This episode of The New Abnormal podcast features Nik Badminton, a futurist keynote speaker and AI keynote speaker who helps leaders explore possible futures and make stronger decisions today.
His work connects emerging trends with the choices organisations face over the next ten years and beyond. Across more than 30 years, Nik has worked for clients such as NASA, Disney, Google, Microsoft and the United Nations. He's also an author, and in this episode we focused on his new title “The Hope Engineer’s Playbook”, and the belief that hope can become a practical organisational capability rather than simply an emotion or expression of optimism.
Drawing partly on positive psychology and hope theory, he describes “hope engineers” as people who explore alternative futures, create compelling visions and help organisations develop multiple pathways towards preferred outcomes. Hope provides the energy for change; futures thinking provides destinations and possibilities; and wisdom provides guidance. This combination forms the core of his Futures–Hope–Wisdom approach.
A recurring theme is the damaging short-termism of modern organisations. Nik argues that the pandemic accelerated an already-existing tendency towards increasingly compressed planning horizons. Genuine futures work, by contrast, should look ten, twenty or more years ahead, enabling organisations to identify signals of change, understand emerging trends and rehearse alternative scenarios.
This connects to what he describes as a poverty of imagination. Organisations absorbed by immediate delivery can struggle to imagine radically different possibilities. Futures thinking therefore creates strategic space for asking bigger questions, challenging assumptions and exploring different pathways before disruption occurs.
The conversation also explores AI. Rather than regarding AI as a universal productivity solution, he advocates selective, intelligent application. AI should support strategic inquiry, while human judgement, wisdom and imagination remain essential.
The wider message is that futures thinking becomes more powerful when combined with hope, agency and action: helping individuals and organisations move beyond reacting to change towards actively shaping better futures.
So, I hope you enjoy listening to Nik as much as I did!
