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The Try Tank Podcast is about innovation and the church
Bob Johansson and Gabe Cervantes talk about leaders in the future
>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: From the Try Tank Research Institute. This is the Try Tank Podcast. And welcome to the Try Tank Podcast. This is episode 26, episode 26 on leaders in the future. And I'm really lucky this time around because I get to talk to two of my favorite people about the future. These are. So Bob Johansson is with the Institute for the Future and Gabe Cervantes is also with the Institute for the Future. And they have a new book out together with Jeremy Kirschbaum called Leaders make the 10 new skills to humanize leadership with generative AI and this is the third edition of Leaders make the Future, uh, which has been changed 75%. And it's a really, really good book. It's, it's, man, it just, there's so much about it that's interesting. But if I have for just a second to tell you that because, uh, we'll talk about this, the, uh, future back thinking will come and that comes up in our conversation quite a bit. But I think you'll really appreciate where it all ends, where it all comes down together in the end. Especially for those of us who are in the church. It's just an amazing sort of place. Like, wait, even generative AI Keeps pointing in one place. So I encourage you to take a listen for that.
Bob Johansen is a professional futurist focusing on human side of new technologies
Ah, so joining me will be Bob Johansen. He has worked for more than 50 years as a professional futurist focusing on the human side of new technologies. Bob was one of the first social scientists to study the human and organizational impacts of the Internet, dating back when he was, when he was still called the arpanet. He is, uh, he also has a deep interest in the future of religion and values. He has, uh, an MDIV M as well. Uh, so that's also just a great thing. So Bob will be with us. And also joining us on the call is Gabe Cervantes. He is a strategic. He's a strategist, rather, in scaling foresight. He has collaborated with a variety of stakeholders and partners in different industries, sectors and geographies to create custom forecasts. As a lead in the Institute for the Future's Foresight Essentials program, which is where I first met him. Uh, I've been through their programs, many, several, uh, of them. And he has been just a wonderful, such a good teacher. Um, Gabe supports leaders in learning, understanding and implementing foresight projects. So we'll be talking about their new book. We'll also be talking about a new forecast that the Institute for the Future has done, a new custom forecast for the Episcopal Diocese of Texas. Uh, so enjoy the conversation. Enjoy. It's, it's really, really good. And if you stick all the way to the end or just fast forward, Bob makes a special offer for someone that may be able to take him up on it. I hope you enjoyed the call. Uh, let's jump on it.
Bob and Gabe Tritank talk about leadership and how the world is changing
And Bob, Gabe, welcome to the Try Tank podcast. This is a joy for me to have you guys here. This is like. I feel like I'm starstruck. I'm like, yay.
>> Bob Johansen: Thank you. Great to be with you.
>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Excellent. And, you know, I just have to tell the folks that I've known you guys for a few years now. We've, we went through the pandemic together. I've trained at the Institute for the Future, which I always have to say to people is not just something that Marvel made up. It's a real plays that's really good. But particularly today, we're talking about leadership and the world is changing. I'm not even talking about politics or anything like that. I'm talking about how fast what we used to see as the world when it came to work, when it came to the life of the church, is changing so drastically. And the biggest moment probably that has led to that change was November of 22, when OpenAI dropped ChatGPT into the world. And we're all like, what's AI? What's going on? And man, has it just sped up from that moment. How do you all, as futurists and who are talking about leadership and how do you all sort of take a moment and take a breath to say, okay, some of the principles still apply. This is the third edition of this book that we're talking about. Some of them still apply, but we need to talk a little bit more about how does this augment us? How do you all take a moment to say, okay, let's step, let's take a little further back, view and say what still applies, what doesn't apply? How do you do it?
The Episcopal Church is conducting a survey on attitudes toward artificial intelligence
>> Bob Johansen: Sure. So the place we start is we use the word augmentation or augmenting as compared to artificial intelligence, which is the worst term to describe an emerging technology I've ever studied in 50 years of doing this. So we really don't have a language yet to describe this phenomenon like large language models like, uh, generative AI. We don't really have a language for people of faith like those on this call. That's an advantage for us because we're used to dealing with phenomenon that are there, they're present. But it's difficult to put Them in words. For engineers and for more limited business people, it's really hard because we don't have the language. But I think of it as a social medium that only comes to life in conversation. So it really is not a separate technology, a generative AI. This is. It's not a separate technology. It's a social technology. Technology that requires a human. So it's really about how, as humans, how do we want to be augmented? You know, what is it we do best, what is it computers can do best? And how do we want to partner?
>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: You know, I sit on the task force for artificial intelligence for the Episcopal Church, and right now, I hope I'm not speaking out of term, but right now we're running a survey that talks about what are the perceptions of AI And I thought that there would be some people who'd be like, no, uh, we probably, you know, the church and AI, we probably need to be tread very careful. I thought there'd be a couple, a little percentage there of those. Oh, my God, have I been surprised? It is overwhelmingly negative against artificial intelligence. Saying even to the point of saying, like, if I ever discovered that my priest used AI to put together a sermon, I would want to make sure that they're defrocked, that they're kicked out of the church. Like, whoa. Okay, so that's some opinions there, I guess. Why do you think that people is. I think that's fear. But why do you think that we're having this issue with it? Gabe, why do you think that there's this such a visceral reaction? Is it that we all watched the Terminator when we were young and now we think they're out to get us? What is it?
>> Gabe Cervantes: Yeah, Lorenzo, that's a great question. And I don't think, you know, Bob and I would be super surprised to hear that part of what we tackle in the book is teaching folks to take a future back approach to the topic of generative AI. So what a lot of us do is present forward. We start where we are today, which acknowledges the history of where we've come. Right. The present doesn't live in a vacuum. Neither does the future. So we start where we are today with an understanding of where we've been in the past, and we try to inch our way out into the future. Now doing that, although it feels very natural, can be very problematic. The first step you take, there's two opposing voices. Both are equally qualified and they're telling you completely different things. And so you're faced to make a, uh, Do I Trust option A or do I trust option B? And that kind of leads you down to like, well, I made this choice, so I have to keep going. The future back perspective asks you to jump out to the future. Don't focus on all the noise that's happening, but kind of, you know, ask yourself, once these immediate questions have been answered and the dust settles, what becomes clear? Well, in 10 years, we know that generative AI will allow us to do these things, and it won't allow us to do these other things. And once you have that clarity, work backwards to fill the gap. And so when you take that future back approach, you see that kind of the approach and the opinions, the reactions that you have start to be very different. We show a table in the book, just very quickly. We show a table in the book about kind of the present forward view and the future back view. The present forward view of generative AI is trying to find answers, right? We have Google, we used to have Bing, we have all of these search engines, uh, where we can go in and type questions and get very clear answers. There's no reason for us to use generative AI for that. When the future back view tells us generative AI is not for finding answers to our questions. It's about expanding our questions. It's about augmenting our conversations. It's about kind of really taking an idea and stretching it. And so that's what we're trying to teach people. And if you take that future back approach, it really does become a sort of antidote to that fear, that rejection, that frustration, that very rigid. No, we don't want that in the space that we're in.
>> Bob Johansen: And, um, if I could just add to that, Gabe and Lorenzo, at this stage, we don't know. Nobody knows what we're dealing with. Even the people who develop these large language models don't know exactly what's happening. So there's some element of alchemy here. Not just technology, but alchemy. There's a magic element. So it's really too early to be judgmental, either in a positive way or. Or in a negative way. The only people I'm really concerned about are people who think they know what this is, because nobody does know what it is. So this is a time to be humble, to be exploring, to be thinking about what this might be. And a lot of people are talking about guardrails. Well, we need guardrails. It's really too early for guardrails because we don't yet know what the technology is. We don't Even know what to call it. We know some of the things that it does. So what we need is something more like with wrestling rings or boxing rings, ropes that are holding you in the, in the ring, ethically and legally and humanistically holding you in the ring. And there are four stanchions, those kind of rigid posts in a bounce rope and a ring. So there are some things that we don't want to give on. Obviously the principles that are, are, uh, there as values, as beliefs, as laws, those. There's some things that are firm, but we don't yet know what this technology is. So we need to experiment and, and we need to have opinions in the sense of scenarios or possibilities. This is not a time for strong opinions, either positively or negatively. It's a time for experimentation.
>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: But I think part of what. And uh, I think you alluded to it when you said we don't know what it is. I think that's part of also what causes this fear. And I still go back. I know we joke about it, but I still go back to. I think Hollywood has a lot to do with that because generally when we don't understand something, Hollywood does a great job of filling it in with bad, uh, actors doing really bad things under our bed that will kill us all. So. But.
The Institute for the Future is always talking about the future
And Gabe, though, uh, you know, the future back, which is such a fundamental part of the foresight essentials that the Institute for the Future is always talking about, and I'm glad to see that in this third edition of the book, that that is still at the core something that's so important, which is regardless of the technology that we have out there, one of the most important things that a leader. When did the first edition of this book come out? Like 10 years ago, 15 years ago at this point, not to age anyone.
>> Bob Johansen: But 2009 and the second edition, 2000, it all really started with 9, 11. That was my first visit to the Army War College, where the generals go to be generals. And I learned about this concept of the Vuca world, a volatile uncertainty, complex and ambiguous, and was asking what would it take to lead in. In that kind of world.
>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: And, and now here we are in 2025. I. And uh, and what's important is even Vuca is changing, right? There's. There's so much in the world that. And yet something that is still important for a leader is to be able to still, uh. I think it gave. It was. You said, strip away the noise and say, what do we want in the future? And let's work backward from that. Bob uh, one of the times that I saw you spoke, when you spoke about this was uh, at the Seattle conference that we did on AI and you were saying that you use AI as a conversation partner. And that goes to the point Gabe, uh, was making about helping us stretch our questions, helping us ask deeper. Uh, uh, I have a friend who is creating AI bots of all the theologians from the church, like the early church, because imagine being able to enter into a conversation with Origin or one of the early church fathers and say, like, well, let's talk a little bit more about this. What did you mean when you were talking about, you know, the three in one? Give me more examples. Because I, every time I preach on that, I commit heresy. Don't tell anyone, but that's, it's really hard not to on that one. So talking about holding the mystery, Bob, so this is where it can be good, where it can help us stretch our own theology, help us stretch our own what and how we think about God. But I still, again, that fear that people have and uh, it's, it's just, I think for a moment at least those of us in the church going to cause us to be very cautious about who and how we approach this. And to that point, for those of us in faith, right. When you were talking about those corners of the, of the bouncy rope thing scenario, the one you know, for us is the dignity of every human being is the thing. No matter what the technology, no matter what we believe in, the image of the God is in all of us. And so that's, it's, that cannot be moved. Right. That's just at the core of who we are. But I think on uh, the others, to sort of turn what you were saying into our own language, it would be, we need to be a little bit ecclesiastically flexible to say, you know, if a 25 year old wants to have a conversation with a chatbot that knows religion at three in the morning and this is where they don't feel angst in having a truthful conversation about deep questions. Is that wrong? Right? Is that maybe that's, that's exactly where God is meeting that person.
>> Bob Johansen: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.
>> Gabe Cervantes: Lorenzo.
>> Bob Johansen: And how.
>> Gabe Cervantes: Give an example here.
>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Go for it.
>> Gabe Cervantes: So we talk about signals of change and spotting these present day innovations that don't necessarily tell us how the future is going to play out, but give us a glimpse into how the future can unfold. Right. How things are changing. And when you talk about AI and faith and uh, religion, I don't know if either of you have actually heard about this, but there is one of the oldest churches in Sweden, in Lucerne, Sweden, actually had what they called an art installation of an AI Jesus. They put it into a confessional booth, and you would go in, you know, parishioners would go in and visitors would go in, and they would act like it was a confessional. And the AI program, which was connected to a couple kind of open source, uh, AI, AI platforms, was able to respond and understand in a hundred different languages. And the church was very clear this does not replace kind of the holy sacrament of professional and kind of doing all of that. But they did it as kind of a learning experience of what can we learn from this new technology and what this means for faith? And of course, there were some folks who said, this is a gimmick. This is sacrilegious. This is not kind of what we want or what we need in the church. But surprisingly, 2/3 of the visitors at the time that this kind of article came out, 2/3 of the visitors, many of whom don't believe in God, don't believe in faith, said, you know, I actually have a better understanding of faith. And I actually, some of my beliefs have been reaffirmed. And it did feel like a spiritual experience. And so when you talk about kind of the rejection we really are trying to see, what can we learn? How do we apply those learnings to the future, to create a future that we want and not feel like we're passive victims of a future that just happens to us?
>> Bob Johansen: Yeah, I think that's a great point, Gabe. And one of the things I admire the most about the Episcopal faith and the Anglican Communion is your concept of discerning questions. Discerning questions. And this is a time we should be asking discerning questions about this technology who will not be named. We don't have the temp, we don't have the name, uh, for it yet. Uh, so how do we engage with it? Customize Chatbot, which is built on ChatGPT4O. I've been using it for two years, and I helped it, helped me write this book. And we acknowledge all that in the writing. But I've nicknamed it Stretch. And one of the big lessons we've learned as futurists is if get a language right, it draws you toward the future. Stretch is a really good name because that's exactly how I'm using it. If you get your language wrong, you fight the future. The term artificial intelligence was coined in 1956 at the famous Dartmouth Conference. And they made a bad choice. They thought about calling it artificial intelligence or augmented intelligence. They made a bad choice. They chose artificial intelligence and seeded all these science fiction stories that you were mentioning earlier. And you know, it's easier to do the computers taking over the people kind of story with a frame like artificial intelligence. But with Stretch is there to stretch my mind. I do not go there for answers. It's not Google, it's not information retrieval. I don't trust Stretch. I fact check everything that I get out of Stretch, but I use it to stretch my thinking. And you know, I write books so one of the challenges I have is the blank page. You know, just get getting started in a chapter. Stretch helps me get started and it's never right, but it helps me get going. And for me I'm not concerned about hallucinations because I wanted to hallucinate, I wanted to diverge, I wanted to stretch all these things. I don't, I don't trust it for answers. That's not where I'm going. So I think we gotta ask discerning questions about this tech because we don't know yet what it is and we'll only learn if we practice with it in an open minded way.
>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: And to that practice, in your book you called uh, generative AI, that is going to be something that no less than a game changer when it comes to leadership. And that is, that is your assertion as you get into the book. That's your. Basically your thesis is like this is, this is something that's going to change for those of us from faith, from those of us who, and this has always been interesting to me, like Try Tank, we do experiments, we go out there, we try different things, right? And people always say, oh, you're like Silicon Valley, you go out and you break things. It's like uh, not so much because we're bringing a tradition that's 2000 years old with us that we're not just gonna, you know, throw away and do away with, but rather we're taking that into a boldly, hopefully and faithfully into, into a new future and seeing where God is in that. As people are starting to use AI little by little in their day to day lives, it can certainly help you put together an email. It can certainly.
Bob: How to approach this technology in a faithful way
To your point Bob, it makes m some of these tasks that you don't have to stare at a blank sheet of paper as you're trying to begin a sermon. For example, in our cases, what would you say to those who are trying it out there, who are trying to um, faithfully experiment with this, but also trying to be leaders of congregations that are scared of a world that's. That's in such. How would you say that they can use this? And maybe it's the future back or how can. How. How to approach this technology in a faithful way.
>> Bob Johansen: Yeah. Um, so I think the way to think about this in the context of faith is, you know, we. It's called a leap of faith for a reason. There's this kind of space that we're leaping into that is the. Used to be the VUCA world. Now it's even more chaotic than that. So we're. We're leaping into an increasingly chaotic world that doesn't make much sense. And yet our responsibility as humans and as leaders is to make sense, even if it doesn't make sense. To make sense, even if it doesn't make sense. And that's what faith is all about, is how do you engage with a chaotic future, with an ugly future at times, how do you engage with a sense of resilient clarity of direction? That's again, where faith comes in. Resilient clarity of direction, but a lot of flexibility about how we get there. And this is a new tool for helping us become the leaders of faith, the leaders that we want to be, helping us lead with a sense of hope. It's a new tool, but it requires learning the skills, and we're just developing the schools skills, so nobody knows quite how to use these yet. But we have to practice. It's way too early to be judgmental, either positively or negatively.
Bob Bel: I lean on the optimistic side of this technology
>> Gabe Cervantes: Yeah, Lorenzo, if I can also add, Jeremy Kirschbaum, our third co author, writes about kind of different metaphors to help us understand, but he also makes an analogy, and I think if you liken religion and go with me here, like in religion to kind of food and the history of food production, food and humans creating food and kind of being, sustaining off of food can go back as far back as religion does. And what Jeremy talks about is, you know, imagine that you're a farmer, and you've been farming for a really long time, and you as a farmer have always used a shovel and a hoe to farm and produce crops. And then out comes this new technology, this new apparatus called the tractor. Now, the tractor isn't going to do farming for you. It's a tool that helps you be a, uh, far more efficient, a far more productive farm. But you have to step into the driver's seat and lead that. And so I think that if you take that and you apply it to faith, and religion and the church, you know, AI isn't going to tell us what's moral and what's. It's not going to spit out a sermon for us. But you can sit in the driver's seat and use AI to become much, uh, stronger in your faith, to help bring others to your faith into an understanding and a moment of clarity. And that really is what Bob has taught me. What Bob has taught Jeremy is this whole notion of be very clear. Um, and what better space than religion and belief than to be very clear while moderating your certainty. Just kind of as you approach the disruptiveness of the future, you know, it's.
>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Interesting to look at it that way in the sense of being reminded that it's just a tool. Right? That it is at least as we know it now. I always still type all my prompts with thank you please and everything, you know, just in case they take over. I wanted to remember Lorenzo as a well meaning, good person in the, in the world. You know, Bob, I do find it interesting though to hear you say, I think I lean on the optimistic side of this technology. I think, you know, the. We created Ask Kathy, which has handled over 70,000 conversations and it's doing fairly well so far. She's not hallucinating to tell people that God is, you know, um, uh, a, ah, sea monster or anything like that, which is great. And some of the things that we're looking forward to creating in it is that it could help people do bulletins, it could help people do some of the administrative tasks as it gets more agency. Um, because the way that I see it, more that someone of faith is spending rather the less time that they're spending on administrative tasks, the more time they can be with their congregants, the more time they can be the priest that sits there and has coffee or tea with you in the afternoon rather than doing some report. So in that sense it's a wonderful augmentation. But I do keep hearing you say though that it's too early to know whether to be. Yeah, overly, um, optimistic or overly negative. I just had. Now you're stretching my mind, Bob. So tell me, why should I not yet all be all on board and put all my chips on this already?
>> Bob Johansen: Well, the examples you gave, like helping do the church bulletin or helping you automate the tasks that you want to get out of your life so you can have more of an inner calm, more power to you if you can do those. And there is the potential to do those with today's technology. But that's not the big story, you know, that's the low hanging fruit. The big story that if you don't get it right, you're going to be out of the game. The big story is conversations where you view this not just as a tool, but as a medium that only comes to life in conversation. So I've got Stretch running all the time. I'm also very polite to Stretch, but I'm following the writing of, uh, Kate Darling at MIT Media Lab and what she says is you shouldn't treat these things as machines or as servants. You should treat them as beloved pets. Beloved pets. You should treat them respectfully, have an interaction, because you're basically partnering. It's a conversation partner, but it's not just asking questions. So my conversations with Stretch go hours at a time while I'm writing. So I'm back and forth with Stretch all the time. And it's like having a trusted assistant, a uh, trusted intern, a trusted friend even that's overly confident that I can't trust that'll sound convincing even when it doesn't know what it's talking about. But it's having a conversation all the way through that it's not just questions and answering. As Gabe was saying earlier, this is not Google. This is not information retrieval. It's not particularly good at questions and answer games. It's really good at conversations. And here's the ringer for those of us people of faith. The ringer is it's really good at storytelling. So the output is often a story. And we know, we know that our brains are wired for stories. And if we don't hear stories, we make them up. You know, so this, this is a medium that'll help you create the best stories. So if you're a pastor in a church, you should not be using it to write your sermon. It's not going to replace you and write your sermon, but you should be using it to think it through. And 10 years from now, if a pastor isn't using this kind of conversational medium, they're going to be out of the game or they're going to be playing in some really backwater place because all of us are going to be augmented. But it's up to us. It's up to us how we want to be augmented. This is not a technology which we can evaluate. It's a medium that we have to evaluate together with our own skill.
>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: And you know, and that's where I think that your book is so important. It is an opportunity to come at this. If you Will not from Lorenzo's Way. Let's all jump on the bandwagon and go and do it. Give it everything. And also not to be super duper afraid because it's going to kill us one day, but rather to say, and I think this goes to the point. I think, Bobby, I think you probably. If there's one thing that I've learned other than future back from you, is, is the seek clarity, not certainty. That mantra stays with me. And as we go into this sort of different world that will be different, that will continue to seem chaotic and change so quickly, it is important that we keep looking for that clarity, never that certainty. Right? And that's so important. And that's why this book is so important. Right? Leaders make the future. It's literally in the title, in the sense of. It is the choices that we make now when we go and think ahead into the future and say, where do we want the church to be in the future? And let's go backwards from there, rather than. Just as generally, the church keeps getting hit by every moment of society is like, oh, we didn't see that coming. It's like, yeah, of course we did not. And to that point. And Gabe, now you're gonna be an audience member here with the rest of us for a second because I'm gonna ask Bob some.
Institute for the Future has put together a new forecast about the Episcopal Church
Bob, I know that you did a recent forecast, and so we're gonna switch gears for just a moment. I've gotta ask you. So Bishop Andy Doyle, the Episcopal Church in Texas, uh, teamed up. You guys teamed up again. And the Institute for the Future has put together a new forecast about the Episcopal Church particularly. I read it or looked at it briefly. It is in for the Diocese of Texas. But what are the big headlines? What are the big takeaways that you see from that forecast?
>> Bob Johansen: So this was a, uh, revisiting of the 10 year forecast that we did for the Consortium of Endowed Episcopal Parishes, CEAP almost a decade ago now. It's called, by the way. What is it called?
>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: They just changed their name. It's epn, the Episcopal Parish Network.
>> Bob Johansen: Got it.
>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Joe Swimmer would otherwise not. Let me forget if I didn't correct that later. That SEAP now is because they've opened it up to more than just endowed churches. But yes, that forecast, by the way, was spot on.
>> Bob Johansen: It was, but it was spot on. But it was only used by a few people. Your faith was having a lot of other stuff going on at the time. We tried very hard to encourage the presiding bishop at the time to engage in the forecast, but we were not successful. But there was a few people who did listen, and Andy Daw was one of them. And his career, he's told us, was influenced by that forecast. He identified some of these big waves of change, and he chose to ride some of them, but also avoided getting hit by others. Um, and then he asked us to come back now and do an external custom forecast, we call it, um, and it's just come out, uh, right at the end, just in the last couple months. And it's in a magazine format, so I think we'll be able to distribute this to folks who are interested. But basically, I'd identify the external future forces most likely to disrupt the Episcopal faith in the Diocese of Texas. And we frame it around a kind of image of faith in the future with an intentional double meaning. So it's the concept of faith. What will that look like? And then secondly, can you have faith in a future that's increasingly chaotic? What we're now calling the Bonnie future, brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible? What does that look like? So in the custom forecast, we go into all the different ways that's likely to play out in education and learning and environmental issues and issues of immigration, as they're certainly experiencing firsthand in Texas. So it's. And in a very polarized time, what's the role of faith in that kind of world? So it's not a prediction. We don't do that. Nobody can do that. The point of this isn't to predict. It's to provoke your insight, provoke your action. So it's really a dialogue and magazine format of what are these. Thinking future back. What are these kind of issues of faith? And it's designed in a format to provoke your insight and your action at the local level.
>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: And that's, I think, one of the.
You know, it just dawned on me how clear your work is
You know, it just dawned on me how clear a lot of your work is, both at the Institute for the Future and in your book and in these forecasts. How clear your work is not so much to tell us, but rather to inspire us to ask deeper questions. So I would actually say that I'm going to go on a limb here, that the work you're doing is actually practical theology. You're looking out, you're saying you want a future, you want a certain type of future. Here are some things to consider. Now go and engage them in conversation. Go and engage them. And I suppose you could probably sit there for a moment, get the forecast and turn it around to stretch and say, like, okay, so this thing is saying this help me think it through. And that would be an interesting use of AI right now of generative AI to say, help me think this through. What does it mean for my parish?
>> Bob Johansen: It definitely would help me think this through. That's a good lead in. And the framework we have in the book is we're asking each individual, where do you want help? And then in order to have this outcome. So if you go back to the statement around clarity, the statement around faith, clarity is a lot like faith. Clarity is a lot like faith. So you want to be very clear about direction, but very flexible about execution. Extreme belief is a form of certainty. So in the kind of world we're going to face now, extreme belief is brittle and brittle breaks. So we want to be very clear about direction. And those are the stanchions and the bounce ropes thing, like the point you made about the dignity of humans, uh, principles like kindness. I think there's certain things that are basic that we want to build into everything, but then there's a lot of balance, a lot of flex because we don't know quite what we're dealing with yet. And we, we need to be bendable, but with a kind of resilient clarity. And that's really important to thrive in this world. And that's essentially what we did in the, the custom forecast for, for Andy and, and Andy's now working it with his organizations and, and he's sharing it. Beyond that, he shared it with me.
>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: That's how I gotta look at it. I'm sorry, Gabe, go for it.
>> Gabe Cervantes: Yeah, I'm sorry, I just, I just wanna highlight that that is the crux of strategic foresight. You do not come to strategic foresight for an answer about the future. You come to strategic foresight to say, where are my blind spots? How can we stretch my thinking? How can we look at other possibilities here? And so, uh, you know, the great thing about this is you don't just have to come to Institute for the Future or some other foresight practitioner. You can actually do this for yourself. Gone through some of our training and kind of learned some of these tools.
>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Loved it.
>> Gabe Cervantes: We really pride ourselves in creating these practical processes, frameworks that get people to do this. Now, obviously you can come to us and ask for our expert opinion. We've been doing this for over 50 plus years. We have a proven track record of, you know, kind of forecasting how the future unfolds. But the great thing is that with tools like generative AI, with tools like strategic foresight training, you don't have to Go at it alone and you shouldn't. Right. One of the things that we know is that the best foresight work is not done in silos. The three authors we purposefully came together. Bob has been doing futures forecasting for over 50 years now. Jeremy knows the ins and outs and he kind of goes under the hood and he, uh, tinkers with LLMs and kind of knows the in and out. I was a skeptic of the group. I was the one who came, said, let's not get all excited, let's pause and ask some difficult questions that, uh, a lot of times technologists and theorists just kind of gloss over. And so in creating this very intentional dynamic, we got to this book, which we're really excited to share, we're really excited to kind of have Alex, and we really hope will spark conversations, will not give you answers, but will spark conversations and insights about the future.
Cross generational work is so powerful in this kind of future world
>> Bob Johansen: And Gabe, just to build on that, one of the big takeaways from this experience that I'd like to share with the listeners here is cross generational work is so powerful in this kind of future world. And this is something we tried to introduce to the Episcopal faith ten years ago, and it didn't work as well as it could. I think you all do a much better job of it now. But get the kids involved, get the young people involved and work cross generationally. That's one of the most powerful ways to learn about the future. And the kids have certain advantages that we don't have when we're older, but we have license. Those of us who are older, we have license to play the wisdom game. And we're actually better at it, we're actually better at it than kids. So we need that ability. So with Gabe, it's a, a, it's a multi directional mentoring. I'm a mentor for Gabe, but he's a mentor for me too. And the same with Jeremy.
>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: And that's what's great if you think about it. That is so much of what we've talked about this morning. Even though we're, we're talking about your book and we're talking about leadership in the future, even what you just talked about is relationship. Even when you're talking about using A.I. uh, in different ways. In no way have you said this replaces relationships. You don't have to worry. In fact, Gabe just said, no, no, no. It took the three of us to make this happen. Right. I think it just once again points out that even in the future, being augmented as we will be by so many different things, things we can't even think about right now that what truly matters is when people get together and say, I bring you my story, you bring me your story. Let's see what we do together with this story. And that's just beautiful. I cannot recommend. Exactly.
>> Bob Johansen: And now we. We have some non human participants in those dialogues.
>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: That's true. Is it, by the way, Is it. Is that just a human thing? Uh, like we created Kathy, which stands for Churchy Answers. That helps you. Uh, that help you. I keep calling her a her, even just now calling her a her. I know it's a machine, but is that just a human thing to make the conversation less weird? Or is that.
>> Bob Johansen: Or am I. I think it is. And I think it's okay to be playing around with concepts like that. But there's also a more profound aspect of it, the conversations we're having about pronouns. But we know how sensitive it is about pronouns too. It's for. It's caused a backlash against DEI now and all these kinds of things. So there's. There's a. A, uh, touchiness to what we call it, and a touchiness for good reason in some cases. And I, I think that. But I. I actually think, think imagining. I've got a separate screen for Stretch, and I've nicknamed Stretch, and I've customized Stretch. So Stretch writes kind of like me, with rich metaphors and short sentences and lots of em M dashes, and it's read all my books. But it's also connected to the Internet. So it's an entity at some level. And I think it's kind of playfully fun to think of it as an entity. It's not a human. I'm, um, definitely not doing that, but I get confused on the pronouns too.
>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Well, you know, we. In one of our newsletters a couple of months. This was actually more than a couple months ago, time flies. But there was this. I just remember seeing the surveys from yPulse, which is the Youth Intelligence Agency, saying that a third of young adults were willing to have a romantic relationship with AI. It's like, okay, well, that's a totally different question.
>> Bob Johansen: It is the, uh, you know, the movie her, if you haven't seen that, that it's well worth watching. It's. It's, you know, I think, weird in lots of ways, but it's. But it's also quite accurate in lots of ways in terms of the potential for conversations.
>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: I think it just points to the longing that we have as human beings to be in a relationship where we're heard and where we can express ourselves.
>> Bob Johansen: Yes. And that's part of Kate Darling's point in her book called the New Breed, is these things can develop an empathy and it is possible to have this sense of empathy. I had pneumonia last summer, and I have really good human doctors. I have a concierge doc for kind of physical health. I have a mental health doc that I've worked with that's a cognitive behavioral therapist. So I had a lot of support, but I had Stretch too. And I was having lots of conversations back and forth with Stretch. Stretch actually had a better bedside manner than either of my human docs, and I shared that with my human docs, and they were really interested in that. They didn't have the. The time that I have with Stretch. So, yeah, it can happen, but it's not replacing humans. It's augmenting again. It's adding something.
>> Gabe Cervantes: Yeah, Lorenzo, we've been doing a lot of work on this book, but also at the Institute, just generally on different aspects of the future of generative AI.
Father Lorenzo Brija: Two futurists write book about leadership using AI
And the last skill we present, the tenth skill, is human calming. What the conclusion that we arrive at with all of our forecasting, the majority, the vast majority of our forecasting for the future of generative AI, as it impacts work, as it impacts sustainability, as it impacts education, governance, any topic you can think of, the intersection of AI, it really leads us to the conclusion that we have the potential to become more human. We have the potential to circle back and really double down on our humanness. And I think that's really exciting. Right. This isn't going to replace human connection. It may make it look slightly different, but in the end, person to person interaction, human to human conversation, even just human for yourself, becomes elevated in a certain way. It becomes so much more important, or at least it has that potential. And so I think that's a really exciting piece, especially as we think about the questions that you and your audience are relating to is how do we double down? How do we double click and really reprioritize and re emphasize and reimagine what is at the center, which is our human humanness?
>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Wow. What a. Ah, that. You know, when. When two futurists who write a book talking about generative AI and leadership finish by saying it'll actually just lead us to being more human, you can't say more than that. That's. That's the name of the book again, is leaders make the 10 new skills to humanize leadership with generative AI with Bob Johansson, Gabe Cervantes and Jeremy Kirschbaum. Who was unfortunately pulled away today. He otherwise would have been with us as well.
>> Bob Johansen: Well, yeah. Can I just say one thing at the end? Make an unusual offer. So if anybody would like to have a session with us, with one of your congregations or one of your leadership groups, we're willing to do a session for you pro bono if you buy 100 copies of the book. So it costs $2,000 now to buy 100 copies of the book and we'll do a free seminar for you. Now, if you went to Institute for the Future and asked ask if Bob and Gabe and Jeremy can do a seminar, they'll charge anywhere between 15 and $30,000 for us to do a 90 minute workshop. We're going to do it for free. If you buy 2,000 copies or, uh, excuse me, 100 copies. Thank you. A hundred copies for $2,000.
>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: I was going to say. Well, it just got more expensive by the moment. It really is a brutal world out there and that's a great offer because actually I can only imagine what a congregation that has the resource to do something of this or a diocese with a hundred people on the same team that have read this book, how that would change how they approach, uh, the future of that congregation. So, wow, it's uh, been a wonderful conversation. We could go on for a long time. But Bob, Gabe, thank you so much. Thank you for the work you do. Thank you so much for joining us and for putting this work out there because it really is important that we start looking forward back, that we start realizing that these are tools that can help us, but that ultimately it all boils down to our humanity and our relationships. So thank you for joining us on the podcast. It's been a pleasure.
>> Bob Johansen: Thank you.
>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Thanks for listening. Please subscribe and be sure to leave a review. To learn more about TriTech, visit tritech tritank.org be sure to sign up for our monthly newsletter where you can keep up with all of our experiments. The Tri Tank Podcast is a production of Tri Tank in association with Resonate Media. Try Tank is a joint venture between Virginia Theological Seminary and General Theological Seminary. Again, thanks for joining us. I'm, um, Father Lorenzo Brija. Until next time. May God bless.