Cultivating Awareness: The Art of Identifying Signals of Change

“It’s not just about foreseeing; it’s also about feeling and sensing. It’s about imagining the smells and sounds of the future. It’s really about being an active player in your future, an active builder of the future.”

– Sylvia Gallusser

What you will learn

• Exploring multidisciplinary approaches to future thinking
• Using foresight meditation to visualize possible scenarios
• The power of signals in understanding future trends
• Amplifying cognition through creativity and fiction
• The importance of history and sociology in futurism
• Transforming future visions into actionable strategies
• Addressing truth and deepfakes in the digital age

Episode Resources

• Accenture
• Silicon Humanism
• STEEPLE
• University of Houston
• Hawaii University
• Apple TV+
• X
• Facebook
• Adobe Firefly
• ChatGPT
• Generative AI
• Deepfake
• Liar’s Dividend
• Jim Dator

TV Series

• Black Mirror (TV series)
• Extrapolations (TV series)
• Silo (TV series)

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Sylvia, it’s wonderful to have you on the show.

Sylvia Gallusser: Hi, Ross! Delighted to be on the show. Thank you so much for having me.

Ross: So you delve into the future and help people do that. How do you help your clients or people you work with to think more effectively about this wonderful world of the future?

Sylvia: That’s a question I love to have an answer to, and I really hope we can always have more people enter the future thinking field. So I started actually working in technology and strategy for quite a long time, mostly with entrepreneurs at first; but coming from a multidisciplinary background, I really found it interesting how we can bring different disciplines to help people think about the future and today. There are really, I like to say there are two different ways, two different paths to arrive at future thinking. There are very formal ones where you would go academic about it, you would attend university programs. And there are tons of great programs I’m sure you’ve heard about from the University of Boston or sorry, Houston or Finland to Hawaii University and so on. So there are already a lot of really great programs. 

But at the same time, what you see in the profession is that a lot of futurists are coming from more diverse backgrounds, having started a career in other industries, and I like to talk about it as a second choice career. And you see people coming from marketing, strategy, HR, sometimes also some artists, technologists, psychologists. So there’s really an interesting variety of professions that can lead you to think about the future. Because just, and that’s really the topic of your podcast here, it’s about amplifying cognition. So we really do believe that future thinking is the way to amplify the way we think about the future. 

So for example, the way I started, well, if you’re interested in maybe me zooming a bit about my own a way to bring people around me to think about the future. I started actually as a strategy consultant for maybe 15 years, working first with Accenture clients in France, then moving with a French embassy in the US and working more with entrepreneurs to finally start working with students and a variety of individuals around the future. So I created my own company, which is called Silicon Humanism, and on top of having a more general strategy toolbox, I’m really happy to always include other tools like fiction, or popular fiction, for example, that can help us think about the future. I also love to envision meditation, help people to bring themselves to develop their own mindset and extend their reason to think about the future. We also use a lot of gaming to help bring scenarios to life. But ultimately, what’s really important when I work with clients is to go from the envisioning to really the action planning. So that’s why, for me, strategy is really a complement to the foresight futurist toolbox that we have.

Ross: So there’s a lot there to dig into and just let this come back to multidisciplinarity. And so I suppose this is about…I think I agree that to be an effective futurist, you do need to bring together a wide variety of disciplines and exposures and experiences as I knew and many of our colleagues do, but part of it is I think the big part is it’s not being the futurist for others. It’s helping people to be their own futurist, to bring together their own thinking, and to expand how it is they think effectively about the future. So How could we add disciplines or bring disciplines together in our thinking? How do we put into practice this multidisciplinarity?

Sylvia: Yeah, that’s a wonderful aspect of it. And I like that you’re thinking about it and really focusing on it in your podcast around amplifying cognition. And what is it to be human these days? And for me, really, we are talking about different disciplines. I think the first foundation for me is really like the humanist foundation. It’s about anthropology living together. So sociology, about how we’re history, really believing that to be a good futurist, you need to know about history. You need to be a good historian first. So it’s really whenever I would work around a topic and let’s say, for example, future of work. Or you’ve been talking about the future of food recently. It’s really about understanding what happened throughout the millennaries, like, how did it start? What makes us human in that aspect, what is kind of working in cycles, what is constant, kind of perennial, and what is evolving. And I think when we have this really like giant cycles trends, then we have a really strong foundation. So I would really start with social science, usually at the first basis of the system. 

And then on top of that, we do a lot of scanning, scanning the environment, and scanning for what we call signals of the future. So it’s really about now that you know, what is the invariance, the kind of the landscape, what do you see changing? And this is really like a radar you have on understanding what is changing in every direction. And here you’re familiar with that, but we call it the steeple approach. It’s about seeing what is changing in the social field, in the technological field, environmental, economical field, political, legal, and even ethical. I also like to add behaviors, just behavioral fields. And I think it’s really interesting to add those signals to see what is emergent. So we are talking about the force of the future. So not what is already there, like only in small pieces, but what is going to be. And there’s not, like one main scenario, I also like to say we’re not forecasting, we’re not predicting the future. We’re trying to imagine possible scenarios that are relevant. It’s not about being just flimsy and imagining everything, but based on the landscape, based on the new signals. What possible scenarios are we going to live in and and usually we really like to stretch the horizon here, thinking about more dystopian ones, thinking about more utopian ones. And I’m very fan of Jim Data’s force for alternate scenarios which are about growth, constraints and discipline and about transformation and collapse. 

So I think it’s really that phase that is really important in the process to put together the different disciplines into very vivid scenarios. And at this point, that’s usually when the artistry, the fiction comes in. This is about giving foresight. Like to say it’s not just about foreseeing. It’s also about feeling, sensing. It’s about imagining the smells of the future, the sounds of the future. So usually, at this step, what I like to do, to bring that together into something that people can really project themselves in, is like foresight, meditation, filters and visioning, trying to really put yourself into that state of imagining how you could live in such possible scenarios. 

And finally, because I talked about strategy. For me, the strategy is really like the end of the process now that you can really project yourself or your business into the future of an industry. Okay, now what does it mean? How do you get there? What’s your action plan? And it moves you into action. It’s not just about being passive. It’s really about being an active player of your future, an active builder of the future. So that’s why I talk about multidisciplinary but it’s not just everything comes together at once. There are these different layers and these different steps or stages that together will bring a full process of future thinking and future building.

Ross: Fantastic. So, I want to dig into some of the details there. And so part of it is, you talked about the radar of being able to scan out and the signals that we see. And so one of the, I suppose, frames is, as you say, using a framework such as steeple to break out the different categories and so on. But a lot of it, I think, is about sensitizing ourselves to signal so that we can more likely to notice the things that are relevant or important or point to things that might change in the future, and that’s what futurists do. But how? How can we, I suppose, convey this as a capability or skill that others can learn and develop, that have been able to see and to sense signals that are point to change?

Sylvia: It’s a very interesting thing with signals. It’s like raw material. It’s something that anybody can apprehend, and that’s what makes future thinking something that really anybody can work with and develop as a personal skill. Because it’s, it’s about becoming more aware of what is going on around and that’s why I think it works really in tandem, in duo, with the first step, which is about always knowing more, always more about what is long-term landscaping, and then being more aware of the variation. And this can go from analyzing behaviors of people around you, like, what changed during the pandemic? Were people more polite, more civilized? Did we see new behaviors, new words? Maybe also studying popular culture is a very interesting aspect, because if you see what is going on in the media, TV series, movies, books, you also sense a lot of what people are attracted to, what new changes are starting when there’s like this kind of enthusiasm for a new book. Also sometimes that means something. So how can you get more aware of this? It’s really an everyday practice, and I like to say two things. So it’s a personal practice and it’s a collective practice. That’s something you can really train yourself to do all the time, just reading the news, being aware of what is around you, like just having your sensors open to the world around and once again, it’s all senses. It’s about listening. It’s about observing people around you. It’s a different taste in the air. It’s really multi-sensitive here. 

Why I say it’s also collected. The futurist community is a very active community. It’s very, it’s not that big. It’s small. It’s very interconnected. And there’s a lot of platforms to be able to exchange signals. They call it sometimes signal swarming or or signal scanning. You have different names. But the idea is really, futurists love to exchange around that topic, to meet and say, ‘Hey, this week, what did you notice?’ And once again, the steeple aspect is interesting, because when you’re on your own, coming maybe from one industry or one profession, maybe you have kind of a bias around one or the other. Like, I’m coming from technology at first, I would really focus on everything around, like, new technology and so on. But I guess someone who’s a psychologist might have a different opinion. An economist might see things differently. So coming together as a collectivity community is really interesting in enhancing and amplifying the way you connect with those signals around you. And finally, I would say, on top of it being collective, what’s interesting when you want to bring a group, a population, a company, a corporation, to work around future thinking, is to build the capability to do this. It’s very simple. It can start with just an Excel file. It doesn’t need something very fancy. But just like bringing people to come see what are signals, and get them to understand, like, what’s the texture of it? What does it look like? What does it sound like? And they start to log their own signals. And then you already have a big basis of signals of change, and cooperation, that’s a great first way to enter the field of foresight.

Ross: So one of the other things you’re talking about was, putting yourself in the scenario. And I suppose the first part of the practice is to be able to create a useful scenario that does help you to think about new things or envisage things that help you shape your current action. But as just individuals, what are ways in which we can, I suppose, conceive of and bring ourselves or enter? I think you used the word meditation there, and love to hear about what. What is that practice? How do we put ourselves to immerse ourselves in these useful future scenarios?

Sylvia: Absolutely once again, you know, it can be very personal and intimate, and it can be something more collective. So I’ll try to address both aspects, because I think they can work really well together. So you can develop your own future thinking practice as an everyday discipline, let’s say, and I wrote a few years ago, an article about mental stretching exercise you can practice to work on that. And it can go from dealing with different perspectives, trying to develop empathy. Put yourself in the shoes of someone else and imagine a story. You know what? Actually also learning new languages and learning new culture is also a great way just to practice this perspective change and facing things in different ways, reading, listening, and learning about fictions, for me, has been an immense way to just stretch myself to see a future that is possible and that is not necessarily dystopian. 

So there’s I love to talk about science fiction because we tend to think of science fiction as something very dystopian and very scary, and not necessarily a good way to start for people who are scared about the future. But I would say there is more and more very interesting science fiction now about creating a future world that is not necessarily negative, that can be, like, really engaging, and develop a plot which has a narration where the problems are, but it doesn’t mean that the negative aspect is the world’s building. Like the story, to be interesting needs to always have something, something of a dilemma, or something of complexity, or naught to it. But it can be interpersonal stories, not necessarily in the world building around it. So I think science fiction and future fiction really offer us ways to think about the future. 

So for example, the way we do it collectively, with group and I was talking about those meditative exercises and a really great way we’ve been doing it in the past is it was around the future of the home, because during the pandemic, the home evolved dramatically, and not just the structure, but also the way we reorganize life within it. And I like to talk about the structures and the intangibles that happen in the home. So what we would do, for example, is, in terms of envisioning meditations with a few groups, was really you waking up in the future home you live in maybe 10 years from now, 20 years from now? How do you wake up? What is the first trigger? What happens like is it a wake up call? Is it natural lighting? Do you still live in a bedroom? Like, we really start just, what do you smell? What do you think? What do you feel? What does it sound like? So, five senses. 

Meditation is a really effective change, as I was saying and so on. So these are different tools we would use to bring people to get into that state of the future, and then go through a day in the life like, Okay, what do you do from your bed, then do you go to breakfast? Do you go to your bathroom? What does the bathroom look like? Is it interactive? Do you live alone? Do you live with other people in the community? And just now it starts asking so many questions that people naturally get their mind to wander around like the future home, and that was a really great tool to get a sense of that new type of space that could exist. And oh, they would like that home to be, because, once again, it is also about developing what would be our preferable future, our favorite futures and building them.

Ross: That’s fantastic. I think that, as you say, those five senses in the day in the life, but putting yourself in that is, very powerful way to pull people to think about not just, well, the broad shape of life in the world, but also some of the details. And they can put people in a very creative state. So you were mentioning this idea of science fiction, and how that can help us in so many ways. And you have been a long time devotee of science fiction. But what I think you said is something very interesting there, in the sense that a storyline requires tension, and it’s kind of and it’s too easy just to say, ‘Okay, well, is it just, you know, it’s a horrible world, and so there’s all sorts of problems. And so we get a story out of that,’ as opposed to saying, well, ‘it’s the future and it’s different, but, there’s something, something happens, and there’s a storyline within that.’  So love to what science fiction that you would point to that has been interesting or evocative, or points to interesting, rather than horrible worlds in the future?

Sylvia: Yeah, there are definitely more, let’s say dystopian ones than utopian ones I usually come up with. So I’ve published, a few months ago, a list of my best off of TV series around future thinking and so on. There’s one called Extrapolations, which is really interesting, because it’s not. Is about one point in time, but it’s trying to take different points in time and seeing, like at every, let’s say, every decade, or every couple of decades, what is going to happen. For example, the climate aspect is kind of degrading, but at the same time, you have people working in sustainability, and there’s a whale watching whale listeners in one of the episodes. And it’s really interesting to focus on one perspective, and then the next episode would focus on another perspective, and what I like in that show is really the intimate aspect. It’s not just like the big like the president, and it’s going to happen something at the I don’t know, like an asteroid coming on us, or big scenarios that we used to have this past 20 years. It’s more about intimate perspectives, the same way we are in Black Mirror, like you’re faced with one technology at a time. It’s not like everything changed at the same time. It’s almost kind of the same world in many of the deserts, but one technology is brought in, one new aspect of life is brought in, and you see the intimate, the personal life of one person in reaction to that new invention, for example, another one I can think of. Sorry, it’s, once again, a TV series. It’s called Silo. It was a recent one on Apple TV plus, and it was about people living within a silo, and they haven’t seen the exterior of the world, like the exterior world for a while, and there’s a giant screen, they are not even sure that’s what they see outside the truth. So there’s always these questions around, like, what do they see through the glass? Is it like the real world? Is it the way it has been destroyed? And so there’s this thread that the outside world is very emanating, very threatening, and they don’t want people to get out of the silo. But at some point, what happens is what happens every time you put people in captivity, they want to go outside and they want to see what’s real life. And I think that tension is really interesting, and it’s a great metaphor for so many things we see these days around truth management, like, how do we deal with the truth? How do we deal with different screens we have in life? There are so many screens around us, not just technology, but really screens that we don’t know anymore what is real, what is wrong, and deep fakes are definitely a scary aspect of the future.

Ross: Yes, we’ll definitely put a link to your compilation of science fiction in the show notes. But getting on, you’ve raised this very interesting topic of the truth, which is the nature that is changing today in all sorts of interesting ways. And that’s something which you’ve, I think, working a lot with. But I’m particularly interested in how we as individuals deal with that. How can we have better cognition to deal with a world where there might be more untruth than it was a while ago? What’s that path? What’s that journey?

Sylvia: Yeah, you know, that’s interesting. I guess, depending on the day, I can be more optimistic or less optimistic, your choice. I think I’m mostly optimistic, but in a year of elections in the United States, definitely you care a bit more about what is truth, what images of truth are conveyed to us. But I tend to have an optimistic view of how humankind evolved. I think we have really resilient species. And throughout the millenaries, we’ve heard so many times like chaos is coming, and I feel that every time, there was overall moments, but every time we found a way to grow bigger out of it, that’s probably a personal belief that kind of dictates how I think as a futurist. 

And so when I think the new technology is coming and there’s a lot of scare around it, I tend to rely on my historical knowledge, once again, saying, like, how many times this happens, or cycles? How did we react? Or can we identify what can be a threat, a threat to democracy, for example. And that helped me identify, what are signals, what are the stages at which stage are we, for example, around, like, maybe having a president that is not as much of a good role model as it could be. So I really rely on this. 

The second thing, I think, is our force of adaptation. And I take maybe more short term examples, but seeing how we’ve reacted when. We started having emails, like email systems or search engines. This was definitely different from what we had before. And at first, if you go back to what the media were saying by then, our people reacted to them. There were really strong reactions to it, like this is going to be the end of communications and so on. And in the end, we learned to differentiate. We still communicate as individuals in real life, even if we communicate in the virtual world. 

So I truly believe that we are very social animals. And when I say social, it’s not just social media style. I think we like to be in the presence of each other, and the pandemic has been an immense example of how people wanted to go around the rules to meet in person, because we need the human, the lively presence of others, and not just the virtual. So that’s why I’m never too scared with new technologies, because I know that there’s a balance. We will still have some bubbles of disconnection. We like to disconnect. Sometimes we like to be just without a screen. I still like to read books, and I still believe that some people have their own bubbles and their own way to deal with disconnecting. And we know a lot around mental health is about disconnecting. 

So coming back to what we were saying, I think it’s really important to see how as a species, we are resisting and we are resilient around invasion of too much technology, for example. We know we have been the one bringing technology in comparison to other species, but every time technology comes around, we find ways to regulate, to put regulation in place, to put limits to it, to work around it. And there’s a lot, for example, talking about generative AI and generative assets and new contents and deep fakes, for example, it’s about understanding what is true and what is not. I think there are really different levels. I like to think about it as a set of regulations or rules and behaviors. 

First of all, I think like the more and more we see those tools developing, the more there has been around like watermarking content or tagging or displaying or putting where the source is from to now put a stamp on what has been generated or not, and thinking back, back about, oh, we thought about it a year and a half ago with the first examples of this, and I was working at Accenture by then, so that was really a big topic that we had, like, with these new things coming on, generative AI and ChatGPT and all the consequences of it on All professions. And what happened by then is, really we were scared that those, those assets, those discontent, is indistinguishable from real life. It was just going to be better and better at some point, indistinguishable. But what happened is more and more because we reacted to that fear. We worked on that fear to evolve, to adapt. We were also able to put in place some tools to be able to distinguish more and more. 

For example, social media. They want to like Twitter/X, or Facebook. They help us work around Okay, is this the content that has been generated or not Adobe, if you create, like an image with Firefly, there’s a watermarking system that puts where it’s from. And more and more you need to put the sources attached to the results you get on ChatGPT or any other answering engines. So that’s this layer of what the profession, what the technology layer is adding, but then talking about amplifying cognition and what I think also, we’re resilient and resistant as individuals. The more we are exposed to things, we also create our own machine learning, not just machines do this machine learning thing like our brain is able to adapt. So the more we see something that we are not sure is true, the more we will be able to see the small differences. We think in patterns. We already think in patterns. So the first time you see a generative asset, you will be surprised. You get fooled probably a few times, but the more and more you get exposed to it, the more you will question it. And what’s even interesting is we, can we say like we don’t, we distrust so much the content that there’s something called the Liar’s Dividends. Maybe you heard about this, which is about at some point you don’t even think that truth is truth anymore. You start to distrust things that are true. And sometimes we see that in the media. You would hear about something that happened, and the reaction people, the first reaction, would be, this didn’t happen. This is generated AI or whatever? 

Ross: Yeah, well, that’s one of the big challenges today. Certainly is, as you say, that now distrust of truth. So to round out what you know, as a strategic thinker, as a futurist, as someone who helps people to work with that, what are just two or three recommendations for how people can amplify their cognition and think better in a world of extraordinary change?

Sylvia: I love that. And you know, maybe I’d be a bit counterintuitive, because maybe you’re thinking like, increase skills, increase expertise. Read More like experts talking about it, I would go the other way around. I’d say, like, go towards arts and fiction. Like, continue to create. I think that’s a great way to not just be passive in reaction to the tools, but continue to explore creative ways and I think it’s really interesting when you see how, for example, new media campaigns are playing around AI, not just using it, but humans are creating around the ideas of AI. And we’ve seen really great ads from ketchup and Nike and so on. So that’s really interesting. Like, continue to create, I would say, easily. Want to continue to not just be passive towards the world, but like, be part of creating it. And definitely I’d say, like, um, use fiction. Like, read fiction, consume fiction. I think that’s a great way for us to explore in safe ways. When you create fiction, there’s this cathartic effect that you can envision. Is to know that you’re not comfortable with, but you end up leaving those scenarios in a nicely packed way. So that’s why you end up usually having different thoughts about the future. So it changes you, but I think it makes you also more adaptable to what could possibly happen.

Ross: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Sylvia today. 

Sylvia: Thank you so much. Ross. It’s a pleasure.