Building Futures Literacy For Smarter Strategy | Lasse Jonasson

Strategy often treats the future like a straight road. We treat it like a landscape. With Lasse Jonasson, Chief Foresight Officer at the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, we unpack how to swap predictions for preparedness and why language is the first tool of good strategy. When leaders share a vocabulary for assumptions, signals, and scenarios, conversations stop drifting and decisions start compounding.

We dig into practical moves that any team can run this quarter. Start by stress testing your three-year plan against plausible ten-year futures: what must stay true for it to work, what signals would disprove it, and who owns the call to pivot. We show how to identify elements of your organisation that endure across scenarios and those that demand redesign. Rather than chase certainty, build optionality with explicit triggers, resource pathways, and decision rights. You’ll hear why “strategic ambiguity” is not vagueness but a guardrailed space where discovery and delivery both win.

AI and geopolitics headline the change, but their real impact lies in how they reshape relationships, processes, and business models. Most leaders explore AI for efficiency; the advantage arrives when you reimagine work and value creation. We contrast the machine metaphor of management with the ecosystem metaphor, making the case for cultures that sense, adapt, and learn in public. We also challenge tidy hero stories and winner’s myths, highlighting how documenting assumptions and debates—now easier with AI—helps teams separate preparation from luck and improve cycle after cycle.

If you’re ready to make strategy a living practice—futures literacy, scenario thinking, and identity-aware choices—this conversation will give you the prompts and patterns to begin. Subscribe, share with a colleague who owns a roadmap, and leave a review with the one assumption you plan to test next.

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Transcript

Strategy Meets Foresight

Mike Jones 0:00

Most people do think of strategy that way.

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Developing a new strategy.

Mike Jones 0:04

Strategic blind spots. When strategy meets reality. Strategy and innovation.

SPEAKER_01 0:08

In the strategy world.

Meet The Chief Foresight Officer

Mike Jones 0:09

Drive their strategic goals. And welcome back to Strategy Meets Reality Podcast. Welcome back to Strategy Meets Reality Podcast. I'm delighted today to be joined by Lasie Jonan. I hope I pronounced that right. I think there's going to be a whole um clip thing of me in these episodes about mispronunciation of people's names, so I do apologise. But it's fantastic to have you on the show. And just for our listeners, do you mind giving a bit of background and a bit of context about what you've been up to lately?

From Prediction To Potential Futures

SPEAKER_01 0:39

Yeah. Happy to be here. And um you can you can call me or pronounce my name in any way. I'm I'm used to uh people not being very crisp on on this Danish pronunciation. Lese Jonason is the way I pronounce it. And I'm from uh I'm from the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies, where I'm uh a CFO, and usually people think that that equates to chief financial officer. In my case, it's it's chief foresight officer. So uh CFO of the future, one might say. Um and I I think yeah, I'm less interesting, and I I think uh Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies is is a more interesting topic. So more on that. We're we're uh an independent non-profit think tank founded back in 1969, where um we were founded with the purpose of understanding the future and basically predicting what is coming. After a few decades, we we realized we cannot predict the future, so we stopped doing that and instead trying to understand potential futures, and and that's also in our name, Copenhagen Institute for Futures in plural studies. And and that's basically what we do today. Uh, we work with different organizations, helping them to understand what is ahead, and also helping them position your themselves towards those potential futures. So in in the field of foresight, that that's where our core competence is, working with a lot of different actors, both leaders wanting to get get with their strategy, but also foresight practitioners who want to get some some sparing on on how to work with foresight. Well sound.

Why Organisations Struggle With The Future

Mike Jones 2:31

Yeah, uh I think that foresight is one of those elements in the strategic process that I think is underestimated. I think people talk about it, the future, but I think they fall into that trap of that you said about trying to predict the future, which we know we can't do. So what what what are the things you think that sort of prevent or make it difficult for people to use futures in organizations?

Language And Literacy For Futures

SPEAKER_01 2:57

Yeah, first of all, it it's abstract, right? As you said, it's uh it's difficult to predict the future. And it's difficult to speak about the future. And what is the future? I mean, five minutes out, that's the future. Usually we try to look much further ahead, so so five, ten, twenty years out. So so one thing is what what is the future? And I I would say for for us, the way we we try to define it is in the time horizon within which your organization is beginning to be exposed to some external elements that would require other than just linear thinking. So more radical uh futures that will have a significant impact on your organization. So I think we we lack a language, uh we lack uh uh discipline, um and and it it's a little bit cultural uh difficult to accept this uncertainty. So usually I say that uh for me, uh not having structured work around the the foresight dimension is corresponding to leaders getting into a room, looking at each other and saying, let's discuss last year's financial results, and then say it's not that we have anyone, any financial controller or bookkeeper in the room. No, no, no. Let's just discuss intuitively what did happen. Right? No one would do that, seriously. Yeah, yeah. But I I do think the future is at least as important as the past. So um actually having a structured approach to potential futures that would open up for a conversation around the future, because that's also the the challenge, right? It's the conversation in many leadership groups about the future is juvenile to directly. Uh because if you don't have a language, then you cannot speak very efficiently about the future. Let's say now I use the example of financial numbers. Let's say you didn't have a a word for revenues or ibidah, you know, just a complex, then you say ibidah, everyone knows what you're speaking about. That's because you've spent quite a lot of time understanding what's behind that term. Yes. So so we need to have that in the future. We have to have outspoken assumptions about the future so we can discuss that more structurally.

Geopolitics And Shifting Assumptions

Mike Jones 5:30

Yeah. And I and I think, you know, over the last two decades, I think a lot of the management thinking has spent a lot of time on you know perfecting sort of the you know, the the structures of organization, the management of organisation. And you know, we we've got some great work on futures, but I don't think it's really um sort of come into the mainstream to perfect that language and that shared understanding. But I think it's really it's really important because you've only got to look and you're you're in the midst of this, um, and I'm not sure roughly when this is gonna go out, so it might be a bit dated on this subject, but you know, just thinking about you, you know, you're in Denmark, the issue with Greenland, the issue with our um our sort of powers around the world changing what we always thought to be true and factual, and you know, those those governing constraints, those straints that we thought that were untouchable, they are now moving them or testing them. And this is really crucial because if we don't have the language to look ahead of the future, we we can't really understand well what would happen if these things did shift, what would emerge, what would that mean for the futures? And I think then if we don't do that, we we're just sort of going into going into the or allowing the future to come to us quite blind.

Scenarios To Understand Today

SPEAKER_01 6:58

Yeah. Yeah, I fully agree. And and um and I would say most events you only understand in hindsight, right? Let's take the Berlin Wall. When when that happened, what was the consequences? Now, when we look back and say the consequences of the the fall of the the Berlin Wall, that was quite clear. It led to this, this, and that. So basically the consequences and and the uh importance on the on an event is only understood with hindsight because you know what it led to. And I would say that that's why future thinking is actually extremely powerful. Because if you do some futures thinking, then you work on scenarios which might be the consequences of events happening today. And through those scenarios you can see the potential of those events. You might not be right, but you have an idea about it. So actually, to understand the present, you have you need to have an historical, you know, literacy, but also what we call a futures literacy. So you need to understand what what will be the potential consequences of of what is happening here. And and that's exactly what what you also mentioned there. We have some quite solid assumptions that that are very uh implicit in our thinking. One of those might be that we have uh a world where people are respecting the overall dynamics, the laws, the geopolitical tensions are keeping uh uh us in some side of uh a predictable behavior. And what if that is not true? Uh we need to have some optionality here, um which is inconvenient to think about. Uh it doesn't feel nice. And first of all, sometimes you you're just not aware of your assumptions. It's it's hidden assumptions that that are actually the basis of your your strategy or whatever you are going.

Surfacing Hidden Assumptions

Mike Jones 9:07

And I think that's really crucial. There are really good things there. Um I pick up first, and this is where I first came on to your um your work was you've done an article about um gamification of futures or or or simulation of futures. And I think it's that because we hold those implicit assumptions, there's no way of really challenging those, and that's where future thinking really helps because you have different perspectives in the rooms. It's not just you going, Oh, I wonder what the future is, it's really a collaborative thing where we're challenging what are you seeing? What what could you know? We're using that um cognitive creative capacity of people. Um and I think that's really challenges because that that'd be interesting to me. Why are you seeing that and I'm not? Why do you believe that and I don't? And I think that whole bit about surfacing those tensions and then being able to run those scenarios in a way that people can get involved, I think is really powerful.

AI: Efficiency Or New Models

SPEAKER_01 10:01

Yeah, exactly. And we all have assumptions about the future. And the power comes when when we actually reveal those assumptions, when we get a language for those assumptions, so we understand that when we are discussing a potential entry in a new market, for example, a strategy, and then it's because my assumption is that we will have a much more open economy, and I believe we need to go into that market, whereas your assumption might be that will not happen. So we don't agree in the actual uh um you know elements of the strategy, it's because we have different assumptions. And very often, if now this is, you know, one assumption and one one quite clear example which would be revealed in our conversation. But what we see very often is, for example, when we go into organizations, we very often, uh as a fundamental layer before we do our work, our uh analysis and futures work, we do some interviews, qualitatively based interviews, where we try to reveal the assumptions about the future. And uh now geopolitics is one area. Of course, AI is very high on the agenda for most people. And if you just ask uh, do you think AI is impactful? Everyone will say yes. Do have you considered a lot about the impact of AI? All leaders would say yes, uh nine out of ten, right? But but if you go further into that, most uh leaders have spent all their cognitive power on understanding how AI can change what they do today. Yes. How they can make things faster, cheaper, better. Whereas what really would be powerful about AI, I believe, is when we start doing things differently, when we start making new processes, when we start uh making new business models, interact in new ways. And in order to understand those dynamics, there are so many uncertainties, so many assumptions. So you need to work with scenarios. You need to spend a lot of time getting rid of the assumption that, you know, we as people are the smartest entities here, that we have as people are, you know, a keystone in all communication. So when you get rid of that, you will see totally new, very different futures emerge. And if you spend a lot of time doing that, Mike, and I haven't, then again, our strategy conversation about the next move becomes, you know, so difficult because our assumptions about the future is so profoundly different.

Stretching Beyond Utopia And Dystopia

Mike Jones 12:53

Yes. And I think that's real important because those assumptions they sort of boundary what we see as possible. And I think that you know you could you can still have your assumptions and your beliefs, but it's about you know, let's let's let's set them aside to let's let's think about what would happen if that assumption wasn't there. And I think that's where the real stretching conversation goes. And it's I think sometimes I've seen organizations they've done, we've done futures, and I see a couple of faults. One is that they're overly optimistic, so they they've created this optimistic view of the future that's you know is not going to be challenged, or they've gone really um dystopian, so that you know the the the whole world's burning down because AI is here. And the final one is that they they haven't they haven't tacked uh attached what the futures are, the scenarios they've done, with decisions that they are making today. There seems to be this void, it's almost the future's over there, we'll just carry on doing. They've not made that connection between the decisions that m them reveals in today.

Stress Testing Strategy With Foresight

SPEAKER_01 14:00

Yeah, yeah. No, yeah, I fully agree. And to give you an example, we're working with one of the world's largest retailers, and um they they wanted to improve their capabilities within Foresight. They established a dedicated Foresight function. And then we had a discussion around how what would be a good starting point uh to work with Foresight and introduce that to the top management. And we agreed to to have a you know to futures test the the the current strategy, which was a three to five year strategy. And and then we said, okay, let's let's do some some interviews with uh you know the strategy team and some some key points in top management and ask them about the assumptions about the future ten years out in your industry. And what came out was, you know, sophisticated thoughts. People have spent time thinking about that. Then we took what came out here, looked at the strategy, and said, does this three to five year strategy, which was a few years in, so so even shorter term, does that address those assumptions about the future, which is, you know, first of all, AI will fundamentally change the customer relationship. Everybody, not everybody, but most of the leaders addressed that. But in the strategy, that wasn't addressed because that's an uncertainty. We don't know how it's happening. Okay, so you know that your business model needs to, with with high uh uh likelihood, fundamentally change. But you haven't addressed that. So you're you're basically kicking the ball to corner, if that's a way to go. You say that in Danish.

Organisational Optionality And Design

Mike Jones 15:49

I don't know if you say it in English. No, yeah, it's all right. But you you you're right, because it's even with your you know strategy or your organization, we know that some organizations their ability to change is painfully slow and is not as quick as and I think they don't do the foresight, so they're they're blind to it, so they're constantly then forced to react, which one they don't have the capacity to do because they're so lean, um, they haven't got the speed to do it, so they'll miss out. And three, they they can't handle the destabilization that causes in the organization. No, where even as you you scenario or stress test your strategy, it's always your organization. Under these scenarios, what elements of our organization would be still the same? They will still exist roughly across these, and then what what would change across these various? Then you could start seeing that there's elements of your organization that you know will probably sustain. So I'll I'll carry on investing in that, and there's other bits where you go, well, that's going to change. What do we need to know to enable that to let us know that that's changing? And then how quick, you know, how quick can we do that? So, what time lag do we need? And I think this then really involves people because you're going, Well, you know, let's let's look for these things. We're looking for these things. And I know then if we see these things, we can start to decline this and grow this element.

Embracing Strategic Ambiguity

SPEAKER_01 17:08

Yeah. Uh and what what is what is keeping a lot of leaders, I I think, away from working with this is first of all, the analogy to organizations has for for decades been that we're a great machine.

unknown 17:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

And if you are a machine, then processes are predictable, and what you do here and now would also be predictable. Also, that we don't want to infuse too much uncertainty into our employees. And I think the the analogy should be better caught from from biology, from ecosystems, that we are complex, dynamic systems that we should work with thesis on where we're heading, but we also need optionality. And and as a leader, you don't have all the answers. So I think that there's this, in many cases, false assumption that if you reveal that some of the future scenarios are negative, then everyone will live in uncertainty and be nervous and so forth. But but I mean usually stress is is a phenomenon where you're exposed to uncertainty where you cannot do anything about it.

Mike Jones 18:23

Yes.

Foresight Missing In Popular Frameworks

SPEAKER_01 18:25

But but if you expose your employees and the organization to uncertainty and say we actually are working actively with this, I think it would be much more comfortable than if you know by yourself that AI is happening. You know, that there's a geopolitical crisis, but my management is just working through towards those utopian, that utopian vision that we established three years ago. I I mean that that just don't feel comfortable at all.

Mike Jones 18:57

No. And I I write about this often, I call it strategic ambiguity. And then then you need to embrace ambiguity in uncertainty, and because too much clarity can be dangerous. Because as soon as you start to go too much clarity, you start to narrow that vision and you start to live in a world where you think that things are predictable, where actually a bit of ambiguity is good because it opens up opportunities, but to match with that, you have to have the conditions where people can adapt.

SPEAKER_01 19:28

Yeah. But that's actually interesting. So you and I totally agree on that. How many do you think would disagree in that conversation? Would you say they disagree, or do you think they would just don't have focus on this, so it's kind of like a blind spot?

Integrating External And Internal Worlds

Mike Jones 19:44

I think if you if you from my experience, if you draw it down and you explain it, I think it it makes sense to people. But I think we're going, you know, against the grain in all the sort of literature around sort of effective management and strategy, which is always about, you know, perfect alignment, you know, clarity, you've got to, you know, you've got to give clarity on everything. And I think that skews what it's a you know, what's actually really happening. And I think that lives in the world where um, you know, the world of linear cause relationship, you know, you do this, this will happen, or the world is still stable or the world's predictable, you know, that that stuff will work. But I think there's a more nuanced argument which we're talking about, which um is more useful, but it does go in against the grain of traditional thinking.

Ownership Of Assumptions And Triggers

SPEAKER_01 20:35

Yeah. Yeah, and it's it's it's interesting. I I wrote an article half a year ago, I think, about anticipatory leadership, where I tried to look through different literature around leadership strategy and and scanned for what are the assumptions about foresight, futures thinking in these different frameworks. And it was not that the literature said that the future is not important, right? It was addressed in in many different frameworks, but I didn't find any of the popular strategy frameworks treating foresight as a discipline. It was more like, yes, you need to understand the future markets. And that's it. And okay, yeah, but how do you do that? How do you understand the futures market and and blue ocean strategy? Yes, understand where it's still a market potential where you could sit alone and so forth, and and the future is important. It's just not addressed as a discipline that you sh need to do your work and you need to work with optionality, several futures and so forth. So it's kind of like a little bit just nah, it's complex, it's difficult, but of course it's important.

Strategy As Ongoing Conversation

Mike Jones 21:56

But let's go on with the strategy. Thinking that I keep seeing. So it's like they treat strategy as strategy. And I, you know, we I can go on all day about my my views around a lot of the um so-called models of strategy. Um, but it's the same they do with execution, is almost they talk about execution. Most strategy books talk about execution in like a pass-off paragraph, um, rather than realizing how you know intertwined the two are. You can't have one without the other. But that's the same with the external environment. Most strategy doesn't take into consideration much of the external environment other than a bit about markets, where actually the whole thing is so intertwined between the futures, the external environment, to the internal environment as well, our ability to execute. But they keep separating them as if they can they can survive on their own. It just doesn't happen. And when when people you talk about the future, they'll talk about in a narrow sense of like this market. We've seen this data tell us this market's going to grow by um you know X billion, so that's a good way to invest, rather than going, well, what what's your assumptions about what's holding that market together? Yeah. And what would what would emerge if these assumptions were to change?

Maps, Ecosystems, And Identity

Optionality Over Hero Narratives

SPEAKER_01 23:17

Yeah, and and actually working with both elements, right? And saying, Yes, this is our thesis, let's make a very concrete plan towards this, but then let's stress test and say, what what what needs to happen to convince us about this not being a good idea? What can we do then? What is our optionality? Who has the responsibility for realize when the assumptions are wrong? Uh, and how can we work on this? And if this is wrong, you know, a strategy doesn't exist. It's not just a product of all the the single plans, right? It's the dynamics, it's the synergies among that. And what happens if we take this out of the equation, right? It's it's a it's a difficult conversation, it's complex. But I I I I do think that is the dialogue you need to have. And very often when when I speak about this topic, you know, one thing is the very large organizations where they have a very structured strategy process, they have a whole department responsible for doing strategy. So they of course have have processes and so forth. In minor organizations, they don't have this. There's, you know, the CEO or the management team is in charge of the strategy. But how do they run strategy? Very often that's actually much closer to what we speak about here, because they don't have formalized plans, they have optionality, they have ideas in their head, and they tweak them, they don't make make the specific plans, but sometimes they see and push things in one direction, then it doesn't feel right for some reason. Let's twist that. So it's it's actually interesting to see the formalities. And what I'm saying here is also what I hear in in a lot of the larger organizations where they're a little bit when they say it's not that we fully trust the strategy team in all circumstances, and they're might just brought in once in a while. Uh because strategy happens throughout all conversations. It's not just something that you put into uh into the agenda in in uh you know every third months or whatever. Yeah.

Mike Jones 25:39

You're lucky if you even that. And I suppose you're a really good point about the formalization of strategy because I was you know, we were talking a little bit just before we came on about that, and I was saying about how strategy formed from an ability to sense or in optionality really understand the terrain. And in modern days, like we don't in businesses, we don't have maps, we don't have maps of the terrain. The terrain is the future, so that is the map we're using, it's the ecosystem, it's the future. That's the map that we need to have some sort of understanding of. Um, all the way to now, where it seems to be that strategy is an output. So it you hear it in conversations, you hear the words, do we have a strategy? And it's people may challenge me on language, but that to me represents that they have something like tangible in the hand rather than a way of being to sense and create options.

SPEAKER_01 26:37

Yeah, yeah, I fully agree. Then yeah, can you show me your strategy? Uh yeah, I mean, then people think about yes, that's an execution plan. But is that the strategy?

Ambidextrous Leadership And Culture

Mike Jones 26:49

No, it's it's a bit like we talked about earlier with you know a really crucial question that I always ask um organizations when we look at the future and the ecosystems. Normally I do a lot around modelling the ecosystem, and then we bring futures into that because we then we go, well, with with with the assumptions we hold, where how would this change? Because we've got fit here now, we're viable in this ecosystem now. If that changes, what's that mean to us and where does that take us? And um I always say that if if we took this path, would we like what we become? And that's the identity question. You see this with um Navito as a classic example. They they started off as an AI um as a game microchips, didn't they? Yeah, and you know, they didn't suddenly turn from that to um you know a four trillion dollar business doing the the microchips for AI that wasn't just done overnight. That that has to have some sort of anticipation of future, seeing opportunities, affordances that they've took to change their identity.

Story We Tell Vs Reality We Are

Futures Cone And Flexible Histories

SPEAKER_01 27:58

Yeah, and uh, and of course it's also it's very tempting to look back and and and you know say then we saw that and we we moved ahead. Uh you post-rationalization that always happens. Yeah, so so very often when I hear I had the conversation last week with um with a friend of mine who is advising top leaders, and we had the conversation around one leader that that was without a job and thinking about where to go from now. Uh and most leaders, when you hear, okay, then I took a you know few months out and I thought about what to do, and then I chose this and it went to this job and I took this decision. And but you hear that in hindsight. When when when people, you know, and then it it becomes a very planned journey where they wanted to understand this and took this path and so forth. Whereas if you ask them when you're they are in it, both leaders and in strategy conversations, they don't say, now I I I'm fully confident this is our strength, this is where we need to move. So five years from now, we will be the largest company in the world, right? That that is not happening. That is hindsight, where you take those one, that path and and and speak about it like it was obvious. And when you get exposed to those stories, it's also easy as a leader to be a little bit, you know, overwhelmed and say, wow, some someone out there sees things much clearer than I do. Yes. But they don't. I mean, there's no one who sees things one-dimensional and say there's only one option and we're heading for that. They are confused, but they also work with future scenarios. No, Nvidia didn't figure out the whole journey from day one, but they worked on optionality and they saw potential. They pursued that. So without seeing the potential and without daring to actually lean in to that uncertainty, you will not succeed in the same way.

Documenting Decisions With AI

Mike Jones 30:10

No. And this is why the external environment, you know, is so important because there is that that that relationship that and and people think that it's all one way that we we we anticipate something and we we've done it, and that's where it's easy to post-rationalise and go, well, we made these decisions. And it's never like that, it's about the relationship, the coupling. There's there's there's changes in the external environment that you didn't anticipate that you've you've responded to by it as an opportunity, or you know, you've reacted, and there's things that you've consciously chosen and chosen. And there is a mix of both. It's never is never one way, and actually, we could do the futures, and there'll be stuff that we didn't see. There isn't stuff that we we didn't assume, but it happened. But the fact that we have done futures work and we've looked ahead, it gives us that I call it scaffolding, that that that capacity to to make sense of that far quicker than someone that is completely in the dark and surprised by this emergent thing that it just appeared.

Luck, Winners, And Sample Bias

Distinguishing Preparation From Luck

Final Takeaways On Foresight Practice

SPEAKER_01 31:18

Yeah, I I I fully agree. And and two comments to that. First of all, all Howard Business Review articles are based on one very, very smart person that saw everything. Yes, and saw and people were thinking completely wrong about that. But I saw it, and this is what I did. And now look at this extreme success, right? Oh uh I mean it's it's it's dumbing down everyone around them, so so that's not how the world is. But also to your point on this, I think what what one of the biases that I think is extremely relevant in future sticking is that we want as human beings, we want to be right. We want to be smart, we want to see it. So if you're working with foresight as a future vision, then you build up that's very often very utopian, right? But you build up this idea about how the future and how you would succeed, and then this is your story. And then when you see signals, things happening in your context, then you try to interpret these signals in a way that they confirm that you were right. But that that's a dangerous way to do it. That's why you need to work with scenarios. Don't think about utopia and dystopia. Think about potential scenarios, the plausible futures. And if you think in multiple domains, as you say, then you train your brain for understanding dynamics in different environments. And when you understand dynamics in different environments, then you try to build your organization on a fundament of thriving in different dynamics. And that that puts you ahead. So when you see a signal, it's not just confirming that your strategy is the best one. No, it it makes you think about does that lead to this scenario, this scenario, this scenario? And you get a much more, I should say, not hybrid, but ambidextrous in your thinking. And I I think to your last point also, what I've worked a lot on is actually combining futures thinking with strategy and leadership. And that, you know, triad, I think is again, it's obvious, but it's I don't think it's prioritized sufficiently because a lot of the the drivers of change we see in the environment, the geopolitical situation we have now, it's not a surprise for anyone that that US is no longer the the only uh uh real power in the world. So this multipolar uh world we've spoken about that for decades, that it's going to happen. It hasn't taken anyone by surprise. AI doesn't take anyone by surprise. So thinking about what does that do to your strategy, to your business model? And then again, what kind of culture, what kind of leadership style is needed in a future where we might need to be much more ambidextrous? We might might need to have more focus on adaptability than lean. What does that need for our leadership? What does that what kind of capabilities, what kind of conversations do we need? And most leaders um are have a one-size-fits-all leadership style and believe that this culture in the organization, that's that's what I think is best. And that one size fits all is very conveniently also suited to the style of leader you are, right? And that that becomes a little bit how people think that then that's just a given that is how how we lead our organization. But I think we need to think in multiple scenarios and multiple leadership styles, organizational cultures, and we need to start focusing on pushing in the direction that that we see the world is heading in, and hence also uh our organization.

Mike Jones 35:28

Yeah, I agree. And there's a big there's a big challenge to that for a lot of leaders. One is the sort of embracing the perceptual complexity, the fact that you know we all we are in a collective system, but we all perceive things very differently and uniquely, and we're never going to be a hundred percent aligned. And actually, to be able to take that view, you need to be able to recognise that. And I think that's where we need to step away from that hero leadership that there is that one person that gets parachuted in and they solve the world. That's not true, and I think the other one is around this really understanding the identity of your organization, i.e., what what actual culture, behaviors, or structures, what actual capabilities do you have? Because I think we live in this dualistic world or self-created dualistic world where we have what the what the organization actually is and what we perceive it to be by the story we tell ourselves. And this is the utopian bit. You see it, you you only have to go to a few websites and you see our purpose is to blah this or our thing, and and it and our values are this, and it bears no recognition to what really is happening. And I think that makes it very difficult for them to then realize with these futures, what does that really mean culturally, capability-wise, leadership-wise to us, if we don't really know ourselves. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:55

Yeah, and we're actually working on a framework right now in order to combine those futures thinking with the the hindsight thinking within organizational culture and within social phenomena. Because as we we are working with with the what we call the the the futures cone, and maybe I'll do it like this, right? The further you go into the future, the wider the spectrum of uncertainty and potential futures. Whereas when we think back in time, we have an idea that the past was fixed. Yes, Lydia. The future doesn't exist, right? It will never exist. We will always be in the present. The history doesn't exist. It's also about the present. So both the future and the past is about perception. So whereas the future has a wide spectrum of potential, so has the past. It's about the stories we tell ourselves about what has happened, where we come from, who we are, and that is very flexible, right? So it's about working with those dynamics and understand where we came from. Understand that that that the stories about the past is also very divergent. So if we don't have an agreement on where we come from, where we're heading, then you know, the different lines of trajectories of where we're going, that also becomes quite a complex conversation.

Mike Jones 38:25

Yeah. And it it'd be a useful exercise to look back and say what what were those key decisions that were made and explore what actually drove those decisions and what were the other options. And that's that's extremely interesting, right?

SPEAKER_01 38:40

Because uh when when you look when you look at economics, when you look at technology, when you look at very uh you know powerful decisions and so forth, all of that is very often something you can look back and get some tangible measures on. Whereas if you think about the culture, if you think about what did we actually think, what was our world view, was our perception, our assumptions when taking those decisions, you have no idea, right? No. So the latter you shape so it's very convenient to the actual decisions. So you don't have a good historical understanding of how those two fits together. You have a good idea about how it looks in the present, right? Yeah, yeah. But what is extremely interesting is that many organizations are taking AI into the decision room now. So a lot of those conversations you're having, the conversations we're having, the conversations I am having with my colleagues, the conversations we're having in projects about assumptions, uncertainties, and so forth, suddenly that is documented. Suddenly that becomes tangible. Over time, we can actually connect that. And that that's dangerous because that will reveal that a lot of our actions was just pure luck, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But also makes it much more, I would say, scientifical in a sense, that combining those, because right now I would say the way I'm assessed as my ability as an advisor, that's my likelihood, that's how likely I am as a person. That's how convinced I sound when I say things. And then what they what what I deliver, how they feel, how good is this work? It's I don't think that it's about, you know, over time saying what could be alternative decisions if we hadn't had this engagement and so forth. No one does that. So so so it's it's a little bit we as advisors are measured on on some uh weird stuff, right? Which is why most advisors say it's about sounding as convincing as possible without knowing anything, right? Yeah.

Mike Jones 41:04

A little bit, you know, toughly uh roughly. I think that'd be I think looking back on some of those if we used AI to really, you know, challenge what actually happened, maybe be the paradigm shift that we're talking about in the fact that we we we need to get comfortable acting with limited information, you know, nothing there's no such thing as perfect information. We need to embrace these optionalities that you know and really test those. Um I call them like um constraints, war gaming. You know, if this constraint that we believe to be true was to change, then what would that mean to us? How would that how would that change the way that we we would need to operate?

SPEAKER_01 41:42

But I think Yeah, and and it does the sample size we're looking at, right? Most examples are like you mentioned NVIDIA, right? So of course NVIDIA has taken a lot of right decisions. And uh, you know, it's it's kind of like, you know, I'm a I'm a bike rider, or bike rider, right? And and when you're starting a bike race, you're 200 people and only one will win the race, right? And when you when you ask that person what did you do, right? What they did was taking a lot of quite uh uh risky decisions, uh but that turn out right. So if you only ask the winner about how how did you uh uh make your choice, right? They will take uh mention a lot of bets they made, right? Uh and and then you you think, okay, uh I just need to take a lot of bets and then I'm gonna win. No. Just ask the one who who uh who uh got a DNF, did not finish, right? They all took risks, right? Yes. So and and this so it's it's like if you're throwing the dice and see who will and you are 10,000 people, someone will come out and they've they got six times six in a row. There will be someone who's doing that. And is that because they're wise or were they just lucky, right? So there will be a lot of luck in the sample size of the uh you know extreme winners. Yes, yeah. That's obvious, right? But it's it's just something we as human beings try sometimes forget.

Mike Jones 43:20

Yeah, I think that's definitely that thinking about you know, that one person that really brings in that sort of heroism. But you know, they they must be the the grand vision person, yeah, because they got all their their bets right when really um there's a lot you can learn from both around the decision making. And I suppose if anything, it's like you always like even with your race analogy, the the rider, they they done what they could do beforehand to help, you know, with those risky moves. You know, they had the right training, they made sure they had the right capability, the right skill to do it. So you know, they help. In that way, it's all but I think we need to distinguish between what's pure luck and what is anticipatory that they they set themselves up contextually to help help the situation.

SPEAKER_01 44:11

So when we hear some of these successful leaders saying this is what I did, this is you know what up issue, then we will um we will get uh get open AI to reveal that chat story.

Mike Jones 44:26

Yeah, I'd I'd love that. Uh and I think this this conversation really highlighted um the the sort of the the true need and the utility of futures. Um and and for you in Denmark at the moment, you know, it's it's it's it just shows you how how crazy things can be. But as you said earlier, it wasn't a surprise, it surprised the people that aren't looking or or not willing to look beyond that. So I I really thank you for coming on to the show today. Um and uh before we leave, what would you like to leave listeners to go away and think about from this episode?

SPEAKER_01 45:05

Basically, one thing that that you know, even though it's difficult to to work with and imagine the future, I think it's irresponsible not to engage with the future in a structured way because it's a discipline like like uh like anything else, and it will actually improve your ability to take good decisions. So do yourself a favor, dive into this world of of foresight and try to understand how to engage more structured with the future.

Mike Jones 45:40

Yeah, yeah. And I always say to people, you know, it's just practice, it's a discipline.

SPEAKER_01 45:46

So you practice it, you feel uncomfortable, but you know, there'll be plenty of people in your team that you know It doesn't feel doesn't feel nice in the beginning, but I think most decision makers know that it's not about you know living in a false uh comfort, it's it's about throwing yourself out there and then you'll learn to manage this discipline as the rest of the disciplines.

Mike Jones 46:08

And I think that a bit earlier as well, we were talking about the formality, like when you're initially doing it, don't get too too hepped up on process, just just go with it, you know. It doesn't have to be doesn't have to be perfect at uh you know the early stages. Yeah, definitely. I loved it. Thank you so much, yeah. I really appreciate it. Um, and for the listeners, if you enjoyed this episode as much as I have, uh please like and share to your your community so they can get the benefit from these wise words and experience from Lassie today. So thank you so much for joining me, Lassie. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Mike. Great conversation. Cheers, yeah. Take care.