Crafting Positive Futures for Africa with Saar Ben-Attar

Sara, thank you very much for joining me for this conversation about your article that you contributed to the inaugural Crafting Positive Futures for Africa journal. Your article was titled A Manifesto for the Builders of Africa's Futures, which is just, as a statement, really, really exciting and inspiring. We're going to have a conversation. I'm going to start by asking you a little bit about the work that you do, and then we can talk about your article and then how we feel about the future of Africa. So welcome. Please, Saurabh, give us a little bit more of an insight about the work that you do at the moment in your business.

Sure. Firstly, it's great to be here, Charlotte, and thanks for, for insisting and persisting and overcoming all the technical and other challenges along the way. As any challenger knows, that's all part of the, part of the work. And so I guess a little bit of a background. I head up a consulting organization that uses futures work that uses foresight to infuse new insights into strategy, into optionality, into looking into new ways to solve vexed problems, particularly in the business world, and ultimately to create impact. And for us, kind of venturing into this space was a very natural thing.

Yeah.

And it was something that I think the whole team got quite excited about and I think we're very fortunate to meet some amazing individuals along the way that guided us, that showed us new perspectives, that got us to look at futures in new and very creative ways. It is such a creative and a wide-spanning field. I'm always amazed when I meet fellow futurists as to how they got into the profession in the first place, and it's always fascinating and a different story. So I'm sure mine is one of very many others.

Yeah, no, it is. I remember when I first went to study futures thinking, and I'm sitting there in this lecture hall, and they're giving us all this information. And I don't know, apparently I have a bit of an ADHD brain, but I'm going, oh, this is so exciting, and you could do this, and you could do that, and it can, you know, solve these problems. And why aren't we all doing this? So yeah, it is a very exciting and empowering mindset, I think, to, to really start thinking about the future that way. Lovely. Saar, your article for the journal is about Africa's future. So what makes you interested in this particular continent, first of all? So how would Africa's futures look different perhaps from other parts of the world? What are you working on in that line?

Sure, I guess a couple of questions in one. I guess kind of to start off with what really got me interested is I love history. I love looking back in time and understanding ancient cultures, understanding ancient empires. You know, we sometimes forget that ancient Egypt, for example, was a superpower. It was a global superpower for just shy of 3,000 years. That's a hell of a time period.

Yeah.

And so Africa is full of these stories, of these very rich pasts. And that gives us a really fascinating place to explore both the past, far past and near past, as well as to then extend into the future and say, what could the future look like? Far future as well as nearer versions of the future.

Yeah.

So, for me, it was really a personal interest in history that kind of got me onto this trajectory. I mean, to the second part as to what's different about futures in Africa, You know, it's such an interesting question because in some aspects, futures thinking in Africa, I think, is, if not unique, is very opportune in our need to think into the future. That is something that's common to all cultures. We all as human beings think almost intuitively in many cases into the future. It helps us to problem solve, help us to anticipate and prepare for whether positive or negative effects that might come out of change. But I think in Africa, we tend to do that even more. And that for me is something that's perhaps not unique, but is distinguishing of the use of futures thinking in Africa. And perhaps one last thing is that I think it's a very opportune time to do that. If I look at the next 30 to 50 years, I think there's so much we can do in Africa by using futures thinking And by doing it in a way that we can only do it here in Africa, that can't just be replicated by sitting somewhere else in the world, peering into the African continent and saying, hey, I've got a perspective on Africa's future. Not that it's not important or valuable for any reason, but I think there's something unique about immersing yourself in a space and then looking outwards into possible and plausible futures.

Mm-hmm.

With that insight.

Yeah, yeah. And that's part of the kind of origin story of why we're even doing this journal. For me, I kind of live in 2 worlds. One is the professional speaking world and the other the futurist world. And in both places, I've encountered very well-meaning people from other parts of the world with an incredible, incredibly blinkered, shallow understanding of this continent of 54 countries and over a billion people and all the languages and religions. And they think if, you know, if they watched a movie, if they've been on a safari, if they've met somebody from Africa, then they understand. And, you know, there is just so much variety across the continent and that it's, it's really simplistic to think that you've got an understanding from meeting, you know, just one facet. But also the, the patronizing way sometimes people say, well, this has worked in our part of the world, let us come and help you in Africa and we'll implement this. But the context is so different. And if we don't understand the context, if we don't have respect for that, then we're not really making any kind of difference. So there has to be a lot more of a conversation and an understanding of what is happening in Africa. And that's why we're kind of like looking for futurists, people who practice foresight in Africa to talk about the kind of work that we're doing. So yeah, no, I absolutely get that. What, in your experience with futures work, how is what we're doing today with futures work different from how we might have looked that looked at it in the past?

It's a good question. Again, it's a bit of a mixed answer. So some things are similar and some things are distinctly different. And the more I kind of peered into the deep past, the more that becomes kind of a distinguishing feature. So let's take an example. One of the first kind of written examples of the use of foresight way before it became science, way before it became known, certainly an academic discipline, Um, was in ancient Egypt, and, and the Egyptians used, uh, you could, you could argue, a form of foresight, or a form rather of futures thinking, I should rather say, um, to effectively plan for and prepare for the annual flooding of the Nile. That was essential for their agricultural ecosystem.

Yeah.

Now, that involved some knowledge of astronomy, It involved some mathematical calculations. It involved also a bit of an imaginative touring of or exploring of what that could look like.

Yeah.

And in a very interesting way, when you deal with, you know, basic technologies like flood irrigation, for example, you in fact have to do that. You have to kind of venture outside of the known knowns in order to get to a better answer. At the same time, that was also— when you look at over hundreds of years and certainly over thousands of years, that was also a hindrance to them because their mathematical know-how was not as good as the Babylonians, for example, and certainly the Persians who followed from there. So there was a limit to which they could use these models to anticipate those annual cycles. And that's what we find, that as within a certain set of conditions, a population, even an organization, because, you know, a dynasty, a ruling dynasty is an organization.

Yeah.

Different roles and different facets to it and different rules by which it operates. And it would work over a period of time in relative stability and adjust the way that it uses futures thinking. And then something fundamentally changes.

Okay.

And that's where you hit the limits of your method. And that's something that I think we are doing better and faster in the modern era. And certainly here in Africa, the way in which I think futures thinking in Africa has evolved over the last 20 to 30 years has been absolutely astonishing. It really has, to the point where I can share with you stories of how the way that we teach and practice futures thinking here in South Africa specifically has influenced futures thinking in Europe, has inspired new centres for learning about futures thinking and about its application, particularly in the field of strategy, in many other parts of the world. And in my travels, I come across that very often. So it is something that I think those constraints are something that we hit as the environment becomes less stable, and as a result of it, we learn new ways and extended ways of using futures thinking more so and more frequently in an accelerated fashion in the last century. Yeah.

Yeah, no, that's certainly the academic work that has been done here is really good. And I think we need to get some of those good professors from Stellenbosch Business School to have a conversation as well around this. Good. I'll tell you one of the things that I look at, and I am relatively new to futures thinking, although when I look back on my life and I see the kinds of interests that I've had, it's always been there. But I just, I didn't even know that this was a field until a few years ago. But what I love to try and do is, is look at these incredible models that we can use in strategic foresight, everything from causal layered analysis to the simpler, you know, trends and scenarios, but to see, to demonstrate how they've been used in big organizations and, you know, multinationals and countries and militaries, but then also to see how those same tools can be scaled down to where a small business or an individual entrepreneur can actually use the same tool to have a more systematic scientific look at their future and not just to hope for the best. So I love to, to see how robust those, those different models are. That's satisfied something in my brain.

It's, it's, it's the— it's— I think we call it the kind of democratizing futures thing. Yes, it really has. The same tools are available And the same common sense could be applied to those by, as you say, a sole entrepreneur, right, to very complex and large organizations. And maybe I should just add one more thing. I think when I kind of look at it in a historical context, we've had occurrences where one had to, if not democratize, but certainly extend the use of futures thinking in response to a change. I'm thinking, for example, I'm taking it way back. Northern Ethiopia, the Aksumite Kingdom. We're talking way over 1,000 years back. You know, today we speak about trade corridors. We speak about our ability to co-create scenarios with others.

Right.

And very much as part of futures thinking and as part of the co-creation process, we can then create shared goals. We can then explore and look at new insights. That's what the rulers of the Aksumite Kingdom have done when they were effectively creating new trade corridors into Asia, into the Arabian Peninsula, for example. Again, that worked well for a while. They minted their own currency. They made decisions based on those scenarios. And there's fascinating records about this.

Hmm.

But also, at some point, they got to a constraint of not knowing what futures thinking tools they could use next, for example, more speculative scenarios. And when they hit, for example, climatic changes, not to the same extent that we now experience them in terms of climate change, but what happened as a result were demographic changes that ultimately led to a loss of a lot of their territory and certainly the control of those trade corridors. And so I kind of look at it as I can see the use of scenarios in certainly the way that they affected change, in the way that they collaborated, reached out to other cultures, and created a common monetary system that could be used. And then at some point, one had to use a new tool, and they didn't have it in their arsenal.

Wow.

And that's when they started suffering. They couldn't deal with the fast demographic changes that came out as people were literally emigrating or moving across significant regions or part of the empire as a result of it. So yeah, certainly not, not something that new, but it is really fascinating. And it all happened here in Africa.

Yes, yes. Yeah. And I love how you can talk about that history because we know that the further forward we want to look, the further back we need to, to understand in order to have that, that kind of perspective. And yeah, looking back 1,000 or so years can teach us some really good, good insights. How do we make this futures work practical? How can we use it in the business environment instead of just these really big organizations and, and perspectives?

Sure. So, so I guess there's kind of 3 broad things that you could do with futures thinking, and I'm thinking in the business world. You could use it in other ways outside of it, in non-commercial areas of our lives, but in the business world, kind of 3 major applications. The first one is to challenge, is to change ingrained mindsets, and futures thinking gives us some wonderful tools to do exactly that. It's not to change a decision that was made today yet, is to simply be able to view what mindset are you approaching the future in.

Right.

You might, for example, approach it with a mindset that is closed, that says the future is a replication of the past. And as a result of it, your scenarios, if you do use scenarios thinking, might be rather dull. They might simply be an extrapolation of what you're already familiar with. And that exposes you to more extensive or swifter changes in the environment, as we're seeing in many parts of the world today, not just in Africa. So that's kind of the one part, is challenge your own thinking, challenge the thinking of your team, and futures thinking is a wonderful set of tools to do that. The second part is really to explore deep, to find those new insights, and then start to backcast it to the present and say, how could we have arrived here? So let's take an example. We could look— one of the industries that I'm fascinated by and love working in is the automotive sector, and it's got a proud history in Africa and certainly in particular in South Africa, as well as to an extent in North Africa. And what we find with that is when you start to ask the question is, given all the changes taking place in the industry, software-defined vehicles, electric vehicles, mobility more generally, shared models, etc., etc. And we can go on and on and on. It's a fascinating industry. And you start to ask the question, so what will the industry look like, say, by 2035 on this continent? Will it be pretty much the same as it is today? Maybe one country a little bit more, another country slightly less, some, some minor, you know, evolutions. Or could we be in for a fundamentally different way in which the industry has evolved, has changed, and the type of opportunities and risks that it brings along with? Again, futures thinking gives us that ability to not just think far, but to think deep. And that is something that's really a distinguishing feature of that. And if you combine then futures thinking into your strategy process, so it's not kind of a once-off, it's something that you do offsite and then kind of reality hits. but it's something that is ingrained into an ongoing process that takes place in your organization, continually infuses the organization with deep insights. You might come up with scenarios that are fundamentally different and in many cases very opportune in working in your sector. In fact, the definition of your sector, the way that you look at your sector, same way that we are morphing from very well-defined OEM-driven automotive industry to a somewhat different model and a broader definition of what mobility means, and new role players and non-traditional role players that take shape and participate in this sector. And I'm just using this industry as an example, there are many others. You're able to venture deep in order to get to those insights and then backcast and say, how did it start? How did it happen the first 2 years? What was the first indicator that the model is shifting, that our Plan A, the way in which we have traditionally and in terms of our business plan perhaps have factored in some of those risks and are responding to it, may not be enough? Plan A may not work for us any longer under certain conditions. So that's the second, this kind of a second kind of category or way in which one could use futures thinking. The third one for me, and I guess the most practical in a way, or in a way also exciting, is futures thinking for me is much more about today's decisions. It's not about tomorrow's decisions. You may encounter some very interesting tomorrow's decisions, but the more interesting ones and the very practical ones are today's decisions. Futures thinking for me is about the future implications of today's decisions. Even the decision to do nothing different is a decision. It has future implications. And futures thinking, when it's infused into your strategy process, allows an organization, allows leadership team, and to your earlier point, allows through democratizing the process, many others to contribute to making better decisions today. And when you start to use then the law of compound interest, within a very often within a much shorter period of time, those become fundamental decisions and it could have a huge impact. And just as an example, again, I'm going back to automotive, but I'll use a US example. EV charging stations, they're popping up all over the place in the US, in North America, more generally in parts of Europe, Southeast Asia, I'm just about to get on a plane and visit Singapore again. Very excited about that. Always love visiting there. And the rate at which these charging stations have kind of taken over Singapore, Malaysia, and some of those other countries is extraordinary. But in that expansion, there's one decision that was made, in fact is being made in the States, at every state, at the state level, and in many countries at a country level, at a national level. And that is, do you regulate that space? To what degree should EV charging stations be regulated? That decision alone, which corporations influence, if not outwardly decide, depending on how unregulated the current state is, has a fundamental impact on the profit potential, on the various opportunity pools that are available, on the sustainability of incumbents to stay in the industry and to defend that space and to grow. And for me, though, it's just one example of how futures thinking is really about today's decisions. If you're willing to look at it with enough discernment, if you're willing to know or discover or spot which are the very specific decisions that using compound interest as an analogy could have a marked impact.

Yeah.

And that's where futures thinking, I find time and time again, can be very substantive and could make a real difference.

Um, there's so many thoughts from that, but, but one of them is that, that kind of lag between the legislation, um, the political response to the technological and social things that can change so much quicker. So you can go and, you know, create and innovate drones and put them out in the air, and businesses are working out how to use them. And then the legislation catches up, and now an industry that was having a lot of fun suddenly has some, some boundaries around it. And yeah, so if we're anticipating that by seeing it happen in other innovative areas, then we can prepare to know that there may be some requirements coming in. And what might that look like in terms of legislation or any kind of control?

Yeah, absolutely. And if you're able, maybe just to add to it, if you're able to do it in a proactive manner, if you're able to do it before the inflection point has happened, before it becomes obvious to everyone, that's what generally is known as the second bounce of the ball. If you're able to see where the second bounce of the ball might be, that makes a tremendous difference to your ability to influence the ultimate outcome. certainly the second bounce, possibly the third, and obviously the economic consequences that come from that.

It just made me think of during COVID in the whole business conferencing area that I'm a part of. Obviously everybody goes into lockdown. So, so many different types of businesses and sectors were affected by— I mean, so many were, but in my world, so many were affected. And we had the associations in South Africa all get together and create the South African Events Council, and they've already started collaborating. And part of the action that they did was, we're in lockdown now, but when we go back to meetings, there's going to be safety requirements, and not just safety requirements for diseases, but for other things. So let's start drafting safety requirements for events, for conferences, for meetings like that, indoors, outdoors, you know, all the different kinds of festivals, fairs, and conferences. And they researched around the world and got together. And when government said, okay, we need rules, and they're going, well, here are some rules that we want to live by. And then it made it so much easier to actually have that conversation and to work with government instead of feeling like government was trying to impose something on a sector that they didn't understand. So yeah, that second or third bounce sounds like a really good space that businesses can act in if they can anticipate the future that well.

Absolutely.

All right, let's move on to mindset. When I think about futures, I always start with mindset. Then you got the tools, and I love playing with the tools. And then once we work with them, we got the skill at the top. But if the mindset is wrong, it doesn't matter what tools we're using, it's not really going to work. You talk about being futureful. What is that about in terms of mindset?

So maybe let's take a bit of a step back. When we talk about mindset, what we really mean by it is not what you're thinking, but how you're thinking about what you're thinking. In other words, a nice analogy to it is I look at it as a lens. If you change the lens, what you see is different. How you think about it and the constructs that you create in your mind the assumptions that you make, the paradigms that you work within, what you think is possible versus non-possible. All that is an outcome of mindset. Now, the good thing is that while we are at an early age in the first few years of life, some might argue at birth, that's a, that's a very different discussion. We won't go there. But within the first few years, certainly we're able to detect that each individual, each human being has a dominant mindset. But the good news is that dominant mindset does not prevent us from developing additional mindsets. It allows us to flex. And the ability to which, or the extent to which we can flex depends on us. That's actually within our realm of possibility. That's within our sense of agency to do something about. And if you, if you're able to go there, and if you're able to practice that flexing of mindsets, and to your earlier point, there's some very practical, simple tools that you can do for exactly that, then your field of vision extends and suddenly what was out of bounds, what was impossible, not feasible, can't be done in Africa, will never get— will never stick here, becomes very possible. And I see that in my visits and my work throughout Africa. And just as an example, I mean, probably one of the most notable examples of this is Rwanda, and it's particularly the work that it's doing around inclusive finance.

Yeah.

It doesn't have the size, it's landlocked, and there are many other constraints to its ability to really demonstrate new— the use of new financial technologies and their application in terms of new business models, you know, to— along a new scenario, to envision the country doing something fundamentally different for someone standing completely from the outside and not having any context will be difficult to imagine. It's possible, but it will require a different mindset. In all my discussions and the work that we're doing in Rwanda, one of the things that really struck me is not just their use of futures thinking, it's who they bring into futures thinking. Very recently, literally a few weeks ago, We had the Inclusive FinTech Forum taking place in Rwanda. It's done in collaboration with Elevandi. Elevandi is a subsidiary or a company owned by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Surprise. And if you look at that combination of what Elevandi brings to the table and what the Kigali Financial Center, International Financial Center, and various role players within the country, financial institutions, regulators, and others bring into the picture, you can create something that's very new, that's different, that doesn't rely on, you know, the kind of economics of scale that we almost implicitly look for.

Yeah.

And that all emanates out of mindset. If I use a different example, just north of us, Namibia, small country, right? 2.5 million people. Has been in many respects dependent on kind of a South African dominant mindset, South African corporations, South African law, etc., etc. And at the same time, it has developed, and it's so fascinating to watch, particularly over the last probably 4 to 5 years, a real ambition to become something different in Africa and in fact globally. If you look very closely about the work that Namibia is doing in the hydrogen space. It is truly fascinating. It is inspiring, in fact, to see such a small nation making a stand, developing its own ambition, roping others anywhere from the European Hydrogen Bank to, you know, off-takers, effectively clients in South Korea, Japan, etc. And I can go on and on and on, developing its own local skills. And yes, while we're still kind of in the earlier chapter of it, we are pretty much at the beginning— sorry, at the end of the beginning.

Okay.

And it's fascinating to watch a small country do that. Now, the reason why I raised those 2 examples is those are 2 small countries that if, again, if you look from the outside, even in an African context, let alone an international context, you would say, why here? Why them? There's so many things that won't go in their favor. But in fact, what we're finding in our studies of futures work and the application of futures work, many cases small is actually good. It allows you, it almost forces you to think differently. It's a bit like, if I can use a European example, it's the argument that the Dutch make. You know, the Dutch have had an extraordinarily completely outsized impact on our democratic institutions, on our economic models, on company law, and I can go on and on and on. I'll probably add soccer to it. Okay. How could a small nation like that have such an outsized impact?

Yeah.

And what I find is that both in my travels there as well as just in interacting with Dutch corporations, and many of them are doing fascinating work in Africa, in food, in financial services, very often indirectly, What I find is that it's a mindset issue. By bringing a different mindset, the supposed or the assumed impact of size actually goes away.

Yeah.

It's your depth of thinking. It's your ability to reach out and partner with and in fact co-explore and co-evolve with others that gets you to a much better answer. And same reason as to why, you know, if I use another African example as to why, you know, M-Pesa succeeded in Kenya. And while we see good examples elsewhere in the world, much larger economies, China, India, et cetera, et cetera, some of Latin American countries, Brazil more recently, there's very distinct reason as to why in a relative sense, small is actually to your advantage when it comes to futures work. It forces you to innovate. It forces you to challenge your own assumptions or to admit upfront that I'm not going into it with an assumption because we haven't been involved.

Yeah.

We haven't had the length to which we could practice foresight for long enough and haven't had the institutions to do it to that extent. That's actually an advantage, and it could be Africa's advantage.

That's inspiring. The assumption that bigger is better or older is better just because it's been around for a while is actually the opposite of what works, which is a fresher, innovative, smaller, more agile mindset. willing to learn and respond to real things and not just rely on history in order to create something.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's not just a thing that's unique to Africa. As I said, we've seen it in virtually every part of the world. Yeah. What I think is really interesting, though, about Africa is when we start to anticipate this going forward, there was a very nice talk as part of the the, the Fintech Forum, the African Fintech Forum event. I can't remember the presenter's name. I'll try to just remember it later and just maybe put it in the comments section on LinkedIn. It's a fascinating question that he posed about what is Africa's largest export. And everyone went, oh, it must be oil. No, it must be something else. And maybe a critical commodity now. It's actually talent. Talent is Africa's biggest export. Now, when you use that as an insight into what will be a plausible scenario where African talent grows in new and unusual ways, where it starts affecting other parts of the world and bring some of the technologies, some of the new models that perhaps were piloted here, perhaps were conceived here, African talent, that they come back. And by that stage, some of our regional structures are better developed. Some of the monetary integration that's taking place is more advanced. You know, in 20 to 30 years, we might have, and this is the opportunity, we might have a common market to rival the ASEAN market in Southeast Asia. And if you look at the advances that they've made because of that integration, And for me, the role of African talent is pivotal to all of this because while we don't need scale to start, we don't need scale to kind of venture into futures thinking. If you kind of supercharge it with the extent to which we can develop and particularly export talent, that takes on a different scenario. And that could be very, very interesting, not uniformly applied. I'm not suggesting that it will apply equally to every industry and every facet of life. But I've seen some very, very interesting scenarios about African talent and what that can create. And in fact, some of the more interesting, some of the most interesting, in fact, African kind of regional players, Axion, for example, coming out of Madagascar and a few others, you could see them using that as a lever in some of their investments and some of the new areas that they're venturing into beyond kind of their core industry. And there are many examples of that. I mean, we could spend the next hour just going through names of these African champions, those African challengers. I think more books will be written about African challengers in the next 10 years, far more than were written in the last 30 to 40 years combined.

Yeah, that reflects well in the speaking world. We were talking about how do we raise up, connect, network the professional speakers across Africa. And we have got some incredible talent here, but not very well known. So we're really trying to find and connect them. And I keep saying we want to export this talent and wisdom to the rest of the world, not necessarily forever, like, you know, go and share, but then come back home again. But, but there is so much we can learn from, from Africa and Yeah, and it's just time we heard, we heard of the work, we heard of the voices that are actually doing this amazing work.

Good.

So as we head towards the end, what advice would you like to share with the African builders of the future? What are we looking forward to?

Sure. I think there's a lot of advice that they can share with us, to be honest. I mean, we regularly interview, do case studies. just inherent as part of our consulting work with many of those. We call them challenges. In fact, my book, you know, the title of my book is exactly the same. And it's really built on many of these interviews, many of these stories. And so there's a lot of good advice that they've shared with us. I've tried to capture as best as I can in my book, but there's many, many, many more others. I think I've just hit the tip of the iceberg. What I'd love to share with them, I guess, in return, my biggest reflection in doing futures work and tying it to strategic decision-making in Africa, I guess, is twofold. The first one is think small and far. And what I mean by that is, don't go straight to big economies. Don't go straight to the US, China, India, and you pick the next one. Force yourself within a small environment to think into the future. Because you might just find that a lot of the constraints and a lot of the hidden assumptions that are pervasive in those markets, and you are not just unaware of them, because you're looking from the outside in, you'll miss it. So use your local context. And very often in African context, many of the countries in Africa in global terms are small. Use that to your advantage. In fact, the 3 in our study, the 3 countries in Africa that uses a futures mindset the most are Rwanda, Namibia, and Mauritius. They're all small countries, right? And it doesn't take away from some of the larger ones, like South Africa and Egypt, Kenya. But those are the 3 that came out. Those are the top 3. So, so for me, with that in mind, think small, but then think far. Apply yourself deeply. The tools are readily available. There are good coaches for them. There are many case studies that one could use and comparative work that you can take on and then use your own, use your own imagination.

Yeah.

So that, that's the one part. Think, think small and far, imaginatively far. The second part for me is about taking action. One of the more frustrating parts of futures work is that often it is seen as this think tank within organizations, as this place where people go to not retire, where people, you know, develop wonderful reports, but it kind of, and then a lot of the value kind of gets lost in translation as getting to, so what does it mean for capital allocation? What does it mean in terms of innovation? What does it mean in terms of optionality in creating new ventures, either supported by our own organization or completely openly using venture capital funds, et cetera, et cetera?

Yeah.

So taking action for me is that second piece of advice. Don't leave it in the think tank. In many organizations, that's where you start. Small teams, sometimes one person. In fact, when I was taking part in the Dubai Future Forum last year, we're heading back there in November. Phenomenal organization in the forum itself. It's a, you know, it's a It's an incredible experience for all senses, really, based at the Museum of the Future. One of the things that really kind of struck me is that in organizations around the world, there is still that tendency to create very small teams, sometimes one individual who will look after futures studies, futures thinking within the organization. And that person supposedly is there to infuse the entire organization with futures thinking. I mean, imagine we had to a conversation with the head of futures studies in Jaguar Land Rover, and we had one from Volvo. We had a few others who were there. I can't remember all names. I think McDonald's was one. It was one of the really interesting ones. McDonald's thinking about the future, the future of hamburgers, and I guess some food. But in a more practical note, in many of these organizations, it is one person or a bit more. No matter what the size is, your ability to bring futures thinking, to connect it, hardwire it into your strategy process so it becomes part of your cycle is probably the most practical advice I can give. And it is, it is not a very difficult thing to do. It requires some thinking.

Yeah.

But it is the, it is the one thing that I've seen time and time again. where you can create outsized impact because the organization then leverages those insights as part of a known process. Capital is put behind it. The measurement framework can get tweaked and adjusted to look at some of the longer-term impacts and whether we are moving towards them. Those are all known knowns. Those are things that we can apply firsthand and relatively easily. And then maybe a last thing is don't get despondent when the future looks either bleak or completely chaotic, because it's not. Because while there is a space for completely speculative and in some cases chaotic scenarios, and there's a stream within futures thinking that deals with that, What I often find is that we tend to overemphasize the role of uncertainty and then stop there. Uncertainty is a good thing in futures thinking. It's a good thing in strategy making. It is a good thing in execution if you use it in a particular way. So don't stop there. Don't let uncertainty get the better part of you. Rather, look at the practical application. It's today's decisions, what still needs to be decided today, even if I don't know all the answers. That would be the best use of futures thinking that I can think of. And that's, that's what I would, that's, that's what I would advise and certainly what I've seen from my work.

Very good. Very good. I'm going to capture those last 3 points and share them afterwards. And I love the encouragement about uncertainty. Not everything has to be resolved and known. If you know everything, then where's the fun? And I know something, some uncertainty is not helpful or welcomed. But, but yeah, that is life. And the assumption that we can just resolve everything and know what is going on and eliminate, or I hate the expression future-proof. It means like we're rejecting, like waterproof, you're rejecting the water. We're not rejecting the future. We're trying to respond to the opportunities that are inherent in this space that is still Somewhat unknown and uncertain.

Well said.

Very good. All right. So, Benatar, thank you very much. How can people get hold of you to find out more about the work you're doing and to find out more about your book, which I saw on your LinkedIn banner on your profile?

Sure. So easiest just to get hold of me on LinkedIn. From there, there are links to our website where there's more information, and you can certainly then leave an inquiry if you wish. The book is available on Amazon. I'll share the link with you, and perhaps one could post that. You can buy it as a Kindle, you can, you can buy it as a physical copy. I'm still trying to figure out, you know, why certain people love hard copies versus soft copies. You have it in all 3 versions, so choose whichever version works for you.

Yeah.

It is also regularly updated. One of the things that I really like about Amazon is the ability to update your book regularly. You don't have to wait for the, for the second edition 3 years in. The second edition is already in, and so is the third. So regularly updated with new examples, more compelling stories, and to my excitement and to my real satisfaction is, is more African examples. So go and have a look at that.

Marvelous. Thank you very much. I've really enjoyed this conversation and reading your article, which is in the Crafting Positive Futures for Africa journal, which will be released on Monday, the 9th of September. And then we can read your article and the other articles from the other contributors from everywhere, from Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, and beyond. And, and we'll be speaking to the rest of those contributors next week. So, Saad, thank you very much for the time that we spent together today.

Thank you for making time for this. Appreciate the conversation as always.

Fantastic. Thank you.