The Power of Relearning: Insights from Stoicism with Peter Hayward S10E2 (132)
🔥 If all our knowledge is about the past, but all our decisions are about the future. How might we need to unlearn in order to truly learn?
🔥 What if the future of education isn’t about creating better institutions, but about learning how to let them die well?
🎙️ Episode Summary
In this enlightening conversation, Louka Parry and Peter Hayward explore the realms of foresight and future studies, emphasizing the importance of personal transformation, the role of Stoicism, and the evolving landscape of education. They discuss how engaging with the future involves understanding our fears and hopes, the significance of endings, and the need for new institutions that prioritize human connection and critical thinking. The dialogue encourages listeners to embrace the future with courage and creativity, recognizing the potential for growth and change.
👤 About Peter Hayward
Peter Hayward is a globally respected futures practitioner, educator, and facilitator whose work bridges systems thinking, organisational change, and the art of foresight. Discovering futures thinking in 2001, or as he says, perhaps it discovered him. Peter found deep resonance between foresight and his background in systems and change.
After completing his PhD, he spent fourteen fulfilling years teaching and shaping the next generation of foresight professionals, helping them explore not just how to predict the future, but how to create it. Following his academic chapter, Peter turned his focus to what he loves most: engaging with visionary thinkers, mentoring emerging practitioners, and co-hosting the global podcast FuturePod, where he explores the ideas shaping our collective futures.
Driven by curiosity and care, Peter continues to champion the use of foresight in business, government, and community settings, empowering people and organisations to think long-term, act with intention, and embrace transformation with wisdom and imagination.
📘 Takeaways
Foresight is about understanding both the past and the future.
Real learning is about self-transformation and personal growth.
The future is a space waiting for our best efforts.
Engaging with the future involves confronting our fears and hopes.
Education is shifting from content delivery to content creation.
Ritualizing endings is crucial for new beginnings.
The quality of people shapes the future of institutions.
Critical thinking cannot be outsourced to AI.
Grief can energize the process of change.
We must balance the excitement of new ideas with respect for the past.
📘 Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Foresight and Future Studies
01:34 The Importance of Relearning and Stoicism
03:35 Understanding the Future: A Personal Journey
06:43 The Evolution of Future Studies
10:36 Engaging with Fear and Hope in Futures Work
11:47 The Role of Death in Shaping Our Future
14:41 Ritualizing Endings and New Beginnings
18:33 The Shift in Educational Institutions
21:05 Emerging Trends in Learning and Content Creation
28:06 Final Thoughts: Embracing the Future
🔗 Connect and Resources Mentioned
🔗 Stay Connected with Louka Parry
For the latest learning innovation follow Louka on LinkedIn
Share your thoughts by visiting www.thelearningfuture.com
Tune in to be inspired, challenged, and reminded why love truly is at the heart of learning.
[Transcript Auto-generated]
Louka Parry (00:09)
Well, hello everybody and welcome back to the learning future podcast. I am your host, course, Luke Capari. And today we are delving into foresight and we're doing so because we're speaking with a wonderful guest, Peter Haywood, who has spent the last. Well, let's say many decades, Peter, you know, really being able to articulate the power of future studies. Pete actually, he says he found foresight in 2001, but perhaps it found him. and what he learned studying with Richard Slaughter.
was a good fit for his previous systems thinking and organizational change tool kits. A PhD followed, and then many years teaching foresight to passionate and skilled groups of people, Peter. And when your academic career ended in 2016, you were then free to engage with your real passions, namely talking to heroes, I love this, bouncing ideas around with the next generation of foresight thinkers, and inspiring a new group who might want to join in. I certainly see myself as part of that group, Peter. So thank you for making the time.
Peter Hayward (01:05)
Pleasure, Luca. Lovely to be asked to be on the receiving end of these. I've done quite a few, a couple of hundred at least. So yeah, chance for me to sit on the other side.
Louka Parry (01:15)
Be the guest.
Yeah. And we should say that Peter hosts the future pod podcast, which has been really delving into this future space. And I would call myself a newer entrant into future studies, Peter being an educationalist and educator leader first. So why don't you take us deeply into this world? But I want to start first with just a really practical question, which is what's something that's you're learning at the moment that's enlivening you.
Peter Hayward (01:38)
Yeah, it's a great question. Thanks for that, I'm actually relearning one of my disciplines, and you're going to hear a little bit about disciplines, but one of my disciplines is to go back to books, to go back to things. ⁓ So I come from a Stoic philosophical perspective. ⁓ And Stoics, of course, one of the four precepts of Stoicism is discipline. So there's always a discipline of returning to reread.
Louka Parry (01:49)
⁓ Nice.
Love that.
Peter Hayward (02:06)
relearn to restudy because you never quite get all that you need on one entry and so I am currently re-reading for the umpteenth time meditation by Marcus Aurelius and also going to then after that then reread the daily stoic
Louka Parry (02:20)
brilliant.
Peter Hayward (02:27)
which is kind of the modern take on Stoicism. So that's kind of where I am right at the moment. So I'm actually rereading a book that I have read. I can't tell you how many times, but every time I go back to it, it's like a new book.
Louka Parry (02:42)
I love that Peter. There's something about the wisdom of the Stoics that resonates with me and I think with so many others and Ryan Holiday has done a great job at modernizing it also. The concept of discipline or even a return, isn't it just remarkable with a book you can go and experience the worldview of somebody that lived thousands of years ago in the case of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and others. I just find that just remarkable.
pull from the life of wisdom into your own life in an applied way, I hope. And so obviously you're a student of the past in some ways, a historian. Tell us then about what's the benefit of kind of going into the future? Why futures work?
Peter Hayward (03:24)
It's a good question and it's not a simple answer. I found the future in the sense that I I started as a technically trained economist accountant, worked in large organisations, got involved in change projects, got involved in leading and driving change. And the more I got into this idea of how do we help people change, often that's a code.
Luca because we want them to change. We don't want to change ourselves. We often want to change someone else. We dress it up as a change project. Increasingly you learn, you have to learn that actually you can only change one person. That's yourself. You have no control over anyone else. And as you get, as you play more and more in making decisions and living with the consequence of decisions, then you are a futurist.
Louka Parry (03:50)
Mmm.
Interesting.
Peter Hayward (04:16)
There is a great saying that all our knowledge is about the past and all our decisions are about the future. And that's it. Those are my two great loves, the past, because that's all we have to learn from.
The future, which is the thing that we are creating, either wittingly or unwittingly. And then of course the third, the most important one of course is being completely present. Because presence is all we have. And so I dance between the three. Never fully satisfied that I'm good enough in the present or I've necessarily learnt what I need to learn from the past or in fact whether I'm always acting the best I can for the future that I'm...
Louka Parry (04:40)
Hmm.
Peter Hayward (04:55)
wittingly or unwittingly involved in.
Louka Parry (04:57)
There's some deep reflections there, Peter, for sure. think that my view really is that learning, real learning, not schooling, but real learning is actually always about self-transformation. How am I becoming different? Who am I becoming is one of my favorite questions. And I think it implicates great other questions like what's mine to do, which I love because it implicates uniqueness. And I think you think about even like economically.
You know, what's the marketplace? Well, if you're more aligned to your strength basis and your passions, you're likely going to have a higher state of life satisfaction. And, know, this ranking to matching paradigm shift is something that I'm following very closely and I'm trying to communicate about because ranking tells us something. But matching is a far more humane and I would say even efficient way of ultimately solving some of those.
jumping over some chasms that I think we have in our world. But perhaps take us on a bit of a journey, Peter, because most people listening to this will be educators and they'll be hardworking. They'll be curious because they're listening to a podcast about the future of learning. I'd love for you to give us a little synopsis, perhaps of future studies and kind of how it's emerged and evolved. We've had a few great futurists on here. Ladies Sir Kay Solomon from Stanford, Peter Bishop recently from Teach the Future. So tell us why.
What real benefits can you see us gaining through doing this kind of this work, shifting these mental models in the ways that futures can help us do?
Peter Hayward (06:26)
Yeah.
I suppose for me, and I won't give you the full history of future studies, certainly people better qualify than me to talk about that. The way I understand futures, Luca, is it starts with an interest on the outside. In other words, we talk about this thing called the future, which again, as another great statement says, the future doesn't exist, but that doesn't mean that it's not real. And so the future we study out there.
We almost study it as a discipline. All organisations have plans. All organisations are moving towards a future. The future exists, even though it doesn't.
And yet we talk about learning about it on the outside of us. And that's where most futures work starts. Most futures work starts because you want to have a holiday, build a house, create an organisation, build a career, whatever else. We have this thing we call the future. It's a destination. We're on the path to it. That's completely true. What I learned and what I've continued to learn, Luca, is that it's as much as anything a journey on the inside.
Louka Parry (07:10)
Mm.
Peter Hayward (07:33)
And that futures is, while it is an external study of what's changing, how does the world, what could the world become, what might the scenarios be, what are the trends, it is all that. But I think most importantly is futures work when you really get into it is actually a process of transformation on the inside. Because the things you have to, if you understand and you study what is changing in the world and what has changed in the world.
Louka Parry (08:00)
Yeah.
Peter Hayward (08:01)
then you start to ask profound questions about yourself and your purpose. If I give you a very heavy, but I think makes the point, we have these ideas which we cannot imagine. We can't imagine the future. because how can we? The same way that I can't imagine my own death. I can accept that there'll be a point where I don't exist anymore, but I can't imagine it. Now, someone would say, well, if you can't imagine it,
Louka Parry (08:25)
Hmm.
Peter Hayward (08:29)
ignore it and I'm going, actually I don't know you ignore it. I think the fact that you can't imagine something is actually really interesting to lean into it for what it teaches you. And so for me the study of futures is, while it is about what's happening on the outside, it's deeply involved in what happens on the inside because it's how you understand yourself. When we engage with the future
We also engage with our fear and our hope. We also engage with our agency and our lack of agency. And it's about the combination of all those things upon which we find purpose.
We don't control the future, but it doesn't completely control us. Yes, we should be fearful of some futures, but we should also be hopeful for other futures. Futures, when you really get into this internal capacity, external conditions set, that's what education tries to do for people, particularly younger people, is how do we give people? They have to understand the future.
is changing, scary, or could even call it that. But it's also a place of change, transformation and hope. Things are possible in the future that have never happened till now.
And you've got to dance on the edge of tipping people into things where they feel they're overwhelmed by the future. Because the future can be overwhelming.
Louka Parry (09:55)
Yeah.
Peter Hayward (09:56)
But on the point of overwhelm is where a person finds their agency, their purpose, their courage, their power. I don't know how you find the power unless you go all the way to the edge.
Louka Parry (10:03)
Hmm.
⁓ Peter, that's, gosh, that's gorgeous. one, a couple of things for me that that's brought up. One is the piece around death that I just want to speak to directly. I think it is one of the most powerful things we can do as human beings. And to get a bit stoic on this too, right? I believe that you are only, and I don't know who said this, you might know, but only the man who was prepared to die in any moment is ever truly alive.
Peter Hayward (10:32)
Correct. Yeah.
Louka Parry (10:33)
There's something about that that
I just, that's just like my whole body, have a visceral reaction to that sentiment like that. Because there's something about the denial of reality or the denial of what is true that I think is so seductive for us as human beings. I think we could apply, it's quite a, you're right, it's a heavy example, but I think it's the most real there is. You could apply that to anything, like a change in an organization, you know, to not accept.
that this is going to happen, your role will end at some point in time, that potentially in the private sector, your company might end at some point in time, because of the pace of exponential technology and the convergence of them. yeah.
Peter Hayward (11:14)
And
the other thing, Luca, is nothing ever dies completely. I have a particular podcast I do that pops up occasionally on the FuturePod series. They're called Remembering Podcasts. So one of the things I wanted to do with FuturePod, me and the others, was I wanted to talk to people while I was still with us. Rather than have to talk about someone who's not here anymore, I wanted to have at least one conversation with the person where they got to tell their own story. But of course, you can't always do that, you know, people...
Louka Parry (11:18)
Hmm
Hmm.
Yeah.
Peter Hayward (11:41)
And so there was a person, and so when a person dies and we haven't had a chance to have them on the pod, then I have a couple of people on the pod who knew the person and I have the conversation with them about the person. it's a remembering conversation. Now, one I just did recently was a showstopper, was I wanted to remember Johann Galtung, who was a great, know, a great futurist, the person who admitted to peace studies, yadda yadda yadda.
Louka Parry (11:55)
Beautiful.
Yeah.
Peter Hayward (12:10)
The people I got on to talk about Johan was Sahel Inotula and Otto Sharma.
Louka Parry (12:17)
Mmm.
Peter Hayward (12:17)
So these two remembered Johann.
and in remembering Johan they told us who this person was how much he meant to them and what he taught them and the absolute takeaway from the podcast is how much of Johan continues in them now so Johan never died the corporal Johan stopped but the heartfelt
Louka Parry (12:36)
Beautiful.
Peter Hayward (12:46)
intellectual passionate person is alive in the auto and is alive in sale and for everyone they meet the old hand keeps going and keeps going. This is the other point about how death is important because it poses another one of those questions of how do you want to be remembered or how do you want people to carry you forward into the future. So what are you going to give them? What are you going to inspire for them?
Louka Parry (13:11)
Yeah.
Peter Hayward (13:14)
That's the leadership game.
Louka Parry (13:18)
That's so beautiful, Peter. It really is. You know, I'm sure you've done many of these things in futures, know, a eulogy crafting session is some work that I continue to do. And it's just so and it doesn't need to be that it can also be at the end of your role here at this school as a teacher or a leader. You know, there's there's something about speculating or, you know, branching into a preferred future and then staking your
claim for the person you are choosing to become. gosh, it makes a big difference. One of the practices that that actually some of my friends and I do is every birthday, you send a video to your future self. And so it's such a wonder. It's so simple. And you know, feels a bit weird talking to a camera for 20 minutes or whatever. But you know, then you go back a year. And what you've done is you've actually made a commitment into the future. Again, it's about who you're becoming. And of course, that's terrifying because it means facing reality.
The parts of yourself that you do not want to acknowledge exist, you know? ⁓ gosh, it's just such a wonderful way. And I love that as well. I had a great relationship with my Yaya, my Greek grandmother. And you know, there, I have all these sayings that I still deploy that came directly from her spirit and her being. it's just, you know, I fully believe that in some way she lives on through me. And that might just be how this whole game works, Peter. Let's not be cool about it.
Peter Hayward (14:38)
Yeah.
I think, again, if you're talking to people who have the opportunity, when we talk about the future, we're excited by what is coming, and quite rightly. But I think we also need to give deep respect to what is ending. And we need to learn to do good endings as the beginning of the next process. think we often in organisations, and I'll put my hand up.
Louka Parry (14:50)
Yeah.
Peter Hayward (15:07)
We often want to move from something that's ending quickly and get onto the thing that's starting.
Louka Parry (15:13)
Mm.
Peter Hayward (15:15)
Understandable. But I think if you look at what's important, a good ending where you remember, where you ritualise, where you take the learning from something so nothing is ever a loss. Those rituals of ending, I think we are under play in how we create change going forward to the future.
Louka Parry (15:40)
That is so well put. I think it implicates rites of passage, for example, as a wonderful framework that helps us separate, challenge, integrate as we move through transitions. And I don't know about you, Peter, but the more I reflect on life and leadership and entrepreneurship, everything, everything is a rite of passage. You wake up in the morning, this is a mini lifetime that we live today, you know, we've come out of our unconscious state into a conscious state.
That's an arrival of sorts. You know, how do we arc our day without overloading ourselves with extreme pressure to, I don't know what the word would be, self-improve. And Peter, found this, you brought this to my mind. I found my favorite title of a book. I just read 4,000 weeks and then I've read, which is by Oliver Berkman, which is phenomenal. It's kind of the life span stuff. It's just, how do you live a life well? And Meditations for Mortals is the next book. But this book called Death.
the end of self-improvement. And part of me just really finds that hilarious because as people that, as human beings that are constantly works in progress, there is something about knowing that at some point we will have done enough. but of course, while we're here, especially if we, in all these a day, a week, a year, what that, which we have, how are we showing up? What are we doing? Well, how are we ritualizing our endings?
and our beginnings. And it's a Keynesian quote that I reflect on all the time, Peter. And again, we do organizational change work as you've done for many years. So it's not so much embracing the new ideas, it's letting go of the old ones. That's sometimes the great process of change, the grief that comes with acknowledgement of this is the end of something.
Peter Hayward (17:24)
And grief is part of the energy for the next part of process. So giving due accordance to what has served us well and no longer is going to serve us into the future, giving respect to it, being energised by it. Because we're as much energised by what we carry as responsibilities from the past, as the past as a set of burdens or loads.
Peter Hayward (17:52)
that we need to put down. So as I say, those are the things I've learned. It's as much about
Louka Parry (17:56)
fascinating.
Peter Hayward (17:58)
How we as humans, foible, frail, short-lived beings, how do we mobilise energy, our own and other people? How do we let the energy go when it's appropriate to let it go and let people go elsewhere?
Louka Parry (18:01)
Yes.
Peter Hayward (18:14)
And doing that with a gentleness, because we're not in control.
Peter Hayward (18:20)
Influences certainly. And again I'll go back to the Stoics. Justice, courage, discipline and wisdom. And of course they end on wisdom. And as I often point out to people, Luca, you don't know what's wise. The future will judge whether you were wise. The wisdom is not your call. You're driven by the other three.
Am I disciplined? Am I courageous? Am I seeking justice? And the future will be the one that judges whether I was wise or not.
Louka Parry (18:55)
Wow. gosh, some good stuff, Peter here. I'd love you to reflect on what you've noticed or learned in that change space, because we've really kind of honed in on the individual. And my view is that schools, for example, are human systems, so universities, know, culture is the space in between people, shared of tacit beliefs that can manifest. What would you say about...
this moment that we find ourselves in 2025, multiple black swans potentially over the last five years, increasing, know, VUCA, BANI, all the different type of futures acronyms. What's your kind of your state of the field? don't know, What's from your vantage point?
Peter Hayward (19:23)
Yeah.
I think we are living through the end of institutions as we know them. And we're quite right to grieve the loss of those institutions because they've served us so well for such a long period of time.
So I think the idea of the school is going, the industrial school even. I also think the university, been around for a few hundred years now, but I think the idea of the university is going as well. They've served us well, but they've also, I think, gone past the use by date. I think most institutions, most organisations are bumping into the use by date. I think what is coming to the fore again, what
One of the things I say, used to say, I still say, is organisations don't have futures. Only people have futures. Never about the future of schools. No, it's about the people and their futures. And institutions and organisations have their futures because people love them and believe in them to give them futures.
Louka Parry (20:41)
Hmm, beautiful.
Peter Hayward (20:42)
I think we're in that ending phase of people falling out of love with their old institutions, respectfully, but letting them end. And then the exciting part is creating the new institutions. Because I don't think we know what they are. So to me, that's where I... But I don't think it's the quality of the institution that's going to make the difference. It's the quality of people.
they bring together to create these new institutions. That's the important.
Louka Parry (21:13)
That's beautiful. It implicates, think, something you were speaking about before, is presence. And even having Otto Schaumann presencing as a concept over productivity or with productivity, perhaps. I often look at, I'd say, some of the language being used in society. And I think this is really archaic in some ways, kind of calcified. And I think...
Even the product, even productivity, which I find really interesting, right. It's good to extract, but if it's an extractive type of product, what's the point of that? It really has to be for me, it's thriving in some ways for flourishing or, know, IKIGAI, you know, purpose oriented values driven life, create value, the creation of value. Those are far more powerful and I think interesting framing, sweating,
Peter Hayward (22:06)
I think so. think once again, I think we're
picking words that even still, I'm a gardener. Gardeners are interested in growth, but they also give due respect to compost. I think we as humans prefer the exciting, sexy stuff. We don't do the grubby, decompositional processes, but they're...
Louka Parry (22:13)
Haha, cool.
Yes. Yeah.
Peter Hayward (22:35)
They're more important than the sexy ones. yeah, thriving is important, but thriving doesn't happen in isolation of the other side of thriving. There's always another side, which is not to make it depressing, it's just to make it balanced. And this is this thing of balance. Whatever you're leaning into, whether you're leaning into the dark or the light, it doesn't matter. Notice what you're not leaning into and lean into it for a while.
Louka Parry (22:38)
Yeah.
Yes. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Peter Hayward (23:03)
People say, you know, I prefer the light. Fine, then hang around with someone who's a bit dark. ⁓ And learn their world and show them your world.
Louka Parry (23:07)
Ha. Beautifully put, Peter. I've got two final questions for you. One, we've talked a lot about, I don't know if archetypal, but it's kind of a deep internal change. If you were to look at a couple of interesting signals for learning through a futures frame, what are some of the principles that you think are emerging and some of those that are declining?
Peter Hayward (23:35)
I think the big one that's declining and big one that's emerging is content. Who's in charge of content? Education's completely had a turn around in the last six, probably the last five years. Educators are now longer about the content. Your people who come to you are the content. Your job is to work with their content and other people's content. So don't control the content. That's them.
Louka Parry (23:51)
Hmm.
Peter Hayward (24:01)
let them produce their own content. To me, education's not about read this book. It's about, show me the book you want to write. So I think the classroom's completely flipped on that. And that's going to make what an education process, completely different. Because the knowledge is not for the person who's in charge of the education process. The knowledge is brought by everybody. How do you work with knowledge? How do you challenge it? How do you improve it?
How do you critique it? And whether it's human or it's AI, it doesn't make any difference that everybody now is a content producer whether they know it or they don't.
The second one is, again, I'm very hopeful out of that. At the same time, I am very concerned with the short-term effects of our first playing with social media and various other things because all the anecdotal information is that people are engaging less. That people are engaging with short-term videos rather than
videos and short-term summaries rather than long-term reading. I don't know what's going to happen there. I'm not going to say everyone needs to Finnegans Wake to become a better human being. But it's very important that we find the balance in there. That if we're all responsible for our content and promulgating our content then I wonder how we brought back the discipline of being better.
critical thinkers open. That's the part I'm kind of caught on. I'm excited where content's going. I am very interested where the critical thinking things, because I don't believe we can outsource critical thinking 100 % to AI.
Louka Parry (25:43)
That's beautiful. We talk a lot about discernment, Peter, in our work. It's like one of the key human intelligence factors that I think needs to be increasingly developed. And you do it through Socratic seminar, ultimately, not through, you know.
⁓ It's been a fantastic conversation, Peter. Thanks for your time and taking us deep into it. I've benefited a lot from this conversation. I feel changed myself actually. My last question to you is what's the take home message that can resonate with our listener audience today?
Peter Hayward (26:11)
Not to fear the future. future is there as a space waiting for your best efforts.
Louka Parry (26:18)
Absolutely fantastic. Peter Heywood, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for gifting us some wisdom. If I could be so bold, alongside the discipline, the justice and the courage. Thanks for joining us for the learning future podcast.
