The New Abnormal

This episode of The New Abnormal podcast features Clare Stark, Head of Futures Literacy and Foresight at UNESCO - the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

They’re a specialized UN agency dedicated to promoting world peace and security through international collaboration in education, arts, sciences, and culture. Headquartered in Paris, its mission spans 194 member states and encompasses several focus areas. Key Initiatives include World Heritage Sites, Global Education, Scientific & Ethical Standards, and Cultural Heritage Safeguarding.

Clare is a dedicated professional with more than 20 years of experience in international development cooperation, she’s passionate about ensuring that technology leads to positive social transformations, and using futures literacy and foresight to inspire collective action to shape the futures we want, using evidence-based approaches to enhance anticipatory capacities.

She covers a lot of ground in the podcast, including UNESCO's role in advancing futures literacy and anticipatory governance / Embedding foresight into national and int’l policymaking / The Global Anticipatory Policy Coalition / AI governance, AI readiness and responsible deployment / Climate anxiety & information anxiety / Trust, democracy and misinformation / Leadership through collective intelligence and collaboration / The importance of culture, history and indigenous knowledge in shaping future policy / Participatory foresight involving young people, educators and citizens / The future of education, creativity and public policy in an AI-enabled world. 

So, I hope you enjoy listening to her as much as I did, in what I hope you'll agree is a fascinating conversation re: the growing importance of anticipatory governance and futures thinking in addressing today's global challenges.

This episode of The New Abnormal podcast features Fatima-Zahra Ma-el-ainin, who is a psychologist, poet, and narrative architect reimagining how societies cultivate wellbeing. 

Her work sits at the intersection of systems work, knowledge design, and social transformation, informed by more than a decade of experience in systems mapping, programme design, and conversational leadership. Through global commissions, institutional partnerships, and field-building initiatives, she develops frameworks that elevate wellbeing from intervention to design principle. 

She currently serves on the Lancet-LSHTM Commission on the Emotional Determinants of Health, and co-leads the World Economic Forum’s Future50 Initiative. Previously, she co-founded a mental health social enterprise whose programs and curricula impacted seven million students in Morocco. 

A sought-after speaker, she has addressed audiences at the UK Parliament, the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, the IAYMH Conference, and TEDx, among other platforms. 

So, I hope you enjoy listening to her as much as I did, in a dynamic conversation that takes in all of the above and more! 

This episode of The New Abnormal podcast features Dr Mark Bloomfield, who has leveraged AI and advanced technology for over fifteen years to drive innovation, transformation, and measurable impact across an array of businesses.

Operating at the intersection of business, technology, and academia, he now works across multiple industries, advising organisations on how to apply AI and emerging technologies for real commercial impact with measurable results. 

As a Fellow at Cambridge Judge Business School, Mark teaches on executive education programmes. Hence, he's constantly immersed in the most cutting-edge thinking and practice, engaging with some of the brightest minds in academia and business.

So, I hope you enjoy listening to him as much as I did, in what I hope you'll agree is a fascinating conversation.

This episode of The New Abnormal podcast features Tommaso Cesano, Founder of Osmo, a Strategy+Design studio focused on creating impactful products and experiences, aiming to build products for clients that can 'change their tomorrow'. 

Based in Italy, this award-winning studio works with ambitious companies who wish to be innovators in their industries. They believe in 'Curiosity, Adventurism, and Effort'. Along with their work for leading-edge companies, one of the many dynamic things they do is to oversee the visual identity of TEDx events in their beautiful home city of Brescia. 

We discuss Tommaso's design ethos, and along the way also cover the amazing bookzine that they publish (L'osmonauta), which has something of a cult following. So, if you're interested in hearing a detailed viewpoint on the issues impacting design agencies today, this one's for you! 

This episode of The New Abnormal podcast features the independent futurist Jonas Drechsel, who is also a member and co-initiator of the dynamic collective practice youngK Berlin; which is interdisciplinary, exploratory, and holistic.

His mission as a solo freelance futurist is to make desirable futures more likely. As a critical futurist, he thinks about how the status quo works and what doesn't. As a real utopian, Jonas participates in the creation of exemplary projects that anticipate a better world. And thereby create spaces of possibility. 

We discuss those issues in this episode, where he explains why working with the youngK collective is so fun, as their culture, exchange, and collaboration contributes to shaping futures with joy and dedication. He also covers the leading-edge methodologies that he’s using, along with a piece he’s just written for the Journal for Futures Studies.

And we cover the recent ‘Futurist Archetypes’ report that he produced, which has gained a lot of attention in the futurist-community. Whilst he insists that these archetypes are ironic and deliberately exaggerated, they’re also both funny and uncannily accurate. The crucial question for futurists is, of course, in which of them might you recognise yourself?

So, I hope you enjoy the conversation!

Series Six

This episode of The New Abnormal features Alice Dimond, who leads Mō Āpōpō Future-Makers at Tokona te Raki, a project that equips young people to imagine and create better futures. 

This includes designing a toolkit grounded in Māori perspectives and stories, empowering young people to use these perspectives to navigate complexity and drive transformative change. 

In addition, she's a Fellow with Next Generation Foresight Practitioners, an Advisory Trustee at Ako Ōtautahi Learning City Trust and the National New Zealand Lead for the Futures Methods from Around the World project, where she explores how Māori worldviews, ways of thinking, organising, and acting can unlock new pathways to better futures. 

Alice has presented at global forums such as the Dubai Future Forum, World Futures Day, and the Building Hopeful Futures Festival. She's committed to using innovation to challenge dominant thinking, create new solutions, and drive change. 

So, we discuss all the above and I hope you enjoy the conversation!

This episode of The New Abnormal podcast features Marianna Maki-Teeri, Director of Foresight at Futures Platform. 

She’s an internationally recognized futurist with 15 years of experience in strategic foresight & futures studies, and helps organizations around the world make sense of change before it happens.

At Futures Platform, Marianna leads an analysis team in translating emerging signals and “what ifs” into actionable insights, while advising clients on building and scaling their own foresight capabilities. Her work serves as a constant bridge between practice and theory. 

As a doctoral researcher at the Finland Futures Research Centre (FFRC), she investigates the synergy between human and machine intelligence in foresight work, exploring if and how AI can augment our capacity to reach more impactful outcomes.

Marianna is driven by the conviction that foresight helps us become better architects of tomorrow. In an era of constant disruption, she works to ensure that systemic transformation is a deliberate choice rather than a passive drift.

So, I hope you enjoy listening to Marianna as much as I did!

This episode of The New Abnormal podcast features Mikko Dufva, the Leading Foresight Specialist at Sitra.

Mikko works on projects across an array of areas including those related to the futures of synthetic biology, platform economies, forestry, mining and use of renewable energy. 

Sitra is a future-orientated organisation that promotes Finland’s competitiveness and the well-being of the Finnish people. They specialise in anticipating societal change, trying out new operating models and accelerating businesses aimed at creating sustainable well-being. 

In the interview, we discuss Sitra’s approach to examining trends, the tensions between them, and aligning with weak signals of change alongside mental images connected with the future, in order to make futures more approachable. 

We particularly focus on their ‘Megatrends 2026’ report which aims to strengthen Finns’ future-orientated thinking and their capacity for foresight in decision-making; but also discuss their newly released report the ‘Growth Atlas’ along with ‘IF magazine’ which focuses on weak signals. Finally, Mikko also illuminates a side project regarding the development of ways to explore futures through body and movement. 

So, I hope you enjoy listening to him as much as I did! 

This episode of the New Abnormal podcast features Ramila Khafaji Zadeh, who is a trainer and designer in Futures Literacy at Hanze University of Applied Sciences and part of the UNESCO Chair in Futures Literacy. 

She leads projects with governments, industry, higher education, and NGOs, and has previously worked with the UN on futures-oriented initiatives. With expertise in social innovation and governance, her current work focuses on transitions and how being futures-oriented, as a capability, helps navigate and shape these processes. 

In this episode we discuss all of the above, but do so by particularly focusing on her homeland of Iran. Thus she illuminates her views on why the freedom of imagination is so important regarding utilising plural perspectives to imagine plural futures. As she says "what happens next hasn't been written yet, and the next chapter cannot be written only by what we fear might return..."

This episode of The New Abnormal podcast features the renowned superforecaster Warren Hatch, CEO of Good Judgement Inc. 

He joined the organisation as a volunteer forecaster in a research project sponsored by the US government / funded by the intelligence community, where they emerged as the undisputed victor re: geopolitical forecasting. 

Warren then became a 'Superforecaster' and is now CEO of the commercial successor, Good Judgment Inc, a world leader in applying innovative probabilistic solutions to real-world decisions in order to forecast the future.  

He's assisted governments and private companies around the world to improve their foresight and quantify uncertainty. Warren's prior career was on Wall Street where he started at Morgan Stanley, and he earned his PhD from Oxford University.

So, we discuss all of the above in what I hope you'll agree is a fascinating conversation, focusing around Warren's views on how to quantify subjective risks to deliver accurate and early foresight, thus enabling better decision making about the future.