Donna Dupont who is a former policy advisor and emergency manager who now applies foresight to strengthen decision-making and she returns to the Pod for a catchup chat.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
Links
FutureMinds Coaching Collective with Dr. John A Sweeney and Donna Dupont
Transcript
Peter Hayward: While we should never wish for a crisis, in hindsight a crisis can give the impetus to build a better future. But that's hard to do in the moment
Donna Dupont: When you are changing, you're stepping outside of the familiar and the comfort zone and it's very uncomfortable and people are feel like with a disruption, once it ends, it's going to go back to what they're familiar with. I think it takes a shift in mindset. I always thought disruption bad. Bring it back to normal. And there is a part of me that's Oh, I just want things to be settled and safe. But I also know we're on the cusp of a whole new way of being in the future. I'm having a lot more empathy for people wanting that safety and security, because I think change is challenging. And I think perhaps we need to improve and help people through the change process more.
Peter Hayward: That is my guest today on FuturePod. Donna Dupont who is a former policy advisor and emergency manager who now applies foresight to strengthen decison-making and she returns to the Pod for a catchup chat
Peter Hayward: Welcome back to FuturePod, Donna.
Donna Dupont: Thank you, Peter. It's wonderful to be back.
Peter Hayward: Five years ago, and you listened to episode 48, I think I said to you in that introduction that we in Australia have just come off our worst bushfires and we're looking at the next emerging pandemic.
Donna Dupont: Yes, you did. Yes, you did. And I remember my response was very quiet at the time I, I was watching the all of the signals and patterns like, like most people, but not sure in so much unpredictability with pandemics.
Donna Dupont: And so wasn't sure what would happen, but certainly we all know what happened shortly after.
Peter Hayward: So how was that for you? Professionally and personally, I would have thought in some respects, given your background, The synergy with emergency management, it would have almost been the best of times.
Donna Dupont: Oh not exactly. It's interesting though, because at the time when the pandemic hit I wasn't working in government as a health emergency manager, like I had done previously with other types of health related or infectious disease emergencies. So it was really different for me. I did have a moment I remember where they were looking for health emergency managers to help out at different operation centers.
Donna Dupont: So to go right into As a planning chief or to help with the planning section and I thought about it for a while. I really did. I thought, I'm a futurist. That's going to go right into the crisis again. I've escaped from crisis thinking or tried to, but now, I was going to go jumping back in.
Donna Dupont: It was not easy decision. I remember speaking to John Sweeney about it. He was my mentor and still is my mentor and yeah. It was, we had a great conversation and at the end I decided to not jump in back into that world, but to be on the outside as an observer and just seeing how things unfolded and some of the cascading consequences that I remember came up in various stages planning meetings as an emergency manager in my previous career, but we're always ruled out as that will never happen.
Donna Dupont: That's impossible. That's too extreme. We can't plan for that worst case scenario. And there's a lot of that makes a lot of sense. It was a lot more extreme than we ever experienced before, and it was prolonged. Typically, emergencies aren't prolonged for years, so it had a very significant impact socially.
Donna Dupont: Still is
Peter Hayward: with us now, still is with us now, we're not even, we're not even through it.
Donna Dupont: Absolutely. Absolutely. And it really impacted trust across the board too, at every level and you can see even family conflicts with different views and different opinions on, just. The health emergency in itself, right?
Peter Hayward: Individual rights versus social need. One of the oldest arguments that no one will ever solve.
Donna Dupont: Absolutely. It's the biggest challenge with these types of emergencies. And it's always the tension point requires very important communications to really help. But it's definitely not, it's not an easy position to be in.
Peter Hayward: Five years. Purple Compass is still around and it's five years mature and it's a, it's got a broader reach. Can you take us maybe through your both professional, personal, intellectual journey over the last five years since we last spoke to you?
Donna Dupont: Yes, I'd love to. So, during the pandemic I jumped in to a role at the Canadian Forces College.
Donna Dupont: Thank you so much. And that was I was stepping in for a colleague who was taking a sabbatical and I became the design director of this capstone program called Shifting Sands. And essentially it's a foresight and design exercise over two weeks on a really complex military challenge. So as the stepping as the new.
Donna Dupont: Acting design director. I had to take the program and re imagine it for a virtual platform and then deliver it with other facilitators within the defense and security community. And it required me to really step into my role as a foresight practitioner in a whole different way, and I grew so much from that experience.
Donna Dupont: And so it was a real unique opportunity working with the Canadian Forces College over the pandemic. It was it allowed me to get into some real complex topics. Somewhere around pan domain war fighting somewhere on national security some were on Arctic security some were even pandemic related as well but what it did is it allowed me to really think about the types of foresight tools and design tools and systems and how you can integrate them and get insights that you can mobilize very quickly and so it was a real rapid.
Donna Dupont: growth period for me in my professional development. And so I, even though I was very nervous stepping into that role I now reflecting on it, it was pivotal for my development and to really just push me outside my comfort zone. Into a very different environment. And then from there, it's opened up a lot of other opportunities through the Canadian Forces College.
Donna Dupont: I was also affiliated with the Archipelago of Design, which is a defense and security collaborative based in Canada, but has a network globally. And Through that affiliation, I was able to become involved with different projects related to climate change and security some at the initial stages of helping to define a new centre of excellence in Montreal, Canada, but also, working with some of the Climate change experts and testing different exercises and using foresight in those ways to really look at how we can enhance our understanding our intelligence and make better decisions.
Donna Dupont: So it's been really interesting. And then. From there I've collaborated on different security projects as well. I had an opportunity to be a principal at the School of International Futures, which was a wonderful opportunity for me. And it allowed me to expand outside of the defense and security world and military futures thinking and See how civilian futurists and how other futurists working on global projects approach different types of methods and how they integrated into their work.
Donna Dupont: And so it allowed me to see security on a different level and like health security and organized crime and even space sector and learning all about that and how important the space sector is and how much change is happening there. For me, I wasn't that wasn't an area that I was involved with in terms of conversations or exposure in the past.
Donna Dupont: But I was so grateful for that project because it allowed me to understand. All of the different tools like satellites and all of the different functions, and especially from a climate change and security and emergency management perspective all of these tools really help with situational awareness and planning operations.
Donna Dupont: So it was it was a really wonderful experience for me.
Peter Hayward: One of the challenges I found when I was working as a consultant, and I want to ask you about it, is content expertise, process expertise, and it's never an either or. No. But when we get opportunities to work in different domains, how much do you have to become subject literate, subject competent?
Peter Hayward: To have the confidence to lead or work with experts in that space because, and you might say you do as much as you have to do, but that by its nature is impossible. . . How have you, what have you learned about Donna and what have you learned about, doing the work we do? Moving across domains, how do you navigate that such that you feel professionally competent, personally competent, but also loading yourself up to simply become a subject expert in every space you work in?
Donna Dupont: Exactly. That's a really great question because and I know a lot of my colleagues we talk about this, often what I've learned from my experience. Especially with working with defense and the military is that I'm not a warfighter. In fact, I'm more of a peacekeeper. So it was really understanding my role in that context and in those spaces and what I was bringing.
Donna Dupont: And I was bringing more the methods or the way of thinking or the way of process. And I would be very. clear with that with the military professionals and senior officers that I was working with around, they are the domain experts, like they understand the system, they understand what's happening.
Donna Dupont: But my role was to help make sense of the patterns and understand what's emerging so that we can. collectively as a group, develop insights. And that worked really well because I wasn't trying to be a war fighter. And in fact, what I learned when you do really good anticipatory futures work in a war fighting space is that you anticipate conflict and then you want to mitigate.
Donna Dupont: So then you start moving towards more the peacekeeping side. And and that was, it makes sense now, looking at it. In retrospect. But at the time, I never really thought of it that way. But that's how my role was in that space. Now, with other security contexts, because I have a background in health, Like clinical background in health and because I have a background in emergency and disaster management, and I've had some experience working with law enforcement professionals, what's common to all of those type of security professionals is the way they anticipate and the way they their mental model is around understanding risk Threats and environments and that was really helpful because I could enter, from where they're at.
Donna Dupont: In terms of how they're seeing the world from that risk threat lens, but also then trying to expand that mental model and also I call them breaking mental model a little bit around just expanding that anticipatory lens to look at things more holistically. And perhaps elements that you know that they don't traditionally look at and to understand the bigger picture.
Donna Dupont: So less tactical, more strategic at the 30,000 view perspective to see the bigger picture in order to understand what could be emerging. So again, what it allowed me to do is bring the process because I'm very process oriented and I try to adapt the process for the context and for the type of project and also what we want to learn from the project itself some might be more systems oriented some might be more foresight future oriented with scenarios so I try to adapt.
Donna Dupont: To the needs of the client as much as possible,
Peter Hayward: if you'll let me, I want to take it down one more rabbit hole and then I'll pass the story back to you you mentioned working with experts and I wonder, given the world we're in it was starting back in 2020 when we first spoke, this whole social attitude where experts are no longer regarded as experts by community, where to be a subject expert puts you on a defensive position of why should I listen to you just because you've studied or you work in this space, or you've got PhDs or qualifications or 30 years experience,
Peter Hayward: what have you noticed of experts you've been working with as to how they're trying to orientate? Their role as expert in a world where experts are just not as respected as they once were.
Donna Dupont: That's a real, really good question. So let me just pause for a moment here.
Donna Dupont: I guess when I. What I've observed from some of the experts that I've encountered is that especially post COVID, with the, that tension between scientific advice and politics, that whole narrative around Experts and also the proliferation of misinformation or it was probably always there, but I think there was more awareness during that time and it just amplified it's a challenge it's definitely a challenge for all professionals working space and I think that there's.
Donna Dupont: There's different degrees of expertise that I think that people can draw on in terms of, more academic, more theoretical versus practical expertise and knowledge and experience from what has happened, what's worked well. And I don't see academics, like in climate change and security and health security holding back.
Donna Dupont: I think that they are still trying to push forward and release important information. I see a lot of really great work coming out around climate change and security and all of the different offshoots around that, but I think it is challenging. At a social level and but I don't see that push back at the organizational level.
Donna Dupont: A lot of organizations when we're doing projects want expert advice and they want to integrate that into the work. They do want the evidence. They want, Understanding what the research says, but then they also want to know, okay, what are the experts? What are they observing? What are they seeing?
Donna Dupont: And where is that information coming? Is it just theory or is it from actual experiential knowledge? So I think this might be an interesting differentiation moving into the future in term. And I try to differentiate when I work on my projects. Thanks. In terms of the type of experts I'm engaging with, the type of expertise you want a broad, nice diversity of different knowledge sets and so making sure that you have that in the mix and that you're getting different perspectives.
Donna Dupont: I think adds to the strength of the process.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, I was wondering too, Donna, whether there's something, as you say, trying to shift people's mindset from just the tactical, when we try to take them to the strategic. I was wondering whether there was anything particularly about trying to also change the perspective as to almost, who does this information have to work with?
Peter Hayward: It's not that we don't listen to the chatter of what happens in social media, what it even the political chatter, but to some extent trying to keep people's focus on what is the task here and what is the strategic task and what is the future that we're trying to anticipate or manage or risk we're trying to mitigate, not let people get it.
Peter Hayward: Distracted by they because these things are done in order to get attention and often the attention they are trying to pull takes you away from what the actual task is.
Donna Dupont: It's true. It's true. A few years ago I attended the world conference of emergency management. And at that conference, there was a concept that was shared called social listening.
Donna Dupont: And I really like this because it was about understanding society's perception of what's happening and not disregarding it understanding, some of it might be based on incorrect information or, different experiences that they've had, but I think, we're I think as professionals it's important to understand the social perspective and to not ignore it and the reason I say this is I remember early on in my career in emergency management and health, anti vaxxers Was, it was an issue then.
Donna Dupont: It was definitely a challenge. And I remember, having conversations with my colleagues about is there a misunderstanding? How can we improve our communication? How do we need to consider, how we message things so that we're not, amplifying challenges or creating a disconnect? So I think that same concept applies for today that we need to be aware of when we're messaging things.
Donna Dupont: When we're sharing things, how others who are outside that area of expertise might perceive it and how we can enhance our communication so that this way it's, it doesn't become a conflict in the
Peter Hayward: future. I'm also hearing in that, Donna, one of the things we talked about. And the last podcast was this notion of empathy, where you actually take something out and you look at it from the perspective of the others affected by it, and it does sound like that social listening is a kind of form of empathy mapping, where we how are others going to interpret it?
Peter Hayward: How are others going to respond to it? What information are they going to take? That's right. And bringing that into the process.
Donna Dupont: Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's about understanding the human element of a lot of these issues and understanding what their needs are. And maybe it requires some new actions to, to settle the anxiety that might be brewing.
Peter Hayward: Back to your story and I won't I'll try to. Stopped taking you down rabbit holes.
Donna Dupont: No, I loved your rabbit holes. Those were really good ones. And we made our way out of the rabbit hole. We did.
For me, it's been a really interesting journey of just learning, through different projects and working with different people.
Donna Dupont: And I think this has been the value of being independent for the last, this is my seventh year and yeah, year seven. Thank you. And I think it's required me, it's certainly not easy to be independent because there is a lot of uncertainty with the next project, the next, the next contract that you'll be working on, but.
Donna Dupont: What it's allowed me to do is learn a lot across a variety of sectors from defense to security and even international development and bring in some of my experience in health and emergency context and where it's appropriate. And I think that has been it's been wonderful, not easy.
Donna Dupont: Definitely not easy, but it has been a wonderful experience, and I think for any professional futurist that really wants to accelerate their learning, that is definitely a way to do it. Not an easy path but definitely it's one that I'm really grateful for and there were moments where I thought, oh boy, this is too hard to continue, but now looking back I'm so grateful.
Donna Dupont: For it, and who knows what the future will hold. I'm always open to different possibilities, but for now, this has been a really incredible journey and of growth.
Peter Hayward: Okay I'm going to take you back to one of those points of growth, just because when I re listened to our podcast, we had a very short, but I thought important conversation where I was talking to you about, the emotional burden and managing and supporting ourselves to do the heavy lifting, to anticipate futures that we don't want to happen, but to really anticipate them as if they are real.
Peter Hayward: And when I raised it with you, I think you even said in the podcast, you'd never really thought of it that way before. But you did say that you'd probably, if After a bit of time and a bit of experience, you might have an answer. Where are you now on how, as a professional, and solo slash, not in an organization, but how do you both understand the emotional aspect of the work we do, and how Do you manage yourself and others in doing this work in a sustained way?
Donna Dupont: Yeah, that's again, another great question. I have definitely thought about this a lot since our podcast, 100%.
Donna Dupont: I think in the early days, I was just very excited and very green in the futures world and just. Excited at any opportunity to learn and grow. I think I know as I've worked on various projects. Some of the content is it can be challenging and it also can be I think very emotionally difficult because you want to be able to really connect to the work.
Donna Dupont: You really want to be able to take in, all of the different elements. Elements that your client needs and so I, I've definitely gone through different waves where I found it to be very challenging at times on emotionally, especially like for different health security projects where you're looking at some of the consequences and the issues and the complexity of some of the challenges and what we want to shape, but the reality of Where things are and sometimes, the challenge overcoming, certain structures and systems for that change.
Donna Dupont: And that can be really hard to accept sometimes because you want to see the positive, you want to see movement. And there were projects where we definitely had strong insights and ideas and you do the best you can to be able to package it for the client. Who then takes it on that next stage of mobilizing that knowledge and translating it for whether it's policy or strategy, because they have to do it from their internal lens.
Donna Dupont: And you never know what impact or what gets shaped differently. And I think that's a little challenging sometimes for me because I really, Even though I know it's a long game in terms of system change and futures it's sometimes you do want to know, are we making progress and we're putting so much of our heart and our emotion into it.
Donna Dupont: And I think about that with every project I'm involved with.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, not that I've got any real answers, Donna, but I had a couple of things I used to lean on to give myself a bit of support. One was when policy goes into the political process, stuff is stripped away.
Peter Hayward: That is the nature of the political process. But if the goodness was not in there, it never gets added. Yeah. We have to put the goodness, the hope, the aspiration, the virtue, into the proposal. Because if it's in there, there's a chance all of it, some of it, gets out the other side.
Peter Hayward: If there's none of it in there. If it's purely pragmatic, if it's purely practical, if it's purely tactical, no one ever adds that stuff later. So that was the first one. And the second one was to stop looking at the outcome and look at the person you were working with.
Donna Dupont: Yeah.
Peter Hayward: Because the real object of the work might not be The project or the policy or whatever else, but it's this person because you talked about it last time about this as a leadership practice.
Peter Hayward: Yes, when you work with a person who's smart enough, good enough, respected enough to have carriage of a. Important piece of work for an organization, and you're working with a proto leader, and if you can instill aspects of this mindset into them as leaders, then what might they, then how might they lead the future once you're forgotten and the work's forgotten, but that person is going on and leading.
Donna Dupont: Yeah, thank you for sharing that. That is, those are two very powerful points. And I agree, reflecting back on my projects and experiences, I know just the process itself, engaging in different conversations. I've had many people say, these are conversations I've never had before. And it's lighting off all different ideas in their mind.
Donna Dupont: And those ideas stay with them. We don't know how it filters into the ecosystem of change but, I do see that ignition of passion through, especially through, these plausible scenarios and getting into really good conversations. Thank you for reminding me of that, because that is very important.
Donna Dupont: And that's a very important part of that leadership. Development and that shifting of mindsets
Peter Hayward: in the last one. You talked about resilience. It was one of the things that was on your website back five years ago. I haven't checked your current website. Apologies. But you were very much. Then, attracted to this idea of resilience, how we can almost, how difficulties, emergencies actually become a thing that we can respond to.
Peter Hayward: They can actually make us stronger. It's a, I think what Nicholas Taleb calls the anti fragile mindset. Disruption that makes you stronger versus fragility is disruption that makes you weaker. Where are you now? On that sort of journey between, resilience, because, and are there other aspects?
Peter Hayward: Because I know in our pre our pre podcast conversation, you also mentioned, I'm going to suggest ideas of surrender or acceptance, which are also very powerful.
Donna Dupont: So that's, resilience. That's been a concept that's been with me for a while, and it came from my emergency management days and.
Donna Dupont: Definitely fueled by other work. I was exposed to and it's still there. I think there's a part that when I think of resilience, I think of this ability to adapt. To a changing environment and to be to not disconnect, from what is happening today. And to, it's an ideal that is really not easy to achieve in the long term, I think sometimes, and it's not me being negative.
Donna Dupont: I think that I think when you think of resiliency outside of a crisis, right? it's really hard to have that kind of, yeah. Intentional change, some are motivated to shift systems and structures and improve things and to become resilient back to how it was
Donna Dupont: for them,
Peter Hayward: that's always one of those things is that people say, let's just go back to how it was. And the answer was, but what happens if wasn't that good?
Donna Dupont: I think it's about, it's when you are changing, when you are adapting, it's, you're stepping outside of the familiar and the comfort zone and it's very uncomfortable.
Donna Dupont: I think I've been thinking a lot more about this in terms of the cognitive side and these biases, people are very comfortable in what they know, And they feel like when there's a disruption, once it ends, it's going to go back to what they're familiar with, that normalcy bias, right?
Donna Dupont: And it's sometimes really hard to break out of that. I think it takes a shift in mindset of how you see things. And I think innovators. Visionaries naturally have that mindset, but I think most people don't and I can speak from my own experience because when I was working in public policy or emergency management, I was very tactical and I didn't really think about resilience on a large scale.
Donna Dupont: I always thought disruption, bad, bring it back to normal, bring it back to baseline, and so I think it's challenging and still is challenging today, even for someone, like me that has been studying futures and practicing futures with all the disruption happening in today's world.
Donna Dupont: There is a part of me that's Oh, I just want things to be. Settled and safe, but I also know that there's, we're on the cusp of a whole new way of being in the future. And there's going to be a lot of restructuring happening on the geopolitical side in the economic side. And there's going to be a lot of Consequences are a ripple effect around that, but it's very uncomfortable.
Donna Dupont: It's very uncomfortable. So I think I'm having a lot more empathy for people, wanting the status quo and wanting that safety and security, because I think change is challenging. And I think perhaps we need. need to improve and help people through the change process more.
Peter Hayward: Maybe again, maybe it's another one of those things that we need to have the conversation about. Yeah, there's uncomfort, I think, as some, as some clever person coined it. The same way that we need to have a conversation about how good was it, this thing that we regard as comfortable, and who was not helped or assisted or a winner.
Peter Hayward: In the world of comfort, because I guarantee we might have been comfortable in that past, but there are a whole lot of people who were uncomfortable in that past. Yeah. And that was that awful truism, but it's used, I've never missed the opportunity provided by a good crisis. It's true.
Donna Dupont: It's true. I think when I reflect on that, I think about just the disruptions in the system and those types of breakdowns, they are, there's a need to recognize them.
Donna Dupont: And to understand the why that's happening and to, as you said, recognize the problem within the system. Those are breaking down or those are disruptive or there's conflict because these are tension points in the current system or the current paradigm. And so it's really important to. Be aware of that, because once you're aware of that, you'll see it from a different perspective.
Donna Dupont: And then it is the entry point to have conversations about what could the future look right? If this is breaking down, where. Where can we go from here? And I think it does require a process of awareness to be able to recognize and see the pattern to make sense of it. And then to also let go of this ideal or this nostalgia of this, how it was, because maybe it was there.
Donna Dupont: Perfect from your perspective. But as you said, when you look at it more holistically, you're going to see the imperfections of that paradigm in that system. And that exists constantly. So I, yeah, I think that I think there's some really interesting work there of helping people recognize the anomalies in the system and being able to let go.
Donna Dupont: In order to allow to be pulled forward into a future.
Peter Hayward: Nice, I like that. So let's wrap this, because it'll probably take us five years to get together to talk again. You're a futurist, I can talk to you about your future and Purple Compass's future, but what are, what are the things on your horizon that are exciting you or challenging you that we might want to talk about for our next podcast.
Donna Dupont: Right now I've been doing a lot of work in consolidating what I've learned across all of my projects the last six, seven years. And I put it together in one model called the futures intelligence lab, and it's pretty new in terms of its ecosystem of five inter connected parts, but it represents different projects and different offerings that I've provided to clients over the years.
Donna Dupont: So I'm really excited about that. And I Just launched two weeks ago, the future minds coaching collective with Dr. John A. Sweeney, which for me is this opportunity to build a learning community around futures, but also to learn from each other about practice and to share, lessons learned strategies and to help each other grow as a community.
Donna Dupont: And that was something that I really wanted. Early days when I was starting out, and I just didn't know how to navigate the system and find that support. I was lucky that I did meet a few people early on in my career, and I had opportunities to volunteer. But for me, that was A really important part of my growth is being able to learn from others, observe, and from what worked for them, and then practice as a community.
Donna Dupont: So that's something I'm very excited. It's very new, and I'm hoping This idea will gain some traction and grow. And
Peter Hayward: you've been doing podcasts. Congratulations.
Donna Dupont: Thank you. Thank you. New podcast hosts for the tension podcast. So new as in one year, it's still pretty new. I have a lot to learn, but it's been excellent.
Donna Dupont: It's a defense and security. Podcast. So I get to speak to really interesting professionals in defense security all over the world. And we talk from a futures design perspective, but it's not technical. It's just talking about the systems and making sense of the complexities of Today's challenges.
Peter Hayward: I've listened to a couple they're good. And they're available. And again, the same reason that, we did, we do the conversations at future parties. We like to have people. Hearing not necessarily only what we think about things, but also how we think about things.
Peter Hayward: Because I actually think the how of thinking is in some ways more important than the content of thinking.
Donna Dupont: You're absolutely right. I love that. I might quote you.
Peter Hayward: Donna, we've we've come to the end of another catch up. It's been delightful to, to talk again and to hear just how much you've grown and how much you're still passionate and excited by the work and working in a really important juicy place of working where, yeah, people. Want to, people want to manage disruptions, but at the same time use disruptions to create futures that they want or prevent futures they don't. Congratulations on how far you've come. I look forward to our next one. And thanks for taking some time out to chat on the pod.
Donna Dupont: Thank you, Peter. This was a fabulous conversation. As always, talking to you, I enjoy, I enjoyed very much. So thank you again for the opportunity to appear on your podcast.
Peter Hayward: Thanks to Donna who I think has very sophisticated and also very empathetic ideas on helping people and organisations manage disruption. FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the Pod then please check out the Patreon link on our website. I'm Peter Hayward thanks for joining me today. Till next time