Tim Fish: Welcome back to New View EDU. I have to say, today’s episode might easily be titled “Back to the Future,” because we’re throwing back to the beginning of this podcast and talking about how to design and teach futures thinking. I could not be more pleased and honored to welcome back my former co host, and the person who first inspired this podcast, Lisa Kay Solomon. Longtime listeners will remember that Lisa is a bestselling author, educator, a futurist, and a designer in residence at the Stanford d.school. She teaches classes such as “Inventing the Future,” where students imagine, debate, and analyze the 50 year futures of emerging tech. In her popular LinkedIn Learning course, “Leader as Future,” and in her writing, Lisa helps all leaders and learners expand their futures, adapt to complexities, and build civic fellowship.
Since her time as my co host, Lisa has furthered her work through some absolutely amazing new ideas and initiatives, and I can’t wait to learn more about what she’s been up to. So, friends, let’s get Back to the Future!
Lisa Kay Solomon, welcome, welcome back to New View EDU.
Lisa Kay Solomon: It's so exciting to be here, Tim. It's like a reunion show.
Tim Fish: It is a reunion show! Lisa Kay, there would be no New View EDU without you. Without your vision, your persistence, your collaboration, your energy, your ideas, and to be really honest, your Rolodex! You connected us to everybody you know in the first few seasons and I'll tell you, boy, you open doors that I never could have opened.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Oh, that's so kind to say, listen, it's been so exciting to see the success of the podcast. And I think it started from a very personal place for both of us, which was how do we support school leaders in a time of extreme flux and change and uncertainty? What could we do to be learning partners alongside of them and to help provide some new ideas, provocations, perspectives that might inform how they were going to rebuild their schools following the most disruptive moment any of us have ever experienced, which is the start of the pandemic.
Tim Fish: That's right.
Lisa Kay Solomon: And it was really about how do we widen the conversation, the perspectives, in a way that was empathetic, in a way that understood that school leaders were exhausted and were really out of energy in many ways and needed all the support and help that they could get. So it was such a pleasure to start with you, and frankly, it was a great model for I think what we're going to talk more about, which is how do we shape the future?
I think it was our approach to saying, look, we can't fix every school, we can't go in school to school, but what might we do to serve the people that are making the decisions real time, and be of support to them to help tomorrow or the school year ahead be better than the one we just had? So bringing that to life, giving form to it, not knowing exactly how it was going to turn out, was in and of itself, I think, a model of what futures thinking in action and applied futures is all about.
Tim Fish: I think you're right on. And I think that's what we, that's what we were trying to do. It's what we still are trying to do with the podcast. And we, I think we've made some progress and we've had some great conversations. And I remember in our most recent conversation that you and I had on the phone, we were really talking about, again, we were talking about the future, which is something that of the many things you have helped me to think about, that's one of them. And in particular, this idea of like, what's it look like to be a futurist?
You know, one of the things I love about the d.school and the design school at Stanford is this idea that everybody's a designer, right? It's not some Thing. And I think what you've taught me is that in many ways, everybody can be a futurist. This is not like some PhD you need in futurist thinking. But your perspective on how we think about the future is unique. And I wonder if you could just help our listeners understand a little bit about this idea of futures thinking.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Yeah, thank you so much, Tim. I mean, it's work I've been doing for over 20 years. I started doing work when I joined a scenario planning firm here in the Bay Area that was designed to help leaders develop skills that would allow them to discover the future, that would allow them to explore futures, plural, and to engage in processes and a mindset and a posture towards the future that was one of exploration. That was one of...a sort of curiosity about how the future might unfold and why.
So yes, imagination from the standpoint of understanding that tomorrow or certainly five years from now or 10 years from now may be very different than where we are today. So we have to stretch our imagination. And we certainly can't predict the future. So I also want to say that futurists do not predict the future. And anyone that says, I know exactly how the future is going to unfold is someone that you should really come back and ask a lot of questions about. And we reward people for putting out their opinions and this is going to happen and why, because we, in some ways, that feels safe, right? Like that there's safety in somebody knowing, but the reality is that they don't know. So I think, you know, being a futurist means being willing to explore a multiplicity of futures, many futures, not one, there's not one future. There's many futures.
Having the curiosity to ask different kinds of questions. Bringing in different perspectives in order to inform that. So it's not just throwing wild ideas out there and hoping that they come true, but really informing yourself from many, many different perspectives. Getting comfortable with ambiguity, Tim, which is, gosh, probably one of the most important things we can do, that we have no practice at, because of course, knowing that the future may not be one thing, we have to get comfortable understanding it could go this way or this way, and being able to read those signals, and being able to think across time horizons, which is also a critical skill that we don't have practice in. You know, thinking about tomorrow and thinking about five years, right? Toggling these temporal horizons and being able to understand the different implications and different decisions on them.
And like you said earlier, and I couldn't agree more, I fundamentally believe that futures thinking and leading like a futurist is something we can all practice and get better at, right? It is not for where I live in the Bay Area, the Elon Musks of the world, to have a future that then they kind of future all over us.
Tim Fish: I love that, future all over us.
Lisa Kay Solomon: It is up to us, right, to embrace our own agency, to imagine bolder futures, to shape those futures, and to bring those futures to life. And I find that to be one of the most optimistic perspectives and it's what frankly gets me up every day.
Tim Fish: You know, it's this notion, right? We talk a lot. I mean, the thread that started when you and I were doing the initial episodes and has continued, the number one thread that's gone through this thing has been agency. It's been this idea of self-determination, this idea of self-efficacy, this idea that I can set my own path. And what I'm hearing from you is the process of discovering the future is one that I can have. I don't have to wait for Elon Musk to tell me what my future will be. I have agency to discover my own future, not predict, but discover my own future.
So what are those things, Lisa, that if I'm someone who thinks I do want to be, I want to do that work, I'm inclined to think that way, what are some ways that organizations, let's take a board of trustees or a leadership team or a third grade team at a school, could be thinking about how they might be doing some futures work? What maybe are some things they could do to help them?
Lisa Kay Solomon: Yeah, it's such a great question. And frankly, pretty much since the pandemic—and starting New View EDU was a big part of it—it really helped me see how important it is for us to thread futures thinking into all K-12 education. When I pause and I think about, OK, well, and I say this often to educators or school leaders that I have the privilege of working with and learning from, I'll start off and talk about futures thinking and I'll say, so how many people here have taken a class in history? And everybody raises their hand. There's probably some historians, probably teachers of history. Everyone's like, yes, of course I did. And then I'll say, well, how many people here have taken a class in futures? Zero, zero hands, zero. And maybe one person that took like a workshop or something. And then I say, well, which one of those can you influence? And it's like, oh, mic drop.
Like, where are we spending our energy? Now, it turns out these things are actually not separate. I want to also say that, that the best futurists are actually historians. Why? It’s because history, when taught well, is not about memorizing facts, it's about understanding patterns. It's about looking for contextual understanding about where something was at a certain moment in time and why that happened and forces at play. Well, that's the same thing we want to do, prospection, like in the future. So if history is about reflection and understanding, futures is about prospection and trying to understand what might happen.
So I just want to say from the outset when we think about whether it's a third grade teacher or a board or a head of school, this idea of futures as something that we can learn and practice is so, so critical. And that we have to do it, and that we can do it, and that we can do it across disciplines, right? We are now at the d.school developing a futures library, a futures primer, work that we've been developing over the last three years, frankly, since the pandemic, since we ran a number of scenario planning exercises for school leaders following the start of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, when there was all this race like what's gonna happen in the fall of 2020? Are we gonna go back to in-person learning? Is it gonna be hybrid? We have to make decisions now. We don't quite know.
And so we ran these scenario planning sprints for school leaders, again, not to predict the future, but to help them rehearse a variety of futures to figure out what were the robust moves we can make right now for the people that we care most about, our students, our family, our community, to ensure that whatever unfolds in the contextual world around us, these macro forces that we can't control, we are prepared to make moves that create value for the people we matter most.
And it was so popular from the standpoint of learning and agency, as you said, right, that I'm not powerless against the forces, in this case of the pandemic, or the regulatory decisions about masks and mandates and all the things. I can move forward. I can have influence over a subset of things that will still help me be in service of the people that I care about. It was so popular, they were asking for more, that we've been now developing a number of approaches to bring to schools to help them, for example, trace change over time, right? To look for signals of change. To help them see in multiples, right? To help them say there's not one future, there's many futures, there's not one input, there's many inputs. How do we use those to help inform decisions that we can make? And I think that's really critical to understand that, one, we can practice them over time, and two, that at any given moment, we are not without options. And I think those are two very powerful stances to have.
Tim Fish: You know, I think of Rita McGrath's work from, I think she's at Columbia now, and her work around sort of seeing around corners and in particular, inflection points. And the idea of those sort of early signals. And how do you look at some of those early signals to help you be thinking about what kinds of things might be coming, where might you be headed, what kinds of information can help you inform your future.
The other piece that's interesting to me is this idea that you know, being, you said it in the beginning, this notion of being comfortable with ambiguity. You know, I think one of the themes that I've heard about thinking about schools that are really effective and the kind of environments we want our young people to be in, is environments where complexity and messiness is part of how we deal with things. I think one of the things that I see in the most, quote-unquote, “successful” schools is that they're moving away from this idea that everything is controlled, that everything is tidy, that we move from one thing to another to another.
And as I think about work with strategy, the same is true. You know, I'm working with a school right now on strategy. And one of the things that amazes me is, as it's getting more strategic, it's also getting more messy, right? That we moved way beyond the tidy little strategy and now we're into really the good stuff. We're leaning into what are the challenges that they're really facing. But boy, I'll tell you, it feels kind of messy. And I'm curious about how does your understanding of futures also really force you to think a little bit about that ambiguity, that messiness, to be comfortable with that?
Lisa Kay Solomon: It's a great question, Tim, and you can't escape it. I mean, and again, I'll go back to, I said, how many people have taken a class in futures, and zero hands. How many people have taken a class in ambiguity?
Tim Fish: Yeah!
Lisa Kay Solomon: And again, what do we need more than anything? What do we know actually to be given, ironically, of the future? It's gonna be more ambiguous, not less. So why aren't we practicing the things we need to get better at? We know, and you know I do a lot of work with athletes and certainly the philosophy of my classes, which is this is the time for you to practice. You have to practice the stuff that you're gonna need in life. And unfortunately, so much of our K-12 system is based on rewarding things that are knowable, that are performable, that are easily measurable.
You know, show me the scale on ambiguity. Show me the person that's like, oh, you got an A in ambiguity, crushed it. We don't have a great vocabulary for it. We don't have a great practice ground for it. So I think about this a lot, because you don't want the first time someone comes head to head with a high stakes, high uncertainty, highly ambiguous situation to be when it matters most. You want them to have done the practice steps along the way, the scaffolding in the safe environment.
And so to your point, whether it's a board meeting and you're like, look, we got to go to some messy territory now. You don't want that to be the first time, right, that the board has had to deal with each other relationally, has had to navigate disagreements in different perspectives. That's not the moment. Ideally, they're coming into it with a level of trust. They're coming into it with a very skilled leader or facilitator that says, look, let me tell you about what may unfold here. And it may not feel great and that's OK. Right? That is OK. That does not mean we are not advancing. It means this is hard. Right?
So you need someone who's very, very skilled at naming and holding and sensing. And again, we don't spend a lot of time facilitating these conversations, and we definitely don't spend a lot of time designing them, which is of course why we wrote Moments of Impact to begin with. And why we said it was the most important leadership skill you've never been taught. Because if you think about the fact that the conversations need to be about discovery, they need to be about learning from different perspectives, from experimentation and exploring, not defining, not presenting, right? Not even deciding, but learning, right? Those are designable moments.
And again, I think in this world that we're in right now, the VUCA world that we talk about of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, coined 30 years ago by military planners, I always sort of get a chuckle and I think like, they thought it was VUCA then. They didn't know about ChatGPT and social media. If you think about it as a futurist and say, what do I, again, what can I pretty much bet on going forward? The world is not going to get less VUCA. It's going to get more VUCA. Right. And so if we believe and we're hoping for solutions that worked in a different time to still work in a world that promises to be filled with more change, we're setting ourselves up for surprise, and not the good kind.
And so we need to change the way we respond. And I think the only way we can do that is to become better learners, more adaptive learners, more curious learners, hungry to understand the different forces at bay, not defenders of what is there. And that takes practice. And that's primarily what I do in my work at the d.school and the classes that I teach. And of course, the applied futures work that I do in areas that matter like civics, which we can talk more about. But right now I'm getting ready, so it's good timing that we're having this conversation, to teach the sixth year of my class Inventing the Future at the Stanford d.school.
Tim Fish: Tell me about that. So those students have a class in the future.
Lisa Kay Solomon: They do, they do. And we initially started this class, I started it with Tina Seelig, who's a brilliant author and creativity expert, and Drew Endy, who is an expert in synthetic biology. And the three of us came together because we feared that there was a lot of classes around, can you build it, right? The feasibility of technologies that would influence our future, but not enough, in fact, not any classes on, should you build it? How do you get ahead of the narratives about how these technologies might impact society, so that you can rehearse the future instead of being blindsided by the present?
And of course, we're teaching this at Stanford, at the heart of Silicon Valley, where the mantra is, right, move fast, break things, right, Facebook, except when it's democracy, or the idea that we could be bold in our technologies to shape the future, these techno utopias, and to say, no, we are societies. We're not robots, right? So how do we think more holistically about the implications? And the entire course is focused on agency and building the skills of our students to be able to think creatively about the future and critically about the future, by having them practice ways of both interrogating this current moment through different patterns and levels, challenging assumptions, understanding the signals that are in plain sight, looking at how change happens over time, and then constructing potential futures, right, seeing the multiplicity of futures by using things like the futures implication wheel or improv, right, like gaming.
And the capstone of the class, we have these students create these 50-year utopia, dystopia debates on emerging technologies in a world-building kind of way, right, where they're telling stories about the future that are vivid and textural. And I think one of the most important learning moments of the class is, unlike a traditional debate where your goal is to win, to defend and be right, we say for the utopia team to the dystopia team, What did they get right that you didn't see coming? Like what surprised you? And likewise on the other side.
So again, at every moment, we're fostering this sense of curiosity, humility, openness, wonder. And then the last thing we do is we typically bring in an expert in the emerging tech that we're exploring to give some commentary on the current state of how that technology is evolving. But the best part is that the students see that expert leaving with like, huh, I never thought about that. I'm gonna take that back to the board. I'm going to check that out. So we're modeling the sense making in action, and I think that's really important.
Tim Fish: It's so important, you know, and it makes me wonder about what would it look like if we were to take that course into a high school, right? Or into that third grade classroom, right? What would it look like to bring that futures thinking in? And I'm curious, to have a teacher of futures in a school, what would be some of the things, if I were thinking about hiring a teacher to be our futures teacher, what would be some of the things I would look for? Because as you said, they probably don't have a whole, they don't have a degree in futures thinking, that's for darn sure. So what would be some of the characteristics that maybe an educator who could lead that class might have?
Lisa Kay Solomon: Yeah, it's a great question, Tim. And I will say, my hope is that all of our teachers become futures thinkers as well. That I don't necessarily see this as a separate discipline. I actually see this as integrated into our sciences and our humanities. And I can give you some examples of some teachers that we're working with.
Tim Fish: That's a great point.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I would like to see it, for example, incorporated into capstone projects. And we're actually working with an incredible educator out in Hawaii right now who is using futures thinking to infuse this into the eighth grade capstone project that's focused on sustainability. So even that, you know, if you can add an imagining component, right? Like what is the potential image of the future in which we have a healthier relationship with our planet and our environment? What would it take to get there? Who's involved in that future? How do regulatory systems support that future? That's futuring, right? That's a live example of doing that.
And you could take, for example, and I think this teacher is doing this, the existing sustainability plan. So it's not just like far-out sci-fi, It's like, hey, let's take the existing sustainability plan and let's project it out. What could it look like if we're successful beyond our wildest dreams? What would it look like if our best intentions actually faltered or failed? What happened? Again, that gets you in that thinking, diagnosis, as you said, systems mode, future shaping mode. And all of a sudden you're like, ideally you get insights that you might not have thought of if you just looked at a static plan.
You're using it for active learning. And you're like, you know what? Wow, you know what's missing? This group's perspective is missing from that. You know, this helped me understand that we're vulnerable here. So how do we build a relationship that we didn't have? How do we get expertise that we didn't have, right? Again, ideally you're showcasing your blind spots or your vulnerabilities that might create a future you'd like to prevent, and you're identifying the accelerators of the future that you want to bring to life. But the key is integrating some of those different disciplines and some of the practices toward something that has both relevance and stretch. And that's important.
I'll give you just another quick example of a humanities teacher I'm working with that has this great, again, it's like it's always that they didn't see it. They, for years, have had this great lesson planner on thinking like a historian. OK, let's go back. Let's think like a historian. What happened? What were the forces that led to that? But now they're adding a component. Let's think like a futurist. Like how do we actually extend that further? So what's something that might happen to the future?
So take an issue that you care about, think historically, how did we get to this moment in time? What were the forces? What were the powers? What were the influencers? What were the cultural elements? Now project out where you want to be. What would that look like? What would that feel like? Who's involved? You know, how do people that were previously underrepresented get represented now? Where are the sources of power? Where are the flows of money? And all of a sudden you can say, wait, I can imagine that future, and how do we get there?
Tim Fish: You know, I, what I love about it also, Lisa, is that when you put yourself in that future disposition, right? A few things have to happen, right? I can't, I don't know. I have to be open. My mind has to be more open to what might be possibilities. I have to be able to think more in a systems way. I have to be able to entertain the idea that there'll be this divergence that maybe is not, I can't control. And I think one of the dispositions that we need to establish is this idea of that, open to an evolving future that comes along.
You know, one of the things I also love about your work, and you mentioned it, is your work in Moments of Impact. And what I love so much that you talk about is the notion of designing a strategic conversation, that so often when we have meetings, the meeting was never really designed to do one thing or another. In fact, what we need to do is be intentional about what we're trying to accomplish in those environments. Can you tell us more about that?
Lisa Kay Solomon: I have so much empathy for what school leaders are going through right now. Just managing all of the decisions, near term, long term, the relationship with the board and faculty, students, parents. It is a really, really difficult moment that requires, as you said, a different stance towards strategy. We tend to think about strategy, again, as a noble thing that ends up in a strategic plan. Like, what is a strategic plan? It’s a vision for the future. But the problem is, is that it's static. Right?
So you hire a consulting firm and you do all this work for the strategic plan and you get the board to approve the strategic plan and you disseminate it to the parents, the strategic plan. And these are our points of the strategic plan. And then you know what happens? The future.
The future happens, right? And the future doesn't care! Your future doesn't care about your strategic plan. It does not care about your strategic plan. And then you're like, uh-oh.
Uh-oh, we have all this investment in the strategic plan, but the future has teed up something very different. What do we do? And so I think this notion of a strategic conversation allows for that adaptability, allows for us to learn together, to say, wait a minute, how can my board become a learning board? You know, I presumably, I brought people on the board because they brought different perspectives and they could help us become more resilient and robust in the face of change because I am no single leader, right? I can't know it all. I can't know it all. So, you know, to paraphrase Sacha Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, when he took over, he said, I have to turn this culture at Microsoft from a know-it-all culture to a learn-it-all culture.
So I think, like, if strategic conversations can be the elixir to become a learn it all board, I'm all for it. Because the best learner wins because you're always learning, right? You're always in a state of trying to ask questions, gather information, and try to assess where you are against a dynamic factor.
I think the book was, to your point, both a kind of perspective shaping book, right? That the goal of strategy is not to get to a plan. The goal of strategy is to help you do well. And it's a living, organic process that never ends to some extent. And a how-to playbook. And as you know, we, going back to, yeah, going back to design, we knew that people didn't have time to read. So we put a starter kit at the back. Just go to the back, just go to the Cliff Notes.
Tim Fish: Which, mine is all dog eared up. And, and the other thing for me is that it does—And what I love is the way you look at three different types of strategic conversations, right? Those that are building understanding, those that are shaping choices and those that are making choices, if you will. And they're different, and there are different ways you design for those to be successful.
The other part I like about it is not only do you set that big sort of goal of living into that more as you talk about in chapter one, the adaptive versus the technical, because so many of the strategic plans I see are technical, not really leaning into the adaptive nature of the world, the evolving future we're seeing. But I also like about it, is you really get into some of the details. You talk about, you know what? The space where you have that meeting really matters. The way you ask some questions.
And what you talk about in the book is this notion of like, when you would often talk to somebody about a big meeting they're having and they're flying people in from all over the world. And you'd say like, how are you structuring that conversation? And they would often say like, I don't know, I haven't really thought about that. And you're no, and the part I love about it is that while it may be open to all kinds of ideas, the structural design to create the conditions for that conversation to happen, boy, you’re, really the details matter a lot about the structure of that conversation. It's what I always talk about, is this thing called structured agency, right? That you want to create the conditions for agency to be fully expressed and unleashed. And in order to do that, you've have to be really thoughtful about structure.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I couldn’t agree more. I love, by the way, that's my favorite chapter too, Set the Scene, and I know I could briefly go through what the others are, because in some ways our environment is the thing we can make choices on with the least amount of effort in some ways. But just, you know, I think everyone listening to this can appreciate, right? You have a really important meeting and you've cleared it on everyone's schedule. People have flown in. They know it's important. And so because it's an important meeting, you go to the important board room that has the big oak table and the leather chairs and no windows and you got the PowerPoint set up. And yes, it's structured, but we have to remember there are human beings walking into that room, and our brains take a look at those signals: big oak table, leather chairs, no windows. And they think status, power, be right, be smart.
They're not thinking, be open, be imaginative, be generative, right? Be curious. They're not thinking, because we're wired to sort of pick up on those signals and respond to them. And I think if we could say, gosh, if we could create environments that allow people to show up in the way we need them to show up, that these exchanges, these gatherings, the convenings would be so much more successful. And so when anybody asks me my advice on how do I have this important board meeting coming up, I would say like, design backwards for me.
If this thing ends at 5 p.m. and you've been involved in all day offsite, tell me about 6 p.m. What, someone who's been there, what are they thinking? What are they feeling? What are they able to do now or want to do now that they wouldn't have been able to do when they walked in, right?
Everything should be designed in order to achieve that goal.
People have a lot of thoughts about what design is. Design is quickly becoming one of those words that if you ask 50 people, 50 different responses. I have a pretty simple response to what design is. To me, great design is functional utility, right? It enabled you to do something, right? Like why do we love our iPhones? It's because it allows all this functional utility. It's not just a phone, it's all these things. Equally important, and this is the piece that I think most leaders forget when they're designing these high stakes conversations, is the emotional engagement, right? Great design makes us feel something.
Why do we pay double for the iPhone, or why do we sleep out for it? Because we love it. When I ask people to say, tell me about a product in your life that you design, you know, they'll talk about their vacuum cleaner, their Dyson vacuum cleaner, and I think like, think about that for a moment. You love this machine that picks up dirt from your floor. You have an emotional relationship with it. Why? Because it's awe-inspiring, right? The design of it. It's quiet. It's bagless. We can do the same with these meetings.
Like what emotion—do we want them to feel excited? Do we want them to feel nervous? Do we want them to feel accepted? Do we want…we can design for that, right? By the choices that we make. And so that has to be a part of the agency equation. It's not just about the knowing piece, right? The intellectual piece. It's also about the feeling piece. And that's a holistic set of expectations.
And then I'll just say, you know, going back to your earlier point, understanding what kind of conversation you need at the moment that you’re in is critical. If you're at the beginning of exploring something, you're not making a decisions conversation, you're in a building understanding conversation. That's gonna require different people, right? So first, here are the principles. You have to define the purpose of your meeting. Is it about understanding? Is it about exploring options? Is it about making decisions? Right, that's it. The second thing you need to do, based on what kind of conversation it is, you need to engage different perspectives. The perspectives you need for a discovery conversation are different than the perspectives you might need in a shaping options conversation. So you need to understand that.
The third is, you need to frame the issue, right? Most people don't really understand how to organize a question to put the conversation around. And we call it the Goldilocks challenge. It's either too broad, right? We have to fix school culture! Or it's too narrow. We have to figure out how to make this one class work. So you have to figure out the sort of just right framing so that people can understand where to put their energy around.
You have to set the scene, as you said, right? You have to think about the environment that we're in, and you got to make it an experience. You have to bring emotion into the room. Most people are like, this is a serious problem. No room for emotion here. But guess what? We're human beings, thank goodness. We're not ChatGPT, we're not robots. Emotion matters. So let's not pretend that it doesn't. Let's find the data in that emotion and use it to our advantage. What are people scared of? What are they fearful of? What are they joyful of? We can use that as part of the design.
So when you understand that there are levers that you can play with and that you can understand, you're going to be much more equipped to design a conversation that actually accelerates where you need to go.
Tim Fish: I love it. And it gets back to the idea, right? If those little things matter, the ways we think about those little elements are gonna matter and asking those questions, I love your six o'clock question. And so I also love this notion of, if we smash them together, right? Let's take these two big ideas we've been talking about, how we think about the future and how we create organizations that can think about the future or have students or young people be thinking about the future. And how do we design strategic conversations?
So here's a very specific example. Literally two days ago, I had a conversation with a board that's asked me to come out and spend a little time with them. And in that conversation, they said, look, we're good. Things are pretty good at the school. You know, enrollment's strong, parents seem engaged, kids are loving the school, we have a stable faculty that's not turning over an awful lot. But they said, you know, as a board, we're largely made of current parents. So the board's mostly all current parents. And they said, because of that, we tend to think in this year or next year, and we set goals and priorities, and we're very good at hitting those goals and priorities. But what we're really not good at, at all, is thinking about five, 10, 20 years out. How as a board are we going to be, to use Roman's term from one of the great episodes of New View EDU, good ancestors for this school?
Help me, as my consultant, Lisa, and all the listeners I'm sure will appreciate, help me think about how I might help that school, in two hours or so, start exploring some ideas around the future. So this is pretty darn selfish of me, but I'm going to see how you can help me think about that.
Lisa Kay Solomon: It's a great question. And I think, first of all, starting with what I said earlier, having empathy for people having those conversations, turns out our brains are not actually wired to think long-term, right? So again, and we don't have a lot of practice. So that's a hard conversation to structure in any meaningful way, in a way that has relevance for this moment.
There are a number of ways I would think about it. Again, if we go back to this framework of how do we think long-term, one is what kind of conversation is it? And given that we're stretching forward in the future, I would say it's a building understanding conversation. So you would say, OK, well, given that, who has perspectives about the future that would benefit this conversation? So one is, there's probably some experts in the kind of adjacent, but...what we call macro environmental world that would help us understand different things we need to be aware of.
So that could be things like what's happening in technology. You know, listen, every single educator got rocked about a year ago when ChatGPT made itself available and they're like, oh my gosh, everything I knew about grading and teaching is off the table. So what's the next version of that coming in five years? Well, teachers probably don't know, the board probably doesn't know, but somebody probably knows, someone in R&D lab knows.
You know, again, not predicting it, but they could tell you what's on the horizon. You know, they could tell you like, hey, is VR going to be a thing for real for real, or is it still going to be in the hype cycle? What else is going to happen around hybrid learning? What's going to happen around our phones? What's going to happen with augmented reality? What's going to happen with AI at this point, right? So, there are perspectives around just the technology that you might want to have in the room.
There's probably also some perspectives around psychology that you'd want in the room, right? Like how are students and young people, right, five years from now, if we're a high school, well, let's work backwards. Where are they right now? They're probably now in elementary school. Maybe they're in kindergarten, right? Like what are they exposed to? How does more years of that exposure lead to the development of their brains? What are we learning about brain development? So my point is, you can bring in different experts to get at a sense of where the world might be and why in five years, and have them in the room. You also could probably get perspectives about parents of newborns. You know, they're going to be the future parents of high schoolers, right? We know that to be a fact. So, you know, maybe they're not quite in the mode, but like, how do you represent those perspectives as closely as you can? How do you get kind of proximate with the future, so to speak, to help inform the different ways you might understand how the future might unfold in life?
And then the last thing I'll say, and this is getting back to the feeling the future bit that I think is so often missed, how do you tell narratives about this future? I mean, listen. The future does exist in every single school right now. It's called the business plan, right? It's called the forecast. And the challenge with that is that there's no humans in those forecasts, there's just numbers. And this is Roman's big part in The Good Ancestor. He says by not really, he doesn't quite say cultivating empathy for the future, that's something that we're really talking about at the d.school. We are literally discounting the future, because how are the forecasts done? They're done with a discount value. We're literally discounting the future humans in those futures. So how do we give form and narrative and feeling to those future students in ways that have the same level of urgency that we might feel about our current students?
So the best way to do that is through narratives. And even Roman talks about in his book that there's, I think it's called Japan Design, but they literally designate perspectives from the future. When they have a big board meeting, they will give people like a yellow vest that represents perspectives from the future. And again, you're not looking to be right. You're looking to have a different kind of conversation. You're looking to have a good perspective.
Tim Fish: You know, I had the privilege of serving on the board of trustees at Viewpoint School in Calabasas, California for a long time. And Mark McKee and I were talking about, and other board members were talking about, what should our, sort of what used to be the strategic planning committee, what should we actually do? And it was Mark's idea with some other trustees to really think about inventing what he called the strategic futures committee. And it's a committee that doesn't look to be in the one year or two year horizon, but it's a whole committee of the board that sits out at that 10 year, at that 15 year horizon. And using tools from Institute for the Future and other places to help develop protocols for having conversations about the future that then shape the things we should be doing today in the finance committee. And I think it's that connection, between a possible future and some of the actions we want to take today, where real strategy comes in. We actually start thinking about making a bet on something in terms of going forward.
This has been, as I knew it would be, such a great conversation. And I'll tell you, we went through so many episodes together where you and I were talking with a guest and weren't able to actually really get into our ideas, and in particular, your ideas.
And so it has been so, so wonderful, Lisa Kay, to just have you telling us a little bit about what you're thinking about and where you are. Any final thoughts about how to help schools and teachers and educators continue to think a little bit about the future and about strategy?
Lisa Kay Solomon: Yeah, thank you so much, Tim. This has been just such a delight, and so many ideas are sparking. And I just want to talk about a couple of quick things that you said in these final remarks, which is not to be afraid of the joy. We know that when we are our best selves, we are feeling a sense of joy and possibility. And at the end of the day, and I know that the purpose of New View EDU is like, you know, really exploring what is the purpose of schools. And I think it is about practice ground to help our students become, right? To really help them grow and shape who they are in service of not only themselves, but their contributions toward the future.
And, you know, when I think about where students are right now and what the future needs, the future needs our students to feel joy. The students need to feel like they can make a difference because they've experienced making a difference, not because people are telling them what they could or can't do. And that is all about the environmental choices that we make. And one last thing I'll say, and of course we're running out of time here, is that when I'm thinking about my applied work, not just teaching this with my students at Stanford and working with K-12 students, but where is this needed most in the world right now? I think it's around how we are imagining our future society and our democratic society and our civic contributions to society.
And so I'm spending a lot of time right now thinking about how might we amplify civic joy in those moments, and remind ourselves of the kind of futures that we want to feel and be a part of, that are steeped in democratic values, not ones that are about fear and what's happening in this present moment. And so I just want to encourage all school leaders and educators to say, how do I create conditions of possibility in order to allow my students to feel what it's like to imagine a future that they want to be a part of and that they want to build? And that all of those are possible. All of those are teachable, learnable moments that we can build on. And I know that's so much of what you're doing here at New View EDU.
Thank you so much for this opportunity and I'm excited to keep listening to all of the guests that you continue to bring on that work towards that goal.
Tim Fish: Oh, thank you. Well, Lisa, I love that. And I love that notion of experiencing making a difference, right? You don't just learn about it, you actually are doing it. You're feeling it. You're feeling it, right? It gets back to one of the things you've been talking about the whole episode. How important emotion is, how we can feel it. We can feel the future. We can discover the future.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I just love our conversations and I'm just so glad we were able to have one on New View EDU.