Voices on the Future: Five Conversations That Stayed With Us
# Innovation
# Thought Leadership
# Interview
# Xcelerator Community
Highlights From Our Thought Leader Interview Series
Bill Johnston
Brian Pagels
Over the past year, we had the opportunity to sit down with some of the most provocative thinkers working at the intersection of technology, industry, and human potential. Our Thought Leader Interview series brought us into conversation with futurists, researchers, and innovation practitioners to explore how we can shape a future that is not only technologically sophisticated but also profoundly human and strategically resilient.
Two themes emerged across these conversations: why organizations struggle to imagine genuinely different futures, and how to build the capacity to do so in service of humanity.
Ed Finn from ASUâs Center for Science and the Imagination diagnoses a specific shortcoming in how organizations often conceive of the future: the imagination gap. Storytelling and digital modeling, he argues, are underused tools for helping teams rehearse possibilities before they arrive. âI think there is a crisis of imagination... it's that we invest so much of our energy into imagining the world as it's the status quo, and we say, 'that's impossible! You can't do that.' And we self-censor.â
Futurists Scott Smith and Susan Cox-Smith advocate for embedding foresight into organizational culture rather than treating it as an isolated exercise. âIt's like driving at night with the headlights off and only occasionally voting to switch them on for five minutes. You don't really get a feel for the road that way.â
Jason Frasca and Iain Kerr from Emergent Futures Lab challenge the traditional âideate-plan-makeâ model at its foundation, arguing that leading with ideation is logically flawed when you're trying to produce something genuinely new. Their alternative: deep immersion in context, letting ideas emerge later rather than forcing them to the front. âIf somethingâs really innovative and novel, we donât have the words, we donât have the imagesâit doesnât exist. So how could you ideate it whatsoever? Thereâs a logical fallacy there⌠weâre barking up the wrong tree⌠Ideas emerge. Ideas come late in the process.â
Dale Dougherty, founder of Make: Magazine, argues that what's often called the âmaker movementâ is less about manufacturing and more about a fundamentally different approach to problem-solving: iterative, hands-on, and unencumbered by institutional caution. âWhat a maker movement means is it's more of a prototyping revolution than a manufacturing revolution... The tools matter less than what happens when people come together around them.â
Futurist Gerd Leonhard pushes back against the automation-at-all-costs mindset, arguing that the more useful frame is âcognificationâ â using technology to amplify human judgment rather than replace it. âEmbrace technology, but don't become technology... When we embrace technology, it means we're doing it for a reason. And the reason is to be better humans, not to replace ourselves.â
Stay tuned for further conversations with leading thinkers on the Siemens Xcelerator Community in the coming months.Â
