Insights May 26th, 2020
In early-2020 I had the chance to speak with Glen Hiemstra on the EXPONENTIAL MINDS podcast. He’s also one of the most open and accepting people I’ve met in a long time, and has been working as a futurist since the early-1970s and he’s had a fascinating journey over the years.
You can see Glen Hiemstra on the EXPONENTIAL MINDS podcast here on Youtube, and you can see it also on Apple, Spotify, Anchor.fm and Soundcloud. Click to listen below.
The podcast was fully transcribed using an artificial intelligence and edited by Nikolas Badminton for Glen’s site Futurist.com. Nikolas was recently inducted as a member of Glen’s Think Tank alongside Dr. Cindy Frewen, Anne Boysen, Richard Yonck, Ramez Naam, Jared Nicholls, Brenda Cooper, Robert Jacobson and Glen himself.
The transcriptions are contained in four parts, as follows.
Part 1: Glen Hiemstra on becoming a futurist
Some of the issues that we were talking about in 1980 are the same issues that we talk about in 2020 – 40 years later. Environmental issues, the impact of technology on the future of work and jobs, and so on. The themes are, it’s pretty amazing to see how some things seems to change very fast and other things seem to change virtually not at all. Even in 40 years.
Part 2: Glen Hiemstra on probable, possible and preferred futures
One of the things that I’ve seen that you’re doing, and what you just described in that highlight presentation (at LAND EXPO 2020) is be willing to go very far into the future, to begin with an assumption that that is possible, at least if not probable, that human beings will be around in 200 years or 500 years or 1000 years or a million years. And that’s kind of rare right now.
Part 3: Glen Hiemstra on forgetting past lessons
This [generational] cycle might just literally have to do with this weird part of the human memory that unless we were there personally it does not register as well. We also have this tendency to romanticize things. I mean, you and I are just romanticizing positive futures. Maybe it’s all part of the same phenomenon.
Part 4: Glen Hiemstra on how you can become a futurist
My goal is to get more people to think of themselves as a futurist, to adopt that longer term perspective, to adopt a perspective of thinking about future trends in terms of what’s probable and what is possible and to think about vision in terms of what a preferred future is. And, in terms of action, how might we do something different this year to make a more positive future more likely.
You can reach Glen and the Think Tank members over at Futurist.com, and I’d be thrilled to speak with you and your organization about your visions of the future. Please reach out and we can start the conversation.
