“The future doesn’t happen to us. We create it with the decisions that we make today. What the future needs and deserves is for each of us to be smart about what’s coming next and to build that future muscle.” – Trista Harris, FutureGood
When building a collaborative strategy or working through your implementation plans, it might feel like what you need most is a crystal ball (or a mystically accurate Magic 8 ball) to reveal which activities will work, which won’t, and where you can pivot so you and your partners can keep making progress. Moving ahead while surfing through ambiguity and questions like, “what will happen if…” can make the process of working together even more uncertain and stressful.
The practice of futurism can be helpful when working through questions about where your collaborative work can go, and how your work may be affected by shifts in , political, financial, environmental, and other conditions.
In this new podcast episode, we explore how futurism can be used by collaboratives. We talk with Trista Harris, President of FutureGood, an organization that supports funders and nonprofits by tapping into future thinking. We discuss how these practices can support scenario-planning, risk mitigation, and imaging what an “ideal future” might be.
In the discussion, we also explore the future trends that collectives may need to consider, including the impact of artificial intelligence (AI), disaster planning, and imagining a bright future when facing daunting challenges.
Ways to listen: You can listen below or on your preferred podcast streaming service, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Simplecast, iHeartRadio, Amazon, and other podcast apps.
Please find a transcript of this talk further down this page.
Resources and Footnotes
More on Collective Impact
- Infographic: What is Collective Impact?
- Resource List: Getting Started in Collective Impact
Music
The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.
The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.
Listen to Past Episodes: You can listen and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Simplecast, iHeartRadio, Amazon, and other podcast apps.
Podcast Transcript
(Intro) Welcome to the Collective Impact Forum podcast, here to share resources to support social change makers working on cross-sector collaboration.
The Collective Impact Forum is a nonprofit field-building initiative that is co-hosted in partnership by the nonprofit consulting firm FSG and the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions.
In this episode, we’re exploring the practice of futurism. We’ll be talking about how futurism can be helpful when working through questions about where your collaborative work can go, and how your work may be affected by shifts in political, financial, environmental, and other conditions.
To learn more about what practicing futurism really means, we talk with Trista Harris, President of FutureGood, an organization that supports funders and nonprofits by tapping into future thinking. We discuss how these practices can support scenario-planning, risk mitigation, and imaging what an “ideal future” might be.
In the discussion, we also explore the future trends that collectives may need to consider, including the impact of artificial intelligence, disaster planning, and imagining a bright future even when facing daunting challenges.
Moderating this discussion is Collective Impact Forum executive director Jennifer Splansky Juster. Let’s tune in.
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Jennifer Splansky Juster: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s podcast. I am Jennifer Splansky Juster, executive director of the Collective Impact Forum. Thank you so much for joining us today.
I’m delighted to be the host of a conversation today with Trista Harris from the organization FutureGood during which we will learn about a practice of futurism and how futurism can be used as a tool to help place-based collaboratives in their work.
In these times of increasing challenge and polarization and what for many feels like uncertainty and volatility looking toward the future can be tough. It can feel difficult to lift up from today’s work and look ahead. And it can feel even more difficult to think through how what we anticipate happening in the future should influence what we do today. But Trista is going to help us understand what futurism is and not only why this is important but also how to begin incorporating futurism into our work. And while I know she doesn’t have a crystal ball, Trista is also going to share with us what she sees as some of the most important trends that are likely to be shaping our future. So without further ado, welcome, Trista.
Trista Harris: Jennifer, I’m so excited to be here with you today, with your listeners as well.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Awesome. Well, I’d like to start by having you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what brought you to your current work.
Trista Harris: So I have worked in nonprofits and foundations since I was 15 years old. I’m very passionate about the work that happens in the sector. I’ve led a foundation and I’ve led a membership association of foundations. I started my career on the fundraising side and so really appreciate what happens in the nonprofit part of the work. About five years ago I started FutureGood. We are a consulting firm that helps foundations and nonprofits build a more beautiful and equitable future and we teach them how to use futurism as they’re developing strategy. We also teach people how to build those futurism skills themselves.
Most folks—I’m a philanthropic futurist and a lot of folks have not met a philanthropic futurist. The way that I got there was during another time of volatility where I was a couple of months into my first job running a foundation, super excited, you know. You take a new job and everything is shiny and new and then a couple of months in is where you can see all the cracks and things that are broken that nobody talked about in the interview process. So we were a community foundation that needed to fundraise and what our cracks in the foundation were a donor base that was sort of taking a wait and see approach to a new executive director during a time where there was some financial volatility.
And so a couple of months after that we got a call from our investment advisor and he said, “Don’t panic,” which is a perfect time to panic. Our endowment had lost about 50 percent of its value and this was in 2008 during the crash and we had tried to be a good grant maker that made multiyear grants, and so suddenly we didn’t even have the dollars to make the grants that we had already committed to, which is not a great place to be.
I didn’t have any strategies besides crushing anxiety, which was not serving me well. But at that time, I ran into a book about how to use futurism to get a business advantage during times of crisis, and I was like, “Oh, this is a crisis. Let me jump in,” and so I read it from front to back and realized that those futurism tools were exactly what our grantees needed to be able to move forward through a really difficult time, and so we brought those tools to our grantees and the following couple of years they had 10 legislative wins. Our foundation funded community organizing. They had wins on things like alternative teacher certification to diversify our state’s teaching force, first in this country Homeowners Bill of Rights to deal with the mortgage foreclosure crisis, and then marriage equity in the state of Minnesota. So it really lit this spark in me that if you take the tools of futurism and you put it in the hands of people that are doing good for a living, they can transform the world. When I tried to find the futurists that were working in our sector, I couldn’t find them, and so built my own set of futurism skills to be able to bring that to the field.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Wow. So your org is really grounded in the same kind of work that the listeners are bringing in and that’s been your launching pad into how to bring futurism in.
So tell me, we’ve alluded to futurism. My hunch is that most folks listening probably aren’t super familiar with the term and the practice. Maybe let’s just start by building a shared understanding. In simple terms, what is futurism?
Trista Harris: That’s a great question. Just like how historians study the past, futurists study the future. Our work is not crystal ball or magic eight-ball work of sort of here is exactly what the future is going to look like because there isn’t a single predetermined future. There are many possible futures that are based on the decisions that we make today. I think a lot of folks get stuck in this place of the future is a terrifying thing that’s coming towards us, and really it can be a beautiful place but we have to make different decisions today to actually make that future happen. What a futurist does is we help you make sense of those possible futures, so we help you clarify what futures are possible and what are the sort of factors that make it more or less likely that a particular future is going to happen. We use those trends to sort of determine what is possible, probable, and preferred in the future. At FutureGood, most of our work is really focused on that preferable future. The social sector exists to change the trajectory of the future every time you fund a program or every time you propose a public policy or you start a new community initiative, your intention is to make the future better than the present. So what we help organizations do is make that picture of the future very clear and then develop a strategy to get there.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: I love that. It’s much more, or very understandable to break it down into terms that folks are quite familiar with. One of the things that I’ve heard you talk about when you talk about futurism is that you share some of the habits that people can use to bring futurism into their work. Can you say a little bit more about what some of those habits are?
Trista Harris: Yeah. I think when a lot of folks think about futurists, even if your organization has worked with a futurist which a handful have, often the frame is we need to bring in a futurist to tell us what’s coming next. I will say a lot of futurists encourage that because they get paid a lot of tell you what’s coming next. So they’re like, “This is too complicated. Let me tell you what’s coming.” But really it is a simple set of habits that if you practice them consistently it can help you both predict and shape the future, and I want everybody that is working to make the future a better place to use these skills because it makes you much more effective.
We have a framework that we use at FutureGood called Stop, Look, and Go to incorporate futurism into your work. So Stop is stop loving the problem. I think often what we do is we spend most of our time and energy describing the racial gaps are this big, the homelessness problem involves this many people, foundations are the chief problem levers in the field. That’s what grant applications do is sort of lay out please describe to us how this problem is so much worse than whatever somebody else is bringing forward to us. What we have to do, the first part of the future frame is to stop doing that and instead have a picture of what it looks like if it’s fixed. If you are a hundred percent successful meeting your mission, what does the world look like as a result of that work? So we’ve got to get out of this problem-loving space.
The easiest way to do that is if you’re hosting a meeting or if you’re writing a report, don’t make the problem the guest of honor. Don’t spend all of your time and energy really digging into here’s all the things that are broken. People have come to your meeting or they’re reading your report because they know what’s broken and they’re already on board with you. You don’t have to convince them. I think often, especially in collective impact efforts, we spend so much of our energy trying to define the problem or how large the gap is so that we have a starting point when we’re trying to measure in the future, but by the time you actually get to doing the work you’ve worn everybody out with the measurement piece and you never get to the action part.
So we encourage people to start with that picture of success. Look is about making time for the future in the present. There’s a saying, “The future is already here. It just isn’t evenly distributed,” or, “Today is giving you clues about tomorrow.” There are things that are happening the present that are giving you a picture of what the future could look like. It could be one town over. It could be in another country. It could be another organization. There is a place that’s already living the future that you want to create. Look is about paying attention to those signals. The last is Go, which is being willing to try new things. So you’re learning things in this Look step that are telling you what the future can look like. What are you going to do differently as a result, and how do you share what you learned, the good, the bad, and the ugly?
I know your audience has all been at conferences where people love to share their successes. Here’s the thing and it went so great and we’re so proud of it. I love those sessions because I love successes in the field. But let’s also talk about the places that we bumped our heads and the places that it didn’t work because you’re going to prevent somebody else from doing that. And then I think the easiest thing to do because often I’ll hear from folks, “I am too busy with the present to think about the future.” What futurism allows you to do is to transform the activities that you’re doing in the present. So when you have a clear picture of the future a lot of the things that are on your plate probably shouldn’t be on your plate because they’re not aligned with that picture of the future.
So we encourage folks to set aside just five percent of your time for the future, a couple of hours a week, Friday afternoons are my favorite when it’s a little bit quieter. During that time set a Google Alert for yourself, future of whatever thing you’re interested in, future of early childhood, future of neighborhoods, future of Minneapolis, future of self-driving cars, future of sidewalks, whatever your thing is that you are concerned about. Set this future of Google Alert and what it will give you is a constant stream of information about what people are thinking about what’s coming next, usually a really positive frame of what’s possible in the future. Read those articles and create a notebook for yourself. I prefer electronic notebooks like Evernote and you clip the article and then write notes for yourself. What might this mean for my organization? What might this mean for our collective impact effort? What might this mean for kids that live in the community that I care about?
And it’s even more powerful if you could get multiple people in your organization to start to collaborate together on what these things might mean. So for some of our clients they use Slack or Chatter and Salesforce, that sort of thing where somebody will post an article and they’ll use the hashtag, Trends, or something like that, hashtags Signals of the Future, and they’ll link the article and then they’ll write notes and they’ll say, “Hey, I think this is how this might impact your X, Y, and Z program.” Then your colleague reads it and they say, “I’m actually seeing the opposite. I think it might look like this.” Different perspectives give you a clearer picture of what’s possible in the future, and so when we start to do this work together it means that we’re more likely to create a picture that’s useful for our organizations.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: That’s just some really helpful practical advice and I hadn’t ever thought to set a Google Alert for future of specific topic as a prompt for learning and reflection, and I know many folks that we work with talk about being learning organizations or having a learning culture and what a nice way to orient that learning, at least some of your learning time towards the future, what are we learning about what might be possible in the future.
Trista Harris: I’ll give you one caveat to that. So I find that that future of whatever that word is consistently gives you real positive pictures of what’s possible in the future, which I think is necessary as we’re doing our work. We have a program called FutureGood Studio where we train people on how to use futurism in their work, and one of the students came and said, “I tried to do that and all the articles were so negative. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.” I said, “What are you looking at?” And she said, “Future of climate change.” And I was like, “OK, well, for that one, you have to say like, ‘Future of positive technology around climate change,’ or ‘Future of climate innovations.’” There are a couple of things where there is so much conversation about how terrifying that future is that you need to adjust some of the words so that what you actually get are really useful tools that help you move forward. I don’t think it’s healthy or useful to be constantly worried about what’s coming next. I think we need to get excited about what’s possible. So if you find that you set up your Future Of alert and it seems a little bit negative, see if there’s some things that you can do to the words that help you get a more positive stream of information coming.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: That is a very helpful caveat. Thank you. I wanted to follow up on one other thing that you said, Trista, around being sometimes—I think of it as like asset based and asset framing and not as you said stop getting, stop loving the problem. You gave the example of how sometimes we do our planning processes by trying to understand the disparities. When we, at the Collective Impact Forum, talk about what it means to do equity-centered work, one of the things we say is you have to start by looking at the baseline data and disaggregate it. For example, to look at the problem so that you know how to target your solutions. Help me square how that fits with what you’re saying around stop loving the problem.
Trista Harris: Yeah, for sure. So when I ran the Minnesota Council on Foundations,we had a number of foundations, sort of collective impact projects that we were managing, and I noticed this pattern where every single one of them would start with a sort of assessment of who else is funding in this area, what do the demographics look like, how big is the problem, has a report been written about this, should we write a report about that? And consistently like clockwork, a year or two into the process they would still be trying to understand the landscape and they would start to lose participants who noticed the next great shiny community issue and jumped to that where they would also start with doing the landscape. So we had a sort of minefield of projects that were just starting where everybody was just in that problem space. I definitely think it is important to understand the scope of the problem that you’re working on, but I think it’s important that that isn’t the place that you start your work. And so when we do strategy the first thing that we do I we bring together all of the collaborative partners, community members that would benefit from the program, board members, all of those sort of things, and you envision what the future state looks like 30 to 50 years in the future. So if you’re a hundred percent successful, what’s different as a result of your work? I think in many efforts if you start with describing the problem and then you immediately go to here’s our set of solutions, what might be happening is everybody’s working on a different vision of the future. And you’re all working really hard but you don’t have a shared picture of what success looks like and so you can’t ever get there. My favorite quote about this is, “If we can send a man to the moon, how come we can’t solve poverty?” Well, you know if you have sent a man to the moon. He’s there. And when you’re solving poverty, do you mean in the U.S.? Do you mean internationally? Do you mean just for families? Do you mean for individuals? Do you mean the current federal poverty line? Do you mean a living wage? What do you mean? And I think within many of our organizations and institutions we have this fuzzy picture where each of us feels like we’re super clear about what we’re doing, but when you start to untangle it, you realize that those visions of the future just actually aren’t aligned at all so no wonder we’re not making progress. With the organizations that we do strategy with and they’re developing this 30- to 50-year vision of the future, there’s a couple of things that happen with a really long timeframe. One, it’s no longer your problem, the person that’s doing vision, because you’re not going to be running the organization 30 years, 50 years from the future, so it’s about legacy and it’s about your highest hopes about what’s possible and what’s the transformation that you want to see. You also, when you have a long timeframe, you’re actually much more hopeful about what’s possible in the short term. We get very incremental. The secret of it though is after you’ve had that 50-year vision, it definitely doesn’t take 50 years to get there, and for most of our clients it’s about five to seven years to get to that ideal future because what you needed is a clear roadmap and a clear direction that everybody is pushing together that speeds your progress much faster than sort of starting with here’s how everything is broken, let’s dig into that. Let’s start with what success looks like.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Let’s stick on this topic of how you bring futurism in kind of collaborative strategic planning together. Sometimes in collective impact language we would say shaping your common agenda as your strategy. Say a little bit more about what strategic planning and strategy work looks like with this future framing.
Trista Harris: I think it’s actually most important for collective impact organizations so when we work with individual organizations, what we find is there are very differing visions of the future amongst board members, amongst senior staff, amongst frontline staff. Everybody has either slightly or very different picture of what the future would look like as a result of their work.
When you have a collective impact effort, imagine that but exponentially because suddenly you have 20 organizations with 20 different boards and 20 different senior leadership teams and 20 different direct line staff. Each of them has a different picture of what the future of the collective impact effort looks like, and so what a futurism frame allows you to do is, one, make that picture really clear, and two, it makes it worth the effort.
So people do not like change. Change is hard. You don’t want things to be different. I hate to break it to everybody but we’re living in a time of humanity of exponential change that is only going to get faster and more intense. That’s just the luck of the draw of when we were born in humanity so what happens with collective impact efforts is people say, “Well, we want to keep on doing our work exactly the way that we’re doing it. Yes, we’ll join this table as long as everything aligns with exactly the way that we’ve been doing things because it doesn’t feel worth it to transform your internal processes.”
What a futurism frame does is it gives you a picture of what the payoff is of doing something different, and when you see that vision of the future, it actually feels much more comfortable than the present and people are excited to transform and to move because they can see how that movement will get them to the future that they’re excited about. Often people about change will say, “Well, it’s the devil you know.” You can know the future if you develop a clear picture of what it looks like and that feels like it just fits better, and so you’re willing to transform and to change and to move staffing resources and to start new programs and get rid of programs that people love because you understand how it’s going to get you to the future that you’re excited about.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yeah, I could not agree with you more. I think it’s something we talk about at the Collective Impact Forum that sometimes we’ll say if the organizations that are participating in a collaborative are not actually changing their work because of that participation, then it’s not really collective impact work because otherwise it’s people around the table talking about what they’re already doing because if you’re coming together to see the bigger picture and to understand how the sum can be greater than the individual parts, organizations have to change, right? And what I’m hearing is that this future thinking, kind of imagining that change in the future might be a really helpful practice to get an increased willingness and understanding and motivation for taking on that kind of change so that really resonates.
I may be too literal here but I’ll just ask this question. You talk about envisioning the future 30 to 50 years. That sounds very exciting, slightly overwhelming but then if we kind of think, OK, we need to put a plan on paper to think about what are the goals that we actually think we can achieve. I think you mentioned something like a five- to seven-year timeframe for your goals which is not out of—unheard of for strategic planning but tell me, kind of take it down to that practical level for me around how that lands in the process.
Trista Harris: Of course. My team is so sick of my soapbox about why strategic planning has served us so poorly over a time. Traditional strategic planning starts with the looking backwards just like we were talking about with the collective impact efforts where we say what progress have we made in the last three- or five-year plan, what worked, what didn’t work, and we have staff really dig into the data of that, and then after they’ve done all that digging we say what do you think we can do in the next three years, and people set a very low bar for a couple of reasons.
One, they’ve been disappointed about progress previously and feel like, well, gosh, I’ll guess we could only do this much before, I think that’s only what we can do moving forward. The other part is everybody is so busy and their schedules are so packed and they’ve got so much to do. Most strategic plans, what it asks you to do is five percent more of everything that you’re already doing so it’s sort of like I think I could push a little bit harder and we could get closer to that future.
The other thing that happens in traditional strategic planning is it is a thing that happens every three to five years. An outside expert comes in and they are your sort of strategic brain that helps you think about what the future strategy of your work should be. They leave you with a plan that often sits on the shelf or in your computer, does not get pulled out until your executive director or CEO needs to go to the board and report back on progress, and everybody is really disappointed in a couple years and they go, “This doesn’t actually fit.”
With FutureGood what we do instead are a couple of things that I think are really important. One, you start with that future state so we encourage organizations to pull together a really diverse group of people that care about the organization’s work to together dream about what the future could look like without having to worry about how to get there. So what are your highest hopes 30 to 50 years in the future if you’re fully successful, and then we have them work backwards into the present and say what have we already done that is a signal of that future. What do we have sort of a muscle and a skill around that’s telling us that we actually can get there? It might be something that we do all the time. It might be a program that we did once a couple years ago and stopped doing but let’s develop that picture of the resiliency and skillset that we already have to get there.
The next piece are things in your current reality that are misaligned with that ideal future, and those are the pieces that you’ve got to let go of and stop doing. I will often tell our clients, you know, nobody is coming to you and saying build a toxic waste dump. They’re asking you to do fantastic things that will make the community a better place. The question that you have to ask yourself is is that aligned with the ways that we want to change the future, and if it isn’t, then it shouldn’t be your work and it shouldn’t be your program. It doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen but it shouldn’t be yours, and so as a part of our process what we have organizations develop at the end of the process is a strategy screen which is a set of five to seven questions that staff can keep on their desk or you can keep in a board book or on your computer so when somebody calls and says, “Hey, I’ve got an opportunity for you,” you can run through those questions and figure out very quickly if it’s aligned with our ideal future.
My favorite example of this is I was running this membership association, we have a big annual conference every year and one of our retired members reached out and said, “Hey, I really miss my friends from philanthropy. Could you host a reception for people that have retired so we can connect with each other?” You know, for any of your audience that hosts a conference, it’s really easy to set aside one of the rooms for a reception. You already have the food minimum, you’ve got all the stuff, it’s not a big deal, and so I brought it to my team and said, “Hey, love to do this for the conference and pretty much like tell me what room it’s going to be in.” And they said, “Could we run that through the strategy screen?” And I said, “What, for my stuff? I thought we just did that for your stuff. We’ve got to run it through for my stuff too?”
And the first question was how will this program or project improve the philanthropic practice of current foundation staff, and I was like, oh, it doesn’t, it doesn’t, and so it doesn’t mean that you say no to all of the great ideas, you adapt it, and so what we did is we had a program that was intended to diversify philanthropy where we had people of color that were placed in three-year positions as program officers or McKinley fellows, and we hosted a reception for the McKinley fellows with the retired folks from the field that were able to share lessons learned over their career and they all described it as the highlight of the conference. So what a clear future frame gives you is a picture of how you need to adapt and change to get closer to that future.
The other part that I think is really important for strategy is so you’ve got this 30- or 50-year vision of the future, in our process what we do is you develop a rolling three-year workplan. So the first year is very clear. This quarter so-and-so is doing this thing and we think this is what’s going to move us forward. The next year a little more fuzzy, the year after even more fuzzy, and the intention is that at least every year but hopefully every quarter your staff is building this process of looking back and looking forward so at FutureGood we use something called the 12-week year where we break our year into these 12-week chunks and we have really specific goals that we’re working on in those 12 weeks. We have a 13th week that’s in between, which is our time for reflection and planning.
When the world is changing really quickly, it is really important to be able to pause consistently and to say, hey, now we have a global pandemic, maybe our strategy for next quarter needs to look different. Here are the things that we thought were going to take a long time to do but we actually did it really quickly because conditions were right. Let’s change our goals for the rest of the year because we’ve already accomplished that thing. What happens when everybody is constantly engaged in strategy is, one, they’re being more strategic in their day-to-day work, and two, that progress happens so much faster which encourages people to stay on that path. So I think the difference when you’re using a futurism frame is that you’re able to aim a lot higher and get much bigger wins in a shorter time period because you’re using a longer-term frame for your work.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Trista, when you gave the example of, gosh, there’s a global pandemic, we need to shift our work, what are some signals that people might need to shift that might not be quite as obvious as a global pandemic?
Trista Harris: Yeah, I think some of it is are there things that you’re consistently hearing from community in this moment that you need to pay attention to, so let’s say you’re an afterschool program and people are consistently complaining about the time that the school day ends or they are complaining about something that’s happening with the social studies curriculum, and you realize that there’s a transformation that needs to happen in that moment to move forward but if you’re not attuned to paying attention to those repeating patterns, all of it seems like an individual thing that’s showing up. I will say on the pandemic piece, for probably about five years before the pandemic, I had a trend that I used to share that had a picture of two people in an airport wearing masks and it said global pandemics are much more likely, and there’s a ton of reasons why global pandemics were much more likely. We’re encroaching into natural areas, global travel is really cheap. It was not a question of are we going to have a global pandemic but when are we going to have a global pandemic. When COVID first started and it was clear that it was spreading, I was like, oh, that’s that thing. Oh, there’s a million ripple effects to that thing that I’ve been paying attention to and for me the first one was I was in a super cool coworking office that I was paying a ton of money every month to be in, and was like, yeah, I need to cancel that right away so I went into the office and talked with them and they said, “Is that about that COVID thing? We’ll shut down for two weeks and we’ll refund you but if you cancel your membership, you’re going to be at the end of the two-year waiting list and you’re not going to be able to come back.” And I said, “No, I definitely want to cancel it.” So I came back probably six months later because a piece of mail got delivered there accidentally and I walked in and the office is empty. All of the staff has been laid off. There’s a pile of mail in the middle of the super cool loungey living room that I’m digging through trying to find my piece of mail because the world transformed in the ways that we had been thinking about, what would happen if this sort of transformation happened. And so paying attention to future trends allows you to—yes, it’s stressful and it’s hard but you react in a way that isn’t reactive. It’s thoughtful because you’re made the decision at a period of time where you’re using the smart part of your brain and not the animal part of your brain. I think for many of our organizations that have been caught in the cycle of being reactive all the time, what futurism gives you is a low-stakes moment to imagine what’s possible and what’s coming next, and it helps you jump in differently than you would if you were reacting.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: So, Trista, you’ve shared a lot of really interesting insights and ways you’ve partnered with organizations to bring futurism into their work. Can you tell us a little bit about the kind of skills and capacities organizations need in order to do this work on their own and how they can build some of those muscles?
Trista Harris: Yes, I think it’s critical and I think everybody within your organization needs to build those strategy muscles. Often, we expect the CEO to do it or the board does it but it’s really about every single person in your organization being strategic about the work that they do. We had an interesting moment at my organization about a year ago where we do a lot of visioning and strategy mostly with large national foundations and nonprofits because it can be a really sort of expensive process to go through strategy and use a futurism frame, and we have a value about creating a more beautiful and equitable future, and I know that that happens through small organizations and organizations led by people of color. So when we had our staff strategy retreat, we were digging into this mismatch of we want to create this change in the world but the way that we have set up this model means that those organizations can’t work with us, and so we created something called FutureProof where we teach organizations how to use these skills within their own institutions and each organization develops a strategy team of five people that are leading an organization not just through a strategic planning or strategic visioning process which is the core part of the work but also how to continuously build that strategy muscle about looking back and looking forward. So we encourage folks in FutureProof to do postmortems after you finish a project or after a big thing happens. Let’s talk through what worked well, what will we do different next time, how do we take those lessons learned so that we can continuously improve. We also encourage organizations to do premortems so before you start something big, where are all the places this could go wrong? What is the worst possible newspaper headline for how this project ends, and how would we have gotten there? What’s the thing that really could go bad or could go really well, and what do we have to do in our planning piece of this work to make it move forward. So I think for many organizations what’s happened is everybody’s overworked and they are trying to do, do, do, but what they’re not doing is giving themselves that breathing room and that space where they can build that strategy muscle and then they can use it to inform all of the busyness that’s on their plate in this moment. Is this the right stuff that we should be doing or is it just activity, and the activity is making me feel like it’s progress but it isn’t actually moving our mission forward.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yeah, and I’m thinking about applying even that thinking not only in an organization but in a collective impact effort. I could imagine a steering committee bringing this practice in and doing premortems and postmortems and taking those pauses as a group which is—I haven’t come across steering committees facilitated by a backbone that brings that sort of thinking and planning and rigor into how they consider how their work evolves over time.
Trista Harris: I think one of the pieces that I’ll add to that is there is a ton of research about how your brain makes connections only when you’re bored so that’s why when you’re in the shower great ideas pop up because you have all these great thoughts that haven’t had the time to integrate together. As human beings we have ensured that we have these little devices in our pocket that keep us busy all the time. We used to wait in line and having nothing to do and now we’re checking email and we’re on social media, and I think that there is both a strategy for these committees or for organization or just for individuals that are in the field, what are the open spaces that we’re creating. If you’re hosting a strategy meeting, make sure the lunch isn’t programmed. Make sure that you’re letting people go for a walk in the middle of the day together and talk about what you’ve been sort of planning during the day because those are actually the moments where the transformative ideas show up that can move you to the next level but I think we think of that as a little bit too luxurious, and we’ve got so much work to do and it’s so important, we’re just going to squish the agenda together, and I think any of your audience members that have ever been to a conference know that all the good stuff happens in the hallway, and so it’s that in-between time where transformation happens and so build it in the front end.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: As someone who plans a lot of conferences, I think there’s good stuff that happens in the meeting rooms too
Trista Harris: Of course.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: I’m just teasing. You’re totally right, Trista. At the Forum we are big fans and especially my colleague, Tracy, always reminds us the importance of letting yourself get bored and that downtime is so important.
Trista Harris: I think in conferences, brilliant people on the stage get people’s ideas flowing, and then the space allows you to make it useful for the work that you’re doing so you’re making the connection from their big idea to your big idea, and that’s really where the magic happens.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yeah, I love that. So you mentioned how when COVID happened, you had helped organizations think about a future that may include a global pandemic as one of those potential trends. What are some of the other trends that you think need to be on folks’ radar right now particularly those who are doing place-based and local collaborative work in their communities.
Trista Harris: For sure. I think the most important one is artificial intelligence, AI. There is a lot of transformation that’s happening in that space that’s going to impact every bit of what it means to be a human being and what it means to live in community. I’ve been following AI for probably the last 15 years or so and until the end of 2022, all the tools felt useless so I would go and I would download and I would learn how it works and then I would interact with it and it would create something and I would go, I could have just done that myself. This is a lot of effort for not a lot of benefit, and then at the end of 2022 when I tried ChatGPT, I was like, oh, OK, well, we’re here, there we go. We’ve hit the tipping point of usefulness and it is one an exponential curve, and so technology and AI in particular, the speed of it and the sort of usefulness of the processing doubles every year and a half, and so I can’t imagine what AI is going to look like two years from now. I think it by then will have transformed a ton of aspects of how we live and interact as human beings. I think our responsibility during this time is to re-envision what humanity looks like with tools that can do a lot of the work that people do so anything that is repetitive in your day, anything that involves processing information, AI is going to be way better at it than you are. What AI can’t do is create new ideas. The only thing that it can do is take what exists and make meaning out of it. Humans are great at coming up with new ideas and creating new art and creating new programs and creating new things, and so what we need to do is sort of unleash humanity in that area which I think in the collective impact space is going to be so, so important. So how are you utilizing AI to take things off of the plates of the organizations that are collaborating together so that there is space for real transformative solutions. I think what AI can bring us—the industrial revolution moved us from 80 hours a week to 40 hours a week of work. I think the AI and robotics revolution could move us from 40 hours a week of work to 20 hours a week of work, and I think what happens in a community space if suddenly people are working half as much, how are they engaging in parks? What does raising children look like? How is that different if work looks different? How do we take care of elderly folks in our community? How do we engage in our democracy? Suddenly it transforms the ways that human beings can be engaged. What we need to do to be able to have that future be possible are AI taxes and robotics taxes. We’re in a moment right now where companies are using these tools to maximize profits, laying off a lot of folks, expecting the people that are left to be able to hold all of the human work which is too much for people to be able to hold with a much smaller number of people. We need to have real conversations about things like universal basic income and what a safety net looks like in society but folks are very worried about AI and how it’s going to destroy the economy and how will families survive. I would really encourage your audience to dream about what the best possible future is with these tools and then what legislative transformations do we need to ensure that that future happens.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Trista, I don’t know how much this is your wheelhouse, but are those conversations happening? Are policymakers taking on these questions as they ought to be?
Trista Harris: Absolutely not. I’ll use my disappointed voice. I think the challenge with elected officials is that they don’t understand both how these technologies work and also how differently it’s going to work in just a short timeframe. The technologists know that but there is an economic incentive for them to allow—for them to ensure that there isn’t good public policy, and so we all need to skill up really quickly and understand how these tools work, understand what a strong framework, a legislative framework looks like for AI tools. It’s not about—I’ve heard a lot of conversation when ChatGPT came out about we need to ban these tools and we need to make sure that they’re not being used—the cat is out of the bag. It is impossible to sort of pull these tools back. I’ve talked to a lot of folks that work in the education space that are very focused on how do we ensure that students don’t use AI. They’re going to use AI so instead of assigning a student one essay about a book, assign 50 essays and have the students review the AI and noticed where it lied, notice where it was wrong, notice where it’s misaligned from what the student thought the book was about. Teach students how to interact with these tools because when you ban the tools what happens is only students that use school devices are impacted. Kids that have a computer at home will continue to use it, and if you try to use an AI detector, all a student has to do is write an essay with AI and then say rewrite this so that it goes around an AI detector and it takes about 10 seconds so there isn’t a way to prevent it. How do we ensure that students are actually really smart about how to partner with technology, how to push back when AI is racist, how to push back when AI is sexist, how to push back when AI is making things up and giving false sources. All of those things happen all the time. We need to teach our children and adults how to notice that and how to respond to it instead of just letting AI sort of run on its own.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yeah, we are in interesting times for sure, a good reminder that we need to stay current, right, and to be prepared not only as a society but individually as well. What other trends might you lift up beyond or in addition to obviously the huge impact AI is going to have?
Trista Harris: We’re paying a lot of attention to the future of democracy both locally and nationally and globally. There are some megatrends that are happening. In general, in society there are stabilizing forces, family, church, government that ensure that everything really stays the same, that it’s hard for big leaps and transitions to happen, and you can always rely on those things. Then we also have these accelerating forces, things like the economy, education, technology. Those are things that are intended to push us forward, and when you have both of those things in balance, what it gives human beings is a set of—sort of feeling of stability as we are exploring and transforming. What’s happening again in this unique moment in time is that those stabilizing forces, religion, family, democracy, are transforming in front of our eyes and they don’t feel very stable anymore, and so when I look at the future of democracy, I have a theory that our population has gotten too large for the version of government that we have. I also think that the Electoral College and those sort of systems that were really built out of slavery and other tools about making sure that not everybody has a voice when it comes to population are not serving us well when it comes to national policy, and I think we need to have real conversations about what does the democracy of the future look like in the United States and beyond. A trend that we are paying a lot of attention to is the growth of hyperlocal when it comes to democracy. That is actually the place that is really transforming what people’s experiences in their local communities looks and feels like. There are a lot of folks that are sort of using those tools to transform what’s taught in schools, and so really starting to think about what a hyperlocal strategy looks like when it’s on public policy. I remember the early 2000s that we would say, yeah, local is fine but things that really impact people’s lives, things like immigration and health and those sort of things, those are all determined on the national level and so that’s where we need to focus our attention but you have states that are refusing Medicare and people don’t have a hospital a hundred miles from them where they can deliver a baby because of very hyperlocal political decisions that are being made. So I think it’s really important for collective impact efforts don’t ignore the political piece at the neighborhood level, at the city level, at the state level. All of those things are, I would say, exponentially more important than they felt previously.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Trista, we’re going to have to do a follow up podcast on the intersection of local democracy and collective impact because I think there—our team has maybe unintentionally been using some future thinking to think about what is the role that collective impact effort can play when it comes to local democracy and things like if you’re working on an education effort, a cradle-to-career effort, and you have goals around things like closing an achievement gap and creating equitable space in the schools, are you activating citizens to vote and to try to get the school board in place that’s going to support goals that are consistent with you effort so things like that where there are actual strategies that collective impact type efforts and place-based collaboratives can be taking on to try to shape the local democratic institutions and representation that is in place so just like another thing we’ve been thinking about that’s really—I hadn’t thought about it as futurism but very, I think, aligned with what you’re seeing.
Trista Harris: I will say the other trend that we’re paying a lot of attention to is disasters in general. Climate change is completely transforming what our cities look and feel like, and I think when it comes to a futurism frame, understanding what natural disasters are possible and probable in your local community and how do we ensure that we’re building the resiliency that’s necessary before that happens. So which nonprofits are going to be the ones that show up right away if there is a wildfire in your community or if there’s a flood or if there’s an earthquake. We already know who those organizations are. How do we ensure that they preemptively have that space and capacity to be able to care for a community? How do we build the built spaces in our community to be really resilient moving forward? So I can’t tell you how many times I hear on the news we had a once-every-hundred-year storm. Yes, and you had one of those last year and you had one of those the year before so there is a different level of infrastructure that’s needed in our cities, and then also civic disasters. Police murders are a civic disaster. The Flint water crisis is a civic disaster. When we can’t rely on our civic institutions, that creates disasters in our community, and so where are those broken places in our society, collective impact efforts can shore those places up and make it less likely that those disasters will have as significant of an impact as they would have if we weren’t thoughtful about it beforehand.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: I hadn’t thought of the term civic disaster, like a natural disaster but it makes a lot of sense. Thank you for naming that for us. This has been a fascinating and extremely helpful conversation, Trista. Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you’d like to share with folks today?
Trista Harris: What I would leave with your audience is, you know, the future doesn’t happen to us. We create it with the decisions that we make today. What the future needs and deserves is for each of us to be smart about what’s coming next and to build that future muscle. When I started FutureGood in 2018, I was on the sort of speaking circuit of all the social sector conferences and I can’t tell you the number of people that said I’m so glad you’re paying attention to this, I don’t have any time for the future but that’s great you’re doing it. I hope what 2020 has taught us is that each of us actually has a responsibility to understand what’s coming next, and so at FutureGood we have FutureGood Studio where we train people on how to do individually use futurism in their work, and then we have FutureProof which is to help organizations bake futurism and strategy into all of the ways that you’re doing the work moving forward but for your audience, just setting that Google Alert and just starting to flex and to build that muscle and have conversations with your peers in your organization about what they’re noticing and what they think is coming next, that is what transforms the work that we’re all doing so that we are not reactive. We’re proactively creating that more beautiful and equitable future.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Trista, I know folks are going to want to learn more so where can they continue to follow your work?
Trista Harris: If you connect with us at wearefuturegood.com, you can download a free copy of my book, FutureGood, that teaches you how to do this work. We also have a series of free webinars that we do every month where folks can jump in and think about scenario planning around elections or how to transform strategy within your organization. We’re really trying to build this future muscle throughout the field and so that’s the best place to get connected.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Wonderful. Thank you for joining me today. I am so glad that we were able to bring your expertise into the Collective Impact Forum podcast. I thank everyone for listening and wish everyone a great day.
Trista Harris: Thanks so much, Jennifer. I appreciate everything you’re doing to create a better future and your audience is doing as well.
(Outro) And this closes out this episode of the Collective Impact Forum podcast. If you are interested in learning more about what was discussed, you can find links to resources in the footnotes for this episode. And if you’re enjoying all that we share at the Collective Impact Forum podcast, we encourage you to rate us on your preferred podcast platform, and share your favorite episodes with colleagues.
We would like to acknowledge that this episode was produced and edited on the unceded, traditional lands of the Coast Salish people, including the Duwamish, Suquamish, Stillaguamish, and Muckleshoot tribes. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the past, present, and futures of these tribes.
The Intro music for this episode was composed by Rafael Krux and our outro music is composed by Kevin Macleod.
In Forum news, we’re excited to share that registration is open for our fall workshop series titled “Essentials for Collective Impact.” This is an online workshop series focused on building practical knowledge and understanding around four key areas that support collective impact efforts. These focus areas are collaborative planning and engagement, building a data culture within your initiative, implementing and strengthening community engagement, and avoiding common challenges that can stymie the work of collectives.
You can register for the full series of workshops or just the topics that interest you most. You can find out more about this online workshop series in the events section of our website at collectiveimpactforum.org.
This is Tracy Timmons-Gray, Associate Director here at the Collective Impact Forum, and your podcast producer. I want to say thank you so much for listening, and we look forward to connecting with you more in our next episode. Until next time, let’s keep working towards collective impact.
