September 4, 2025 • 49 mins
History is littered with missed calls and downright bad predictions. Think Arab Spring, the post-2003 occupation of Iraq, the Sino-Soviet split, the fall of the USSR, Operation Barbarossa and the assumption that engagement with China would mean liberalisation.
Futurist Florence Gaub’s job is to help NATO make sure it isn’t caught like a deer in headlights when events take an unexpected turn.
In today’s episode, Florence, who directs the research division at the NATO Defense College, explains how she and her team consider the “what if” events that could throw NATO’s strategic plans into disarray. She talks about the science of forecasting, the enormous complexity of geopolitics, the value of being prepared, and communicating with decision-makers.
Florence reflects on forecasts that have proven useful, the value of science fiction in forecasting, the role of powerful individuals in history, major trends shaping the world today, and the value of diverse cultures, personalities and perspectives in a forecasting team.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Stop the world. Welcome to Stop the World.
I'm Olivia Nelson and. I'm David Rowe.
Today's guest, Florence Galb hasone of the most fascinating jobs
in national security. She's a futurist for NATO.
That doesn't mean predicting thefuture, but rather studying
possible futures to help preparedecision makers and strategic
(00:22):
planners for the unexpected. It's a.
Pretty cool job live. I want to be here, so do I.
Florence is the director of the research division at the NATO
Defence College in Rome. She should actually ask if they
could set up a campus in Florence.
I didn't ask her that she leads a team that thinks about what if
Events that could throw Natos strategic plans into disarray.
(00:44):
In today's conversation, Florence explains how she and
her team make forecasts, how they project forward given the
enormous complexity of geopolitics and international
affairs, the value of being prepared, interestingly, to
reduce reaction time. There's a big, big problem with
being caught flat footed when things don't go the way you
expect and how to communicate your ideas to decision makers.
(01:06):
So of course you're not just filling their heads with
pessimistic information, but actually giving them something
that they can act on. All very important stuff.
Florence reflects on some of herprevious work, such as her
report for the European Union and global trends to 2030, some
of the forecasts that have proven particularly useful, as
well as the value of science fiction in forecasting.
You also discussed the role of powerful individuals in history,
(01:29):
major trends shaping the world today from climate change to
technology, and the role of AI in forecasting, which I'm sure
Dave was your favourite part of the conversation.
It was like dessert. I left it to the end.
And on science fiction, let me just say it is a common thing
for Nat SEC people to be sciencefiction nerds as well.
And I in fact wasn't into science fiction until I got into
national security. That year really went together,
(01:51):
so very useful takeaways from Florence's conversation.
Not least the need to put yourself in other people's shoes
to understand how they might respond differently from the way
you expect. We had an interesting exchange
about that. The value of diverse cultures,
personalities, and perspectives in a forecasting team.
Of course, we've seen what can go wrong just in recent decades
(02:13):
when strategic planners assume that other parts of the world
and other leaders are motivated by the same values and
preferences that they are. Indeed, this work has never been
more important, so please enjoy Florence Galb.
Welcome to Stop the World. I'm here with Florence Galb in
person here in the studio. Great to be here.
Welcome. So Florence, you have the
(02:33):
coolest job I've ever heard of. You're a a futurist, a security
futurist for NATO. We'll get this clear at the
outset. You don't try to predict the
future, right? You, You, but you you sort of
study possible futures in order to better prepare us.
Exactly. Right.
Yeah. Let's start with how you do
that. I mean, you know, I I have ideas
in my head about how you might do it.
(02:53):
Just explain what what are the processes?
OK. All right, some people ask that.
Actually, I have one. It was a gift to a friend of
mine, but it doesn't work. So the way we do that, So what
what futurists do is they just like academics in general,
actually, we look at all the information that's out there on,
you know, what do we have certainty over?
Some things we have high certainty over.
Like we have a lot of data like climate change, demographic
(03:15):
stuff like that. And then where we don't have
data, we try to fill in with plausible scenarios, ideas where
this could go. You know, we study causalities,
what leads to what? And then we develop, well,
mostly we we like scenarios because scenarios are evident
events based developments. I think I find them more useful
in trend analysis. Trend analysis is very popular
(03:37):
as well, but we really do a lot of scenarios.
And then because with the scenarios we go back into the
present and say, OK, what do we do with that now?
How can we act in the present toinfluence or avoid that future?
Sorry and for non I suppose not.I'm not an academic person or a
technical person, but scenarios.I mean, you're talking about
actual like desktop exercises ora tabletop.
Well, or something like that. Obviously working for NATO,
(03:58):
we're a worst case organisation.I always say right, because
we're in the business of war. So our job is to think about the
most existential types of futures.
So let me give you one what if scenario that's coming out.
Once a year we have a collectionof what if scenarios coming out.
So we have one that's about a nuclear weapon being detonated
(04:18):
in space. There's historical precedent up
in the 60s. What effect would that have on
Earth? Mainly a problem with
electricity, power cuts and all that.
So we're thinking, we're imagining what if Russia did
that? With what effect with intention?
How can we avoid that and all that?
So that would be a scenario along those lines.
Normally ours are five years into the future, so we don't
(04:40):
deal with 192050 or 2040 even. Why?
Because our decision makers obviously they want to influence
something that's within their reach.
So we're looking maximum five years into the future.
But you're you're essentially asking what if questions and
then proceeding from there. But plausible what if questions?
Exactly. So normally our what ifs based
on what we call a weak signal. A weak signal is a is an early
(05:02):
sign that something could happen.
It's not yet a trend if you want.
It's like a trend being just born.
And based on that weak signal, we we develop that further and
imagine, OK, what if this actually becomes a solid trend,
a solid indication that something is happening.
So we have some evidence. We don't imagine aliens coming
to Earth or whatever. So it has to be rooted in
reality. Right.
(05:22):
OK. I mean, so even five years is a
long time in international politics.
Of course. I mean, we were talking just
before we, before we started filming about, you know,
segmenting recent history into 510 year periods, whatever it
is. Let's say you took someone at
the turn of the Millennium and said, you know, five years from
now, what do you think things are going to look like?
They wouldn't have said that, you know, Islamists would, or,
(05:45):
you know, jihadists would fly 2 buildings into a, into twin
towers and, and the US would invade two countries.
Well, I mean, both of them unsuccessfully.
Arguably, if you project forwardfar enough, far enough, it's
very, very difficult because international relations
geopolitics are extremely complicated systems with all
(06:06):
these inputs, talk a bit about the the utility, the value of
what it is that you do. I mean, are you trying to give
leaders better decision making abilities, you know, improve
their decision making? Are you, you know, are you
looking for actionable options? Yeah, for responses. 100% if you
(06:28):
don't like in strategic force ingeneral, if you don't lead to
any action in the present and you've kind of missed your job.
So that's why I was saying that it's a scenario that scares
people into paralysis, which is a common reaction.
It's called the Cassandra effect.
Then you have actually missed your target.
Now, I think you say something super important about
geopolitics, and I think that's something that's for some people
(06:50):
will sound heretical. Specifically, I'm going to say
that international relations theory, you know, everything
that we study in university, that it realists, realists and
constructivists and all that, they're all attempts at making
predictions about where international relations will go
in the future, what are patternsfor interaction between states.
(07:12):
And I'm saying none of these actually have universal
predictive power. I mean, they're still useful
because anything that helps you structure your thinking about a
problem is useful. But I'm saying the only way you
can actually really the only tool available that helps you
navigate exactly what you said, this the complexity of
(07:33):
international relations. I think it's strategic
foresight, because strategic foresight is the only tool you
have that includes all these idiosyncrasies, right?
What makes the geopolitical system so, so complex is we
don't have a lot of data. Like I can't call Putin and say,
can I interview you for my qualitative analysis that traces
patterns for invasion decisions or whatever.
(07:54):
Even the people that he spoke towas a small circle of people.
So you have not a lot of data. Decision making takes place in a
small circle. It's defence.
So the data is by definition secretive.
And then you have notions of rationality, values, interests
that are not necessarily easy tounderstand from the outside.
The only thing you have is empathy and imagination to put
(08:17):
yourself in, in the other people's shoes.
And that's we use in strategic foresight.
So I think it's actually much more useful than studying
international relations in termsof trying to understand what can
come your way. Right, okay, that's fascinating
spicy. I love it.
I mean, your point is well takenthough, because I mean, the,
the, the international theories that we, oh, you know, I suppose
(08:40):
the theories of international relations that we, we all hear
about, I mean, they're essentially kind of models.
And they, I mean, they, they have their, their usefulness up
to a point, of course. I mean, it's you, you know, you
believe that the world operates in a particular way.
And therefore, if you apply thatmodel to a particular point in
time or a or a scenario, then you can assume that actors are
(09:02):
going to, you know, to act in a particular way according.
To that. Model, but of course it turns
out they. Don't no Fukuyama, right?
Fukuyama proposed. I think this is what the future
is going to look like. A lot of people in Europe
actually believe that and turns out Putin didn't.
So I think they have their value.
And then don't get me wrong, I'mnot saying oh, they shouldn't
exist, but they shouldn't replace creative, constructive,
(09:25):
imaginative thinking about the future.
Right. Yep, Yep, I like the idea of a
of a fuzzy image. I mean, you're, you're, you're,
or you're drawing fuzzy images of the future.
They're not precise, but even a fuzzy image is useful.
So we compare. I compare strategic foresight of
all things future to the gym forthe mind.
(09:46):
It it exercises your critical thinking, your imagination.
What happens as a result is thatyou are, even if a scenario
doesn't correspond 100% to the one that you thought about, it
reduces surprise. And what does that do?
It increases decreases your response time.
So you'd be less shocked. You will also have a clearer
(10:07):
notion of what your capabilitiesare because you will have
thought through the possible consequences and your own tools
that you have available to to deal with the future.
So you also need to be self aware, right?
So in a way, what we call that is creating a memory of the
future. So you read a scenario and then
something similar happens and your mind already knows.
(10:27):
Wait, I've seen that before. It reminds me of XYZI.
Know what to do next, and that'swhat we're trying to accomplish.
That that that is fascinating and that seems to I mean, even
if it were that alone, that would have value, right, Because
whenever I mean, the human reaction when we when we're
confronted with something highlyunexpected is almost always
freeze flat footed. Exactly, you know, a lapse.
(10:52):
The, the, I mean, it's, it's, it's, I mean, I'm, I'm picking
on poor George W Bush suddenly here.
But I mean, it's, it's hard to forget that image or that, that,
that the video of him when he was first told about.
Oh, yeah, no, when he was first told about September 11, he was
reading a, reading a book to thekids, remember?
And he got that look of absoluteshock on his face.
(11:12):
And then he spent, you know, another 2 minutes or so
finishing the book. Now one. 100% and there's other
examples from history right? There's Stalin, when Nazi
Germany attacked the Soviet Union despite having a non
aggression agreement. And I think he disappeared for
10 days or two weeks. He was so shocked.
And you could argue, you know, some people say that Russia
until today is traumatised by bythat attack.
(11:33):
So reducing response time is, isof huge value in international
relations. But you know, what you just said
was that that's the minimum we can achieve even more.
But I think that you achieve regardless of how accurate this
scenario is. I'll give you another example.
In 2021, so just before the invasion of Ukraine, I was at
(11:53):
the EU Institute for Security Studies.
At the time, I was also pushing for what if scenarios.
The way I always do that is the analysts have freedom to choose
their scenario. They just have to provide
evidence for a weak signal. And of the 10 contributions, 3
or even 4 talked about Russia. None of them talked about Russia
(12:14):
and Ukraine, but you had Russia and the Balkans, Russia and
Moldova, Russia and the Baltic state.
So it was like, you know, putting your hands on the train
track and feeling, OK, something's coming.
Yeah, We're not sure where and in what shape, but we can feel a
belligerence coming. And I think that was also one of
the values. OK, OK, Hands on the train
track. That's another good analogy for
(12:35):
it. What about being believed and
being taken seriously? I mean, you're asking
potentially decision makers withvery, very limited bandwidth,
limited resources limited, you know, there are only so many
things that they can respond to.You're asking them to invest
time and, and, and effort potentially in, in contingencies
that never eventuate or, or go against their, their existing
(12:58):
expectations and beliefs. It feels like you're, you're
working against a whole lot of instinctive human biases here.
Is that difficult? Yes, it is difficult, but there
is a way around that. So I think what people like
myself have to learn is to thinkwith their client in mind,
meaning think what the decision maker will need or also their
(13:23):
psychology, right? And of course that differs and
the longer you know somebody andif you have a relationship of
trust, that will help because you know it's not just about the
message, it's also about the messenger.
And that's very interesting. So some people will respond,
will have a completely allergic reaction to overdoing emotions.
Other people will need emotions to engage with the scenario.
(13:45):
So I think you have to be, you have to think a lot more about
the person you're advising than about your message.
And I think that requires frankly letting, checking your
ego. Because I think what a lot of us
are guilty of is wanting to be right and wanting to, you know,
have influence. And you remember when the
pandemic started and ex Twitter was, you know, inundated with
(14:09):
people saying I saw it coming, but nobody heard me.
Well, maybe then you failed at your job because a successful
foresighter, it shouldn't be judged on whether they were
right, but whether they were hurt.
So my most successful scenarios never came about because
somebody did something about them.
But then you can't prove that you were right because it never
happened, right? So that's why, you know, you
(14:29):
have to learn humility in this job.
Can you give any examples of that?
That's really, I mean, can you give an example of a of a,
something you anticipated that didn't eventuate, but which you
have some, you know, reason to believe?
One thing we mobilised because that's the other thing I think
Speaking of ego, you are much more successful if you create
(14:52):
alliances with other people. So when several academics,
thinking tankers, advisors coalesce around one opinion and,
and, and pass that on to decision makers, you're much
more successful than if it's just you and one person.
I mean, that's, you know, that's, that's a bit of a
fantasy for a lot of people thatwant to advise policy makers.
But in reality, it's normally what I call a school of fish.
And one example I think was during the height of tensions in
(15:18):
Iraq, but also Syria. You will remember in the early
mid 2000s when ideas came up to partition Iraq and then also
during the Syrian civil war to partition along ethnic lines.
And we were all saying the problem is not ethnicity.
It's, you know, everything that came around it.
And of course, you know, IslamicState used that and all the
(15:39):
jihadists did, they used that. But we said that's not what the
issue is about. And I'm I'm happy to say that
petition never happened. It doesn't mean that all the
problems went away. But we were sure that creating
state let's wouldn't solve the problem.
So it's not one of the big ticket items.
The other one was after the ArabSpring, we were all warning very
much about youth unemployment. We said policy priority has to
(16:02):
be to keep youth unemployment at30% or lower, but definitely
make sure it doesn't increase. So it's not a great success
because there was no real dent in youth unemployment in the
Middle East, North Africa, but it was kept at that level.
So you know, that's, that's not nothing to write home about.
Nobody's going to say yay, we avoided.
Well, we don't even actually know exactly what he avoided
because it didn't happen. But I think over time you'll see
(16:26):
you build a reputation for beinga trusted advisor.
And that's what it's about, not being super dramatic and being
in the news saying I saw it coming, nobody hurt me.
That's the fastest way of not being hurt, right?
Right. Instead, Yeah, OK, just just
giving steady, sober. Yeah.
Useful advice. Exactly.
And and something like youth unemployment.
Absolutely. That makes a lot of sense.
(16:47):
Talk about the obstacles that you encounter.
I mean, like I said before, you're working out against all
these biases, confirmation bias.This is a famous one.
Groupthink is another famous 11.I'm going to, I'm going to just,
you know, state my own position here and you can you can give me
your thoughts on it. But I mean, failure of
(17:08):
imagination seems to be one of the biggest ones at the moment
for me, including, you know, I guess most troublingly, failure
of imagination about how, how vulnerable democracy might be.
The the, the, the assumption that institutions are enduring
(17:30):
and so strong that that they will naturally sort of self
preserve through the ups and downs of, of, of difficulty in
democracies. When institutions are in fact
just still made up of people whoare prone to the influence of
the people around them. And, and might be prone to the
same false expectation that the institution will just endure by
(17:53):
its own nature without anyone proactively and actively kind of
propping it up and, and, and, and reinforcing it.
To me, failure of imagination seems to be a really, really big
one at the moment. But talk a little bit about the
sort of obstacles that you most often encounter.
So it depends in on the organisation that you're working
(18:13):
in. I think what what I like about
working in NATO is that NATO is a political military line.
So there's civilian, there are civilians and military people.
Military people tend to be very happy to entertain all kinds of
catastrophic scenarios because at the end of the day that's
their job. So they are not that scared of
(18:34):
imagination. I mean, they're scared of maybe
using their own imagination, butthey're very happy to use ours
over with scenarios. And they, they're not as likely,
I find, to reject a scenario because it doesn't confirm their
worldview. If it's plausibly explained,
they're happy to think it through.
That's been my experience. However, although I'm a civilian
(18:54):
myself, or perhaps because I'm acivilian myself, I'm going to
criticise the civilians. And that's both in NATO but also
in the EU where I worked for a long time and maybe, you know,
in other European government sections.
My experience is that the more normative you are, and I will
(19:14):
say the EU is a very normative organisation.
What do I mean by normative? The more you have strong beliefs
about what the world is and how it should be, the harder it is
for you to imagine something that's outside of that realm.
And so that's why I think, you know, NATO was probably faster
and accepting what was going on in the run up to the Ukraine war
than many EU representatives, because the EU fundamentally is
(19:38):
a, is a, you know what, what wasthe EU at the outset was a
economic organisation. It's a, it's, I always say it's
a development organisation and believes that trade and
economics are actually what holds peace together.
You know, it's, it's a very laudable goal, you know, peace
through prosperity and all that.But it also makes it it's, it's
such a can't say wishful thinking, but it's such a
(20:01):
positive view of the world that anything that goes counter that.
Will you said confirmation bias will be a lot more difficult for
them to accept. So, and I think it's not just
the EU, it's it's, I think civilians generally have a
tendency for that. You 2.
If something something's a moraloutrage or irrational, I find it
very, very hard to. Believe so even it's going to
(20:21):
happen. Yes, yes, I understand that.
But it means that you have a blind spot.
And so what's interesting yeah, we have trouble engaging
decision makers, but you know wehave our own biases too.
And that's I think the most important characteristic for
futurist is to know that you have biases and what they are
(20:41):
and learn how to deal with them.And so my trick is always
whenever you have a very strong emotional reaction, then you
should be aware, like Bing. OK, hang on.
I think there might be a bias here.
You might be very attached to this outcome for some reason.
And then what I do then is to define under what conditions I
would change my mind. So I feel that something is
(21:03):
happening. And then I'm like, that would
never happen. OK, Under what circumstances
will I change my mind? And then you can decide for
yourself. It's like giving yourself a
watermark and saying, OK, when that is reached, then I will
have to change my mind. And I define it myself.
So the way I find that the way we can, you can't get really
people out of their bias, but you can understand where they're
(21:26):
coming from. And I think what helps is invite
them to self reflect. Like I said, you can say to them
under what conditions do you think you would change your mind
or what? Why is it so important for you
to believe that? Right.
So engage them in a conversation.
Shouldn't just tell people you're just stupid to believe
that because that's their worldview and they built that
worldview over years, you know, with information stacking and
(21:47):
all that. But you should be aware.
Yeah, you get into a field whereyour long held beliefs, your own
and your counterparts will can get in the way.
Won't necessarily be in the way,but can get in the way of seeing
the situation for what it is. Right.
OK. And an extension of that, I
think you mentioned empathy earlier, an extension of that is
(22:08):
understanding that the way you see the current situation might
not be the way that everybody else sees it, that someone with
a set of different values and preferences or whatever it might
be, including a potential adversary, might see things
very. Very differently is not.
Going to act the way you. Expect.
And that's why it's important that you engage with people from
other countries and cultures. And OK, I can't go to Russia,
but I can travel to other countries and talk to people and
(22:29):
just, you know, without any emotion, just ask, OK, how do
you see that? For instance, I was in Morocco
shortly after the war started and I asked a friend of mine
there, what do you think about the war in Ukraine?
She said, well, I don't see how it's so different from Iraq.
And of course, you know, then I came back to Europe and I told
some of my colleagues there and they got they were outraged.
So it's not at all the same as Iraq.
And I said, put that aside. Just get, just accept for a
(22:52):
moment that somebody in North Africa will think it looks a lot
like Iraq. Just leave it for what it is.
And I think they often we get weare own worst enemies because we
don't want to see it. We get, we get emotional about
it rather than saying, OK, this is an inconvenient view for me,
but it is a view that's out there.
I completely agree with that. And certainly travelling and
spending time in different places.
(23:15):
I mean, the Middle East is a great example, isn't it?
I mean, you've really got to spend that time there to
understand, you know, that that thinking can be extremely
different from from what you areaccustomed to.
So and, and, and I mean, let's just stay on the diversity thing
for a moment. And presumably building a team
that is that that is diverse is,you know, whether it's cultural,
(23:35):
whether it's religious, you know, gender, gender or just
diversity of personalities for that matter, as.
Well, paramount, paramount, you can't.
It's a team sport. And the more diverse your team
is, the better. And when I say diversity, so I
mean working for NATO means I'm lucky because by definition
everybody's from a different country.
You have a lot of different professional backgrounds, You
have military, you have civilian, you have two different
(23:56):
services and you have different personalities.
And my team, we once did a personality self test and we
came. It was very interesting because
we discovered that I think we were 10 different personalised
types, we were 10 different people.
We literally, we had one from each.
And I thought, OK, that's challenging.
But then one of my colleagues said, no, it's great.
You have one for every situation.
(24:16):
So that is the perfect setup to do strategic foresight because
we all look at the problem in a different way or we see
different things. You know, when I mentioned weak
signals, they will all notice different things because also
the way they inform themselves, what they read, what they listen
to, it's different. And then when we come together,
then that's really beautiful. So I mean beautiful.
(24:37):
It's just mega productive. And I understand that, you know,
sometimes we will come to NATO and they're so frustrated
because multinational institutions that doesn't look
very efficient at the outset because you have all these
different cultures and you have misunderstandings and whatever.
But I think ultimately the outcome speaks for itself,
right? Let's talk about the world now.
(24:57):
I mean, let's, let's put it put into practise some of what
you're talking about here. I mean, you wrote, you wrote
this report, Global Trends, the EU back in 2019.
I look through it, it holds up very well.
Thank you. Yeah, I looked it the other day.
Yeah. There's no Francis Fukuyama type
situations there. I think Francis is brilliant, by
the way, I, I. No, he is.
(25:19):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just I think he's.
He's, he's been held. Yeah.
He's everyone remembers. Sorry for him because yeah, but
it's a different conversation. But I I think he's great, but
he's not a prophet. No, no and no political
scientist. Well, and you didn't try to be
in global trends. Instead you just you said here
are here are some important issues that we should keep an
eye on. And you were right, AI obviously
take populism risk to risk risksto democracy, excuse me,
(25:42):
demographics, all these sorts ofthings.
So with your crystal ball, that doesn't work.
I mean, what do you see in 2025 at the moment?
What I mean what what are the sort of key drivers that you are
looking at in 2025? So it's funny, I looked at that
report the other day myself and you know, it's always a bit
painful. Well, no, it's not painful.
(26:03):
But originally you think, oh, should I look at that?
Maybe I was wrong. But you definitely should read
your old foresight and because this is how you learn.
And I looked at it and I thoughtboring, all of this happened.
And I realised, yeah, that meansit was a good report.
Because if you read an old report and you go, hmm, that's
funny, that's wrong, then you were wrong.
So luckily, we managed to get almost everything.
(26:25):
Well, there was nothing wrong. We were some of the timelines
because it was written before the pandemic.
You know, when it comes to digitalization, digitalization
happened faster because of the pandemic than we thought.
So if you're asking me today, I think the number one trend, of
course, that continues to exist is climate change.
Since the report came out, of course, a lot has happened, a
(26:47):
lot of commitments have happened.
A lot of change has actually started to unroll.
Is it fast enough? We're still not on track for 2%,
but when if all the commitments are being met, and I think we
have, we have a good chance of getting there.
But yeah, climate change is still an issue.
You know what's interesting? The report before had talked
about climate change, but not asprominently as the one that I
(27:08):
wrote. And when I wrote that, it was
not entirely uncontroversial because many people didn't think
it was such a big issue back in 2018.
Can you imagine? Because today it's like, yeah,
that's the norm, yeah. So, and sorry, I'm going to let
you finish your answer, but I just want to inject something
quickly, which is that I think that far from being boring, a
lot of the things that you mentioned are actually
accelerating. I mean, AI is, I mean, you were
(27:30):
talking about it six years ago. Great.
But it's actually a far more. I mean, it's, it's, it's
spinning at such an enormous rate now.
Populism has got worse, I would say.
And it's it's getting to the point of where it it it
potentially is, is, is crisis level.
I think demographics are, I mean, you know, you look at
South Korea, for instance, or, or Western, Western Europe or
yeah. Yeah, so we even I even wrote
(27:52):
that a war is purely statistically a war in the next
decade was likely. Of course, you know, I didn't
say, oh, it's going to be in Ukraine, but so climate change
100%. What's interesting that the
demographic change is already unfolding.
So I guess if I had to look out for the next, yeah, if I had to
(28:12):
say 2035, by 2035, we will have probably I would I would guess
found a way to deal with it. But the demographic, so the,
the, the 2% losing 2% of the workforce also means that we
have at the same time 2% more spending for healthcare.
So I would say that that both the economy and the healthcare
(28:36):
sector, so innovation and medicine are moving in that
direction. So it's too soon to say what
exactly we have. No, we had on cancer and stuff,
but we have beginning to have positive signs on Alzheimer's.
So I think like this whole notion of longevity, which was
not, we didn't talk about that five to six years ago.
So I think that's emerging because of the demographic
change in terms of AI and technological, so technological
(29:00):
evolutions that we're seeing. I think you'll see that the big
AI earthquake that we're living through right now, in the next
decade, we will have a clear idea of what it can actually do,
which jobs would it actually replace.
We will remember in the report we started looking at at the
numbers and it was so big, nobody had really an idea of how
it's going to impact the labour market.
(29:20):
So I think from here we're now moving in that direction.
So we know it's going to change the labour market.
We have a better idea now than we had six years ago, but it's
still not clear, right? And we see that with, you know,
generative AI, it's great at some things and we also
discovering it's not so great atother things.
So it's not, you know, the Holy Grail account to everything
Space. Space was not in the report at
(29:43):
the time of very, very barely, Ithink.
So the space is making the big return.
Yeah, we're having the 202035 mission to Mars as planned,
manned mission to Mars or human mission to Mars.
So that I think is a trend. And then geopolitically what's
(30:03):
interesting is that also demographically Chinas
population is, is shrinking, Russian population is shrinking.
So you know, of course as western as we always like we're
obsessed with ourselves and we're shrinking, but we're not
the only ones. So one of the questions we're
having, so I don't have the answer to that, but it's a trend
is that is that what is the impact of that on geopolitics?
(30:24):
As in, can you actually conduct a war like in Ukraine if you
just lost 14 million people because by 2035, Russia will
lose 14 million in population size because 1414 still still a
lot. Because if you if you're having
a manpower intense warfare as Russia does, that's going to be
difficult. So same for China.
(30:47):
Some people argue China cannot afford a war because all the
families have only one child. So how how do you sell that
domestically? So I have more questions than
answers. I would have to go deeper.
But I will say the technologicaldebate has moved, I think very
much in the direction also of intersection of climate change
(31:08):
and technology. Of course, you know,
geoengineering, people are looking at that now, I think
more seriously. Of course, the big question is
CO2 capture. Will that be a breakthrough?
We don't have reasons to believethat right now.
But if it did, that would changethe game definitely.
Right. Okay, I could go on and on and
on, but yeah, these are just a few.
Thanks and I could too. I'm going to skip a few.
(31:30):
I wrote down so many questions because I'm so excited about the
topic, but I'm going to skip a few because I'm, I'm conscious
of the time I'm going to get to science fiction.
So you've, you've contributed to, you've been, you know,
you've used science fiction in some of your work.
I, I completely get the relevance of it because it's, I
mean, in, in writers terms, it'soften referred to as speculative
fiction rather than science fiction.
(31:50):
And really what you know, we're really talking about speculation
about the future, you know, alternative.
What it starts with a what if question.
Basically. I mean, look at all and look at
these great. I mean, good example is Jurassic
Park. You know guys, you know, OK,
what if someone called dinosaursand stuck them on a on a
Equatorial island? Yeah, or the matrix.
What if we live in a simulation?Absolutely.
(32:12):
Tell me about the the value of. Science fiction in your craft.
So I think there's you, you mentioned imagination.
Obviously you can push imagination.
So what our scenarios aren't science fiction because they're
they're science based, like thisevidence that something is
happening, etcetera. If you want to push this a lot
further, you have to go full on imagination and that's science
(32:35):
fiction. And I think then we should be
candid and say we have no evidence, but we also have no
reason to exclude that this could happen at some point in
the future. So typically the way we used it
at the native defence college, you know, we had a project last
year, NATO 2099, it was for NATO75th anniversary.
And my idea was, well, how aboutwe travel 75 years into the
future, think about what NATO can or will look like then now
(32:59):
no strategic force, cider can go75 years into the future.
It's just way too little evidence, especially in our
field, right defence to politics.
So I thought, well, let's ask science fiction authors and
specifically do what in French you call the collective
imaginer. So when you have many, many
people together imagining something, you find common
patterns. So we had 40 contributions for
(33:21):
zero, and we stacked them and found what are the common
patterns that they're finding about the future of NATO.
They had three questions. What does need to look like in
2099? What challenges has it overcome
and what challenges is it facing?
And then from that, we devised, it turned into a graphic novel,
because a graphic novel is much more attractive than just word
(33:41):
on text on paper. And it was a huge success
because it went counter to some of the prevalent feelings about
NATO in the summer of 24. You know, this feeling that
NATO's over and Russia's stronger and the West is over
and all that. We didn't find that in the
contributions. It was actually a lot of, well,
it doesn't. If you look at the novel, it
(34:04):
doesn't say everything's going to be fine.
It says there are challenges andis candid about them, but what
did the utility of that is? I think it captured an
imagination that there was no space for elsewhere.
Now what's interesting is there's a French researcher, she
just finished a study on the useof science fiction for military
institutions. And she finds that when a
(34:26):
military organisation tasks science fiction authors,
inevitably they end up producingscience fiction that has a huge
confirmation bias that caters towhat the organisation wants to
hear. So I can't tell you, are we part
of that or are we not part of that?
I would like to think not. But the utility in general for
(34:47):
military institutions is of course to take people out of
their day to So for your US, that's not so
(35:07):
interesting to have a conversation about because
everybody already has an opinion.
Let's take them into a field they haven't thought about and
science fiction is great for. That right OK and it's
fascinating that a lot of the I mean, I know lots of military
people who are huge science fiction yeah fans and the best
science fiction actually often does have some pretty clever not
just it's got some some whiz bang ideas and technology and
(35:28):
these sorts of things. But I mean, the best is actually
strategically very interesting as well, and they craft some
really interesting strategic scenarios.
And even innovators take cues from science fiction movies.
Like, what could we? I mean, have you seen Star Trek
lately? A lot of the Star Trek today,
you're like, yeah, that's an iPad.
That's a computer. That's a sliding door.
That was in the 60s. None of that existed.
(35:50):
But they gave people ideas on what what could be interesting.
It's definitely it does. It definitely seems to or the,
you know, the Internet or virtual reality is an obvious
one. I mean, virtual reality was.
Yes, yes, Matrix established. Virtual reality.
The headset? Yep.
All right, let's let's bang through a few so we can, because
I don't want to keep you too much longer.
But individuals To what extent do do powerful individuals Dr
(36:15):
Historic events. The eternal question, so you
know that in political science like at university, we don't
study individuals because we think everything is, you know,
human beings act as a collectiveetcetera, etcetera.
But when I will remember, I think it was the high
(36:35):
representative of the EU that said, I think was it the
pandemic or was it the invasion?I can't remember.
But he said, oh, you know, foresight is always about
trends, but in reality, it's events that drive things.
Now. It's always a combination of
both. An event is a combination of a
trend in the same way that an individual will never operate
completely in a vacuum. So we're assuming, for instance,
(36:56):
I was asked this the other day actually here in, in Australia,
do you think that when Putin leaves a new, a new time will
come for relations between Russia and and Western Europe?
And I said as much as I would like to believe that everything
that's going on is just Putin, Ialso think that there is a wider
(37:17):
context that led to him coming about.
So I think the precise decisions, especially in an
authoritarian system, I think yes, the individual plays a huge
role and we as democracies should spend more time thinking
about Jinping, about Vladimir Putin as as outsizing what we
(37:38):
look at, I don't know, province to in Australia, Chancellor in
Germany because their influence is much bigger, their
constraints are different than than ours.
So I will say it's a combination.
You probably would have to look a lot more at the context.
So what political system is it, what kind of person is it,
etcetera, to understand what's more important here, the person
or the context? I think in a European country,
(38:00):
the context is more important than the person, but it will the
person will still be important. So I would say I'm, I'm coming
down on a balance somewhere between.
I'm not saying the individual isnot important, I think it's
usually important, but I also think they're driven by a
context. But in an authoritarian system,
the individual will have an outsized influence.
Let's touch on Donald Trump then, because I mean, he to me,
to me, he is the obvious exampleof where an individual is, is
(38:25):
having enormous, significant influence.
Now. Now people will talk about how
there were these underlying, youknow, political frustrations in
the US that have been building up for a number of years that,
you know, you can look at, I don't know, stagnating middle
class wages or, you know, offshoring and, and, and
globalisation there. I mean, there are about, or
immigration as being an issue. I mean, there are obviously a, a
(38:47):
bunch of forces that are independent of Trump that we're
building up. But even taking account of
those, it just seems to me that he has had a, an enormous
individual impact in sort of in harnessing them and, and you
know, and some would argue exploiting them.
But I mean, the fact that we spend a lot of time when we're
(39:09):
analysing U.S. policy, we spend a lot of time asking ourselves
what is what, what, what, what is Trump's instinctive emotional
reaction to XYZI mean, I, I did AI do media from time to time
and I did ATV interview. This is, I think it was around
the time of the Iran Israel war.And I, I, I thought I coined a
phrase at the time which was psycho political analysis
(39:31):
because I felt like for, for Trump, this was actually a
really, I mean, this is something we all have to engage
in now is this psycho political analysis, which is in
understanding the politics, we actually really need to
understand the psychology. Yeah.
Man, I mean do do you? Well, in a way that that that's
what I just said about Jinping and Putin, right?
That's in a way that without knowing you weren't, I think
that's exactly what I'm suggesting.
And you need to think about who is this person?
(39:53):
I will say that in presidential systems, so the US, but also
France, for instance, you will have to spend more time on on
thinking about that individual because they have a lot more
power than in a parliamentary system, for instance, right.
And I think what's interesting about Trump is that, yes, like
any U.S. President, he has a lot of.
Power, I mean, as a president per se, but American president,
(40:15):
obviously. But when I look at the surveys,
the opinion polls about what he's been doing, there seems to
be still a very solid majority, not a majority.
I think it's like 49% approval rate, but then depends on on the
topics. He has very big approval rate on
certain things not doing so wellon, on inflation, on the economy
(40:35):
and stuff. So I still see, by the way, same
in Russia. You have a lot of opinion polls
that seem to indicate that the Russian population broadly
agrees with Putin. They don't like that people
dying, but they think that the special operation, the war in
Ukraine was a good idea. So I think you're right.
It's we got out of that habit, Ithink with the end of the Cold
(40:58):
War. I think I was looking at, you
know, what profiles have there been done about political
leaders? The last one I could find was
Saddam Hussein in the 80s duringthe Iran Iraq war.
Like what, what is Saddam Hussein like?
And would he actually, how wouldhe respond to to this and that?
And I think we got out of doing that because I think in the 90s
there was this perception that, you know, Fukuyama, we're all
(41:22):
kind of the same. We all want the same things, a
good life, democracy and all that.
So it would feel kind of weird to draw up a psychological
profile. I think it, it felt old school.
But I, I agree with you. We need to find a way back to
that. Right, yeah, I mean, because
that's definitely proven not, I mean, globalisation was AI mean
still some, some merits to it and it's, and it's been a
(41:44):
fascinating period, period in world history.
But but the, the, the limitationor the limits of it have been
demonstrated, you know, sort of spectacularly, haven't they?
And including the fact that, yeah, we're, we're not all the
same, we don't all want the samething.
It's not because we're, I mean, we're all the same human beings.
We're all, you know, we've all got the same brain, the same
(42:04):
bodies or all this kind of thing.
But but you know, there's 8 billions of a spread.
Because I think we also maybe this is a controversial for me
to say, but just imagining or talking about another culture
was often was beginning to be seen as othering and just, you
know, I'm not them, so I'm different and that's negatively
connotated. But you know, I've I've worked
(42:26):
in the Middle East for a long time and I said no thinking.
And in fact, it's the opposite. It's like she honouring their
culture by thinking about what are you thinking about?
What am I thinking about? The difference doesn't mean
hierarchy, doesn't mean I'm better than you just because I
realised that you're not like me.
And I think, yeah, I think, I think we need to get back to.
That and I think that shouldn't be controversial.
(42:46):
It's a, it's a, it's a very legitimate point.
OK, Two other things. Technology, part of your job
obviously is, is data. I mean, you, you, you look at
what you can actually draw from,from statistics, from numbers
to, to get a sense of, of which way things are going.
How is that changing already? And how do you anticipate it
(43:07):
will change with the technology that's available now,
particularly, you know, AI analysis of large amounts of
data? Is that going to So will that
give us a? Crystal well, we're playing with
it. What we find is so far what
we've seen AI isn't, you know, AI lacks imagination,
unfortunately, because it's it'svery good at just getting a lot
of material in and then finding the most probable patterns.
(43:30):
And everything that we're working on, you know, war or
geopolitics generally is a fieldthat's not made up of high
probabilities. So it cannot really tell us good
stories. What it's good at is getting
large data sets together and then help us analyse them.
But the qualitative analysis, wedo that.
(43:50):
So it's more like a junior assistant in a way at the
moment. And so that but that's super
helpful. So I have one data person on my
team. She, for instance, could show,
thanks to data, that the people being sent to Ukraine were
drafted from regions in Russia that had not voted for United
Russia, which is the party that supports Putin.
(44:11):
So, you know, that is useful because that gives us an
indication for what the cohesionis like in those units, et
cetera. So we should definitely use all
the data available, but I will say the qualitative analysis
that humans do better than the machine for now.
Right. OK.
So it's still your analytical expertise.
Yeah, with your, with your humanjudgement, those two things
(44:31):
fused. But but on top of more
presentable data, yes, that's the advantage of the moment.
Exactly. I give you a stupid example, but
I was writing a scenario in 2032.
I think it's the Olympics in Brisbane.
Yes. And and then I said help me
write a scenario if they're happening and write, help me
write a scenario. And then it said, Oh yeah, it's
in August, so it's going to be super hot.
(44:52):
And I said, but Cherry August inAustralia, it's winter.
It's like, Oh yeah, you're right, right.
So that's a pretty basic thing to get wrong.
But it just shows you, I'm not saying aha, AI isn't a threat.
I'm just saying that probably we'll still have a bit of a way
to go before it can can do a lotof the thing for sure.
Sure. That's an interesting mess.
That's these things I get wrong.OK, final question.
(45:15):
A lot of people might be listening to this thinking this
is such common sense. Presumably governments
everywhere do it, presumably allorganisations like alliances do
it. But if I, if I understand
correctly, is actually a deficitof this kind of work.
Now a couple of examples that I would point to.
The Pentagon shut its Office of Net Assessment this year.
It doesn't seem to have replacedit with anything comparable.
(45:36):
So it looks like that's done. Aspie, I'm going to give a shout
out to one of my colleagues here, Chris Taylor.
He did some work last year on strategic intelligence, sorry,
strategic warning intelligence, saying it's something that the
Australian government needed to incorporate into its, into its
Intel's community. Now a we, we had a, an
independent intelligence review that came out subsequent to that
(45:57):
and had a sort of mild version of what Chris was, was
recommending Chris's piece wherehe wrote about this.
It's got an award winning opening line.
Even mind boggling actions typically have a logic that's
discoverable. He said he went on to.
Site Hitler declaring war on America after Pearl Harbour or
Putin invading Ukraine. Is there a big deficit of this
(46:18):
sort of work and why do you think that is?
And is that changing in any positive way?
So when you look at the history of strategic foresight, it
always ebbs and flows in states.In most states, it will have a
heyday and then disappear and then come back.
Every time a government or society comes to a point of
(46:39):
uncertainty, they bring back strategic foresight.
So we have, I know a PhD student, we're currently working
on strategic foresight in the EUwho showed me, you know, in the
70s, you know, 70s was a pretty tough decade, lots of inflation,
uncertainty in the idea. So the EU, the European
Commissioner at the time, created a strategic foresight
unit, dismantled it in the 80s when things had calmed down.
(47:01):
Then the Cold War ended, they brought it back.
And it isn't. I got rid of it in the early
2000s because, you know, got used to the future.
The future is always uncertain, but you can get used to a
certain future you imagine. So I think that's kind of the
norm. It comes and goes.
What I will say is that in Europe, well, in NATO, we have
the classical states that are better at it.
(47:24):
Not great, but better. So you have the USUK, Portugal,
Spain and Netherlands and France.
And then you're going to say, what about Germany?
And Germany has a huge economic power.
Germany, I think is honestly notthat great.
I mean it, you have it here and there, but you don't have a
national culture of thinking about the future, which I think
is a huge problem. Sorry, I forgot that.
(47:46):
Foresight champion of all times.Because they have not gone
through the up and downs. That's Finland.
And Finland has had an established structure since the
80s. So started with an ecosystem of
think tankers. Then the Cold War ended and
since then it hasn't establishedstructured process in, you know,
(48:08):
in parliament. They have a committee on for on
the future. They have a future experts in
each ministry that liaise with each other.
They have a report as I can't remember how many every every
years, two or three years or so.And what's interesting is
Finland is also the most prepared country when it comes
to, to Russia. And funnily enough, they're also
one of the happiest people on earth.
(48:28):
So I'm thinking there is a link.And I saw a study the other day
that said, the more you think about the future in a structured
way, not just obsessing, but think about what can I do, the
happier, the more optimistic youbecome.
And that's why I think we shouldall be a bit more like Finland.
And I would hope, you know, you mentioned the US.
It's, I think it's a very sad example.
The Office of Net Assessment wasin had been in place since the
(48:50):
60s or 70s and in case sixties 60s right Andrew Marshall a
really long time. And then they got rid of
something that we also was extremely good.
So it ebbs and flows, but I would say keep it because it
will always be useful. Yep, Yep.
OK, Finland, There you go. Despite being dark, we should.
All be more very cold. Yeah, right.
And you go to Finland, you tell them, did you know you're the
(49:12):
happiest people on Earth? Like, yeah, nobody's more
surprised than we are. Brilliant.
OK. Florence, thank you so much.
Thank you so much for joining me.
It's been a great chat. Very nice talking to you.
Thank you. That's all we have time for this
week on STOP THE World. Thanks for listening, We'll be
back soon.
Stop the world. Welcome to Stop the World.
I'm Olivia Nelson and. I'm David Rowe.
Today's guest, Florence Galb hasone of the most fascinating jobs
in national security. She's a futurist for NATO.
That doesn't mean predicting thefuture, but rather studying
possible futures to help preparedecision makers and strategic
(00:22):
planners for the unexpected. It's a.
Pretty cool job live. I want to be here, so do I.
Florence is the director of the research division at the NATO
Defence College in Rome. She should actually ask if they
could set up a campus in Florence.
I didn't ask her that she leads a team that thinks about what if
Events that could throw Natos strategic plans into disarray.
(00:44):
In today's conversation, Florence explains how she and
her team make forecasts, how they project forward given the
enormous complexity of geopolitics and international
affairs, the value of being prepared, interestingly, to
reduce reaction time. There's a big, big problem with
being caught flat footed when things don't go the way you
expect and how to communicate your ideas to decision makers.
(01:06):
So of course you're not just filling their heads with
pessimistic information, but actually giving them something
that they can act on. All very important stuff.
Florence reflects on some of herprevious work, such as her
report for the European Union and global trends to 2030, some
of the forecasts that have proven particularly useful, as
well as the value of science fiction in forecasting.
You also discussed the role of powerful individuals in history,
(01:29):
major trends shaping the world today from climate change to
technology, and the role of AI in forecasting, which I'm sure
Dave was your favourite part of the conversation.
It was like dessert. I left it to the end.
And on science fiction, let me just say it is a common thing
for Nat SEC people to be sciencefiction nerds as well.
And I in fact wasn't into science fiction until I got into
national security. That year really went together,
(01:51):
so very useful takeaways from Florence's conversation.
Not least the need to put yourself in other people's shoes
to understand how they might respond differently from the way
you expect. We had an interesting exchange
about that. The value of diverse cultures,
personalities, and perspectives in a forecasting team.
Of course, we've seen what can go wrong just in recent decades
(02:13):
when strategic planners assume that other parts of the world
and other leaders are motivated by the same values and
preferences that they are. Indeed, this work has never been
more important, so please enjoy Florence Galb.
Welcome to Stop the World. I'm here with Florence Galb in
person here in the studio. Great to be here.
Welcome. So Florence, you have the
(02:33):
coolest job I've ever heard of. You're a a futurist, a security
futurist for NATO. We'll get this clear at the
outset. You don't try to predict the
future, right? You, You, but you you sort of
study possible futures in order to better prepare us.
Exactly. Right.
Yeah. Let's start with how you do
that. I mean, you know, I I have ideas
in my head about how you might do it.
(02:53):
Just explain what what are the processes?
OK. All right, some people ask that.
Actually, I have one. It was a gift to a friend of
mine, but it doesn't work. So the way we do that, So what
what futurists do is they just like academics in general,
actually, we look at all the information that's out there on,
you know, what do we have certainty over?
Some things we have high certainty over.
Like we have a lot of data like climate change, demographic
(03:15):
stuff like that. And then where we don't have
data, we try to fill in with plausible scenarios, ideas where
this could go. You know, we study causalities,
what leads to what? And then we develop, well,
mostly we we like scenarios because scenarios are evident
events based developments. I think I find them more useful
in trend analysis. Trend analysis is very popular
(03:37):
as well, but we really do a lot of scenarios.
And then because with the scenarios we go back into the
present and say, OK, what do we do with that now?
How can we act in the present toinfluence or avoid that future?
Sorry and for non I suppose not.I'm not an academic person or a
technical person, but scenarios.I mean, you're talking about
actual like desktop exercises ora tabletop.
Well, or something like that. Obviously working for NATO,
(03:58):
we're a worst case organisation.I always say right, because
we're in the business of war. So our job is to think about the
most existential types of futures.
So let me give you one what if scenario that's coming out.
Once a year we have a collectionof what if scenarios coming out.
So we have one that's about a nuclear weapon being detonated
(04:18):
in space. There's historical precedent up
in the 60s. What effect would that have on
Earth? Mainly a problem with
electricity, power cuts and all that.
So we're thinking, we're imagining what if Russia did
that? With what effect with intention?
How can we avoid that and all that?
So that would be a scenario along those lines.
Normally ours are five years into the future, so we don't
(04:40):
deal with 192050 or 2040 even. Why?
Because our decision makers obviously they want to influence
something that's within their reach.
So we're looking maximum five years into the future.
But you're you're essentially asking what if questions and
then proceeding from there. But plausible what if questions?
Exactly. So normally our what ifs based
on what we call a weak signal. A weak signal is a is an early
(05:02):
sign that something could happen.
It's not yet a trend if you want.
It's like a trend being just born.
And based on that weak signal, we we develop that further and
imagine, OK, what if this actually becomes a solid trend,
a solid indication that something is happening.
So we have some evidence. We don't imagine aliens coming
to Earth or whatever. So it has to be rooted in
reality. Right.
(05:22):
OK. I mean, so even five years is a
long time in international politics.
Of course. I mean, we were talking just
before we, before we started filming about, you know,
segmenting recent history into 510 year periods, whatever it
is. Let's say you took someone at
the turn of the Millennium and said, you know, five years from
now, what do you think things are going to look like?
They wouldn't have said that, you know, Islamists would, or,
(05:45):
you know, jihadists would fly 2 buildings into a, into twin
towers and, and the US would invade two countries.
Well, I mean, both of them unsuccessfully.
Arguably, if you project forwardfar enough, far enough, it's
very, very difficult because international relations
geopolitics are extremely complicated systems with all
(06:06):
these inputs, talk a bit about the the utility, the value of
what it is that you do. I mean, are you trying to give
leaders better decision making abilities, you know, improve
their decision making? Are you, you know, are you
looking for actionable options? Yeah, for responses. 100% if you
(06:28):
don't like in strategic force ingeneral, if you don't lead to
any action in the present and you've kind of missed your job.
So that's why I was saying that it's a scenario that scares
people into paralysis, which is a common reaction.
It's called the Cassandra effect.
Then you have actually missed your target.
Now, I think you say something super important about
geopolitics, and I think that's something that's for some people
(06:50):
will sound heretical. Specifically, I'm going to say
that international relations theory, you know, everything
that we study in university, that it realists, realists and
constructivists and all that, they're all attempts at making
predictions about where international relations will go
in the future, what are patternsfor interaction between states.
(07:12):
And I'm saying none of these actually have universal
predictive power. I mean, they're still useful
because anything that helps you structure your thinking about a
problem is useful. But I'm saying the only way you
can actually really the only tool available that helps you
navigate exactly what you said, this the complexity of
(07:33):
international relations. I think it's strategic
foresight, because strategic foresight is the only tool you
have that includes all these idiosyncrasies, right?
What makes the geopolitical system so, so complex is we
don't have a lot of data. Like I can't call Putin and say,
can I interview you for my qualitative analysis that traces
patterns for invasion decisions or whatever.
(07:54):
Even the people that he spoke towas a small circle of people.
So you have not a lot of data. Decision making takes place in a
small circle. It's defence.
So the data is by definition secretive.
And then you have notions of rationality, values, interests
that are not necessarily easy tounderstand from the outside.
The only thing you have is empathy and imagination to put
(08:17):
yourself in, in the other people's shoes.
And that's we use in strategic foresight.
So I think it's actually much more useful than studying
international relations in termsof trying to understand what can
come your way. Right, okay, that's fascinating
spicy. I love it.
I mean, your point is well takenthough, because I mean, the,
the, the international theories that we, oh, you know, I suppose
(08:40):
the theories of international relations that we, we all hear
about, I mean, they're essentially kind of models.
And they, I mean, they, they have their, their usefulness up
to a point, of course. I mean, it's you, you know, you
believe that the world operates in a particular way.
And therefore, if you apply thatmodel to a particular point in
time or a or a scenario, then you can assume that actors are
(09:02):
going to, you know, to act in a particular way according.
To that. Model, but of course it turns
out they. Don't no Fukuyama, right?
Fukuyama proposed. I think this is what the future
is going to look like. A lot of people in Europe
actually believe that and turns out Putin didn't.
So I think they have their value.
And then don't get me wrong, I'mnot saying oh, they shouldn't
exist, but they shouldn't replace creative, constructive,
(09:25):
imaginative thinking about the future.
Right. Yep, Yep, I like the idea of a
of a fuzzy image. I mean, you're, you're, you're,
or you're drawing fuzzy images of the future.
They're not precise, but even a fuzzy image is useful.
So we compare. I compare strategic foresight of
all things future to the gym forthe mind.
(09:46):
It it exercises your critical thinking, your imagination.
What happens as a result is thatyou are, even if a scenario
doesn't correspond 100% to the one that you thought about, it
reduces surprise. And what does that do?
It increases decreases your response time.
So you'd be less shocked. You will also have a clearer
(10:07):
notion of what your capabilitiesare because you will have
thought through the possible consequences and your own tools
that you have available to to deal with the future.
So you also need to be self aware, right?
So in a way, what we call that is creating a memory of the
future. So you read a scenario and then
something similar happens and your mind already knows.
(10:27):
Wait, I've seen that before. It reminds me of XYZI.
Know what to do next, and that'swhat we're trying to accomplish.
That that that is fascinating and that seems to I mean, even
if it were that alone, that would have value, right, Because
whenever I mean, the human reaction when we when we're
confronted with something highlyunexpected is almost always
freeze flat footed. Exactly, you know, a lapse.
(10:52):
The, the, I mean, it's, it's, it's, I mean, I'm, I'm picking
on poor George W Bush suddenly here.
But I mean, it's, it's hard to forget that image or that, that,
that the video of him when he was first told about.
Oh, yeah, no, when he was first told about September 11, he was
reading a, reading a book to thekids, remember?
And he got that look of absoluteshock on his face.
(11:12):
And then he spent, you know, another 2 minutes or so
finishing the book. Now one. 100% and there's other
examples from history right? There's Stalin, when Nazi
Germany attacked the Soviet Union despite having a non
aggression agreement. And I think he disappeared for
10 days or two weeks. He was so shocked.
And you could argue, you know, some people say that Russia
until today is traumatised by bythat attack.
(11:33):
So reducing response time is, isof huge value in international
relations. But you know, what you just said
was that that's the minimum we can achieve even more.
But I think that you achieve regardless of how accurate this
scenario is. I'll give you another example.
In 2021, so just before the invasion of Ukraine, I was at
(11:53):
the EU Institute for Security Studies.
At the time, I was also pushing for what if scenarios.
The way I always do that is the analysts have freedom to choose
their scenario. They just have to provide
evidence for a weak signal. And of the 10 contributions, 3
or even 4 talked about Russia. None of them talked about Russia
(12:14):
and Ukraine, but you had Russia and the Balkans, Russia and
Moldova, Russia and the Baltic state.
So it was like, you know, putting your hands on the train
track and feeling, OK, something's coming.
Yeah, We're not sure where and in what shape, but we can feel a
belligerence coming. And I think that was also one of
the values. OK, OK, Hands on the train
track. That's another good analogy for
(12:35):
it. What about being believed and
being taken seriously? I mean, you're asking
potentially decision makers withvery, very limited bandwidth,
limited resources limited, you know, there are only so many
things that they can respond to.You're asking them to invest
time and, and, and effort potentially in, in contingencies
that never eventuate or, or go against their, their existing
(12:58):
expectations and beliefs. It feels like you're, you're
working against a whole lot of instinctive human biases here.
Is that difficult? Yes, it is difficult, but there
is a way around that. So I think what people like
myself have to learn is to thinkwith their client in mind,
meaning think what the decision maker will need or also their
(13:23):
psychology, right? And of course that differs and
the longer you know somebody andif you have a relationship of
trust, that will help because you know it's not just about the
message, it's also about the messenger.
And that's very interesting. So some people will respond,
will have a completely allergic reaction to overdoing emotions.
Other people will need emotions to engage with the scenario.
(13:45):
So I think you have to be, you have to think a lot more about
the person you're advising than about your message.
And I think that requires frankly letting, checking your
ego. Because I think what a lot of us
are guilty of is wanting to be right and wanting to, you know,
have influence. And you remember when the
pandemic started and ex Twitter was, you know, inundated with
(14:09):
people saying I saw it coming, but nobody heard me.
Well, maybe then you failed at your job because a successful
foresighter, it shouldn't be judged on whether they were
right, but whether they were hurt.
So my most successful scenarios never came about because
somebody did something about them.
But then you can't prove that you were right because it never
happened, right? So that's why, you know, you
(14:29):
have to learn humility in this job.
Can you give any examples of that?
That's really, I mean, can you give an example of a of a,
something you anticipated that didn't eventuate, but which you
have some, you know, reason to believe?
One thing we mobilised because that's the other thing I think
Speaking of ego, you are much more successful if you create
(14:52):
alliances with other people. So when several academics,
thinking tankers, advisors coalesce around one opinion and,
and, and pass that on to decision makers, you're much
more successful than if it's just you and one person.
I mean, that's, you know, that's, that's a bit of a
fantasy for a lot of people thatwant to advise policy makers.
But in reality, it's normally what I call a school of fish.
And one example I think was during the height of tensions in
(15:18):
Iraq, but also Syria. You will remember in the early
mid 2000s when ideas came up to partition Iraq and then also
during the Syrian civil war to partition along ethnic lines.
And we were all saying the problem is not ethnicity.
It's, you know, everything that came around it.
And of course, you know, IslamicState used that and all the
(15:39):
jihadists did, they used that. But we said that's not what the
issue is about. And I'm I'm happy to say that
petition never happened. It doesn't mean that all the
problems went away. But we were sure that creating
state let's wouldn't solve the problem.
So it's not one of the big ticket items.
The other one was after the ArabSpring, we were all warning very
much about youth unemployment. We said policy priority has to
(16:02):
be to keep youth unemployment at30% or lower, but definitely
make sure it doesn't increase. So it's not a great success
because there was no real dent in youth unemployment in the
Middle East, North Africa, but it was kept at that level.
So you know, that's, that's not nothing to write home about.
Nobody's going to say yay, we avoided.
Well, we don't even actually know exactly what he avoided
because it didn't happen. But I think over time you'll see
(16:26):
you build a reputation for beinga trusted advisor.
And that's what it's about, not being super dramatic and being
in the news saying I saw it coming, nobody hurt me.
That's the fastest way of not being hurt, right?
Right. Instead, Yeah, OK, just just
giving steady, sober. Yeah.
Useful advice. Exactly.
And and something like youth unemployment.
Absolutely. That makes a lot of sense.
(16:47):
Talk about the obstacles that you encounter.
I mean, like I said before, you're working out against all
these biases, confirmation bias.This is a famous one.
Groupthink is another famous 11.I'm going to, I'm going to just,
you know, state my own position here and you can you can give me
your thoughts on it. But I mean, failure of
(17:08):
imagination seems to be one of the biggest ones at the moment
for me, including, you know, I guess most troublingly, failure
of imagination about how, how vulnerable democracy might be.
The the, the, the assumption that institutions are enduring
(17:30):
and so strong that that they will naturally sort of self
preserve through the ups and downs of, of, of difficulty in
democracies. When institutions are in fact
just still made up of people whoare prone to the influence of
the people around them. And, and might be prone to the
same false expectation that the institution will just endure by
(17:53):
its own nature without anyone proactively and actively kind of
propping it up and, and, and, and reinforcing it.
To me, failure of imagination seems to be a really, really big
one at the moment. But talk a little bit about the
sort of obstacles that you most often encounter.
So it depends in on the organisation that you're working
(18:13):
in. I think what what I like about
working in NATO is that NATO is a political military line.
So there's civilian, there are civilians and military people.
Military people tend to be very happy to entertain all kinds of
catastrophic scenarios because at the end of the day that's
their job. So they are not that scared of
(18:34):
imagination. I mean, they're scared of maybe
using their own imagination, butthey're very happy to use ours
over with scenarios. And they, they're not as likely,
I find, to reject a scenario because it doesn't confirm their
worldview. If it's plausibly explained,
they're happy to think it through.
That's been my experience. However, although I'm a civilian
(18:54):
myself, or perhaps because I'm acivilian myself, I'm going to
criticise the civilians. And that's both in NATO but also
in the EU where I worked for a long time and maybe, you know,
in other European government sections.
My experience is that the more normative you are, and I will
(19:14):
say the EU is a very normative organisation.
What do I mean by normative? The more you have strong beliefs
about what the world is and how it should be, the harder it is
for you to imagine something that's outside of that realm.
And so that's why I think, you know, NATO was probably faster
and accepting what was going on in the run up to the Ukraine war
than many EU representatives, because the EU fundamentally is
(19:38):
a, is a, you know what, what wasthe EU at the outset was a
economic organisation. It's a, it's, I always say it's
a development organisation and believes that trade and
economics are actually what holds peace together.
You know, it's, it's a very laudable goal, you know, peace
through prosperity and all that.But it also makes it it's, it's
such a can't say wishful thinking, but it's such a
(20:01):
positive view of the world that anything that goes counter that.
Will you said confirmation bias will be a lot more difficult for
them to accept. So, and I think it's not just
the EU, it's it's, I think civilians generally have a
tendency for that. You 2.
If something something's a moraloutrage or irrational, I find it
very, very hard to. Believe so even it's going to
(20:21):
happen. Yes, yes, I understand that.
But it means that you have a blind spot.
And so what's interesting yeah, we have trouble engaging
decision makers, but you know wehave our own biases too.
And that's I think the most important characteristic for
futurist is to know that you have biases and what they are
(20:41):
and learn how to deal with them.And so my trick is always
whenever you have a very strong emotional reaction, then you
should be aware, like Bing. OK, hang on.
I think there might be a bias here.
You might be very attached to this outcome for some reason.
And then what I do then is to define under what conditions I
would change my mind. So I feel that something is
(21:03):
happening. And then I'm like, that would
never happen. OK, Under what circumstances
will I change my mind? And then you can decide for
yourself. It's like giving yourself a
watermark and saying, OK, when that is reached, then I will
have to change my mind. And I define it myself.
So the way I find that the way we can, you can't get really
people out of their bias, but you can understand where they're
(21:26):
coming from. And I think what helps is invite
them to self reflect. Like I said, you can say to them
under what conditions do you think you would change your mind
or what? Why is it so important for you
to believe that? Right.
So engage them in a conversation.
Shouldn't just tell people you're just stupid to believe
that because that's their worldview and they built that
worldview over years, you know, with information stacking and
(21:47):
all that. But you should be aware.
Yeah, you get into a field whereyour long held beliefs, your own
and your counterparts will can get in the way.
Won't necessarily be in the way,but can get in the way of seeing
the situation for what it is. Right.
OK. And an extension of that, I
think you mentioned empathy earlier, an extension of that is
(22:08):
understanding that the way you see the current situation might
not be the way that everybody else sees it, that someone with
a set of different values and preferences or whatever it might
be, including a potential adversary, might see things
very. Very differently is not.
Going to act the way you. Expect.
And that's why it's important that you engage with people from
other countries and cultures. And OK, I can't go to Russia,
but I can travel to other countries and talk to people and
(22:29):
just, you know, without any emotion, just ask, OK, how do
you see that? For instance, I was in Morocco
shortly after the war started and I asked a friend of mine
there, what do you think about the war in Ukraine?
She said, well, I don't see how it's so different from Iraq.
And of course, you know, then I came back to Europe and I told
some of my colleagues there and they got they were outraged.
So it's not at all the same as Iraq.
And I said, put that aside. Just get, just accept for a
(22:52):
moment that somebody in North Africa will think it looks a lot
like Iraq. Just leave it for what it is.
And I think they often we get weare own worst enemies because we
don't want to see it. We get, we get emotional about
it rather than saying, OK, this is an inconvenient view for me,
but it is a view that's out there.
I completely agree with that. And certainly travelling and
spending time in different places.
(23:15):
I mean, the Middle East is a great example, isn't it?
I mean, you've really got to spend that time there to
understand, you know, that that thinking can be extremely
different from from what you areaccustomed to.
So and, and, and I mean, let's just stay on the diversity thing
for a moment. And presumably building a team
that is that that is diverse is,you know, whether it's cultural,
(23:35):
whether it's religious, you know, gender, gender or just
diversity of personalities for that matter, as.
Well, paramount, paramount, you can't.
It's a team sport. And the more diverse your team
is, the better. And when I say diversity, so I
mean working for NATO means I'm lucky because by definition
everybody's from a different country.
You have a lot of different professional backgrounds, You
have military, you have civilian, you have two different
(23:56):
services and you have different personalities.
And my team, we once did a personality self test and we
came. It was very interesting because
we discovered that I think we were 10 different personalised
types, we were 10 different people.
We literally, we had one from each.
And I thought, OK, that's challenging.
But then one of my colleagues said, no, it's great.
You have one for every situation.
(24:16):
So that is the perfect setup to do strategic foresight because
we all look at the problem in a different way or we see
different things. You know, when I mentioned weak
signals, they will all notice different things because also
the way they inform themselves, what they read, what they listen
to, it's different. And then when we come together,
then that's really beautiful. So I mean beautiful.
(24:37):
It's just mega productive. And I understand that, you know,
sometimes we will come to NATO and they're so frustrated
because multinational institutions that doesn't look
very efficient at the outset because you have all these
different cultures and you have misunderstandings and whatever.
But I think ultimately the outcome speaks for itself,
right? Let's talk about the world now.
(24:57):
I mean, let's, let's put it put into practise some of what
you're talking about here. I mean, you wrote, you wrote
this report, Global Trends, the EU back in 2019.
I look through it, it holds up very well.
Thank you. Yeah, I looked it the other day.
Yeah. There's no Francis Fukuyama type
situations there. I think Francis is brilliant, by
the way, I, I. No, he is.
(25:19):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just I think he's.
He's, he's been held. Yeah.
He's everyone remembers. Sorry for him because yeah, but
it's a different conversation. But I I think he's great, but
he's not a prophet. No, no and no political
scientist. Well, and you didn't try to be
in global trends. Instead you just you said here
are here are some important issues that we should keep an
eye on. And you were right, AI obviously
take populism risk to risk risksto democracy, excuse me,
(25:42):
demographics, all these sorts ofthings.
So with your crystal ball, that doesn't work.
I mean, what do you see in 2025 at the moment?
What I mean what what are the sort of key drivers that you are
looking at in 2025? So it's funny, I looked at that
report the other day myself and you know, it's always a bit
painful. Well, no, it's not painful.
(26:03):
But originally you think, oh, should I look at that?
Maybe I was wrong. But you definitely should read
your old foresight and because this is how you learn.
And I looked at it and I thoughtboring, all of this happened.
And I realised, yeah, that meansit was a good report.
Because if you read an old report and you go, hmm, that's
funny, that's wrong, then you were wrong.
So luckily, we managed to get almost everything.
(26:25):
Well, there was nothing wrong. We were some of the timelines
because it was written before the pandemic.
You know, when it comes to digitalization, digitalization
happened faster because of the pandemic than we thought.
So if you're asking me today, I think the number one trend, of
course, that continues to exist is climate change.
Since the report came out, of course, a lot has happened, a
(26:47):
lot of commitments have happened.
A lot of change has actually started to unroll.
Is it fast enough? We're still not on track for 2%,
but when if all the commitments are being met, and I think we
have, we have a good chance of getting there.
But yeah, climate change is still an issue.
You know what's interesting? The report before had talked
about climate change, but not asprominently as the one that I
(27:08):
wrote. And when I wrote that, it was
not entirely uncontroversial because many people didn't think
it was such a big issue back in 2018.
Can you imagine? Because today it's like, yeah,
that's the norm, yeah. So, and sorry, I'm going to let
you finish your answer, but I just want to inject something
quickly, which is that I think that far from being boring, a
lot of the things that you mentioned are actually
accelerating. I mean, AI is, I mean, you were
(27:30):
talking about it six years ago. Great.
But it's actually a far more. I mean, it's, it's, it's
spinning at such an enormous rate now.
Populism has got worse, I would say.
And it's it's getting to the point of where it it it
potentially is, is, is crisis level.
I think demographics are, I mean, you know, you look at
South Korea, for instance, or, or Western, Western Europe or
yeah. Yeah, so we even I even wrote
(27:52):
that a war is purely statistically a war in the next
decade was likely. Of course, you know, I didn't
say, oh, it's going to be in Ukraine, but so climate change
100%. What's interesting that the
demographic change is already unfolding.
So I guess if I had to look out for the next, yeah, if I had to
(28:12):
say 2035, by 2035, we will have probably I would I would guess
found a way to deal with it. But the demographic, so the,
the, the 2% losing 2% of the workforce also means that we
have at the same time 2% more spending for healthcare.
So I would say that that both the economy and the healthcare
(28:36):
sector, so innovation and medicine are moving in that
direction. So it's too soon to say what
exactly we have. No, we had on cancer and stuff,
but we have beginning to have positive signs on Alzheimer's.
So I think like this whole notion of longevity, which was
not, we didn't talk about that five to six years ago.
So I think that's emerging because of the demographic
change in terms of AI and technological, so technological
(29:00):
evolutions that we're seeing. I think you'll see that the big
AI earthquake that we're living through right now, in the next
decade, we will have a clear idea of what it can actually do,
which jobs would it actually replace.
We will remember in the report we started looking at at the
numbers and it was so big, nobody had really an idea of how
it's going to impact the labour market.
(29:20):
So I think from here we're now moving in that direction.
So we know it's going to change the labour market.
We have a better idea now than we had six years ago, but it's
still not clear, right? And we see that with, you know,
generative AI, it's great at some things and we also
discovering it's not so great atother things.
So it's not, you know, the Holy Grail account to everything
Space. Space was not in the report at
(29:43):
the time of very, very barely, Ithink.
So the space is making the big return.
Yeah, we're having the 202035 mission to Mars as planned,
manned mission to Mars or human mission to Mars.
So that I think is a trend. And then geopolitically what's
(30:03):
interesting is that also demographically Chinas
population is, is shrinking, Russian population is shrinking.
So you know, of course as western as we always like we're
obsessed with ourselves and we're shrinking, but we're not
the only ones. So one of the questions we're
having, so I don't have the answer to that, but it's a trend
is that is that what is the impact of that on geopolitics?
(30:24):
As in, can you actually conduct a war like in Ukraine if you
just lost 14 million people because by 2035, Russia will
lose 14 million in population size because 1414 still still a
lot. Because if you if you're having
a manpower intense warfare as Russia does, that's going to be
difficult. So same for China.
(30:47):
Some people argue China cannot afford a war because all the
families have only one child. So how how do you sell that
domestically? So I have more questions than
answers. I would have to go deeper.
But I will say the technologicaldebate has moved, I think very
much in the direction also of intersection of climate change
(31:08):
and technology. Of course, you know,
geoengineering, people are looking at that now, I think
more seriously. Of course, the big question is
CO2 capture. Will that be a breakthrough?
We don't have reasons to believethat right now.
But if it did, that would changethe game definitely.
Right. Okay, I could go on and on and
on, but yeah, these are just a few.
Thanks and I could too. I'm going to skip a few.
(31:30):
I wrote down so many questions because I'm so excited about the
topic, but I'm going to skip a few because I'm, I'm conscious
of the time I'm going to get to science fiction.
So you've, you've contributed to, you've been, you know,
you've used science fiction in some of your work.
I, I completely get the relevance of it because it's, I
mean, in, in writers terms, it'soften referred to as speculative
fiction rather than science fiction.
(31:50):
And really what you know, we're really talking about speculation
about the future, you know, alternative.
What it starts with a what if question.
Basically. I mean, look at all and look at
these great. I mean, good example is Jurassic
Park. You know guys, you know, OK,
what if someone called dinosaursand stuck them on a on a
Equatorial island? Yeah, or the matrix.
What if we live in a simulation?Absolutely.
(32:12):
Tell me about the the value of. Science fiction in your craft.
So I think there's you, you mentioned imagination.
Obviously you can push imagination.
So what our scenarios aren't science fiction because they're
they're science based, like thisevidence that something is
happening, etcetera. If you want to push this a lot
further, you have to go full on imagination and that's science
(32:35):
fiction. And I think then we should be
candid and say we have no evidence, but we also have no
reason to exclude that this could happen at some point in
the future. So typically the way we used it
at the native defence college, you know, we had a project last
year, NATO 2099, it was for NATO75th anniversary.
And my idea was, well, how aboutwe travel 75 years into the
future, think about what NATO can or will look like then now
(32:59):
no strategic force, cider can go75 years into the future.
It's just way too little evidence, especially in our
field, right defence to politics.
So I thought, well, let's ask science fiction authors and
specifically do what in French you call the collective
imaginer. So when you have many, many
people together imagining something, you find common
patterns. So we had 40 contributions for
(33:21):
zero, and we stacked them and found what are the common
patterns that they're finding about the future of NATO.
They had three questions. What does need to look like in
2099? What challenges has it overcome
and what challenges is it facing?
And then from that, we devised, it turned into a graphic novel,
because a graphic novel is much more attractive than just word
(33:41):
on text on paper. And it was a huge success
because it went counter to some of the prevalent feelings about
NATO in the summer of 24. You know, this feeling that
NATO's over and Russia's stronger and the West is over
and all that. We didn't find that in the
contributions. It was actually a lot of, well,
it doesn't. If you look at the novel, it
(34:04):
doesn't say everything's going to be fine.
It says there are challenges andis candid about them, but what
did the utility of that is? I think it captured an
imagination that there was no space for elsewhere.
Now what's interesting is there's a French researcher, she
just finished a study on the useof science fiction for military
institutions. And she finds that when a
(34:26):
military organisation tasks science fiction authors,
inevitably they end up producingscience fiction that has a huge
confirmation bias that caters towhat the organisation wants to
hear. So I can't tell you, are we part
of that or are we not part of that?
I would like to think not. But the utility in general for
(34:47):
military institutions is of course to take people out of
their day to So for your US, that's not so
(35:07):
interesting to have a conversation about because
everybody already has an opinion.
Let's take them into a field they haven't thought about and
science fiction is great for. That right OK and it's
fascinating that a lot of the I mean, I know lots of military
people who are huge science fiction yeah fans and the best
science fiction actually often does have some pretty clever not
just it's got some some whiz bang ideas and technology and
(35:28):
these sorts of things. But I mean, the best is actually
strategically very interesting as well, and they craft some
really interesting strategic scenarios.
And even innovators take cues from science fiction movies.
Like, what could we? I mean, have you seen Star Trek
lately? A lot of the Star Trek today,
you're like, yeah, that's an iPad.
That's a computer. That's a sliding door.
That was in the 60s. None of that existed.
(35:50):
But they gave people ideas on what what could be interesting.
It's definitely it does. It definitely seems to or the,
you know, the Internet or virtual reality is an obvious
one. I mean, virtual reality was.
Yes, yes, Matrix established. Virtual reality.
The headset? Yep.
All right, let's let's bang through a few so we can, because
I don't want to keep you too much longer.
But individuals To what extent do do powerful individuals Dr
(36:15):
Historic events. The eternal question, so you
know that in political science like at university, we don't
study individuals because we think everything is, you know,
human beings act as a collectiveetcetera, etcetera.
But when I will remember, I think it was the high
(36:35):
representative of the EU that said, I think was it the
pandemic or was it the invasion?I can't remember.
But he said, oh, you know, foresight is always about
trends, but in reality, it's events that drive things.
Now. It's always a combination of
both. An event is a combination of a
trend in the same way that an individual will never operate
completely in a vacuum. So we're assuming, for instance,
(36:56):
I was asked this the other day actually here in, in Australia,
do you think that when Putin leaves a new, a new time will
come for relations between Russia and and Western Europe?
And I said as much as I would like to believe that everything
that's going on is just Putin, Ialso think that there is a wider
(37:17):
context that led to him coming about.
So I think the precise decisions, especially in an
authoritarian system, I think yes, the individual plays a huge
role and we as democracies should spend more time thinking
about Jinping, about Vladimir Putin as as outsizing what we
(37:38):
look at, I don't know, province to in Australia, Chancellor in
Germany because their influence is much bigger, their
constraints are different than than ours.
So I will say it's a combination.
You probably would have to look a lot more at the context.
So what political system is it, what kind of person is it,
etcetera, to understand what's more important here, the person
or the context? I think in a European country,
(38:00):
the context is more important than the person, but it will the
person will still be important. So I would say I'm, I'm coming
down on a balance somewhere between.
I'm not saying the individual isnot important, I think it's
usually important, but I also think they're driven by a
context. But in an authoritarian system,
the individual will have an outsized influence.
Let's touch on Donald Trump then, because I mean, he to me,
to me, he is the obvious exampleof where an individual is, is
(38:25):
having enormous, significant influence.
Now. Now people will talk about how
there were these underlying, youknow, political frustrations in
the US that have been building up for a number of years that,
you know, you can look at, I don't know, stagnating middle
class wages or, you know, offshoring and, and, and
globalisation there. I mean, there are about, or
immigration as being an issue. I mean, there are obviously a, a
(38:47):
bunch of forces that are independent of Trump that we're
building up. But even taking account of
those, it just seems to me that he has had a, an enormous
individual impact in sort of in harnessing them and, and you
know, and some would argue exploiting them.
But I mean, the fact that we spend a lot of time when we're
(39:09):
analysing U.S. policy, we spend a lot of time asking ourselves
what is what, what, what, what is Trump's instinctive emotional
reaction to XYZI mean, I, I did AI do media from time to time
and I did ATV interview. This is, I think it was around
the time of the Iran Israel war.And I, I, I thought I coined a
phrase at the time which was psycho political analysis
(39:31):
because I felt like for, for Trump, this was actually a
really, I mean, this is something we all have to engage
in now is this psycho political analysis, which is in
understanding the politics, we actually really need to
understand the psychology. Yeah.
Man, I mean do do you? Well, in a way that that that's
what I just said about Jinping and Putin, right?
That's in a way that without knowing you weren't, I think
that's exactly what I'm suggesting.
And you need to think about who is this person?
(39:53):
I will say that in presidential systems, so the US, but also
France, for instance, you will have to spend more time on on
thinking about that individual because they have a lot more
power than in a parliamentary system, for instance, right.
And I think what's interesting about Trump is that, yes, like
any U.S. President, he has a lot of.
Power, I mean, as a president per se, but American president,
(40:15):
obviously. But when I look at the surveys,
the opinion polls about what he's been doing, there seems to
be still a very solid majority, not a majority.
I think it's like 49% approval rate, but then depends on on the
topics. He has very big approval rate on
certain things not doing so wellon, on inflation, on the economy
(40:35):
and stuff. So I still see, by the way, same
in Russia. You have a lot of opinion polls
that seem to indicate that the Russian population broadly
agrees with Putin. They don't like that people
dying, but they think that the special operation, the war in
Ukraine was a good idea. So I think you're right.
It's we got out of that habit, Ithink with the end of the Cold
(40:58):
War. I think I was looking at, you
know, what profiles have there been done about political
leaders? The last one I could find was
Saddam Hussein in the 80s duringthe Iran Iraq war.
Like what, what is Saddam Hussein like?
And would he actually, how wouldhe respond to to this and that?
And I think we got out of doing that because I think in the 90s
there was this perception that, you know, Fukuyama, we're all
(41:22):
kind of the same. We all want the same things, a
good life, democracy and all that.
So it would feel kind of weird to draw up a psychological
profile. I think it, it felt old school.
But I, I agree with you. We need to find a way back to
that. Right, yeah, I mean, because
that's definitely proven not, I mean, globalisation was AI mean
still some, some merits to it and it's, and it's been a
(41:44):
fascinating period, period in world history.
But but the, the, the limitationor the limits of it have been
demonstrated, you know, sort of spectacularly, haven't they?
And including the fact that, yeah, we're, we're not all the
same, we don't all want the samething.
It's not because we're, I mean, we're all the same human beings.
We're all, you know, we've all got the same brain, the same
(42:04):
bodies or all this kind of thing.
But but you know, there's 8 billions of a spread.
Because I think we also maybe this is a controversial for me
to say, but just imagining or talking about another culture
was often was beginning to be seen as othering and just, you
know, I'm not them, so I'm different and that's negatively
connotated. But you know, I've I've worked
(42:26):
in the Middle East for a long time and I said no thinking.
And in fact, it's the opposite. It's like she honouring their
culture by thinking about what are you thinking about?
What am I thinking about? The difference doesn't mean
hierarchy, doesn't mean I'm better than you just because I
realised that you're not like me.
And I think, yeah, I think, I think we need to get back to.
That and I think that shouldn't be controversial.
(42:46):
It's a, it's a, it's a very legitimate point.
OK, Two other things. Technology, part of your job
obviously is, is data. I mean, you, you, you look at
what you can actually draw from,from statistics, from numbers
to, to get a sense of, of which way things are going.
How is that changing already? And how do you anticipate it
(43:07):
will change with the technology that's available now,
particularly, you know, AI analysis of large amounts of
data? Is that going to So will that
give us a? Crystal well, we're playing with
it. What we find is so far what
we've seen AI isn't, you know, AI lacks imagination,
unfortunately, because it's it'svery good at just getting a lot
of material in and then finding the most probable patterns.
(43:30):
And everything that we're working on, you know, war or
geopolitics generally is a fieldthat's not made up of high
probabilities. So it cannot really tell us good
stories. What it's good at is getting
large data sets together and then help us analyse them.
But the qualitative analysis, wedo that.
(43:50):
So it's more like a junior assistant in a way at the
moment. And so that but that's super
helpful. So I have one data person on my
team. She, for instance, could show,
thanks to data, that the people being sent to Ukraine were
drafted from regions in Russia that had not voted for United
Russia, which is the party that supports Putin.
(44:11):
So, you know, that is useful because that gives us an
indication for what the cohesionis like in those units, et
cetera. So we should definitely use all
the data available, but I will say the qualitative analysis
that humans do better than the machine for now.
Right. OK.
So it's still your analytical expertise.
Yeah, with your, with your humanjudgement, those two things
(44:31):
fused. But but on top of more
presentable data, yes, that's the advantage of the moment.
Exactly. I give you a stupid example, but
I was writing a scenario in 2032.
I think it's the Olympics in Brisbane.
Yes. And and then I said help me
write a scenario if they're happening and write, help me
write a scenario. And then it said, Oh yeah, it's
in August, so it's going to be super hot.
(44:52):
And I said, but Cherry August inAustralia, it's winter.
It's like, Oh yeah, you're right, right.
So that's a pretty basic thing to get wrong.
But it just shows you, I'm not saying aha, AI isn't a threat.
I'm just saying that probably we'll still have a bit of a way
to go before it can can do a lotof the thing for sure.
Sure. That's an interesting mess.
That's these things I get wrong.OK, final question.
(45:15):
A lot of people might be listening to this thinking this
is such common sense. Presumably governments
everywhere do it, presumably allorganisations like alliances do
it. But if I, if I understand
correctly, is actually a deficitof this kind of work.
Now a couple of examples that I would point to.
The Pentagon shut its Office of Net Assessment this year.
It doesn't seem to have replacedit with anything comparable.
(45:36):
So it looks like that's done. Aspie, I'm going to give a shout
out to one of my colleagues here, Chris Taylor.
He did some work last year on strategic intelligence, sorry,
strategic warning intelligence, saying it's something that the
Australian government needed to incorporate into its, into its
Intel's community. Now a we, we had a, an
independent intelligence review that came out subsequent to that
(45:57):
and had a sort of mild version of what Chris was, was
recommending Chris's piece wherehe wrote about this.
It's got an award winning opening line.
Even mind boggling actions typically have a logic that's
discoverable. He said he went on to.
Site Hitler declaring war on America after Pearl Harbour or
Putin invading Ukraine. Is there a big deficit of this
(46:18):
sort of work and why do you think that is?
And is that changing in any positive way?
So when you look at the history of strategic foresight, it
always ebbs and flows in states.In most states, it will have a
heyday and then disappear and then come back.
Every time a government or society comes to a point of
(46:39):
uncertainty, they bring back strategic foresight.
So we have, I know a PhD student, we're currently working
on strategic foresight in the EUwho showed me, you know, in the
70s, you know, 70s was a pretty tough decade, lots of inflation,
uncertainty in the idea. So the EU, the European
Commissioner at the time, created a strategic foresight
unit, dismantled it in the 80s when things had calmed down.
(47:01):
Then the Cold War ended, they brought it back.
And it isn't. I got rid of it in the early
2000s because, you know, got used to the future.
The future is always uncertain, but you can get used to a
certain future you imagine. So I think that's kind of the
norm. It comes and goes.
What I will say is that in Europe, well, in NATO, we have
the classical states that are better at it.
(47:24):
Not great, but better. So you have the USUK, Portugal,
Spain and Netherlands and France.
And then you're going to say, what about Germany?
And Germany has a huge economic power.
Germany, I think is honestly notthat great.
I mean it, you have it here and there, but you don't have a
national culture of thinking about the future, which I think
is a huge problem. Sorry, I forgot that.
(47:46):
Foresight champion of all times.Because they have not gone
through the up and downs. That's Finland.
And Finland has had an established structure since the
80s. So started with an ecosystem of
think tankers. Then the Cold War ended and
since then it hasn't establishedstructured process in, you know,
(48:08):
in parliament. They have a committee on for on
the future. They have a future experts in
each ministry that liaise with each other.
They have a report as I can't remember how many every every
years, two or three years or so.And what's interesting is
Finland is also the most prepared country when it comes
to, to Russia. And funnily enough, they're also
one of the happiest people on earth.
(48:28):
So I'm thinking there is a link.And I saw a study the other day
that said, the more you think about the future in a structured
way, not just obsessing, but think about what can I do, the
happier, the more optimistic youbecome.
And that's why I think we shouldall be a bit more like Finland.
And I would hope, you know, you mentioned the US.
It's, I think it's a very sad example.
The Office of Net Assessment wasin had been in place since the
(48:50):
60s or 70s and in case sixties 60s right Andrew Marshall a
really long time. And then they got rid of
something that we also was extremely good.
So it ebbs and flows, but I would say keep it because it
will always be useful. Yep, Yep.
OK, Finland, There you go. Despite being dark, we should.
All be more very cold. Yeah, right.
And you go to Finland, you tell them, did you know you're the
(49:12):
happiest people on Earth? Like, yeah, nobody's more
surprised than we are. Brilliant.
OK. Florence, thank you so much.
Thank you so much for joining me.
It's been a great chat. Very nice talking to you.
Thank you. That's all we have time for this
week on STOP THE World. Thanks for listening, We'll be
back soon.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.