Message From The Future | Wendy Schultz
Message From The Future | Wendy Schultz
This futurist studies how to reshape our existing institutions
Appears in this episode
“All along that spectrum of our human ability to fiddle with nature, there are moral and ethical questions, and also questions of responsibility and accountability for the impacts and consequences of what we do. All of which are, philosophically, what the law is our institution for handling in most societies, and some of which regulations in the law already cover.
“One of the points we were trying to make is that, first of all, we wanted to connect up the pieces of that evolving and expanding system of how we are interacting with life as human beings, and say to the law profession, you may be called upon to adjudicate or negotiate or protect different aspects of all of these activities. So let's keep an eye on how they're all changing.”
Wendy Schultz is an academically trained futurist with over thirty-five years of global foresight practice. Director at Infinite Futures, she has designed futures research projects for NGOs, government agencies, and businesses.
Wendy and I discuss the Law in the Emerging Bio-Age report she recently published, which asked how legal structures can support second chances at improving human relations with living systems and our planet. We also discuss how to bridle the finance industry to support a just transition, the role of activism, governments’ relationship to information, and, more generally, how to solve wicked problems.
Message From The Future | Wendy Schultz
The expertise of foresight futurism sounds like an important part of the new ecosystem of prudent stewardship we need to be building around our institutional fiduciary owners of Intergenerational Fiduciary Money - our Pensions & Endowments!
After sharing with us the work Jigsaw Foresight did with The Law Society, Wendy generously extends an open invitation for people to share thoughts on what they might have missed.
My thought is that these focusing questions still need to be addressed:
Who decides?
Who decides who decides?
How do we hold our deciders accountable for the decisions that they make with the authority we give them?
We have a plethora of new social narratives on Climate, Conflict, Pandemics, Populism and Political Discord and other threads in the polycrises of our times.
Many competing narratives of these parallel crises are calling on us for attention, so that we can take action. Each of these diverse crises have their root in one shared crisis. A crisis of social narrative, about being human together in society through economy, in our changing times.
Because our times have changed., but our social narratives of social decision making have not.
I talk about narrative, not systems. Because we can make changes to a system, and still keep the same basic system. When we change the narrative, we get a new narrative.
And that is what we need. A whole new narrative.
Work sponsored by the WEALL Alliance talks about social narratives taking the form of Crisis > Awakening > Collective Action.
In our times, the crisis is time. The crisis is scale. The crisis is narratives, about scale and time, and being human at the scale, and in the time of our changing times, in the 21st Century, and beyond.
The Awakening is to the failure of our currently popular social narratives of Neoliberalism.
The Collective Action is a new 21st Century Global Citizenship in a new 21st Century Global Commons of Fiduciary Money mobilized to finance fiduciary-grade social contracts between enterprise and popular choice for shaping an economy of technological sufficiency, social equity and habitat longevity for living our best lives in the 21st Century, and beyond…
Foresight futurism has much to contribute to that new citizenship!