Becoming Antifragile in a World of Constant Change
with Disruption Expert Pascal Finette
The future is a paradox we have to learn to hold.
In this episode of How We Future, Lisa Kay Solomon is joined by Pascal Finette, Co-Founder of radical, an organization that offers strategic advice to help leaders build organizations that strengthen under stress instead of breaking. Over nearly three decades, Pascal has led transformations at eBay, Mozilla, and Google, and he brings refreshing honesty about what it really takes to navigate uncertainty.
The conversation centers on a simple question Pascal asks thousands of executives: "The future is ___." How you fill in that blank reveals everything. Some say bright. Some say terrifying. Pascal argues we need to hold both views at once because the future genuinely is contradictory. He and Lisa talk about the danger of the "official future," that narrow path organizations and people lock themselves into that leaves them brittle when inevitable shocks arrive.
In this conversation, you'll learn:
Why holding opposing views of the future at once is essential
Why curiosity is the most important muscle for navigating change
What anti-fragility means in practice and how it differs from resilience
Pascal encourages listeners to ask more meaningful questions about their role in society rather than just focusing on quarterly profits. The future, he reminds us, is ours to create.
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Lisa Kay Solomon: I'm Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow starting today. Today on How We Future, I'm joined by my fellow futurist, Pascal Finette. Pascal has an uncanny ability to spot what's coming next and, just as importantly, translate it in ways that actually help people think and act differently.
Pascal has spent years working with leaders around the world, helping them navigate uncertainty without getting trapped by a narrow version of what the future is supposed to be. He's the author of Disrupt Disruption, a book that asks the question, how do we stay human, curious, and adaptable as change accelerates? In this conversation, you'll hear why the future is full of paradoxes, how curiosity is a skill we can practice, and why learning may be our most important capability right now. Thanks for being here. Let's get into it with Pascal Finette.
Pascal, you live in the future. You're one of those people that is always on the edge and thinking about where things are going and then translating it back to leaders and learners everywhere to help them follow you into the future. I'm just thrilled to be having this conversation with you today about your own practices of how you see the future. I thought, appropriately, I'm wearing my futures curious shirt because Pascal Finette, you are one of the most futures curious people that I know. Thank you for being here.
Pascal Finette: Lisa, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. It has been a while. I'm so stoked for having this conversation. I'm really stoked that you have this podcast now.
Lisa: It's inspired in part by all the great work that you've been doing and the work that we have been exploring since meeting many years ago at a place called Singularity University, which we'll talk a little bit about. I also really want to talk about your fabulous book that came out a little while ago, called Disrupt Disruption. You have this wonderful opening that I want to start our conversation with, where you say, "The future is..." Pascal, sitting here today, how would you finish that sentence? The future is?
Pascal: That's a really good question. I think the future is a pretty crazy place at the moment. If anything, the current moment we're finding ourselves really powerfully demonstrates Stewart Brand's quote that what is today was once the unimaginable future is true in so many different ways. It also demonstrates very powerfully that the future is this incredible wide cone of possibilities.
Some of those we like, some of those we don't like, but it's surely more than what is famously known as the official future, this very narrow path of what we define as our future or imagine our future to be. Because I'm pretty sure, regardless where you are on the political spectrum, on the economic spectrum, what we are living through today might have not been in your books maybe a year or two years ago, as in this is the future I imagine for myself. I do believe that there is a strong part of that in there.
Lisa: What I appreciated in the book, when you talk about “the future is,” and you mentioned that you've asked this question to literally thousands of executives and leaders around the world, that you always get different answers. Future's bright, future's dark, future's scary, future's now, future's far. I've adopted it, by the way, and I bring it into my classes, and I ask my students. It's always interesting.
By the way, a side note, my students tend to be a little bit more optimistic on the whole than executives, which I think is a good thing. We want our young people to be optimistic. You talk about this notion that the future is all of those things. In fact, it's a paradox. This notion that we have to live with the complexities. That it is both exciting and scary. It offers possibility and threats.
You say, “the future is truly a paradox, encompassing seemingly contradictory positions, nonexistent but already here, unwritten but visible in signals all around us, a source of hope, but also anxiety.” What I want to do today, Pascal, is talk through these paradoxes because you are one that seems to navigate them beautifully, being both generative and discerning, having a broad future and focusing on the now.
Maybe I'll start with our origin days together of meeting each other at a place called Singularity University, which was all about helping executives around the world learn about emerging exponential technology in order to have outsized impact in the world. It was a very exciting place to be for a while, filled with promise and possibility on the future.
It introduced me to a chart that was probably like the center of every bingo card in every program and every talk, which was that great conversation captured between Astro Teller of Moonshot and Thomas Friedman in the Thank You for Being Late book, where they have the exponential up and to the right in the curve and the linear. You talked about this is the path of exponential technology, but this is the path of linear adaptation. I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about how you see this paradox of the future being both exponential and linear.
Pascal: When you start to unpack this, I think there's a couple of things in there which are important, I think. One of the reasons why I love this question so much is it allows you to reflect on your own answer, as in, what is my natural predisposition? Because the question is so quick, the future is blank. Then I ask people, it's like, "What's the word which pops into your head?" It's pretty immediate. It gives you a good indication of where do you actually see the future?
What I also like to point out with that particular question is when you then hear other people and their responses, you can check in with yourself a little bit about the discrepancy between your worldview and theirs. When you talk about the future as a leader, particularly when you talk about the future of your company, the vision you have for it, you do need to acknowledge the fact that people might have a very different starting point, even thinking about the future, than you do.
I think that's a really important dichotomy sometimes, particularly when you're on far extreme ends of the spectrum. When we were both at Singularity University, I think Singularity University was overly optimistic about the future, and everything will be solved by technology and abundance everywhere, which I think we can take with a grain of salt and say, "Well, maybe it's a little more complicated and a little bit more complex than that."
I do think it's important to start there. As in, where do I actually see myself in this world? Then the other piece is, there's a quote, I think it goes back to Fitzgerald, who said, "The sign of true genius is to hold two opposing views in your head at the same time." I think the challenge I see with a lot of people when they look at the future, into the future, is that they tend to only can hold one view of it. Either the super optimistic everything will be fine or, oh my God, we are doomed. This is the end of the world.
AI is a really good example for me, where on one hand, it's like the hype camp. Artificial intelligence is coming. It's beautiful. On the other hand, it's like the Terminator side, where Skynet becomes real, and then we're all done. I think the really important bit is for us as leaders, for us as humans, is to be able to hold those two thoughts in your head at the same time because they are both true to certain extents. We need to navigate this. I think this is probably the one thing I really, really want to get people to really understand that the world is not black and white. It's not just gradients. It's all these colors. We need to see all the colors to actually get a comprehension of it.
Lisa: It's such a thoughtful way of both understanding the power of different perspectives and how do we lean into them and learn from them, and also checking in with our own biases about why we might be holding ourselves back from seeing that or even just making ourselves more aware that there's not one future. That where you sit is where you stand in some ways when it comes to the future.
One of the most important things we can do is start to be curious about that and start to check in. Wait, why do you see this as so positive? I'm so nervous about this. Rather than defend our positions, can we actually turn towards each other, as Margaret Wheatley might say, and learn from each other about what's giving us both great hope or what's causing us tremendous fear? Pascal, just say, there's so many things I admire about your work.
One of them in particular is your ability to understand technology and be able to talk about where the future is going, and yet hold the human heart so closely in who you are and how you connect with others. That you never lose sight, no matter how optimistic we feel about technology and what it can do, that fundamentally, it is the human psychology, the human heart, the human persona, the human connection that we have to hold on to. Maybe that's just a place to build on. How do you balance those?
Pascal: I think technology for the sake of technology. I grew up in tech. My whole career, my whole life was tech. I was very fortunate to be at some of the more influential companies, which have really laid some interesting groundwork of the world we're living in today. I was part of eBay very, very early, which really laid the work towards the abundance of e-commerce we now have. Later, I was part of Mozilla, which co-built the internet to a certain extent.
I think the most important thing to understand is tech is here to serve us as humans. I have a very visceral reaction to people who are tech for the sake of tech. There's a lot of that at the moment, particularly, again, when it comes to AI. I think there's a lot of AI for the purpose of AI. I think we really need to get back to the human factors. I think that's number one.
Number two is over the years and decades, I have just seen too often the promise of technology and the reality in the world. It is because humans are messy. It is because our social systems are complicated, and they're often unjust and built to favor certain particular demographics or certain groups. Thus, I really think if we want to leverage technology and thus create a better future, we have to do this from the perspective of how does it serve the people, the human, because otherwise, we dehumanize ourselves, which is a terrifying thought.
Lisa: Yes, we sometimes talk about with technology coming at us faster and faster, if we're not mindful of our own stance and our own points of view and values, we outsource our imagination, and then the future's happening to us. I think it can be very hard when we're at this crazy clip of change, where every day brings disruption, new versions that make the other one obsolete, it can feel so unnerving that, as my colleague Scott Doorley likes to say, our creative director at the d.School, our nervous systems are nervous. How do we do that?
You're right. Not everybody holds onto the idea that we have to really focus on technology serving humanity and not technology for technology's sake, and holding onto that. Throughout your work in both your programs and your writing, you're constantly reminding us of putting humanity first and not allowing maybe used futures of what futures used to be trap us into thinking that there's only one way of doing it. I know we started to talk a little bit about it earlier, this notion of the official future and how that can be a trap of maybe the choices that we make, and therefore, the futures to come. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.
Pascal: Very generally speaking, the concept of the official future it's fairly popular in the futurist community, but the idea is that the official future is the future we're telling ourselves. The very narrow view of this is how it's going to happen. In some ways, this is helpful and serves us. For example, take an athlete. If you are a track and field runner and you have a specific goal in mind, that becomes your official future. You want to beat that.
It is helpful because it focuses all of your attention towards this singular goal. It becomes very, very inhibitive and a trap when, for example, an organization tells itself a specific version of the official future. What then happens is you allocate your resources toward this specific future. You're in this interesting flywheel of trying to make this official future happen. Now, the challenge is we're living in massively interconnected systems with huge disruptors happening to us.
COVID was one. The geopolitics at the moment are another one, like terrorists, for example. It very easily can derail your official future. Then, when you have your systems and your attention and all your money wrapped up in a particular version of the future, you can very easily find yourself being in a very, very bad spot, very derailed. I think it is dangerous. It's dangerous and problematic for companies, organizations, but also for us as leaders, as individuals, as well as society.
I think the really important bit about the future is to think more expansively about the future. This notion of the cone of uncertainty, this idea that the further out you go, the wider your spectra becomes, the wider your possibilities about the future become. I think it behooves us to, at the very least, consider these futures, create plans for them, as in, well, if this doesn't go this way, but that way, what does this actually mean? What are my contingency plans? What is my plan B, C, and D so that when this future hits, you actually have a chance to navigate this and not fall into amygdala screaming at you, fight or flight, and as Scott mentioned, getting your nervous systems all riled up.
Lisa: Yes. I often think the crisis is not the time to do your first planning about the future because you're in a state. You're in a state that is wired for reaction and defense and protection when we need generative, responsive, imaginative thinking. The time to do it for the first rung, and I love that you brought up an athlete metaphor, is not during high-stakes competition. You got to practice well before you're in that final championship moment.
You've spent a lot of time working with leaders to get them to flex those muscles. I think that it can be very hard to even realize that you're operating within an official future within a certain way, let alone to pause and break out and be like, "Oh, yes, we should allocate time." At a time where I feel most crunched to do, I need to pause and think or imagine. What are some of the ways that you get executives, leaders more comfortable that this is actually a better investment of where they're spending their energy, rather than the pressure to just go, go, go?
Pascal: The first step, I think, is just acknowledging the fact that you have an official future. One of the things I love to do is I just ask people, what's the future of your company? Where do you see it? What's the vision? Often, you find that there is a very clear, very well-articulated version of the future. Then these executives tap themselves on the shoulder, which is amazing, and they're like, "Oh, my God, look how aligned we are."
We all say the same thing. That's fine. Alignment is great. I also then point out to them, it's like, "Okay, so great. If this is your future, what happens if the following shock happens to your system? What do you do?" Then you see the cogs in their heads spinning and turning. A way I like to phrase this up for people is I like to actually go one step earlier and talk a little bit about how can we actually see, spot the future?
I always like to point out to people, in hindsight, it was very obvious that, for example, mobile phones have taken over the world and we're all on mobile devices now. Smartphones are everywhere. In reality, it's actually interesting because when you go back in time, you could have seen that future decades before it unfolded. A lot of executives, if you're old enough, you remember the Palm Pilot, the original personal digital assistant.
Lisa: The OG.
Pascal: The OG, exactly. I recently bought one on eBay because I wanted to have one again. I used to have one way back then, but I wanted to have another physical device. It cost me only $5 US. The interesting thing is, you look at this device, and it looks exactly like an iPhone. It's the same form factor. It has this full screen display. It has apps on it. The funny thing is, this thing came out a good 12, 13 years before the iPhone was even launched.
There's this really interesting piece in there, which is when you look at these crummy versions, early versions of what the future could be, we have this tendency to look at the future and ask ourselves, what is it today? It's a personal digital assistant that doesn't really do anything, whatever. I can put my address book on it, and that's about it. Instead of asking ourselves, what could it be in the future?
Alan Watts once said, the problem with humans is that we don't look at things, we overlook them. I think it's so interesting and so powerful. There's a reason for this because we tend to reason by analog. We like to look at stuff and compare it to the things we already know. It makes sense because it allows us to make decisions really quickly. Jeff VanderMeer, he's a science fiction author, once said that the challenge is that, "By reasoning by analog, you miss the future because the future doesn't look like the thing you already see."
He has this really beautiful line. He said, "A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle." That's exactly what happens to us. We look at squares all the time. You can see the future, but we want them to be circles because that's the thing we expect and want. To your question about how do you see more of the future is, you mentioned this earlier, I really like this notion around curiosity.
I think that is the most important muscle you need to stretch when you want to think about the future. Become curious about the future. Then, yes, there is tools and frameworks on how you do this more systematically and whatever, but the moment you become curious and just sit there, and you're like, "Huh, what could this mean? What could it look like? What are the implications of that?" Once you start doing that, you see so much more of the future.
Lisa: You have so many wonderful ways that you share the future with others, including newsletters and Substack. I love the section in the radical briefing that says, thin whispers of tomorrow. You're basically handing. You're like, "This may not be on your radar yet, but this is what's going on." One of the things that you and our dear friend and your colleague Jeffrey Rogers introduced me to years ago, years ago, plural, was the idea of digital humans and Little Miquela and what was happening with Little Miquela as really a thin whisper of tomorrow.
Of now the conversations that we are having that's creating strikes in Hollywood and has actors all up in a tizzy. You saw that. You could have imagined that. I wonder, for those that don't know about Little Miquela, can you talk a little bit about Little Miquela and why she represents really a thin whisper of tomorrow that many people, I love that, overlooked?
Pascal: Yes. Little Miquela, I have to admit, I became pretty obsessed about her. She's like the OG. A little bit of a background, years ago, literally five, six years at least, a marketing agency based out of LA called Brood created a digital human, young female, 19-year-old, eternally 19-year-old female, and started putting her on Instagram. She is very human-looking, so there's very little of that uncanny valley effect to her. She looks very human.
If you look very closely, you can see that she's rendered, that she's a computer animation, but she looks very human. Then they started making, essentially, fashion photo shoots with her, placing her into the classic fashion photo shoot backgrounds, and put her on Instagram. She amassed some 2 million followers on Instagram. Phil believed a good chunk of them don't even know that she's not real, that she isn't physical.
Lisa: She does seem to have the best life.
Pascal: She has an amazing life. She also has always perfect skin, I just want to point that out. She never ages. For the last seven years, I've followed her for six years, she has not aged a year. What is fascinating about her is when I first came across her, I had this moment where I was like, wow, isn't that interesting? This is so weird. It's weird because A, a lot of people follow her. B, she's churning out content.
Then she started, or the agency behind her, she isn't real, but they started getting sponsorship deals. She showed up with fashion brands, wearing specific fashion brands in her shoots. She became a spokesperson for Pacsun. She made a very, very, very funny short appearance as a spokesperson for WD40, which is a lubricant.
Lisa: Oh my gosh.
Pascal: An engine lubricant, I should say, because she admitted that she's a robot, and as a robot, that's her skincare practice. Very funny. Yes, the funny thing is, again, you saw this six years ago. The point I made about this is, just think about it, first of all, what it means for the fashion industry and fashion models, because Little Miquela doesn't age. Her skin is always perfect. She will never complain about working 24-7.
She can be in 15 places at the same time because she doesn't need to physically travel anywhere. She can be replicated. You clearly can tune her to whatever liking and cultural context you want. Then we make the connection to, so imagine these were static images, but imagine what this will look like when she becomes really animated, and then you get into movies. That is what you mentioned now, Hollywood going nuts about what we see with OpenAI Sora AI generation video model.
Before that, even, we had a Korean pop star, Kitsune, who's also computer-generated, but commands tens of thousands of people going to stadium tours looking at a screen of a computer-generated artist. It is fascinating to see, and it also brings up interesting questions going back to the humanity, as in, what does this actually mean for us in terms of our arts, of what we value, how we consider art, what is art? Lots to unpack there, but yes, goes back to the point of you can see the future if you look carefully.
Pascal: You're willing to look beyond the official future. If you're a traditional ad advertising and you're seeing that, you're thinking that's a fad. That would never happen because. A lot of times, when I run futures workshops or scenario planning with executives, I have very few rules. One of the most important rules I say is you could never say that would never happen because. You have to train yourself to say, what if? What if that happened?
I know you, and I spend a lot of time scaffolding that for executives. One of our favorite activities to do is to look at the future's implication wheel, to take something in plain sight, like digital humans, like Little Miquela, and say, "Okay, if this is happening here, then what could happen? Then what could happen? Then what could happen?" Pretty quickly, with just asking that question, you get into some very fantastical futures.
It really starts with curiosity. Are you willing to go there? Versus shutting it down to say that would never happen because. One pattern that I have found, and I'm curious to hear your perspectives on it, because I've run that exercise with lots of different audiences, the more senior folks tend to stop out at the second-order implication. They just can't go.
If you take a middle schooler or even elementary school, no problem. I'm getting to fourth implications, maybe I'm getting to unicorns, maybe I'm going somewhere else, but they're just much more fluid in their willingness to go to places that are uncomfortable. I wonder if you could share some patterns that you've seen and how maybe we can rewire ourselves to get more comfortable with those outer edges.
Pascal: I've seen the exact same thing. I used to be on the digital advisory board for Pearson, the world's largest learning company. We had these long conversations about learning and the future of learning and so on. One thing which stuck to me was one of the leaders there made this comment saying, "The thing is, when you look at children, kids, they have curiosity in abundance." That's how they see the world. That's how they operate. They always ask why and what if, and to the extent that if you are a parent of a young child, it's annoying because they're all the time.
Then the unfortunate reality is we sent them to school and literally beat it out of them because our schooling system really is, and I can't blame anyone for it, but the schooling system really is about don't ask questions, find the answer. What you and I and all of our colleagues in this space do is we go back to people and say, "You need to be curious. You need to start asking questions instead of finding the answer.' I see the exact same pattern.
The more senior the person is, the more somewhat, and this is overgeneralization, but the more narrow they tend to be in their worldview. The other thing I find is particularly when we do this implications wheel, or we call it a disruption map exercise, where you look at a trend, a disruptor, and then you ask yourself, what are the implications? Then you go from there and say, what are the implications of those implications?
In my setup, I always, and I'm really curious to hear how you do this, I always tell people, when you get to the outer edges of this, like the moment you get to the second, third, fourth order implications, it's interesting because you don't actually even need to go back anymore. It's only forward. You ask yourself, if this becomes true, what does this world look like?
I find that particular business-minded people have a hard, hard time of not tying it directly back to the business, directly back to the original line. That limits you in what you can see and what is possible for you. The thing I love about this exercise and I highly recommend it to people to try this out. As a matter of fact, we actually have a fully self-run free course on our website, so you can check that out.
Lisa: I will definitely link that.
Pascal: What I love about this exercise is I really fundamentally believe that once you've done it maybe twice, maybe three times, it rewires your brain. You can't go through the world without asking yourself, what are the implications of the implication? I'll give you a simple example. I was recently in Bentonville, Arkansas. This is the home of Walmart. It's a small town in the middle of the US. I flew into the airport. It's a relatively small airport.
I saw a robotic barista in the airport. One of these, literally robot arms making your coffee. I was flabbergasted. I stood in front of that thing for 10 minutes. I was like, "This is so weird," because this is Bentonville, Arkansas. It's not Silicon Valley. The only other place I've seen that thing is in San Jose Airport. That was my first thought. I was like, "That's so weird." It's like, "What's going on here?"
Then my second thought was like, "Hey, wait a second. If we have these things here, what does this actually look like?" Then you get into this crazy world, as you mentioned. My first thought was like, "Oh, man, if you run concession stands in the airport, if you are the person who runs the concession stands in the airport, you have a problem," because currently, if you have a Starbucks in there, that's like, I don't know, 500, 1000 square feet. That thing is only 20 square feet. It's tiny. Number one.
Number two is I was like, "Oh, my God, who is the barista today?" It's a student who's pays off his student loans. We don't need baristas anymore, so no more student loan payoffs. Then I thought about Starbucks famously claims the third space. Starbucks being the third space, homework Starbucks. These things are clearly not the third space. We lose the third space. All these implications.
Then you can think about what are the implications of that? Again, I stood there for 10 minutes. My head was exploding. I think everybody just looked at me like I'm a complete weirdo. Then the weirdest thing happens. While I'm standing there, there's a human who comes to the machine, who services the machine. What the human did is he opens the back and pulls out the trash. He pulls out the spent coffee beans, essentially. I'm sitting there, and I'm like, "Oh, my God, is this the future of humanity?" The machines make the barista Starbucks coffee for us, and we as humans are there to pull the trash out.
Lisa: Oh, my gosh. Oh, my God. There's so much to unpack in that example. One is the fact that you even noticed it at all. It's hard to notice if you're walking through the airport with your head on your phone just looking at your text. One is the noticing, which I think you are just unbelievable at, observing, noticing from anywhere, use everything. The other is then pausing to question. I wonder what this means. Could this mean this?
Then the third is then the implications of this, the synthesis. What's going on? The human is servicing the robot. We're taking this small example, but what could that look like at scale? Of course, that's a question everybody's asking right now. What is the future of work? How do we think about the skills and the jobs of the future?
What I appreciate in just that small example is that we're all capable of imagining it, of just starting with what we have and where we are, giving ourselves space and time to say, I wonder what that means, and then going and using that as your research agenda. Who else is doing it? If we're doing this for coffee, is that also happening with bartenders? Yes. Yes, it is. Is it also happening with caregivers, maybe in an area that's more desperate to service that market, like in Japan, that's having a demography crisis? Yes, it is. That's the birth of emotional robots.
What I like about that is that while there aren't answers, it is advancing your understanding of it through the questioning, and it's connecting it, and it's a process. Listen, Pascal, I have great memories of, again, being back at Singularity, and you used to facilitate this week-long program for executives to come in and basically get cliff notes to the future. That's how I would describe it. It's like, "Hey, you want to understand where technology is coming, you can either hire a very expensive research firm or create a staff position, or you can come for a week and go touch the future and then bring that back."
You were the master facilitator doing that. One of my favorite aspects of watching you do that is that every morning you would come in with some new, going back to thin whispers of tomorrow, and you would have the deadline while you were sleeping. It was mind-blowing because you were modeling, again, that cycle, observing, questioning implications. Now's my chance to ask, how did you do that? How did you do that? That was incredible.
Pascal: Good old days at Singularity. Before we get to the how did you do that, I just want to make one comment. Because I think it's, having reflected back at my time at Singularity, and I was at Singularity for, I don't know, five years or so, it was a decent chunk of my professional career. Clearly, the two of us had this amazing fortune to meet each other there. I will never forget the moment we actually met.
We were sitting in the back of the room. You were being introduced to me as like, "Oh, here's a new faculty member, facilitator.' You gave me a copy of your book. Never forget that. The one thing I found interesting about Singularity now in hindsight is that, funny enough, Singularity presented you a version of the future. Really interesting. Singularity had a very official version of its own future, which was very techno-driven and very advanced.
There was lots to like about it and lots to learn from it. I think what we failed to do was to give a much broader spectrum of possible futures rather than just the, and this is how it's going to be. Someone much smarter than I am once mentioned to me that if someone gives you a future, they always have something to sell to you. You always should ask yourself, what are they selling?
Now, that aside, a thing I did there, and I loved doing this, was literally while our participants were in the classroom and then also in the evening, I just scoured the web and looked for what are the headlines literally for this day. When you start doing that, and you've got enough sources, and to this day I read hundreds of blogs and news sites, et cetera, and I don't really read them, I skim them. I don't spend all that much time on them, but I skim them.
It is very easy to find, honestly, every single day, something crazy, amazing, weird happens. Some new breakthrough in robotics, something in chemistry, some bio experiment run wild. Now, clearly, every day there seems to be a headline about AI. I loved pulling those out and just showing people, listen, within only 24 hours, all of this stuff happens. The reason was less about the individual item. It's really never about this particular item.
It's about two things for me. One is trends. As in, if I see a lot of stuff happening in, I don't know, a specific area of robotics, I know that there's heat coming. There's some steam, there's pressure evolving, and there is something happening in this area, so it behooves me to look closer to the area itself. The second one is really, for me, was just to get people to get a bit more of a practice of just continue to look at the internet.
My personal practice is, like when I wake up and have my first coffee, I spend a good 20, 30 minutes just going through my headlines. At least for my brain, what happens is the more I see something, so when I see a specific headline, a specific thing, if it reoccurs, if I see it multiple times, multiple sources, it just indicates that this is not just like flash in a pan, but it's something I should pay attention to. For me, it's the best way to see the future. I can outsource it. This is the nice thing. I don't even need to do the hard work. I can just have tons and tons and tons of people do the work for me, and all I need to do is synthesize it.
Lisa: Yes, it's such a brilliant practice that is so available to us right now that we could do if we allocate the time. Of course, our attention is the thing that is most valuable these days, so the attention to pay attention and to go wide as a part of your practice, I think, is such a valuable takeaway. It reminds me, Sam Wineburg, who is a professor at Stanford, came up with this idea of historical thinking.
He's been doing a lot of work around civic reasoning, and he talks about lateral thinking, which is what I hear you talking about. He said, "When Wikipedia came on the stage," which I know is something you've thought about around open source information, spending a lot of time at Mozilla, 'Teachers are like, don't go to Wikipedia. That's terrible. Don't go to Wikipedia." He is like, "Go to Wikipedia," because it has already collected lots of different bits.
It's basically allowed you that first place of seeing where a lot of sources come together, and then go to the bottom and decide to go deep. It is that blend of lateral thinking. This is what he says good fact-checkers do, versus anchoring too deep on one expert only to find out that one expert was, in fact, no expert at all. I think that's just such a valuable way of making sure you are touching the future, but doing it in a way that doesn't consume you or overwhelm you.
It's time-boxed, and you're doing it in a way that fosters curiosity. It reminds me, you have such a great quote in your book from our friend Kyle Nel, who used to be the head of innovation of Lowe's, who said something like, "You don't want to be overwhelmed, and you don't want to be underwhelmed." You just want to be whelmed. I thought that, how do we get into that state of whelmed?
Being open, being generative, being willing to take in information, but not so triggered that we go into a defensive stance where we are rejecting it. I think that's both an internal practice and also an organizational practice that we can think about. I want to use that as a question for you, Pascal, about helping organizations become more adaptive.
I think you talked about helping organizations become anti-fragile as a way of not future-proofing, which is like-- ugh, I can't stand it when people say that. There we go. I just said it. I said it out loud. I can't stand it. Because it's not one thing. It's a series of behaviors and practices, and even culture. I wonder if you could share a little bit about what that means to you.
Pascal: Yes, there's a lot to unpack there. For me, the whole notion around anti-fragility is really anchored in this idea that you hear a lot of companies do-- By the way, this is my trigger word, which is resilient. You hear a lot of companies who are like, "Oh, we need to become resilient." There's nothing wrong with resiliency. The challenge is resilience allows you to absorb a shock, but you only absorb it.
I find it really fascinating how do you create systems and organizational structures which actually allow you to grow, triggered by shocks, like changes. Nature is full of it. Our whole ecosystem, everything is full of it. If you break your bone, the place where your bone reattaches and regrows is stronger than the surrounding bone tissue. If you go to the gym, it's a good example. It's like you actually exert micro tears to your muscles. You overexert your muscles. You actually damage your muscles so that they can grow back stronger than they were before.
In organizations, we tend to not do that. There's lots which has been written by, for example, Taleb, who wrote the book Antifragile, which is an excellent book. He looks at it from the macro. I really like to look at it from a very practical, like what do you actually do as a company? For me, it has a lot to do with understanding that, first of all, you need to acknowledge the fact that there's a good chunk of your company or organization which you have to run with minimal risk.
You need to protect it because this is where you get your cash cow from. This is what pays for everything. Then the other side of it, you need to actually take some extreme risks. The stuff in the middle is actually really stupid. You have some risk, but it also doesn't really pay off. Go out and try things out. Then this, for me, has a lot to do with your willingness and your ability to try things out. Failing.
You had the amazing Dan Klein on this wonderful podcast, who talks all about how do you actually fail better and forward and positive. I think that is so incredibly important for organizations to embed and become better at. I think that's the first step you want to get to is how you actually can do lots of small experiments, learn from them, create this learning culture inside of your organization. I think that's the initial starting point.
Lisa: I love that. It reminds me of an earlier conversation I also had on this podcast with my mother who was the first chief learning officer that I ever met. Of course, to meet her as a mom, where we would have dinner conversations that were about the conversations, the learning that mattered, it gave me a lens that learning was the most valuable skill that you could learn and that you could help create in your cultures and for others.
Increasingly, I've been thinking about that the chief learning officer is also the chief futures officer. We cannot have an antifragile organization if we really don't have a learning organization. Of course, it was Peter Senge in the Wayback Machine that helped us understand the power of systems thinking and the power of the learning organization, and why that's so important. I maybe want to close with just a question for you about what's exciting you these days and how we can all become a part of that learning journey with you.
Pascal: This is a really good question. First of all, thank you so much for the bouquet of flowers you just handed me. Trust me, you don't want to have a Pascal Finette in your organization. First of all, I think I'm unemployable by now. I've just worked for myself for way too long. Secondly, I don't think any organization needs any more white, bald dudes in their leadership position, so please don't. Hire more women and people of color. You want diversity.
What really excites me at the moment, I think, is that given the overall situation we find ourselves in globally, it feels to me that this is a really fascinating moment in time where we have maybe a reawakening for people. I see so many more people just in the last six months, basically, coming to me and talking about much more meaningful topics, as in not how do we increase our quarterly profits or what's the next technology, but really asking thorny questions about, what is the role of my organization in society? How do I support my community? How do I support my people?
I do believe that there's an interesting glimmer of hope for us here. Again, regardless of where you stand, I don't care, and it's globally, for us to reimagine what the world should look like for us in this particular context, in a context where we live alongside and with technology, which is just getting more powerful by the minute. I'm very hopeful about what the future will hold for us.
Lisa: I love that. It reminds me of the last line in your book, which I turn to again and again, where you say, "Let's dream, disrupt disruption, and build what matters; the future is ours to create." Thank you, my friend, for providing that clarity amid the ambiguity that we find ourselves in, and for bringing the humanity forward in such a beautiful way. Thank you for being here.
Pascal: Lisa, thank you so much for having me. That was an amazing conversation.
Lisa: I'm so glad you got to hear this conversation with Pascal Finette. He inspires me to ask new questions, and I hope he's done the same for you. Maybe this week, you'll have one conversation where you ask a genuine what-if. Maybe it's at home, at work, with a friend, and resist the urge to shut it down or to solve it right away. Let's keep our minds open. If you found this episode valuable, please consider sharing it, leaving a rating, or writing a review. I'm Lisa Kay Solomon. Thanks for listening to How We Future, and I'll see you next time.
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