The Research Hub Podcast: Navigating the Future with Resilience

Transcript

Sophie Tidman  00:00

Welcome to another one of Mayvin Research Hub podcasts. I'm Sophie Tidman, and today I'm joined by Anna Iles, who is a futurist life coach and facilitator, supporting empowered mindsets and resilient strategies in challenging contexts. She leads the futures thinking agency, flux, compass, building preparedness for disruption and finding constructive ways forward with companies, education institutions, multilateral groups and conflict affected communities. She's worked for over 10 years with sustainability and systems change consultancies, Forum for the Future and business for social responsibility, and authored two books on innovative culture and strategy, most recently, the innovation friendly organization. She also is mother to three boys under five, so has plenty of experience with disruption and conflict at a very personal level, and she is living in Hong Kong. Welcome Anna. It's so nice to see you. 

 

Anna Iles  00:49

Lovely to see you too. Really good to be with you. I'm well, I'm well, I'm feeling, I think everyone is the the surge towards the end of the year. 

 

Sophie Tidman  00:58

Yes, we're I'm very conscious we're talking in the week of the winter solstice, which is on Saturday, I think. So, yeah, it always feels like there's a bit of a juggernaut towards the end of the year. And this year I've like, I haven't socialized at all this week, haven't gone out, and I'm so happy about it. 

 

Anna Iles  01:13

Was that an intentional sort of retreat, or is it a, 

 

Sophie Tidman  01:17

Yeah, kind of, kind of, I remember one of my colleagues, James Traeger, always talks about the period of Advent, not so much, I suppose, the week up to Christmas, but the period of Advent and the month before Christmas actually traditionally a time of quiet and reflection, which makes a lot more sense, really, at this time of year, the ending of things. And yes, I feel very much personally in my own winter, quite deep in reflection, and wanting to honor that, and wanting to move well into the new beginning. Yeah, how is it for you in Hong Kong? Because it must feel very different this time of year

 

Anna Iles  01:49

I think, well, it it's sort of maybe mercifully cool this week, which does help you connect with the season. Sometimes the seasons sort of disappear in in parts of Asia, and it feels less you get less of the sense of that rhythm. Personally, I've been I've taken some reflection time. I've been running. I've committed for, well, instigated by a friend's request, I've committed to doing a marathon in February to raise funds for this wonderful charity called Resolve that supports inclusivity in Hong Kong, and it empowers community leaders to be the change agents and to develop, find and develop pathways for inclusivity. It's a very, very unequal city Hong Kong, it's very diverse and very unequal, and so I've been doing these long runs, which I find, for me, a really wonderful sort of retreat. And you get into a space of thinking that you don't often give yourself, or I don't often enough give myself, unless I've sat down with a pen and paper to write, just to really just follow thoughts and let thoughts emerge. And I was and road running particularly. So I just ran 10 k1 way, and 10k back, and so I didn't have to think about routes at all. So I just was following my thoughts. So that felt a really lovely sort of yeah, way to wrap up, or to gather thoughts, not to wrap up, but to gather thoughts, and to be thinking also about where I am in life. And it was also prompted by, I've been invited by, there's a lovely group on the island called Lantau entrepreneurs, and they've been invited to do one of their monthly talks. And their talks are really life stories, and so it's quite rare, I think, in lives, unless we've got ourselves into the sort of TED Talk space, it's quite rare to be asked to really narrate your life and to give it that sort of structure of a something that has a sort of the arch of a story, which to me, feels both artificial, but also very well creative in a way, and sort of, yeah, creative reflection prompt. And there's, I have a funny relationship with that sort of sense making, because you're you can always make sense of things in retrospect. So I suspend my disbelief and sort of see it as a bit of a fictional process, but it it's quite it's both challenging and maybe in some ways affirming to to do that for oneself, and then gives you a sense of So, this is where I am, and, and, and where next?

 

Sophie Tidman  04:38

Yeah, recreating your own narrative, or many different alternative narratives, I guess, is quite empowering. Yeah, the running thing, it reminds me I've been doing a lot of yoga recently, not so much cardio, but a lot of yoga, and often very early in the morning. And there's something about doing a practice in the darkness, because I don't but, and it reminds me, reminds me of the wilderness retreat I did earlier in the year, which we've spoken about, and being in the darkness and feeling just absorbed by it, something very surrendering in that which feels really right for this time of year. And my practice in the last couple of years has been not fighting this time of year, but actually just going with it, which feels quite uncomfortable and then very freeing 

 

Anna Iles  05:21

Being held by the darkness or just letting, I think that sense of sort of be absorbed by it and yet also surrendering to it. Yes, quite Yeah, really makes letting go. I guess it reminds me of that sense of you can either feel lost in darkness or you can feel like just an an openness to possibility. 

 

Sophie Tidman  05:41

Yes, it's very fertile voidy, yeah, I think we're going to talk about the U curve shortly as well, which has resonance with that. We were thinking about doing a bit of a meditation visualization. They were going to take us through. Should we? Should we do that now to kick off? 

 

Anna Iles  05:59

Yeah, wonderful. I think it's a good follow on from thinking about the end of a year and where next. In some ways, it's about closing down one paradigm and moving to the next. So close your eyes, or I invite you to close your eyes if you'd like to. And what I'd like you to do is imagine that you have just walked all the way up a steep, steep mountain, and it's been a bit of a tough slog. And you've got to the top, and it's been one of those tops that goes, you think you're there, and then it dips and there's another bit, and you think you're there, and then it dips and there's another bit, and last bit's a real push, and then you're there, and you have a sigh of relief, and you sit down and gather your breath, and then you look around, my gosh, it is beautiful. There's all these peaks out there beyond you, and there's some extraordinary valleys and the light falling in beautiful places. And you just love to stay there. And you maybe sit and look, pull out your sketch pad, draw, eat your sandwich, meditate, but then you know that the sun is gonna fall and that it will get cold, and that it would be very unwise to stay there any longer, and the only way on from here is down. But before you go, you just take another look at that view, and it's still just so beautiful. And out there are some peaks that are even bigger, maybe, and maybe even more beautiful, or the view from there. And you don't know, but actually you need to find out. You think, actually, I'm going to have to have another walk. I'm going to have to reach that peak. That is where I want to be. And you look in the gap between where you are now and where you want to you're wanting to go, and it's not easy to know how to get there. Don't know if you've done much hill walking, but it there's often this way that the paths curve around and go up and down ridges, and sometimes go back on themselves. And it's never very clear which paths actually lead up the next peak and which ones maybe fall into a different Valley or curve back to where you came from. And so this is something you'll have to figure out, but you're determined to do that, and so you take your final look that amazing view, and put your coat on, because it's already getting cold, and start on your journey down. And this, if you want to, when you're ready come back to the room, is how I conceive of a futures thinking framework called Three Horizons that begins with just simply recognizing where we are today in terms of the sort of paradigm that we're in. And that might be the paradigm for, I don't know, the world or your country or your city or your sector or your strategy within an organization, whatever, however you choose to frame that scope, but the sort of the status quo and within that what is not fit for the future in that status quo. So it doesn't mean necessarily, it's not throwing up the baby with the bathwater. You can recognize what's valuable there also, there's also beauty from this peak. It's also a beautiful peak. But it's simply recognizing that wherever we are in the now, we're at the peak of a paradigm that's falling away, that the the now is always falling away from us, and so just enabling people to hold that, that the only way really forwards from the now is down, is recognizing that setting sun and that gathering momentum from that perspective, it's helpful to set our sights on where next. So what is the peak that we're aiming for? Where do we want to go and that's the face for or sort of means, or an invitation to conjure up visions, so to imagine what that peak might be like and what we want it to be like, and then to move back into that question of so how to move from here to there, and which paths are really going to take us there, and which ones actually go back to where we came from, or into some other Valley. And that's the very interesting analytical part of the three horizons process where you try and sift out the emerging changes that really lead to transformation from the emerging changes that actually are supporting today's paradigm and will not take us further and will become redundant, doomed to that redundance so a bit like if you think of how the music industry shifted away from disc recordings to the digital, sort of live streaming sort of era, and in that sort of slightly messy shift, as all shifts are, there were, there was a phase of moving from CDs, and it sort of lapsed into mini discs. And mini discs lasted, I don't know. They feel like a month in my mind. Maybe it was a year, I'm not sure, but they didn't last very long, because they were tied to the old paradigm. So they were an example of a sort of an innovation that's not a transformation, and then you get the likes of Spotify coming along, and that was the way forward, or the way we took. So I find this is a process that is a really wonderful, empowering one in that it takes us through from recognizing the demise of today, which can be humbling, destabilizing, disorientating, sort of can sometimes bring people into a state of paralysis or fear or attachment to the now, and it helps to ease us out of that attachment or paralysis through showing us the and both showing us and asking us to imagine the beauty of the possible futures, so the beauty of the peak we might reach, and to really imagine what and how we'd like that to feel, and then to go through so how might we get there, and which transformations can we see around us today that might be accelerators of that, or might be bridges towards that, and which innovations around us today might we need to look beyond or sort of not be distracted by. And whenever I've been involved in or leading facilitating one of these processes, I've myself come away with, and I've all noticed that participants come away with a sense of momentum and empowerment that wasn't there at the start. They most likely have come in with a sense of either standing still or reluctance to move, or fear of inhibitors, a sense of inhibitors, and then they find ways beyond that, through the visioning and through the questioning of pathways forward. 

 

Sophie Tidman  13:16

Yeah, beautiful. I love the I love the spaciousness of the imagery, which is not how it often feels for me or for clients, and thinking about the future, it feels really, really complicated and hard and something to be worked out and picked analyzed. I was reading a bit of a book, by I think it's Lisa Britta Enduring Time that was recommended to me by one of our Masters cohort, our second Masters cohort, participants. And it's that, it's we believed in progress for so long, which is a kind of very it's a one future. We're on the road to it, it's going to be better, and it's sort of just happening to us. It's given to us. We're somewhat passive in it, and there's a sense of entitlement as well to it. And now people don't believe in that now, and it's, it's, as you say, quite paralyzing and fragmented, scary. 

 

Anna Iles  14:10

It's funny you say about believing in progress. It's one of my my bug bears. I don't believe in progress. I think simply, I'm looking at, I think, looking at sort of, it's both looking at some of the claims we might make in terms of the progress we've made in society, and then if you take a longer term view how much setback there may be, and there is, in say, currently with the with ESG backlash with women's rights backlashes, with gay rights backlashes just, I mean so much, and that we might have called progress is is being taken away. And that's just endless cycles, I think. And then even with the and this is deeply saddening, but with the current narrative is that we've really reduced global poverty so significantly, and and may well be arguably true for now, but then if you look at the impacts of climate change, I think it won't be true at the end of the century, and, and so yeah, progress is one that I struggle with. But I think also as a futurist, when you're one of the exercises that we're often doing is looking at how any particular change or particular trend might evolve in terms of all the different possible implications you might be able to imagine. And so one tool that I frequently use for this, even as a sort of working practice and culture on a weekly basis in team meetings has been to look at how a particular signal of change might evolve using a futures wheel. I think you might have a similar practice to discuss. And in a futures wheel, you begin with that change at the center of the wheel, whether it's I was doing this in a workshop very recently, actually, at the beginning of the week, where we were looking at looking at the signal of change from last year that Chat GPT four posed as someone with visual impairment to trick a human worker into completing a capture for it. And so the seed of the future that we extrapolated from that was, what if you can no longer tell if your co workers are human or AI, and we use that as the sort of seed of the future in the middle the particular change. And then you look at all these first order implications in this around it, in the center of the wheel, and then move to second order implications and third order implications. And this is a process that I find always supports the revelation of nuance, like even even changes that you come across sort of vaunted as sustainability solutions in the papers or or as wins for human rights or progress towards the SDGs, even even ones that are the best intentioned when you look through multiple perspectives and that multiple multiple possible outcomes beyond the intended ones, you see a picture that can't be captured within the idea of progress, a picture that's just too complex. So yeah, I'm with you on that one

 

Sophie Tidman  17:17

Yeah, and it's and it's heartbreaking, really, like it is, you know, we were children of the 90s and the end of history. And it feels like it obviously didn't at the time. Never does. But it feels like a golden age, looking back on it

 

Anna Iles  17:30

Yeah, it does, yeah

 

Sophie Tidman  17:34

And, and as someone who works in development, the kind of SDGs and the, you know, the feeling like the righteousness of ending poverty and that idea of progress, it's difficult to leave behind. It's, it's, yeah, it's, it's heartbreaking a lot of the world today

 

Anna Iles  17:50

Well, I agree. It's, it's heartbreaking, it's difficult to leave behind, and it's, we've got to find ways to to not leave the ambitions behind. So I think it's, I mean, yes, there's the righteousness and the, yeah, the sort of Savior narrative that needs to be transformed. But the, I think the, for me, the movement still towards greater equity and greater justice and protections, all of that needs to continue just with with greater diversity of participation and greater ownership of, yeah, less just empowerment, really, of those at the heart, from the grassroots, and it's hard to I think we're struggling within many sort of movements that are cognizant of the impacts of climate change and the need for equity and justice that was struggling with how to, how to rework those narratives, how to, how to keep moving, while letting go of the sense of progress and the the sort of wins that that gave us along the road,

 

Sophie Tidman  19:03

Yes, and obviously we did this as part of the Masters, which I've talked to you about before. The module four is the future of organizing. And it did put people into a bit of a spin talking about the future and how to put themselves in relation to it. For me also, how am I in relationship to the future. And I think both futures, thinking anger stout, have something interesting here to say, not thinking of the future as this place over there, separate to us, but intertwined with the now, with the present. The image I really enjoyed in my master's paper on this was it came a bit from David Abraham, yeah. And he talks about how the future is, is all our all our language is metaphors, embodied metaphors. And I'm not going to be able to do justice to it now, but he talks about very much the future being, or the horizon, so it's embodied metaphor for us, and the past being the underground is something that we're always standing on with us, but we can't actually get into. And in that metaphor, actually we're walking towards the future. And the process of walking is interesting, isn't it, because you're always you've got to leave something behind, to take one step forward, and actually you've got to let go before, well, let go, let come. So actually, the future, moving into the future is impossible unless you first let go.

 

Anna Iles  20:28

I really love that metaphor, actually, because I think it's, yeah, it's got that impossibility you can't get there unless you let go. Which I which I hold. It's also got that, that paradox of perspective. So the future is always there. The horizon is always there. It's always got its own now, in some ways it's that it looks far away to us, and then as we move towards it, it recedes. And really, you never get there. You're always in the now. And yet the future is always there. I guess I think of the future as something that is, I guess it's sort of everything wraps up in the in the in the now the it is here. It's emerging today, except just not in a linear way. And it's something that into your question of, how is it in relation to us? We're all always building the future, whether or not we intend to. So all our actions, all our choices, are future shaping choices. And I think that futures thinking, for me, is a lot about bringing intentionality into that awareness of how we might be shaping the future, awareness that we have agency in the future, which I think is what can lift it from that complexity? And yeah, there is a lot of complexity, and the analysis can be intimidating, that it can lift it into that space of this is something not just that I can do, but that I am doing, whether I like it or not, and I might as well do it to the best of my abilities, or at least with some degree of intention and recognizing that intentions don't always work out in the way we'd like them to 

 

Sophie Tidman  22:04

Yeah, sort of what. What am I embodying in the now, 

 

Anna Iles  22:07

Yeah, what am I embodying? Where am I putting my Yeah, tension energy, my energies. 

 

Sophie Tidman  22:14

Yeah, I do get the sense in a lot of with a lot of clients, that at the moment, there's been a growing sense of disempowerment, and I we can't do this unless this changes, unless somebody sets a vision or a bit clearer on this. And at the same time, the recognition that change is continuous, that change is the state is is not we're not going from A to B through a bit of a space of transition that we're staying with us?

 

Anna Iles  22:41

Yeah, and I think I've also seen something similar in sort of in relation to shifting political paradigms. So say, in Hong Kong, there's been massive curtailment of civic space and civic freedoms. And so there can be a sense of the future is no longer ours as a disenfranchisement. And there's also, I mean, I've been part of a collective effort to bring communities together to build visions, in spite of that so in spite of top down government led planning, that leaves people feeling angry and frustrated and unheard, a movement to still build our own visions and find it sort of another track of of ways forward. And I feel those processes are extraordinarily empowering and just bringing a sort of overriding that sense of of of not being included, of not being heard.

 

Sophie Tidman  23:44

How is that sustained? Do you think?

 

Anna Iles  23:46

Through community? Yeah, through so recognizing that futures is not sort of a process that can be yeah, as you say, it can't be sustained in isolation. It doesn't really function so well as a as a standalone workshop. It functions best as a culture of practice, and that has to be sustained by people and and so through building that trust and bringing people together in a continual way to collectively think what, what is it worth creating? I think futures is both both sustained by community, but also it an engender community. So can bring where you have disparate groups, a sense of either sort of lack of commonality, but even adversity, futures can help people to find that space beyond the now that is sort of shared space of hope or shared space of vision that can create relations, actually, that reminds me there was, there was a poem I wanted to share with you that I think speaks a bit to this, the need for a new approach is the need to move on from that Savior mentality that we were talking about. Can I read this one to you please? It's the place where we are right. By Yehuda Amichai, who is a who was an Israeli poet who lived from 1924 to 2000 From the place where we are right, flowers will never grow in the spring, the place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard, but doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole a plow and a whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined house once stood. And I think what I love about this poem, or the line I love the most is the is the doubts and loves stick up the world. I think for me, it's that sense of the it's that destructive sort of constructive power of of both doubting and loving. We doubt the future is a place of doubt, because it's a place where none of us are expert, where there's all these uncertainties that could come about, could change, could there's so many different possibilities, but it's a place entirely characterized by doubt, but to which we're all tied. It's our future home, and so it has that potential to disrupt our assumptions today, but also rebuild and I find that transformative power very, very compelling and very empowering. 

 

Sophie Tidman  26:29

Yeah I love that as well, the doubts and the love I had a I had a discussion, bordering on argument, with some old friends recently old colleagues, about systems change and what's going to work Sophie? But what nothing's working, what works? And I immediately found the felt the need to give some ideas of what works. Have some answers, and we're continually going well, we need better narratives, more politicians. We need better visions. Maybe that's true, but I think what's more true is that we're all going to have to get used to not having to be children and having to be supplied with visions and to live in doubt. There isn't another way. And the idea that we could know what systems change is, how systems change is going to happen, is we're slightly from this idea of this rational perspective, or objectively knowing things

 

Anna Iles  27:18

Yeah and I think it's it's that perspective, and it's also our funding models, like we need to be able to quantify and measure change and impact and systems change is very hard to capture in that way. It's very hard to know. And I think we do, yeah, as you say, we need to learn to live in doubt and to find, somehow, find, there's this interesting tension between doubt and comfort, like, can we find ways to be comfortable with doubt? I think we've too long associated comfort with certainty, or many ways. and for many peoples, that's very understandable alignment, or need, the need to have financial security, food security. We talk a lot about security, and what if we can have a different relationship to security, or a different relationship to certainty? What does it mean to Yeah, to be embracing doubt? What? What does that mean for trust? What does that mean for human dynamics? 

 

Sophie Tidman  28:19

Yes it's when our when our certainty and our security has come so much from things and processes which are, after all, a lot of the time social constructs, it's returning to stability, comfort in community, which is more dynamic, relational, frustrating, other than living in community, isn't it? Not that's not idealize it, but living in webs of relationship rather than bubbles of comfort. Yeah, and the doubt, we really doubt that opens up because it's always moving. 

 

Anna Iles  28:48

Yes I guess we realize that we say we've been hankering after stability in material ways, and all of that unchecked consumerism is, is bringing us an instability, a global instability that is immeasurably greater, and maybe sort of, if we can let ourselves go into that web of uncertainty and communities other than, rather than, yeah, receding into pockets of material stability, then we can find a better balance.

 

Sophie Tidman  29:22

Um, I've been reading a lot about, well, a lot of mythoetic stuff, but also about tricksters. Recently, just holding up a book here. This is the Lewis Hyde book. Trickster makes this world. How disruptive imagination creates culture, which is kind of how I see what what you do, and sometimes what we try and do in OD is, is bring disruptive imagination into organizations. And I just love how he talks. Lewis Hyde in the book, talks about the gods. So, for example, in Greek mythology, Hermes, who's the trickster god, was the one that came last. Cos everybody's got their everybody's got their. regimes. Everyone's got their thing, everyone's got their boundaries. This is what we do really well. This is our realm. This is heaven, this is earth and but without trickster, that solidifies and it's rigid and it and it becomes sterile, and everyone seeks their own perfection, but there's no communication across those boundaries, and everything's very dry. So in lots of cultures, trickster comes along and disrupts the boundaries between heaven and earth, disrupts the boundaries between mortality mortality, between clean and dirt, sanctioned, what's not sanctioned and and has a totally different paradigm that's not not kind of no you're wrong. It's like a playful questioning, like the legitimacy of everything, not not going head to head on things at all, but sort of just weaving a bit of magic, a bit of happy accident around the place, bringing life, bringing movement. And it feels like that when I look at the world today, even trends that we that we might, on the face of it, think of quite in a quite fearful, negative way. Perhaps we can see everything, because those kind of things actually just trying to erupt some boundaries were things modern life has become too staid, too regimented to categorized. 

 

Anna Iles  31:05

Yeah, I love the trickster, so it's making me think of I wonder if this is I don't know. I wonder if others perceive Ganesha in this way. But it's making me think of Ganesha. Do you know the story? So Ganesha is Hindu God and one of the most loved who comes about because so he's the son of the Lord Shiva, or Shiva, and Parvati. And Parvati has asked her son to watch the door to the gate to their house while she has a bath, and she hasn't told Shiva that she's doing this so Shiva would comes back, and he doesn't actually know this is his son. He's been away traveling, and he comes back and there's this little obstinate boy at the gate, saying, No, you can't come in. And he's like, I'm sorry, this is my house. The boy's like, No, he can't come in. I've been told you can't come in. And eventually gets frustrated and cuts off his head. And Parvati is distraught, and Ganesha, I mean, Shiva, realizes what he's done when she tells him and says, I'll go and make it right. And he goes and gets an elephant's head and puts it on the baby, and all is well. But Ganesha is sort of the, it's a very funny little, little like cheeky boy, and also God of clarity, and there's a, sort of the third eye and sees, and sort of, you have this trunk, and maybe with the trunk, he clears the way, sweeps the fog, sees what's coming. And I guess I feel a bit like that with, as you say, the role of the trickster. It's like seeing beyond the nice, neat boundaries we make in terms of what's clean and what's dirt like so much of like, that's one of the fundamental errors, I think, in our in our world, is that we've we've categorized things as dirt and stuck them in landfill, which is completely blind to the fact that we live on a round planet where there isn't it's not like we live in a flat shelf and can push it off and it's gone like it comes back to us. It's coming back in the oceans and and so there's a real there's a greater clarity in disrupting those neat categories than there is in in the the fictions we spin for ourselves

 

Sophie Tidman  33:15

And we haven't found a way of doing it, in a ritual way, in a way that's connected to the sacred, like a lot of cultures, indigenous cultures, cultures before us, do we? We push it to the sides, and we like a lot of tricks to God. When they've been translated during times of colonialism, they've they've been translated as the devil, like Loki in Norse mythology, yes, and like in North African or West African culture. So yeah, so ways of ritualizing it in in organizations, perhaps starting there, but you could I see even comedy, for example, lots of lots of women's comedy. I really enjoy today, in the last 10 years or so, because it's sometimes very shocking, and I enjoy that and very sexualized and very kind of obscene sometimes, which is traditionally quite trickstery, and it shocked people coming out of women's mouths. So I enjoy that energy. I'm always just quite drawn to it. So I think it's coming out in lots of different ways in society, but it's not, it doesn't have that purpose, that sacred purpose, often, that makes it more meaningful and not just disruptive and or funny

 

Anna Iles  34:24

Yeah, that legitimizes it, yeah. 

 

Sophie Tidman  34:27

And sort of shifts a more fundamental level.

 

Anna Iles  34:31

I mean, there's such a need for for breaking taboo, isn't there for enabling? I mean, it's enabling people to talk about their bodies, enabling. I mean, you're making me think so much for my little boy, Tristan, who's a cheeky soul, and he was on the phone to his grandparents, who were quite conservative, and at the end of the call was like, bye, bye, poo poo. And afterwards, his dad said to him the next time you speak to Granny, please don't say bye, bye, poo, poo. She won't appreciate it. And his response was, I have to it's funny. Yeah, I just love that compulsion towards humor in him. And thought, actually, I mean this. Okay, so it's funny. I don't know if it's just always funny, or if it's funny because he's already picked up on some taboo around bodily processes that that, yeah, he has to learn about his body, and that's exciting and new and just part of who we all are, and not wanting to take away the humor of it, but we need to, why is it so bonk. I loved it. He was just like, sorry, I have to do this. I have a higher order. 

 

Sophie Tidman  35:49

I love how children are so principled sometimes, according to principles that were previously unknown to me. So do you when you do this work, I imagine there's some resistance. How does it come out?

 

Anna Iles  36:02

Yes, there can be resistance. And I mean some of these frameworks, including three horizons, which we started with, with the mountains, have been developed by people very mindful of that resistance and with a sense of wanting to hold it and transform it. So saying three horizons, one of the approaches in facilitation is recognizing the voices of the three horizons, so recognizing that some of us in the room will inevitably be people who stand for and attach and are attached to the status quo, the managers. Some will be the visionaries, and some will be the entrepreneurs and encouraging those different voices to come into dialectic, through through that recognition, legitimization of them, and also through role play, so inviting people to play the role of the manager and to play the role of the vision in the entrepreneur, even if that's not your natural bend , and To through that to recognize the challenges in each of those positions, but also the fact that actually we we need all of those positions in a way we can be more constructive together. So that's one way, I guess. Another way we work with resistance is in scenarios. So often I find it tricky introducing people to the concept of scenarios. People, some more inclined to try and identify the most plausible scenario. And I'm often encouraging people to let go of the need for plausibility and to embrace scenarios as fictive tools to the imagination and to building strategic resilience to disruption, and that if you're the aim is to become agile or expert in imagining what you might do in a what might feel a highly implausible or extremely disruptive scenario, and that that is how you're going to build resilience, rather than through putting your bets on plausibility. And so it's really important to work with the resistance in the room. And I find the processes can can really support people to come through that resistance. So say, in Hong Kong's protests, and I was working in with both sort of three horizons and scenarios to support people to think strategically about where different actions might lead. And one of the, one of the outcomes that was seen as really implausible was the rise of apathy in a context of clamp down. And that I'm not sure about apathy, but the the with the realm for sort of civic protest gone, there is, there is a need to work in a much more confined space, or in a very different space. And I think there was a recognition through that, that the Yeah, that working with seemingly unlikely scenarios can help the movements find new ways forward, and whether that's underground or just different tracks

 

Sophie Tidman  38:59

Yeah because what you're asking people to do is not a predictive exercise, is an imaginative exercise. And actually, and this is why I love futures thinking, I think it could add a lot to OD, who is incorporated a bit more systematically. Is it it gives containment for that, because it's quite anxiety inducing people. Whenever we ask people to do creative exercise in the organization, there's always a few who are like, won't be good enough. What do am I supposed to do this? What supposed to look at look like? So kind of having permission in organization, creating those ritual spaces for imagination, you know, for people to say, the kind of the wild, the crazy, the taboos, there was that there's a story we often use they're in. It's from the Second World War, where people, group of soldiers, were stuck up a mountain. They'd been they'd got lost on the in winter, on the snowy mountain talk it was in the Alps for several days, and they didn't have, didn't have a map, and they thought they were going to die up there. And then somebody found a map. They found the map, and they were like, Oh, great, we can. We can find our way back now. And so they did. And when they got back to base camp, they found out that map wasn't the map of their area. It wasn't, you know, but the the idea of having a map, they had a belief, yeah, and that was containment enough to kind of, you know, help them move.

 

Anna Iles  40:08

Now, that's wonderful, yeah. It's yeah. It's like having a charm, isn't it? Yes, yeah, yeah. Ways to back that trust in in uncertainty. Maybe trust is all we need, or movement, in spite of it

 

Sophie Tidman  40:21

Yeah, I wanted to ask you, you've been, you've been working in futures for, I don't know, is it over a decade now? 15 years? 

 

Anna Iles  40:28

Yeah, yeah, about 15 years, yeah.

 

Sophie Tidman  40:30

How has it changed you? How has it affected you, your personal life? 

 

Anna Iles  40:36

So I think as a combination of futures and life coaching. I think I have personally become much more resilient to uncertainty, and in some ways, I think I was always drawn to it. I've always had an adventure spirit, and I think that's what attracts me to to futures. I can find stability and comfort a bit boring and liked. I like possibilities. I like the unknown. I like the sense of firing off many different arrows and seeing what lands, and that sort of endless creativity without necessarily conclusion. And I think maybe because I've always been a bit skeptical of of neat narratives I am, I've been drawn to it, and yet it's easy for that to be the case in when you're not attached to any thing, any particular outcome. And yet we all have attachments in our lives, and there are all things that disrupt us and that we would grieve to lose. And so I think there's been, there's been a few moments in my like, in the last decade, say, um, where I've needed to really let go of something twice a country where I've been living and two or three times a job, and just embrace the unknown. And do you think that that longer game and that recognition of we can't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Like we will have to make it we'll have to mold it into, I'll have to mold it into what I can from here. And that could be many things, and something will emerge. I think I've been I think I've become much more comfortable in that space of of unknowing, which I also recognizes a privilege. Yeah, I think there's something else, 

 

Sophie Tidman  42:25

We're probably at time, but this has been very far reaching. I've really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you, Anna

 

Anna Iles  42:31

Thank you, Sophie, yeah, you've made me want to look into any things more. So I want to fix the book that sounds great during time.

 

Sophie Tidman  42:41

Yes, I've really got to try the three horizons model again. I used to a long time ago, but I think it would be, yeah, fabulous to use with some clients again soon. Yeah, really grateful, really grateful for this conversation, really appreciating you and everything you bring. Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure. Thank you.