Transcripts are edited for readability and clarity.

Nigel: Hello, my name is Nigel Prentice, and I am a Design Director at IBM. And I would like to welcome you to the It’s about time podcast. The podcast is coming from the Racial Equity in Design work at IBM.

Nigel: I normally like to start with a quote and today is no different. And what I’d like to talk about a little bit is promise. And so, the idea is this, “What the people want is simple: they want an America as good as its promise,” and that is from Barbara Jordan in We Rise and so today I have something special for everyone.

Nigel: And listen, having been in design in related fields since the 1900s, as my son has reminded me where I’m from, it’s not often that I get the chance to discover something brand new to me, a method that makes me take a step back and reevaluate how I view the world and honestly challenge me how I should apply this to my world.

Nigel: Today, we’re gonna be talking about the intriguing practice of speculative fiction sometimes referred to as speculative futures. And we’re gonna get into the meanings of those concepts and words in just a second. First, I want to introduce my two guests. My first guest is Sarah Brooks, who is a design executive who I’ve had the pleasure of working with for most of my time at IBM. She’s always human-centered, always an advocate of user-centered design and of very intelligent thinking. Her educational stops include Boston University, California College of the Arts, MIT, and the Barack Obama presidency. She was a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow and brought those innovations to the Department of Veteran Affairs, IBM and more.

Nigel: Sarah, welcome. Thank you for joining me.

Sarah: Thank you, Nigel. Always happy to talk with you. Likewise, and my second guest is Herman Colquhoun. He is a newly appointed IBM Design Principal who brings his unique combination of design, technology and business skills. And believe me when I tell you, when I got to know this brother, I was really impressed with how he gracefully melds all those into a hybrid approach to his brand of problem solving.

Nigel: And he applies this design centered problem solving to the IBM Quantum business unit. Educationally, attended University of Waterloo, started a business in his early career, has a number of patents to his name, and is someone who I look to for inspiration when we’re combining research, design methods, and outcomes. Herman, it’s so good to have you today.

Herman: Thanks, Nigel. Glad to be here. Thanks for the generous introduction.

Nigel: Let’s get into a little bit of background before we jump into speculative fiction. I think it’s always instructive and interesting to — to understand the context through which our guests process the world and drive these methods forward. So, Sarah, for those who don’t know you as well as I do, when you describe your work, just describing your career, how do you encapsulate what you do, professionally, and how did you get to this point in your career?

Sarah: Yeah, I’ve had a loopy path always following my intuition and my many different interests. And so, I started out really being a reader. As a little kid, I always really loved to read, and I love stories and the power of people’s stories to be transported into all kinds of different worlds and be moved emotionally, and questioned things, and just jump into different realities and understand life from different people’s perspectives. I think that is a through line for me through all of my fine art, writing, and design work.

Nigel: Very interesting. Listen, I think you, you make every parent’s heart swell when you say reading is the passion that —that ignites you. And while you were here at IBM, you mentioned something to me that — that made me very proud that the Racial Equity in Design work was inspirational for you. Could you talk about that a little bit and maybe mention what about that work activated in your mind?

Sarah: Yeah, I really feel like it was one of the most important community led and inspired initiatives, that happened during my years at IBM. I feel — though we need to be doing so much more, for a more adjust and equitable world. And I really appreciated the self-organization of the community around how we have more racial equity in design across the global community of designers at IBM and looking at where’s the agency that we have to make changes that we want.

Nigel: Where is that agency indeed. and I want to turn to one of our Racial Equity in Design leadership team members. Listen, just give the folks a little bit about yourself. I think it’s really interesting folks who take one approach to education and career, and yours was mechanical engineering. And fast forward a few years and now we see you as a Design Principal. Talk about that a little bit and maybe what inspired you, in that transition.

Herman: Yeah, so I think I see them as one and the same, in a way. My interest in science is really the foundation for both. And being great at math and sciences growing up and getting into mechanical engineering, I wanted to know how things worked, and that wasn’t limited to just the mechanics of things.

Herman: It came to people as well. So, psychology, kinesiology, these are other courses and parts and things that I needed to learn about. And I wanted to learn about how humans —human beings worked internally and externally. So, I combined both worlds and that’s what prompted me to pursue the area of human factors, which built on my mechanical engineering background and my industrial engineering background and merged it with psychology in the science of the human being.

Nigel: That’s really intriguing, and I’ve gotta ask, what is, or what was a title of your patent or one of your patents?

Herman: Oh, the patent that I was pursuing was a remote-control interface that was activity based. An activity based remote control that grandma could use, not just technical people.

Nigel: There you go. Leave it to a designer to have that empathy to drive a human-centered piece of technology, no matter what it is, right? For everyone’s understanding, since 2020, our IBM Racial Equity in Design team has pursued what we call a vision to prioritize racial equity in our beliefs and actions, especially at IBM.

Nigel: Although we’ve made, several operational changes and gains, we’ve realized that it’s about time to step back and let our imagination soar. And so, we partnered with the team of practical futurists from our Strategic Foresight Guild to explore the question, what does inequity first workplace feel like for Black folks?

Nigel: And so, the team facilitated a series of activities. Sarah, could you just rewind the clock a little bit if you don’t mind, define the field, speculative fiction, speculative futurism. What is this field and then, what are the activities that we typically kick off with when working with a new team?

Sarah: Sure, speculative fiction is a really big, broad umbrella. So different people think about the boundaries of it in different ways, but essentially, it’s fictions or stories of things that — that could be true in the future, but they’re not yet true today.

Sarah: So, it’s a really great way to explore critical questions and a fictional world to stir emotional reactions and plant ideas in people’s minds that are very vivid. That does the work that fiction does of dropping you into a world that you can feel, you can understand what it’s like to wake up in that world, and live a day in that world, and try it on, right?

Sarah: So then if we have that kind of a robust picture, then we can step backwards and say, then what are the actions and decisions that we would take today to move us into that future or into those futures? A note on that, the future is never a singular thing. It’s not a foregone conclusion, right? It’s this multiplicity of options that is — that’s always there and is always being created kind of day to day. So that’s how I think about it. And so, the process of working with building out speculative fictions, that we used, we designed it particular for the group of people that we had, there’s all kinds of ways to do that sort of work. But I could of walk you through, that stepwise process, if that sounds good.

Nigel: I’m curious, and I’ve always been curious about this, what about the way in which speculative fiction goes about its work you thought would resonate with Racial Equity in Design?

Sarah: Yeah, I didn’t really hear what our end goal would be like in the conversations that were happening inside the company.

Sarah: I couldn’t myself articulate, here’s what this team wants when the goals have been achieved. Here’s what the workplace actually feels like for people to wake up and show up every day in it when we really have achieved racial equity. Thought it could be really interesting to — to work with the leadership team and see what’s in people’s imaginations and really bring those pictures to life for all the other colleagues to see, to get a more nuanced perspective of really what we mean when we’re talking about a place that people wanna wake up and work in every day.

Nigel: That makes sense. In other words, this method helps us speculate in a very concrete way on what the future could be and that is so much more powerful than brainstorming or goal setting. And I’ll share, that was a little uncomfortable for me at the time. As a leader, you want to be somewhat directive about where we’re going and to say, ‘I don’t know where we’re going’ can be uncomfortable. Just in full transparency, I think that’s what helped. That’s one of the moments that helped me grow, honestly, is to let go.

Nigel: My path towards creativity might be a little bit analytical sometimes, meaning I plan my sessions in which I will, at this point, try to be as clever as I can in whatever it is. I’m trying to do some design work around, however, this was different. This is fiction. It can be organic and going a lot of places. How do you deal with that? How do you deal with this giant enterprise of a company like IBM with written down KPIs and outcomes and business processes that we’re optimizing? And yet here we are with fiction as a business driver. Talk a little bit about that unique combination.

Sarah: Yeah, it was something really new in our context and that’s also why I think the folks in the Strategic Foresight Guild were thinking that it might be really interesting for this team because this team — racial equity and the initiative is audacious, is urgent. And there’s also a sense, I think, from a lot of people on the team that, things are not moving as quickly as we all want them to. We were thinking about of all the different methods we could use to think about how do we want the futures we want, it felt as if we could paint some really concrete pictures of what some potential futures were like then maybe that would help people see how far away from them, we are today, right? And maybe help move us more quickly toward them.

Sarah: And again, as I said, like when we have stories that have really concrete situations in them, they have social relationships that are really clear, new technologies that are clear, then we can use that analytic lens to say, again, then what are the steps? What are the decisions? What is the roadmap for how we move toward those things that we want?

Nigel: That’s an interesting connection point. Day-to-day, we use this concept of roadmap so often, right?

Sarah: Yeah.

Nigel: In corporate design, because we’ve got ideas and the art of the possible, and we have these visioning sessions, and then eventually we have to make it real.

Nigel: We have to make something, and it has to ship, right? And so usually we use a roadmap like you just mentioned, to get there. So that’s very intriguing. Herman, I’m curious, what were your first reactions to this? Was this new to you first of all? And then if it was new to you, were you immediately all in or did you take a minute for it to become comfortable?

Herman: Strategic foresight was not new to me. I had an interest in it before. While we were working together in Racial Equity in Design, I had this curiosity in this area, and I was happy to see that the two were coming and merging. But speculative fiction in itself was very new to me. And so, I — I was not like you, Nigel, I was a little bit hesitant, and didn’t know what to do with this and how we would make something concrete out of this method and how we would show strategic outcomes from this. I, too, was taken aback, but I developed a— an appreciation for the method as I went through it and adopted it. I am a believer.

Nigel: That’s right, that’s right. And so, let’s go back to those workshops. We did some world building and having a son that loves video games, in that industry, they talk about world building all the time. What does that mean in our speculative fiction? What were the prompts? And what are you attempting to do, Sarah, when you’re asking someone to build a world? What does that mean?

Sarah: Yeah, the way that we went about it was to cross-examine these macro forces that were affecting racial equity today. So, we looked along social, technological, ecological, economic, and political lines. And then, the team each picked a handful of those forces. And then we worked in these pre-formatted story cards, and we created characters who were gonna live in that world and then built a desired world around the forces we chose for the characters that we created. So, I think creating some structure and stepping through the things that are affecting a person, and then who is that person?

Sarah: And then from there, within the stories, people imagined new technologies, new ways of relating and new potential policies. It was very quick. Great examples of world building and speculative fiction. Some of my favorite examples are novels, full blown novels. I love the writer Octavia Butler, for example, who’s a wonderful, speculative fiction writer who creates entire worlds and groups of characters who are moving through those worlds, right? And they moved through an entire story arc in the, over the course of a novel. But for us, we needed to give our effort some parameters. People were very busy; they were pulled in many different directions. We didn’t want this to — effort to feel like it was yet more work or some kind of burden for people to do.

Sarah: We wanted it to catalyze and bring ideas forward that people already had in their minds and were running in the back of their minds. Hey, I wish something could be true. A way of bringing forward those wishes and those wants in this world format. So, creating those story cards and giving people time to work through what was the character, doing in that little world. We did a little bit of the sketching of that within a workshop. And then when the workshop ended, myself, and Herman, Megan McGrath, who’s in the Strategic Foresight Guild, who was part of facilitating the workshop along with Roosevelt Faulkner and Dan Silvera. We worked with the writers of the stories to continue fleshing them out and then editing them and then finally packaging them into this zine format. And we had that beautifully illustrated also by a designer within our team, Alex Graves. So that’s one way to do it. There’s so many different ways, but that was what we did.

Nigel: I don’t wanna spoil some of the stories, but do any of the stories stand out to you in terms of being daring and really exploring? And maybe we should ask first, what was the major prompt specifically for Racial Equity in Design as the participants were going about world building? I remember there being a sentence. Do you remember the prompt we had for the work?

Sarah: Yeah, we asked what the equity first workplace of the future felt like for Black folks in 2035?

Nigel: That’s it!

Sarah: So, we put it, in a not too far out future, but far enough hopefully that — that people wouldn’t feel constrained to only the initiative — to extending ideas of the initiatives that we currently had underway. We wanted to give people enough imaginative space to feel like they could bring all their new ideas.

Nigel: Okay, and who gets the apple in the classroom? Which one did you like? Which one had an impression upon you as particularly daring or futurist?

Sarah: Herman and I are shaking our heads. Nigel, that’s unfair! Each of these stories is so beautiful each in their own way.

That’s correct. That is a correct answer, and Herman wrote one. So let me turn my softball question to you, Herman. Let’s talk about your own story. You can’t say no about that one. What’s the title of it and who was the main character?

Herman: So, the title of my story is They Looked Both Ways and the main character — his name is Jahlani, and Jahlani a designer in his own right. Very smart person. A Black person who’s meeting challenges in terms of trying to really solve some of these racial equity problems in the world and using technology to do so.

Nigel: Okay, all right. A very appropriate cliffhanger there. No need to ruin it for those who will read it. And what was that process like as you were writing? You mentioned earlier that you came to appreciate this method as you were practicing it, as you were using it.

Nigel: I remember those sessions. I remember us, conversing and talking, with our guides and facilitators. What was your inner conversation at that moment? What were you thinking about as you constructed this space for Jahlani to operate in?

Herman: As I said, I was a little bit hesitant. I was also curious, but the framework that we were supplied — the speculative fiction approach, forced me to deconstruct my thoughts a little bit differently than normal. And I’m an engineer, so I like things like formulas, and we use somewhat things like the design thinking framework, and we combine observation, and we distill those observations, and we reflect on them to create our designs.

Herman: But this takes it a step further. As designers, we often work with the art of the possible, as you said, and we build to-be scenarios to portray what could that possible near term future look like. But in this case, we’re looking at more far-reaching futures and it enables me as the author to express what might normally be my internal thoughts and deliver those in a more digestible fashion as part of the overall story.

Herman: So that was another way of executing on these scenarios, in a more complex fashion. And it not only creates empathy, but it — I think it immerses the readers in our story and the stakeholders. The readers are our stakeholders and they’re in there so deeply that they’re verging on sympathy. And that’s even more powerful than empathy. And yeah, I think that’s the power in this story.

Herman: Oh, I see. Yes, definitely when we write about the future, we are making extensions of ourselves and where we’ve come from. So, as we project, we are really basing the foundation in those projections from what we know of ourselves. And we dig deep to figure out, okay, what am I going to bring from my scientific background? What am I going to bring from my cultural background? What problems do we see that we don’t want to see in the future?

Herman: And so, the methods, force us to put those onto paper, force us to share those with others. So, it brings everybody into alignment or at least, with an ability to see your stories. And they can “yes, and…”just like we do in design thinking, and we can build on those concepts and deliver them effectively.

Nigel: You mentioned culture just now, a person’s culture. Would you mind sharing it a little bit? How would you characterize your culture and your lived reality?

Herman: I think I’ve transitioned in life, but there is a place I came from where I can feel an affiliation with other people, especially in our Racial Equity in Design group. We all have similar upbringings, and come from similar places, even though we’re from all over the country and the continent. I think that’s what’s really interesting to note about us. Even though we’re from all over that we can unite with these perspectives.

Herman: And that’s one thing that I think we bring to our stories. That’s because this is an amalgamation of stories in this collection. You’ll see that we bring a variety of perspectives, about being Black in America and understanding the common struggles. And the struggles aren’t things that we necessarily call out in the stories directly. They’re things that people realize are being perhaps addressed, perhaps solved, perhaps changed in the stories that makes them think, oh, I didn’t realize that was going on, or that was something that needed to be taken as a problem to be solved.

Nigel: And you mentioned, geography, a second ago, as I asked about culture, and yours is interesting because you are in North America, but not the U.S., you’re in Canada. So, part of your culture is being Canadian, being a Black Canadian. Being a father, being a husband, being a designer. As you observe the state of race relations in the States, as a Canadian, as you observe the state of racial equity conversations in the States versus what you might see and you do see in Canada, could you comment a little bit about that? How naive or off track are we down here? And tell me how figured out you got it up there.

Herman: I wouldn’t say that the two are so different. What is it, you have 10 times the population, so you have 10 times the visibility? So, while some of the States and the issues that we deal with might be more suppressed in terms of — is it as in your face as it is in the news that you see coming from the States? No. But do the problems exist? Do the same problems exist? Yes. Some might call it a microcosm, but not really. It’s a nation, right? So, they’re two nations that have really some of the same problems that they need to deal with.

Nigel: As you have moved through your career from being, a college student at one point to having your first job, to being in mid-career, and now you’re a leader, what has it been like? Have there been moments where you were like, did that comment just get made to me because of my skin color? Or am I maybe exaggerating intent of what that person just said? Have you ever had those moments that many folks of the lived experience of being a minority, whatever the minority is, but especially being Black tend and to have or has it been something different for you?

Herman: No, I think — I don’t know if I’m overstating by saying that we all have those thoughts, those same thoughts. Am I going through this particular situation? Am I being held back? Am I being treated differently because of the color of my skin? I can tell you one thing that I knew at a young age when I was coming out of the University of Waterloo and going into my co-op programs, I did — this was a conscious thought that, ‘oh, my name on my resume does not reflect my culture.’ My name is German. ’Herman’ is German, and ’Colquhoun’ is Scottish. And no one would ever know who I was on that piece of paper. All they could see were my accomplishments. And I thought to myself that might actually be a good thing or a — not a good thing, but an advantage in a way as opposed to something opposite.

Herman: So just the fact that I even had to — that I thought about that, and I consciously thought about that says that there’s something very wrong in this world. For a kid like myself at that time to have to think those thoughts.

Nigel: Yeah, absolutely. And that makes me think of several of these moments that many of us must navigate, right? Professionally, but also personally. I remember when folks were being chased through their neighborhoods for jogging and ultimately, harassed by their white neighbors. I’m wondering, you and I haven’t really talked about this as dads, but have you had to talk? When you get pulled over by a White police officer or when you’re talking with an adult son, daughter, your skin is Brown and here’s how to act. Here’s how not to be stereotyped. Here’s how to survive, honestly. Have you ever had that talk?

Herman: I am in Canada and Toronto, and maybe that’s one of the differences that I can call out is that there are areas where I might not have to worry that much about my son’s encountering those kinds of problems because of where I’ve chosen to live. And I’ve been privileged enough to choose where I live. I’m blessed for being that position. But I think that does call it a difference in in some respects, as to do we need to worry about the police to that degree, yes, we do need to worry about the policing in our area.

Herman: Does policing need to be changed? Yes. Policing, the way policing is done needs to be changed. Do we have to have this talk with our children? That’s where you and I diverge a bit. And I never fully had to have that in depth of a talk with my sons about this particular nature and encountering the police.

Herman: Although I do know that there has been bias from the police themselves. And there are many cases in Toronto where we do feel that race has been the root cause for an unfortunate incident. A death. A murder. But I’m not as concerned as to how my sons speak to an adult, or how they speak to an officer here, or how they behave themselves other than, behave yourself, appropriately.

Herman: When it comes to the color of their skin, that’s not as critical as it might be across the border.

Nigel: With myself, knowing how you approach your work, having worked side by side with you. I imagine that your conversations might not necessarily about be about the police force and how to exist in those environments, but perhaps you would have conversations about what success looks like and what it means to navigate a world where the majority don’t look like you. They might not have your hairstyle, texture, color, products. Those types of conversations, and how do we stand up and be counted. I feel like I have a connection to you in that, a deep belief of meritocracy that, you perform well, and therefore the rewards will come. Does that sound familiar?

Herman: Oh, completely accurate. I think that’s a generational thing for people like us. My parents come from Jamaica, and they’ve instilled in me, work hard, be academically successful, focus on developing yourself. And that comes out in my story, right? My speculative fiction. It comes out where Jahlani’s mother is the one who instills upon him to understand where he comes from and how the past can affect his future in terms of his race, and his decisions in life. And so that part of me has come out in the story. And it is something that I do talk about with my sons in terms of making sure that their achievements stand out, and that can ensure themselves a better future by showing their merits, as you say.

Herman: What’s what will help excel them and take them beyond these race racial headwinds that they might meet on their way there.

Nigel: And so, Sarah, as you listen and observe this interaction Herman and I are having, right? Two parents, two professionals, two designers thinking through what identity means and what it means to exist in this space, in this time. What thoughts or reactions do you have? How might it impact you? And what does it mean for you to listen and hear us explore these spaces?

Sarah: It brings up sadness, brings up anger, brings up frustration. Personally, how to emotionally hold injustice is that’s something that I work on within myself. Anger can be really useful good force for galvanizing action. And also, there’s a point at which it can become really personally, individually, destructive and for me — like not emotionally healthy. So, I think something that comes up is I’m always working on finding that line for myself about where to take action. And then, just where to cultivate personal practices around peace and acceptance of the things that I cannot change, as well.

Sarah: The second thing that comes up for me too is differences, qualities, or experiences that may put us at the margins. Some of those are more visible, some of those are less visible. My grandparents were Ukrainian. They were fleeing pilgrims, where Jews were being killed. They’re Jewish. Jews were being killed for being Jewish. That’s a thousands year long history of Jews being killed for being Jewish in different contexts. There is definitely a lot of inherited trauma around Judaism and being persecuted. So, I feel that in the history of my family, and I think about where kind of trauma comes down through the bloodline and then what I do with that, how I work on it. So those are a couple things.

Nigel: Such a meaningful moment there. I think you’re speaking about these emotions in the human experience that stem from the realities in our human experience. And that’s one thing to bring it to this futurism work that I find really interesting is that as I look back at the stories that were read, this method allowed, and really invited us to take the idea of equity work beyond lip service.

Nigel: It’s beyond the talking points. We’ve move beyond the diversity, equity and inclusiveness, trope if you will, that every corporation, plows into their talking points. And says, no, it’s not just about hiring and retention and those sorts of standard, platitudes. Let’s get to something real. And I couldn’t help but think as Herman described his character, Jahlani. That potentially Jahlani was a bit autobiographical. And that even if Jahlani isn’t meant to be autobiographical, Herman likely infused into Jahlani some threads from his own experience from his life. And so, you can’t help but be authentic if you’re putting yourself into the work. This fiction work is an exercise — it does something really interesting, I think, in the professional arena. Does that make sense from a futurism methodology standpoint, Herman?

Herman: It drives home the point of if you we’re putting these collections together what are people really going to take away when they hear these stories, right? I think that people are either going to see themselves in one or more of these stories or align likenesses like Sarah just did. Back to her history and said, look, we’ve gone through this like what you’re experiencing, and come out with a better understanding of the complexities and the nuances around what we call the struggle, right?

Herman: So, there’s struggles. There’s several struggles in history but our struggle and ’struggle,’ they’re really the hardships created by racism and systemic racism. And it’s such a massive, interconnected web — It almost defies description in a way. And that these stories shine a light on it. It’s almost easier to do it through fiction as opposed to like standard prose and reporting. In the end, I think people will be able to deconstruct that path.

Herman: Sarah, you said there’s a multiplicity of futures, right? So, the futures could be positive, or they could be negative, but in the end, people can see the path from where they are now to how they get to that particular future and take action. Be the change that needs to happen to either prevent that or bring it to fruition.

Nigel: Sarah, I’d love to get your reaction to this. Many times, we need to build a business case for any sort of meaningful work that a team takes on. This is nothing new, right? What sort of ammunition would you give to our colleagues to have that conversation with their executive or with their business owner, their stakeholder, whoever that is, that makes the case that this is an activity that allows us to do something that you can’t do somewhere else. What coaching would you give an aspiring futurist to bring that practice to life?

Sarah: Yeah, I think the work of speculative fictions can be seen as something that it is an extension or perhaps a richer version of what we typically do in planning exercises that we call visioning. We talked about it earlier. Herman was talking about how it takes scenarios, which we often rely on when we’re doing planning around what is it that we wanna achieve? What are the business goals? We have some vision that we’re working toward. So, this is a way of having an enriched vision of what we’re working towards.

Sarah: And I also think, there’s — I don’t know, I’m curious what you two think. For me, facts and figures and quantitative data behind anything is very important. What truly moves me, and what stirs up a will to change, and really do something and take action in my heart, are people’s stories which contain emotions. That’s what moves me. And I’m like, I’m glad when those are backed with — reality backed when data and responsible, truthful information.

Sarah: But it’s story. It’s the power of story and the power of art. I think it sounds a little bold to invoke the power of art in a business context, but maybe that’s something that I would say to that aspiring person. When we talk about humanizing business and getting outcomes that are respectful for people and respectful for the planet, and that can become regenerative and not degenerative, as business practices.

Sarah: I think that art has, and story, film, has much to give us, to teach us, and to help us. What do you both think? You think that’s true?

Nigel: Herman, go ahead.

Herman: Yeah, I do think it’s true. And in particular, we’re talking about fiction.

Sarah: Yeah.

Herman: And as Nigel said, this fiction, it’s organic, and it can go a lot of places. And what does that mean? It means we have freedom. That’s essentially the core of what we’re looking for is freedom. And I think this is the most appropriate tool to be able to express that.

Nigel: I love that. appropriateness, very key. Also going back, Sarah, to your point, once again, storytelling wins the day, right? I don’t think this is earthshattering, but half the time in the business unit I work in where there are not a lot of design teams in that whole business unit, I can show up to a meeting of my peers and executives who outrank me and immediately make an impact on whatever topic we’re talking about by telling a story. I don’t know if y’all do this ever, but I sometimes start a playback or a presentation with the actual words: ’But first, let me tell you a story.’ Dramatic pause. What do we do when we watch a movie? Or consuming and connecting with a story when we watch television, it’s a series of stories back-to-back.

Nigel: Even the commercials are stories, right? And then when you meet up with your friends over lunch, what do they tell you? Stories. The story is the universal human channel for connection. That’s why I love this field of design. We get to use many of the same tools as the artist and apply them in the space of a business outcome.

Nigel: Where do you think the role of speculative fiction sits in this toolbox of design and designers? And if I were to invest as a leader of design, how much should I be investing in this method with the teams that I lead?

Sarah: The Strategic Foresight Guild at IBM is really robust, right? It’s a group of people. It’s something that’s self-organized. It’s the folks that I mentioned are the leadership team: Roosevelt Faulkner, Megan McGrath, Dan Silvera, kicked it off, right? They’re all people who have, academic and practice background and using different futures methods, just like design methods, right?

Sarah: There’s many futures, methods, and just started meeting, holding guild meetings once a month and bringing different things to every meeting. Bringing a method, bringing a case study, bringing in someone externally who’s applying the work in some way. And over the course of last year, we worked together and thinking through just IBM had done for design with the design thinking toolkit, put together IBM’s perspective on here’s how to really get started out of all the design methods you could use.

Sarah: Here’s the ones we’re really gonna major on, that we feel like are appropriate to our context. So, the guild did that around futures methods, and came up with a group of methods that have been prototyped across the business with different teams, that could work through different ways of getting at what kind of futures do people want and what’s the best way to get there?

Sarah: And this speculative fiction is a really key among them in getting and addressing that vision piece. With starting with the end in mind. We say that a lot in design and the design works start with the end in mind, right? So, these fictions are a great way to do that. It’s just there as a tool, for anyone to use who’s internal in IBM.

Sarah: And there are a lot of people who do different flavors of speculative fiction and in futures practices that they’re just great examples if you go searching on the web of other ways that people have done similar exercises. Again, in different context. And this work is done. It’s done in government, it’s done in strategic planning, in large corporations and nonprofits, NGOs with community groups. it’s very widely utilized.

Nigel: Okay. And what strikes me is like many design practices, this helps us take a leap. I’ll never forget the first few times — I’m maybe 15 years into my career, and the first time I’m in a design thinking workshop, like why are all these sticking over?

Nigel: And then it’s oh, I see the sticky notes help us democratize the ideation session, right? The personas help us humanize the data about those whom we serve. But those first few steps are almost always filled with a bit of trepidation. And so, I think like that for many folks, when they embark on a speculative fiction activity, I encourage folks to allow that discomfort to dissolve into the method and trust that method to unleash something new.

Nigel: And to me, that thing that’s new was the bridge between sort of the corporate body, meaning the status quo, the processes, the budgets, the business outcomes and the creative ethos that helps us become makers.

Nigel: So, I’m gonna give Herman the final word. I feel like you’ve been inspired with this method, and I know you are one who collects methods, and you continually add to your overall tool set. What role will this now play for you and what do you look forward to those outcomes being in your career?

Herman: I think, so the speculative fiction and the role it plays is almost —I can liken it to it being to scenarios that we currently use in our design toolbox. As a visionary or business development lead would liken roadmaps to sprints. I think if we can use that as a tool to communicate to the business the value of having a speculative roadmap, if they already buy into design and scenarios, then we can deliver a powerful punch, and one for design overall.

Nigel: Okay, a speculative roadmap. There it is. There is the latest, newest artifact, that I can’t wait to see your version of Herman. And as you continue to apply that in Quantum and beyond.

Nigel: So, to the both of you, thank you so much for this conversation. I can’t wait for folks to experience these stories as we have, as really the tip of the iceberg. I hope to continue this practice. I hope that we are able to untether ourselves to the sort of concreteness of today’s reality. And like we have all shared today, unleash the art of the possible when thinking about a future that we can make exist.

Nigel: Thank you both for your openness and, and for sharing, sharing your thoughts on this matter and more, and most importantly, for always supporting the Racial Equity in Design work, and for being my friend and someone who I look up to in both cases. Thanks, I can’t wait to see what we do next.

Herman: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for having us.

Sarah: Thank you, Nigel. Love you.

Nigel: Of course. Take care.

Nigel: Thank you for listening to It’s about time. I’d like to thank Alisha [Moore] Padolsky, our producer, and David Avila, our audio engineer. And thanks to the entire Racial Equity in Design workstream here at IBM for making this possible. Everyone, be safe and be well.