Hi, this is Greg Kielstrom. Welcome to season three of the Agile World, where we discuss customer

employee experience, organizational and workforce transformation, and how business can adapt and

continually improve in an Agile age. The Agile World podcast is brought to you by tech systems,

an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services, and real world application.

For more information, go to techsystems.com. To read more about the topics discussed in the show,

you can go to my website at theagile.world and read my latest articles or get a copy of my latest

book, The Agile Workforce, now available on Amazon and other retailers. My name is Greg Kielstrom,

and I'm the host of the Agile World podcast. Welcome to a special episode of the show,

brought to you in partnership with Arlington Economic Development, where we discuss issues related

to the workforce, the role of place in the future of work, and the role of the creative sector

in a larger business context. We call this return on creativity. Today, we're going to talk about

the future, and more specifically, how augmented and virtual reality will play a role in our futures.

Tell me and discuss this topic. I'd like to welcome Kathy Hackle, author, futurist, and chief

metaverse officer at Futures Intelligence Group. Kathy, welcome to the show. Thanks, Greg. Happy to be here.

Great. Looking forward to talking with you. I'd like to start by defining a couple terms used in

your title. How do you define the role of a futurist, and how do you define its importance to

businesses? Yeah, what I would say is when people hear the term futurist, and I think it's someone

that can predict the future, but no, we don't predict the future. No crystal ball. No crystal ball. Sorry,

people, if I had the crystal ball, I'd probably be doing this interview from my private island

next to Sir Richard Branson, which I'm not. But what I would say is futures really,

what they try to do is make sense of all the emerging trends in the signals. Try to look at

second and third order effects, and try to, you know, make, we kind of see, you know, see around

...