What role does work play at this point in human evolution?
How do we create more humane workplaces?
How can we move past what our systems and structures allow to find the new way that better serves us?
Dr Ciela Hartanov is an explorer of the future of leadership and adaptable organisation. She brings together foresight and organisational development to break down barriers and invent the next practices for humane, kind, and responsive workplaces.
Interviewed by: Amanda Reeves
About Ciela
Dr. Ciela Hartanov was part of the founding team of The Google School for Leaders and Head of Next Practice Innovation and Strategy at Google, where she developed projects designed to shape the future of leadership and work. She currently runs humcollective, a boutique strategy and innovation firm that helps companies, executives, and teams make sense of the forces shaping the future and prepare strategically.
Ciela has been a featured speaker at a wide range of conferences from The House of Beautiful Business to the HR Leaders Forum in Australia. She has been quoted in Psychology Today and Forbes and is sought after for her thought leadership on the future of leadership and adaptable organizations. She brings a multidisciplinary view that leverages business foresight and organization development to break barriers and invent the next practices for humane, kind, and responsive workplaces.
Connect with Ciela
Insta: https://www.instagram.com/cielarose
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cielahartanov/
Website: humcollective.co
Contact: ciela@humcollective.co
Show notes
Hear Ciela’s podcast on Identity: Who am I at work and who decides?
Audio Transcript
Amanda Reeves: What's the purpose of work at this point in human evolution? How can we create more humane workplaces? And how do we move past the limits of our current systems and structures, so we can find a new way that better serves us?
You're listening to FuturePod. I'm Amanda Reeves.
Ciela Hartanov: When I left Google, my idea was I want to be bringing this to organizations of all shapes and sizes and in particular organizations who are building from the ground up, so that they are starting from scratch, building this future forward thinking into the muscle of how they build strategy, of how they think about people, of how we think about building more humane workplaces. My whole mission and reason for being is I wanna be part of the workplace revolution.
Amanda Reeves: That's Dr. Ciela Hartanov, an explorer of the future of leadership and adaptable organizations. Ciela brings together foresight and organizational development to help break down barriers and invent the next practices for humane, kind, and responsive workplaces. I'm so delighted to have her as my guest today.
Ciela, welcome to FuturePod.
Ciela Hartanov: Thank you so much for having me. It's nice to be here.
Amanda Reeves: Can we start with the Ciela story? How did you end up in the space that you're working in?
Ciela Hartanov: Thank you for asking it's been a journey to get here as most career paths are. So I have an academic background. I have a doctorate in culture, in human behavior. And for a split second, I thought I was gonna be an academic, but that is not what came to pass. I ended up working in corporate.
My very first job, I was an intern at a small leadership consultancy practice. And I had a mentor who gave me a way bigger job than I was probably qualified for as the best mentors do. And she gave me this role to restructure their consulting practice. And that was my sort of first entry into working as an organizational change practitioner.
And I went on to continue to do that for many years in my career, why I finished my doctorate along the side. So I started working in corporate and doing my doctorate on the side. And so at the time I thought this makes good sense. I can then take theory and move it into practice, which is what I've done my entire career. And so for a long time, practicing as an organizational effectiveness and change practitioner, and in my last six years at Google, which was my last corporate role before I've started my own consulting firm, I started wondering more and more about this idea that really the world is changing a lot.
And so is this idea of leadership. And so is this idea of organizations. And now we all talk about it as the future of work. But even before that term was coined or was common vernacular, I began to wonder about what else might be possible because I started to see the theories and practices that I had learned as a practitioner in graduate school, not working anymore.
So that is when I came to the tradition of futurism and foresight as a way to solve this problem. Thinking about what is the future of leadership and what is a new entry road into this question rather than taking the traditional approaches, which are things like benchmarking and asking, well, what has everyone else done? Or asking more traditional questions, which is what does all the research from a hundred years ago tell us about this? I wanted a fresh take and that is how I entered the futur ist field.
Amanda Reeves: And I think you're not alone there. One of the things I really enjoyed about going and studying the Masters of Strategic Foresight was just finding how did other people end up in this space? And so many of us were people grappling with really big problems and just felt that the tools that we had available, and the common tools and the common ways of thinking just weren't up to the job of the challenges that we were now dealing with.
Ciela Hartanov: Yeah. And just the widening the lens and it is, it's so interesting that you mentioned that too, because if you're not familiar with future work, future's work, it can be confusing to people who are generally more inclined to data analytics or what does the research backed evidence?
Tell us. And of course, coming from an academic background, I'm very used to these types of questions. And when I was explaining to my boss at the time that I wanted to embark on this question of what is the future of leadership in a very different way. Graciously, he let me do that. But about six months later, you know, once I had a report and I had some thinking about it, he shared with me, in retrospect, he said, you know, I, I went with you because I trusted you.
And I knew that you were capable and smart, but at the time I was wondering, what is this thing called futurism? Is it, is it a psychic? Like, what is this, what are we doing? So a lot of misunderstanding, I think, around what futures work actually is and what it can provide. And that it's actually a discipline. It is just as rigorous if you do it well as a data insights report, for instance.
So I'm really on sort of a mission to help us understand that doing foresight work is essential when we're in these times of these questions that can't be answered the old way, but it doesn't mean that it is a pie in the sky exercise. It's actually a discipline and a practice of course, that you know, and people who've studied it know.
But the general populace, I would say doesn't know, which is why it's challenging to bring it into the work environment.
Amanda Reeves: Absolutely. So how did you go about bringing it into the work environment?
Ciela Hartanov: So luckily I was able to pitch the idea that I was gonna do a side project. So this was not meant to be my day job. I just pitched an idea to say, I think we have this really fascinating question that we can explore. And I think I'm the right person to explore it. So I pitched this idea and I really led with what I was solving for, versus perhaps the practice of foresight and how I was gonna use it. So I led with, I wanna address this question of what is the future of leadership. And that was the discipline that I was working in, that was my remit. And so, because I came with something that I was trying to solve, a real problem that I was trying to solve, I got some runway and some bandwidth to do that.
The other piece that I think really mattered was that I was a known entity and that I was riding on my reputation of course, to be able to build something that was effective. So leading with the problem, and then also leveraging my reputation to be able to get the bandwidth. And then I really set a finite amount of time.
I said, how about six months? Give me just a little bit of bandwidth and space for my day job, and then I'll come to you with a report out. And that made it timebound and constrained, which also gave me some freedom.
Amanda Reeves: And gives you the opportunity at the end of that piece to take the next step. Once we've built some confidence in this approach.
Ciela Hartanov: That's right. And the confidence was absolutely built because I ended up building up a next practice innovation lab, which ran for the next four years while I was at Google. And that has been the foundation for what I provide now to my clients, which is an innovation approach around how we think about organizations, leadership, and the human side of the business.
Amanda Reeves: I'd like to ask you a little bit about this shift from working in Google, to working in your own consultancy, what's taken you along this sort of journey.
Ciela Hartanov: Yeah. It's such an interesting question because career paths are, they're not necessarily linear, right? So there's a lot of different answers to that question I could provide in my own sort of thinking about my career. And it's interesting, you ask me that right now, because I've been talking to a lot of different people lately, who I think are at an inflection point in their careers.
And this I think is a hangover from COVID and all of our questioning that we've been able to do. And it's not even so much, maybe it's, maybe it is questioning, but I think. We're able to see something collectively that we weren't unable to see before. And that has given us the opportunity to think about ourselves, our agency, our careers.
So I think this is a really important question right now for all of us to be thinking about in terms of what do we want to be doing and where can we offer the most value?
Amanda Reeves: Mm.
Ciela Hartanov: And when I left Google, my real. The core when I really get down to it, the core of why I decided to leave and build my own practice was that I really believe that all of us, all organizations, all individuals, we need to be able to build this foresight discipline. We need to be able to think wider, think more proactively, be more future forward. And it shouldn't just be the large organizations, the organizations who have a lot of funds that can be afforded that. And so when I left Google, my idea was I want to be bringing this to organizations of all shapes and sizes and in particular organizations who are building from the ground up, so that they are starting from scratch, building this future forward thinking into the muscle of how they build strategy, of how they think about people, of how we think about building more humane workplaces. My whole mission and reason for being is I wanna be part of the workplace revolution. I think we are now at the opportunity where we can break out of the industrial era thinking.
And that requires all of us to get on board and all of us to have these forward thinking tools, not just the big companies. And that's why I ended up leaving and building my own consultancy. So that's one piece of the puzzle, but the other piece of the puzzle that's perhaps more personal is thinking about my own identity and what are my gifts and what do I really value about myself and how can I bring that to bear in a way that really shines? So that question was also alive for me too. And that informed the fact that, now I've left and I'm in the process of writing a book. And I really wanted to reclaim some of my own thinking and be as honest and truthful with my own thoughts as I could be.
And you can really only do that sometimes when you're outside of a corporation.
Amanda Reeves: It's an interesting thing to move inside and outside of organizations doing this kind of work, whether it's obviously foresight or whether you're going in as sort of a stealth provocateur. There's certain things you can only do while you're inside an organization, but there's also certain things you can only do while you're outside.
And I think there's something really interesting in the dance between these two.
Ciela Hartanov: Absolutely. And I think one of the things that's so clear to me from being both an organizational practitioner and a human behavior expert, but also having, I don't know if I would claim I'm a futurist, but having some skills in that, that everything is always contextual.
Remembering that helps us do this work well, because yes, when you're inside an organization, you're inside a context. And so what we can buy, what we can sell, what makes sense for an organization is always contextual. And when you're a solo entrepreneur and you're working as a consultant, that's also contextual and there's pros and cons to both of that on a career path.
And it's just a matter of deciding where does it give you the most agency to do what you're best at and what you have most passion for.
Amanda Reeves: I'd like to ask you about your background in human behavior and how that operates as part of the toolbox that you have for bringing to this work.
Ciela Hartanov: Yeah. So I think what I would say is you could look at it just sort of as an anthropologist, I think that's probably the best way to understand human behavior is to think about what an anthropologist does. So my background is in culture and human behavior, psychology, which is a discipline that is a blend of anthropology, psychology and sociology.
I will not bore you with all the details of it, but if you think about an anthropologist, what are they always doing? They're putting the human being back at the center and using the human being and the collective tribe, if you will, to understand why we behave in the way we do and why we create the systems that we do and how we connect with one another.
Sociologists also do this. Psychologists we're looking more at the specific individual, but like I said, context always matters. So when I think about something like the future of work, which is where I spend a lot of my time thinking when I do futures work it's generally these days about the future of work and that means a lot of things.
But the idea here for me is, and I think where I offer the most value is that I'm always putting the human back at the center. So you hear conversations about the future of work, which take the human being out. And I can't ever understand that because work is nothing
if there's not a human in inside of this idea of work, there's no such thing as a vocation, unless there's a human being inside of it. Now you can have things that are built in production that happens, and that's an assembly line, or you have an AI that produces something that is production.
Work, the idea of work itself or vocation, the very definition of that requires that there's a human being inside of it.
So when I talk about the future of work, I'm talking about what is the revolution at this stage in our human evolution, around how we're making sense about our working lives?
Where does it fit into the context of what it means to be human at this juncture in our history? So that does have things to do with like flexibility. Sure. Because flexibility tells us where do I wanna live and work, but it means more than that. If I move somewhere else, outside of a big city hub where I used to have to work.
Then where does the community get built?
Amanda Reeves: Mm.
Ciela Hartanov: What does collective look like now? Where do we build collective tribes? So what I'm interested in is this downstream impacts of some of these things that we've been talking about as the center of the future of work, but that are really about the human condition.
Amanda Reeves: How do you see the role of work in culture, in society, at this point?
Ciela Hartanov: Yeah, I think it's actually really shifting and the answer often with futures work of course, is it depends.
Amanda Reeves: Yes.
Ciela Hartanov: I think there's a few different scenarios at play. There's a set of people that I would say that are saying work is not central. Work is a piece of building a life. And so I'm gonna make different choices about the centrality of work, and I'm gonna place it in its proper equation in the landscape of my life. So there's a group of folks who are doing that. This is where we started talking about the great resignation. You can call it whatever you want, but this is basically a reconsideration of where work is placed.
And in that analysis, a lot of it has been placing work not as primary. So there's that. There's another scenario set of people who are saying work still is primary and it absolutely matters, but it only matters if it's purposeful.
And if I can align to an organization whose purpose aligns with mine and so that I can put agency inside my work, but work is still primary.
So there's that sort of conversation that's happening inside work as well. It all depends on, where I go back to, of course, is the human being. So what are the segments of human beings and how are they making sense of it? And I'm sure we could articulate probably two or three more segments of human perspective on where work is going.
One of the things that is problematic when we talk about the future of work, we talk about it as if it's one future. I think we should say the futures of work.
There's going to be multiple iterations in different ways that people relate to it and are making choices about it. There's not just one.
Amanda Reeves: It's interesting. I feel like one of the challenges that we are really grappling with at the moment is how much our work and what we do and how we do it is tied up to our sense of value. And it's a really interesting thing to watch that becoming more apparent and to watch people reckoning with that, as we have, you know, all of these changes in how we work, what it means to work. What does good work look like?
Ciela Hartanov: Yeah, I love that you brought this up because I've been thinking a lot about identity in particular, since I left Google, because working at a large corporation like Google you almost become self-identified. What I would say about that is this is an engagement strategy. This is on purpose. Organizations are creating this sense that you are part of us so that you will give discretionary effort. You'll build friendships there, you'll build community there. And then of course, what will you do? You will stay
Amanda Reeves: Mm-hmm
Ciela Hartanov: It's part of the engagement strategy. What does that mean, then, for people who are in that first camp of the futures that I just described, who are saying work is not the center of my life, my identity.
Then it becomes a different type of grappling and thinking about who am I without work as central? What else has centrality to me? I think we've done people a disservice, because we haven't introduced these types of conversations or how to, what even questions to ask yourself about your identity beyond the workplace, because what do we ask children?
We ask them, What do you wanna be when you grow up? And be, it's not, it's really, what it means is what job do you wanna have? We're not actually answering the real question, because if we were asking, what do you wanna be? That's actually a phenomenal question. That's the right question. It's just we've taught the wrong answers.
I completely agree with you. We're at a juncture where we need to start having more conversations about identity, and identity in work. I did a podcast series with a few colleagues of mine, one of who's in Australia. And we had one episode, which was all devoted to identity.
And that episode came pretty much right on me sort, the cuffs of me coming out of Google.
And so if you're interested, and I actually should go back and listen to it because it was a very raw conversation about what does it look like to disentangle yourself from a corporate identity?
It's not easy work, but it's imperative. If we want to, if you're in that camp where you wanna reclaim where you place work, the question does become then who are you outside of that?
Amanda Reeves: Really redefining that relationship with work.
Ciela Hartanov: Yeah. We're looking to a lot of organizations to answer that for us, but in some ways there's a real individual and psychological grappling that needs to happen. And that, that is just a deeper way of thinking about work as for an individual versus for an economy, for example.
Amanda Reeves: And different individuals will have different answers.
Ciela Hartanov: Absolutely. And that needs to be accounted and allowed for.
Amanda Reeves: I'd like to ask you about what you are noticing at the moment, in terms of the emerging futures, what's capturing your attention as Ciela the human?
Ciela Hartanov: Yeah.
Well, it's hard to disentangle those two things that we, as we just talked about. I live looking for edge cases, and so that's always interesting to me. There was an article that just came out today in the New York Times about the founder of Patagonia.
Amanda Reeves: Yes!
Ciela Hartanov: That is capturing my attention.
And the reason why is because I think it's profound. We've talked a lot about, so for those who haven't looked at the article, essentially the owners of Patagonia have given away the company, they've put it into a trust, or a couple of trusts that will work to combat climate change and issues with the environment.
So all future earnings from Patagonia will not go to the founders, it will go directly into this trust and the trust will basically be given into these really important issues. So I read the article a couple of times. I read it twice because I was trying to understand a couple of things.
One is there's this thing that happens inside, at least the future of work conversations, which says legally, our structures can't do that.
Amanda Reeves: Mm-hmm
Ciela Hartanov: Our systems are not set up for that. And it's a really easy way to, to get out of changing how work works. So what was interesting to me about my first read of that article is I was wondering how did they actually structure that and make that work?
What it came to is, they don't have all the details in the article obviously, but what was interesting to me about it is it took time, one,
Amanda Reeves: Mm-hmm.
Ciela Hartanov: and it took the extreme commitment of the founders. They kept pushing and they kept saying, I don't want this company to go public, which is the other option. I don't want that to happen.
And here's the reasons why. And so we have to find another answer. We have to find another answer. So this extreme commitment to finding a new way. Beyond the traditional ways that the law would tell us or the regulations would tell us or the best practice would tell us. And that is really important, I think, when we talk about futures work. So that's really capturing me because it's a mindset shift to say there has to be a new way and we're gonna find it. I love working with leaders who are like that. Those are the leaders who I wanna be working with. I was just astounded. I thought, yes, that's the kind of leader I wanna be working with. Who's not asking me for the 10 step tips because they don't work anymore. And it's like, I wanna find the new way.
So I was looking for that in the article. It was like, how do we get past this idea that the system won't allow it. And then of course, because of my background in human behavior. I was just wondering about the psychology of the founder and how did he maintain his sense of what was right for him and his sense of his values and not be captured
Amanda Reeves: Mmm.
Ciela Hartanov: by what so many other billionaires get captured by, which is grandiosity. And he didn't get captured.
Amanda Reeves: I imagine it's very intoxicating.
Ciela Hartanov: intoxicating. Right? You could have anything you want and anyone wants to talk to you. And how did he not get captured by that? Because that is part of the problem with work is that there's this idea that getting rich is the end game.
And yet that was never his end game. And he stuck to that, he never wavered from that. So some of what I'm thinking about right now, then in the context of that is relates to your identity question. How do we build enough identity and fortitude that we can be solid as we are thinking about our own working lives. So we don't get swayed, and we can stay true and authentic in our path.
Amanda Reeves: One of the phrases that stuck out to me from that article was describing him as a reluctant billionaire. It got me thinking about that idea that the best leaders are leaders who were reluctant leaders who didn't want to take this power. who didn't wanna have this amount of responsibility, but they are doing it out of a sense of duty to other people. And I wonder if that's a really important component. of this, that it's not that he's set out to become a billionaire, it's not the guiding star.
Ciela Hartanov: It's not the guiding star. I think you're right. There's something about that because if your goal is to become a billionaire, then of course that is the end game. So he would've won, but that wasn't, that was never his end game. In fact, it wasn't probably even in his consciousness.
Amanda Reeves: Mm.
Ciela Hartanov: So that's one thing I'm watching, and I've been looking at B corps for some time and wondering how is that gonna unfold? I think that's a really important part of the future of work, because it talks about what is the purpose of an organization writ large?
Is it to make money or is it to do good? What is it? So that's always interesting to me. Yes, that relates to my practice and as my consulting work, but it also relates to just what I care about as a human being.
How are we evolving and what do we care about as a society? Because work reflects that.
Amanda Reeves: Absolutely. And what is work for?
Ciela Hartanov: And what is work for.
Amanda Reeves: Mm.
Ciela Hartanov: The other thing I'm looking at a lot lately too, is there's just this level of burnout, and it's just unsustainable. And for me personally, I, I really worry, because what has started to happen is now that I've stepped out of the corporate environment and now I consult with people who are in the corporate environment, I look back. And when I'm in conversations with my clients, and I think that used to be me.
I used to be that burnt out, I used to be that ragged. I used to show up at meetings and be completely disoriented. What is this meeting for? I had no center place to go back to. I was completely ungrounded. I mean, maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit.
I still was doing yoga. You know, I was trying to, I was trying to find my place, but, but I can see myself reflected back to me. And I think about those who don't have the choice to leave, or try out something new, or go out on their own.
And when you don't have choices and this is the only choice you can make, what a disservice that is to just living a life and being a human being in the human condition. So, so much of my interest right now is where is the humanity, and how do we put that back inside of our working lives? But, frankly, just our lives in general.
Amanda Reeves: Ciela, we've talked a little bit about a range of different things that you do, and your background. I'm curious, when you meet someone new, say, at a dinner party and they ask you, what do you do? And they don't necessarily understand what it is you do, what tell them?
Ciela Hartanov: I love this question because it's a it depends on the day
Amanda Reeves: It's a great futurist question. It depends.
Ciela Hartanov: Right now what I say, like, what I tell my mom is I say, you know, I work with leaders and organizations to make work feel better.
Amanda Reeves: Hmm.
Ciela Hartanov: And that's probably the closest I have to aligning a, sort of a mission statement with the practicalities of what I do day to day. But sometimes I'll say, you know, I'm a researcher and writer and I think about our working lives.
Amanda Reeves: Mmm.
Ciela Hartanov: And then sometimes I'm saying I'm inventing the future of work and we're moving past the industrial era.
But people don't always understand what that means. Yeah.
Amanda Reeves: I'm so interested in this idea of how do we get past the industrial revolution, you know, hundreds of years later. But I think one of the really interesting things about COVID has been so many organizations have been working in a really lean way and lean very much comes from that production line.
And how can we, how can we strip away what's unnecessary? And that works really well in some circumstances, but when there are the conditions that support it. And I think one of the most interesting things about COVID has been that it has challenged some of those assumptions that we have about, well, I only need to have one packet of toilet paper in the office because I know I can always just pop down the road and get one.
I don't know if you had the toilet paper crisis
Ciela Hartanov: Yeah, there was definitely a mad rush to Costco Yes. And I love that you're bringing that up because that's such a great example of one of the systems or structures that we have taken for granted, what we thought was the right way is to create efficiency. And that was the goal was to create efficiency. And now we know the goal actually is to create an effective organization.
And that means that in some places you can't be lean. Unfortunately, I don't think all corporations have learned that, and what we're starting to see with some of the layoffs, at least that are happening in the tech industry, which is where I spend most of my time. I'm fearful that some of the choices that are being made are going back to this idea of the lean model versus realizing in some ways you really do need slack in a system in order to flex
Amanda Reeves: Yes.
Ciela Hartanov: And flexibility is not just, of course, in the future work way, but in the organizational structure way and being able to adjust and adapt to changing terrain, that is the penultimate necessity of corporate right now. And there's a tension because I think organizations actually understand that. And yet they're not willing to break the system that they know and understand.
Amanda Reeves: It's also so necessary for being able to do sustainable work, that without that flex in there, we can't sustain our work because as soon as there's any kind of surprise, which happens more often, than we care for it to, we don't have any slack in the system to be able to respond and take that jolt.
Ciela Hartanov: No, you don't have a colleague who's available to help you. And so it's just take more and more.
Amanda Reeves: Yeah.
Ciela Hartanov: And hopefully over time, we'll learn some new ways to handle that.
I mean, I think the unspoken piece of this, of course though, is that when you're working in a capitalist system, or you're running a public company, there's always that push to provide more returns, and to put slack in the system means actually less returns perhaps initially, like maybe there's a new model where over time that won't be the case. But that goes of course, back to Patagonia, and why the founder saying, I will not let this be a public company because of course he knows, then you can't have this kind of slack in a system whereby you can actually address longer range issues or to be a longer term thinker.
Amanda Reeves: For our listeners who are early on in their foresight journey, I'd really like to ask if you can tell us a bit more about how you've built your own foresight skills and practice without formal training.
Ciela Hartanov: Sure, I'm happy to. So when I was starting out this idea about wanting to think about the future of leadership, I thankfully reached out and was able to find someone who is very skilled in futures work and brought that person along as a consultant to me in the project that I was working on.
So this won't be a surprise, but it was almost like an apprenticeship, I would say. And so we worked side by side. Of course me knowing the organization, me being a leadership development expert, I brought all those pieces to the table and she very graciously brought a lot of her foresight and strategy skills to the table.
So between the two of us, we were able to build a really great plan and approach, but I really viewed myself as a learner alongside her and not an expert. And because of that, I was able to receive this on the job training. That's a recommendation I have. If you don't, or can't, do some of the formal training, who could you align with to do a project with? What skills might you have that that person could value and use and partner up together?
So that's one piece of it. The other piece is that of course, formal training is wonderful, but you can also just go and look up what books are you reading? Or who should I follow? And what podcast should I listen to? And because of my, just, avid love of learning, I do that all the time and I continue to learn that way to help myself understand the skills.
So I've read so many books thinking about what are the models? How do people do this? Lots of different, there's so many different foresight, like think tanks, who produce reports and you can go in and you can read them all and you can look about how do they package and what story are they telling.
So that's another way that I've learned also.
And then of course, over time as I was working at Google building Next Practice Innovation Lab, I was able to take that and put it into practice by building my own research methodology that then was adopted by Google. So that's the other piece that I would say is important is you learn from someone, you gather a lot of knowledge through executing a project together, and then at some point you just have to do the work. And so, of course I probably have had some missteps, but, who hasn't?
But building a model and executing it through see where were the gaps, how did this work? How did this not work? And over time, just refining it. So that's been my process to figure out the futures work.
But of course there's still always more to learn.
Amanda Reeves: And can I ask for our listeners who are trying to bring foresight into the way that they do things within an organization, can you tell us a bit about how you integrated foresight into the work you were doing in that Innovation Lab?
Ciela Hartanov: Absolutely. So the model that I built was based on using futures and current data to create insights. So the first lesson that I would share that, that I learned is that you have to understand what the organization that you're working in cares about. So what the organization that I worked in cared about was using analytics and data driven and data backed.
And I understood that well, but that's very much focused on the now. So the model that I built said, okay, yes, that still matters. Let's keep that in the mix. And then let's add in the future forward thinking and the edge cases, and then we're gonna blend those two things together and create an insight profile that tells us what matters now and what matters next.
Amanda Reeves: Nice.
Ciela Hartanov: By doing that, I was able to solve a current problem if you will, or basically just work within the mindset and the mindset constraints of the corporation that I was working in, but also push them just a little bit further. The thing about foresight work, my experience in the corporate world is that you can't push people farther than what they handle.
And maybe if you're working in a think tank, that's really is thinking, you know, 20 years out and trying to build scenarios for that. And they accept that, that's a different beast. But when I'm thinking about the corporate environment, it's much more about, six months from now, what are we gonna be solving for? A strategy, very practical.
And then what's the added layer of beyond that so that you can start getting people more familiar and equipped, and then over time you can push the futures thinking out further. But for me, I had to really pull it in to get buy in and access. So that was part of the model that was built, was understanding where does insights come from and what insights will people buy.
Amanda Reeves: It's that approach of meeting people where they are, what already matters, how are we doing things now, and then stretching them, but not so that they break. Yeah.
Ciela Hartanov: That's right. And of course, I know you just mentioned that you have an organization change background. And the first thing that we're always taught in organization change is about readiness.
So where is the organization and where is their readiness and meeting them and then pushing just a little bit beyond that, but you can't push them to the edge or else you don't have a place to start.
Amanda Reeves: Is there anything that you wanted to talk about today that we haven't spoken about?
Ciela Hartanov: Well, I guess what I would wanna say about futurism or foresight work is that sometimes I think it can feel daunting, or maybe like an exclusive club, and I just wanna sort of myth bust that because every strategy right now needs some foresight work put into it. And I think about, I think it was Amy Webb, who's a very famous futurist, during COVID she said everyone now needs to be a futurist.
And I loved that because it's a democratization of the field of foresight as essential to working in this uncertain and volatile time.
Amanda Reeves: Mm.
Ciela Hartanov: And for me, that's why I am really interested in putting organization change and effectiveness alongside futures work, because we need to build strategies that have more longevity than ever before, or at least are more adaptable. Even if they can't have longevity, at least they can be adaptable if we're bringing more foresight into the discipline. So I'm writing a book right now, which is really talking about this. And my book thesis is that all of us need to become better sense makers, be better foresight practitioners, be better prospective takers. And that is for all of us to do, not just for people who have foresight in their title or who went to a foresight program. So I just wanna create an invitation that it's up to all of us to think wider if we wanna create a better future.
Amanda Reeves: Lovely. Well Ciela, on behalf of the FuturePod community, thank you so much for taking the time today to chat with us. It's been so interesting hearing about your journey, and I love the work that you're doing, bringing human behaviors and organizational development and foresight together.
It's just such a rich and exciting space and I've loved hearing about it.
Ciela Hartanov: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to meet you.
Amanda Reeves: My guest today was Dr. Ciela Hartanov.
I hope you enjoyed today's conversation as much as I did.
FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters.
If you'd like to support the pod, please check out our Patreon on the website. I'm Amanda Reeves. Thanks for joining me today.