In this talk Charlotte Kemp outlines three promises for future‑ready leaders, beginning with how to notice emerging signals. She explains that while many futures‑thinking tools and frameworks exist, the first step is cultivating personal attention to discomfort – the feeling that something is off in otherwise smooth operations. Discomfort signals hidden shifts in technology, customer expectations, or internal processes, and leaders must sit with it rather than rush to fix it. Kemp mentions her forthcoming book that surveys her favorite futures tools and describes the “Sandbox” – a collaborative space where coaches, consultants, and speakers experiment with these tools to apply them to client work. She invites listeners to join or host Sandbox sessions. Throughout, she emphasizes the liminal nature of leadership, likening the need to endure uncomfortable transitions to a caterpillar’s chrysalis, and warns against shortcutting grief or change processes.
Chapters
But let's dive into the actual 3 promises that we're going to be looking at. And the first one is how to notice emerging signals. Now, in the futures thinking world, and this is why I love this space, there are lots of tools and you can quite nerd out on all of the different tools and models and frameworks that are there. We have a whole lot from before when we just had like, you know, business management science. But now there's a whole lot more in terms of the tools actually designed for futures thinking or strategic foresight. And dare I say, I have created a few models of my own. There's a book that is like almost ready. It's in that liminal state between being completely written but not yet edited and put together. So like that last 2% takes longer than everything else to get the book published, but any minute now. But I've got this book that I've kind of dived into each one of those different tools to explain what they are. Well, not all of them, but the ones that I liked, and that book will be ready soon. Um, towards the end of October, uh, when I have my next Sandbox meeting. The Sandbox is, uh, a place where coaches, consultants, um, some speaker friends, we get together and we play in the sandbox. We play with these different tools to explore, uh, what they mean for us, for our practice, for the, the work that we, we're doing with our clients, uh, with people we're coaching. Um, how do we use these futures tools? What tools do we have from our own practice that can be enhanced with these insights? So if you are in that category of people who wants to play around and explore those, then I'll send you some more information later about the sandbox, or we can run sandboxes for other companies and organizations as well. But having said all of that, there are these great tools. I love them. I'll share one with you just now in the second part, but rather than looking at the tools, if you want to identify the signals, there are tools that can do that. But the first thing you need to do before relying on an external tool or model is to learn how to pay attention, to be aware of discomfort, because discomfort is that indication that something is happening that is not what we expected. If you go to work Monday to Friday and everything works and the traffic is fine, and, you know, all of your KPIs are met and all of your turnaround times are met, it's a good, nice, smooth week. It's nice. You might feel relieved, you know, by the weekend, but too much of that, you're going to get bored. Most people would. But when something happens to disrupt that really smooth process, that's when you go, what happened here? Do we have a process that is wrong? Have we not met a customer expectation? Is something changing with technology? There's a discomfort there, something that we very often try and gloss over or fix very quickly or smooth away because we don't like discomfort. But as a futurist leader, as a liminal leader, one of your first things that you need to learn how to do is to sit with that discomfort for a while. Like when the speaker doesn't speak for too long and there's a pause. We need to sit in that space of being uncomfortable and not try and fix it. It's like we've had some people who've passed away recently, and you want to go and fix things. You want to go and comfort them. You want to get them to move quickly through this grieving process to the other side. But that grief is a transition period. And we have to go through it just like the caterpillar has to go through the chrysalis stage. We have to go through it to emerge on the other side. We cannot shortcut certain things that need to happen because then we bury it, we suppress it rather than actually deal with it.
