Imagining futures with Reanna Browne – episode 1

Season 1, episode 1 summary

September 12, 2023 // 50 min, 30 sec

Welcome to "The talent time machine," where we set our sights beyond the horizon to envision the future world of work in 2050.

How better to kickstart the series than with an introspective look at what it means to look further than the five-year strategies and financial forecasts, peering into the absurd.

Reanna Browne is an academically trained and practicing futurist, and stands by the fact that ‘the future arrives via the ridiculous’.

Join Reanna as she shares with our host, Cielo Chief Executive Officer Marissa Geist, how to improve our future thinking, and the value it gives us today.

In this episode:

• Using the future to rethink our actions in the present
• Mitigating the fear of being wrong in your predictions
• Unlearning how we’ve been taught to think of the future
• The change in language to think more proactively

Episode highlights

Reanna Browne at 1:30
“We can use the idea about the future to actually rethink action in the present. It's almost the tyranny of the urgent. When we don't look forward, we end up in a cycle of the current dilemmas repeating themselves.”

Reanna Browne at 4:00
“When we take a view that's longer than five years, the parts of the brain that are triggered are more imaginative. When we're taking a narrower view, the parts of the brain that are triggered are more historical.”

Reanna Browne at 6:00
“All futures work, or all contemplation about the future, should inform action in the present.”

Reanna Browne at 14:50
“We've been taught to think that the future is something that's out there and down the track. But of course, the future of work never arrives because we're always in the present. So the future, and our future, happens via our actions and our inactions today.”

Reanna Browne at 16:00
“Any useful statement about the future should, at first, appear ridiculous, otherwise it’s just a projection of today.”

Marissa Geist at 21:30
“People didn’t want to come in all the time, but were asking if there’s an office to go into. It’s those nuances that are tough to capture in a study or survey.”

Reanna Browne at 26:50
“You don't need to be a futurist. We all have innate foresight capacity. So I think it's leaning on that, and really integrating it into the everyday flow of our work.”