The Wicked Opportunities Podcast

In horror flicks such as "Night of the Living Dead," zombies are portrayed as slow-moving, awkward "predators who are totally independent from a physiological needs of any kind." (Thanks Max Brooks!) However, modern zombies have gotten much faster, making it more likely that you (or your slower friends) will fall prey to their ravenous hordes. They've definitely become mor...

Zombies are among us! However, they come in many different forms. In this week's episode, your hosts Yvette and Frank will take you on a tour that reveals how the Zombie Apocalypse is manifesting through our use of technology, psychology, and biomimicry. Warning: not all zombies are so easy to recognize. Some are scary. Others may signal the way to a better future. Can you recognize the diffe...

Braaaains! Historically, this is how zombies have been portrayed: as undead, flesh-eating corpses. Unlike other monsters - which are mostly a product of superstition or fear - today's zombies reflect our viral subjugation to technology in the form of social media, algorithms, and screens. What if we reframed the Zombie Apocalypse as the Global Brain - a mutual consumption of knowledge that cr...

We’re wrapping up our first collection of podcasts, but we’re just getting started! Hopefully, the same holds true for humanity’s performance as generative designers in the ongoing story of the universe. We have the power to play a major role in this unfolding narrative - look at the positive and negative impact we’ve had during our time on the show - but we must realize that our part is dependent...

This is the last time that we will be using the Point of Impact questions to create a future map (at least for awhile), so we didn’t want to waste this opportunity to “GO BIG!” As you may have already noticed during the first 2 weeks of this topic, the idea of humans making an evolutionary jump plays a big role in the transition from being a species of parasites to instead becoming life-giving sym...

You might be thinking, “Really Yvette and Frank, you believe that the human species can transcend beyond our base wants and desires to become a higher expression of conscious evolution?” We CAN, and we SHOULD! If you’re a regular listener, you know that we have been using the second episode during each series to demonstrate that our Wicked Opportunity isn’t just “pie in the sky” (you’ve got to lov...

Welcome to Month 7 - the last series in our first collection! (Wait, you didn’t know we were creating collections of podcasts based on overarching ideas? Hmm… there might be a challenge awaiting our listeners in this episode!) In this series, we culminate with the Wicked Problem of “Homogenecene Extinction” or the human-imposed sterilization of our otherwise biologically and culturally diverse wor...

Futures thinking isn’t about waiting for the future; it’s about bringing the ideas for better futures into the decisions we make today! Can imagining alternative futures really change the way we approach the domains and disciplines that we practice today? Specifically, can the Wicked Opportunity of Decentralized Prosperity reframe the way that we practice law enforcement (BTW, police officers have...

Our well-worn maps that detail the landscape of housing, employment, healthcare, civic engagement, democratic participation, and due process are no longer serving us in a world of increasing complexity and changing social dynamics. Many would argue those maps never served us very well, as they were fashioned around ideologies based on separation and superiority. We not only need new maps, but a no...

The injustices exacerbated by the “powers-that-be” are unlikely to change through a purely top-down effort, as the factors that lead to these prejudices and inequalities are rooted in our local and individual beliefs. That’s not to say we shouldn’t fight for just government; rather, widespread prosperity must become part of our global psyche so that it is practiced in our businesses, neighborhoods...

If any Wicked Problem has been front-and-center in recent times, it’s certainly the Systemic Barriers that have marginalized various individuals and groups, denying them full access to the rights, opportunities and resources that must be available to everyone. These barriers are largely based in fear and hatred, but are then expressed as laws and regulations that alienate people from the social in...

Each month our end-of-series episode imagines alternative expressions for traditional professions, but this month during Wicked Creations we are drilling down even further as we focus on the “new identity of identity itself” - how meta of us! What would embracing an Extended Reality - a mutually interdependent environment that promotes “we” over “me” - mean for domains such as big tech, entreprene...

Are you beginning to see a new identity for humanity on the horizon, rising out of the ashes of the broken and outdated identities of siloed, disconnected and closed systems? Futurists and foresight professionals use various methods to create alternative visions of the future, and that’s exactly what we’ll do during this episode, painting a picture of a world that adopts the Wicked Opportunity of...

Now that you’ve journeyed with us past the Wicked Problem of Identity Crisis, and been introduced to the novel landscape of Extended Reality, it’s time to create a new visionary persona that we can all identify with (see what we did there?) for greater care, capability and creativity on a global scale. Rather than only dreaming about a healthier human expression that fosters equity, unity and pros...

Greetings Wicked Wizards! It’s time to begin a new series, and this month we’re going straight for the jugular. Our world is in the grip of a widespread identity crisis - from the speed of technological change that disrupts work and meaning at an individual level, to the shifting social demographics that threaten to upend our national ideologies. If we’re going to survive the turmoil that rises fr...

We’ve challenged the idea that battling VUCA should be traded for a greater embrace of a long now perspective, but what does that mean in practice? More specifically, what does it mean for those who are practicing foresight in their institutions, governments and lives? In the final episode of the Embracing the Long Now series, Yvette and Frank question the role of the futurist as a discipline that...

Now that we’ve built a bridge to leveraging our VUCA world instead of waging war on the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity that defines a cosmo-centric universe, it’s time to imagine the advantages that a long now approach can offer us. Such a world promises to look quite different from the structures and players that we are used to, but also holds the potential for solving long-sta...

Moving from a mindset of battling a VUCA environment to one of embracing a long now perspective is certainly no easy task. However, it’s a shift that we must engage in if our hopes for humanity extend beyond a struggle for survival or a surrender to certain obsolescence. The bridge to a mysterious future may be covered by the fog of legacy systems, but our collective fear of such a future - one th...

Welcome to the first episode of 2021! Throughout 2020 there were a plethora of voices reinforcing that we live in an increasingly VUCA world - volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous - and for very obvious reasons. Facts being ridiculed, stable governance under assault, and a pandemic that completely altered life around the world - all manifestations of a VUCA environment that has unraveled bus...

If you haven’t realized by now, this isn’t your grandparent’s century. In order to excel in a future of converging quantitative and qualitative metrics, unfolding possibilities and transformational realities, each and every one of us will need to reframe our approach to work, planning, output and actions. In this last episode of 2020, futurists Yvette and Frank invite listeners to examine how vari...

Emergence is a property of exponential complexity in which the unfolding nature of reality can look very different from today’s parts, pieces and expected pathways. However, this does not mean that we have no agency when it comes to charting the future. Humanity is not separate from nature - we are a part of nature - and as such, we play a co-creative role in recognizing, understanding, embracing...

The number of books suggesting that humanity must embrace complexity, emergence and transformational change in order to manifest better futures have exploded over the past several years. However, it’s one thing to point out the need for a shift from Analysis Paralysis to a landscape of Co-Creative Emergence, but another thing to make it a reality. How can we move away from the Wicked Problem of li...

The Wicked Problem of “Analysis Paralysis” is often used to describe the act of overthinking an issue to the detriment of taking action, but it also reflects our current infatuation with quantitative-heavy measurements as the gateway to a perfect world. The current belief that “if we can just gather more data, we can overcome any and every obstacle” has created an overly simplistic narrative in a...

Breaking past the closed idea of Generational Warfare into the open spaces afforded through a People Cloud will mean that our ideas of talent, work, learning, skills, expertise and knowledge creation will radically shift. In reality, our ability to both survive and thrive as a species may depend upon this transformational way of defining life. Join Yvette and Frank on this month’s final episode as...

If we’re going to create a landscape that benefits from a People Cloud full of human cooperation, open access, unlimited knowledge and convergent insights, we must redefine the closed environments, systems and stories that have separated people across time and space. Can we build platforms of understanding that weave a tapestry of unique and unseen interconnections rather than simply surrendering...