Insights · July 26th, 2026
Somewhere along the way, thinking about the future got demoted to a luxury.
A lot of companies now call three years a strategy. Five years feels ambitious. Ten years sounds unrealistic.
And that shrinking horizon changes everything.
Nikolas Badminton joins The Keynote Curators Podcast with Seth Dechtman to make the case for looking further ahead. Not as a thought exercise. As a leadership discipline. Because when teams stop imagining what’s coming, they don’t become more efficient. They become easier to surprise.
For event pros, leaders, and high performers: if your audience is thinking about the future, technology, teamwork, or how to plan with more imagination in a fast-changing world, this conversation lands.
Inside this episode:
- Why short-term thinking leaves companies vulnerable
- What future-focused organizations do differently
- Why AI is a slow transformation, not a quick fix
- What gets lost when technology replaces human connection
- How one team used a seven-year plan to improve results now
- The simple five-minute habit that builds stronger futures thinking
Watch the full episode here:
Full podcast transcription
Nikolas Badminton – We’re kind of at this point where there’s a lot of tension in organizations, and with the world feeling so calamitous and challenging, and so many unknowns, it’s causing some kind of paralysis. And what we do as futurists, and I’m a hope engineer, so I use hope as an energy for change. In addition to building, you know, vision through futures work, we really have to build that capability for stamina, attention to what might come next, so that strategy can be really supercharged and can make a real difference to what people are doing today.
Seth Dechtman – Well, hello and welcome to today’s episode of the Keynote Curators Podcast. I’m Seth Deckman, your keynote curator and our guest today is Nikolas Badminton. Nikolas works with organizations that say they’re ready for what’s coming and helps them figure out whether that’s actually true. He spent years looking at where things are heading and what it really takes for companies not just to survive change, but to get ahead of the curve. Nikolas, welcome to our podcast.
Nikolas Badminton – It’s really great to be here, Seth. It’s long overdue, so I’m glad we’re sitting down for this chat.
Seth Dechtman – Yes, it’s happening at the perfect time. Let’s just get right into the heart of the matter here. What’s something that leaders, from your perspective, are spending a lot of time and money preparing for that you think is not as helpful and can actually become a distraction.
Nikolas Badminton – It’s really interesting where the world is right now. Last week I did a keynote for 700 corporate directors. So so people that are doing board governance, people that are really steering the ship of companies, not only from a governance perspective, from a strategic perspective. And at the beginning, I said, “Hey, I want to see a show of hands. Who does long-range planning for their own, you know, their pensions, their retirement, their kids’ school, their kids’ graduation? Everyone. Then I said, “Who’s got a 10-year plan in your organization? Everyone put their hands down, so we’re kind of at this point where everyone has kind of quietly given up on the long term. They’ve stopped developing a longer view. So your question is about what are they preparing for?
A lot of these people are preparing just to survive the next sort of three, maybe five years, and and this is a big problem because what you end up with is is a deficit of imagination, a deficit of anticipation, and a lack of empathy for for what’s coming. You know, understanding the dynamics and the stories that are going to play out, and how that organization is going to be part of creating that future. Whereas when they’re sat that far back from it, they’re going to be victims of what’s coming for them. You know, vulnerable to disruption. You know, finding that people aren’t really, you know, stepping up is is a real disappointment because I mean, research has shown us the companies that are more vigilant, that do the work of looking at signals and trends, that are really exploring dynamics through scenarios and asking what if they’re more profitable? They’ve got higher rates of growth. They’ve got higher market capitalization, and it seems to be such a few companies that are stepping forward. But at the same time, sir, it’s so busy because the leadership, you know, the C level, you know, the CEOs. I I speak to CEOs in 99% of my engagements because they’re the people that really know that you know just operating day to day and just working out you know the next 18 months to three years to even five years isn’t good enough right so we’re kind of at this point where there’s a lot of tension in organizations and with the world feeling so calamitous and challenging and so many unknowns is causing some kind of paralysis, and what we do as futurists, and I’m a hope engineer, so I use hope as an energy for change. In addition to building, you know, vision through futures work, we really have to build that capability for stamina, attention to what might come next, so that strategy can be really supercharged and can make a real difference to what people are doing today.
Seth Dechtman – At the risk of reducing it down to just something simplistic, you know, it’s a way of thinking. You know, people use the word mindset. You know, we can know all about the current technology, all these performance measurements, optimizing teams and leadership, and you can even have a 10 year plan. But if you’re if you’re not in the right mindset, the way of thinking, the right context, none none of that other stuff matters. Do you think that because and it’s I just don’t want to point all the finger at artificial intelligence because I don’t need to tell you it’s been around longer than everybody kind of thinks it has been. But the difference might be. I mean, what’s different between now and 50 years ago? 50 years ago, people were talking about change and change, and it’s moving so fast. Has is it just because the. The pace, the velocity, so much, coupled with the amplification, the visibility of it, the the saturationness of it, is so new, and that’s kind of put us in less of that tenure viewpoint and more in a survival kind of mode.
Nikolas Badminton – You know, if we go back to the late late 1960s early 70s, you had incredible inventors and thinkers about personal computing, like Douglas Engelbart, the people at Xerox Parc that create the world’s first personal computer. But the Xerox executive thought that the future was going to be better copiers. And then Steve Jobs rolls into a demonstration, licenses the the software, and then develops that and releases the Macintosh in 1984 and he does that with a big story about Big Brother being crushed and that story was published and and broadcast during the Super Bowl some 41 years ago right but that last 40 years or so and I’m I’m 54 this year so I’ve sort of lived through a lot of this. It’s been really interesting. We’ve seen a lot of hype cycles and new technologies. The paperless office that didn’t quite play out the way that we needed it to.
Then mobile tech, then the internet came just ahead of that, and then suddenly all the different machinations and versions of of what was happening with with the internet and Web three and cryptocurrency and a whole bunch of different things and here we are we’re in a world where there’s so much change happening it’s complex it’s difficult to wrap our arms around we call that a hyper object in the futures world and it’s difficult because we can’t really define it it’s like a movement of of in so many different directions, and what we’ve got is we’ve got so much pace and so many developments. But really, what’s really distracting for us, and what’s difficult to to work out, you know, what’s really valuable in the mix is that the noise is is deafening. You know how how we can really cut through to find out what’s important. This is with hope as an energy for change. Hope is actually something that cuts through that because with hope you set a goal and you find pathways. You give agency to people. Those people really qualify what’s going to be valuable. This directly links to governance and why governance is so like valuable in an organization, because you know, without that, got no trust, and trust has to be deep and wide in an organization. So we’re sort of at this point of complexity and difficulty in understanding, and you’ve got you know all of these tech CEOs shouting from the treetops and and from X or from from whatever media channel, just saying, hey, get on board. If you’re not on board, everything’s over. We’ve seen this in AI the last three to four years. People have just been desperately trying to get their arms around what what’s the truth, and it’s starting to really play out. And it’s it’s great that right now the the conversations that I’m having and the conversations that that that leaders want is what’s going to work, what’s going to move the dial on my business, and what’s going to be really valuable going forward. Because I can’t work it.
Seth Dechtman – You know, AI governance is a is a is a word that can be applied to so much. It’s very it’s very broad, and it and it means a lot of a lot of different things. Why leaders need to have their eyes on it.
Nikolas Badminton – So the first thing it’s about. Okay, if we make this investment and we go through this transformation, what value is going to be released in the business? And obviously, the big narrative in in AI has been productivity, productivity, productivity. And what’s what’s being found is that you know productivity metrics aren’t actually changing at all. You know we’re not we’re not reducing employment in an organization, and we’re not increasing productivity suddenly with the use of all these tools. There’s there’s an interesting study that came out, and the study said that people that applied some of these AI tools, and when I say AI tools, I’m talking about these LLMs that are out there. This particular flavor of AI, you know, the ChatGPTs, Cord, and the searchlight. The people that apply that seven to 10% of the time in their work, you know, just that little shine and that little that little augmentation of our capability are gaining the most productivity. But there’s only 3% of the workforce that does that because everyone else is gung ho, like throwing every single piece of work through the sausage machine, and then everyone’s burning out. The CEO is cranking up the pressure to like release that value, and really, there’s a big question now, and this is difficult. It’s like, what does doing things better look like in terms of value at the other end? Because sometimes that transformation can take it could take five years or 10 years if you do it right.
Seth Dechtman – so, is a question which human contributions are still inside of the production boundary? An enterprise and which aren’t.
Nikolas Badminton – It’s not that simple. There’s no delineation because you know you you might have in in a certain day we under undertake say between seven and 10 different tasks. Within each task there’s a number of different actions and activities. With those activities, some things might be you know augmented through the use of templates, or they might be augmented through the use of some of these LLMs, or they might be augmented through the use of a phone call to someone to tap into the wisdom that they have. You can’t really do that. It’s all part of a system, and that’s why a systematic approach and an architectural approach to an organization. I’m, I’m secretly a fully qualified technical architect as well. In a previous, what you have to do is you really have to work out the the holistic functional mechanisms in your organization. And I always say to leaders, you know, here’s a spoiler. You know, there’s no magic dust. It’s a transformation project, and how much do we love that? We’ve all we’ve all gone through, you know, the ERP solution or the CRM solution or the upgrade to email or whatever in our organizations. It’s been painful. It’s been slow. It’s been expensive, and here we are. You know, people are you know waving the flags and saying, “Here come the robots to suddenly revolutionize everything, and it’s still a transformation project.
Seth Dechtman – the technical attributes, the technical elements, the deployments are important to dominate, understand, be able to execute. But before that, it’s whoever makes the argument most persuasively is what’s going to shape, you know, an organization or even the economy, and you know how that argument’s understood. It seems
Nikolas Badminton – It’s true. Organizations have sort of they they’ve discounted the value of imagination and design. In futures work, we tap into both.
Seth Dechtman – They underestimate because that that one just you just kind of slyly let that one slip right in there. Say it again.
Nikolas Badminton – They underestimate the value of imagination and design. And let’s break it down. So imagination helps us, you know, really explore possibilities and possibilities around what could happen in 10 plus years. We we tell the stories. We look at the signals and trends. We look at the dynamics. You know, what if in 2036 we see these people, these places, these systems? We see different dynamics of change. What if you do that scenario planning? And it’s cognitive. So it’s all on paper, and this is the design element of it. So we can design something on a whiteboard or in software or whatever before we actually do any work of thinking about deployment or impact and the such like. But we can start to model this, and then it’s a cognitive exercise. So really, there’s no risk to an organization. There’s more of a risk of not doing it because you’re always in reactivity mode. Building that proactivity in terms of exploring possible futures, reigniting imagination in the executive toolkit is is an absolute revelation for so many people because it it’s been discounted for so long, we’ve seen all of the biggest tech companies, you know, decimate their design functions. It’s always the thing because, hey, we just got to get on with deployment, deployment. Let’s do the stuff, and oftentimes it goes horribly wrong because we haven’t really plumbed the depths of what potentially could happen, the positives, the risks, you know, all the good stuff in between.
Seth Dechtman – There’s a lot there. When, when you, when you come from an architectural background, like you said you do, you know, there, there are just established axioms of you know stresses and design elements that are basic and foundational that really can’t be avoided to hold a structure in place, but then there are those areas where there is unbound freedom to be creative and to you know let the imagination run wild. If we’re looking at that in application of you know AI governance or the use of AI or you know what a leader needs to look to the future. How do how do you take into account or measure for or design for these outliers? So I’ll give you an example and help me land the plane. Being not only the better hairdo of the two, but you know, the smarter of the two. I ran across a, you know, there was some documented experience of like an equivalent of a 700 customer service agents that were, you know, couldn’t handle volume that they they were they were replaced by AI. But customer satisfaction dropped whenever complexity and emotional charge and these edge cases were kind of overwhelmed. This architectural trained system savings were real; they they were they were palpable, they were calculable. But what what kind of was the invisible cost was, you know, satisfaction dropped and trust dropped and you know that connective tissue, pardon the pun, that the human brought through, and then ultimately brand. I don’t want to sound like a doomsayer, but brand resilience that kind of absorbs when there’s a dispute or a failure or something like that doesn’t fit into that kind of architecture decision tree. So what what do you say to that? How is that? You know, I don’t want to sound like negative Nancy, but you know how how do you how do you address that?
Nikolas Badminton – It’s really interesting. I I’ve worked with a lot of service centres over the years, and CRM, and beyond, and ostensibly, what you do is you give them a number of systems so they can access customer information, and you give them a set of scripts. They’re not allowed to deviate away from those scripts. They’re not allowed to move beyond that. But what I found, and the systems I used to put in place for these people were recommendation systems. Next best action, next best recommendation, and just a little bit of insight about that person, what they last bought, the last interaction you had with them, how they’re feeling today, completely changed the conversation. Now, sure, you could, in theory, replace that entire chain by removing the human and putting one of these LLMs in the mix. It’s going to be expensive to implement. You’re not going to be in control. It could make mistakes. It could ultimately feel to the person on the other end of the of the chat box or on the other end of the phone. Even more importantly, especially if you’re using voice simulations, they just feel creepy.
They just feel like something.
It’s like chatting to a zombie. The uncanny valley, and so so there’s something to do there. And what people are doing is short-term gain and a massive impact to long-term trust, long-term relationships. I mean, if you look at this, the S and p5 100. The average age of a company in the S and p5 100 is less than 15 years old. If you look at companies in in places like Asia, they’re planning decades ahead. You look at SoftBank. Massayoshi Song has got a he’s got a 300 year strategy, and it that’s underpinned by a 30-year strategy to to to really you know not only like plan for investments, release value, but the operations and the holding companies and the way that they look after their workforce. And here in the West, we’re sort of we’re desperately running quarter to quarter.
Seth Dechtman – You were reading my mind. I was going to say quarter to quarter. I was waiting for you to say year to year.
Nikolas Badminton – Desperate to say something good, you know, and it takes time to build. I worked with one of the most incredible CEOs a couple of years back in in San Diego. He brought his team together, the people, and all these operational capabilities in a large dairy product, dairy food production facility. They made cheese. In fact, they made they make literally billions of pounds of cheese. They’re growing exponentially. He makes all of the the production area heads write a seven year plan, and I was absolutely floored when I was chatting to him, and what happens there is that they look on beyond the boundaries of what’s in their control, to what’s potentially going to be forced upon them in terms of not only regulation but you know wider megatrends, you know supply chain and a number of different things. The foresight that they built in that organization was incredible. It’s not that they didn’t focus on you know growing their business today and building the partnerships. They just had a wider, broader perspective on possibility that they went even further. And I took them into whole new realms of thinking in a number of different areas, like you know fermentation and whatever. In the specifics, but like when we actually did the work together, we had a room of like 20-five people that were fluent in talking about the future.
Do you know what? An organization, I think they, I think they added another 30% out output in a year. That’s what I’m talking about in terms of gaining a huge amount of capability by by taking advantage of this, and yes, there’s technology in the mix, and yes, there’s process and governance. In fact, the governance piece is right there in that room. With and each person in the 25 person team has got elements of the governance evident. You know, they’ve got elements of the intelligence. And the ability to execute, make good decisions, and directly influence what’s happening at the top of the company.
Seth Dechtman – I can’t help myself but indulge in a sports analogy every now and then. I think it’s a pacification for me. But you know, in the West, we’re so in a hurry.
Nikolas Badminton – In the West we think of decades, and in in in the East they think of millennia. I think there was a it was it was very succinctly put to me that way, the oldest company in the world is a construction company out of Japan. It’s nearly 1500 years old. If you look at what we’re doing, like you can barely find a company that’s yeah. I’ve actually worked with a number of companies that are over 100 120 years old, and I’m always amazed. But they’re not the same today as they were 120 years ago.
Seth Dechtman – Nordstrom’s is an example. They’re 125 years old, and that’s a that’s a really tough industry among many other industries in the retail. You know, I often, as you’re saying that about the millennia and a 1,500 year old construction company, think about you know the Shark Tank, and there are people that present on that show, and there could be Shark Tank Brazil, Shark Tank UK.
Nikolas Badminton – You you know what? It’s like all the what what’s happening in AI right now. You know, some of the founders of OpenAI did off, they run their business. Jan LeCun is probably one of the smartest people that you can follow in the artificial intelligence world. One of the godfathers of AI. He’s been around for a long time. You know, incredibly smart Frenchmen. Frenchmen are French folks are incredibly strategic in the way they think. You know, he exits out of Meta where he’s actually steered the ship very, very well. Raises a billion dollars for his staff. You know, on what on the fact that his shoulders are big and wide, and he’s got the best you know brain in the world. Is that resiliency? Well, if Yann Lecun disappears, there’s nothing. You know, this this cult of celebrity or faith in people, which I don’t mind, Seth, because because I still think that we need people to cling on to like you know high hope leadership to lead us into these new challenges and whatever. But like again, there’s a desperation around you know we we have to do something or or we’re going to miss out. And and I think you know there is slow and steady. There is experimental thinking. There is imagination that needs to come into the mix. Organizations can move quickly, and they can have slow, long-term plans that really ground us what is going to matter. Like intended.
Seth Dechtman – Let it simmer. Let it percolate. We don’t have to boil. We don’t have to go at a high burn. But keep it steady and with you know, and infusing it with you know volume or velocity when we need to. Nikolas, what is what what is there a belief or a thought that about the future that you maybe held like five years ago that you’ve completely changed your mind about?
Nikolas Badminton – Five years ago, we were we were deep, still deep in the pandemic. So it’s it’s kind of interesting when I think about that. It’s I was I was always really skeptical. I was really I held two I held two parts of the story at any one point in time. So I wrote a book called Facing Our Futures, and I had a positive dystopia framework in it. You explore how bad it could be with all the bad decisions and guidance and guidelines that we and principles that we apply, and how good it could be. And what you would do is you plug the two together. You’d have this holistic picture, and you try and be able to avoid the the pitfalls of making bad mistakes and really embrace all the good good choices. Now I’ve just written a new book called The Hope Engineers Playbook, which is wildly optimistic. There’s no darkness in the thinking. In fact, the work that I do does it. Whilst it entertains the idea that there are challenges, it frames in a way that you know we we’ve got a hopeful energy to make the right decisions to change them. That’s what’s really changed in my mindset, and I think it’s because there’s a lot of people making decisions on our behalf that we don’t necessarily agree on, and sometimes we do, and that’s okay. But ultimately, we’re we’re struggling in in a lot of different. Economic and geopolitical terms, and even sort of you know keeping our households and communities safe and running, and and looking at our business and building you know resiliency and abundance there, that the the only way out is through, and for that you need stamina, and whilst you can you know focus a little bit on how challenging it is. The risks, a high hope mindset creates a huge amount of resiliency. It creates an ability to follow leadership through the most difficult times. It’s about recognition about what every member of the team has contributed daily, what they’re doing together, what that big picture is that we’re aiming towards.
Shifting that mindset from what is to what if at least once a day, so you create that ability. I mean, that’s the hope engineer’s mindset, and and and what is to what
Seth Dechtman – I love that. I’m sorry to interrupt, but I love that because you throw these nuggets out, Nick, and you know you just kind of keep moving on. And it’s my job to intervene and spotlight what is to what if, because that’s why our subscribers and viewers come to this podcast, and it’s expanding, and we’re getting the message out there. Because really, if you have the conduct to stop and just be a doomsayer and say, oh, this is how it is. What is? What is? What is? Just stating the facts, which are facts and they’re undeniable. But now, how do we use our creativity, our imagination, our focus, our clarity, our values, our direction, and say, what if? And that’s that’s beautiful. It’s simple and beautiful.
Nikolas Badminton – ‘What if…’ is an immutable question, so you can come to me and and I present a wild idea, and that wild idea could be far-reaching, based on imagination, maybe not realistic today, but maybe realistic in five years or 10 years’ time. And you come in and and you want to kill the idea. So you come in, I’m the devil’s advocate, blah blah blah, but I come in and say, “Yeah, but what if? What if it changes? And I actually present something called five minutes to future. So at the end of my keynotes, is like five minutes every single day. Take a signal, something you find is interesting, something that indicates that tomorrow is going to be different. What are the positives? What are the negatives? Then what does it do for my job, my organization, for my community, my country, the play, the world that I live in, just spend that little bit of time, and then like build out that that breadth of acceptance that there could be a lot of different options out there. What you have is you slowly destroy the small thinking in an organization. The best way to kill a dream and a big idea is to introduce it to a small mind.
Five minutes to future is about freeing your mindset. It goes beyond a woo woo idea. And I was on a pre call with a with a client, and we never worked together because they were like, “You write science fiction to help companies”. I’m like, yes, I do, and I took them through the process. They just didn’t get it, but they were a company that was very much focused on the quarter, the six month, half year, or year. They’re a huge investment company, you know, managing billions of dollars, and it’s like there are companies out there that apply this that are like 10x what you’re doing, and it’s because they’ve they’ve just they’ve just opened their minds, right? What we can do, we don’t need any any fancy breath work or things like that.
Nikolas Badminton – We can do more, be more, and think more broadly about possibilities. No matter.
Seth Dechtman – I’m gonna I’m gonna borrow that one. Five minutes to the future. I feel like conceptually I glom onto that kind of happenstancely, but if I bring a slight structure to it. I could even maybe reduce it down to four minutes if I have to. But if there’s an intentionality around it, because I do glom onto an idea and I dream a little bit and I go, “Ooh, how does this relate to the keynote curators? How does it relate to my family? How does it relate to I live on this island? How does it relate to that? But if I structure it in, it kind of amplifies a little bit of the intention behind it, and we’re going to borrow it. We’re going to take it and run with it, Nikolas.
Nikolas Badminton – What’s interesting is the way that I I sort of remind people of how powerful it can be is say you’re in an organization of 200 and so so say you’re in an organization of 500 people. Five minutes to the future for two for 500 people five times a week. 2500 thoughts times by times by a year times it by three years, five years, 10 years. You’re changing how an organization. Thinks and operates is cognitively aware, is present in the world, is is driving towards the futures that we need. You know, and this, you know, we’re seeing companies that are that are really starting to embrace this and to really to really bring this into the mix to to fundamentally change how the world thinks about how it should operate.
Seth Dechtman – It’s subtle and potent at the same time. It’s pretty cool. Well, listen, Nikolas, we are at the end of the road today. I so appreciate you really taking the time out and just speaking expansively on all topics and dancing in the conversation with us. It’s been a real joy to have you, and long overdue. But I’m so glad we did it, and we did it at the perfect time. So thank you.
Nikolas Badminton – I welcome these conversations. The more that we can talk about, you know, a different way of thinking and a different way of really harnessing the gifts that we’re given to think about the futures and to think with hope and to drive and real change in the world together as a team, you know it’s it’s what’s needed. This podcast is needed, Seth. So thank you.
Lightly edited by a real human person for grammar and clarity.
About Nikolas Badminton
Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer 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 600 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.
Nikolas’ is next book – The Hope Engineer’s Playbook, due out in September 2026.
Please contact futurist speaker and consultant Nikolas Badminton to discuss your engagement.
