Becoming the Future: An interview with Adi Yoffe
Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.
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We encountered Adi Yoffe on the LinkedIn Scenario Thinking and Future Strategy Group. We reached out to learn more about her work and how she sees the future unfolding.
Her new book NEXT: A Manual for Disruption: An Essential Toolkit to Help You Navigate in a New Reality is a fascinating aide to how we can think about the future. You can find out more about her work on her Befastforward website.
Ibbaka: Maybe we can start with a little bit about your personal journey. How you have got to where you are, why you are passionate about understanding the future.
Adi: Just before I became a futurist I was working for Deloitte, I was the marketing director of the Israeli practice. I worked there for four and a half years, and after my son was born. I wanted to do something on my own. The real story is that I had a dream. This was back in 2006 when Amazon was just a bookstore.
I wanted to reinvent myself as a futurist, a profession which wasn’t acceptable in Israel back then. I ordered a lot of books from Amazon and when they came, I read 50 pages a day and started to understand that this profession is about trend-forecasting and understanding different possible futures. So I started to build my business.
In the beginning it was really weird because, before the protests of 2011, big corporations didn’t know what I was talking about. They believed that they could control consumers and know exactly where the future was heading. In 2011, during the social protests and when Technology platforms transformed many aspects of our lives, something changed: Organizations started to understand that they didn’t know what was going to happen next. Everything was disrupted. I had been saying for years that the world is one big disruption. It’s not just about black swan events. The new normal is the disruption; the new normal is that everything is abnormal. This was my story, a bit of luck, a bit of vision and then reality playing into my hands.
Ibbaka:It certainly has.
Adi: I begin my book with a story about my parents. When I was a little girl, I grew up in a small town in the north of Israel and came from a family that went through the Holocaust. My parents wanted me to just be safe, they wanted certainty to be a part of my life. When my kids tell me that they want to be “this” or “that,” and talk about whether they want to go to university or not, I say “Go and make your future what you want it to be”. How I was raised had a big impact on me. Now that I know the world is full of disruptions, looking back at my parents perspective, that the world could be a safe place for me to grow, feels a bit naive.
Ibbaka: That’s interesting. My wife’s experience is a little bit similar. Her Japanese family were in Manchuria at the end of the war when the Russians came in. Most of the people around them died. She was born after the war, but her mother, father, brother, and sister managed to escape and get back to Japan after several years. Her mother was very upset when she got married to a foreigner and then left Japan. She asked, “What happens if you can’t come back?” and we said, “That is silly, that will never happen”. This year it happened (due to Covid). It’s very disturbing. As a parent, how do you feel then about your kids? What kind of expectations are you trying to create for your children, about the future?
Adi: In retrospect I think my masters in philosophy has helped me foresee that my job as a parent is to teach my children how to think, to give them the proper tools needed to build skills. It is not about any one profession. The most important skill for the future is how to think and approach a problem. How to ask questions. It is not about the solution.
Ibbaka: To transition to your work as a futurist, how do you think about the future? How can we do that?
Adi: As a professional?
Ibbaka: Yes. Which goes deeper than prediction. What is the thought process that allows you to think about the future? Many people struggle with this.
Adi: People struggle with future thinking now more than ever, because our traditional way to predict the future should be updated with new, more relevant methodologies for this disruptive era.
Traditionally science taught us that everything should be based on the past. For example, if I need to plan an annual business plan for next year, what would be usually done is to look back on previous years and use that as a base for the next year prediction.
My argument is that we no longer have the past experiences on which we can base the future. The election of Mr. Trump in 2016 was something that had never happened before. The social network created by Facebook never happened before. Instagram never happened before. Covid-19 never happened before. Politically speaking, technologically speaking, in every field, we are seeing things that have never happened before. Like I said, We need new tools and a new mind-set in order to predict the future as we don’t have the past to rely on. I base my methodology on the present and not on the past.
Ibbaka: So, you’ve gathered these ideas into a book. Can you tell us more about NEXT: A manual for Disruption, How did this book come to be? What impact do you hope it has?
Adi: Four or five years ago, one of the largest private colleges in Israel reached out to me, they asked me to come and teach my methodology. It was one of the nicest moments in my life. I had to write the syllabus for the course and in doing that I came to understand that I had something that was bigger than a prediction. It’s actually a system of thinking. A methodology. I started teaching it and students liked it, and I said to myself that my next step would be to write the book.
I took that academic course and revised it to make it relevant to professionals. You can take the book, read it, you can and then put the method to work. I really believe one of the skills of the future is future thinking.
There are other skills of course. How to cooperate. How to be a brand. Those are also future skills.But how to ‘future think,’ or how to ‘think about the future’ has to be one of the most important.
I call it in the English version of the book, “A Manual for Disruption.” It is a manual because it actually takes you step-by-step through the working assumptions about disruptions. How to look at the present, how the present can tell you the story of the future, how to build a prediction, what is relevant or not relevant, what is reliable or unreliable and last but not least - How can I do pattern recognition when there is so much information.
A lot of organizations in Israel have bought the book for employees and directors. Given its popularity in Israel, I thought I’d translate it into English, so we started and then Covid came, so it was another disruption! We did two things – the first was we opened the whole finalized book, once translated into English, and then we put in chapters relevant to Covid. The second decision was to upload it to Amazon. Even now, we hope for the best.
Ibbaka: Who would you most like to read your book outside of Israel? Who are the people you would like to reach as your audience?
Adi: I think the book is directed at business oriented people, but it is relevant to everyone. It's for people that find that they cannot predict what is going to happen next. I really want people to change their mindset about future planning through this book, and help them understand that nothing is like it was… it’s like the R.E.M. song, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.”
When Covid started in March, consulting firms started to write predictions about the new normal. Drawing the line at ‘the new normal’ is a mistake, there is no line. If we think about the future of retail, social media, families, countries, municipalities, there is no new normal, there is only continuing disruption.
Ibbaka: I’ve noticed in the LinkedIn scenario planning group; you’ve been sharing some of your ideas about the trends that will impact our future. Can you say a little bit more about what those trends are?
Adi: Every year in December, I publish an annual report on trends, in which I try to go through each category and then see what’s going on in general. Last December, before covid, I saw something that was interesting.
On one hand, there was real prosperity. Everything was going very well. We travelled abroad, we sat in restaurants and bought everything on Alibaba, eBay, and Amazon. I saw something very interesting. I saw that the barometer of trust was decreasing. Trust in governments was falling apart. Climate issues are becoming more and more serious. Groups from Silicon Valley are trying to stop the usage of technology because of what tech is doing to us as people, our brains, and bodies. I thought to myself that this is the beginning of a big change. I asked myself “what happens when we don’t have anyone to trust, when there is no big brother that will come to us and tell us what is the right thing to do now.
We all need some way to balance our lives, or the environment, or capitalism, or globalization. I began to think, something will emerge within us. People will change their behaviour in so many ways, in terms of sustainability, their relationship with technology, capitalism and so many things. I saw that activism is going to be something really strong in the year 2020. I had an event where I was talking about the future of “re-owning” our lives, future, and wellness. People were looking at me wondering what I was talking about as they had a great year and had fun.
Three months later, Covid came and everything changed.
While trying to handle the pandemic, we also started asking ourselves questions that were put aside beforehand. For example, in which Society do we want to live in? around the globe we see activism growing - people demand change. In Israel Protests happen every week. This is happening all over the world.I think it's part of the gap between how we were in December 2019 and what happened to our lives. We want to change, and this is the future of re-owning. We want to re-own and take charge of our lives back in many different ways.
Ibbaka: We touched on this a little earlier, but I would like to go a bit deeper. You see your role as a parent as developing your children’s skills. You talked about the ability to think about the future as a critical skill for people going forward. Can you unfold that a bit more? What are the skills people will need for the future, also, what skills will we need in order to have the skill of thinking about the future.
Adi: The future skills, as I know them, are five.
Future thinking
Learning new technologies
Collaborating in new ways
Building our personal brands, and
Developing emotional intelligence.
The skills that are needed to adopt these future skills are
flexibility and
resilience.
Ibbaka: So, we’re still in the middle of the Covid pandemic, you have your book out in Hebrew, you have an English version – what does the future hold for you?
Adi: I’m working on building digital products such as an online course and several versions of my book: a print one, an Audio one. It's really interesting for me to do several digital products because until Covid, I really believed that the physical connection was the most important thing in my job. I used to consult with some of the biggest corporations in Israel, and I was doing this physically by going to their offices. I did hundreds of talks, I stood on stage at many conventions and conferences. I taught in academia in physical classes. When Covid came, I said to myself that this is not going to happen. I’m so good at doing things in real life, I want to see the eyes of the people I am talking to, I want to see the faces as I teach. I was really upset at putting myself behind a screen.
Then I said to myself that this is a disruption, and I should know what to do now. So, I asked “What are my biggest assets?”
My biggest asset is the methodology. I need to scale it up, I need to build products and to sell the methodology on every platform possible, from Amazon to online courses. I have found myself talking to you and to other people all over the world via Zoom or other platforms. There are some advantages to this new digital life, and obviously future predictions are becoming much more interesting.
