Maggie Greyson MDes is an award-winning professional futurist and the CEO of Futures Present. This boutique agency helps people make decisions in times of extreme uncertainty using design and futures thinking practices.
Her first profession was in the theatre, where she spent a decade in the US, UK, and Canada winning awards for her set, lighting, and costume designs on stages like the Shakespeare’s International Globe in London. She learned that creating a relationship with the audience is fundamental if a story is to have meaning. She continues to use design, scenarios, and fiction to transform lives.
Experience with Fortune 100 companies in tech innovation and digital media helps her to understand what future-thinking mavericks need to be leaders in the 21st century. In addition, she supports the people who want to make a social impact through their work in the cultural sector, governments, universities, healthcare, tech, and non-profit organizations.
Maggie is recognized as a leading futurist, on the Board of the Association of Professional Futurists, and a Fellow of the School of International Futures. In addition, she leads workshops on How to Think Like a Futurist.
Her side hustle is walking her two happy and healthy husky rescues.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
More about Maggie
LinkedIn: Maggie Greyson MDes, APF
E-mail: mg@futurespresent.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/maggie_greyson
Futures Present: https://www.futurespresent.com/
We will help you to think about tomorrow's futures amid present uncertainty. We help you to value uncertainty and embrace the change you seek. Each program is designed in service to your goals using a multi-disciplinary team of futurists, designers, and innovation experts.
References:
Making Futures Present - The Handbook For Future Thinking Mavericks And Next Level Decision Making In Times of Extreme Uncertainty
Greyson, Amy Helen Margaret (2017) Making the Futures Present. [MRP]
The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies 2020 “Design for the Abstract Qualities of Futures Studies”
UNESCO Futures Literacy Summit 2020 “Blended Futures: Learning from Art, Design, Urban Design, Sci-Fi & Algorithmics for Foresight”
School of International Futures Fellow Next Generation Foresight Practitioners
3 ground rules, 3 simple questions, and an artifact to help you think about your post-COVID futures
After Shock: The World’s Foremost Futurists Reflect on 50 Years of Future Shock―and Look Ahead to the Next 50 “Designing the carefully contrived experiences in Future Shock, a classic that is 50 years young”
Interactive futures experience: Nod from 2050
Audio Transcript
Peter Hayward: Do you need to be a Maverick? Or have a Maverick moment in order to create a future's culture in organizations?
Maggie Greyson: One of the things that really gets under my skin is when someone is interviewed, who's had a career for 30 years, let's talk to the Rolling Stones. And they'll start an interview with one thing led to another, and here we are. And it makes my skin itch because it doesn't happen like that. It's not true. There's intention and there is circumstance and opportunity and patience and setbacks and everything. And I think the term maverick connotes like a magical moment where someone can walk into a room, slam down a solution that everyone has an emotional reaction to, and either you go or you don't go. But I can point to many stories in my life where there's a scaffolding or a laddering of little decisions that create epic results.
Peter Hayward: That is Maggie Greyson who is my guest on Futurepod today. Maggie is a Design and Foresight consultant who works with maverick thinkers and leaders in organizations to help them make resilient decisions.
Welcome to Future Pod Maggie.
Maggie Greyson: Thanks, Peter. It's such a joy to be here. I've been listening to the podcast for many years and have been conniving on how I could possibly get your attention because there's so many cool things that I've learned from this. It's made a huge influence on how I see the work that I do. So thank you.
Peter Hayward: Wow. I'm blushing. If you're an avid listener, then you know the avid listener. The first question is the origin question. So what is the Maggie Greyson origin question. How did you get involved with this weird, wonderful futures and foresight community?
Maggie Greyson: I love that you call it a community because I wasn't sure how to describe it to somebody else the other day. Profession or gaggle or, herd? And it really does honestly feel like a community and everyone's got a part to play in it.
I can start with that. When I was a kid, I didn't think I'd be helping maverick decision makers. I love drawing and making art, but I realized I had a talent for interpretation and not really find motor skills. I could translate a concept into something that you can physically point at or understand with your senses.
but I still didn't know how to contribute to the world. I was a pretty insecure kid and spent a lot of time with books and TV where I got my understanding of the world. If a topic was taboo on tv, then it was hard to talk about in real life. So when you're watching TV shows from the fifties model housewife and so on is very the role model of the time. I was able to identify that I was this recipient of a safe and happy life because of generations of suffering and struggle before me. But I felt guilty that I wasn't living in the real world, quote unquote, and that's become a driver for me to hold those two halves at the same time. I'm grateful to be safe and healthy, but restless because I have more to give with a solid foundation of love and support for my well-educated and sophisticated parents that gave me the life that I have.
So I had lots of false starts in my studies until I found a program for theater design at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. The education, the community of artists and the diverse culture of a bilingual city really inspired me. I developed a mature aesthetic and stayed in theater design for 10 years. I worked in the US, London, Toronto, Edinburgh, and assisted world class designers on both authentic reproductions and futuristic interpretations of Shakespeare and Greek tragedies. I sat in rehearsal halls for 10 years watching actors and directors discuss the nuance in the text and how that reinterpretation could change the entire relationship and story. As a prop maker, I would give them a dagger made of plastic, and then they had to do the work to make it a significant threat or turning point in the play. I was part of a team of highly creative people orienting themselves towards opening night. There's a lot of pressure in serving the product. We're all starting with a eight and a half by 11 piece of paper with 10 point font on it, and creating a world that means something to an audience in exchange for their time and money. So aside from the technical skills of being a designer, I used research, empathy, and intuition to help others do the best they can. And that is a bit of the approach I bring to my work today.
Peter Hayward: So that kind of makes, that's like a contained sense of that Maggie and then did that just ease into the future space or was it actually a disruption from that? The Maggie we've got now?
Maggie Greyson: Thank you. So working in the theater may sound glamorous, but I spent many late nights alone.
Peter Hayward: it's passion and poverty together, .
Maggie Greyson: It is. And I've been looking for non poverty and still very passionate about my work. But either I was working really late nights at home alone or pounding the pavement with my portfolio in hand. It was, boom or bust. And for many people it's all or nothing. In Canada, very few people are lucky enough to have this as a sustainable career. So I always had one foot out the door hoping to transfer my skills into something that was, had a rewarding income, but was still collaborative, story driven, and had social impact.
So lucky for me in 2006, I met Suzanne Stein because I was invited to be a resident at the Canadian Film Center to study interactive media. Suzanne brought a trend deck and I practically had this thing in my wallet and showed it to anyone and everyone who I could talk to about it. Eight years until I applied to the program. So she I've, I because of that experience in the Canadian Film Center program I followed down the path with Interactive Media, which led me to work in marketing communications with big tech companies like Rogers and GE and Nissan. I developed a definition of innovation that served my clients very well.
I tested their risk appetite with innovation and would deliver something that was outside their comfort zone so that they'd get excited about the possibility of change. Finding out someone's baseline beliefs about change and managing their expectations through it is another approach that I bring to my work today. So since I thought Suzanne was the bees knee, I kept track of what she was involved in, which turned out to be founding the Masters of Design in Strategic Foresight and innovation at the Ontario College Art Design University. I went through the program and gain the language to help Mavericks to understand their risk appetite and what they need to lead change. So working with Suzanne and many of the other brilliant teachers and students in the program changed my life and I'm for forever grateful to the community of social minded thinkers that it attracts.
Peter Hayward: You've introduced the word. I think that's gonna come up a couple of times today. The Maverick. So what is it? . Okay. Who are mavericks? What makes a person a maverick and why are you, I'm gonna say so interested in working with mavericks.
Maggie Greyson: I think I'm drawn to mavericks and what I think of maverick is an archetype that people can put that hat on if they want to, in the right circumstances, when it requires challenging thinking, when it requires looking around a corner where other people aren't. So it's both a mindset and a way of being in the world. And I actually spoke to a woman named Billy
Billy Carn (http://maverickwisdom.com/ MAVERICK WISDOM INSIGHTS AND STORIES FROM ENTERPRISING MAVERICKS WHO CHALLENGE THE STATUS QUO) who wrote about mavericks and she interviewed 99 mavericks. And each one is a recorded podcast about half an hour, and she's got a list of 10 questions and asks each maverick, Why do you do what you do? So it's seems not to be a consistent definition for each person. And that there's not necessarily a self identification as a maverick. It's someone who just has the optimism and humility and empathy and self-reflexive ability to try something a little bit different and be okay to not get it right.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, I'm looking at this through the lens of art. Of course, you can be maverick in many ways. In the Arts field mavericks are often outside the norms and outside the morals of culture and choose to do that. Choose to almost be maverick and not to accept that there is collateral effects of what they do, but to almost simply say of course there are, I'm actually a maverick in order to create the collateral effects. Are you a maverick? ? You talk about them, but are you a maverick or were you a maverick?
Maggie Greyson: Yeah, I didn't think I was until a good friend of mine described the book that I was writing as a well organized leap of faith for mavericks. And she said, you're gonna know this because you are one. One of the things that really gets under my skin is when someone is interviewed, who's had a career for 30 years, let's talk to the Rolling Stones. And they'll start an interview with one thing led to another, and here we are. And it makes my skin itch because it doesn't happen like that. It's not true. There's intention and there is circumstance and opportunity and patience and setbacks and everything. And I think the term maverick connotes like a magical moment where someone can walk into a room, slam down a solution that everyone has an emotional reaction to, and either you go or you don't go. But I can point to many stories in my life where there's a scaffolding or a laddering of little decisions that create epic results. But I don't consider myself a maverick because it doesn't happen at once.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. When we can see fundamental change and we can see maverick ness looking back in hindsight from where we were to where we are. But in the moment, in the present, it's lesser being a maverick and more just being stubborn, determined and prepared to just stick at something in order for the future to emerge.
Maggie Greyson: I think intuition is another word that I would add to that because sometimes there's no words to describe how certain you are about the way things might happen or play out, but a strong comfort in let's just give into this process, or let's give into a decision that doesn't seem to have foundation to it it's that maverick that can hold the space for people to be okay. Yeah. That there is a decision being made.
Peter Hayward: Nice let's move to the work of Maggie. So what's in the bag of tricks that you use and what do you want to talk about and explain to the listeners?
Maggie Greyson: Thank you for asking that question. This one was difficult for me to come up with one tool because there are so many and they all can't be used at the same time for the same reason. So I went back to the research that I did when I was doing my Master's program. At the time I used a series of methods that support scenario development and futures literacy because culture is so important to manifest change. The mavericks that hire me have tremendous hearts and drive, but they can't onboard foresight into their organizational alone. So we work together to create a culture of futures thinking that hopefully becomes a strong reflex and more practitioners get hired to do the work. The serious work that we do. That's a call to action . At the beginning of my Program in starting in 2014, I began completely overwhelmed. I cried in my first systems thinking class. I felt lost in my Design and Business Innovation class. And I couldn't understand a word that my Prof was saying in Human Factors. I thought I could just skate by without learning anything theoretical or complex, and then come out the other side making awesome future tech solutions for science fiction movies.
But when it came time to do my own thing in my major research project, the challenges of what do we do and how we explain it is was still a very big sore spot for me. So my impulse was to help future thinking maverick decision makers to understand strategic foresight by experiencing it firsthand. I wanted to enable them to understand it using their own language, having experienced it. So in this case, I would be the script writer and they would be the main actor interpreting the text in their own way. So at that time, Personal Futures was a very niche area in Future Studies. In 2015 when I started thinking about it Verne Wheelright's PhD thesis was using Future Studies, putting the self at the center of the line of inquiry for example, back casting your relationships with your family or creating four scenarios for your career.
It's a great primer and it's very scalable, and he is done really well for the community by translating his book into many different languages. This made sense to me, but doing the exercises myself didn't make me feel optimistic about my future. So I worked on a technique during my master's program that combined tools from systems thinking, design thinking, ethnography, prototyping, storytelling, and crafts. Stuart Candy was my advisor, and I was also working with a social design organization called In With Forward, that's done some work in Australia.
During my research, I developed a workshop that I called Making Futures Present, and I've since run this workshop with about a hundred people in all life stages from high school to retirement.
So I've broken it into five steps and the content changes, but the technique is elastic and has helped me to generate a lot of insight about how we think about the future. The five steps are listen to what people think they want. Echo back and open the door to possibility. Help them to use uncertainty as a gift. Practice strategy in different contexts, in a low risk environment. And then help them to look more closely at the impacts of their decision before going ahead with the plan.
Peter Hayward: It all sounds obvious when you spell it out that way. I suppose my first question is why do we need to tell people to do what seems to make sense?
Maggie Greyson: Because people are busy and I think that finding a place of calm is a very hard thing to do. Only when you found a place of calm can you even look around at your surroundings and then when you're able to digest or understand what's around you, can you start to look forward and make sense of it?
Peter Hayward: I'm hearing Andy Hines has a term called Permission Foresighting, which is the notion of giving people permission allowing people to pause, to sit, to have fun, to just explore. In my experience working with people in organizations, they love the chance to just do something like this because they don't get to do this very often. You've talked about culture, so if a process like making futures present is done to disturb, The existing culture , then why does the existing culture prevent people doing this naturally?
Maggie Greyson: There is a lot of information that I cannot provide in order to answer that question. However, there's reams and reams of scholars that could talk about organizational culture and development and business strategists that can help to look into why an organization has some rigidity to it. Where there is no space to reflect or make change. One of the things that I learned when I was working with the social service sector in working with people who are street involved, their ability to look at the future is slim to none. And asking them to think about where they wanna be in five years is almost cruelty because they don't have hope. They don't know where they're gonna sleep that night. It leads to the conversation about thinking about the future as a privilege. And so when you're asking someone to, to do something that makes sense, there really has to be an elastic spectrum. For that context, what makes sense? How clear or detailed or strategic that sense making can be really is part of how we create the space for somebody to do the work. So we have to be really sensitive when we're even just facilitating the room about what tools, techniques and questions to ask.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. Your first step is listening and listening, of course, presumes that a person will tell you their truth. And a person's preparedness to tell their truth comes down to whether they feel safe in telling the truth and I wonder whether culture and safety and truth telling and listening to truth is what you're talking about?
Maggie Greyson: A hundred percent. The first step I describe as listen to what people think they want. And so I invite them into thinking about their assumptions, their expectations, sharing their bias. I drew out a model that's a reinterpretation of the Future Cone and I call it the Cones of Multiple Truths and all of the data, all of the stories, all of the interpretation that is coming into the present moment. All of the things that have had happen in their whole life up to that moment. So they're bringing their own sensitivities. What they saw on the news that day, stories that are as old as the beginning of their civilization, all into the room at that time. And what they think they want in the future is also mediated by the stories that came from their past and their assumptions about the present.
And if we think of Dator's four futures and the continuous growth, it's the one that's just preconditioned for some people, not everybody. But it's the assumption about how the future might roll out and the invitation to share their expectations, share their their bias and so on. Share what they anticipate and encouraging them to not value whether it's right or wrong, not to put that that fence around it. And in doing so, what emerges over time is values and how they wanna contribute in the world. And themes that I continue to hear, and whether it's on a micro level, like a really small comment within a response, or they're talking at the systems level, people tend to wanna give back as mentors or coaches or teachers or something. And a lot of comments tend to include something about that.
And comments also tend to include health and wellness and community. An attachment to community, personal futures and personal appreciation of how you construct stories and where they're from and what the value of them is fundamental to my approach in futures thinking. And so I spent a lot of time looking at comfort zones, and there was only one piece of research that I could find in peer reviewed articles that really made sense to me about comfort zone and being outside of your comfort zone. And the mental I model came out of listening to someone talk about helping someone step from one tree to another 30 feet off the ground. And one platform is only a meter away from another platform but the idea of stepping out of your comfort zone and the terror and the and the pushback and all of that friction when you're asking someone to do that, it's very real and doesn't create growth if if it's too taut. So part of the work, which is really critical, is understanding what that growth zone, which is a thin meniscus between comfort zone and outside of comfort zone is, and it's different for everybody. So that's why this is a hard job.
Peter Hayward: A couple of things that strike me, Maggie, is this again, I'm always arking back to this notion of maverick and maverick behavior. This notion of the comfort zone and moving outside the comfort zone is again, a maverick behavior. But not too far. That you basically go from being maverick to being dangerous or just are not helpful. And the other one is this notion of it's okay to play and be wrong. You can't be right about this, therefore there's license to be wrong about this. And I wonder whether that's also part of this kind of culture that you are talking about.
Maggie Greyson: When I think of some of the people who have been mavericks in really, like bogged down traditional organizations, massive ships that can't turn, I think of how warm they are and how much they laugh and radiate. And the people who are rebels or people who are shit disturbers, they don't get a free pass. They can drive their agenda because they feel really right about it. But they might get that once because they're so strong-willed. But the mavericks know that they're so much more involved in getting it right. And in, in my interviews I've found that some people don't even think that there is a wrong or right. It's just change is always going on. You can't get away from making decisions. So just make them, and if you don't make a decision, then the decision is made for you. Yeah. So just being a maverick, it's just getting ahead of inertia.
Peter Hayward: Let's move to, we're not gonna leave Maverick thinking behind, I'm sure, but the futures around Maggie, the emerging things that are getting your attention and why, where is your attention being drawn or where is your attention moving from?
Maggie Greyson: I've noticed something that I'm clustering together, which is "yes and" culture. "Yes and" is a technique in improv where the first person will say, great, I'm on a train and there is someone coming at me and I don't have a ticket. And then the next actor is called in and without any direction other than yes and.
And the next actor will say, so you jumped through the window or something to just keep the story going. And it's a antithesis of "no but". So I'm seeing "yes and" culture a as an impact on culture in little ways. People adding their pronouns to their names. People adding how many parts per million of CO2 were in the air when they were born. I'm seeing the way people title themselves on LinkedIn differently. I'm seeing the Pride flag, which started with seven colors. Now has I apologize cuz I don't have one in front of me to count, but maybe 12 colors. And each opportunity is another way to express the multiple layers of how we are in the world.
Bob Johansen wrote a book called Full Spectrum Thinking, and it is a lot of fun to read. He narrates it as well and he does the great job really pulling out the story of how youth will introduce themselves with 20 different signifiers and that this is something that he's seen across so many different facets of life that he turned me on to the idea of Full Spectrum Thinking. And bringing multiculturalism and our language is changing. Interdependence is a word that has really emerged in the last year. Intergenerational is a new theme in work. And we have a very strong movement in Canada to bring in some of the recommendations from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that took over five years to complete.
And it was an interview of survivors of the resident school system in indigenous and Inuit and and their families and one of the recommendations was a land acknowledgement. So now when we see multiple people coming into a panel discussion from across Canada, they'll say, I reside on the land that was originally governed by, and so on. So it's no longer a street address. It's a geographic coordinate. It's a piece of territory on Turtle Island. And it's a, it's something that will exist long after we do
Peter Hayward: I wonder if you are attentive to "yes and" then you must be very sensitive to "no but"
Maggie Greyson: Yes, I am.
Peter Hayward: Because that cause we are seeing for the best possible intentions there are many people who argue for a future that emerges better from attention to "no but". So how do you sit with that ?
Maggie Greyson: Would you be surprised if I said that I said that it makes my skin crawl? I'm on the Program Advisory committee for a college in Toronto for their journalism program. And I dedicate time to teaching them and mentoring them and hiring them as interns and everything because they're journalistic integrity is critical to sweeping generalizations. I feel quite certain that injecting that level of granularity and nuance into our work is going to help the "no buts." It's very common to read a scenario that is muddy and sentences you don't really string together. It's just a system snapshot. I don't find those to be very helpful. They can create a very strong "no but" in the people who read them. So to counteract that, "no but" having nuanced patina, real life examples, dates, places policies that were enacted. Really help to level an argument into the foundations of what's being discussed. When you have a real life example, you can orient yourself to that real life example. When you have a generalization or a "no but " it's not a fair argument.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. I guess for some people the improvisational nature of the future scares them and they want there to be firm things in the present that they can hold onto in order to move to a future. And then I also see people who deliberately want to leave things behind that have been with us till now. And they wanna embrace the difference, the emergence, the improvisational nature of a different future. How do you sit in those worlds where there are people who are excited and wanting to run to a different future? And there are other people who are saying, I actually like the way things are now. I actually like the history that I'm part of. Zia Sardar said the future is a contest. It's a contest of ideas. There are ideas that go forward and there are ideas that do not go forward. There is the future of gain and the future of loss. When we move to a future, other futures are extinguished. Yes their were multiple possibilities but in the present we've actually closed down the space. We've actually chosen, or it's chosen us.
Maggie Greyson: I learned about a word or a concept called tempo centrality. And the idea is that we are smarter now than we ever have been in the past or ever will be in the future. And it's a phenomenon that our brains need because we can't possibly process the level of detail that we think might happen in the future. Or remember every fragment of every moment that happened in the past. It's a biological imperative that we don't have that all at the same time. So when you've got that biology and we also have a constant stream of menacing stories, it's hard to recognize what is future and what is past. And in the moment I've got my head in a very linear future thinking when I'm answering this question, but I wanna step backwards a little bit and remember that in indigenous culture as an example, they're thinking seven generations ahead and seven generations behind. I learned from Pupul Bisht that in India there is no future. It's just the ever present now. And so the not wanting things to change could perhaps be a very emotional reaction to a very emotional question. If you're not asking the question, they might not be answering that.
Peter Hayward: How does Maggie explain to people what Maggie does when people don't understand what Maggie does?
Maggie Greyson: I help individuals and organizations think about the future so that they can make resilient decisions today. I help serve up the question, what if? so what? and now what? So that they can start to consider, is this what we really want? Are we actually doing what we think we should be doing? Is this actually the problem that we're trying to solve?
Peter Hayward: Do you trade on the design and theater aspect to your past in order for you to do the things you just said?
Maggie Greyson: A hundred percent. I get hired as a designer because I'm a futurist and I get hired as a futurist because I'm a designer. So the projects that I end up doing are at that intersection of communication, understanding, calls to action, and then when I'm working as a futurist, I'm always bringing in tangible experiential learning. And when I'm working as a designer, I always bring in the future into the questions that are being on the put on the table today.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, your business is future's present, which seems to be a provocation in some ways, that a lot of futures is not futures present.
Maggie Greyson: It's a really interesting perspective about the future in the perhaps the future doesn't exist. And it's blurry. It's too blurry to be malleable. So if we make it something that we can point out by constructing little pieces of it that are that can be described in detail then we can bring the future into our present.
And I'll give you an example. I wanted to share very personal story about how I learned that thinking about the future was q uite hard. Not just from a professional experience, but my husband and I were building a house and we had a roofer who actually burned down the house. What helped me get through that torturous time and the trauma of seeing it and the problems with the whole cast of characters that come around and ask you questions.
I made a model, a little model of the house. That when it was finished, it would look like this. And it was the process of building the model and measuring and cutting and thinking and making decisions on the minute level, really losing myself into constructing something that I wanted to see happen really was a very therapeutic process for me. And until that moment I couldn't get calm. And then after I had this model of the house, I could connect with it and then start thinking about living in it.
Peter Hayward: And I imagine the construction of the model wasn't an attempt to totally lock in what the future had to be. It could still be different.
Maggie Greyson: It could still be different. It could still be different. And it was just a just an experience of making decisions, little decisions, one after another.
Peter Hayward: So we're at the last part of the chat, Maggie, and you are writing a book. Wanna tell listeners about the book you're writing ?
Maggie Greyson: Sure. I call this my next book even though I haven't written a book yet, because I want to envision multiple books and also take the pressure off myself of making this book perfect. So I'm writing a book for future thinking maverick decision makers. It's called Making Futures Present, and it's for organizations that are buried in uncertainty and need to make a change. Now in the process of writing this book, I've interviewed people from Meta Arab Interact, Disney CEOs of traditional financial institutions, people in the US Army people in the New Zealand Army high level people in Global Affairs Canada people who run philanthropic organizations, marketing agencies, and many futurists. And also people who have just lost their jobs and people who are just starting their career and. Some really interesting themes are starting to come out. I ask them the same 10 questions and the answers that I'm getting back are on a continuum about confidence. So I'll ask in making decisions and times of uncertainty, what are the biggest challenges, frustrations and fears that you have?
And some of the answers are not having enough information to make the decision or not having the right process to make the decision. They're spinning their wheels on figuring out how to think about it. Other people take the pressure off and say perfection is impossible. Making decisions is inevitable. Some people suggest being a self critic is how they get through it having diversity of thought and it's thinking types, ages disciplines backgrounds, and all of those things comes up as a as a positive and seems to open up a gate for for embracing uncertainty. And I, this is something that I hadn't thought of before until this conversation, perhaps armed terror psychology, perhaps being in a room with people who are different from you and you already recognize that you are not the same and recognize that you are not gonna come to things the same way that you're already breaking a, like you've already got momentum of not knowing. So I don't know. I wonder if Peter, that how that comment resonates with you.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. What struck me, Maggie, was one of the things I observed teaching people. And when you are running. And I used to run workshops that went for days, so I wasn't lecturing. In a traditional lecture format, we tended to run days that went for two or three consecutive days. So in that kind of intensive process, everybody was on their learning journey as an internal process for what I observed was as a group, people often observed how others had changed, how they saw others changing, and the act of observing change in others gave them confidence that they were going okay as well. So it wasn't internal. I need to feel confident. I see you've clearly changed, you've clearly shifted your thinking, and that gives me confidence to continue staying the path.
Maggie Greyson: That's really beautiful. It, it's, it creates a a little micro community in a moment when you recognize someone has changed. I think that's a human quality that we're not gonna get from AI and machine learning and so on. That's exciting for humans. Yeah.
Peter Hayward: Maggie, it's been a challenging and very enjoyable interview. Thank you Maggie for taking some time out to have a chat and talk to the future POD community.
Maggie Greyson: Thank you. And I will throw it back to you and say that this has been a very challenging interview as well because you ask fantastic questions. So thank you for the opportunity. It's really a pleasure.
Peter Hayward: Today's guest was Maggie Greyson. You'll find more information about Maggie and Futures Present in her show notes on the website.
Futurepod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the Pod please check out our Patreon link on the website. I'm Peter Hayward, thanks for joining us today.