But I think that your team was probably uniquely qualified within this mindset shift where you may have already been thinking about Lulu as a technology company.

Yeah, I mean, we're, you know, our team is elbows deep in the technology side of it, in the product side of it.

So, of course, we feel like it's a technology company.

Right.

I think, you know, what we have been able to accomplish over the past six years is really solidify that, especially when we, you know, relaunched the platform recently.

and kind of got it away from the old legacy platform that was really holding Lulu back from advancing as a technology company.

And now we have this great foundation that's new that we are able to build on and really kind of flex the technological muscles that our team is capable of doing.

okay again putting it under the lulu direct umbrella was was post 2020 right like the official brand yes 20 okay but so you're you we're predating that you're talking about right the the we're talking about just the shopify yeah okay yep so this is even longer than like you've been percolating this idea for even longer than than i thought okay yeah

Mm-hmm.

And so it's like, it's that, you know, 10 years ago it was like I was on the first mountain.

Two years ago, I was still on the first mountain, right? And, and it's weird, and talking about my wife or bringing something up is, like, me being on the first mountain of, like, achieving and success, we've been blessed that my wife's always been a stay-at-home mom.

And so me being on this mountain, I was kinda like, "Well, why isn't she there with me?" Kinda like, oh, you know.

But she's always been on the second mountain.

And so her heart and the way she shows up for others is just so amazing.

So it's like, I literally text her yesterday.

At least one up me

I'm with you, I'm with you.

When we talk about human centricity in relation to AI, let's say, I think, One thing that's starting to happen, and obviously this is a very quickly evolving conversation at the moment.

I think for quite a long time, design has been focused on the outputs of the design process, the end artifact, the image, the piece of motion graphics, the interactive surface, the chair, whatever it is.

And now that AI tools are able to sort of either get there or mimic those end results, they can produce high fidelity video, they can produce high fidelity applications, they can produce potentially templates for future products.

I think what that's doing is having a... a sort of self-reflection on the design industry and designers as to like focus a bit more on the process and focus a bit more on the craft and focus a bit more on what it means to go from zero to one and not just what the one is.

And I think that's the part that I'm interested in, whether that will have a net positive or a net negative impact on the design industry.

I think we're still waiting to see, but I do think that at the moment, the conversation certainly around here where I'm based is much more on like not the end goal anymore.

So can you share with us a little bit about what that title means to you and how you think about impact at that level? And even also just start by, for those who don't know what Royal Designer of Industry, what that distinction is.

But practically, when you're out talking to people, when you're doing your work, when you're writing your book, how does that play out? What does that actually mean in practicality?

Yeah, maybe it's just the midlife crisis coming out of me.

And maybe it's not.

Maybe I'm being a bit unfair to myself there.

But I feel like I've been involved in conversations about explicitly about the future, particularly about the future of technology and how that plays in society and culture and all of those other things.

And so I've been in thousands of conversations about that.

what the future looks like, what we might make, what we want to make with all sorts of different people.

This is an awakening

But we're- we're in the middle of this crazy arms race, and so what approaches should business leaders use to navigate that?

Yeah, so should futurism is just defined by some form of certainty about the future, and I think that can come from two places.

One is a sort of ideological position, either from your religions or the state of morality that you'd like to see in the world, and we should point towards there.

That's the world we should build.

I think that's sort of off to the side of what we're really talking about.

The should futurism I see played out a lot in business is- is this notion of observing the world through- through numeric practices, creating models of how we think the world works, and then the sort of- the temptation to project those models out into the future becomes almost irresistible, and people do that.

But the challenge that I have with should futurism is that once that solid line turns to a dotted line, it ceases to be data, and it becomes-

So they don't do enough of that.

Uh, and yet these fundamental questions, do we want to guard against humanity, do we want the government to be involved in protecting, say, how children interact with future tech, uh, are important, no?

Yeah, I mean, one of the major, uh, challenges we're facing is the speed at which change is coming.

Not just technological change, societal, political, uh, community change.

All these sortsa things are changing underneath us and it's sort of hard to get a footing for all of us, not just lawmakers and people who are trying to sort of regulate industry.

It's hard for us to get a footing and because a lot of these technologies are digital, they can be rolled out en masse very, very quickly, and the change sort of feels like it's moving even faster than regular laypeople can handle, let alone whether they're too old or too out of touch.

Um, and I think that's a real challenge and I think what we really need to do is to try and find ways to think about the future with more depth and more rigor, because we're all currently living in a sort of accidental time capsule that was planted by our predecessors who didn't think very much about the future either or weren't able to think in great detail about the future either.

So that's one thing I'm calling for, really.

D- do you think we should approach AI like the Industrial Revolution, painful but all of this good stuff on the other side, more like tobacco or alcohol, can be fun but boy, you don't wanna get addicted, uh, or s- or some other comparison?

So would you mind, Nick, sharing some of those buckets, some of those ways of thinking that we're all wedded to because we don't know many different but that aren't actually serving us?

Yeah, I mean, what I've tried to do here is break up, like when we think about the future, it's a massive thing.

A billion ideas come rushing in.

And all I've tried to do with my sort of most recent work and the book that I've written is break that work up into four big buckets that I've called could, should, might, and don't.

And they're very simple words.

They're just very simple behaviors that I think we all fall into.

And I can go through them very, very quickly, maybe as an overarching term.

So I guess really my question is, how do you want this book to make us think about the world differently or see the world differently that we can all adopt in our own everyday lives?

(laughs)

The corporate strategists, the people who have sort of worked out the numeric patterns in the world and tried to decode the world and say, "We've done the numbers and the arrow points there, so we should do that." Now, I'm not here to say that that's always wrong, but it is o- it is wrong quite often.

And I think the thing that we always miss is that no matter how good your data is, when that solid line turns into a dotted line, it ceases to be data and it becomes a story.

And I don't think we're honest enough about that.

So I refer to it, there is a bit of stink on this, but I refer to it as numeric fiction because I tell stories too as a designer, but I use films and objects and prototypes and, you know, bits of conversation.

But people who come from maybe a corporate strategy or an analyst perspective, they'll use numbers.

And because numbers hold this sort of lovely place in our hearts, we ha- we believe them to be rigorous and we believe them to be sort of honest and true and empirical.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

... because I think we need a reassessment, actually, that none of us...

N- n- I'm a designer, I've worked in tech, but none of us is particularly good at thinking about the future.

And what I mean by good is rigorous, well-balanced, detail-oriented, uh, tenacious, uh, long-termist.

I- I just don't think we- we don't learn how to do that at school.

We all tend to find ourselves falling into one of these four pots that I've isolated and sort of ignoring or diminishing the other three.

And I think we're all living in a sort of accidentally planted time capsules that our previous generations just sort of dropped on us and we're dealing with those things now.

Yeah.

How, in your experience, do organizational leaders typically approach this work, and what do they tend to get wrong?

My opinions are all tainted by the companies that I've worked for, so, you know, my experiences are quite narrowly focused on large technocratic organizations, which is where I've spent the majority of my career.

But I think th- it's a spectrum, and I think I've been fortunate to work in companies that have, you know, typically a separate team or a group of people explicitly focused on long-term, futures-oriented projects, which is, I think, a part of the problem and a sort of a blessing and a curse in equal measures.

You need a lot of time and money typically to build those sorts of units, and you need to have a company where there's that amount of flexibility and the desire to explore and shape the future.

Quite often, it's cleaved off into these sort of separate labs and separate units.

That's the first thing.

It sort of others this kind of work in an, I think, an unhelpful way, and it sort of means that other people in the rest of the organization feel like it's not their job.

Would you say for organizations, that is the goal, to just sort of get everyone thinking with, through the four lenses, or can you build teams to sort of make sure you have a could thinker, a should thinker, a might thinker, and a don't thinker all working together?