Foresight to insight to action | Jeremy Kirshbaum

This is our seminal model, is that the— is the foresight to insight to action model. So what we've been talking about here is foresight to insight, using foresight and futures thinking to provoke insights about what you're doing to inform action or strategy. So the point of all of this is to make better decisions in the present. Like I said, we're not trying to predict the future. No one can predict the future. But we can look farther out using certain techniques in order to make better decisions in the present. A foresight story is a plausible, internally consistent, provocative story about the future that provokes an insight, an aha that creates a new pattern of connections in your brain. And an insight is different from an idea. So you can't go back to your old way of thinking once you've had an insight. Yeah. It changes you. It's very difficult to have an insight. I don't think, you know, if one of you had an insight in, in this talk today, then that was an enormous success. And collective moments of insight are the most powerful, but also the most difficult. Action is a way forward expressed with clarity and ideally as a story. So consultants work like right in here, the insight to action curve. So like a Deloitte or McKinsey. And we work more on the foresight to insight curve, helping do foresight stories to provoke insight in the present. So an example of an insight is from a forecast we did with Disney World. We were trying to figure out the future of fun. And this is really tough to do for Disney because they know a lot about fun in a really specific way. And so out of our forecast, the insight that came out of it was that Kids, when they go to a park, want to be scared. They think that's fun. But parents want it to be very, very safe. They think that's fun. And for reasons that Disney doesn't talk about much, Disney parks are actually some of the safest places in the world because of partnerships that they have with the military. And so the insight is that they wanted to be safely scared. This was the one insight that came out of that work. So, this is the last thing that I'll leave you with is just about storytelling and why storytelling is important. We do work with a guy named Kendall Haven. He is a master storyteller and neuroscientist, and he works with— he was hired by DARPA, the research arm of the Defense Department, to look at why the Taliban stories were more effective than ours. People were responding better to Taliban propaganda. Than to our propaganda, and they wanted to find out why. So, being a master storyteller and a neuroscientist, he took people and brought them to a lab in California and hooked them up to 60 different sensors. And while they were hooked up to these sensors, he gave them different storylines and different stories about different characters in order to gauge their responses, to pull out what it was that made an effective, emotionally responsive story. And the overlying insight that he found And there's a great book on this, Story Proof, that I think you should read, is that our brain is wired for stories, and if we don't get stories, then we make them up. So that's why this provocative, internally consistent story of the future is important, is because we're already telling ourselves the story of the future, whether you like it or not. And what this is doing is giving you tools for doing that productively so that you make better decisions In the present. This is his radicalization potential equation. You don't need to look at this. I just thought it was kind of fun that he got it down to that level of quantitative. So these are his key elements of stories that provoke radical behavior change. Who is this story about for me? How bad is the story for that character? Who is responsible, and what should I do? So at the very leading edge of developing your idea for what you want to focus on at Draper University, and thinking about your own story of why you're here, and what you're doing here, think about these 4 elements. Who is this story about for me? Are you here for yourself? Are you here for some disembodied public? Are you here for your parents? Who is the story about for me? How bad is the story for that character? What is the problem that you're here to solve? What is the challenge that you need to overcome? Who is responsible? And what should you do about it? And if you can really nail these 4 things and create a compelling story about that, it will drive and focus what you're doing here. And when you start developing your ideas, this is a great counterpoint for ways to describe your idea to people in order to motivate them to action. I do a lot of work with maternal rural health. And I asked Kendall, I'm always trying to fundraise, you know, so what's the best advice you could give me on how to fundraise better? And he said, don't be afraid to end your fundraising pitch on a bad note. We always wanna end with some escalatory success, but then people feel like the story was resolved, and they don't do anything. If you end on a bad note, if you end on number 3, and then tell them what they should do, then they'll have to resolve the story, and they'll do that by donating. It hasn't worked out well, but that's more on me, I think. So when you're describing an emerging future, whether that's for you or your idea, it's important to get your words right. So let's look at the driverless car. We had the horse-drawn carriage, which became the horseless carriage. And you can see, actually, the words match the concept. It really just looks like a carriage without a horse on it, right? And then that became a car, which was nothing like a carriage. So now we're all talking about the driverless car or the autonomous car, and you can see it looks exactly like the old car but with no driver in it. And then, who knows what that will become? And it probably isn't going to look anything like a car. So this is the power of words, this is the power of stories, is that unbeknownst to us, the words and the stories we use are always framing the way that we innovate and the way that we think about the future. So if we are thinking about omnichannel or selling something, you might have signal channel, omnichannel, mixed reality shopping. So as we're thinking about the future, think about what the words you are using to describe yourself. What are the words you're using to describe your idea? And what are ways that you can think about that and tell that story more intentionally in order to induce more disruptive innovation and better create the future that you want to see. And I'll end there. Thank you.