Webinar Futures Alchemy

This is very much an exploration, this particular webinar today, because it's a topic that, that I really enjoy, and I thought as the last webinar for the year, let's just have a little bit of fun. So it's not too serious, although it could become a little philosophical later on, and I hope that it does. So for the sake of Nicholas and anyone who may be watching later on, I'm Charlotte Kemp. I'm a futurist, a keynote speaker, an executive leadership coach, an author, and I love exploring new ideas and concepts. When I moved my career into the futures world, first of all, I felt like I'd come home because I've always been interested in future topics and science fiction that explores the future and books that talk about how society changes for the future. And I just hadn't realized that it was a field of study, and it is, and it's wonderful, and I have a lot of fun. But I also wanted to find a way to express my interest in looking at the future and what we do. So I came up with, after a number of really fascinating conversations, I came up with this brand, this concept of being a futures alchemist. And part of the reason is because I do not believe in gurus. Nobody should be the person who holds all the information and others have to go to that person to get wisdom. We are all natural futurists. We are all really clever and experienced and intelligent and creative in our own spaces. And futures thinking and all the modalities and tools that are there are something that we can add into the work that we do. So I want to be able to pass that on to other people without implying that I'm the expert and you've got to come to me and only I will have the right answers. First of all, it's wrong. Secondly, it's immoral. Thirdly, it's a lot of pressure to maintain that kind of guru status, and I wasn't interested. But as an alchemist, this is what I do, is that I work with people And I bring my philosopher's stone. I bring my ideas and learning and the models and things, and I help people to unpack the work that they're doing, and together something new is created. And that is the magic of alchemy. But alchemy as a brand is also incredibly overused. There are product alchemists and training alchemists, and it's like it's a new marketing term, like, you know, the new black, just like innovation and disruption. And when we start throwing around a term too much, we develop something that is called— there's a really good word for it, and I've just forgotten what it is. It's a thought-terminating cliché. So when we throw around a word too much, we respond with this thought-terminating cliché. The minute we hear it, we go, I know what that means. I don't have to think any further about that, and then you go on to the rest of the conversation. But these words are actually powerful. They imply a lot. There is history behind it. So I thought, let's spend some time exploring alchemy. So we're going to go to a little bit of a primer on what alchemy is and where it came from and the different kind of stages and operations. This is not meant to be heavy at all, but once we get through the actual content, I'm going to go back through the 7 operations and just pause slowly and pose some questions, and you can think about them in terms of your professional development, the place where you work, and how you want to see the future, and see if you can use this as a metaphor to think about the future. Futures Alchemy. One of the things that I find really fascinating that I'm discovering more of in recent times is that a lot of our history that we have is very biased towards the Western world, and we think that this is the history that is out there. We have ignored a lot of other history, and when we look at alchemy, it's not just Greek alchemy. Chinese, Indian, there was Islamic alchemy, Egyptian alchemy, which we'll mention again. And all of these different types of alchemy came about because people were trying to explore their world. They were trying to answer certain questions, and alchemy was where people, where society was at a stage of actually exploring that content. When we think about alchemy, people immediately go to it turns lead into gold. And while that is a theme that comes up quite often and we use it as our marketing clichés, the title of this talk is Futures Alchemy: Turning Possibility into Gold. It wasn't just about gold. The alchemists weren't just trying to make gold and make lots of money. It was a much deeper pursuit than that. Talking about turning, you know, lead into gold means that they got a lot of marketing, a lot of PR, a lot of state sponsorship. They also sometimes had to leave in the middle of the night and catch a ship to another continent because people were after them because they clearly were not making gold. It's more about, as a philosophy, it's more about kind of turning lower things into higher things, a base something into something higher. So the base metal of lead had certain components. Why can't it be turned into gold? Our base lives and opportunities we have, why can't we transmute that into something more? So it's about pursuit and purification and something higher. Alchemy is a proto-science, so it is what was there before the scientific method, but a lot of things that were explored during that time have turned into tools and things that we know about very well today. So behind alchemy, well, after alchemy came chemistry, distillation, separating things out, filtration, cleaning liquids into something that is consumable, fermentation, everything that we do with all of the fermenting drinks that we have as well as beer and products like that. These, all of these concepts were first developed in alchemy labs. A lot of things like the salts that we use, some of the base medicines that we have, The tinctures that we have, the herbal constructs, all came from an understanding and appreciation of alchemy. But as a metaphor, alchemy has been used in a lot of things, and famously by Carl Jung when he was exploring psychology. And there's lots of videos and books that you— well, not videos, audios— of kind of exploring how Carl Jung looked at alchemy in terms of our psychological development. and the things that have to break down and be distilled and then brought back together again. And it's that type of metaphor that I like to use in terms of futures thinking. So we got these kind of proto-science things, the pursuit of the scientific method before there was a scientific method, the experimentation. But there are some like big concepts of what alchemy is about. There's really a lot of work on this. I'm just going to touch on some of them that really appeal to me and the work that I do. One is as above, so below. So there is this correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm, between the universe and a cell structure. And obviously alchemy didn't know about all of those things yet, but there was an understanding that there are certain kind of rhythms and patterns of how things are how things are in our universe, in our experience. And when we start to understand that correspondence, we start to appreciate a little bit more of the rhythm of nature, the rhythm of what is being created, rather than just trying to apply our human minds and control things. We actually really want to enter into and understand what is happening. Another major concept of of alchemy is solve et coagula. It's a little bit of Latin in some of these phrases, but this is essentially dissolving and coagulating, so breaking down something and then bringing it back together again. And we see that in so much of our work. There are some trainers and speakers here, and part of the work that we do is working with clients, even when we're coaching, is breaking down something to understand What are the components? What is making the situation as it is? We want to break it down and distill it and understand it. And once we've done that, we can reassemble it and build back together so that the person can, can go forward or the team can go forward. And they don't have to think about those separate parts anymore because now they're more than the sum of their parts because they've gone through this process and they've got rid of some of the things that they don't need, which we'll explore shortly in one of the operations. We see this again, so much of this rhythm and breaking down in nature. If you think about a moth, what is it, the little word, the caterpillar, the caterpillar turning into a butterfly. You've got a state and then it goes into its cocoon and then it comes out a butterfly, but it's not a neat change. When it goes in there, it actually dissolves. into this goo, and then the goo coagulates again and emerges as a butterfly. Something completely different comes out of this cocoon period of time. That's alchemy. That's solve et coagula. The next one that we look at is the Philosopher's Stone, and this is one that we're familiar with, any of us who have paid any attention to fantasy writing, Obviously, it's in the Harry Potter books, but the Philosopher's Stone is this mythical substance that people were trying to pursue and find and discover. The Philosopher's Stone was the impetus, the catalyst for change that would help to transmute something. If they found this theoretical Philosopher's Stone, they would be able to turn that into gold. That would— and that would be the least of the interesting things that an alchemist could have done. When we think about the Philosopher's Stone, when it's used in fantasy, it's very often used in terms of the concept of immortality. So how can we take the substance that will change this mortal body of ours and allow us to be immortal? So we're changing the substance of who we are. Again, think about it in terms of a metaphor. What is the Philosopher's Stone in the work that you do or in how you think? What is the model or the approach that you need to take that will be that thing that transmutes your circumstances into something else? That is what philosophy, the Philosopher's Stone, is about. And then the concept of transmutation, which really is interesting. transmutation is that change into something higher. It's not just the chemical process, it's also esoteric, it's also philosophical. It's about us, how we transmute into something higher. There are many people in the world who are happy to live their lives and keep going on in the direction that they're in, but there are others who look at the world and say there's got to be something more or something better or something different. Choices have been made that have defined these circumstances that I'm in, and I want to go beyond that. So what do I need to do to break something down, to break free of something, to be able to change my circumstances into something that is elevated, that is higher? That's transmutation. When we look again at using this as a metaphorical concept, we can then start to transmute many things. When you look at people's fear and anxiety that we see today, so much of it, when we transmute that, when we move past the fear, it becomes wisdom because we've got that experience, we've gone through something, it has hurt, it has been terrible, but we've learned something, we've evolved, we've changed, and now we have this this element of wisdom, we can transmute the concept of scarcity into abundance. We're trained to see scarcity. Huge amounts of money are paid to PR firms and marketing firms to make us feel that there is a scarcity of things that we need, and the only way that we can get past that scarcity is to buy this widget. But there really is an abundance. There is on the planet at the moment an abundance of anything that you need, but it's just not accessible to all of us. So how do we transmute that scarcity concept into an abundance concept? How do we transmute the feeling of the complexity of the world, the pace and everything that is happening in the world that is so difficult? How do we How do we transmute that into clarity? Not certainty. In terms of futures thinking, certainty is really dangerous, but clarity is essential. We need to be able to separate out and see what is important and what needs to be put aside, what we cannot respond to and what we can change. That clarity really helps us move into the future. Let's look at a particular individual theoretical individual called Hermes Trismegistus. So if you go into alchemy, if you start reading about alchemy or watching some amazing videos on YouTube that look at the history of it, this character comes up quite a lot. Hermes Trismegistus, he is the thrice great Hermes. He's actually not a real person. He is kind of like the figurative figurehead of early alchemy, and he's a compilation figure of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth, which we think of in terms— a lot of medicine came out of the Egyptian god Thoth's work. Trisgreat, so 3 times, because he was a priest, a poet, and a king, and a lot of the writing that the fragments of alchemy writing that have been found around the world have been attributed to this character, just to kind of give it a base point. What was amazing about early alchemy and the history of it is how people went looking for something. They were trying to pursue something deeper, and in different parts of history, alchemy was either embraced or outlawed. But when it was embraced, then people could talk about alchemy, they could do alchemy experiments, they could meet in public, they could talk about it in the public forum, and there was a lot of sharing of insight and knowledge. There was some sharing of particular little substances that were sent by whatever mail system they had at the time so that somebody else could take that little bit of substance and hopefully use that as a philosopher's stone to generate something. So some practical things were shared, but a lot of philosophical conversations. On those occasions when alchemy was outlawed, either by the king because he was just duped and there was no gold, it was all faked, or by the church because they saw it as evil and as a threat, when it was suppressed, people didn't stop their pursuit. We don't stop the pursuit of knowledge just because those in power don't like what we're doing. So they started meeting privately, and people would travel long distances to other countries to take gentle walks beside a river, to talk about alchemy, to understand something deeper. And I think this is one of the most compelling concepts for me about alchemy is is this commitment, this dedication to pursue something, to pursue this great work that was not going to be financially compensated. They were not going to be made famous because it was outlawed, but they needed to know, they needed to explore, they needed to experiment, and it's almost a pure science in that effect that there was something that they were looking for. not necessarily something missing, but something beyond that they wanted to be able to have a part of discovering or touching. So that's the romantic part of the history of alchemy, and there's lots of really good stories as well about literally people trying to dupe each other. And if you know a couple of magician tricks and sleight of hand, then it's very easy to pretend to a king that you've used this lead, you turned it into this little bit of gold, can you please have some more money to carry on your experiments? And then one day disappear. Alright, so let's talk a little bit more about now what philosophy is actually about. It's a philosophy of possibility, of what could be. Everything contains the potential for something else. The caterpillar contains the potential for the butterfly. We contain the potential for whatever is the next stage of our lives or our careers. Nothing is fixed. Everything can be transformed. Opposites can be reconciled and something new can be created, new realities. Alchemy has lasted as a philosophical concept for such a long time because it's not answering the question, it's not even asking the question, how do we predict the future? A lot of people just want to know that. How do we predict? I need to know exactly what will be happening. And that's the wrong question to ask because it can never be answered. But if we change the question like the alchemists did, then we find a different question. How do we transform reality? How do we now experience something very different from what we're experiencing right now? Are we stuck with this or can we change it? How much agency do we have over our future? And that is at the heart of, of why people keep leaning into alchemy. Because we know that there needs to be a different reality. We do not have to accept the reality that we have right now, not in our own personal lives, not in the circumstances of this planet. We can transform reality. So now on to the actual deep work. There are 4 stages of alchemy. And these 4 stages are kind of like the higher-level stages. So this is what Carl Jung used a lot in terms of the psychological process of what we go through. After the 4 stages, we look at 7 operations. So the 7 operations are, you know, if you were in a laboratory trying to do something, these would be the things that you would actually see. But these stages are the kind of overarching concepts of what we go through. The first one is Negredo. It is the blackening. Things are burnt away. The confusion, the darkness, something must change, the tension. We're not happy, but we have to actually burn things away. We have to collapse certain things into this Negredo, this blackening, before we can do something with it. If we're not experiencing, if we never experience that, we can't change. If we never say this is wrong and it needs to change, I need to break this down, then we just carry on a merry life accepting what is. But if we don't want to accept what is, then this is the very first painful, messy, hot, difficult thing we have to do to change. We have to blacken it. We have to burn it down. Once that has happened, the next stage that appears is albedo, the whitening. And now we're looking at clarity. We're seeing what is real. There's purification where we're identifying truth. We've washed away the noise and now we're left with something that we can actually work with. Here we start to feel a little bit more agency over the future. It's like I've got through this terrible, difficult blackening part and now I'm seeking clarity. Then we can move on to Citrinus, the yellowing. Now there is an awakening of wisdom. Now we have the insights. Now we have conscious choice. We become conscious futurists, conscious leaders, conscious consumers, because we're now being intentional about the future that we're creating, the life that we're working in, the process that we're going through. After that comes libido. which is the reddening. So very simple, 4 stages here: black, white, yellow, and red. And at the reddening, the rubedo stage, we now have this integration and this embodiment. These, these things come together. We are embodied. We now are intentionally conscious individuals operating in our world, and we will automatically see the world differently and automatically make different decisions, different choices, because we've gone through this process to come out in this way, and it is a completed transformation for us. This is where our futures become actual lived realities. So those are the 4 stages, those 4 colors, and if you want to think about alchemy for yourself going forward, then just hold on to those 4 concepts. Very simple. Black is burning away, white is purifying, and the yellow is now the wisdom and the extraction, and the red is it all comes together, and now you're looking to the future. That can be the start of your own personal alchemy journey. But we want to go a little bit further and do some work. So what were they doing in the laboratories? They were doing certain operations, and we'll go through the operations and then we'll touch on them again in terms of what that means for us as humans. So calcination is the first part. This is the burning away, the place where that, that nigredo starts, where we're blackening things and burning away. We're stripping away inherited beliefs, we're stripping away outdated narratives, we're stripping away those things that we've inherited and never examined and are not serving us. And it's not necessarily a nice process. It is hot and burning, but this is the stage that we need to go through so we can get to the next one, which is dissolution. And now we're dissolving into, you know, into something else, but it's breaking structures apart. It's deconstructing those existing ideas and categories, and it's allowing that fluid movement, which is really important. In some of the work that I do, I talk about 2 fundamental trends that, that explain the world. And the one trend is this dichotomy, these, these different parameters of being a binary thinker, right, wrong, yes, no, black, white. You know, there's only 2 options. The opposite part of that trend is fluid thinking. where you look at a situation and go, there's a lot more going on here than I could imagine. And that fluid movement is so important for us to be able to craft an intentional future. The next stage is separation, and now we are sifting from the embers. We've got things burnt away that are at the bottom. We've got the smoke that is rising, We're separating out the different parts. We're separating out the rubble from what is important, what is the essential things we want to pursue. Once we separated those out into the different component parts, the next alchemy process is conjunction, where we're starting to bring them back together again. We're combining now the essential elements, not the dross that has been burnt away, but what is left that is good, and we're bringing that together to create something new. Could be a new framework, a new way of seeing things. Once you brought them together, there's an additional process of fermentation, and this is where you're actually breathing life into the mix. Think about fermenting beer. Beg your pardon. Fermenting beer or, you know, any of these fermenting healthy products that people play with, but you're breathing life into it. There's something new that is being created in terms of what we're thinking about. This is when we start to, to add imagination and story and, and life and inspiration to a concept, to a framework, to a process in the workplace. So we're fermenting, bringing, bringing it to life, and then we can distill, really, really refine exactly what it is that is important. for us, what it is that we're aiming for, what it is that we value. And that distillation process allows us just to focus our efforts, our values in a particular direction towards a future, hopefully, that we are aiming for. After that distillation process, then you actually have the coagulation of the gold. It's actually solidifying now into something that is tangible, that we can point to, that we can demonstrate. This is the finished, the finished version, the usable version of, of whatever process we're working through. This is the thing that we can point to and say it was worth this process to get here because now we have a better life, we have a better something. So I'm going to pause just for a moment while you think about that because the next part that we're going to go on to is we're going to look at these again but with a little bit of um, a little bit more of a specific application to what it means to thinking about the future. But you can think about that for just a moment. So as we start now, we're going to go through those same 7 stages, but I'll try and pause every now and then because I'd like you to think about If you can see this reflected in any part of your life, how does this play out in your personal life, in your professional life, in the workplace that you're in or with your clients? When you think about the future, the conversations you're having with people, what does this look like? How could this play out? And just take a few notes on this because it is a metaphor, but a very powerful metaphor that has been used for hundreds of years for people to re-examine the world that you're in, and now this is your opportunity to think like an alchemist in terms of your life and the future and the future that you'd like to aim for. So the first one is calcination. This is where we're burning away the old. This is intentional destruction of what no longer serves us. We're burning off our ego, our assumptions, our inherited scripts, Anything that has come into this that is no longer needed. There's a lot of work being done in the space for people. If you go online, you can see a lot of people really looking at circumstances that they've been in and saying, this does not serve me anymore. And some people are stuck there, but others are being very intentional about breaking that away so they can actually move forward. So personally, we need to let go of those identities that make us feel small. We need to burn away the outdated stories, the stories that were told about us in the past, the fears that have defined us and held us back from something. We also need to burn away any obligations that we should not have, that have been thrust onto us that we should be giving up. Professionally, we want to challenge legacy thinking. This is the way it's done here. It's always been done this way. We need to let go of measuring KPIs and processes and believing that just because something has worked in the past, we need to hold on to it because, you know, it's— we can't just throw away everything in the past. So there's a whole lot of these assumptions that we really need to challenge. Identifying those taboo topics and actually shining some light on them and dealing with them. Once we've done this calcination process, we then move on to the dissolution. Dissolution is melting the rigid, breaking it down. So the old has been burnt away, and now you've got the structure that can be fluid. We can do something with it. We now are going to allow for a little bit of uncertainty. We're seeking clarity, but certainty is not helpful, so we're going to allow for uncertainty. We're going to give space to that. We're going to embrace ambiguity because the world is not black or white. There are many shades, so we need to actually embrace that ambiguity and be able to sit with these unresolved issues and not feel like we have to resolve everything because we can't. So there's a lot of this kind of fluidness and learning to become comfortable with the unknown, with the unresolved. Personally, it means being comfortable with the fact that you're not always going to have all the answers, that you can't always save everybody's problems. The people that you care about are going to go through difficult things and you cannot make it right. You can walk with somebody, but you cannot resolve all of these issues because it's just, it's not going to be possible. This is, you know, we're grown-ups now. We need to let go of our rigid self-images, our definitions of who we are, because we're changing as well. We could not have gone through COVID and come out the other side of COVID the way we were before. We've changed through that process, and things that are happening around the world at the moment mean that we're changing. So we have to give ourselves the grace to change and give those people in our lives the grace to allow them to change as well. When we keep trying to hold on to what used to be, we can't make any progress, and that rigid structure will break and shatter Whereas allowing it to dissolve and be fluid means that we give ourselves the space to explore what could be, and we could find a new way of coming together again shortly. Professionally, break apart organizational silos, allow teams to reimagine their roles and their identities instead of making them stick to, you know, a strict job description and KPIs. Um, those of us engaged with working with other people, it's to allow those teams that we're working with to brainstorm and have wild, impractical, implausible ideas, because we need our brains to be able to be free to explore that so that we can bring that mess back and transmute it into something. But this is the stage where it's allowed, where we need to have that freedom. We need to experiment with new ways of being leaders, of belonging, of working, of being of value to the world. It's a beautiful, messy, uncomfortable, potentially exciting stage to be in. So that's the dissolution. Once we've done that, we move on to separation, and now we're sifting through those elements. And we're sorting them, and we're identifying what is essential. What are we going to move forward with? What are we going to leave behind? Our personal separation and conversation here is what truly matters for us for the next chapter. What do I want to take into 2026? What strengths do I have that I want to amplify? What parts of my life do I want to acknowledge and then leave behind? What relationships do I have that nourish me and serve me, and what relationships have run their course and need to be just packaged and put aside as well? How do we separate out our fears and our intuition about the future? Professionally, now we start to define or redefine or reclarify an organizational purpose. What is this team for? What is this organization about? When we're faced with disruptions and challenges from other industries and other sectors, then we have to redefine things sometimes. We have to say, well, we've been serving this, you know, this value for 3 decades. That value is no longer created. Do we end this business or can we do something different? So you go through this process and you can find a new identity and purpose for an organization, separating out those old habits, old traditions, and working out what is useful to take into the future. Then we have conjunction. Now we're coming, we're bringing things back together, we're trying to reform them into something new. It's a synthesis, it's a bringing together, and If you're working with people, if you're going through this process up until now, it could be a bit scary. Like, you, you've— you're in that cocoon and you're just a big mush. Okay, now you separate it out. What are the good parts and what's going to get left behind? And now you can start to bring it together. We're intentionally creating a new whole, a new thing out of that where we're actually doing the science of putting this together now. Now we start to look at if it's our personal conjunction phase. If we've left certain things behind, what have we replaced them with? Do we have new values that we need to incorporate into our lives? And if there are values, how do we incorporate that? How do we demonstrate in our calendar, in our purse, how do we demonstrate those new values? How do we incorporate them into our lives? What does that look like? How do we take action and work on the purpose that we have identified for ourselves to move forward? Professionally, we're looking at taking these insights and creating a new emergent strategy for an organization. It's creating new and refocusing, so certain things would have been left behind. I'm working with a team right now, and I keep thinking about them in terms of this because When, when I first met with them, um, there was this feeling of like heaviness, and it's a good job and a good company, but they just were not happy with where they were and where they were professionally, individually, and what the team was meant to do and how the team served other people. And they went through this big messy process, but when they got to here, they're starting to, to really redefine, uh, because now they're very clear on who they are and the value that they uniquely bring to this team and to the entire organization. So now they don't see other people as— and other departments as threats to them or chipping away at their work and their value. They see how their unique value can collaborate with those other teams and create something new out of that. And just to see this all come together in such an incredibly powerful way is really exciting to watch. This is the part in terms of thinking about the history where we are literally co-creating the history— the future, sorry, uh, co-creating the future. We talk about collaboration a lot. Collaboration is, um, I do this and you do that, and together we can do something, uh, in that space. Co-creation is I value this, you value that, and we come together without assumptions about what needs to happen. or be done, but with an openness to exploring what could be. And what comes out of that co-creation is uniquely alchemical, but unique because it's not an imposition or an assumption of what we can do. It's literally bringing these elements together and something new is created out of that. And that's really exciting. Fermentation. Now we're introducing new life. This is where something enters into the mix and it, and it becomes, it takes on a life. It's a breathing document. This client of mine has a strategy document which is technically brilliant, but as we worked through it and looked at it through new lenses in terms of their future value, that document just came to life. People were now referencing the document and what the document says that they can do and where they're going and what they can add to it. And it was just incredible just to see this thing all bubbling up and people getting excited because now this is meaningful to them. That is the fermentation process. So you've done all this hard work and now you're starting to see something really interesting, the creativity, the inspiration, When you talk about what you're doing and somebody else is excited about it, that is fermentation. Personally, for yourself, you want to explore inspiration, look at new ideas, look at art, explore some kind of art or artistic expression that you've never looked at before. Not that you have to be the artist, but sometimes when you immerse yourself in some other field, You, you get that, that spark of creativity that brings life to the work that you're doing, and that, that is the value of art, of play, of music, is bringing that, that creativity and life to something else as well. Professionally, now we're looking at innovation in the workplace. We're looking at changing perspectives and responsibilities of an organization. We're bringing in new partners, new ideas, new technologies that can help us serve a changing world in a really powerful way. The organization is now living and breathing new life for a new future, as opposed to just serving, you know, their origin story. So from fermentation, we go to distillation. Again, clarifying the essence, and now other people can see it. Now other people can start to say, this is what you're about, or this is what this organization is about. We've got the inspiration, we're refining it, we're making it clear. There's a little bit of discipline and focus to make this now work. Personally, we are sharpening our personal practices— pardon me, our goals, our priorities, our boundaries. We can, the kind of people who have signed up for this webinar, we can do anything. We can do so many things. There's so much that we have the capacity to do, but we cannot do it all. So that's why we have to go through this process so we can really aim towards that value that we have where we can make the most impact. So you have to have some boundaries so that you're not just always flying off to explore new ideas. There needs to be time to explore new ideas, but in terms of the value that you're creating, you're really trying to focus it here. Professionally, you're clarifying the structure of the organization. You're removing complexity, unnecessary complexity from plans and strategies so that people can see where they fit in and what the organization is supposed to do. Clear, simple, repeatable models and solutions. We don't need that complexity that obscures inefficiencies. And then finally, we get to that last stage, the coagulation, the turning the possibility into gold. We've actually now defined this, solidified this whole process into something tangible and beautiful. We're now embodying this whole process, our conscious approach to the future, our conscious approach to relationships, to ourselves, to our professional careers. We're living the future that we've designed and we're creating the legacy that we know that we will leave behind when our process is done. We're embodying the agency that we have instead of abdicating it to other people to make decisions about us. We're very conscious, we're very intentional. In the workplace, this looks like actually implementing the strategy, not creating a strategy document, to show to the shareholders and the board and to do one rah-rah and then put it into, you know, an electronic folder and just carry on with, you know, business as usual. Now you're actually embodying that strategy because it has been created through this whole process. Now you can measure, you can iterate, you can reinforce, you can explore, you can experiment, you can do other things because you now have the freedom to do that because you've gone through this process and you're not being held back. By that which has been burnt away. So those are the 7 stages, the 7 operations of alchemy that you would go through, and you can do this today. You can look at those 7 stages, you can look it up online and go through them. I encourage you to look at those 4 color stages because those are really helpful to just start getting your thinking around alchemy. But I just want to, just want to finish off now, and then we can take some questions and discuss if anybody's got some ideas. But I just want to finish off with some of the concepts that really appeal to me personally and why I call myself a futures alchemist. The alchemists are dedicated to experimentation and seeking. They don't just accept what is handed to them. They don't just accept the marketing message from some organization. They are seeking for something deeper and more meaningful, and they will experiment with it. And experimentation means that sometimes you fail, sometimes you make a mess, sometimes you have to throw things away because they didn't work. But there is that space that allows for that failure in the pursuit of seeking something that is beyond, something that is transcendent from what we have. They were in pursuit of an idea. They were in pursuit of an ideal that never did, may not ever actually be realized about what a human soul could be and what a human soul could be like in a society, what we really could be like as humans on this planet in this reality. They were looking for that. and they were trying to achieve that. It might be unattainable, but that doesn't make it any less valuable to pursue because that is the highest version of ourselves. It's not about money or wealth or gold. It's not about ego. It's not about acquisition. It's not about hierarchy. It's about meaning and belonging and community and creation and creativity. That was what they were in pursuit of, and that is what I'm in pursuit of as I look towards more preferred futures. They also consulted and collaborated, and that is so incredibly important. The myth of the self-made man is not just mythical but dangerous and abusive and ignores the contribution of of everybody else in the creation of something. When we start to dissolve the ego and be able to collaborate, co-create, work with, engage with other people, we have the opportunity to create something new and extraordinary that can never be created on our own or individually. We are part of community and we exist in community, and the more that we can, we can do this, the better are the results of what it is that we're creating. And then this last concept, alchemy is called the Great Work, and I think this is, this might define the last 2 decades of the work that I've done. The Great Work is is what is meaningful for you. It's what you create, what you want to do, what you're called to do, or what you've decided to invest yourself, your time, your intelligence, your creativity, your relationships. You've invested into this because you want to see your part of the world be better because of your contribution to it, or you want to see something that you have created that is extraordinary because you've invested into it. It's not about what is on your business card or your LinkedIn profile. This is not a job title. Um, this is you. This is your— whatever you have decided your purpose in life is, that is your great work. Beg your pardon. So that is the great work, and that is why for me this whole concept of alchemy is so important, and we shouldn't just use it as a marketing adjective. It is extraordinarily deep, and as a metaphor, it serves so many parts of our life and the work that we do. And the more we embrace it, the more we can actually create better work in whatever field we're doing. So when I actually do futures work, I very often explain to people that I am a professional futurist and I'm a member of the Association of Professional Futurists, and I studied and I've written and I've explored and I've done— I've got a body of work. But we are all natural futurists because we all look at the future, we all anticipate something in the future, and We can identify our worst-case scenarios and our best-case scenarios, and we, we take actions to move away from the worst case towards the best case. Um, we're all doing that naturally, so we're all natural futurists, but we're also all natural alchemists, um, because we're always in the process of transmutation. Like, you're born as a baby and you turn into, you know, all through your life you're changing. That's a whole transmutation process. But we're also seeking in terms of our souls and our hearts and our minds. We're seeking something different. We're exploring and experimenting with that. So everybody, you are all natural futurists. You're all natural alchemists, and you actually get to intentionally, consciously create the future that you live in and the future that others live in as well. And that is what I invite you to do, because if you do, then you too are doing the great work.