Alvin Toffler famously coined the phrase, a future shock. to describe a possible future state where we are overwhelmed by the scale and pace of disruption around us. A positive pathway out of such an overwhelm is to amplify our cognition, if such a thing was possible. We have human cognition, which has evolved over tens of hundreds of thousands of years.
Our cognition has changed dramatically even in the last couple of decades through the rise of our information environment. And so, essentially, while we may have the same structure to our brains, Our cognition is significantly different in the very nature. We are incredibly adaptable and we are evolving to our environment. And as a result, we have some choices.
around, amongst other things, whether we respond to the cues of those who are seeking to hijack our attention or we choose to exert our choice, which does require us to shift. the nature of our cognition in a very different information environment. That is my guest today on FuturePod, Ross Dawson, who's a futurist, keynote speaker, podcaster, strategy advisor, author, and an entrepreneur based in Australia. Welcome to FuturePod, Ross. It's fantastic to be with you, Peter.
Great to have you. So let's start with the standard guest question, the Ross Dawson story. How did Ross get involved with the Futures and Foresight community? It's a lifelong story. Part of it is, in fact, the diversity of my background. I was born in Canberra, Australia, and my father fairly soon got a job in the United Nations. So I spent almost all my schooling at the International School of Geneva.
which had 65 nationalities and was exposed to many different perspectives on the world, which was fascinating. And actually, even at school, I started to frame this question, which was, what is it that all people... wherever they are in the world or whoever they come from is the same? And what is it that's different? What are the cultural differences and what is the same? And that's been a lifelong career, which I already came from that. seeing the diversity of people. I then actually already
Possibly at school. Maybe it was a university I started to frame my interest in the future. And so I studied physics at university. And it wasn't because I wanted to be a physicist, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I said, that's... fascinating to understand the world better in the way that it works. So I did that.
I was trying to frame, think about what I might want to do. At the time, I already had, at the time, what I'd call futurologist as a sort of pretty strong contender for what I wanted to do with my life. or other related frames was to work for a think tank, which back when I was young was a bit of a different thing than it is today, where it was a bit more around thinking as opposed to political punditry.
And so then I came back to Australia after my degree in Britain and first worked in computer sales. And this was probably goes, well, computers are incredible things. I always wanted to tinker and to play with things, even though I tried to do that as much as possible when I was younger.
was involved in both, well, learning about business because we were selling to large businesses and so understanding the nature of business and the nature of technology and that because I was a bit more technical than... Others there, I became a product manager. which was still a sales role but trying to dig into that and
I was still on this quest to say, I want to understand how the world works. What is the state of society? How is that evolving? And so that led to me taking a leap from computer sales to stockbroking. And I said, if you want to understand the world, we've got to understand money. The money makes the world go around. So I...
entered the world of stockbroking, so in international equities for Merrill Lynch. And that was a very important grounding, I think, for understanding the nature of the structure of the world and how it worked. But it wasn't my culture. It wasn't my place. It's not, I think there's A lot of people, including me, don't quite fit in that kind of particular culture. So I suppose the short version of the story is I hopped off to... Japan, literally with no...
job, know where to stay the first night, knowing nobody, knowing no Japanese, and landed in Japan. And again, this is through this wanting to explore, to find different cultures, to learn. And actually, there is an interesting theme there, which was partly Zen that took me there. And perhaps we can loop back because I do have this frame around Zen and the art of creating the future. And I became a financial journalist.
And so this was, again, fantastic for gaining insight into the world and the structure and communicating about it. And I suppose whilst I was at school, I was interested in, early on, loved the creative writing, but I just tended more towards the maths and physics. is what just came very easily to me. But as this was a time when I was coming back to communication.
And even then, and so I got a series of promotions, ended up as a global head of capital markets for Thompson Financial in London. Though at the time already, people were asking me about... to talk about the future in various ways, even though that was not my function. And that was still really the frame. So I ended up saying, okay, that's enough of being employed, time to do my own thing. And I actually think an important part here is that I was studying NLP, Neuro Linguistic Programming.
which could crudely describe as applied cognitive psychology. And I did some studies of that and came back to Australia to work out what I was wanting to do with my life and ended up saying I want to be able to... think and to write and communicate and to share ideas about the world and how it's evolving. And very soon, I... Actually, it is a nice little anecdote.
I was doing some freelance journalism and I was writing an article. I said, oh, I did a pitch and I said, I want to write about business networks. Networks are fundamental. I've always been interested in networks seen as a network frame on the world. And I went through at the time the white pages who look for, I can't remember what it was, and I found this organization called Australian Business Network.
And they said, oh, that sounds intriguing. So I picked up the phone, I dialed it, and they said, what are you? I'm a business network. And they put me through to... a gentleman called Oliver Freeman, who ran Australian Business Network, which was at the time the Australian offshoot of Global Business Network. And so fairly soon signed up for the scenario planning program. So did that in, so essentially run by quite a few people from Global Business Network.
in Emeryville and a few local people as well. So I did that and then went over to San Francisco to do some of the advanced scenario planning. projects and started working on some projects with Oliver and some others, Sally Jones at the time. And we did some very interesting projects, including Future of Asia for Austrade. And quite a few people over from Bay Area for that one as well. And that's where I met for the first time some of the original founders of Global Business Network.
So I was already doing that work, but it was still some years before I would consider myself a full-time futurist. So my first book was Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships, and I put the subtitle as The Future of Professional Services. In a way, saying this is a point, this is an idea, it's very practical and present-oriented, but it is around where professional services are going.
And my next book was Living Networks. And that was around the hyper-connected world and the implications and how that flowed through. And that was far more squarely future-focused. And so there's, again, building some of that credibility. And so I started to still do work around some of these themes, working with professional service firms. We're doing some more scenario projects with various guises. And it was only in 2006 when I set up Future Exploration Network.
as an organization to be able to be a network to bring together future foresight professionals to do projects beyond what I could do individually. And at the same time, I set up the Future Media Summit, which was held simultaneously in Sydney and San Francisco, linked by video for the next five years. And that was really the threshold when I became the full-time futurist.
And when people ask me, how do you become a futurist? I often jokingly say, you claim you are and people either believe you or they don't. And there's people that describe themselves as a futurist and some people have the credibility. So essentially, I was building the credibility through my books in particular and other work. to be able to say if I am working with the future and working on these things then that's i do have sufficient
foundations to be credible and to be worth listening to. And of course, since then, I've been interweaving these themes. But a lot of my work is still around, again, my definition of a futurist. is someone who helps leaders and organizations to think effectively about the future to act better today. And so a lot of my work still is very much about
For example, future of work has been a theme of my work for well over two decades now. But a lot of it is also around what do we do today in terms of... framing that, be that around crowdsourcing, be that around social media or the enterprise, which is another couple of books I've done, or be that around use of AI and reconfiguring workflows and so on. So that's the essence of the story. Yes.
When I was teaching at Swinburne, I used to say in the first lecture that I regard us as presentist rather than futurist because we only have the present. Exactly. We have the past as knowledge. And we have the future as opportunity and also things that go wrong. But the present is what we're in now, this connection to Zen. Talk to us more about Zen and the future.
This was something I was grappling with when I was perhaps 20 or younger. I started to think this, essentially say the only thing that exists is the present. To your point, there is nothing. The past is just memories and the future doesn't exist yet. There is nothing but the present. And if we start to get lost... and thinking about other things, letting our minds wonder about what might be and what could be and what might have been, then we are lost.
And so we do need to be keeping on coming back to the present. And so meditation and practices are one of the ways to facilitate that. So I started reading a lot about Zen at the time, trying to understand that. But I also grappled with this idea. I also am ambitious. I want to achieve things. And these are things which are in the future. So how this seemed to be this fundamental paradox. And actually, I framed this whole array of paradoxes.
to try to reconcile around order and chaos and All of these different paradoxes, but one of the most fundamental ones being around this, what I framed as Zen, which is being in the present and the future, which is around... envisaging things which might be and what it is we can do to do that. And so where we are working in the present to be able to achieve that. So this was part of the context where when I had some choices when I was
I chose to go to Japan, partly because of my interest in Zen. And I immediately found a Zen master who is giving lectures in English and had these regular sessions and ended up, in fact... spending a year living in a Zen dojo that he ran, where we had lectures, went on retreats, and lived our daily life, but using Zen practices. One of the simple lessons learned is that Zen is about... And so if you look at the Zen monasteries, the practice is not only in the sitting, the just sitting of Zazen.
in the present it is as much in the sweeping in the cooking in the cleaning it has been there as you are doing these things which In a way, I'm working towards the future to making a cleaner place, to be able to create a meal which doesn't exist yet, but will exist. And I think it's a very big topic, and I aspire to write a book about this at some point. But this is part of this.
realization over time that there is not a conflict that we can be completely in the present but also aware of what we are doing at the moment helping to create the future that we want Yeah, it's certainly paradoxical, but care and even the karma, that if we are not careful, if we do not have care towards the future, then our acts in the present. can be quite unhelpful in terms of the futures that are yet to come. And so I do completely giving service to the present.
and giving service to your physical space and your emotional space and support of others are all acts done with a care for the future. Absolutely. I think that it's around giving care for our future selves and other future selves. So compassion, as it were, this caring of... other people, souls that exist today or live. And in the future, as some people have been vocally pointing out recently, there are far more souls in the future and there's a lot.
to give to ourselves. I think thinking about our children is the very obvious one, but there's far more people or life in the future that we can serve by trying to shape in better directions. Yeah, I agree completely. So lovely, Ross. We're obviously on the edge of your practice, your craft. So what do you want to talk to the listeners about how you do futures and foresight work? I think of it as
What was really central is Enriching Mental Models. And that, in fact, was one of the section titles in my first book. That was about professional services. And what we do as a professional service is you help enrich the mental models of your clients. And that is the role of the futurist. They often say predictions often have negative value. But the intent is not to make predictions. The intent is to do things which are useful for the present.
For the people and organizations that I work with, the value is into giving them, expanding the scope of their mental models so that they are richer. In a way, I think a summary of what I think you and... many other people do, is as a communicator. as a professional communicator and communicating with intent. And that intent is to help. change people's minds or hopefully open people's minds to a wider spectrum of possibilities. That's the role. And this means that I...
It's not necessarily the techniques that I use or the approaches that I use are essentially ones of facilitation. And so quite a lot of the work I do is as a keynote speaker. And it is a big challenge to stand in front of an audience and have them change the way that they think at the end of it. But if I'm not doing that, then I'm not doing my job.
And that's really the intent is to how do you open up or shift people's thinking to open up to new possibilities and those critically to having a more positive frame. And I often say that I am both a professional futurist, I'm sorry, a professional optimist and a natural optimist.
But that is, people could debate whether that's the right thing to be, but I think it's important to be... to present a positive frame and i always say around thinking about the future you need to acknowledge challenges You can't ignore them. They're real and you have to say, how do we address, understand and address and work around the challenges there are, but also to recognize that there are positive possibilities in the future.
And this is that part of that enriching mental models or expanding them is to say there may be opportunities or directions which you may not have thought about, which if you think about them more, you realize that there are positive possibilities that you haven't necessarily. either envisaged or put enough weight to. And so if I have that weighting of being aware of challenges and being aware of opportunities, I think we need to rebalance generally to not.
destroy, delete the challenges, but have those there, but to accentuate the positives in that optimistic frame. And that is part of that communication. So in terms of facilitation, I think my philosophical foundation is in scenarios. And I suppose the more traditional scenario planning methodologies where, amongst other things, you don't weight scenarios. A good set of scenarios should be all equally plausible.
But the nature of scenario planning is that two fundamental characteristics They need to be plausible, believable. And they need to stretch thinking. And so any good scenario exercise, or I would argue almost any futures exercise, someone which takes the participant to say, I hadn't thought about that before. I hadn't thought that was possible, but now I realize this is possible. And so that is that enriching the mental models. That is that expanding of the thinking.
And I think that there's almost any, and it's individual to the person and the group is the journey to get them to that point. So I think rather than a particular methodology, it is deeply around human facilitation. How is it that you take a group of people to, or individuals, group of individuals, whatever it may be, to start thinking in ways that they hadn't thought before that are enabling? which enables them to see more positive possibilities and the opportunities that they can create.
So I don't have a list of foresight methodologies and I do draw on those as useful. But for me, this simply is this way of how is it that you interact? with a human or group of humans, so they individually and collectively expand their range of thinking about possibility. accentuated to the positive and the opportunities and the possibilities and realizing that there are actions they can take today which will shift things towards that more positive frame. And the one final point is that
This all starts with believing that positive future is possible. If you don't believe it is possible, you will never take action to create it. And that is often part of the journey, part of the battle, as it were, is to say people don't see those positive futures. And first of all, you have to say, even if there is just a tiniest fraction of a percent of possibility that this could happen. you have a duty to do everything you can to be able to create it.
And that is my mission is to be able to create that seed or to amplify that seed of positive thinking in order to be able to then say, all right. So what can we do to create that positive future that you can now envisage? If you look back at how you have been... working with groups, keynotes and others to facilitate this kind of opening of thinking. I'm curious about how the... points of leverage have changed for you as the world itself has changed.
So COVID, of course, was an enormous change in everybody's life, in work and personal and everything else. And if we spin out to the geopolitical level... We're at this fascinating time of the rise of China, the possible decline of America, have things evolved as to the things you bring into people's attention as to what opens them up?
The first point I'd make is that people's readiness to see the possibilities of change has evolved over time and i think around 20 years ago i started to observe there was some cyclicality to people's openness to thinking about the future where in some ways people not seeing many shocks and they say things seem to be steady as they go. In other cases, people seeing, experiencing shocks and saying...
All I want to think about is right now and getting through in survival. And these are just a couple of the factors which shape how ready leaders in particular are to thinking about. forward timeframes and extending those forward timeframes. More generally, my clients are all self-selecting in the sense of these are ones who are more open to thinking about the future, as I suppose is the nature for all foresight professionals.
And so I think it does change. Again, I always believe every human is unique. Every organization is unique. Every group is unique. And so every time, in a way, is unique. And so it's always that that's part of the, I think, the creativity of being in the future role. is to be able to find, well, for this group at that time, in this context, what is it?
that will open their thinking more, whether it is they're already open to that or whether it's not. Sometimes you can just point to things. You just may have, as you pointed out. You just noticed that COVID wasn't expected and that came up. I wrote an article in 1998 about, I think the title was
Did you forecast the Asia crisis when there was the Asia crisis in 1997 and basically looked at the role of scenarios? Because in that case, people were experienced. Big financial shock, completely unexpected. And so they woke up and said, actually, yes, there are uncertainties that we did not countenance. And so you work with what you have in terms of context. And as you pointed out. some of the things which are rising at the moment, but helping people to see them not necessarily as trends.
but things that are... we need to take into account in having a richer view of how the future might evolve and the responses to those trends and the complexities of evolution of the world. The scenario process, I also frame it about scenario as a thinking style and seeing the future as multiple, seeing strategy as optionality.
And is that your experience when you work with groups? Absolutely. And again, I've written explicitly about this saying, yeah, scenario planning is not the point. Scenario thinking is the point. And so how do you get leaders who are often... in a way, through their education and the way in which they are. brought up in often whether they're studies or early corporate career, they are ingrained into thinking about having an opinion.
And so that's the journey. And so the value of scenario planning, and there are many potential objectives for scenario planning and many contexts in which it can be applied usefully. But I think broadly, it's pretty safe to say that the biggest single value from the scenario planning is to engender greater scenario thinking. And back to my point earlier, where you get a set of leaders saying, I didn't think that was possible.
But now I do understand that it's possible. And at the same time, I believe that quite different thing is also possible. And that is scenario thinking. And if you're able to get any progress at all. on that ability to think sonorically as opposed to, I want to have an opinion around what I think is going to happen to actually, there are quite a few things that could happen. That's massive progress.
Are you seeing evidence that there is actually greater appetite, that people are both sophisticated enough, conversational enough to understand it? Are we still fighting a rigged action to convince people that top-down ways of understanding the future and strategy... mightn't be the most adaptive way to run large, complex organizations. As I said, I do have self-selection clients, and so I do have a skewed data set.
in making that assessment. But I do think that, yes, the extraordinary turmoil of the 2020s. And the pace of change has led to... I think leaders, organizations understand that we do need to be grappling with uncertainty and ambiguity. We do need to be thinking about how the world could be different in quite short timeframes as well as long timeframes.
the very present And massive challenges, including climate change, which require longer term thinking and short term action, are all... aspects and these may or may not be framed as foresight or futures thinking but all leading towards which are not embedded in trying to have certainty, but around exploring and discovering and working with that more. And I think that is, at the moment, just even in the last year or two in addition to.
the previous couple of years really unfolding where this is the nature of leadership today. And I think that's fairly well recognized. I know as a professional futurist, you obviously look at the emerging future around you and you're obviously thinking of... your clients, as to the futures that you're finding interesting because it's relevant to them. Just for Ross Dawson himself, what are the futures that just Ross himself is interested most in and is leaning into and why?
I am focused on, one frame is for it is cognitive evolution. So I have human cognition, which has evolved over tens of hundreds of thousands of years. Our cognition has changed dramatically even in the last couple of decades through the rise of our information environment. And so, essentially, while we may have the same structure to our brains...
Our cognition is significantly different in the very nature. We are incredibly adaptable and we are evolving to our environment. That goes to the point of my most recent book, Thriving on Overload. where we have awash in far more information than ever before. And as a result, we have some choices. around amongst other things, whether we respond to the cues of those who are seeking to hijack our attention or we choose to exert our choice, which does require us to shift.
the nature of our cognition in a very different information environment. So today we have generative AI. which is progressing at an extraordinary rate and is already proving to be an extraordinary tool for augmentation. So I, in the first instance, I am deep. My core of my work at the moment is around humans plus AI. How AI can be a complement to humans in their intent.
for particularly complex thinking and decision making, working with boards, for example, on how to bring these tools and structures and processes for more effective thinking. and been able to build the structures whereby humans with their extraordinarily... and I think still untapped scope of thinking, but still finite cognition, can be amplified and augmented with the right workflows and tools and processes by generative AI.
And with a slightly more futuristic hat, I have brain-computer interfaces. Or where, again, I've been interested in these for the last time. I've been writing about them again for over a couple of decades. It's in one of the core interests.
and this will take some time to unfold, but where the reality is that we will choose to augment ourselves, we will connect in more deeply, and this becomes an evolution of our... not just our thinking, but also our consciousness, our relationship to the reality around us. So these are the sets of issues that I have always been deeply involved in and are now very much coming to the fore.
Between turmoil and... our ongoing evolution of our thinking and also this possible symptomatic stuff about that not everybody's coping necessarily has got good coping or learning strategies for evolving.
Yes. I suppose a very specific and very pertinent aspect of that is social media's impact on our mental health. And without delving into that specific topic, there are a wealth of our shifts in our information and relational environment as in the way in which we connect with other humans that has shifted dramatically the nature of community amongst other things are all things which have in some ways, absolutely supported negative shifts in mental health.
I think there are nothing which is entirely one-sided. There are also things which have assisted. I've been able to, amongst many other things, to be able to see, to recognize. to make them more socially acceptable, to discover new ways to be able to treat maladies of how we live and exist, which can be through interventions or therapies or sometimes through... through drugs of various kinds. But this is, I think, very, it is a very relevant question, as in individually and collectively.
whether we have mental health. When I wrote in Living Networks, we're essentially raising this idea of the global brain. raising this question of just as we can look at the mental health of an individual, we can look at the mental health of the global brain of society at large, which is, I think we would probably fairly describe as schizophrenic amongst other. psychological terms. And these are fundamental issues we do need to engage with. And I think we are stretching ourselves in our capacity.
And I think that we do need to be focusing on some of these, again, challenges, potential negative turns, things which are... very potentially confronting, but ones which if we see them and we recognize them and work towards them, we can do our best to address and shift towards positive directions. And you also mentioned AI and the effect of generative AI and the large language models, and you obviously would be aware of...
A lot of people moving in to say this has to be slowed or controlled. You're seeing governments try to legislate or at least bring in governance processes for it. Where do you sit in that kind of process? It is a very complex issue, but I suppose to give a distilled answer. I mean, I'm vaguely in the middle. In the sense of, yes, we absolutely need regulation and we need governance and we need to understand the multitude of risks.
from ai from very present ones around bias being embedded in models through to larger ones around impact on jobs or potentially even ones around rogue ai but I do not think that it is useful to stop AI development. Not that that's anything which ever could happen anyway. So it's not really worth debating things which couldn't happen. But I think that there are ways in which we can, and also to not...
display or downplay the potential upside and positive applications of AI. For example, my most recent episode of my Amplifying Cognition podcast was with Daniel Erasmus, who has created Climate GPT. And essentially, he says, the biggest risk we have is not AI, it is climate change, but we can use AI to be able to assist us in the most complex challenge we've ever faced.
And this is some of the positive applications. We don't want to stop those. So we do need to, as I suppose echoing my thoughts throughout our conversation, we need to recognize the challenges. We need to address them with regulations, instructions, governance, guidelines, whatever will help, and to accentuate the positive in how we can use these tools to be able to create a better future, which I think that they will play an enormous role in doing.
So I'm going to move you to the communication question. You are an expert communicator. I feel fairly confident in saying that. And you've already given your definition of what a futurist is about and what we try to do. On the communication question, yes, how do you explain to people what Ross does when they don't understand what it is that Ross does? That's the standard question.
But are there any general advice you can give to people who are coming to our field? Have you got any tips or advice from someone who's got the scars and the lessons of... trying to communicate this to people. It's saying the obvious to this particular audience, but to always emphasize that the name of the game is not predictions. It is helping think more effectively. This point that there's two points. The future is unknowable.
But there are things we do know which can assist us in seeing the ways that it may unfold. In being able to see the trends, understand the structures of the responses to the trends, and understand the uncertainties, to explore the ways these could play out, and ultimately in seeing the system. And I'm sure many of the greatest people in our field have said the exercise of future studies is understanding the system.
If I think people present their work and what they do, it's helping people to understand the system in ways that they can find the leverage points to be able to create. or shape the futures that they want rather than ones they don't want that is generally is received they're not i still get the crystal ball joke I'm sure we all do, which is a bit tedious.
But when you start to help people understand the nature of, this is about saying we don't know the future, but we can think about the future usefully. Let's do that exercise so that we can. do what we can to create a better future than if we didn't do that. Yeah. I think another one too, which quite a few of the guests on the pod have talked about, is the...
Start where the listener is. Start where your audience is interested, where your audience is wrestling now. Because as you said earlier, this is about your decisions in the present. So this... is I think of it in terms of the architectures or the workflow. So first is to think of a human brain, and we're all thinking uniquely, and ways in which we can basically pull together.
multiple cognitions or ways of thinking to be able to create better outcomes. So this goes back to the fairly ancient almost field of collective intelligence. So how do we get a group of people to be collectively more intelligent than they are individually? And there's been a lot of interesting research over the years.
And so this starts to overlay today when we have where some of those agents can be not only human agents, but AI agents, where they have some strengths and they have some weaknesses. And so when we start to build that, so a lot of my current work is actually looking at the specific workflows or patterns. between what humans do when they hand it off to AI, how that they hand that back to humans. And one of the most, much greatest discussed areas in AI today is of multi-agent AI system.
Now, rather than thinking of a number of different AI systems that are working together, I think we need to be looking at both these, what I call humans plus AI. multi-agent system with human agents, AI agents. And again, there is a lot of very interesting research. It's rising very rapidly in terms of looking at those architectures of how it is we create and bring together that.
but also want to i think it's very important to not just be make this not just about ai Because it does come back to what I was originally saying around having these enriching mental models. And you can start with a particular idea and you can give it to AI and they can get somebody corrected and so on, you have an outcome. But if the human isn't learning and expanding their thinking and thinking better as a result of that, it's not a... It's only a somewhat useful outcome.
So this is around building some workflows where humans are doing what they do best at. And many of the disciplines that I look at are still vastly exceed the capabilities of AI. but also to continue to develop what we do in our perception so that we can see the world, which is what foresight professionals do, to make sense of that.
to go through that process of synthesis of bringing together the scope of ideas and supported or assisted by AI and specific tasks or functions to be able to come to a better thinking and ultimately better decisions, which...
is where from a decision comes action. That's what is going to shape our world. Climate GPT is just one of those many important tasks where we can amplify our thinking by... expanding our awareness and using a whole set of AI tools and architectures to be able to be more effective than we ever could be individually. A colleague of ours, Riel Miller, I'm sure you know well, has talked a lot about our future's literacy and particularly...
How we feed our imagination so that we can actually imagine the future is much more varied than what... is maybe presented by media or that kind of thing. Have you got any thoughts on... how people can enhance their stock of ideas about the future. Because if we can't even imagine something, because we've never thought to imagine it. How can we actually surprise and delight ourselves how broad our thinking can be?
So part of my current thinking, actually, just literally the last couple of days around these things, is that the role of the facilitator is human. And so if we pull together the various... technologies we have and the people, that role of Being able to see the individual, where they're at, as we're discussing, to be able to present the things to them which will shift them. This is an interactive role and is one which is driven by people.
So I think if we set out as individuals to expand our scope of thinking, we can do that. We can set out in different directions. We can be assisted. One of my favorite prompts essentially is, This is what I'm currently thinking, what's missing? Or take five different personas, which are all very diverse, and each of them give you some different perspectives of what I'm thinking to give some other ideas and perspectives.
And you can do this with humans, but they're not always available on hand to be able to respond in that way. So you can set out and use these tools marvelously well. But this role of a human, I think as humans, we need to be able to cajole in a way this different thinking out of others by being able to understand where they are and what it is that will shift them. Do you believe that...
The children that have been born And born into the internet and born into the global perspective and born into this. awareness of so much of what is going on in the world, even if it is mediated through social media. Learning to think. At a much deeper and broader level than, say, was the case when we were kids growing up. I think it cuts both ways. And I've talked about cognitive evolution, but also around cognitive devolution.
And I think that this goes back to thriving on overload in the sense of in a world of unlimited information, that the path of least resistance is to take whatever is easily digestible right in front of it. And I think some people are implicitly choosing that path of cognitive devolution. At the same time, I am seeing many people who are... using the unparalleled wealth.
of insight and information that we have today to be able to think vastly beyond what they could when they were younger or that their older generations may have. So it's something where there is a choice. And I think that's part of the critical part is we... There are, I think, many who are.
falling into relatively simplistic thinking, which goes to, as you suggest, some of the political shifts we are seeing around the world where something is easy, this seems to provide an easy answer, and they're going for that. Yet at the same time, there are so many people who I think are taking this opportunity to use the tools and approaches and the vastness of the scopes at hand to... think deeper and more richly than they have ever before. Good.
Ross, it's been an absolute delight to get you on the pod. It's been a well overdue invitation. I'm so glad that I managed to... Get you on here and we spend some time together and with the FuturePod community. Been a real pleasure, Peter. Wonderful. I've been a long-time listener from the very early days, in fact. Thanks, mate. It was wonderful to finally catch up with Ross. Do check out his podcast, Amplifying Cognition.
And if his ideas interest you, then there's also his book, Thriving on Overload. FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the pod, then please follow the Patreon link on our website. This has been Peter Hayward. Thanks for joining me and I'll see you next time.