“We have an addiction to prediction”

Ian Curtiss:

Hey Graham, how you doing?

Graham Norris:

Doing well. Pretty good, Ian. How are you?

Ian Curtiss:

Good, man. Good. No, I'm thrilled. Thanks for joining us on Riskgaming. I'm excited to chat with you and hear all that you've been up to and delve deeper into your whole world of foresight psychology, and what that means, and how you're solving everybody's brain problems around thinking about the future. How did you get into this focus?

Graham Norris:

Sure. Well, it started when I was in China actually. So I lived in Asia for many years, for about 20 years, including the last eight years was in Beijing in China where I met you. And while I was there, I was really taken by the rapid pace of change. And I lived in other places in Asia which were changing quite quickly, but obviously in Beijing and China particularly at that time, maybe not so much now, but it was really changing very, very quickly.

And I had started studying various aspects of psychology. And for my doctorate, I decided to really get deep into how Chinese people were managing change. So the topic of my doctorate was really on change and adaptability in Chinese knowledge workers. And continuing that intellectual journey, looking at change and adaptability, you end up looking at foresight because you kind of realize that you don't need to wait for the change to happen before you adapt to it.

So that's how I started getting into not just change and adaptability, but also foresight, this slightly more niche area, and the techniques that people use to cast their minds more deeply into the future so they can get a better feeling for what's coming. And really the bottom line of that is making decisions because all decisions are about the future. And the better and more clearly we can think about the future, the better decisions we can make. So that's really how I got into that and how I sort of got on that trajectory to where I am today.

Ian Curtiss:

And so the reason I'm excited to delve into this with you is because obviously I'm sitting on the Lux Capital side of things where everything that Lux does is about the future. Futurism or futurists, they talk about people who aren't thinking about the future, and they try to get people who aren't thinking about the future to think about the future. How would you speak to that maybe gap or that difference of worlds?

Graham Norris:

There are definitely a lot of people, some people anyway, who naturally can cast their minds into the future, have a good feeling, a sense, because there's always going to be uncertainty there, but have a sense about what could happen and where they want to put themselves in the future, what they want to make of it. But I would say that's not the majority, and so maybe Lux Capital does very well because they're better at thinking about the future and seeing what could happen and positioning themselves. That's all you're really trying to do is maximize your chances of success. And if you find ways are successful and keep repeating those, then that's how you succeed.

So futurists come at it from an angle where yes, indeed, people don't necessarily think so clearly about the future. And there are various different kinds of futurists, of course. There are some that are looking at existential threats to humanity, so we're talking about really long-term things here, which would include global warming and nuclear winters and all these kinds of things, meteor strikes or anything else that can see the end of humanity.

And then there are more practical professional futurists who maybe engage more in what we describe as strategic foresight, who go into companies to try to help them think more clearly about what could happen because they might not necessarily be... And they maybe have a cash cow or something like that. They get in some kinds of processes where everything's safe and repeatable, but that means they're becoming blind to what could happen in the future. And I think that could happen to pretty much any company where you've got a very blinkered view of the future, that you could end up missing things, missing other things in sort of tangential worlds that could influence what you are doing. Or you find something that's successful, you just keep iterating on that and think you've understood the future. And of course, as soon as you think you've understood what's going on, then you're probably going to get blindsided by something. So that's really where those two worlds meet or diverge.

Ian Curtiss:

So it's essentially keeping in mind there's always other potential scenarios. You spoke to people getting too married to a specific scenario and then believing that that is the future that will happen. How does that different from agile thinking? Because the thing about this foresight world that's so funny to me is everybody's using all these different terms, so many people are essentially talking about the same thing. What's your take on this?

Graham Norris:

You have no idea, Ian. In the world of futurists, there are constant arguments about what anything should be called, including what the people should be called. Is futurist okay, a futurologist? There's a lot of arguments around the terminology. So we were talking there about thinking about single scenarios, and as a psychologist, I would say we have an addiction to prediction. We like to be able to have an idea about what we think is going to happen and then hang our decisions on that prediction for the future, which of course often can disappoint us because it's never going to turn out exactly like that.

And so in the world of futurists, there aren't that many psychologists. And so a lot of those tools are really to address a problem that hasn't been made explicit, and so when you look at scenarios or futures wheels or any other technique, they really address that issue of the psychological challenge of trying to avoid making predictions and try to look at all the possibilities of the future. And in the world of psychology, there aren't many people that look at the future. There are a few, but even in decision-making, it's a lot about the kind of mistakes that we make in how we perceive the current reality, not necessarily how we look at the future. And so yes, agile thinking is another way to perhaps describe how we need to maintain that flexibility to appreciate the fact that we don't know what's going to happen, but we should get our heads around the likely possibilities.

Ian Curtiss:

All right, so I'm married to a future. I think this is going to be the way it is. Screw anybody else who disagrees with me. This happens a lot, right? People have strong emotional reactions when you challenge their prediction. Can you break this down for me? Why do people get so emotionally involved with these predictions that they have?

Graham Norris:

To have a sense of self, that we have an existence in the world. We also have to have a sense of continuity, that we were a person yesterday, and we are a person today, and that we're going to be something tomorrow. And if you then try to start breaking this apart and saying, "Well, actually, you weren't that person yesterday, and you are not going to be that person tomorrow," then you start to eat away at that sense of identity, that sense of self that we have. And so that continuity so we don't wake up every morning going, "Okay, who am I? What's my relationship with the world? What are my beliefs? What are my assumptions?" We hold onto those because we had them yesterday, and they're still valid today, and we expect they're still going to be valid tomorrow. And so when we look at those forecasts or predictions that we have about the future, people will really identify with them very closely.

What I would say is that there are two aspects of the future that we should probably distinguish. So one is the elements of the future that we can control, and the other is the bits that we can't control. And so if people have predictions about the future outside of their control, that might be one thing. If people have visions of the future about something they want to influence, something they want to create in the future, that's maybe something else. And I would say if you are getting dogmatic about the expectations about the things outside of your control, that's pretty unhealthy. You're going to be disappointed. Whereas I think it is okay to be somewhat obsessive about what you want to happen in the future as long as you're realistic about when to quit, when it's going off the rails. So keep being flexible about what your vision of the future is, whether it's still what you really want and whether it's still practical or not.

Ian Curtiss:

And so this gets to the crux of my fascination with your work, which is, you consider yourself an organizational psychologist. So you're not just working with individuals perception of themselves in the future, but an entire organization of how does the organization see themselves in the future. So there are systems in the sense of how does that compare to this sort of individualistic psychology of my perception of the future?

Graham Norris:

Sure. Well, an organizational psychologist really looks at how people operate in an organizational context. And so you might distinguish that from a clinical psychologist, for example, who looks at mental illness. But when you're talking about the collective there, then what I think is important is that everybody has a sense of what they want from the future, we can call it a vision or a objective, whatever you want, and that at each level there are visions or objectives that will compliment the ones above it and the ones below it. And so people in a middle level somewhere or another need to have vision or an idea about what they want to do.

I did this with a company that I worked at, the Chamber, where we both worked. And so there for the team, we created a vision for what we wanted that team to achieve. And that wasn't just for the team's benefit, that also had to tie into the organization's objectives of course, but it also supported the individual objectives of those team members within that department. And so by collectively creating that vision for the future was sourced from those people and also contributed to the organization as a whole. You can have a very robust sense of direction, which I think is the important part. When we lose sense of what we're trying to achieve in the future, then we can lose motivation and be drifting around. But with that clear sense of what we want to achieve and the direction that we're heading in, that's how we maintain the productivity and the value to the organization.

Ian Curtiss:

So in the sense, okay, so you give a vision to a team and you say, "This is where we got to go," but you've got to create the incentives to get everybody's daily work and weekly work to build towards that. So how do you do that in the sales team? Do they have weekly or monthly quotas that they have to meet in terms of sales numbers or calls, or something that's incredibly short term in terms of the structure of their entire job, but you want them to have a long-term vision to meet the entire goal of the company? How do you connect such distant visions with people's daily lives that they probably... How do you get them to make that emotional connection?

Graham Norris:

Sure. Well, that's the trick is to connect what we're doing in the present with what we want to achieve in the future, rather than just getting lost in to-do lists or emails or watching cat videos or whatever. But you're absolutely right, a company culture was not something you just dictate from the top. It's something you incentivize. It's the product, in fact, of how you set up the incentives. And so if you can, being able to incentivize people's long-term goals with what they're doing in the present would be the key.

Ian Curtiss:

I want to circle back to the details of the psychology of it. You've talked about parts of the brain that engage when you think of the future and how that plays out. Can you just walk me through of how the brain works when you're thinking about the future or yourself and the future and the science behind it all, if you will?

Graham Norris:

Well, there's all kinds of research about how we think about the future and how we perceive different timeframes. Perhaps the element that you are talking about there is the fact that, when we think of ourselves, we have a sense of self, and it engages certain parts of the brain. And when we think about other people, it engages different parts of the brain. And when we think about ourselves in the future, it engages the parts of the brain that we normally use to think about other people rather than ourselves. And so we think about ourselves in the future in the same way as we think about strangers or other people. And now of course, if you then ask yourself, "Okay, who do I care about more? Do I care about me, or do I care about this stranger in the future," you are often going to be caring a little bit more about me because I know me here and now.

And there are other effects as well. So there's a concept in psychology, which I just called the Magoo effect, and Mr. Magoo was a cartoon character who was very short-sighted, and so he could only see things right in front of him, couldn't see things further away. And they used to get in all kinds of trouble because of that, and that was the heart of the cartoon. And it's the same for us when we look at time. Things in the present or the very near future seem concrete, real, and important, whereas things further off into the future seem more abstract and less tangible and therefore less important to us. And so we always leave those things in the future in a fuzzier way. The things in the present seem much more important and more real, so we're always going to attend much more to those things in the present, no matter how important they actually are. And so that's another sort of example about how we can really misinterpret and undervalue the future.

Ian Curtiss:

So when I'm thinking about myself in the future and I'm married to that future, that prediction that I've made, I'm so certain that I will be President of the United States next year that any attack on that future is an attack on me and who I see myself as today.

Graham Norris:

Yeah, I mean, if you have a strong ambition to be President of the United States, as long as you are in a position where you can achieve that, then people may attack that. But I think it's okay as long as you understand how you're going to get there and if you really do want it or not. A lot of people think that they want things. And when you color that in for people, actually they're not so excited about it at all.

I've coached people at investment banks who are very alpha type people, almost conditioned to want to progress and succeed and win and all these kinds of things. And that means getting promotion and seniority and respect and kudos in their bank. And when you sit down with them and ask them, "Okay, so tell me about a day in your life if you become the head of your department," whatever it is they want to achieve. And they'll start to tell you about how they'd have to deal with a lot of difficult people and be pointing out fires and getting up early in the morning. You're asking, "Well, how is that fun? How is that success?" And they can be quite crestfallen when you really get them to color in that future so that it's not such a sketch anymore, but bring it to life for them.

And you find out that actually they'd probably be better off doing something else. I've coached people who wanted to be art fund managers, or they're working on a surf shop in Bondi Beach, investment bankers. And so what they really wanted was actually quite a bit different from what they thought they wanted. And so this for me is the crucial part is actually being able to really color that in and see that clearly, and also keep testing it. Is that still valid? Is it still what we want? Is the way to get there still the same way? Just thinking it isn't the same as doing it, and so the actions have to be there as well.

Ian Curtiss:

As you know, we have a Riskgaming initiative where we build out executive game experiences to war game out potential scenarios. A big part of that is getting people to experience this potential future where they have to make decisions. They get dopamine hits, they feel the cortisol stress of, "Oh no, what's going to happen? My plans fell apart," and to give them a deeper understanding of the trends and the trade-offs of a scenario. But one part of the games that we always try to build in is getting people to understand the deeper sense of complexity of an issue, of all the different things that are connecting and so forth.

Inevitably what happens when we build these games is they become these complex systems where all sorts of things can happen. You get different players, they're bring their own individual personalities to the game. You have the calculations that you put in the game, you have events that occur in the game, and almost every single time there's something that happens in the game that's like, "Oh, wow, I didn't expect that. I've never seen that before." Something emerges. And so this perspective of, "I'm trying to figure out the future," even in a game scenario that I've written, even I'm surprised, but what happens in this three-hour scenario of the future, let alone actual reality.

So there's such complexity. There's so many things that can happen. There's almost so many scenarios that we could try to think about. How do you go about getting people to work through that, just that complexity? And I've seen this with businesses like, "So many things could happen. We're just going to run with our forecast, and if it's all wrong, we'll just recalculate next year." I've heard that from businesses. I personally think it's a terrible plan. How do you deal with that?

Graham Norris:

In terms of all of that complexity and the uncertainty that it creates, I mean, we have what I describe as a psychological allergy to uncertainty, which kind of repels us from thinking about the long-term future. And there was research that shows that we find uncertainty very, very stressful. There was a study conducted at the University College London where they gave people electric shocks. Some people knew they were going to get an electric shock, some people knew they would not, and for other people it's 50-50. And for those who weren't going to get a shock, they were pretty relaxed, but the most stressed were those who didn't know if they were going to get a shock or not. They were more stressed than those who knew for sure that they were going to get one, and so it goes to show just how stressful uncertainty can be.

And so I think the games that you make, and I played a lot of games with you, not these particular games, but it's a fantastic way to experience uncertainty and try to get in a sort of safe way in a safe space and experience that and try to learn from the experiences of it. Because experience and the learnings you get from it are the fuel for your imagination in understanding the future, and that's how you base your decisions. I mean, what's your takeaway in how people are psychologically grappling with the uncertainties and how they're dealing with it with their actual actions and decisions?

Ian Curtiss:

That's funny that you ask. So I'm in Tokyo right now and ran a game here in Japan, and it was the most unique game that I've seen yet. As the players themselves described it, once I described to them of, I gave them read out of the outcomes and how the game went and everything, they said, "Oh yeah, this sounds like a very Japanese experience." That's what the players themselves said. It was an incredibly balanced, steady game. Very thoughtful, strategic, timely investments were made in the game, versus I've seen other games, people come in with guns blazing, throwing out investments left and right in the first scene. Or some just worry about the politics of the game. Others worry only about the finances and forget about the politics. This game was the most balanced.

And so what I've seen in that sense is people come in to these environments of uncertainty heavily biased based on their culture, the society that they're growing up in, or the silo of education that they've risen the ranks in. Consistently policy-minded folks play one way, the tech executives play another way. The British games that I've seen played are played one way, and now the Japanese games another, and Americans one another way. And so people bring such a predisposition with them into these games, this psychological allegory to uncertainty that seems to be very much based on where you are, your climate. So how have you seen that play out, this kind of cultural perspectives of the future and how people respond?

Graham Norris:

Well, you make an excellent point about the different perspectives on the future there because I made generalizations about the psychology there, which of course those studies tend to do. But of course, there is also a massive section of psychology which talks about individual differences and how we all see the world in different ways according to our personalities. And there's quite a famous tool from foresight called the Three Horizons, which looks at different perspectives on the future. So they talk about the managerial perspective, people who like the status quo and want to maintain that. And then there's a visionary perspective of people who want to disrupt everything and create a totally different status quo, a totally different reality in the future, maybe a bit more like an Elon Musk type perspective. And then there's an entrepreneurial perspective, people who want to change, but want to do it in a practical way to see how they can make things substantially better. And that might be to realize the visions of the visionary people, or it could also be to maintain the status that the managerial people are interested in.

And the important thing about looking at these different perspectives is not that there's good or bad perspectives on the future, but that we have different perspectives on the future. So the managerial perspective can give a sense of tradition, and the visionary perspective can give us a sense of hope, and that entrepreneurial perspective can give us a sense of practical progress. And so I think it's really important, and that's the real value when looking at collaborative futures, as we call it, collaborative foresight, that we bring together these different perspectives so that we can get a really good sense of not just what the future could be, but also that sense of continuity, when you have that sense of tradition that we are connected and in some ways growing from the past into the future. So I think these are all important aspects when you're looking at the future and also how you see it play out in these games.

Ian Curtiss:

So going back to that allergy of the future though, I'm curious from your research and working with all your clients and all these corporates, how do you see that play out in the organization? To what you just said, there's individual perspectives of it, but then there's an organizational culture, if you will, that I'm sure creates certain allergies about the future and unwillingness to discuss certain outcomes.

Graham Norris:

I think the important thing is, when you appreciate and you have empathy or whatever it is with different perspectives, then you can start to try to accommodate those perspectives as well. And it's not even necessarily that leaders have more foresight or are thinking deeper into the future. Sometimes as you get older, you can actually look less into the future, and it's actually the younger ones who are coming up in the company who are going to be the ones that can see the future a bit more clearly.

Ian Curtiss:

When have you seen risks of people too focused on the future and overly focused on getting to that next step? There's all sorts of stories of startups that believe that their tech is the future. They focus too much on the science of it and forget to cover the bills in the short term. It's simplest way to put it, but what have you seen in this regard from the psychological perspective, of course?

Graham Norris:

Well, it's really about those different perspectives complimenting each other. Definitely there are people who spend all their time, we could describe it as fantasizing about the future. And actually bringing them back to the present and actually getting them to do something can be quite challenging because they'll do something, but it's not really intellectually stimulating for them. They want to be fantasizing and creating more ideas about the future. We need to have people who are going to translate their ideas, assess them for their practicality, and then execute on those.

And so that's why you kind of need a blend of people. I don't think Elon Musk surrounds himself with other Elon Musk's, for example. He wouldn't get anything done. So by getting the right people doing the right things, that's how you achieve things. It's the same way as if you have a bunch of accountants just sitting around that they're not going to create a fantastic company because they're not going to be thinking about the big picture in the future. They're just going to be counting the numbers. So nothing against accountants, but that tends to be the kind of personality that you get in that situation. And you're absolutely right, you do find personality types do gravitate towards different kinds of functions, different kinds of companies, different kinds of roles in organizations. So getting the right balance is the challenge.

Ian Curtiss:

What's kind of the next thing in the foresight psychology space for you?

Graham Norris:

Sure. So I've been tinkering around with this idea for quite a while, but people after I give talks, they often come up to me really wanting to know another level of granularity about how to do these things, how to escape the noise of the present so that they can cast their minds into the future and stay connected with what they want to achieve, their ambitions, their objectives, their goals. I'm thinking about writing a book or something like this that tells people in a little bit more practical detail about how to do these things for themselves, how to address these psychological challenges.

Foresight has a wonderful array of tools. Like I say, they don't necessarily specifically address the challenges that people are facing, and so how to bring these down to a very practical level. I mean, scenarios is a fantastic example. Traditionally, scenarios is something that could take weeks, even months to produce, and they're very in-depth and in a lot of detail. And of course there's some value in that, a lot of value in that, but there's also a great cost in that.

And so what I really do encourage people to do is to engage in scenario thinking, which is a much sort of quicker and dirtier way of making scenarios, but it becomes a way of thinking. Because what often happens with these very large, complex scenario-building exercises is because people aren't normally thinking in this way, is that these scenarios get built and people go, "Okay, yeah, that's fascinating about this thing about the future." And then that goes onto a shelf, and then people get back to their to-do lists and the emails and all the other rubbish that they have to do on a day-to-day basis.

So what I really do encourage people to do is just think another minute or another day or another week or whatever into the future by constantly asking yourself, "What could happen? Not just what do I think will happen, but what are the possibilities? What are the possible scenarios there?" Just come up with, for whatever it is you're thinking about, don't say, "I think this is going to happen," but say, "Okay, that's one possibility. What's the probability that that will happen? And what else could happen? What are the probabilities for those?" Just by getting in the habit of doing that constantly, you then have a much better understanding about what could happen in the future. So that's really the golden thread in everything I do is just helping people just think a little bit further into the future. But what have you got planned? What's new for you in '25?

Ian Curtiss:

'25? Well, first we're going to finally publish our China EV game, and next year we've got a game under development around water politics and chip fab production in the on-shoring or near-shoring process back in the US, getting chips back in the US. So that's what I'm working on along with various other games, and we'll see where it goes from there.

Graham Norris:

Yeah, no, it's great stuff. It's great stuff. I think games are an excellent way of simulating what could happen and helping people do exactly what I just said, thinking through what could happen, and just that exercise gets that muscle working.

Ian Curtiss:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, Graham, thank you so much for joining us. This was awesome, and I loved the conversation.

Graham Norris:

Thanks a lot, Ian.

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