Part 2/2: Author Trista Harris discusses the future of work and its implications for non-profits
Author and futurist Trista Harris believes that after the pandemic, work will forever be changed; she also believes that we can decide what many of these future changes will be. How do our decisions affect the future? What opportunities do we have at this moment to shape the future of our organizations? For the second and last part of this interview, senior consultant Zara Zanussi talks with Trista about changes in the workplace, the future of work and the implications for people who work in non-profit organizations.
Q: As a futurist, how do you view the future of work?
A: There are a million changes that are happening as we speak in the future of work! I think there are some changes that are happening on the part of how people want to spend their time in a pandemic realizing that we are spending a lot of time at work. Is it the way you want to be spending your limited amount of time, or not? We’re seeing a lot of transformation that I think is going to be really good for society as a whole. On the work side, there's a lot of transformation that has to do with automation and AI and those sorts of things, which was already happening, but the pandemic expedited it. When there is a sort of settling, work is going to look very differently than it did before, but it's also very malleable, and we can decide what we want it to look like. I think people are very open to new suggestions.
Q: So what I’m hearing you say, rather than work looking in a specific way, is more we’re deciding what that’s going to be based on the company or organization. How do you think it will change your work?
A: It already has! It looks a million ways different than it did when I started the business 3 years ago. It is not even the same thing. I think the good thing about that is I used to fly places to facilitate, I’d go the day before in case there were delays, I would facilitate for a day or half day and have meetings the next day, and then I’d come home. I do two of those on the same day now! The audiences that are in the facilitations are also completely different now. Sometimes they’re global, they often include people from around the country, they include people of very different perspectives where before it was all the same organization. [The pandemic has] just changed it all.
Q: In the book, you describe the social sector as "a safety net" and as "collective potential," which are both, of course, tied to futurism. Why do you think there is a lack of the social sector interested and involved in futurist spaces? I was a nonprofit executive for almost nine years, and we did not ever talk about this word!
A: It has not been a conversation in the field for a bunch of reasons, but mostly because there’s a financial incentive in the business sector to use futurism, so that has firmly been the place where [futurism] is. There’s also an incentive on the government side. I often say the government uses futurism to figure out who’s going to hate us next. They use it a lot in the military. There are these financial and other pushes that make that happen. Nonprofits in particular have to be reactive often to the funder landscape, changing conditions, and we haven't made that moment of space.
Also, when I started philanthropic futurism, I was the only philanthropic futurist. There was not anybody to be that translator, there were not people in the field talking about this. There are more people that do that work now. When people hear about it, it makes complete sense. People that work in nonprofits are constantly building the future, that’s the purpose of organizations: to create a more beautiful and equitable future. We just don’t call it [futurism]. So it's really about bringing language and tools to something that is in the DNA of the sector already.
“People that work in nonprofits are constantly building the future, that’s the purpose of organizations: to create a more beautiful and equitable future. We just don’t call it [futurism]. So it’s really about bringing language and tools to something that is in the DNA of the sector already. ”
Q: Thanks. There’s a part of the book where you talk about “the tools you had been taught in graduate school about nonprofit management that were not useful in times of wholesale societal upheaval,” and I fully agree with that. Looking back, what do you wish you were taught in school to better operate in times of change?
A: I think tools like scenario planning and foresight that help you think about possible things that could happen in the future are really really important. It's a way of looking at the world that makes you understand the future doesn't just happen to you, [but rather] you’re creating [it] with the decisions you’re making. There's an ownership that happens in that process, and I can think of many times in my nonprofit career where something terrible happened, but as a result of it we had this transformation or big change or new way to provide services. I think often we hold too tight to our strategy and plans, that it needs to look just like this in that time period, and that is not how the world works. We need to build in this idea of flexibility and ability to know your long term future, but know this year, maybe one of the plans that you had is completely not going to work for whatever external condition, but this other one will work really great. Dig deeper in that spot and let go of the other one, even though you told the org and the funders you were going to do it. It's about being nimble and able to move to what's needed in the moment.
Q: Really interesting! Especially since living in a dual pandemic, a part of the book that stood out to me was when you were talking about living through a time where our stabilizing forces have become less stable and our accelerating forces are moving at an exponential pace and how it’s critical for the social sector to stabilize so they can be our bedrock during this time of change. How do you suggest challenging the flaws in these systems as our foundation while providing a sense of stability as a nonprofit?
A: I think a piece of it is imagining what you want it to look like if it works really well. So it’s creating that space within those stabilizing institutions to say it could be better and it could be different, but let's hold onto the parts that work really well. A lot of my futurism work is not “we used to do something this way and now we do something completely different,” you take what works about it and let go of what doesn't. For some of our institutions, what we haven’t said is what do we keep about that? It doesn’t have to be that all of it disappears, there are some parts of it that are really important and critical, let’s bring those along, and there are parts that need to transform to better serve our societies in this moment, let's figure that out. We’re seeing that a lot in churches during the pandemic. They’re doing virtual services and different ways of people connecting and creating communities. A couple of years ago, somebody would have said “that's not the way to do it, that's not right! It has always looked exactly like this, and it has to look like this moving forward.” It's been an improvement and so how do we keep that part of the improvement as hopefully the pandemic gets better? It’s about keeping the innovation of this time that's useful and then letting go of the things that we don't need to keep.
Q: How do you determine the framing of language to actually address concerns? It was evident how intentional you were with language. Do you have any steps you use or that you would suggest?
A: I don’t have any good tools around language… The piece that I hold close is that it's about positive framing: what are we trying to create as opposed to what are we trying to stop from happening. Nonprofits often describe the stuff that they’re stopping from happening, and it's really difficult to get people mobilized around stopping something. How do we do that, what does that mean? When you’re building something people can see themselves in that vision. When it comes to language, I just try to make sure that I’m keeping my language on that positive frame about what we want to have happen.
“The future doesn’t just happen to you, but rather you’re creating it with the decisions you’re making.”
Check out Trista’s new website: http://futuregood.studio! They have a new product called Future Good Studio which is a 12 session learning module for people that work in nonprofits and foundations to learn futurism, and a community of folks that are doing the same thing.
