In episode 232 Peter chats to Betty Sue Flowers, Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus and a writer, editor, and international foresight consultant, with publications ranging from poetry therapy to sustainability.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
References
Audio Transcript
Peter Hayward: Communicating ideas about the future in powerful and influential ways. Its both art and craft, individual and collective.
Betty Sue Flowers: If you're doing scenarios, you're always listening. It really has to do with listening. People think it has to do with the creation of the story. But I try to put that off in my mind as long as possible. And I listen for the dynamics that will create the story. And that means that, for example, when I work with Adam Kahane, I say Adam I just I want to roam and listen. because often the table groups, there's a domineering voice. And if you just can lurk and listen, oh, there's an interesting idea that someone said, and no one picked up. And I'll make a little note, and then I may put that little detail in my first draft and see how people take it. You'll see that the extroverts dominate at the story creation workshop stage, and the introverts stay with the editing process more so it balances out in the end.
Peter Hayward: That is my guest today on FuturePod, Betty Sue Flowers, doyenne of how we communicate powerful ideas about the future and also a celebrated educator to boot.
Peter Hayward: Welcome to Future Pod Betty Sue Flowers.
Betty Sue Flowers: Thank you. I'm delighted to be here.
Peter Hayward: I am delighted to have this chance to have a conversation with you, Betty Sue. So as is our Way with Future Pod, the first question, which a lot of our listeners tell us they love is the story question. So what is the Betty Sue Flowers story? How did you get in tied in, involved with the Futures and Foresight community?
Betty Sue Flowers: Do you want the long version or the short version?
Peter Hayward: I want whatever you tell us, Betty.
Betty Sue Flowers: I think the long version leads into different directions but has a thread that I recognize as the thread of my life. So here’s the background. My father spent most of World War II after D-Day in a German prisoner of war camp. Feeling that as a prisoner, he hadn’t done his duty to the country, he volunteered for the Korean War and left my mother with a new-born baby and my two-year-old brother and five-year-old me with his parents.
My mother was an uneducated, deeply religious person, who prayed the night my father left for war and believed that God told her my father would come back. My grandmother, on the other hand, had suffered through the experience of receiving a letter in World War II saying my father was missing in action and presumed dead. And she was sure she wouldn't have the good luck to have him come back a second time. So I was living in this house with two women, one of whom was deeply depressed, and the other of whom drove the depressed one crazy with her carefree singing. Finally, the tension got so bad that we just had to move out of the house and live with my father's former high school English teacher, who raised parakeets for a living. That's another story.
Now, I, of course, as a five-year-old, wanted to know, is my father coming back? Who's right, my grandmother or my mother? It took me months before I realized neither of them really knew. But the way they were experiencing his absence depended on the story they were telling themselves about the future.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. Wow.
Betty Sue Flowers: So I realized, as a very young child, how important stories of the future are. The story of the future made a difference as to whether you were crying all day or singing all day, even though the knowledge of the future was equally absent from my grandmother and my mother.
I couldn't articulate it then, but I became very interested in stories and eventually got a PhD in English literature. First, I had majored in pre-med because I planned to be a doctor. In high school, several afternoons a week after school, I worked as a volunteer in a hospital. Because I wasn't a registered nurse, I would be sent to sit with dying people, who sometimes told me their stories. So I learned how to listen to stories. Eventually, I realized that what I was interested in was relieving not physical suffering, but unnecessary suffering--the suffering that comes because of the story you're telling yourself about something or other.
As an English major, I became very interested in mythology and archetypal psychology, Jungian psychology. There’s another long story that I won't tell, but I ended up being series consultant for “Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth,” which was a very popular PBS show in the United States.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, I've seen it. It made it to Australia.
Betty Sue Flowers: Oh, it did? Oh my. I edited the book, too. After that book was a number one New York Times bestseller, I got all these calls from people asking, “Would you help me edit my book?” I was directing the University of Texas Honors program at the time. The calls were so numerous that I told my assistant, who answered the phone, that if anyone calls, just say I’m not editing any more books. But one Saturday, I was working alone in the office, and the phone rang. This guy said he was calling from Houston, and he loved “The Power of Myth,” and would I help him edit his book? Sometimes, you just know. I don't know how I knew, but I knew I had to say “Yes.”
Peter Hayward: Yeah.
Betty Sue Flowers: He said his name was Joseph Jaworski. and he had just started something called the American Leadership Forum, and he wanted to write a book about its founding.
Now when you agree to something that comes from your intuition, the rule is—and it's an esoteric rule, a spiritual rule, there's no such written down rule--the rule is you have to do your best, your very best. But it doesn't have to work. You're not in charge of the outcome. You're in charge of doing your best.
And writing books is really hard, and you have to have a lot of patience, and you end up throwing out a lot of what you write. This guy who called me from Houston ha never done a book before, so I figured he wouldn't have the patience to finish. I told him after he ran every morning, to dictate to his secretary and send me the dictation.
Every Friday I got this FedEx package that I just threw into the corner of my office. I didn't even bother opening the packages as they stacked up because I figured he'd give up. But after a few months, he hadn't given up. One day he called and said, “Maybe we should meet and talk about the book.”
Oh my gosh, I'm going to have to read this stuff. So I started reading it, and it was boring except where he talked about his own journey. At that point, I re-dictated the 10 pages out of a hundred that were alive. Then we started meeting occasionally and using an interview method with a tape recorder.
During that time, Joe went to a lecture in Houston by someone from Shell who talked about scenarios. They talked, and Joe was eventually hired to be the director of scenarios at Shell in London for the next three years. He wanted me take a leave of absence from the university and come along to be the scenario editor so we could continue to work on the book after hours. And except for one scenario project, I've worked on every global scenario set at Shell since 1992 as editor.
When Joe and I finished his book, we called it Synchronicity. When that book became a business best seller, we did another book together along with Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer called Presence.
Peter Hayward: It did.
Betty Sue Flowers: So that's how I got into scenarios. I'm sorry my story is so long.
Peter Hayward: No, it's not.
Betty Sue Flowers: My story really is about the power of stories, especially stories of the future. Later, I learned from my friend Marty Seligman, the father of Positive Psychology, that we really think about the future all the time. He's written a book called Homo Prospectus. We humans live through our stories of the future. That's what's given us a strategic advantage in evolution. So to me, future scenarios are at the center of what it means to be a human being.
Peter Hayward: We call them stories, and they're also historic and cultural containers of stories that we've heard and possibly even containers of stories that we've never heard, but we somehow know. I just wanna lean into the thing that they're more than just stories in some respects, because they actually seem to have causal effects on the world. It is not merely an internal narrative, but it appears to shape the reality of the world you are in, which is what you talked about, the power of what the two women that you live with. It shaped completely how they saw the world. The world was different depending upon the story.
Betty Sue Flowers: Yes. I think the universe is so vast and diverse that the question you're answering gets answered because the story you're telling is like a magnet that picks up the things that pertain to it. When I taught world literature, I would tell my students that in earlier times, people thought the world was responsive to you. You could ask a question and open a book at random to get an answer. Sometimes, I would instruct my students to walk outside the class with a burning question that they really wanted answered. “Look for an answer from the world around you, and come back in ten minutes.”
The quickest answer I got was from a woman who just opened the door of our classroom, shut it, and sat back down at her desk. The question she had asked was, “Should I switch my accounting major to drama? I really love drama.” She had opened the door to see a bust of Shakespeare that was in a glass display case across the hall.
Peter Hayward: And again, going back into the ancient history, we got into this notion of the portents and the divination of the future. That because we were in this relationship with reality, then we had to actually interpret what it was that reality was trying to tell us.
Betty Sue Flowers: Yes. But we've lost that.
I call that the religious myth. And by “myth” I don't mean something untrue. A myth is a big story. In the religious myth, the universe is meaningful and responds to us, either through God or Providence or whatever it might be. But after the Enlightenment and the invention of the printing press, the official shared story of truth in the West came out of science, where our stories of the future are often projections from the present through data. We've impoverished the magic that we used to have related to our questions and our expected answers. But we’ve gotten a lot instead. I really love the scientific myth.
Peter Hayward: And Riel Miller, one of his hot topics has been what he calls developing futures literacy. 'cause he says we only have the ability to have conversations about possible futures, alternative futures if we have a rich vocabulary and experience of ideas, myths, narratives, containers. And and what you describe, I hear is part of what Riel is saying is that we have an impoverished vocabulary through which to describe the future. Then all we can borrow from is what we have now and what we recently remember
Betty Sue Flowers: --and what we project through numbers. At Shell before we started working with MIT and doing some very sophisticated modelling, we told our stories in numbers as well as in words, but we called these numbers “quantification.” The numbers were basically based on the story. But now the numbers tend to drive the story because more and more we perceive numbers as a more trustworthy storyteller.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. You were around when Limits to Growth landed, and that was a story I guess you would call it a combination of storytelling and quantitative analysis and modeling. It was a story, it was a powerful narrative, but it also was a story that a lot of leaders and cultures didn't want. Sid,
Betty Sue Flowers: Because the story of the future shapes the present. So are you going to be like China and enforce a one-child policy? Are you going to just ignore the trajectory of the present into the future? And what is growth, really? Can we have it without impoverishing the planet? And can we have it in such a way that women will get educated and choose to have fewer children?
And where do we find the limit? We have to be quite imaginative in how we apply these projections into the future.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. And Wendell Bell, another one of our giants, set in I think, foundations of future studies that all ideas about the future are morally based. So we have to understand the moral basis of the ideas of the future that we find interesting, exciting, provocative, so to speak. So we need to become morally literate as well as imaginatively literate.
Betty Sue Flowers: Stories of the future may be intrinsically, morally based, but usually not consciously. Every story has an intrinsic moral foundation, whether or not we are aware of it.
Peter Hayward: Let's pivot into the second question, which is the one around craft and work. You've got so many aspects of your craft that you could share with the listeners, but is there a particular part of your work and the way you work that you wanna explore in some depth for the listeners' benefit?
Betty Sue Flowers: I would say if you're doing scenarios, you're always listening. The scenario craft really has lot to do with listening. I try to put off the creation of a story as long as possible while I listen for the dynamics that will create the story.
That means, for example, when I work with a team, I just want to roam. I’m happy to lead a break-out group if I’m needed, but I much prefer to roam from table to table and listen. Often in the table groups, there's a domineering voice. If you just lurk and listen, you may pick up on an interesting idea that has been ignored. I'll make a little note, and then I may put that detail in my first draft and see how people respond to it.
I work with multiple drafts given independently to every member of the team. I don’t work with shared documents for a lot of different reasons. One reason is that people begin to respond to the responses rather than to the story. Another is that if a team member sees that someone else has already responded to an issue, they are tempted to just skip making a comment.
I’ve found that the extroverts dominate at the story creation workshop stage, while the introverts engage with the editing process more, so input balances out in the end.
Peter Hayward: So I, if I play that back, Betty Sue, you listening for often the things that are not picked up in conversation, they may be said, but then be left unsaid or left unresponded, and you then find a way to bring those in as spoken in the actual scenarios themselves looking for tensions or pivots or paradoxes or dilemmas in the stories.
Betty Sue Flowers: All of the above.
Peter Hayward: It can't be neat and tidy, can it?
Betty Sue Flowers: It never is. That's what's fun about it. In every scenario project, you're starting at square one. It's just always different even though some of the same dynamics can show sometimes up. One of the most interesting ones usually occurs about three-fourths of the way through the process. There will be a kind of group dark night of the soul, when team members will say, “Oh no, nothing’s working. We'll never get this done.” I don’t know what causes this kind of crisis except, perhaps, the inherent uncertainty of the outcome, but at the point of loss of faith, I’ll look around the room, and I can tell who has been in a scenario process before. Because they're perfectly fine, and the rest are just going crazy.
Peter Hayward: I would say that to some extent there's a collapse of reason. We've got this native simplicity that the world will work out a certain way, and it's like that's the dark night of the soul where the person actually understands that this simple, naive understanding not the case. The center collapses, anything's possible. I think one of the things Adam Kahane talked about was, again, and given that Adam works in futures that are awful in terms of the potentials for things to get worse, there's so much suffering, a potential future suffering that sits with every person in the scenario workshop that they have to somehow find the hope. On the side of the suffering, but you have to sit in the suffering it seems, for a length of time to get past it.
Betty Sue Flowers: A couple of years ago, I worked with Adam on scenarios for the future of the U.S.- China relationship with a team divided between Chinese and American participants. At the beginning of the scenario-building process, we really had to struggle not to have every scenario end in war.
My favorite moment of the workshop occurred at the closing supper when a Chinese woman and an American man began singing a Chinese love song together. And they acted it out by looking into each other's eyes. It was a beautiful moment. And it reminded me that stories, art, and music bring us together as human beings in ways that our politics just don't.
Peter Hayward: Oh, that was gonna be my next question, I've done scenario workshops where we've introduced art as part of the recording process, where we've had artists sit with tables or move around and produce artworks that are not merely trying to capture what is said, but they're trying to capture a whole lot more of the emotional dynamics and beauty.
And that seems to be an important part that we need to do work that has an aesthetic quality as well as a equally intellectual quality.
Betty Sue Flowers: Yes, art helps us appreciate everything. If you look at something long enough, you can begin to love it. When grandmothers show you pictures of a little baby, they’ll say something like, “Isn’t he beautiful!” And of course, every baby looks like Winston Churchill. Then you realize that love can create beauty. And that if you dwell with something long enough, you begin to see the things to love in it, no matter how unlovely it is to begin with.
Peter Hayward: You worked with Peter Schwartz
Betty Sue Flowers: I often quote him, and my path has often crossed his, but I've never actually worked on a project with him, even though we've worked in the same lineage.
Peter Hayward: Scenarios are an interesting methodology, and I say that in a kind of non-committal way because it's a classic consultant tool. And again not the cast aspersions on consultants, but it's a way of trying to take complexity and turn it into a two by two or a couple of drivers and flip it and finish up with four stories. And then there have been all these additional ways that our field has tried to enrich or make more useful the scenario.
And I'm thinking Dator with his archetypes, I'm thinking Adam Kahan with his transformational scenario processes. And then there's of course the absolute craft of writing this thing. And so where do you sit in scenario as method, scenario as process, scenario as a fundamental tool? 'cause there's many positions to take.
Betty Sue Flowers: I don't have a particular methodology to generate scenarios. I do whatever suits the occasion. The shortest scenario work I ever did was over a sandwich lunch when I was on the board of our local public television station in Austin, and we were hiring a new manager. Usually, you consider hiring someone from a market slightly bigger than yours. Over lunch, we discussed two possible visions of the future: one in which we emphasized our origins in being primarily an educational conduit with lots of children’s programming; and another in which we considered ourselves to be a virtual public square for the Austin community, in which we emphasized local public affairs programming. We became excited over the second scenario and then realized that if we were a virtual public square, we would be looking for a community leader rather than a television station manager—someone who knew about politics, for example. So we ended up hiring someone who'd been chief of staff for our former governor, who became a very successful executive for our station. Without exploring two different scenarios about the future, that hire would never have occurred to us.
That process was very quick. With Shell, global scenarios were a three-year project with lots of interviewing and research before I showed up to do the story shaping and editing.
Peter Hayward: How do you choose the way you are going to write a scenario
Betty Sue Flowers: You have to know what they’re going to be used for. Otherwise, you can write brilliant stories of the future that aren’t very useful.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. I used to teach the Mont Fleur scenarios as I point out, it was done by some socialist accountants. So let's sit down and do some scenarios for the socialist accounting organization in South Africa. And you would say, that doesn't sound very interesting. And yet they were talking about a future that they were passionate about, but also very concerned as what the possible futures were. And they finished up writing a set of decision scenarios using the metaphor of birds. And we know that those metaphors made it out of the scenario into the political vernacular. And we know that politicians said, I'm not an ostrich.
Betty Sue Flowers: Yes, I think President De Klerk said that.
Peter Hayward: how is that possible? How does that happen?
Betty Sue Flowers: I think that kind of magic happens when people really want something to work or want change in the world, and when they're part of the same system. And when their hearts come together, it's possible to have change. When people share the same worries or fears, sometimes magic can happen if you're thinking outside the box of what that fear would lead to—the apocalyptic scenario that is always ever present.
Peter Hayward: Yeah.
Betty Sue Flowers: Sometimes I use the matrix methodology just to quickly collect story snippets. But a matrix usually generates a heaven quadrant and a hell quadrant, both of which are quite useless. You have to generate a number of matrices to collect useful story snippets.
I also use the intuitive logics method where you simply collect story snippets and then group them into larger and larger story components. The methodology depends on what the group needs.
Peter Hayward: And it all depends on how long you have got with the group, and it all depends to some extent on Yeah. Where do you stand on the point of people who have to participate in the building of the scenarios? In order for the scenarios to be useful?
Betty Sue Flowers: Senior executives in big corporations are always on borrowed time. They just have no time. Because of the time constraint, you try to engage them in very focused ways. To begin with, you interview them to be sure that your scenarios will cover the topics they're interested in.
At Shell, we would sometimes share little parts of the stories at particular times. I worked for many years with Jeremy Bentham, head of the scenario group at Shell, who had been trained in drama. I think he was particularly skilled in presenting parts of the scenarios as they were developing and gleaning feedback for future development. You can’t engage senior executives in day-long workshops, but there are other way to include them so they feel they are part of the process as scenarios are developed.
Peter Hayward: Yeah,
Peter Hayward: When you went to Shell and you brought your stock of the myths, the literature, the stories from your study as a professor in literature, English, how did they respond to that when you were bringing, were they already literate in that mythological cultural container stuff, or did you bring ideas forward that even they were surprised by?
Betty Sue Flowers: When I first started working at Shell, the scenario team was full of classically trained thinkers. I put a quotation from a Cavafy poem on the inside cover, and a team member criticized me for putting it in English rather than the original Greek—and he even printed out a copy of the original Greek to give to me as a going-away present.
I was walking down the hall with this piece of paper with the Greek poem on it, laughing, and I met another team member who asked me what I was laughing about. I showed him the poem in Greek—and he started reading it in Greek!
I tell that story just to say the team was highly literate. Mythology wasn’t exactly their thing, but they knew the classics and had a sense for elegance of presentation.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. I think that's also part of what you described as listening.
You are not just listening to the words, you are listening to the style, the form, the meter that people are practicing when they speak their ideas.
Betty Sue Flowers: Yes, and you try to give titles and subheadings that prompt people to remember the story even if they don’t re-read the entire scenario. Ideally, people would tell the scenario story in their own voice. Grimms’ fairy tales lasted because each grandmother retold the stories their own way.Homer may be a composite of all the bards that told and retold certain stories, each of them making slight changes or adding to the story. I wanted the Shell stories to be told and used around the world, not just read. If you make key points and titles sticky enough, people insert their own details.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. And again, I suppose back to what I said about Mont Fleur, they were, became, yeah, they became an oral story.
Or elements, the bird motif became the shorthand for that scenario. I'm not an ostrich or I'm a flamingo, or whatever the thing was. So this that,
Betty Sue Flowers: That's because those birds had archetypes associated with them. I say “ostrich,” and you know exactly what that means. And I name a scenario “Icarus,” and you know it’s a story of flying too close to the sun. Maybe you have to grow up in a place like Florida to know that flamingos take off slowly, but together, to fully appreciate what a scenario called “Flight of the Flamingos” suggests. But once you know that, you have a key “lesson” of that particular story of the future of South Africa.
Peter Hayward: This is one that I've been dying to ask you, 'cause it's something that's been rolling around in my little head, Betty Sue, which is, when you look at what AI is doing to the way people hear stories or stories are written. I'm now seeing AI write stories for us and us starting to, learn through AI stories.
And I go back to James Joyce and I think of things like Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, and I was always struck by how much he expected of his reader. Yep. You couldn't read it if you weren't literate on the Bible. Irish politics, contemporary songs. Mythology. Mythology now. So Joyce wrote. With an encyclopedic reader in mind, or he wrote as a provocateur to make his reader become encyclopedic at. When we talk about stories and Riel talks about futures literacy. What's happening to the way we are going to tell stories? If you can accept that people are reading less and reading in less depth, then where is storytelling going? Are we just going back to an oral tradition because that's what we will sustain?
Betty Sue Flowers: From my perspective, that might be nice, but I don't think we can go back to an oral tradition until people can put their phones down for more than 10 minutes at a time to tell or listen to stories. I don't know. One future scenario for AI and storytelling is that people may begin to tell when AI is the author. I think I can already tell in most cases when AI has produced a picture. The AI style is becoming a little cloying. Maybe the same thing will eventually happen with stories unless we learn different ways of constructing prompts. Even then, what the AI is designed to give you is taken from what’s already out there. Before Finnegans Wake, AI couldn’t have produced it because it didn’t exist anywhere on the internet. Maybe we’ll develop greater prompt creativity, however. Who knows?
Peter Hayward: No.
Betty Sue Flowers: Where AI is very powerful is giving us the digested wisdom that is the amalgamation of all of our thinking. Where it's not good is something absolutely new. But maybe, in a literal sense, there’s nothing really new under the sun. You could write different scenarios about the future of AI.
Peter Hayward: And the digital has both upended the linear style of communication, but also emancipated such that anybody can create an image. So we're seeing a blossoming, so to speak, or some would say it's probably a horror of. People who now can produce content. And for audience that, are we also becoming visually literate or are we in fact probably losing a visual literacy as well?
Betty Sue Flowers: Once again, the true artist will show us a way of looking at the world we haven't imagined before. I find AI art to be somewhat predictably representational. You could tell it to produce something in the style of Matisse, for example—but the prompt would have to point to someone whose art is already accessible on the internet. Perhaps AI could churn out a plot, but I wonder how it could produce a complex plot driven by complex and changing human emotions and motivations. But I don't know. We're such babes in this new world.
Peter Hayward: You are both a storyteller and an English emeritus professor. Are we moving to a future where fewer and fewer people learn the ability to write and read at depth? Or does that simply become the next, career opportunity, that those are the things that humans are going to become better at to differentiate themselves from the machines
Betty Sue Flowers: In the near term, we will probably lose literacy, just as people were said to have lost their once astonishing ability to memorize material when printing was introduced. A number of professor friends of mine are working hard to keep AI out of the classroom when they try to teach writing—but it may be a losing battle.
Already younger generations are no longer learning cursive handwriting. It's just not needed if you have opposable thumbs. I don't know how much we'll appreciate our past in this rush to develop the future and not fall behind. We’re at an inflection point.
Peter Hayward: Yeah.
Yeah. I think we have
Betty Sue Flowers: You as well as anyone can imagine different scenarios of the future about that.
Peter Hayward: Yeah.
What else? And as you, as the future swirls around Betty Sue flowers, what are the other things that you are paying, you find yourself paying attention to? Either because you are drawn towards or more you're repelled by them?
Betty Sue Flowers: I want to write about three things if I can figure out how they interact. One is the future of democracy. I'm an American, and the democracy we've known is being threatened, in my opinion. And so where is the opportunity in that? What is the future of democracy? That’s a question in other democracies as well.
The second subject has to do with the ways humans tend to think in binaries, gender being one such binary. Opposites are at the heart of so much of the way we see the world—dark-light, up-down. We learn through binaries.
My interpretation of the Garden of Eden story is that the true sin was not disobedience, but coming into awareness of opposites—that they were male and female. The introduction of the awareness of binaries is where the fall happened. But what if we could see things not just as binaries, which give rise to logics and computers, but also as continuums? What difference might that make in the world? We couldn’t treat “self” and “other” as opposites except only logically.
The third subject has to do with moving from the economic myth that we’re in now to the ecological myth—from an ideal of individual growth to one of community health. We're all in this together. We're all interconnected. If we realize this in a very profound way, we have to “love one another or die,” as the poet says.
So these are three things that occupy my thinking about the future at the moment.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, my sense for all three of them, Betty Sue, is that we shouldn't be surprised that we're seeing a blow back on all three of those things. This rise of fundamentalism in democracy, in relationship and the relationship with nature, we've been through our post World War II Boomer perspective where we could somehow. Become internationalist and have, cultures and be accepting of others and bring them in and become green. And that pendulum went out as far as it went. And now the blowback is coming back the other way. And, democracy has a way to go where we're gonna see more and more pulling back, more and more hardening, and at the same thing with gender and culture, that people want. Your colleague from Houston, Andy Hines, of course, has just published his imagining Beyond Capitalism, which was the podcast that we brought out last week. The pendulum it's interesting. We are seeing this playing out live. It's moving very quickly in all respects, isn't it?
Betty Sue Flowers: Yes. And it never comes back exactly to the same position. So there's always an opportunity, as it swings back, to move in a slightly different direction. And what would that look like? That to me is a future.
Peter Hayward: Yeah.
Betty Sue Flowers: We're in the breakdown phase.
Peter Hayward: Yes.
Betty Sue Flowers: I’m part of the beginning of a project that gathers women from around the world to think together: if we reinvented democracy, what would be different? What does it look like? What do we build on? And what's the future?
Peter Hayward: Is you talk about binaries and how binaries, I won't say they seem fundamental, but they have been fundamental in how much we understand about ourselves, our world, everything we do. Yes. Drawing it back to our little community.
Have we, to some extent, just represented that same preference for binaries. And is that part of what we have had to do as a field to become, more influential or more effective in what we do?
Betty Sue Flowers: I think there's always a gravitational field that attracts us to binaries. Scenarios, especially when there are two scenarios, are often binary. And if there are three, the third one is often an amalgam of the other two. You try to avoid that, but quite often the conversation goes that way. And if you're reflecting the conversation, you can't entirely avoid that, although I try. But I think that's just the nature of the way that our human brains work.
Peter Hayward: And I imagine too that a lot of our colleagues that are trying to earn a living here are often writing them for organizations that have binary needs. So we need a policy, we need a strategy. We need to be able to work out what to do in X. They're not asking for futures and foresight information so they can change their philosophical understanding of reality. And so foresight and futures, by its nature, can be pragmatic. Has to be pragmatic. Otherwise you're not gonna get paid. But then there's all the other aspects of futures and foresight, which you talked about tapping into the mythic the, yeah, the kind of the spiritual connection the non-Western perspective that, the future is not limited just to western, the western mind. Every culture runs time through its culture.
Betty Sue Flowers: Yes. Time comes at you differently from one culture to another. It comes at you differently if you're on the beach versus New York City.
Peter Hayward: Yeah.
Betty Sue Flowers: Time is a weird thing when you think about it. For us humans, it flows in one direction, but who knows what's happening in the black holes. The more you think about life, the stranger it appears.
Peter Hayward: so I'll bring this back to our question about communication. This question of what do we call ourselves and how do we describe ourselves? So I'll ask you the question that I ask every guest, which is, what do you say Betty does to people who don't understand what Betty Sue does?
Betty Sue Flowers: I usually say I'm a scenario writer and editor, and they never know what scenarios are. So that answer always leads to a second question: “Scenarios. What's that?” And I say scenarios are stories of the future that are used to change the present. That answer either stops the conversation or starts one.
Peter Hayward: And in order to tell good stories about the future, we need a good, solid knowledge of what happened in the past. Would you say?
Betty Sue Flowers: I would, in general, say yes. But you really need to have a good ear for what the tensions are in the present and what the official story is, which some of our colleagues call “the ghost scenario.” It's usually one kind of story of what the future is likely to be. If you start working with a company or a group, then it becomes clear that in some way that story of the future is holding back creativity.
So without guessing what form that creativity could or should take, you introduce different futures, which break up the ghost scenario, and then unexpected things happen that may have nothing to do with the scenario set you wrote.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. Sohail Inayatullah has a term he calls a disowned future that often he finds organizations have got a future that they will not talk about.
Oh,
Betty Sue Flowers: But it's your job to figure out what that story is. Sometimes I think of myself not as a story writer, but a story hunter.
Peter Hayward: Yep. And I would imagine you would include little threads of stories that people don't want to have told. You would find ways to just feed some of those in so that they do get heard.
Betty Sue Flowers: Yes. I remember working with Adam Kahane on the future of the drug problem in the American hemisphere for the OAS. The OAS at the time did not want a scenario that had anything to do with legalization of any drugs—so much so that they actually embargoed some of my sentences. A team member had to go through a high-level political figure in a central American country to get these key sentences back.
Peter Hayward: Censorship is always interesting in terms of the human response to censorship. The stories that we don't want to be heard are the ones that most people are intensely interested in hearing about.
Betty Sue Flowers: Usually, the fictions of the future are non-threatening because they're just fictions. But when you realize the future is always and only a fiction, and that in a way we shape our lives around these fictions, then you give them a little more credit--the power of myth.
Peter Hayward: Betty. So you have been writing another book. Do you wanna talk to the listeners about that?
Betty Sue Flowers: This book is called Scenarios: Crafting and Using Stories of the Future to Change the Present. It’s a short book designed to help you do a scenario project from start to finish, no matter how big or small the project is or whether you’re by yourself or working with a big team.
Peter Hayward: When I reached out to you, you were in Sun Valley. Sun Valley, Idaho, I think were you when you were writing, finishing it?
The first
Betty Sue Flowers: Yes. And now I’m on to the next project, which is a follow-up series to Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, which focuses on goddesses and heroines. The arc of the series begins with the ancient worship of the earth as a mother goddess, who took care of us, as a mother would. We have an interview with an astronaut who experienced the overview effect, as a number of other astronauts have.
When you're out in space, and you look at the earth from space, it is so vulnerable, so beautiful, so precious that it changes you—the overview effect. And I think that's the path we have to take as human beings. The next future we have to create is how we move from our prehistoric worship of the mother goddess to ourselves mothering the earth.
Peter Hayward: I have certainly found our conversation interesting. It's been terrific to catch up with you and have a chat. And thank you for spending some time with the future POD community.
Betty Sue Flowers: My pleasure. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Peter Hayward: I hope you enjoyed the conversation with Betty, a true master of both how and why we try to communicate powerful and inspiring ideas about the future. And keep and eye out for her new book, link to that in the references. Future Pod 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.