Looking Outside comes to you LIVE from the Dubai Future Forum, the largest gathering of futurists in the world.

In this conversation we talk about sustainable design with Arup's Director of Foresight, Josef Hargrave. Arup is focused on creating more sustainable built environments, and Josef speaks to how designing for the future needs to be anchored in decisions for the present, by understanding deeply the structural limitations and infrastructure of today.

In this episode of Looking Outside we venture into dark futures with global futurist Nikolas Badminton, crossing over the line of realism into dystopia.

While positive futures are important, Nik says facing into the fact that ‘bad stuff does exist’ is the important starting point. We often see plans or goals that are so far out, particularly in government policies, that are psychologically disconnected from the people planning them and therefore aren’t designed to provide anything tangible enough to motivate people to act.

Are some people simply more cut out to take on big responsibilities, where lives are at stake, or is it actually just good training? In this episode of Looking Outside, we explore the mindset and skills of preparedness in Flying with commercial airline pilot, Ricardo Nunes.

Being responsible for hundreds of people on the plane is not something Ricardo takes for granted. While many of us would find that extreme level of responsibility crippling, Ricardo says the confidence comes from understanding the weight of the responsibility, and taking that seriously by training for the worst.

We kick off Season 4 bravely with the visionary Amy Webb, Quantitative Futurist, CEO of the Future Today Institute, professor at NYU and author. In this episode, as in Amy’s book The Genesis Machine, we discuss the paths towards synthetic futures and the methods in creating more credible focus on the long term future.

Amy takes us into the future, and the topic of the latest book she co-authored with Andrew Hessel, The Genesis Machine, explaining how over 13 years of researching AI she noticed something profound happening in the synthetic biology space. General purpose technologies have the potential to fundamentally alter society and impact the economy, like electricity and the internet have, and while Amy concedes scaling it is a ‘ways off’, we should be paying attention, and planning for synthetic biology to act as the next generative purpose technology – transforming medicine, the environment and our food systems.

We start a new year with a new way of Thinking, approaching the topic of careful consideration, extrapolation and explanation in a critical way. Joining us is self-proclaimed overthinker, award winning writer, leading cultural commentator and Foresight & Strategy lead at Reddit, Matt Klein.

Matt takes on a lot and he takes in a lot. He shares how he loads information and how he avoids overloading - a process where he binge eats information and then let's it "simmer" at its own pace during a silent walk outside. When he returns to it, it forms a constellation of connection points and inspiration sparks.

In this episode of Looking Outside we learn how to weave together the voices of the future, the agents with vision, to create Coalitions of Change, with Cat Tully, Founder and Director of the School of International Futures.

Having created the Next Generation Foresight Practitioners Network, Cat speaks to why it’s critical we use the voice of young people as evidence towards future planning, by allowing those who will live in the future to speak for it.

We start season 3 digging deep into human values, while speculating on their evolved expression into the future, with futurist and Associate Professor at University of Houston's Foresight Program, Dr Andy Hines.

Having authored a book on the topic of values, ConsumerShift, Andy shares how defining what a value is and how it is expressed by people with differing typologies, helps us perceive them as something less static and therefore shows us their potential evolution into the future.

Looking Outside Episode 13 tackles deeper, critical and courageous thinking, with industry leader on transformative Rethinking, Tom Goodwin, Co-Founder of All We Have Is Now and world-renowned speaker on business transformation.

As someone who proclaims to ‘profoundly not give a shit’, and voices his views regularly to a large audience, Tom shares how he braves feedback and negative perceptions by following the voice of the every day person and championing uncommon perspectives.

To broaden our perspective, in Episode 11 we bring the Curiosity mountain to us direct from the source, with the original Chief Curiosity Officer, former VP of Consumer & Market Insights and Foresight at L'Oréal Groupe, and now Chief Data Officer at Pierre Fabre, Sarah DaVanzo.

Sarah shares her vast experience in “strategic curiosity science”; unpacking what curiosity is beyond intellectualism, stressing the worrying results in quantifying and tracking curiosity over time, and highlighting the importance of immersion when applying curious behavior.

For Episode 6 of Looking Outside we invite thought leader, Maneesh Kaushik on the show, Insights and Trend lead at PepsiCo. Today we’re looking outside Insights.

Maneesh outlines how he breaks apart conventional thinking used in business to understand humans of today and showcases how his team pushes to the human of tomorrow.

We go to philosophical and thoughtful places in Episode 5 of Looking Outside with strategist Philip Ryan, Partner and Head of Innovation & Futures at Ipsos Strategy3. Today we’re looking outside Perspectives.

Philip shares how his curious mind explores varied and broad topics, which allows him to pull in vast perspectives, that lead directly to more robust strategic thinking.