I'm Alison Beard.

And I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HPR Ideacast.

Adi, how good are you at predicting the future?

I am very bad at predicting the future.

In fact, you could use my predictions as a counterindicator of what actually is going to happen.

But why are you asking?

Well, predicting the future is something that every business leader tries to do as they're planning their long-term strategy, but it's obviously extremely difficult, particularly in the current

world, it seems like no matter how much data you gather or logical projections you make,

you really don't know what's next or what's going to happen. But our guest today has a framework

for helping us do a better job. Yeah, that sounds really valuable. I mean, we are living in a period

of hyper uncertainty that's absolutely true. And sometimes the response is just live with uncertainty,

but surely there's a better way to kind of tease out the weak signals or think about

your own goals and visions and be a little bit better at predicting what's next. Yeah, and so that's why

I wanted to talk to Nick Foster. He is a futurist who's worked as a designer at some of the world's

biggest tech focus companies, including Google X, Sony, and Dyson, and he's the author of the book

Could, Should, Might, Don't, How We Think About the Future. So he argues that most of us fall

into one of those four patterns. On the one side is could futurism, which is overly optimistic,

tech-centered utopia. And then on the opposite extreme is don't, where you're thinking about

all the negative externalities. And we're the opposite extreme is don't where you're thinking about all the

negative externalities. And we're seeing that play out in the debate over the future of AI right now.

So here's my conversation with Nick.

Nick, thanks so much for being with me today.

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