57: Forecasting the Future with Rachel Hatch

Hosts: Brandon Nappi, Hannah Black

Guest: Rachel Hatch

Production: Goodchild 

Media Music: Wayfaring Stranger, Theodicy Jazz Collective 

Art: E. Landino

 Instagram: @theleadersway.podcast berkeleydivinity.yale.edu/podcast

Hannah:    Hello, Brandon. 

Brandon:   Hello, Hannah, from the home studios of the Leaders Way podcast. 

H:            It’s true. Every time I sort of scan the bookshelves, my like, these are not decorative bookshelves. These are functional, which means sometimes the books are coming and going, and I like to kind of scan to make sure everything’s above board. I don’t know what could possibly be on the bookshelf that I would need to remove. 

B:            But Your studio is particularly studious. 

H:            It’s very studious. Yeah. 

B:            It looks just so put together and, like, your whole life is put together.

H:            Oh, well, that’s … it’s a charade. 

B:            Facade and charade. Yes. We are putting on our Imagineering hats today. 

H:            Lovely use of the word “Imagineering.” I’m delighted. 

B:            Yeah. That was especially for you. I don’t know that I’ve ever used that word in a sentence before. 

H:            Love it. Love it. Well …Thinking about the future. 

B:            What kind of future are you thinking about? Are there like … if you could change a few things?

H:            Glad you asked. Glad you asked. A couple weeks ago, I went to a church that I don’t usually go to, and there was a dog. I was very into that. The dog went up in the sort of … the receiving line for the Eucharist. I assume the dog did not partake, but that led me to think always there should be lots more dogs in church. That’s what I wanna see in the future. 

B:            Oh, which I think could be a kind of back to the future, because my understanding is that in the middle ages, right, like, you brought your livestock with you to church if you had no one to watch your livestock. Right? Because they might get stolen if you go down to the local parish and leave and left Bessie.

H:            For the record, I have the same feeling about babies. Like, there should be children and noise in church. This is not … we’re not, like, pretending to be something we aren’t when we show up in the house of the Lord. Okay? Rant over and ran out of breath.

B:            Okay. That’s your next book or article that could go on your shelf. 

H:            What would you like to see? 

B:            Okay. I mean, there’s just so much. I’m gonna say that I need the food in your … in your garden-variety Italian restaurant to be better. 

H:            Sure. 

B:            You know? So we’re here in Connecticut. There’s a lot of Italian-Americans here, and I just wanna say people we can do better than, like, generic chicken parm. The … all the veal dishes need to go away because they’re unethical. There, see there I said it. I just feel like we could step up. I feel like there’s a lot of playin’ it safe in local Italian restaurants.

               Number two, can we talk about, can we talk about Japanese knotweed? 

H:            What? Oh, the … oh, I’ve heard this rant. 

B:            The knotweed. That’s all I’ll say. If you know, you know, this is an invasive species of plant that’s taking over my natural environment here in Connecticut. It’s just destroying the world. I talk about this with my family maybe three times a week. 

H:            And what I was gonna tell the listeners is, if you’re ever in the car with Brandon Nappi, it’s a bit of a wildlife flora of Connecticut tour. You’re gonna know the names of every plant, which is great. Very Madeline L’Engle-coded. He’s a futuristic young person like that. 

B:            That is such a compliment. 

H:            Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, she has this whole thing about how, if you move to a new place, one of the ways you can feel at home, you already know this. Of course you do, is to learn the names of the flora and fauna that are native to your new place that you’re moving.

B:            Okay. So I’ve … I would fail the fauna category. 

H:            Come on. You know what a seagull is! 

B:            I know what a seagull is. 

H:            You having them in New Haven. 

B:            I mean, we’ve told the people the story that I thought chipmunks were baby squirrels.

H:            Oh, boy. Okay. We need to move on. 

B:            Okay. Sorry.

               Alright. We have the coolest guest joining us, Berkeley alum Rachel Hatch, the chief impact officer at the Institute for the Future. I’m gonna read you her bio because she has these layers of experience that she brings to this work on the future. While working at a private philanthropic foundation, she led community vitality grant seeking efforts, engaging in public private partnerships to garner place-based investments. Previously, Rachel served on the Institute for the Future’s leadership team and was a research director working with a wide range of corporate, government, philanthropic, and nonprofit clients. She’s the author of Museum Twenty Forty, Citizen Artists and the New Economy, co author of Hack Your Way to a Better Future, and a featured speaker for Forecasting for Alternative Futures for California. And I’m so excited about this conversation. 

H:            Yeah! She came and did a course or a workshop for transforming leaders and you just loved it. What did you love about it? 

B:            I love how she provided a kind of framework to help us think in a really thoughtful way about the future because sometimes I can kind of, fall down the doom rabbit hole. And so her path is very thoughtful. It’s wide-eyed, open-eyed about challenges, but also hopeful about ways in which we can create a desired future place, a future where equity and love and compassion abound. 

H:            Another really cool thing about Rachel’s work is that the Institute for the Future just created a custom forecast for the Diocese of Texas and the Episcopal Church. It looks ahead to the year 2035. So not only is Rachel one of us in the sense that she’s an alum of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, but she just did this project looking at the future of a particular diocese. And, of course, the stuff in there isn’t universal. It’s about a particular place. But we’ll link that in the show notes in case people are interested in some really practical, rigorous findings. And without further ado …

B:            Hi. I’m Brandon Nappi. 

H:            Hi. I’m Hannah Black, and we’re your hosts on the Leader’s Way podcast. 

B:            A Yale podcast, empowering leaders, cultivating spirituality, and exploring theology. 

H:            This podcast is brought to you by Berkeley Divinity School, the Episcopal Seminary at Yale.

B:            Rachel Hatch, welcome to the Leader’s Way podcast. We’re so happy that you’re here. 

Rachel:     Thank you. Good to be with you. 

B:            You have perhaps the coolest title of any guest ever. Right, Hannah? 

H:            That’s very possible. 

B:            Chief Impact Officer at the Institute for the Future. Tell us what that means and help us, please. Any questions about the future?

R:            Yes. It’s quite an interesting time to be thinking about the present and parsing the present much less future. Yeah. Yeah. 

               Well, Institute for the Future is a nonprofit with a mission of helping organizations and communities and leaders become future-ready. So that’s what we spend our time doing. My particular role there; I’m especially interested in how that can make the most impact for good, how to how it can contribute to a more equitable, more sustainable future. So my role as chief impact officer, I get to spend time really focused on community-based foresight, often place-based, people in a in a physical place, thinking about the future of that place from a wide array of perspectives. Sometimes community-based foresight takes the form of, you know, affinity groups who are trying to think about one kind of particular future and how to shape a preferred future in that sense. So that’s what I get to spend my time doing, and it’s often working in service of philanthropic organizations, large nonprofits, educational institutions. So that’s the part of … that’s the neck of the woods that I spend the most time with, at Institute of the Future. 

H:            That’s really interesting. And it dovetails actually really nicely from a couple other conversations we’ve had recently where we’ve been talking about the role that we can have in actively imagining the future that we would like to see and how that’s a really, like, tough muscle to work and really important. And you have to have an imagination of what you want the future to be like if you’re gonna try to enact any kind of change, in a robust way. I wonder, as someone who is has a theology background and is a futurist, do you have a sense of, I don’t know, trends that you’re seeing in society where you can predict that we’re going that would impact the church? Is that something you think about in your role at all? 

R:            Yeah. And I’ll start; we … you know, we in our practice, we make a distinction between forecasting the future and predicting the future. 

H:            I was wondering about the word predict. Is that …

R:            Yeah. Yeah. And it’s understandable. People think of, you know, a futurist or somebody who’s practicing strategic foresight that you would …  it’s understandable. They would think it’s about predicting the future. To us, the world is too combinatorial, ambiguous, uncertain to be able to predict the future with kind of point accuracy. You know, x will happen by y date. And that’s … you know, it’s interesting. It’s part of why we enjoy reading science fiction and yeah, telling ourselves stories. Like you were saying, Hannah, imagining the future. Right. It’s  really stimulating to do that. But the really practical value, I guess, you could say, of strategic foresight is more so about preparing for a wider array of possible futures. 

               We find, you know, people whether it’s a, you know, corporation, a government, an ecclesiastical structure, we all have these kind of default assumptions about how the future will play out. Whether we realize it or not, whether we make those assumptions explicit or not. And the work of really exercising your imagination is to, you know, generate forecasts which are plausible, internally consistent, and intentionally provocative views of how the future might be different. So that’s really how we see the core of our work in forecasting. 

               It’s funny you asked the question about the things that might impact churches in particular. My own kind of connection story with strategic foresight was in, was at–when I was at Berkeley Divinity School, and we were doing the Anglican colloquium series. And there was a guest speaker who came to campus. I think, Brandon, I’ve probably shared this story with you. It was Bob Johansen from Institute for the Future. He was doing a … coming to present a forecast that was on external future forces that might impact the Episcopal Church specifically. And I remember it so vividly because, you know, I was in my final year there. And so by that time, you know your classmates, you know your cohort very well, right? And I could have … I was kinda scanning the room as he was talking about things like how climate change might impact churches, how new media might impact churches. Yeah. And so this would have been in 2007/8 time frame.

               And, I, you know, as I scan the room, some of my classmates were like me, were leaning forward in their seats thinking … Ooooh, if this is if this might shape how things unfold, I really wanna understand it, in terms of what are those waves of change that, you know, we might wanna ride or at least just not get hit by. You know? Some of us had that reaction. Other people, you know, they had probably just come from their church administration class where they were trying to think about the physical plant and how to keep a church, you know, building functioning, how to run budgets with your vestry, all those kinds of things. And they were you know, some people were just “la la la,” you know, hands in their ears. I can’t. I can’t. You know, there’s enough, already. 

H:            Totally. 

R:            So that’s my first exposure to Institute for the Future. And Pam Wesley who had had been at Berkeley Divinity School, she’s the one who she said, you know, this speaker is coming to campus, and you think like he does, but you just don’t know it yet. So you need to go, you know, make sure you don’t miss this talk. And, you know, I met with Bob Johansson afterwards. He said, “Yeah. I’d like to learn more about your background.” I walked down, Canner. You know, I got–raced back to my, apartment, worked on getting a resume quickly together, and I handed it to him in the Yale Divinity School parking lot. 

B:            Oh my gosh. 

R:            Leaving town. And, that was how I how I found my way into the world of foresight. So I really credit Pam. I credit Berkeley Divinity School for bringing him for that colloquium because it’s really changed the trajectory of my life. 

H:            That’s so interesting. I’m hearing … I’m hearing several things. One of them is I should imagine you more like a weather person than a witch with a, you know, crystal ball. I wanna ask you about the word provocative, like, the purposeful provocation, I guess, with these forecasts. But, I also just wanna kind of camp out for a second on you wrote this piece in Reflections in 2011, this Yale Divinity School magazine. And I’m just thinking about how you’ve spent time now in this field as a futurist, and I wonder what that’s like to be able to look back on your career as a futurist. Is there any insight to be gained there? 

R:            Oh my goodness. It’s so instructive. Yeah. I think the practice of strategic foresight, it’s like a craft that you have to hone over time, and it’s taught, you know, through immersive learning, I would say, and it’s taught through mentorship. And I’ve been very fortunate to have strong mentors at Institute for the Future. I think of Bob Johansen and Kathy Vianne and Marina Gorbis, our executive director, Jean Hagen. So in the practice of strategic foresight, for us, it’s important to always look back at least twice as long as you’re looking forward. So we might be doing a ten year forecast that’s, say it’s on the future of mobility for an automobile manufacturer. We if it’s a ten year forecast, we’re looking at least twenty years back, and that’s because the patterns of change, you know, emerge over time. They start as weak signals perhaps, and then they start to pick up speed or there’s something that accelerates or, there’s something combinatorial that happens where maybe something was just percolating along slowly, but it really comes to the fore. My executive director Marina Gorbis, You know, as a refrain, she’ll note that you cannot be a futurist, a good futurist, without also being a student of history.

               So that’s essential. But the piece that you referenced in Reflections Magazine … so I really haven’t looked at it in so long. It was in 2011, looking 10 ahead to the year 2021, which now, obviously, we’ve marked that moment. And I titled it Already Not Yet: Hopes and Fears for 2021. And for me, the already … I mean, the theological concept of the “already/not yet,” is it’s just in my bones. So it’s part of how I understand my own faith, this liminal space. And I think a lot of strategic foresight is living in liminality. You know? It is trying to anticipate what’s coming, that you can’t necessarily point to and have facts about and certainty and hold tightly to. But nevertheless, it’s starting to, you know, emerge. It’s emergent. 

               So in that piece, you know, I was /// I’m just looking back, literally just scrolling through it as we speak. And, you know, a lot of the conversation because of the curation of that particular issue of Reflections Magazine, it was called, I Believe, Facing the New Media Explosion. So just as a contributor, I was talking about new media, in 2011. This was at a time when, you know, Facebook was starting to proliferate. It was no longer just for people on particular college campuses. It was it was … had become broader. And I remember, you know, some debates with people in my final year, you know, “Are we gonna stay in touch on Facebook or not,” you know, after …  “I think it’s awful. It’s gonna be the bane of everyone’s existence. It’s gonna cheapen social connections, you know, and then others.” “Okay. But you’re moving across the country, and I’ve spent the last three years with you. So how are we gonna stay in touch? Couldn’t we use this?”  So that was, you know, very much in conversation at the time. And I’ll just share one example that of a hope for 2021 that I was sharing in 2011. So this would have been, you know, like, three, four years into my practice. Mhmm. Five years in my practice as a futurist. So one hope for 2021, the churches will adopt more nuanced views of the Internet. Today, some within the church overstate the Internet’s potential as a great equalizing force that is free from gender, class, geography, and other factors. And I was noting at the time, you know, this view held by many technological optimists ignores the obvious digital divide access issue to the Internet in the first place. And it also seems naive about the way that the global Internet functions politically and economically. It’s my hope that people within churches will nuance their views in the next decade. And I’ll close with this. “The Internet didn’t just fall from the sky. Pivotal early decisions shaped its value and its functions and will continue to do so.” And then, you know, it goes on.

               And I … I’m just … I feel like I should scan this and see if I talked about artificial intelligence. And this one’s … 

B:            Oh, you get so many extra points if you did. 

R:            Only echoes of conversations that we’re having today. And in general, you know, I think there is a– I thought then, and I still think there is, a moral imperative for people to engage in curiosity about different technologies. Our organization is based in Silicon Valley. So when I went from New Haven, Connecticut to, you know, the Bay Area and Silicon Valley specifically, I couldn’t not, you know, ask these questions. And if you … if you spend any time in Silicon Valley, you know, you can walk in and out of a coffee shop, and there are six people sitting around a table who are inventing the future. They are, in in some sense, building the future that we would encounter next. And I really appreciate the keen observation of, a woman named Yatasha Womack, who’s a … an Afrofuturist. And she gave a foresight talk at Institute for the Future in 2023. And she just asked, very plainly, whose imagination are you living in? Whose imagination are you living in? And, you know, I find that such a provocative question and, you know, you walk in and out of those Silicon Valley coffee shops, and it doesn’t have to be that those are the people imagining some of the things that would be transformative. 

               You know, one big shift, you know, if you think of the impact of technology right now, you know, we’re seeing technologists and tech company leaders are having a really outsized impact on our political arena, regulatory landscape. And so we just … we have to pay attention, even if we don’t think that technology is our job, vocation, interest area. So yeah. 

B:            So I’m intrigued by your invitation to pay attention. I’m a gardener as as our listeners will know, and I spend a lot of time sort of managing the weeds. And I can easily get lost in the weeds. And I wonder if, if there’s the same kind of temptation in parish ministry. Although I don’t think we would ever wanna talk about the day-to-day operations of a parish as weeds, they do have their own demands and rhythms. And you can, gosh, you can spend fifty hours a week just keeping the lights on in a parish and doing all the wonderful things that priests do. Caring for people, celebrating the sacraments, managing staff, taking care of a building, all holy and wonderful. And you can do that really well and not pay any attention to the future, the changing landscape, what’s happening in our communities. And so there’s a kind of … oh, there’s a kind of parallel call, it seems to me, or maybe you have a different way of saying this, to both kind of keep the lights on and do what we’re doing, and do it as well and as loving as we can, but also to have an eye toward the changing conditions and to the horizon. You’re working with organizations all the time. How do you help people sort of lift their head up and look around them and not just keep head down all the time? 

R:            Mhmm. Yeah. And this dilemma of how to balance the tyranny of the present, the things that are absolutely of paramount importance and can’t not be done, and done well; balancing that with thinking of the long-term future is … that dilemma is present in every sector of our society. Right? And I’m thinking especially now of people who may be new in ministry and are … maybe they’re heading to their first, church and are trying to imagine how to craft this this vocation in such a way that they will be able to sustain it and be able to live into their calling.  

               And there are a few a couple of things that come to mind. One is that strategic foresight and future readiness is … it’s like a muscle, just like anything else. You need to practice it not in an episodic way, but in a habit forming way. And for your listeners, there’s one, you know, really simple in, you know, in road into future readiness that I would commend to them. It is scanning for signals of change. And how we would define a signal of change is it’s an early indicator of a future direction of change. It’s not headline news necessarily all the time. It’s not at the level of a big, you know, shift, a big driver of change that we might consider, like changing demographics, for instance. But where you start to notice just around the edges, something is a little bit different.

               This may come up through a conversation with a child or a grandchild where you think, I would never have thought to do this or that. So it could be through an interaction that portends something about a generational shift. It could be you know, I often look at where … follow the money. I’m a realist about that. So where funding streams are going. What is getting really heavily capitalized today? That means that perhaps ten years from now, it will have accelerated beyond what you might imagine. I go to even, this was a stretch for me when I graduated from divinity school, but, I will often look at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. There’s a lot in our in our US context, as we know, there’s a lot of military investments that get made and innovations that happen that impact the military first that ultimately end up impacting the rest of us in our in our daily lives. 

               Or, you know, you might consider looking at movements and movement leaders who are voicing a different kind of future, you know, calling you into that liminality that might shift, you know, the paradigm that might shift the … what, you know, what we think of as the Overton window, the window of acceptability of a particular policy, for example.

               So that habit of looking for signals of change is something that, you know, if you have a vestry meeting or a staff meeting, you could just do a quick go around the table for the first ten minutes of the meeting, fifteen minutes of the meeting. “Here’s the definition of a signal change. What signals of change are you seeing from where you sit?” You know, there’s a quote by William Gibson, who’s a cyberpunk novelist, actually, and he, said that “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” And in that sense, scanning for signals of change helps us to pick up on that unevenly distributed future, you know, earlier than we might otherwise do. 

               So that’s a really accessible kinda habit to build in, when you’re–when you’re trying to figure out how to get to the hospital, you know, and see somebody at their bedside that needs to be seen, and yet also get ready for the changes in the next decade. 

H:            So I have two follow-up questions about that because I think I’m beginning to pick up what you’re putting down, but it’s also still a little bit fuzzy for me. So could you give, like, a few concrete examples of what people might say in a meeting if you were to do that, or signals of change that you’ve seen, or that kind of a thing? 

R:            Yeah. So here’s an example, of a signal of change that’s recently come up. Your listeners, some may remember Three Mile Island, the nuclear facility, which, you know, had a meltdown and then shut down, years ago and, you know, was at the center of a lot of discussion about what do we wanna … how do we wanna power our energy future, for example. And a signal of change I saw recently is that Three Mile Island is going to be coming back online. And, when I … and it’s gonna be used for powering some of the energy needs, specifically, that I believe it’s Microsoft is going to need for its generative AI, generative artificial intelligence needs. 

               When I saw that, it was jaw dropping to me. I wouldn’t … I could–I hadn’t imagined that. It was a thought I hadn’t conceived of, until I saw it. It’s just one example. So it’s not as if this has happened at every nuclear facility, but it does signal something. It’s a potential shift. So if I’m in a church environment, for example, I might be thinking about how to keep–literally, how to keep the lights on as you’re saying, Brandon. And it’s almost like inoculation. Like, you just have a little dose of thinking, that thought that you hadn’t thought before, that then when the future unfolds, if your physical plant has different energy sources, for example, or if that becomes a moral and policy conversation in your community about how we’ll power our energy the energy transition that’s needed, you’re just that little bit more ready to have that conversation because you’ve imagined it.

                I’m thinking of my colleague Jane McGonigal. I wonder if I can find this book quickly. She wrote a book called Imaginable. It was during the pandemic, and she started picking up on, how many news reports would say, you know, “School shut down. This was unimaginable. The supply chain broke. This was unimaginable.” And she lit–you know, it’s like you can do hash marks of how many times you hear somebody use a word. And, so she in her book, she really unpacks how you can get ready for the future by spending that imagination time. That’s an investment of time, in your imagination. 

B:            So seeing the signals is sort of one dimension of the work. But seeing the signals of the future and shaping the future, it seems, are probably related but separate activities. I mean, it even seems bizarre and bold. You know, maybe there’s way too much hubris in even saying shaping the future. But at the same time, isn’t that what we’re trying to do, to create a more loving, equitable, compassionate future? So how do you make the leap between seeing a particular signal and then knowing how to how to shape what that signal is forecasting? 

R:            We think of it as a cycle, that you … you kinda work the cycle. So it begins with preparing yourself. You know, half the battle in life is knowing what’s the right question to be asking. So shaping, you know, what are the questions I’m bringing to, you know, thinking about the future of the church, the future of, say, education for ministry broadly, the future of my community. You know, honing in on those questions and leading with your curiosity and really focusing in on some building blocks in that process. Things like signals of change as you were saying and drivers of change, to prepare our minds to even begin to think about these different scenarios of how the future could unfold.

               You know, it’s been said that there are no facts about the future, but we have to make decisions anyway. And, you know, that’s a very tricky thing. So you can increase your sense of confidence and agency by looking at signals of change and drivers of change. The second part of the cycle, going from prepare to foresight, that would be when you’re truly imagining a particular future, and imagining you’re dropping into that world of, say, 2035, and you’re considering how will health and health care change by 2035 that will impact the needs of my parishioners, that will shift, you know, how I interface with the care system in general. So you immerse in that future.

               And then it’s about finishing up the cycle by drawing out specific insights at the diocesan level. What does this mean, within my, say, interfaith conversations that I’m in. So kinda playing that through at different scales in terms of insight and then ultimately action. What are the short, medium, and long-term decisions that I might make differently for the sake of having, you know, thought about this future. 

               So prepare, foresight, insight, action is that cycle. It’s not a linear process. You kind of … I don’t mean to make it sound quite as linear as that. You kind of bop back and forth between different …

H:            It might be helpful to have kind of chunks, categories.  To put maybe even a finer point on it, if I’m a priest and I’m overwhelmed and I’m overworked and whatever, whywork this muscle? Is there a danger in not doing it? Is there fruit in doing it? The … what’s the big why? 

R:            Yeah. Both. Yeah. Exactly. Both, as you were describing. You know, when we find ourselves … this is why I appreciate the waves of change metaphor. You know? Some of what we’re buffeted by today that that keeps us exhausted Yeah. And challenged are those things that, you know, if we have been …

H:            Good point. 

R:            Engaged enough  about ten years ago, we might be in a different position. So that’s a piece of it. And then also, I think I don’t know about you all, but it can be challenging right now to feel a sense of depth of hope about the future. And, I’m not proposing that if you spend time thinking about 2035 that it’s Pollyanna-ish or happy-go-lucky at all. It’s not, necessarily. But, to be imbued with a sense of agency that I have choices, and we have choices that we can make. And we anticipate that if we make this choice, that pathway might open to us. That feels, that feels grounding I think, and we need that in a time like this. 

H:            It also seems like you want your feet on the ground like that if you are a leader of people such as a parish priest. 

R:            Yeah. I mean, in a way, every sermon you give is an invitation to a future. 

H:            That’s really true. 

R:            And to shape to shape a preferred future for, for each person as they go about their lives as a lay layperson during the week. It’s for them to shape a preferred future as well. 

B:            So I wanna put you on the spot, Rachel, and ask, do you have any favorite forecasts that you’ve gotten right? And anything that you thought, oh, how did I not see that coming? Or, like, do you kick yourself at all and say, like, how did I miss that thing? I mean, you’ve been at this for a while, or maybe that’s not even how you approach the work. But I that that was the first question that that I was dying to ask.

R:            Yeah. We do you know, we one of my one of my personal New Year’s rituals is I spend time … we do a ten year map of the decade, each year. So around New Year’s time, I always like to look back. And so I’m thinking about some work we were doing years ago on advanced fragile democracies, for example. I’ve been seeing that a lot lately as resonant, in this time that we’re in. That’s just one, you know, one example. And there are things that we were, you know, spending time trying to assess the patterns of change where things just went a different way. And, you know, that’s that’s where it’s important to prepare for multiple alternative futures, you know, because the future is combinatorial. You know, things can come into play and collide and, and emerge. New things emerge.

               So and just to give one specific example, we missed–so we do work across sectors, corporate, government, philanthropic, nonprofit. We missed the emergence of the SUV and especially, like, the big Suburbans in The US context. And, you know, my colleague, Bob Johansen, will share this example with humility about how we missed it by tracking what was happening in kind of energy and climate at the time, stranded assets that, you know, particularly energy companies have on their balance sheets that they know they will not be able to leverage, and yet the prices for gasoline were not, you know, showing that, recognizing that at the time. So that’s an example. This was in the US context in particular, that we just–we missed it.

H:            So there’s definitely a dynamic within the Episcopal church at the moment that I would imagine exists in other faith communities as well, where it’s easy to have a lot of anxiety about the shifting landscape. And, it may be that these signs of change are just, like, all around us screaming at us or we’re sort of feeling like we’re in the middle of a wave. And maybe without a very clear vision cast or imagination of what’s on the other side of this kind of rough and tumble wave experience. But, as a futurist and a theologian, I mean, what would you say to a parish priest who came to you with a lot of worry about their average Sunday attendance or one of these kinds of changes about the way people are gathering that really has church folk feeling not grounded? 

R:            Yeah. Anxiety about the future is … you know, we think of it as one of kind of four traps that keep us in the present. And it’s completely natural, and we all experience anxiety about the future, much less anxiety about the present, as you were saying. What is my … what’s my Sunday attendance this week? You know, what was it last week? What will it be after Easter? You know, that conundrum, it’s very natural to have anxiety about the future. Kind of antidote to that is to preexperience the future. So we’ll often generate visuals that are that immerse us in a particular future so that we kind of have, like, a dunk tank experience in it before, it happens. That anxiety is real, and we have to make decisions anyway to get ourselves better prepared. 

H:            And it seems like it’s better to make decisions with your head in the dumpster than with your head in the sand or what you know, my metaphor is truly falling apart at some point. But it seems like even if the future isn’t, this rose colored past when it comes to something like average Sunday attendance, we don’t wanna just kind of ignore that the tide is shifting. We wanna make wise decisions with an awareness that the tide is shifting. Is that right?

R:            Yeah. And see it with clear eyes. You know, a clear eyed view, an assessment of where things might go in the future is as important as a clear eyed view of the present. 

B:            You know, we recently had a a conversation with, with Dean McGowan, our dean here at Berkeley, and, I think I probably find myself in his camp of being probably pessimistic about the future, but ultimately really hopeful, that, you know, God is still working and the Spirit is still moving, and in the end, love wins, to kind of, you know, summarize it that crassly and succinctly and and hopefully, I believe. But, when I think of the future, I tend to get a bit anxious, and I tend to think about all the things that could go wrong. And, you know, we wanna make sure we ask you about AI and your hopes, dreams, and worries about AI. But I also I also think that I’m probably not terribly generous about seeing the ways in which certain aspects of the future might actually be better. I mean, had Paul known about the Internet, that he could preach the gospel to millions of people in seconds, that’d probably be pretty–he’d probably be pretty happy and pretty excited for us.

               You know, so it’s not all gloom and doom, I suspect. Do you have any favorite forecast about the future that you go to when you’re feeling particularly pessimistic about things? 

R:            I am thinking about signals of change that give me hope. Examples, the rise of or the return is how I should put it: the return of mutual aid networks, is an example right now that gives me hope and makes me feel grounded. It’s also such a good example that, you know, there’s kind of nothing new under the sun. You know, there are many returns. There are many and that’s why being a student of history is so important in foresight, as well. So the return of mutual aid networks is one in the, we–I mentioned I do a fair amount of work in philanthropy in my role and, the rise of, so specific signal I’m thinking of, Edgar Villanueva has written a new book. Sometimes a book can be a good signal of change. He’s written a book called Decolonizing Wealth. And, in it, you know, he’s engaging with philanthropy, with the banking system, you know, broadly. And he himself is an indigenous person and so is bringing a decolonizing lens to our relationship with money. And he has an associated giving circle that’s called Liberated Capital. This notion of really how can money function in a reparative way.

               And so you’ll find, you know, in that giving circle, there are people who are in the … you know, have individually, individual wealth that are trying to grapple with what that means, with the origins of that wealth, and how to liberate it in service of, you know, their values, and, also people who are within the philanthropic sector who are thinking about how to influence change within their organizations. That’s another area that gives me hope right now. 

H:            Let’s have the AI conversation in as succinct a way as we can. My experience of conversation around AI, particularly within the church context or maybe even better, particularly-particularly within a seminary communications context because that’s really where I live … People seem to be just kind of saying I love it or I hate it rather than, anything more nuanced. And I wonder whether you have any wisdom for us about how to approach this new tool in the room that’s kind of taking up a lot of air.

R:            Mhmm. Yeah. I think, you know, it’s important for listeners to be … you know, there’s probably a wide array of exposure to artificial intelligence. You know, you think of kind of the classification AI, which is has really owned a lot of the conversation about AI up until this point. And, you know, that’s about kind of looking like, pattern-sense-making. Generative AI is def– is very much related, has some of the same issues and challenges, in terms of algorithmic bias and everything else. But generative AI really is around, you know, how would you …  how would you generate something? How would you complete this sentence? How would you take this, this, notion that I want to imagine and make it into a film, make it into a video game? You know, all of the incredible things that now generative AI is accomplishing with humans. And so I think it starts there, just kind of grounding in. These are related but differing, technologies, and so kind of coming into an awareness of that, I think, is important, at the start. And then it’s after that, it’s like every other technology. You know, it’s are there the tech optimists, the tech pessimists, and then those who think that technologies are tools. And it’s really up to us in how we use them, shape them, regulate them, you know, all those other questions. 

H:            If you got to talk to a seminarian in an elevator and you wanted to make sure they knew certain things or maybe one thing that you’ve picked up as a futurist, what would you wanna make sure seminarians or new priests knew? 

R:            I would want to engage with them about truly the way that, that AI and generative AI are shaping/will shape work for people, for their parishioners in the next decade. Not even just their work, which is kinda what we were just talking about, but how artificial intelligence will impact the kinds of jobs that there are to be able to do, the value that gets associated with those in terms of monetary remuneration, the regulatory regimes that are gonna shift tremendously, over the next decade and beyond, and the attendant imperative around meaning-making that will come up for people in that changing environment. Their parishioners are gonna have to do a lot of–especially in the US context where we have a lot there is a tendency to closely affiliate who I am with what my job is.

H:            Yeah. There’s … an identity thing

R:            You know people defining themselves—I am a professor or whatever it is. That close knitting of who you are and the meaning of your job, is gonna get challenged, next decade. So I would love to see a theology of meaning-making in that kind of future, where automation will create dis … you know, displacement, different kinds of, you know, jobs and vocations that come that come onto the horizon. So that’s one. Climate would be a second conversation I would wanna have with somebody who’s just starting in parish leadership. Climate change-driven migration will impact, you know, who ends up in your parish. You may have seasonal people seasonally end up in your parish, for example, because they, because you may live in a place that is a receiver geography, you know, where it might be more amenable, in a time of extreme weather events. So you may you may have an in inbound increase of people who are in your area who with who you might find yourself having to serve with strains on infrastructure, that will happen and getting to engage in your parish, you know, in terms of additional attendance. So that’s, you know, that’s one potential impact. 

               I think it’s it also is a call for how might you get your physical plant of the church climate ready.

You know, this is where you start to work the prepare, foresight, insight, action cycle. Where are there pockets of funding I might be able to draw on to pair my, you know, my facility to be more climate ready? If we take seriously that that’s going to be necessary in the next decade and we see that with clear eyes, then you can start to approach, you know, some short, medium, long term actions that you might consider taking. So those are … those are two. Each of them, I would love to see a theology of that liminal space around limit migration, for example, and the moral imperatives that go along with it and also meaning-making in the time of … of AI.

H:            So interesting. 

B:            So I wonder as we as we come in for a landing, what brings you hope as you appear into the past, as you study the present, and as you, you know, try to wrestle with the future? What ultimately brings you hope, Rachel? 

R:            Personally, right now, I’m experiencing a desire to want to connect with my family history and ancestral wisdom, I guess you could say. You know, if you think about it, there have been very big shifts that have happened geopolitically in the past. I think we’re in the middle of one of those right now. And that has shaped, you know, where people end up living, how they end up organizing themselves in human settlements, you know, all of those really big-picture things. So I just got back from a trip to Ireland, which is my part of– a big part of my family history. And, I’m finding that connecting with that personal history is grounding. It’s a reminder that, you know, our people, broadly speaking, have been through significant shifts before, and that’s helping me to zoom out in a moment where it can be really easy to get bound up and efforting, you know, about the urgencies of the present, of which there are there are many to be fair.

H:            Now it’s time to play Holy Cow, a game inspired by Saint Luke the Winged Ox (whose visage is in fact AI generated) that proves to our listeners that luminaries, futurists, theologians such as yourself are fully human just like us. 

B:            Because the people wanna know, Rachel, what’s your favorite go-to snack? 

R:            Seaweed. 

H:            Good one.

B:            I love it. Do you have a favorite way of consuming seaweed? 

R:            Not gracefully. That’s my way. That’s the only way. 

B:            I love it. Like fistfuls. Excellent. Random former job. 

R:            I worked at the library at Yale Divinity School and loved it. And I got to visit again, a couple years back, when I came to campus. And I saw Susanna Still Homer and some of the others. 

B:            Bestie of ours. Yeah. Oh, it’s the dream YDS job. Right? You can do some homework while getting paid.

R:            And I, you know, I come by this honestly. My dad is a retired university reference librarian. So libraries, you know, as you said, Hannah, curiosity is our friend. 

H:            It is. 

R:            And I fully believe that, and so that was one of my favorite past jobs. 

B:            Number three, the weirdest thing in your refrigerator right now. 

R:            We have many, many jams. You know? It’s full of jams. Straw-raspberry jam. All the jams. Hot and spicy jams, sweet jams. Hot and spicy jams. I credit my husband. He is … he likes jams. But now the top shelf of our fridge is so full of them, and the light is right above it. I feel like it got, you know, two shades darker in our fridge. When you open it, the light comes on, but it’s just all jam-tinted.

B:            I’m here for the jam. 

R:            Yeah.

B:            K. Bad habit that you are willing to share. 

R:            The first thing that’s coming to my mind is about checking my email when I shouldn’t. You know? 

H:            That’s very relatable.

B:            Oooo … So many people are guilty right now. 

R:            I confess. 

B:            The smallest hill you’ll die on, our final question.

R:            Colgate toothpaste is better than the rest. As we know. 

B:            Wow. The trillions of dollars of marketing spent so you would say that sentence. 

B:            I’m a Crest guy myself. I’ll die on that hill. 

H:            Woah! I have no strong toothpaste feelings … for the record. 

B:            Yet.

H:            Oh, okay. It’s coming for me. Big toothpaste is coming for me. 

B:            Well, thanks, Rachel, for spending some time coming back to your alma mater, even if virtually. And I think you’ve brought some words of encouragement or maybe inspiration for us to conclude with. 

R:            Yes. This is an excerpt from Alvin Toffler’s book, Future Shock, which he wrote in the seventies, ‘79, I think. And sometimes we use it at an Institute for the Future for what we call story time for futurists. You know, like, story time when you’re  a little kid and you’re sitting on the squares of carpet and listening to story time. We feel the need to do that from time to time as well, but our colleague, Jane McGonigal. So my colleague, Toshi, recently brought this back into my circulation, around, Alvin Toffler’s future shock. 

“Anticipating probable futures, however, is only part of what needs doing if we are to shift the planner’s time horizon and infuse the entire society with a greater sense of tomorrow. For we must also vastly widen our conception of possible futures. To the rigorous discipline of science, we must add the flaming imagination of art. Today, as never before, we need a multiplicity of visions, dreams, and prophecies, images of potential tomorrow. Before we can rationally decide which alternative pathways to choose, which cultural styles to pursue, we must first ascertain which are possible. Conjecture, speculation, and the visionary view thus become as coldly practical a necessity as feet-on-the-floor realism was in an earlier time.

This is why some of the world’s biggest and most tough minded corporations, once the living embodiment of of presentism, today hire intuitive futurists, science fiction writers, and visionaries.” (And I’ll fast forward, to a little bit.) “Corporations must not remain the only agencies with access to such services. Local government, schools, voluntary associations, and others also need to examine their potential futures imaginatively. One way to help them do so would be to establish in each community, imaginative centers devoted to technically assisted brainstorming.

These would be places where people noted for creative imagination rather than technical expertise are brought together to examine present crises, to anticipate future crises, and to speculate freely, even playfully, about possible futures. What, for example, are the possible futures of urban transportation? Traffic is a problem involving space. How might the city of tomorrow cope with the movement of men and objects through space? To speculate about this question, an imaginative center might enlist artists, sculptors, dancers, furniture designers, parking lot attendants, and a variety of other people who in one way or another manipulate space imaginatively.

               Such people assembled under the right circumstances would inevitably come up with ideas of which the technocratic city planners, the highway engineers, and transit authorities have never dreamed. Musicians, people who live near airports, jackhammer men, and subway conductors might well imagine new ways to organize, mask, or suppress noise. Groups of young people might be invited to ransack their minds for previously unexamined approaches to urban sanitation, crowding, ethnic conflict, care of the aged, or a thousand other present and future problems. In any such effort, the overwhelming majority of ideas put forward will, of course, be absurd, funny, or technically impossible. Yet the essence of creativity is a willingness to play the fool, to toy with the absurd, only later submitting the stream of ideas to harsh critical judgment.

               The application of the imagination to the future thus requires an environment in which it is safe to err, in which novel juxtapositions of ideas can be freely expressed before being critically sifted. We need sanctuaries for social imagination.”

H:            Go forth and imagine! 

               Thanks for listening to the Leaders Way podcast. You can learn more about this episode at berkleydivinity.yale.edu/podcast. Follow along with us on Instagram at theleadersway.podcast. 

B:            And you can rate and review us on your podcast app and be sure to hit follow so you never miss an episode. And if you’d like this episode, please share it with a friend. 

H:            Until next time. 

B:            Peace be with you.