andrew olsen · web view2019/07/23 · this transcript was exported on jul 24, 2019 - view latest...

This transcript was exported on Jul 24, 2019 - view latest version here .

Andrew Olsen: Hey, good afternoon. This is Andrew Olsen with the Rainmaker Fundraising Podcast. I'm here with my good friend and co-host, Roy Jones. Hey, Roy. Good afternoon.

Roy Jones: Hey, good afternoon. I'm looking forward to hearing from Trista. This is going to be fun today, I think.

Andrew Olsen: It's going to be really exciting. So, we are so grateful to have Trista Harris here with us today, and Trista is a philanthropic futurist. She's the author of the books, Future Good: How to Use Futurism to Save the World and How to Become a Nonprofit Rockstar.

She's a highly regarded speaker in the philanthropic and social good sector, and she consults with some of the world's most respected foundations and nonprofits of government agencies, and we're just so glad to have you. Thanks. Thanks for being here, Trista.

Trista Harris: Thanks, Andrew. Great to be here.

Andrew Olsen: So, I've just got to ask, what the heck is a philanthropic futurist, and what does one do?

Trista Harris: That is a very fair question. I think people envision me with a magic eight ball, guessing what's going to happen next. So, futurists, in general, are people that analyze trends and look for innovations in the fields that they're interested in, to try to understand what's going to happen next so that organizations can adjust their strategies. Futurists are working really closely, often, with the business sector to figure out what we want to buy next or the government sector to figure out who's going to hate us next.

And so, my work is helping foundations, nonprofits, and government understand how to utilize these trends to build a better future. So, how do we take these really high-powered tools and use them in a sector that's making the world a better place?

Andrew Olsen: Okay. So, how does somebody like you, decide one day, hey, I'm going to dedicate my career to this?

Trista Harris: For sure. It started when I was the president of a small foundation, and it was my first time running an organization, and I had a little Post-it note that said, "Learn how endowments work," because I was responsible for it and I wasn't quite sure how they worked.

And so, about a month later, that was in 2008, the stock market collapsed. Our endowment lost between a third and a half of its value at different times and our grantees needed a lot more from us at that time. And so we were a small, scrappy organization and I reached out to the big foundations and said, hey,

Trista Harris Audio (Completed 07/24/19)Transcript by Rev.com

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what do we, what do we do? What's coming next? How does this work? Has this happened before? How do you adjust your strategy when you don't have any money? And they were in the exact same boat that we were.

They were like, "This is terrible. I have no idea." And that was super frustrating because we had a really big responsibility to our grantees to be able to support their work and we weren't in the position to do it at the level that we needed to. And so I started searching first for answers about the economy to try to figure out like, is this the end of the drop? Is it going to be worse than this? How do we help our organizations, especially ones that were working on economic justice issues, figure out to address these problems.

And that's how I found futurism. So I was sitting in a bookstore and there's a book called Flash Foresight that is about how businesses can use the tools of futurism to understand what's coming next for their work. And I thought, "I wonder if this could be adapted for the philanthropic sector, for the nonprofit sector?" And the journey of education started there.

Roy Jones: Wow. Yeah, I mean, I'm vice president of development at Mercy Ships International and of course we do a lot of medical capacity building and just these whole issues of shifting government and shifting what's going on in the economy, you know, to be able to have a resource like yours that can help with at least some guide posts on those kinds of trends.

Andrew was telling me about hearing you speak and so, man, there's not many people that do this. Talk to me about your part in the industry. I mean, are there others that do this? Tell me about how are we dealing with this? I know at Mercy Ships we try to work ... do a lot of collaboration with other NGOs, with local governments, but a lot of times you have no choice but lean in to the challenges and move forward.

Trista Harris: For sure. There are not very many futurists in general and especially ones that focus in the social sector. Somebody that I really admire is Lucy Bernholz who is at Stanford, and I don't even know if Lucy would describe herself as a futurist, but she's somebody that I think has a really great eye on what's coming next in the sector. And outside of that, it's pretty slim pickings. I think there are many future-focused leaders in the sector, so people that are trying to understand what's coming next, but I think they may not know what futurism is or understand how to use those tools, but they're doing a lot of that work.

I think the piece that's surprising to a lot of folks that I talk with is that a lot of the future is very, very predictable. So if you look at demographic trends, you can guess what your community will look like 10 or 15 years from now. You can do scenario planning. So often it isn't that things are completely unimaginable, it's that there's a couple of possible futures. And so there is a way to envision different factors and then you can come up with four possible futures. And it's


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really easy to develop strategies when you narrow the realm of things that could down to four.

And I think that that, for many nonprofit organizations, when we do strategic planning, we're not really thinking about how is the world changing. What we're thinking about is how can we raise 10% more funds next year or within the next five years? How can we serve 3% more people? But we don't envision the conditions that we're working in as that happens, and we don't think about wild cards, so what happens if suddenly 50% more of the population is eligible for something like food stamps? Well, that will change a lot of organizations that are working on hunger. And so if you don't think about those wild cards, then you don't have strategies that are developed when things that are outside of the ordinary come towards you.

Andrew Olsen: You know, that's a really interesting point because I think so often in the strategic planning processes, it's like an organization comes to the table and just assumes that best case scenario will be the norm. You know, whether it's a one year plan, three year plan, five-year or who knows what? I've sat around tons of tables to have that conversation and rarely does anybody say, "Well, what if?" Right? I mean usually the only what if is, "What if we raise more than we expected?" Right? Not what if the wheels fall off the economy.

Trista Harris: I think that pressure goes directly on the fundraisers. So the assumption is, if you guys could just raise some more money for us, then everything would be fantastic, not considering that there's a lot of other things that are [inaudible 00:07:28].

Roy Jones: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean when you talk about ... I mean, we talk about things like long-term donor value and its future as I can, can rarely get is is three to five years and five years is a real stretch.

Trista Harris: For sure.

Roy Jones: Talk to me about your planning when you look at those different scenarios.

Trista Harris: For sure. I think most five year plans are completely bunk because it is, but the progress is consistent and linear over time, which it isn't. So you'll have some years where you'll have exponential growth because there'll be a policy change or a tax law change that will completely change the operation that you're in. And then you'll have other things that will happen that will slow down your growth, but you're actually building for something bigger.

And so I think of organizations that are in capital campaign times, there is a lot of preparation and a lot of slowdown that happens in lots of other parts of your work as you're building for a big campaign. And then during that campaign you can sometimes keep the momentum afterwards and build your annual giving and all of those sorts of things happen. But I'll often hear organizations say, "We


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started planning for this capital campaign, but then our individual donations really slowed down during that time so I think we're not ready for it."

Not Understanding that the work that they were doing planning for the campaign made it so that that work slowed down. So I encourage organizations to develop a vision of their ideal future. So what would the world look like if your organization was fully successful? If you completely met your mission, how would the world be a different place? Or how would your community be a different place and then work backwards from there and figure out what sort of organization do you have to be for that to happen?

So I was working with a youth group serving nonprofit that does afterschool programming. And when they envision their ideal future, what they realized is they were an academic program. They realized that if everything was working well, kids wouldn't need academic enrichment after school. They would getting what they needed during the school day and they wouldn't have to be doing this extra work.

And so they adjusted their strategy to do more teacher training and to do more public policy work that was about schools getting the funding that they needed to be successful. And so I think for many of our organizations, we haven't used that imagination muscle to figure out what would it look like if this really worked and work our way backwards to figure out are we actually doing the right activities that will get us to that ideal future.

The other thing that I encourage organizations to do is you develop that long term vision, but then once a year adjust your strategy based on actual conditions. So I can't tell you the number of organizations that I've worked in and worked with where we had a plan where after year one we knew it wasn't going to work, but we were still accountable to the board and the community for that full five year plan. And every year we'd have to come back and say, "Hey, remember how everything changed and we had to do something completely different? Still doing that."

So one year revisions really help you sort of move your trajectory to fix the direction that you're going.

Andrew Olsen: So I want to pause on that for a minute because what you explained is what we experience all the time. And so few organizations seem to be willing to revisit that plan and to pivot on the fly. Do you find that there's something unique to the organizations that embrace that? Or is it just sort of happenstance, whether, whether an organization ... is it based on a personality of a particular leader or is it something more cultural to the organization that creates that adaptability?

Trista Harris: I think it's sometimes the leader, I think more commonly it's organizations that have different checkpoints during the year that aren't the once per year [inaudible 00:11:28] quarter report to the board where they're actually looking


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at outcomes. So an organization that, at the beginning of every staff meeting, says, "Here are some indicators about our fundraising or program success or future direction, whatever those guideposts are, what are we learning? Which direction are we going? Are we on track or are we off track? And do we need to make adjustments as we go?"

I find that organizations that create enough space for strategic thinking are much more successful. So if your plate is 150% full and you have no time to imagine tomorrow, let alone 10 to 20 years in the future, it's going to be really difficult to think this way. So I encourage people in the social sector to spend 5% of their time thinking about future direction and future trends.

And so just taking a couple hours a week and looking at those newsletters from organizations that you feel like really have it figured out in your area. Watching TED talks that are both about the issues that you care about and also about just random issues. I think there's a lot to be learned from going into a problem that you're trying to solve, picking a random TED talk and then thinking, "Is there something about this learning from another field or about another thing that's applicable for the work that we're doing?"

So sort of stretching that way that we think about problems. We often have a hammer and we just bang and try to find the nail, but instead saying, "Maybe there's a different way around this." When when I ran the Minnesota Council on Foundations, we were having this challenge of member engagement in our programs and so I picked a random program and a random TED talk and it was about the power of introverts and I realized that all of our programs were designed for extroverts. So if you asked questions in the room, then you got value. But if you didn't, then you weren't going to get your unique needs met.

And so we developed a website where we could post resources from the program and people could ask followup questions and provide resources and other things for people that were in the space that were really useful regardless of if you are willing to raise your hand during a program or not.

Andrew Olsen: So tell me this, you said that it's important to create space for strategic thinking and I feel like ... I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it seemed intentional that you didn't say strategic plan.

Trista Harris: No.

Andrew Olsen: Talk about the difference.

Trista Harris: Yeah, I think we've gotten into this whole about strategic planning and what it should look like. And so it should be this big thick document that talks about every aspect of our operations and it should have clear guideposts and we will sort of reach those guideposts come hell or high water that sort of like ... we are going to do these things. I think strategic thinking is more flexible, and it's sort


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of understanding the environment that you're in, and when things change, what do you have to do differently?

And I think for too many organizations you have committed to a path and it suddenly becomes clear that that actually isn't the right path. The community may have an emerging need that's really important that you should step into and suddenly you can't reach all the outcomes that you have laid out for the funders or the donors that are supporting you.

You need to be able to go back to those partners and say, "Hey, there was a flood in our local community, or there was an emerging issue in our school district. We had to step up in this way and here's what that looks like and here's the decisions that we're making. Are you willing to partner with us as we adjust that journey?" And I think because of the power dynamics in the nonprofit sector, we are so unwilling to have those conversations and I think we need to create those brave spaces where we're willing to say, "Actually, the world is changing very quickly and the needs are very different than what we thought it was 19 months ago when we applied for this grant. Let's talk together about how a different path forward might look."

Andrew Olsen: That's perfect. Thanks for the clarification. I want to follow up one point and then I know Roy's got a couple of questions as well, but the power dynamic, talk to us a little bit about what you see, if you see anything shifting and changing in the way that institutional funders are engaging community organizations and whether or not that dynamic is starting to dilute at all or starting to shift anywhere.

Trista Harris: Yeah. I started out my career as a fundraiser and I was constantly sort of navigating that. What does the funder need from us and and how do we report on what we're doing and how do we answer that question, like what are mistakes that you've made through the grant process and what didn't work well and that sort of thing. It's like, well, how do we describe that we are still amazing and if we just had a little bit more money than it would solve all these problems so that we can get funded again the next year?

And I had a funder that had supported a capital campaign for an organization that I was working at and we built the building and the funder had asked for a five year time period to pay off their commitment to our organization, which was just fine. But that meant that every year we had to write a grant report.

And so the first year I was like, "Hey, we built that building, remember you are at the ribbon cutting. It was really great." And then the second year was, "Hey, that building is still there and girls are using it and it's well-liked and it's still in good condition." And then the third year, I'm like, "I don't know what else to write about this building." I reached out to the funder and I said, "I'm not sure what you need, just tell me what you need and then I will provide that report."


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And she said, "I know the building is done, you don't need to send us anything. Send us the report form back with a Post-it note that says you already have the report." She said it's just an automated system that sends out this letter And I didn't realize there was an automated system. I thought there was this angry program officer, like, "Tell me more." And she's like, I already know you did the thing. I don't care and I don't want to have to look at your report again."

It's that sort of dynamic. And she was one of my favorite program officers. And so when I moved into philanthropy and a friend of mine both started from fundraising around the same time in philanthropy and we were like, "She was such a great program officer, we have to do what she did, what did she do?" And then we thought about it and we're like, she just told us what was happening. That's all she did. She just communicated at the most basic level of, "Here's the conditions that you're working within."

And I think what I've seen is more and more funders trying to figure out how to be a good partner with grantees, how to manage the paperwork burden. Sometimes well, sometimes not as well. And then how to get input from both grantees and from community about what the real needs are. So I'm seeing more humbleness in the philanthropic sector and an understanding that there is not one foundation that is big enough to solve the problems that they're working on. It's only through collaboration with a variety of nonprofits and other funders that they're going to move the dial at all, and a willingness to figure out how to do that.

I want to see more of that behavior, but I think there's good stuff on the horizon.

Andrew Olsen: That's awesome to hear. Thank you.

Trista Harris: Yeah.

Roy Jones: So tell me about the bad stuff on the horizon. What are the trends we're seeing? Of course a lot of nonprofits are concerned because last year seemed somewhat flat, financially. Are you seeing things that are common among the nonprofits across the board?

Trista Harris: For sure. So I think the one that you two will not be excited to hear about is, I think that flatness is the beginning of a cliff for funding for nonprofit organizations, for quite a few reasons, but the biggest being tax law changes.

So we've lost the power four of the charitable tax deduction at the federal level. And for most of your major donors, they are no longer going to be itemizing their taxes and they're not going to receive that deduction. Even in my own house, I was working for a philanthropy organization that was doing lobbying around this issue and I still kept all my receipts for all of my gifts in my little tax


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folder and my husband's like, "I thought you said that didn't work anymore." I was like, "Oh, that's right. I forgot. Okay."

So I think it isn't that people won't be charitable, because of course they will. People want to support their communities, they want to support organizations that they care about, but the specific value of a gift to a nonprofit 501C3 organization doesn't have both the same value and the same time crunch that it had in the past. So when I was a fundraiser, we did not get to take off those last couple of weeks of December because we were waiting for calls and magical gifts coming in by folks that were trying to figure out their tax issues. There isn't that time pressure anymore.

I think more people will support GoFundMe campaigns. If your neighbor is battling cancer you are going to put dollars into those sort of campaigns and and support that individual, as opposed to the organization that is providing support to general people with cancer. I think people will also support 501C4 organizations, when in the past they didn't get the tax deduction, but now we'll support those organizations that are doing more political work and I think that they will think about it in their same charitable giving bucket.

So I think there are big challenges coming forward for traditional fundraising and nonprofit work. I think there's a lot of solutions on the horizon as well. More foundations are looking more closely at mission investment and I'd love to see the point where foundations move to 100% mission investment so that their entire endowment is working in the community as opposed to 5% of their funds working in the community and I think that would completely change the landscape of the type of resources that are available to nonprofit organizations.

I think a lot more organizations are getting super smart about social enterprise and what are the other resources that they have in their organization that are actually worth dollars. This fall I'll be launching a tech startup that is for a nonprofit room rental for nonprofits to be able to rent rooms to each other and excess space, like Airbnb for meeting space. I think more nonprofits will sort of look around and say, "What excess capacity do we have and how do we leverage that?

Roy Jones: [inaudible 00:22:06]. That's not what I wanted to hear.

Trista Harris: Of course. Nobody wants to hear that. I usually focus on really positive trends, but I think there's a couple of things on the horizon that if we stick our our head in the sand, it's not going to benefit us. And I think honestly, big changes on the horizon can be opportunities if we prepare for them before we come. So if we know that that donor mix is going to change, then what's the sort of work that we have to do to harness that mix?

The other big trend that I'd love to see a lot more nonprofits paying attention to are changes in our economy overall. So we have an economy that was really


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based on individual workers in the workforce, getting paid to do things, providing benefit. And now we're going to move to a lot more artificial intelligence and robotics.

But we haven't talked about what that means to our economy and what that means to individual workers. So there's a lot of talk about the unemployment rate being so low, if you reach out into communities, what you find is that people are doing two or three jobs to be able to pay their bills. So they're driving Uber, they've got a minimum wage job, they've got maybe a passion job that they're able to do on one of the platforms, where able to share skills and expertise that's only going to grow.

So we need to start to have real conversations about ... we're obviously having a changing economy. What does that mean for society and how do we have to look differently about how to both pay workers and what are the sort of social safety nets that we need through the nonprofit sector and through the government as well. And I think if nonprofits don't start to have those conversations, they're going to be on the hook to try to fix those community needs. And I know many social service nonprofits are already stretched to the absolute limit, and they can feel the change that's happening, but there isn't good language around what is it that's actually happening.

Andrew Olsen: Yeah. And that piece I think maybe scares me more than anything because if what we anticipated might happen with the economy actually happens, you will have a rapid influx of hundreds of thousands of people who no longer have the skills to be competitive in the workforce and there's not a private entity or a government entity today that could handle that kind of capacity increase. Right? And unfortunately, at least in our current political climate, it doesn't feel to me like there's a whole lot of collaboration between government agencies and our sector to to make sure that that safety net is both widened and strengthened. Do you disagree with that at all?

Trista Harris: No, I for sure don't. And I think one of the challenges is that all of this societal instability causes a rise in hate and a rise of hate crimes, those sorts of things. Because the old story is immigrants and people of color are stealing our jobs. The real story is there is a robot somewhere that has stolen ... But we don't talk about that piece. And so we don't understand how it's changing our economy and we're not seeing how quickly companies are automating their work because there's a huge financial value for them to do it.

So there's a rising conversation about universal basic income. So the idea of a robot tax for companies that are outsourcing work to artificial intelligence and robotics and taxing that benefit to the companies to pay for some sort of safety net. There's been a lot of conversations.

So in the industrial revolution, we used to work 80 hours a week and then it went to 40 hours a week because we used technology to decrease the amount


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of time that people are working. I think in the technology revolution we will move from 40 hours a week to 20 hours a week of work. I think if we're all really realistic about our Facebook usage, we might already be at 20 hours a week, but we need to compensate people for those hours in a new way. And I think we haven't thought about what that equation looks like.

Andrew Olsen: Yeah, for sure. My wife will be mad at me for admitting this because she'd prefer that we're always healthy. But I took my three daughters to McDonalds maybe two weeks ago. And we walked in the door, and it's the first time I'd been there in months and there were automated kiosks.

Trista Harris: For sure.

Andrew Olsen: And they were full, people were lined up two or three deep, to order on them. And then there's two people behind the counter instead of six. And immediately I was like, "Okay, well what happened to the other four? Right? And what's going to happen to these two when that particular franchise has enough capital to add another kiosk, right? All of a sudden, you start to think about, well, what's the local food pantry's capacity has to increase to support that or the workforce development program in town has to increase capacity to now help find solutions for those workers who are impacted.

I mean, there's so many downstream effects of that. And I don't say that to suggest that AI and automation are wrong or anything like that. I just don't feel like we've had an intelligent conversation across the spectrum to figure out how do we as, not just institutions, but full sectors deal with these kinds of things.

Trista Harris: I think there's a lot of conversation about artificial intelligence and robotics are replacing minimum wage jobs. So we see the McDonalds example, we see when we go to Target and other self-checkouts and those sort of things. But what we don't talk about is artificial intelligence is now being used to diagnose medical cases that are hard to diagnose and they do a much better job than doctors do.

Andrew Olsen: Oh, that's interesting.

Trista Harris: There's artificial intelligence that's fighting parking tickets instead of a lawyer doing it. So it's not just low-level jobs. And I think if people understood how it was influencing their work, they'd be more concerned. I was talking to an expert in artificial intelligence about what was coming next. And in the middle of the conversation he said, "I actually don't understand what foundations and philanthropy do. Can you tell me a little bit about like what an average day at work is like?"

And I said, "Well, for a program officer you get these grant applications and you read it and you look at your mission of your foundation, you look at demographic changes and census data and those sort of things to try to


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understand, is this a match for the work that you're doing and then what would give you the best return on investment for the foundation's dollars?"

And he said, "Oh, I could automate that." And I was like, "Nobody asked you to. You stop." So I think we haven't considered the whole scale transformation that's happening. And I think some of those changes will be really great. I have a ton of family members in Wyoming that work in coal mining. It is dangerous underground work that is killing your lungs and is terrible in a ton of different ways. And that industry is dying and there are new industries that are being built.

And so I have a cousin that moved to Denver and he started working in solar power and really enjoyed the work. Didn't have to be underground, much healthier for the lungs, all of those sorts of things. And so I think we have to learn as a society to not hold on to the, "This is the way that it was when I'm growing up," and instead figure out what do we want it to look like for our kids and our grandkids? And how does our economy have to adjust to make that possible? What are the skillsets that I have to learn as a worker? And it isn't just, you go to college or you go to a job training program and you're done. It's that constant evolution of our work where you have to be a lifelong learner, otherwise you can't be flexible enough to understand what's coming next.

Andrew Olsen: Wow. Yeah.

Roy Jones: It's interesting just seeing the positioning of this and we're really, have gone from, in this conversation, walking on the ground to in the trees to, I don't know. Now we're 50,000 feet up kind of looking down and it's, of course, when you look at board governance, I'm just thinking of of how relevant this topic is and how really boards of directors of nonprofits need to be thinking this way. How have you introduced it to nonprofits and their boards? Any suggestions for those of us working with boards?

Trista Harris: For sure. So I think that spending the time envisioning what your ideal future looks like is important for every board. And I think understanding future trends are a key governance responsibility for a board of directors. So it's not okay to just come into your quarterly board meeting and say, "What happened last quarter?"

The board really needs to understand the point on the horizon that they're working towards and how to move to that place to understand what's coming next. So I'd encourage board of directors to figure out who are experts in their field that are thinking about what's coming next for the issues and causes that they care about and have them come and help them imagine what's coming next.

My book, Future Good, came out this fall, and I have met with a ton of board of directors of foundations, nonprofits and social purpose businesses to help them


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to think about what trends will impact their work and how to get out of the weeds of the work. It's so much more tangible when you're talking about what happened last quarter, than instead envisioning what might happen 10 years from now, what might happen 50 years from now. People aren't used to being in that space. But I think it's a key responsibility of board of directors because you can't make strategic decisions if you don't know your strategic direction.

Andrew Olsen: So tell us a little bit more about the book. So it's Future Good: How to use futurism to save the world. We've had, I think probably a lot of that downloaded at a high level to us here in this conversation. But give us a little more context for it.

Trista Harris: For sure. So I started writing the book because I felt like there wasn't anything that talked about how to use futurism in the social sector. And often futurism is described as something that is super complicated. So this idea of like, "Oh, you can't figure out the future, please hire me. Very expensive futurism consultant to figure it out for you."

But what I found is I was learning about futurism, is that it was really three super simple steps, stop, look and go. So stop is about stop living the problem. So how do we get out of the space in the nonprofit sector where we're talking about all the things that are broken, and you guys have probably spent just as much time as I have sitting in rooms where you spend the entire time describing how terrible everything is, but you don't ever get to the solution part.

And I think really amazing things happen when you jump to what the solution looks like. Look is about paying attention to those trends and understanding what signals of the future are. So there's a saying that the future already exists, it's just not evenly distributed. And so I've, over the last couple of years, have taken funders and nonprofit leaders on something called field trips to the future where you go to another community or an even another place in the world to see what the innovation that you're looking at looks like if it's fully successful.

So I took a group of funders and government leaders to Sweden to look at their early childhood system to see what it looks like if you fully invest in children and it's completely different than what our system looks like in the United States. And so for our funders and government leaders that have felt like, "Well, this is impossible and we can never get to this level," actually spending time in Sweden and talking to parents and talking to preschool teachers and talking to early childhood experts, help them to understand actually, here's how they got to this place.

They didn't have that sort of system even 50 years ago in Sweden, but they were worried because they had a decreasing birth rate and they said, "Well, how do you fix that?" You make sure that there are a lot of supports for families as they're having children. And when you invest in kids that way, a lot of things change. Your economy changes, level of education changes. They spend a lot of


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time helping students learn how to be a good citizen and how to be a good member of the community. So it's changed what adults look like in the community.

And so for, for the Minnesotans that were a part of that trip, it was a really good opportunity for them to see their own blind spots and to understand here's what true investment looks like. And even when we were in that space, the sort of questions that we would ask, the Swedish people were like, "What is wrong with you people?"

Because it was things like, if you get a year and a half maternity and paternity leave, what happens to the businesses? How are you filling those spaces? And the Swedish people were like, "The business are fine. You have a kid to raise. What are you talking ... why are you so worried about who's going to do your paperwork? Somebody is always going to be able to do your paperwork. Somebody hired to do that in the interim and it's all fine."

Or one of the unnamed elected officials asked one of the early childhood educators, "There's no daycare for kids that are under a year and a half because there's this paternity and maternity leave." And he said, "Well, what if you don't want to raise your kids full time? What if you want to send them to daycare? Where would you do that?" And she goes, "Well, maybe you shouldn't have kids. If you don't want to raise your kids and spend time with them, maybe that's not the thing for you."

But for the rest of us, really, that's a really great question, I'm like, "Oh wait, that's not a great question." So I think that that ability to go someplace and investigate what it looks like if it fully works, really changes your ideas about what's possible.

Andrew Olsen: That's really interesting.

Roy Jones: Well, I'm excited to read the book. So I'm very, very excited about it. And again this kind of thinking is ... it does not come natural to me. I'm one of these guys with the hammer.

Andrew Olsen: Maybe a chainsaw sometimes.

Roy Jones: Well, she's suggesting I might be better with a screwdriver or a pair of pliers maybe.

Trista Harris: I had a coworker once, we used to ask these very sort of silly, getting to know you questions about what's the best birthday gift you've ever received or what's your favorite season, those sort of things. But one of the questions that I asked was, what was something that you thought would be invented by now and you're sort of disappointed it hasn't been? So, hover boards or those flying cars, those sort of things.


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And we went around the room and everybody gave their example and he was like, "Pass." I was like, "Okay, well there we go." And afterwards I said, "What was that about you? You are normally very into these dumb questions and you didn't want to participate." And he said, "I realized when you asked the question that I hadn't used that part of my imagination for a really long time and it made me super sad because it's something that I loved to do when I was a kid, was to think about what was possible and there's the Space Program and I want to be an astronaut and all of all of these sort of things. And at some point into adulthood I lost that and I felt this sense of loss as we were talking about this question."

And I think for a lot of us we've lost the sense of wonder about what's possible and for me, studying futurism, it's really brought that back for me. And sometimes people joke that I'm very Pollyanna-ish about the future, but I think there are really amazing things right on the horizon. Things like unlimited clean water because we're on a water planet, but we can't access a lot of that water. If we have unlimited clean water, that means that we have an ability to farm in a way that we can't in the past, in places that before we couldn't grow food and we now can.

I think there's a lot of potential as we move into these innovations and I think a lot of the jobs that are being automated, that's a great thing. It's repetitive jobs that aren't the best use of a human mind. And so how do we create the space for people to do the things that only people can do, take care of kids, take care of our elders, be a good community citizen, be a part of the world that you are a part of?

I think that technology can give us a lot of those things, but we have to imagine a new future for that to be possible.

Andrew Olsen: That's awesome. So Trista, thank you so much for being here today. Give us two things if you would. How does somebody get your book if they want a copy of it?

Trista Harris: For sure. Tristaharris.org.

Andrew Olsen: Perfect. And then what's the easiest way for somebody to get ahold of you? Is it the same site?

Trista Harris: Yep. At www.tristaharris.org. You can also find me on Twitter @TristaHarris.

Andrew Olsen: Awesome. Thank you again so much. It's been really insightful.

Trista Harris: Thanks so much for having me. Take good care.

Andrew Olsen: Take care.


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