feature. But you can also extend other stances towards the future that are more about recognising a continual emergence of the process. And particularly thinking about sustainability, and about like sensing the fast changes that seem to be coming our way or that we're in the middle of too big for us to really grasp, developing other ways of thinking about the future that relinquish control that maybe have more humility about them, that are less about us being able, being sufficiently Western to mitigate every risk and to foretell every possible future. So I think the attitude towards the house in the future you described is certainly present within the heritage sector. It's certainly appealing in some contexts. But I think also heritage is a source of other ways of orienting to the future, which it's important to explore. I mean, fundamentally, I think, lots of the features, practices that you've been familiar with, and that I've described, evolves, with the understanding that they work with an organisation which wasn't going to change, that they were bringing news of change. And so lots of these techniques are designed to make the case for change, to persuade people who don't want to change that they should change. And so I think if there's one thing to take away from the concept of the Anthropocene, which whatever you think about its value, versus what aspects of it, I think, is useful. It's just a really orient ourselves to the notion that change is not up for discussion now. There is change coming. And actually, the hardest thing might be to preserve sufficient continuity ourselves and allow institutions for them to be able to act to be the same to preserve an identity over the time and they need to be able to do the work that they're trying to do. And so I think heritage, looking to heritage as a means of looking at the future. It's not so much about protecting the heritage. itself, although obviously that matters. It's about understanding that what's at stake isn't continuity, that's not given any more changes and given continuity is not. And if you're looking at the future, perhaps our job now, usually, is to try and preserve that sense of identity that allows us to act without reifying the things that we do need to let go.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Yeah. Yes. I mean, lots of different things occurred to me for all of that one is that, in a way, that's the title of all of this is what can we do in these powerful times. And, boy, you've one of the things you've articulated there is that we can adopt different stances to those powerful times we can be reactive, we can be risk averse, or we can think of them in terms of risk, and so on. So those strategic stances and we can be willing them to be emergent and realising that we can't keep hold of everything we might ever want. And so that's like, that's like a strategic sense towards the future and towards these powerful times. I think another is your I agree with you that a lot of the futures workers and what are involved with a forum was going to say PepsiCo, and showing them four different versions of 2030. And the chief strategy officer in a workshop saying, you've got these wrong, climate changes present in all of these scenarios, and scenarios should be different from each other to be useful. We have to tell him that climate change was happening and there wasn't something which was a variable. And from partly from there, PepsiCo created their sustainable agriculture work. But it was about bringing the news of change. And I think in my current work, the the questions that corporates asking themselves has shifted from why should we do this acting on sustainability into how shall we do this? How should we export sustainably and that's actually, maybe it's very late in the game, but it's all nevertheless a really important shifting question, I think. And then the last thing I was gonna say and just sort of ask you about really, there's a lot of things being created, which have imagination in their title somehow or other. So Jeff Morgan's just released a book as a centre for imagination or collective imagination. It's called, there's Rob Hopkins, great work on from what is to what if mean, is that, is it possible that's like a symptom of us? Right, feeling like the current status quo is run out of road, and we're trying to these things are arising and the interest in other academic fields and futures is arising? Because we're wanting to imagine something different?
Ricahrd Sandford:Yes, I think it is. I think all I mean, to sort of subsidiaries things I'm interested in our understanding from this is kind of a purely sociological point of view. Does this work? Yeah, I think an awful lot of people involved, which I have been wanting for decades now. We often use words like we, without really specifying that we mean, a certain kind of privileged middle class group. And that, like any group, there are ways of signalling your belonging, and there are ways in which you have to change and that new fashions come in, and one reading of this resurgence of imagination, which you can understand it as it's a new concept concepts come and go. They're fashionable. I think that what is interesting about this imagination thing, I made a distinction in my doctoral work between futures that exist on a timeline, and narratives of the future, which are not timed. But instead of existing, what I called perhaps, biologically subjective space, right? So you're not talking about the future as a time, you're talking about whatever it is, you're describing as a possibility and alternative, the thing that could never exist in this timeline that doesn't exist in this timeline. So
David Bent-Hazelwood:almost like an archetype or like imagining something which will draw you forward, but you know, is no not really gonna exist. It's not a prediction.
Ricahrd Sandford:I mean, yeah, it is. It's not really timed. It's parallel. It's in a separate dimension. It's a different thread. It's, you know, if I said, for example, I am sitting here and later on walk out over there. But imagine if I was sitting on the bus right now, now, that cannot exist. Yeah, it's kind of necessarily disproved by the empirical fact that we're sitting here, over here is in front of us. So that story that I just told, is imaginary. It was fundamentally imaginative. It cannot exist in the real world. I think, part of the work that the Father has been doing and that the JRF have been doubling down on so much that people aren't feeding feeding to kill a scientifical imagination. I think what they're trying to do I understand in they're trying to develop the capacity to develop that way of thinking, rather than a kind of projective. Right? We want to get from here to there. So lots of stuff that can come out of imagination isn't necessarily something you could place on the timeline. Again, let me back to my other thing there's a lot of people have done work on imagination already, the social psychologists soon can ask me, for example, a publisher published a lot on the role of imagination in individual agency, how do we imagine that state of affairs get there? There are many references to that, and they come across, you know, these people pricings. Jeff has a professorship here in the heartland, that his background causes policy, from the very heart of Whitehall. So there's maybe a job to do and kind of connecting that potion that call for imagination, to what was going on and so on, and so on. But I think, you know, thinking about this difference between timed futures and futures that exist in this attractive space has been useful for me and distinction between them, I guess.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Right? So next question, as you have this sort of domain or two fields, you're drawing together, and you have your place to stand in UCL. What are your priorities for the next few years? Do you have particular things that you're wanting to progress?
Ricahrd Sandford:And yes, so for example, I'm working with Historic England to find out how heritage professionals think about the future. If you don't mind, my hunch is that on the whole when people step outside, their specialism their their civilian, like anyone else. So it may well be that we see people who work in heritage as having the same kind of lay approaches to the future that take determinism, for example, that you mentioned earlier, as anyone else. But it might be that actually working heritage affords people the chance to engage with ideas, amazing stewardship, care, and so on. I think it'd be great to surface that to celebrate heritage as a field where individual people are orienting themselves to the future in this way that is necessary and demanded by these times. I really interested in getting to a simple set of collaborators who are doing work in natural heritage and cultural heritage places, which perhaps might exemplify these kinds of attitudes. And the kind of potentially this theoretical work I've been doing here is to say, there's very good reason to, to be able to think of heritage as a source of practical examples of this kind of work. And so we're beginning to do the work of collecting these examples and saying, Here's his work with people in Northern Ireland, for example, his work with architecture students in New Delhi, two people I've been working with, I, from an audience point of view, and I'm really interested in theorising better, the relationship between speculative thinking so not just protected or extrapolates here, but the ideas that seem normal and new and fall from nowhere, they come from somewhere produced from within our cultural heritage, our language that is that we have been using. So can we understand that it's a word we can do with language to chant that. And I'm really keen on learning to recognise which attempts to look at future and describe novel words, worlds feel, I feel there are a lot of efforts, possibly some of these ventilation projects where people feel they're embarking on a project to make a new world. But actually what they're doing is just reaffirming the old world. And think about the three horizons model. Some of your listeners will know we're not sure. But the first horizon is increasingly is a mindset that is increasingly less fit for purpose as the world around it changes further. isin is one that will be fit for purpose, but the world has not yet changed to make it so. And then there's a kind of a bridging mental horizon, which kind of helps you step between those two mindsets. And it can either prop up the old way, or it can usher in the new way, early. And I think an awful lot of sorry, work, for example I've been involved in, has tacitly reaffirmed existing power structures, existing ways of getting stuff done. If you don't mention governments, enabling stuff, you're still assuming that the government works the way it does, and so on. So there are lots of ways in which we might try and build a new world which actually vote, and lots of ways in which we don't think we're being radical, but we're just occupying space marked out for us by the old guard. And that's not how do we learn not to mistake that, you know, it's kind of those that's fake change, rather than the genuine change. We need, how do you work with people and that's, I think that's an emotional thing as well. It's been difficult for me to kind of accept that lots of work, I thought was being very divisive, actually, helping. Lots of organisations preserve Third position, the old order was genuinely thinking.
David Bent-Hazelwood:And I'd say recognise some of that from my time in forum. We thought we were doing stuff which would be changing the old order. But often the people who could pay were the ones who were from the old order. And certainly we grew to suspect we were teaching them how to stay in place by how they engage with the future.
Ricahrd Sandford:This is a really interesting question, the work you will did. And for those of you Yeah, over the years, I've always been impressed with everybody's willingness to go to work with Glaxo SmithKline, for example, Unilever
David Bent-Hazelwood:and say, BP.
Ricahrd Sandford:Opp and say that we can't ignore you. There's no point that's talking about that side. But actually, we we might want to work with you. If we need to decarbonize from a pilot point of view, is it bad that BP runs up? I think you could say yes, it is bad. But he can't do things with everybody. Wait, this is partly what we're getting at? What's new stuff? Depending on what was there before? Is there a role for the biggest companies in the world of the most responsible for it?
David Bent-Hazelwood:And in terms of how one thinks about that, if we you tended to default to incremental versus radical. Does the incremental ever add up enough to radical can incremental be a bridge into radical? I think the other thing, which sometimes I think it can be sometimes it might not be because you are reaffirming the existing power structures. In particular, I think what I'd say about, particularly the oil and gas firms 20 years on from when I first started with BP, and like, they've had their chance, like they've had a lot of rope with which to do what they wanted to do, and they didn't use it to decarbonize. So I would be, I'm on record as being very, very sceptical, indeed, about leaving them in that power place now, which 20 years ago, soon after John Brown announced that climate change is a real thing. And he was the chief executive of BP in late 90s, early 2000s, and so on, and they went beyond they talked about going beyond petroleum. It wasn't impossible, they may choose to do something other than what they choose to do, or they say, that's what it felt to us at the time. But perhaps we didn't, perhaps it was available, but closed off by the actions of others, perhaps we were naive, there's a whole other set of things to unpack there in a different podcast and a different interior time. So you have your work, bringing the sort of futures of heritage worlds together, and using the best of both or each other, and particularly that I'm gonna go slightly wrong, but the the having that the stances towards the future and the stances? And how is it to care for things that you care about? And that things here of being in a wide sense? Not just physical things, but values, perhaps is cultural artefacts of physical and non physical to care for them? And what are the statuses of towards the future, which mean that you can provide that can that can be ongoing? And there's particular things within that, if someone was inspired to follow these priorities? What would what do they think you should do next? Obviously, you do a Masters course. So they should come and do your masters.
Ricahrd Sandford:And we run short courses, as well.
David Bent-Hazelwood:So as well as that, what was what should they do?
Ricahrd Sandford:I think one of the biggest things that I think it is for here is noticing the teacher yourself. So we often just accept certain kinds of dominant discourses of the future about rockets of disasters and apocalypse or fall upon kids if opiates, but actually the future occupies a place in our lives in lots of lots of different ways. I think if you can just kind of tune into Do you anticipate when do you plan when, or different stances to the future DC in your life, if you buy insurance, that's one way of looking at the future. If you make a band with somebody, that's another way, if you don't daydream, that's a different way. If you have some aspirations, you're not quite sure how you get there, but they're like a lodestone. And they keep you going. And that's another way to relate to the future. Even just thinking about the complexity, again, this has been I've tried to describe in my doctoral work was the layered time that is just our everyday inheritance is how we start using languages, we're able to talk about past features are anticipated before and now anticipate lesson in the future, I might think differently about Boston, we can time travel, and do all the time. And so just becoming attuned to that idea that the future is more than just a point further along the line. Or something that we should control. It's something that we live in, it's kind of woven into our sense of self at the same way that past the present. And that is the kind of thing that you can do can foster. You know, by just attending to your own kind of interior, thoughts and practices and mood and feel Links and so on. So I think that's, that can sensitise you to thinking about the future and in ways that are different to the standard dominant ways, I guess. And the other way, of course, is just email me people are really interested in this or interesting, I really love talking about this kind of thing. So there's a way to leave my email address on your website,
David Bent-Hazelwood:I certainly there was shownotes, to this, which will have your email address, and the thing you just talking about of, and I'll try to make links to all the different authors you've spoken about as a whole, which might take me a little bit of time, but we'll get to that the your that practice of of being aware of the future in as you're using it in the moment reminds me of Bill sharps notion of future consciousness, which uses three horizons, to say you have a managerial voice, which is about protecting the status quo, a visionary voice, which is about that far future and an innovation voice, which is about the bridging between like, which of those voices, are you privileging in yourself or in your group at any one moment? And it might be the right, it might be right to privilege that managerial voice first. It might be right to privilege the visionary voice, but So paying attention to what isn't, isn't there. And what the neat moment needs is what happened all talks about
Ricahrd Sandford:it absolutely agree completely, because that came from his work with Tony Hodgson. Three of the three horizons minister. I think, because I'm in some kind of ivory tower place I get to think about nature futures, but it absolutely if there's a certain stance you need to adopt in order to have a conversation about the future with a particular group of people, then it's quite right to do that. Yeah. That's the whole point is different contexts, demand different stances towards the future. They're often contradictory. They don't necessarily cohere with each other. But that's, that is how things are. And I think that's okay. Yes.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Next question. If your younger self was starting their career now, what advice would you give?
Ricahrd Sandford:Oh, God, I think possibly. I started work around the turn of the century, the new millennium. And I really believe that everything was very different, and the work is different than their careers are different, and so on. And I think it's been really nice to observe how one particular government office for science work, meeting people who are experts who have proven themselves in some field, it's much easier for them to get into different fields. If you're already well established, if you have a disciplinary home, if you're really good at statistics, you know, what it means to be able to see things that and also, if you have a certain kind of position, or gravitas or something from having established yourself from one field, it's more legitimate for you to travel across to another, perhaps I'm saying this, because I don't really have any of that. And it's been quite hard. I see some people doing it in a much more credible and productive way, which, so I guess, my only cell phones, they just whatever you do, it's the casket for 10 years, then use what you learn Next, you will learn something, it will be transferable. But what you transfer after 10 years development will be so much more worthwhile than after two.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Yeah, I certainly have someone who physics then actual research and then sustainability and all those things within standards. I do feel that I still describe myself as not having a discipline for being a disciplined or in disciplinaries.
Ricahrd Sandford:Who should stress I'm not I'm not saying we will live forever. I think it's important to leave. I just think the timing for engaging with other fields is important.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Yes. Who would you nominate answer these questions because you admire their approach.
Ricahrd Sandford:And think about this. I was really stuck, right? But then I started listening people I realised that I was listening so many people that being left out would be really offended. I guess there's some people that I know here and some people I've never met but would like to John Parker, Bryce from design and sustainability right, magnificently cynical about design and capability to change the world, chiefly realistic about soil, and about innovation and so on really interesting. Writer, philosopher of technology Michael Serkis, is he again is a big follower of our village. He embodies a certain kind of humility caution I don't know what it's it's a deeply interesting with her like reading a lot of similar stuff, slightly. Discovery but I've always fascinated by what Justin Smith has to write his newsletters. He's written a couple of really interesting books recently one on the nature of the internet. really distinctive voice to design a friend of mine, John Wilshere, right. He's done an awful lot of teaching on futures and in a practical sense, deeply thoughtful a curious guy but working outside an academic context, grounded in practice. A really interesting guy called Theo Reeves Everson Bring him here because he introduced me to the idea of speculative infrastructure, long in advance of anyone talking about the imagination, infrastructure, but he's got some really nice thinking on what is it that supports our speculative work. So I'd love to hear him a bit more really, my supervisor, an old boss carry face that. I think we have an awful lot of interesting stuff, as she's been thinking hard about educating for climate change, educating people who are able to meet the challenge that's ahead of us with hope. And I think I learned a huge amount from having the good fortune over the years to speak to Graham Lester, again, worked with Bill sharp at various points in his approach to dialogue, to working with people to quietly saying extremely radical things to people at the heart of the establishment. And doing so Excel consistently over decades is, I think, his inspiration. So any of those people to surprise.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Most of those people love people, I don't know, it'd be wonderful to talk to them. Graham, I have asked, and he has said yes, but we've not found a date as yet. So let's do that. Just in our last few moments. Is there anything else important you feel you have to say?
Ricahrd Sandford:Thank you very much.
David Bent-Hazelwood:Well, it's my pleasure, I think. I mean, you say you're in an ivory tower, and you're have this, something really interesting about I mean, we talked about things that last a long time and heritage and futures in universities as a form are 100 or less hundreds of years, potentially. Certainly, UCL is over 150 years old now. And they are places for they are places for both novelty and continuity, which I think is really interesting. And and which is not to say that it's easy for it to be those things. But I think it's an interesting aspect of them. And although some of the stuff you've been talking about seems very particular. I think there's a much broader set of practices and lessons which might flow out of them over time about that stance to the future. It doesn't just apply to things which we might bear just capital H heritage, but also applies to almost every aspect of our lives and almost every aspect of decision making by large organisations as they're trying to make their way in a world which is much more disrupted and the future much more clouded and uncertain compared to what we're used to. So I think that's one there's a lot I think, going on for me underneath what you're saying, which I think is highly relevant. So thank you very much for sharing all of that. And, and thank you very much for listening to us. This is the end of our episode on what we do in these powerful times with Richard. Thank you, Richard. Thank you
