Insights · August 7th, 2023
In an era of rapid change and uncertainty, the ability to examine and prepare for the future is paramount for any organization. By understanding potential challenges and opportunities, nonprofit organizations can make more informed decisions and thrive in the face of adversity. One resource that equips leaders to do just that is Facing Our Futures. It guides readers in developing the necessary foresight and strategy to navigate the unpredictable.
And it’s a pleasure to have with us the mind behind this invaluable guide. He is futurist speaker Nikolas Badminton and the Chief Futurist at futurist.com, and author of Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth.
Denver: Someone called you a futurist a number of years back, and you said, Eh, why not? I guess I’ll go with it. Sounds good. How do you define the role of a futurist, and what are some of the key skills and mindsets that are essential to being one?
Nikolas: Well, it’s interesting, I sort of tell the origin story when I do my keynotes of where this really all came from, and I sort of didn’t realize that in my life, I’d spent a lot of time like looking at the future very critically and thinking from a strategic point of view. I used to call myself like an innovation, a consultant or expert, but it didn’t seem to stick, and it didn’t really seem to engage people because: What is innovation anyway?
But I was running conferences about the future of humanity and technology. And when I was a kid as well, I’d read a book called The Usborne Book of the Future, and it sort of really ignited my thoughts. And that was, I was only eight years old at that. But jump forward a few years, and suddenly I started doing the work of writing speculative futures– sort of evolving, sort of strategic planning and having a longer view.
And then a good friend of mine, he goes… he introduced me to a group of his friends. He goes, “Here’s Nik, and Nik’s a futurist.” And I was like, That’s really bizarre! Anyway, I sort of embraced it, and then everyone around me said, That’s really bizarre… because back in the day, like 10 years ago, there weren’t people really rolling around calling themselves futurists.
I mean, there were some people out in the world that I knew, like Alvin Toffler and such, like even…
Denver: Yeah, sure.
Nikolas: …Luminaries. I follow people like Jaron Lanier or people like Douglas Rushkoff… they don’t call themselves futurists. I never really used that as a term.
But when I leaned into it, I sort of changed my title on LinkedIn. And it caused two things. One, my current employer was like, “What? You are a futurist now as well?”
Denver: Since when?
Nikolas: As well as, I was a regional director of this, of a large software company. So you’re a regional director and futurist. And then some other friends were like, Look at you, you’re full of hot air! And then suddenly people realized what I was writing and where I was speaking and that I actually had something to teach the world with regards to thinking out 10, 20, 30-plus years.
So I’ve sort of doubled down on that and really connected with an amazing community, built out some meetups and conferences. I’ve done about 400 keynotes in the past eight or nine years.
Denver: Wow.
Nikolas: So it’s really starting to gain pace, and the book was sort of a culmination of all of my knowledge to that point in my life and the work that I’d been doing with clients, certainly at the beginning of the pandemic.
Denver: There’s got to be a downside to it too, like when you go to a cocktail party, and somebody says, Who’s going to win the Super Bowl? Or, what’s going to happen? And they want you to be Kreskin with a crystal ball on everything.
Nikolas: Yeah, generally. I mean, there is the: Oh, you predict things and we don’t; we speculate. And this speculation could be fairly wild; it can be fairly tame, but really we just say, Well, this kind of could happen at this point in our futures. So we don’t sort of put money on the table. I used to do that.
Denver: You predicted…
Nikolas: I predict that…
Denver: …that you’ll run out of money.
Nikolas: …in five years, no, I predict that in five years, this kind of mobile technology and mobile payments will do this and do that, and you get it horribly, horribly wrong, and you look very, very silly. But I kind of like to do every year some predictions for the next two or three years because you can kind of see the trajectory and kind of get it right.
They’re less predictions, and they’re more sort of very, very sort of astute pieces of strategic advice. They might be able to…
Denver: Give us one.
Nikolas: Give us one. Well, I worked with a government early this year to talk about mobile payments, central bank digital currencies and whatever. And I just was sort of speculating on the kinds of chaos that would be caused when you try to implement a formal digital currency.
And what we’re now actually seeing is that that is being used as this narrative of control by the government and a whole bunch of different things. Because on one side, you’ve got China that’s going full-tilt on every single aspect of functionality of a central bank digital currency like programmability, traceability, restriction, the whole thing. That’s how they roll with their social credit system or whatever.
And then you’ve got other places around the world that are literally:… It’s just a digital currency. It’s just going to help us do international payments. It’s not going to have all of these aspects of functionality. So certainly in the United States, across Europe as well, we’re certainly starting to see people saying, We don’t want this. It’s going to take away our freedom and all that.
Unfortunately, we’re going to have to work out how we can roll this out, how it can be useful, because the world’s going to leave us behind if we don’t sort of step up on it. So that’s just one aspect of something that in the next couple of years we’ll have some pace and some credence. But if you look out like 30 years, what’s really going to happen with something like that?
That’s when the wild speculation sort of comes in. And you can say, Okay, say Elon Musk makes Twitter, converts it to x, and x becomes the largest financial company in the world, and it doesn’t choose to use central bank digital currencies. And it issues its own kind of digital currency that people who opt into its own ecosystem can earn and spend. And what happens there?
There’s actually something in economic theory called Gresham’s law, and I like playing with this a little bit with that. Gresham’s law says that bad currency forces out good. So if you can have something that’s on an equal level as the U.S. dollar in terms of value and tradability and spendability or whatever, but then gets used more and more and more, Gresham’s law is enacted, and the U.S. Dollar becomes less and less relevant, right?
So that’s like pushing out. That’s not a prediction, that’s a speculation. So that’s a good illustration of like the near term: Oh, I see these signals and how the world’s going to change. And then the long term, like: This is how wild it could be, maybe.
“But there were people that were afraid. What I say, they were afraid to look into the dark. We have to look at bias. We have to look at the things that could go wrong. That’s where you find all the risks. That’s where you find all of the bad actors. That’s where you find all of the challenges. So the framework that I’ve got sets principles at the beginning that are either positive or dystopian. Positive meaning equity, equality and all the good stuff around empowering humanity. And dystopia, which is power and money for the few technology and solutions before humanity.”
Denver: The way you go about your work, or at least the way I guess you go about your work, is you take a look at frameworks; you look at principles you apply; you have a system, needless to say.
Nikolas: Yeah, that’s right.
Denver: One of those frameworks is the positive dystopia framework. Tell us about that.
Nikolas: Yeah, so it’s something that I came up with, and I came up with it because there’s a lot of people talking about positive futures and positive possible futures. I talk about that as well, right? I want the world to thrive, and I actually think that that’s where we need to focus.
But there were people that were afraid. What I say, they were afraid to look into the dark. We have to look at bias. We have to look at the things that could go wrong. That’s where you find all the risks. That’s where you find all of the bad actors. That’s where you find all of the challenges.
So the framework that I’ve got sets principles at the beginning that are either positive or dystopian. Positive meaning equity, equality and all the good stuff around empowering humanity. And dystopia, which is power and money for the few technology and solutions before humanity.
A whole bunch of stuff, kind of how the markets and the corporate technocrats kind of work today. And you put it through like the sausage machine of signals and trends, analysis and whatever, and you end up with these two stories. And the two stories are really important.
The positive trajectory is about seeing what we can achieve for the betterment of humanity. The negative or dystopian trajectory is the one that just says how bad it can get if we make terrible decisions today. And I think it’s really important because we certainly see in politics, it’s all about positive promises and hiding all of the difficult things that could happen.
An example of that would be maybe Brexit. And I just think if you’ve got this balance, then suddenly we’re better equipped to deal with the unknowns that come ahead of us.
“So I truly believe, and this comes out of the principles of good design, we need to design a humanity-centric, balanced, and egalitarian world. We need to have solutions within that that actually provide a level of equality. That means that everyone’s got access to them and can use them for whatever they need to use them for… and an equitable perspective, which is like people feel that they own it. And in fact, we can give ownership of it to them. And that’s what’s really important.“
Denver: Yeah. I mean, I think just looking at the politics, it’s gotten so bad right now that if you look at things from a different perspective,…sometimes your opponent’s perspective… you’re considered to be disloyal.
Nikolas: That’s right.
Denver: And sort of like: No, we have to really look at the whole thing. There’s a lot of different possibilities here. And if we don’t look at them all, we’re just going to go walking off the cliff and really be in a lot of trouble.
You mentioned principles, and one you just mentioned a second ago was equality and equity in future planning. Tell us the importance of that, and also the dangers if we do not incorporate that into our future planning.
Nikolas: So I truly believe, and this comes out of the principles of good design, we need to design a humanity-centric, balanced, and egalitarian world. We need to have solutions within that that actually provide a level of equality.
That means that everyone’s got access to them and can use them for whatever they need to use them for… and an equitable perspective, which is like people feel that they own it. And in fact, we can give ownership of it to them. And that’s what’s really important. That sort of butts against the system that we’ve got today where you sign away terms and conditions; you give them whatever, and you’re meant to feel good as a customer or a user or whatever, right?
So it’s something that’s maybe a little idyllic, but I actually think that we have to get there because when we are looking at sort of the big structural pieces of the world that need to be sorted out… so sovereignty around water, energy, and food, for example… the reduction of waste is another example.
Denver: Yeah.
Nikolas: The wealth distribution is another example as well. That’s when we have to get really serious. So the futures work that I love, love to do is to look at the big picture, and I educate my clients to say that these macro, mega trends are the things that you really have to pay attention to because they’re going to trickle down into your business.
Sure, we can get into the signals and trends within business lines, whether it’s retail or high tech, or telco or agriculture and whatever. But really, that’s doing some of the sort of the gritty work around what’s going to happen to us in our futures. So that’s all really important. So it’s important to have those two distinctions, whereas the dystopia is all about greed.
Denver: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Nikolas: It can be summarized as greed. And for the last 300 years of our industrial revolutions, it’s kind of typified the trajectory that we found.
Denver: Yeah. And then I think with your clients also, you encourage them to be proactive when they look at those trends, just not sitting back and saying, Hmm, that’s really interesting. I guess we have to be prepared for it. But you’re a provocateur.
Nikolas: Yeah. If you’re provocative, and you work together and you produce reports that inspire new thinking, if you can write white papers or reports and give advisory sessions and teamwork that help you reshape regulation and policy, even if it’s speculatively, that can be incredibly valuable.
I truly believe that you have to connect ideas of our futures 10-plus years out with what’s happening today. It doesn’t mean that that gets watered down. The future is something that you can deliver today, but it means that the principles that you set up, or the foundational elements that you consider, actually provide a foundation for the long term versus the short term.
Denver: Yeah. I’m going to ask you a little bit about that discipline and really through the eyes of nonprofit organizations. The listeners of this show are really going to be interested in everything you have to say about the future because pretty much that’s their job. I mean, climate change, education, pandemics, poverty, gender equity, and so on. It’s actually even quite different than it would be for a company…
Nikolas: That’s right.
Denver: …the larger macro you’re talking about. But you know what? They fall victim to the tyranny of the present. They’ve got money to hit the budget. They’ve got people lined up at their front door who are part of the unmet need.
What advice do you have for them that would allow them to do this in a systemic and thoughtful way in the quest to create a better world?
Nikolas: I truly believe that very quickly people can start to scan for signals and look for trends at the simplest level of what I do. And so, find the areas that interest you. So you might work in a not-for-profit that focuses on spinal cord injuries… so you might actually look at technologies that help people with spinal cord injuries… or academic papers that talk about psychological effects, or you might actually start to tap into some of the research that you’ve actually done.
And they’re all signals that can indicate that something is going to need to change over the next sort of 5, 10, 20-plus years. And that five to 10 years is particularly interesting because anything less than 10 years is all strategy. But I think that with futures work, for some lines of business, some industries, and certainly for not-for-profits, you kind of have to look just over the fence a little way.
Denver: Yeah.
Nikolas: Because you’re still trying to raise money; you’re still trying to really create a community around your cause and drive change.
So I think that people can very much sort of step up and start the work. I mean, I created something on futurist.com, which is futurist.com/kickstart, and it’s just a number of different tools that you can use to start things very, very quickly. And I share this with people I do keynotes with and consulting engagements. That’s a free resource as well.
And what’s interesting is that once these not-for-profits can understand not only where they are, they can lift their head up, shift their mindsets from what is, what’s happening today to what if, and then start to look at the big structural country level and even global level mega trends that certainly will affect what they’re doing in business and how the populations they serve may be challenged more. Climate change is incredibly important.
Denver: Yeah.
Nikolas: Part of that. The world’s getting warmer. Weather’s getting more chaotic, and the narrative around a thousand-year weather event: it needs to disappear when it happens every two or three years, right?
Denver: About every thousand days, they should be saying, right?
Nikolas: Well, this is it. And we’ve seen a couple of those happen in Florida over the last two or three years, right? So when we think about not-for-profit and we’re thinking about this, there’s also the opportunity to draw an image of how the world could be, and to engage people on an inspirational level, and through storytelling.
And storytelling is incredibly important. Part of what I do with futures work… once we can engage on that level where people can feel what that future’s like. Again, with the idea of spinal cord injury survivors and the ability to maybe walk again in 20 years’ time through the use of technologies that are readily available and affordable and equitable, right?
Denver: Right.
Nikolas: It could be really interesting as a speculation. And when you start to come up with these ideas, it feeds the vision of your organization.
Denver: No question about it. Gets people excited. And I hear what you’re saying about 10 years horizon because I think if you were to ask me what’s going to happen in the next three or four years, I would take whatever is happening today, and I would extrapolate.
Nikolas: That’s right.
Denver: My mind wouldn’t change at all. It would be: Well, we did a thousand, we’ll be doing 2,000 type of thing. Whereas if you go out a decade, you’re in a whole different space. You’ve got to think differently, I guess.
Nikolas: Yeah. And when you start to look at those signals and trends and it’s like: Okay, we can see where we’re going, but things are starting slowly today, and some of the things may not happen, and some of the things that we think may not happen actually do happen.
So that 10-plus years is really important as a horizon because we don’t feel comfortable at putting ourselves in that horizon. We feel like strangers, and that’s incredibly valuable as a tool.
Denver: Sure is.
Nikolas: Because suddenly, we’re not used to how things are done. In fact, the last thing you need to do in futures work is try and work out how to do it, how to build it, how to implement it, right? Eventually you can get to that, but only after you’ve done a huge line of inquiry, and then work out what’s even possible today.
Denver: Right, right. It’ll limit you if you begin to try to do the how-to. You get all tangled up in that, and it will stop your free thinking.
Nikolas: That’s right.
“The challenge of today in strategic thinking is that we work within the box. And that box might be within the department in your organization, might be within the organization itself, or the regulations, or the country that you live in. And what we need to do in futures work is challenge the what’s called ‘the poverty of imagination.’”
Nikolas: Yeah. The challenge of today in strategic thinking is that we work within the box. And that box might be within the department in your organization, might be within the organization itself, or the regulations, or the country that you live in. And what we need to do in futures work is challenge the what’s called “the poverty of imagination.”
We’ve kind of lost the ability to really think outside the box, and once we start to flex those muscles around signals and trends and build it out into scenarios where we can work out the dynamics that certain future horizons between like technology and social channels and society at large and culture and a whole number of different aspects, that’s when we can really start to get deep into how things could be.
Denver: Yeah.
Nikolas: How this could work. Your imagination can run wild. And I’ve had clients that in workshops who are suddenly wildly inspired after doing the work because they suddenly have got this new lease on life, where they can really go far with some of their own visions about what they can do. And that empowers them to do more today.
Denver: Yeah, absolutely. They have purpose all of a sudden for this. See what today’s work is leading to.
Nikolas: That’s right.
Denver: And that changes everything. A good metaphor I heard for this once was that it’s when you look at 10 years out, it’s a bit like Impressionist art. You can’t see it clearly, but it’s… you get an idea of what it is, and as you get closer and closer, it becomes more and more clear. But at least you know what you’re looking towards.
Nikolas: It’s a really good analogy, Denver, actually. And it actually makes you feel something quite viscerally more than anything else straight away, right? So for example, I used to quite dislike Picasso. And as I get older… and I actually think as I get older to the age that he actually made some of these artworks, I actually feel a little bit more: he wasn’t particularly a nice man as well.
Denver: That’s what they say!
Nikolas: But like, or you might look at a particular Anish Kapoor and what he does with his abstract pieces and sort of the depths that you can look into his pieces at, or you might look at Damien Hirst and his shark in formaldehyde.
I mean, these things, they cause a reaction, and that’s kind of what we are doing in futures work, is that we are trying to elicit a reaction from people because then people stand up. And I always say that futurism is activism. And especially in the not-for-profit world, that’s really, really valuable and very powerful.
Denver: Yeah, yeah. You mentioned a moment ago water, energy, food nexus. And I think you’ve indicated that particularly with the scarcity of water, our whole agricultural design could collapse by the end of the century, and we might need to reinvent the global food supply chain. Talk a little bit about your thinking on that and what we should be doing.
Nikolas: You know what? We’ve always had our eye on this. I mean, in the early ’70s, we had a book by the Club of Rome called The Limits to Growth, and that looked at resources, food per capita, industrial output, population, pollution.
And it was saying that by 2100, the situation’s going to get pretty dire. We’re going to run out of resources… the food supply system; pollution’s going to just peak in a number of different things, and it’s going to make life pretty unlivable for many, many people on the planet. That’s just been updated a couple of years back by Gaya Herrington.
And she’s sort of saying that that horizon of the 2100s creeped forward to like 2040 to 2050. So things get a little bit more desperate. I mean, here’s some stats. I mean, due to water scarcity, we could have effects on about 98% of electricity generation in the world, right?
And not only that, we’re also going to have a third less vegetables and legumes in the world because of their lack of access to water. But at the same time, there’s solutions out there to potentially deal with situations in a whole new way. So it’s great to speculate about the challenges.
But there’s lots of people ahead of the game trying to build solutions to try and fix some of the problems that really came to pass in the last 300 years in the Industrial Revolution, with the carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases having been pushed into the atmosphere, how the world has been warming, and our reliance on fossil fuels right?
So I think we’re at a point: the next 10 to 20 years is going to be a very important corner that we’re going to be turning.
Denver: Yeah. One of those possible solutions and something that you’ve explored has been biohacking to optimize human performance. Tell us about that journey.
Nikolas: Yeah. So there’s also a very major mega trend I don’t really talk about a lot because it’s deeply human. It is like multi-generational trauma. I mean, we hold the memories of our parents and their parents and their parents, and it sort of comes through, and that’s epigenetics.
So you can interrupt that, and there’s a number of different ways to do that. I, for one, I use breathwork. I use something called psych K, which is about using NLP for subconscious reprogramming of belief systems.
Denver: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Nikolas: Kind of sounds hokey, but is incredibly effective. So that’s psych K. Some people have used psychedelics in therapy to help them break through. Therapy on its own is incredibly valuable as well. So I mean, that’s one of the things, and I, many years ago, was really into the biohacking side of things as well, which is: I’ve got like a microchip in my left hand.
I’ve done all sorts of funky things. I’ve heavily tattooed, and I went through a lot of body modification stuff when I was younger. But now it’s all about the mind and mental health and trying to work that out, which is a movable feast as I sort of get a little bit older. But yeah, the biohacking side of things is really important.
Being able to understand that there are more solutions than just going to the doctor and taking pharmaceutical drugs, to realize that we’ve got a lot of the answers ourselves. And there are some guides that can help us through that, whether they’re therapists, whether they’re shamans, right? It’s an interesting world that we live in.
Denver: Sure is. Let’s stick with mental health a little bit and do so in the workplace. I mean, do you envision the evolution of these workplaces and creating environments that really support emotional wellbeing?
Nikolas: I think the pandemic really disrupted work culture, certainly in North America and Europe as well. I mean, this idea of: you need to do x amount of hours, be at your desk for the majority of that time, connect in ways that are very rigid, have very bureaucratic hierarchies, a whole number of different things.
People for years have been trying to break… they’ve been trying to break these sorts of structures and the bureaucracy. The pandemic kind of broke it in about two months at the beginning. And it’s left this hangover. And it’s quite a welcome hangover, actually. People work remotely; they can connect in ways that, you know… interesting.
Even the people that are back in the office sit at their desks on Zoom calls to the people that aren’t in the offices. It’s like… it’s sort of strange, right? And when we kind of think about what’s happened is that this cultural embedding of a work culture that’s been around for decades, if not hundreds of years, has kind of been challenged.
And I think that this is good future stuff to think about the possibilities beyond that. I mean, in March 2020, I bought a house, my wife was pregnant, all my business disappeared. These were tough times. I had to completely reinvent my business and work out a number of different things. I’ve thrived during the pandemic, but at what cost?
It’s like from a mental health perspective, I’ve ended up in a lot worse situation, and I’m now, I’m going through a number of different things to fix that. But it’s interesting when we think about that in a work context that everyone has come back changed.
Denver: Yeah. Oh, no question about it.
Nikolas: Except for the organization.
Denver: Yeah.
Nikolas: So, you know…
Denver: And they seem to be going even back more in that direction as time goes by. And as the economy softens, they get back to their insistence that everybody’s going to be showing up.
Nikolas: That’s right. And I think that a lot of places are wrong.
Denver: Yeah. Yeah.
Nikolas: So, I mean, and that’s been a real challenge. I worked with a team, with my think tank, people like Glen Hiemstra and whatever, and Cindy Frewen. We worked together with a city, a large city in North America. I won’t say who it is. Lots of big tech in that city. Lots of people working downtown.
The entire ecosystem of downtown was challenged because for every white-collar tech worker, there were like five supporting workers in restaurants, coffee shops, whatever, by municipal services. And they didn’t know what to do. And it was a place that had a lot of riots, a lot of challenges. And it’s still not come back, and I don’t think it needs to come back.
And our advice to that particular city was to reinvent itself and to repurpose the areas that were distinctly business-focused so that it was, again, more community-focused…. to dial up reasons to be there because just going to work isn’t a reason to be there. And I live in Toronto, and even if you go downtown here, it’s the same thing. The work culture just isn’t there…
Denver: Oh, no. It’s not.
Nikolas: …in the same way that there was, you know?
Denver: Yeah. And I think that you see a lot of these bosses and these employers at companies trying to recapture and reestablish the way the workplace was back in 2019. But what they forget Is that everybody thought it sucked. Everybody hated it. So why are we trying to go back and recapture something that nobody… everybody agreed was broken to begin with?
Nikolas: Yeah. And we found out who were the really good people. We found out the people that really felt quite fragile; working out the care systems that we needed to put in place is important. I mean, there was this horrible trend. So it was still happening last year.
You’d have this company that was trying to say how responsible it was. We are going to give everyone the next week off, and the entire company is going to have a vacation sanctioned by leadership apart from essential functions. And it was like: you are just admitting that you were terrible to your people in the pandemic, and you are going to continue to be terrible.
The signals that were coming from that were very strong, and it’s like no one wants to work in these places anymore. I mean, if you look at signals and trends, we’re going to see a world of people working independently and teams built up of trusted, independent contractors that do amazing work.
And you know what? When they go home, the boss can’t text them or email them or force them to work over the weekend. And I think that some of these more cruel work cultures can sort of die on the vine in a way, in my eyes.
Denver: Yeah, I think you’re right. Finally, Nik, what would you like your lasting impact to be as a futurist? And what final word of advice do you have for individuals and organizations striving to shape a better, more inclusive and sustainable future for generations to come?
Nikolas: I just want people to be more curious. So that’s all I’m trying to do, is if more people… and I’ve spoken to hundreds of thousands of people just on stages around the world and millions of people through… I do lots of TV and radio…I just want people to look up away from what they’re dealing with today and wonder how the world can be different and sort of embrace that sort of “what if.” What if the world changes that curiosity because we need more of that in the world because suddenly then you can break free from what you are being told to believe in verbatim to actually have a critical opinion about how our futures could be.
I also want to leave a bit of a legacy where more businesses embrace futures work and drive more progress for humanity… and with an open eye on how bad it could be if we continue on the trajectory that we’re on today. So that’s what I’m trying to do.
“And many organizations around the world that are embracing this, they’re opening new lines of business; they’re evolving new kinds of products; they’ve got better client relationships. So that isn’t just: Let’s give it to the chief information officer, or let’s give it to the chief strategy officer. No, we have to give it to the chief futurist and the team of creatives and other foresight professionals that can really blow the doors off of everything and really challenge what we are doing on a daily basis.”
Denver: Yeah. I mean, just picking up on that, you even believe that companies should have a chief futurist on staff, right?
Nikolas: Yeah. So very provocatively, I’ve called myself a chief futurist, and it is by design. I do it obviously because I think that we need to start talking about the fact that at the board level, you need to have someone that is looking out that far. Now we see some CEOs in the world sort of take that mantle off the side of their desk and sort of espouse crazy visions of the future. And that’s cool.
But I actually think that you need a team there that actually is separate from chief strategy officer, someone in their team that actually gets creative to try and work out what comes next. Because it’s no longer a side of the table initiative to do futures work. I mean, it’s been proven that you can drive more profit and you can have a higher market capitalization by having the capability internally in your organization.
And many organizations around the world that are embracing this, they’re opening new lines of business; they’re evolving new kinds of products; they’ve got better client relationships. So that isn’t just: Let’s give it to the chief information officer, or let’s give it to the chief strategy officer. No, we have to give it to the chief futurist and the team of creatives and other foresight professionals that can really blow the doors off of everything and really challenge what we are doing on a daily basis.
Denver: Absolutely. For those of you who are curious out there, a great place to start is picking up a copy of Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth.
I want to thank you, Nik, so much for being here today. It was a real pleasure to have you on the show.
Nikolas: It’s been absolutely fantastic. Thank you, Denver.
Note: This was originally shared at Denver’s website.
About Nikolas Badminton
Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 300 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.
He helps shape the visions that shape impactful organizations, trillion-dollar companies, progressive governments, and 200+ billion dollar investment funds.
Nikolas Badminton’s book Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth has been selected for 2023 J.P. Morgan Summer Reading List, and featured as the ‘Next Gen Pick’ to inform the next generation of thinkers that lead us into our futures.Please contact futurist speaker and consultant Nikolas Badminton to discuss your engagement.
About Denver Patrick
Denver Frederick, Host of The Business of Giving serves as a Trusted Advisor and Executive Coach to Nonprofit Leaders. His Book, The Business of Giving: New Best Practices for Nonprofit and Philanthropic Leaders in an Uncertain World, is available now on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
