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You're listening to HR Mixtape, your podcast with

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the perfect mix of practical advice, thought-provoking interviews, and

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stories that just hit different so that work doesn't have to feel,

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well, like work. Now, your host,

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Joining me today is Dr. John Austin, the Dean

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of the University of New England Honors College and a partner at

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Dynamic Foresight. John,

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So we are here at SHRM at 24 and

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we're on the expo floor. It's such a great day. It's

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the last full day of the expo. So I'm so glad that we were able to

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do this. You know, you have an interesting background. You

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spent much of your career working on issues of change leadership, but

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you changed to what you're doing now and

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shifted your focus on strategic foresight. Tell me about that.

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Sure. And to be clear, I still do change leadership.

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I love it. It's been what I've been working on my full career. And

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really what it is, is that a lot of my writing has been in the area of

1:12

change. So it's what a lot of people know me for. And for

1:15

your audience, probably it's that I did work with

1:21

I wrote the report for the Sherham Foundation on

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leading change for HR professionals. Yeah. And so

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I still do that. I love that. I will never say no to helping organizations help

1:33

their employees become better change leaders. In the background for

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the last 18 years, I've also been doing work in the foresight field.

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The only thing is I only wrote one book chapter on it, and that was back in

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2015. But back in 2006, I started working for a

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strategic consultancy that was known for scenario planning and

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managing uncertainty. And through that work, I

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started to realize that this foresight work, based

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on my organization development background, was really

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transformative in the way it helped change the

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framing of leaders and their mindsets towards creativity and

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innovation. So really, since then, I've been trying to

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figure out how can you take this tool, which was designed for strategic planning,

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and really use it in a way that is less labor

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intensive and more cost effective as

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a way to really help transform leaders mindset. So that's

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why I'm so excited about it. I see it as something that works as well as a lot

2:33

of the OD tools that we have to do this. It

2:39

Yeah. How do you help employees

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get to a place where they can be comfortable living

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in uncertainty? I feel like going through, you

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know, the height of the pandemic and the speed of change that we

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live in now, there's a lot of uncertainty all the time. How

2:59

Well, that's a great question. And I think the first thing to think about is

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where that comes from. And we There's

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something called the ambiguity effect, which is that we

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run away from uncertainty. We really try to avoid it as much

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as possible and uncertainty creates anxiety. Once you realize

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that that's kind of about who we are, it's sort of a natural thing.

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A lot of what we want to do is try to find ways to reduce that anxiety

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around uncertainty. This actually happens at the organizational

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level as well. When organizations talk about lowering risk,

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it's useful to remember that the risk is still going somewhere. They're

3:37

just offloading it outside of their organization. And to

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the same effect, when we try to avoid uncertainty, the

3:44

uncertainty doesn't go away. We just don't look at it.

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So what I would say, that's kind of a long setup to a really quick

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answer, which is really what we want to do is

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look directly at the uncertainty and engage with it.

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And that really gives us a level of control over understanding what

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It's the same concept, I think, as an

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individual living in their feelings in the moment, right?

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Like if you're in a tough meeting and you're starting to feel angry

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or anxious or sad or frustrated, you

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know, how do you acknowledge that feeling and not try to shove it down and

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acknowledge that it's happening and kind of go through it? Is that

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I would say so. And this is actually where it connects with change as well. It's because it's

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that fear of the unknown that really gets in our way. And so

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whatever we can do to reduce that unknown is something that

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really helps. And that's where I think the dynamic foresight work, it

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gives us a tool. to understand and make sense of

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uncertainty, and in some cases actually benefit from it by seeing

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We've talked on the podcast before about resiliency, and I

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think that's really important. I think you have a different perspective

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to add about adaptability. How do

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So one of my partners that I

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work with right now, Justine Bassett, is an expert in design

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thinking. And foresight and design thinking go

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well together. And what I think we can borrow from design thinking as

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it relates to resiliency is starting with

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that notion of empathy and understanding. And if

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you are in an HR professional, understanding that there's

5:33

a reason that people are anxious and

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trying to understand it from their perspective is a great starting point with

5:40

that. And I would say one other thing about resiliency

5:44

in organizations is that we spend so

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much time trying to predict what's going to happen and

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getting frustrated at our inability to do it. That actually

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sometimes creates more of a fragile organization where

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we're putting all of our bets on

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one future. And so one way that you can build some resiliency is getting

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people confident that They're really preparing their organization to

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be future-proofed, right? To work no matter what the world throws at

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them. And that gives us this confidence that I think really

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Do you have an example of where an organization has used

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Foresight and it's made such a significant impact for

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Yeah, I'm trying to think of sort of the

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one that I really would like to talk about. Initially, it might not sound like an

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HR one, but I actually think it is. Okay. And that is I've worked with

6:38

a organization that served the health, they sold products

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to in the healthcare field. And I actually worked

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with their sales organization. And we did

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sort of future design work. Not

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for their organization, but for the organizations they

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served. So we just developed that their sales force developed a

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whole bunch of futures for their customers to

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understand their customers. And what this allowed that sales force

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to do is to go in and speak with their customers instead of as a sales

7:11

person, as a strategic partner, who in

7:14

many cases understood the future of their customer's industry better

7:17

than they did. Uh, and where the HR angle

7:21

on this comes in as well as what we found is that actually also increased

7:24

the engagement and the excitement of the sales force that

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they really felt like they were partnering to help their clients,

7:31

not just by selling them a product by help, but by helping them

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think strategically. I think that was an amazing use of

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Yeah, I mean, if you think about, you know, as HR

7:43

professionals, we get inundated all the time with sales pitches

7:46

and technology and all sorts of consultants and

7:50

stuff that they want to help with our organization. And if those conversations can

7:54

be that valuable to us, I mean, that's a great partnership to

7:58

know that we have somebody who's thinking ahead and thinking strategically as they walk

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into our organization. And it's not just about the sale. You know, you build

8:04

that relationship with that person. So that's a great example. I love that.

8:08

You know, um, what are some examples or trends that

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you've seen HR professionals track

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over, you know, recent years? And as we go

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forward, what are some things that, you know, you're already seeing that

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Yeah. So there's, um, This

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is an interesting moment to ask that question. This

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is now the third professional conference I've been to in the last month

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and a half or so. And I swear that

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I've just gone to three AI conferences. Everyone

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is so focused on AI as the big thing. in

8:47

the big trend. And I don't want to downplay that. It is really important for us to understand

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it and to really work with that in some ways. But I do have a sense of sort of, as

8:54

someone who looks at trends, it might be taking up all the oxygen in

8:57

the room right now. So there's two things, two trends that

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I'm seeing when I talk to non-HR audiences, as

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they try to understand their futures, that I think really might be interesting. One

9:08

of them is, and this might not be a surprise to your

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audience, but that one of them is that there does

9:14

seem to be something fundamentally different about

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employees who are now just entering the workforce. And one

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of the things that stands out to me because of my background in organization design, I

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do think there's something real about the career intentions

9:30

of new employees that may not be interested in the career tracks

9:34

that generations before them have had. And I think organizations

9:38

that can get ahead of that could really benefit. And then the second one

9:42

is another thing that was taking up all of the oxygen before AI. And

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I do think it also represents a fundamental shift. And that's the return

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to work and the work from home discussion.

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I do think that we're in the midst of a uncertain readjustment

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of the role of work in a person's life. And

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that's an uncertainty. more than a trend that I think we

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all need to study and be aware of. And the one thing I would say

10:09

about that is I see a lot of leaders

10:13

in organizations assuming that there's

10:17

something about this that is just a fact. Yeah. That

10:20

really doesn't resonate when you talk to any of your

10:24

friends and how they see what's happening. Yeah. So

10:30

That last one that you mentioned, I'm curious, do

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you think that that shift is unique

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to the United States? Because as we look at other countries, they

10:41

are more cognizant of things like parental

10:46

leave, vacation time, lunch breaks, all

10:50

that kind of stuff. Do you think this is kind of our own little revolution

10:55

That's a really good point. Certainly in my

10:58

work in Europe, there's much more, there's more of

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a legacy of flexibility built in and sort of policies around

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that. So you might have a really good point there. And yeah,

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I would say it's, It might

11:12

be one of those things would be useful for us to study our colleagues. It's

11:16

coming from a U.S. centric reaction to understand that.

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One of the things we talk about in change management, and

11:29

actually change leadership as well, is you've

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heard the statement that most change fails. I

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don't really like that statement because really what it is is some parts of your change

11:40

will succeed and some won't. The

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leader is really there to sort of guide that

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change. And the way a successful change leader does that is constantly

11:51

monitoring their local environment and modifying the

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change to fit it. So you want to translate that change to fit your local environment.

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What foresight is all about is taking a much more humble

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approach to being able to predict where things are going. And

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so if you think about that, the tools that make you good at

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developing foresight skills are really about trying

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not to force a future, but

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understand how you adapt. I think that's the exact

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same skill you need as a change leader, which is to take a change initiative

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and understand that you have to improvise a little bit to make it work in

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your local area. And I would also say for

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an HR professional who's part of a change

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management team, I would challenge that

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person to make sure that they are open to the

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feedback that they get about how a change process needs

12:48

Yeah, I've talked on the podcast several times, so our audience

12:51

will be familiar with this. But when I think about communication

12:55

that we have to put out, you know, even in my time

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frame in HR, there was a point in time where

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I was having to slide flyers in the back of bathroom stalls. Because

13:06

that was the best way to get in front of our employees. And now

13:10

when I'm on stage talking about communication, I'm like, have you thought about TikTok? Have

13:13

you thought about a private YouTube link? Have you thought about a texting system?

13:18

It's such a good point to think about meeting them where they're at and being

13:22

willing to flex and to show up in maybe a

13:25

way that isn't comfortable or isn't the norm for your generation or

13:29

your environment. So I think that's really good. How

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do HR professionals learn this

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concept of foresight? How do they develop that skill? I don't

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see a lot of people talking about it, so it's definitely not something

13:45

Right. Well, it's, you know, one of the things is foresight actually is

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kind of a rebranding. I think back when I, it

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was really what people mostly talked about was scenario planning, which

13:55

was one approach to this. And so what's happened is all these other people who

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are doing work in this area and using other tools, it's all sort of come together.

14:02

So it's kind of a newer word, first of all, with that. Anything that's about

14:06

future proofing your organization could kind of fall into that

14:09

category. The way

14:16

I like to think about foresight is to just make a quick distinction

14:20

between forecasting and foresight. So forecasting is trying to

14:23

predict the most likely future. Forecasting is trying to,

14:26

I'm sorry, foresight is trying to anticipate the

14:30

range of possible futures. So foresight doesn't

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replace forecasting, it just makes it better. And I say

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that because when you think about what we can do in HR, is

14:41

can you think about ways that you can insert discussions of

14:44

uncertainties into other facilitations that

14:47

you do. That's one of the strongest ways

14:51

to just get the conversation going in your organization. It

14:54

doesn't take much effort to do that. At a bigger end, you

14:58

could actually develop customized futures for

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your organization. Once you have those, you can modify them

15:04

very easily and you can use them to stress test a

15:10

Yeah. Have you ever run into an HR

15:14

person who's who's using this tactic and the response they're

15:17

getting from leadership is I'm trying to

15:21

think of the right word here, but like that they're being sensational or

15:24

that like they're like, oh, that's really not going to happen. We don't need to

15:29

Yes. And you

15:32

can go backwards in time as a way to react to that. So

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a lot of leaders are confident that they know what's going to happen in the next five years.

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I had this great interaction just last week or a couple weeks ago with

15:44

a community bank that we're starting to do some work with. And one

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of the leaders in this bank was speaking with another banker about this

15:52

from another organization. That other banker said, we're bankers. We

15:56

bank. It's so easy to predict what we do. What do we need

15:59

this for? And I think that is sort of a common reaction to that. And so the

16:03

response to that would be, OK, well, let's let's go back five

16:06

years. What were we right about

16:10

what we predicted would happen? And, you know, that's

16:14

probably enough. Yeah. And then the other part of that from a from a

16:18

revenue perspective is for many of your organizations, the

16:23

more that you, if you can just see a shift

16:27

six months before your competitor, what sort of a strategic advantage

16:30

would that give you? Right. And that's what we're talking about very

16:36

Yeah. You know, one of the things that HR is uniquely positioned

16:40

to do is to be a really great strategic partner to the

16:43

business. I think, I think it is our next, talk

16:48

track, you know, for so long it was, you know, getting a

16:51

seat at the table, right? Now we have a seat at the table, but we're not

16:55

often leveraged for our expertise. I

16:58

think it's one step further. I think we need to be leading the table and

17:02

bringing that strategic conversation because we have visibility

17:06

into all parts of the organization. How have you used

17:10

foresight in your conversations with HR leaders to help them align their

17:13

strategy with really what the business is wanting to

17:17

do so that they show up as business strategists who

17:22

Yeah, right. So one

17:25

of the recommendations that I have on that is think

17:28

about what you do with the new employees that enter

17:33

into your HR team. One task that you might want to consider

17:36

giving them is to have them build

17:40

a future map for their organization. So not

17:43

for HR, but for their organization. And what you can

17:47

then do with that is basically train your entering

17:50

employees to understand the strategic need of

17:54

the organization, often better than people have been in that organization for

17:57

years. So you could do that with an entire HR team as

18:01

well. I just find it fun to allow your newer employees

18:05

to have that confidence that they see the big

18:10

Yeah, what a great idea to make it kind of a

18:17

Oh, I agree with that. And one of the things, this is why I'm so excited

18:20

about this dynamic foresight, which is so

18:24

the notion of scenario

18:27

planning from the past, one of the challenges is it was a snapshot of the future

18:31

taking in a snapshot in the present, meaning that it took a lot of work to

18:35

build the scenarios and then One month after

18:38

they were done, something unexpected happens and the scenarios are useless and

18:41

you have to start all over again. Dynamic foresight is a process where

18:45

you can actually adjust it on the fly. You can keep adding new uncertainties, deleting

18:49

them, changing the way things work. And what

18:53

that allows you to do is to bring a series of

18:56

customized scenarios to any workshop that

19:00

you're doing in your organization. And it's just inherently interesting

19:04

to put people into future stories and

19:08

ask them to react to it. So it livens up a lot of the

19:11

work, which is partially why I see it so helpful with the beginning

19:14

of strategic planning processes, which sometimes can be really

19:18

dry. This is a great way to engage your stakeholders in

19:24

Well, it's the same concept we use in training and development for

19:27

our managers. We put them in scenarios, employee issue scenarios,

19:31

and we coach them on how to handle it. So I think that's

19:35

a tactic that's wonderful and it's already being utilized in other places of

19:38

our organization. So it would be easy to adapt. We

19:42

talked a little bit about some of the resistance. How

19:46

about resistance to change? I mean, we all know that change management

19:50

is something that some organizations get

19:53

really well and some don't. And there's

19:57

often always a group that resists change. How

20:02

Yeah. So I always also have a caveat

20:07

with that, which is that sometimes we see resistance when actually what it

20:11

So we have to be careful of that. And there's a second

20:15

thing, which I really love. There was some research that was done, I read, I

20:18

think it was back in 2016, that reminded us that it's

20:22

actually our change champions, that those who

20:25

are with us from the start and stay with us all along,

20:29

that drive change momentum more than anyone else. And

20:33

when you lose a change champion, they become the strongest resistors

20:37

because they've actively chosen not to support your issue. So

20:40

I like to think of that when we spend all

20:44

of our time trying to persuade the doubters, we

20:47

may potentially lose our champions. So as in

20:51

a weird way, I actually would advocate focus so

20:54

much attention on making sure those people who are with you stay with you. And

20:58

maybe don't worry as much about getting everyone

21:02

on board. Now, of course, we want to make sure we can help

21:09

I love that. What a good point. Well, John, thank you for sitting down for a few minutes with

21:12

me here at SHRM. This was a great discussion. I'm excited

21:15

to push myself even more to think about foresight and

21:29

I hope you enjoyed today's episode. You can find show notes

21:36

Come back often and please subscribe, rate, and review.