'Where are we going?' Nick Foster on the future of future thinking
As a Futures Designer who spent an esteemed career at globally renowned tech companies like Apple, Nokia, Sony, Dyson, and most recently as Head of Design at Google X - Nick Foster talks about a new kind of future thinking. With this we celebrate the 150th episode of the Future of XYZ Podcast.
Acclaimed industrial designer and recent author, Nick Foster (RDI - Royal Designer of Industry) joins our Podcast Future of XYZ for its 150th episode of the series! In this special edition, we celebrate not only 150 episodes of future exploration, but also Nick’s recently released book ‘COULD SHOULD MIGHT DON’T: HOW WE THINK ABOUT THE FUTURE’ by MacMillan. This interview is an excerpt of the episode.
iF Design: Nick, why did you write this book in particular?
Nick Foster: I've been in and around the industry. I'm a designer by training. I've been fortunate enough to work for some large and interesting companies. In those companies, I've held roles that involve looking beyond the horizon and considering longer-term futures than most people do. When I was at Google X, it was the extreme version of that. I was looking at things like brain control and computer interfaces, ranging from robotics to stratospheric internet balloons. I worked on long-term projects, thinking about the kinds of things we might make, why we might make them, how we might make them, and whether they would be interesting, risky, or both. Being in and around those worlds for such a long time, I had a lot of conversations about the future with designers, scientists, engineers, investors, marketing people and business leaders. What I've realised, without wanting to sound too critical, is that none of us are particularly good at this.
iF Design: So, you decided to write a book on how to think about the future in a good way?
Nick: I reached a point in my career where I was fortunate enough to take a break. I just wanted to start jotting down some thoughts to help me get my head back in gear. After being in the workspace for so long, I started having that internal conversation about how we should think about the future. Why is it seemingly so underpowered, under-resourced and non-rigorous? Why do people make the same mistakes regardless of their background? So I started to write things down. It evolved and evolved and evolved, and it became unwieldy. And so it turned into a book. It's been a really enjoyable experience. I've always found writing to be a way of making sense of the world for myself.
iF Design: At the front of the book, Questlove, musician, and obviously the co-founder of the Roots, but also filmmaker and cultural curator, says that your book helps provide a meaningful framework for considering the big questions of “Where are we going?" What do you think we actually don't know enough about?" What what is it that we don't know enough about?
Nick: I didn't want to write a manifesto stating what I think the future should contain or which technologies we should invest in. I also didn't want to make any predictions about where I think the future is heading. Nor did I want to write a book that set out a method or framework to scribble on a whiteboard. Those are all things I didn't want to do because I think there's already enough of that around. I think there are four main ways in which we think about the future. Obviously, we all jump between these ways of thinking. Some of us have our preferred ways of thinking about the future. Some of us only do those things, but maybe stray a bit, so the edges are blurry — like every diagram.
Perhaps it's the four corners of the map. But I think they're broadly defined as the four words 'could', 'should', 'might' and 'don't'. I find myself falling into those patterns. I think everybody does, whether they're a practitioner and creator of future visions, a consumer of them, or just someone chatting to their friends in a pub about the future. They'll find themselves falling into one of these four patterns of conversation or ways of thinking. Once we're aware of this taxonomy and can break the future down into four more manageable parts, we can start having a more critical conversation about it. Perhaps what I mean by rigour is that if we spread ourselves more broadly across all four categories, our stories about the future will be more well-rounded, engaging, actionable, understandable, and will bring more people into the conversations we want to have with them.
iF Design: So, what did you learn about thinking about the future so far?
Nick: The main thing I learned is that even when working with highly educated and focused people, when it comes to a deadline, everyone wants a great deal of rigour. Everyone wants to delve deeply into the details. If you just fling out an idea in a meeting is not acceptable. You have to think more deeply. You have to take deeper responsibility. You need to have data to back it up. You need to provide real detail. As soon as the conversation stretches that little bit further, we can talk about what that means — obviously 'further' is a comparative adjective. Of course, it's different in every industry, but if you start talking about the future with someone, even a highly educated person with a PhD or a Pulitzer Prize, you'll find references to The Jetsons or The Matrix starting to come up in conversation. This feels like we're setting the bar too low for these kinds of conversations.
But again, when the solid line becomes a dotted line, it ceases to be data and becomes a story. You'll find that people lean on those dotted lines as if they're synthetic facts, when in fact they're stories, opinions, hunches or guesses. I think there's a lot of tolerance for a lack of rigour when talking about the future, across the board — from designers and creative people to investors, financiers, venture capitalists and business leaders. Everyone has a visible weakness when talking about the future that we really need to start addressing.