Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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My guest today is Leah Zaidi.
Leah Zaidi is an award-winning strategic foresight practitioner and worldbuilder, with over 20 years of corporate experience. She has consulted for a wide variety of organizations, including the United Nations, Fortune 100 companies, Stanford University, the OECD, and other prestigious institutions. She is the only futurist who accurately warned of a Covid reality, a Trump incited militia attack, and Russia’s experimentation with a non-linear war (including the annexation of Ukraine), and more. She has an impeccable track record for success.
Using her proprietary Strategic Worldbuilding™ approach, her work has spanned a wide variety of projects from the future work in the metaverse to the future of democracy to the future of entertainment. Leah is a rare strategist and practitioner who has published seminal papers in academic journals. Her articles and papers have over 75K+ reads and her reports have been downloaded by 1000+ organizations. Her work has been used by organizations like GE and the U.S. military. She is also a sought after keynote speaker whose presentations continue to deliver strategic value long after they’re over.
Leah collaborates with a network of subject matter experts and process experts to deliver exceptional results. She has a BBA from York University and a MDes. in Strategic Foresight and Innovation from the acclaimed OCAD University foresight program.
Leah is the author of the forthcoming novel, Steeped.
I’ve had the privilege of working with Leah for half a decade now, first as colleagues at Institute for the Future and later as collaborating researchers on both independent and commissioned projects. Our latest work together is the Futures of AI research initiative, which is currently in-development. It’s intended to be a public-facing resource for anyone hoping to make better sense of emerging AI futures, and we’re releasing different elements as we go. Most recently we released the drivers report, which features 280+ different drivers:
Think of these drivers as an inventory of the current system. It does not reflect what the emerging possibilities of the ecosystem might be in a few years. The promises of AI have yet to materialize; the perils are emerging rapidly. We may add drivers as the current conversation evolves.
As Leah explains, researching drivers rigorously is critical to producing useful scenarios—the kind most likely to make even industry experts stop and think, “Oh, I’d never thought of that before.”
We’ll be releasing more aspects of this project as we go, and we might just do a followup episode that builds on this one, so stay tuned!
In the meantime, Leah is also publishing her first novel, Steeped, which you should pre-order right now! She also publishes Brave New Worlds here on Substack:
And while you’re at it, also subscribe to our book club, Hidden Systems, in which we examine systems through the lens of fiction:
Here’s the latest episode:
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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Karen Attiah, Renee DiResta, Adam Mckay, William E Rees, and more. Here is another recent episode with Erald Kolasi on AI’s material footprint:
