Thought Leadership for the future | Trond Arne Undheim

Peter Winick

The role futurists can play in Thought Leadership.

An interview with Trond Arne Undheim about making connections, writing books, and being a futurist.

Today’s guest is Trond Arne Undheim, author of Pandemic Aftermath and Disruption Games, host of Futurized Podcast, speaker, and futurist.

Trond joins us to share how it can be tricky being a thought leader on a blend of topics and how there is an underlying common thread that connects it all together. We discuss why Trond writes books, how he monetizes them, and why sales of the book isn’t where your focus should be.

Trond explains what a Futurist is and how he has grown into that title. Plus, we look at the future of thought leadership post COVID-19 and why Trond believes the role is going to come roaring back!

Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:

Networking in thought leadership isn’t just about connecting people, it also involves making knowledge connections.
Writing a book on your thought leadership can create a gateway to paid speaking.
Thought Leaders need to have actionable content instead of motivational speeches. There is no alternative to a knowledge-based view of the future.

Are you investing in your thought leadership future? Do you want to grow more opportunities? Contact Thought Leadership Leverage for assistance. We can help devise a strategy along with many other aspects such as research, sales, and marketing.

Transcript

Peter Winick Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today my guest is Trond Arne Undheim. He’s a futurist and an author, a speaker and entrepreneur, the former director of the MIT Startup Exchange, which is outside of Boston. He’s accelerated for unicorns and helped launch over 50 startups. He is trained as a social scientist with the current technology innovation. He’s the CEO and co-founder of a company called Yagi, which is a search engine for industry professionals providing collective intelligence. He was a lecturer at MIT School Sloan School of Management. He is the author of The Pandemic Aftermath, published in 2020, which is sort of quite timely, unfortunately, or I guess maybe fortunately, the disruption came 2020 and leadership from below. His next book will be out in 2021 called Future Tech. We could go deeper into his bio, but I’d rather spend more time talking to him. This is here. So here we are. How are you today, John?

Trond Arne Undheim I’m doing great, Peter. Thanks for having me on.

Peter Winick Great. So let’s, let’s just sort of dive in. So you’ve got what I would call and maybe not accurately sort of the more blended path, meaning this blend of academia with a very heavy concentration in reality, I think you’ve done a part of for one incredible startup. So sort of tell us your story, because I don’t think there’s a lot a typical linear story would be my guess.

Trond Arne Undheim Yeah. No, I mean, I think I agree with you. My path is always, you know, whatever I do, I put myself at the intersection of the inside on the outside of the organization. So I think this is what explains why I have done so many different things. I always try to learn and make connections. So, you know, my main contributions in any endeavor is to make those connections that are not the boundaries. And, you know, it set the boundaries that I think the most excitement is. And it’s definitely where most of the learning is both, you know, both for me, obviously, but also for the organizations that I help. So, you know, if you look at my path, you could say, you know, I have dabbled at a lot of different things. You know, I have worked in government. I have worked in business. I have started companies. I have helped a lot of startups. And but, you know, largely, it’s all about the same thing. It is making connections, not just, you know, introducing people to each other, but it’s making kind of knowledge, connections and figuring out, you know, what makes sense for an organization to do and putting sort of two and two together. So, you know, if you were to look at my path, you know, how did I get from. You know, building an innovation center and an incubator in Trondheim, Norway, to do working for the EU on e-government and then being picked up by Oracle and working out of London on a technology strategy and then subsequently working at MIT for four, seven years. I mean, for me, when I look back, it all makes kind of sense. But if you just quickly look at it, you’re right, it is a blended career. I haven’t picked a sector. I haven’t really picked an area. But it is all if you look back and if you were to kind of look into those experiences, they’re all about some sort of innovation. They actually have to do with digital technology, most of these experiences. So they are connected.

Peter Winick So the connections don’t have to be glaringly obvious sometimes. That’s the most interesting one, right? But if someone were to introduce you to someone else and they had to limit that introduction to Trond is the guy, what would you define as X?

Trond Arne Undheim Well, you should not ask a recruiter. I once talked to a recruiter and they said, you know, this is like pointing to your point, you know, it’s a blended career. It’s a you know, I guess I’m hard to pinpoint that way, but I don’t really walk around thinking that I am any one thing. I mean, I think what I enjoy is that I am a different thing. So in terms of, you know, positioning that as thought leadership, that is maybe a little trickier. But, you know, I’m an expert in innovation, which is actually a dangerous thing to be because, you know, it’s barely a field, right? It’s something that changes so fast. And, you know, it’s a set of tools. It’s kind of an attitude to life. It’s a set of networks, I guess, but it’s kind of a dubious type of expertise. I will admit that, because it is it contains so many things.

Peter Winick So would it be more that the X would be around the ability to solve or think or do something versus Trond has developed a set of models, frameworks, methodologies that are applied to some definitions that I.

Trond Arne Undheim Mean, you know, you’re right. I mean if you if you were to take it another way, I mean it would I sometimes say to people and this is true, is that I tend to go into situations and take and turn something that either is very embryonic or is actually not going very well. So I’m a little bit of a turnaround person in that sense, right? I will take an embryonic project and I will try to make the best of it and really kind of bring out the possibilities in that projects and I have done that, you know, in the you I took over a very unsuccessful little digital collaboration project and I turned it from 150 very passive users to 150,000 users. And I’ve done that consecutively in lots of different contexts. Even at MIT, I was asked to build up something from scratch. And I think that, you know, that excites me.

Peter Winick You know? Yeah, no, that’s great. So I let’s take this in a different direction for a moment. So you’re an author, your thought leader, you’re an academic, etc.. Let’s talk about then, given that you’re not an easy one to define, it would make, I think it would become really clear to people when to pick up the phone and call you. But it’s not as simple as a branding thing is you’re the trust guy or the resilience guy or for innovation. It’s such an amorphous nobody knows what that means anyway. So let’s talk about your business models as a founder.

Trond Arne Undheim Well, you know, the business model in many cases is to sell pure insight. You know, I will literally sell the advice. You know, I will sell my speeches, which I’ve done very successfully. And then, you know, I sell the knowledge content, you know, as you discussed in terms of books or other kind of tangible output that people might be might be interested in. And then, you know, you can also monetize the actual communication ability. There are a lot of times when I have been brought in and the value that I bring is, you know, I guess you can call it is the network. But what it actually means is just that I know who to get in touch with to get stuff done. Right. And that actually explains some of the stuff, you know, I’ve done with some of my startups, which actually are networking platforms or expert networks where I just I’m pretty good at figuring out who should be working on something not really to, you know, to the.

Peter Winick Bookstore. Right, Right. Got it. So but let’s push on a book for a minute. So you have a concept to write a book. And as we all know, that’s the worst business model just in terms of energy in and dollars out. Right.

Trond Arne Undheim That book itself is exactly.

Peter Winick The book is an SKU or a barcode. Exactly. Exactly. You’ve got you know, you’ve done one book for book, right? So when you put a book out, there might be, you know, non-business reasons to do it. It’s intrinsic. It’s a way to. Force you to solve a problem and kind of fight, etc.. But from a business standpoint, you know, step one is you’re going to sell the book to a certain ethnographic psychographic demographic at a price point that we don’t care about because you can to make money on that. Maybe some of those people bring you into speech. But how do you think about sort of the product design or the monetization path on a per book basis? Like meaning who you’re targeting, what the outcomes look like, how they might hire you?

Trond Arne Undheim Well, I mean, you’re completely right. It’s not the number of books you sell, or at least not the earnings on one individual book that matters very little. It took me a little while to realize this, but, you know, books, as you know, similar to many, many other things, even in the knowledge industry, it’s about quantity and presence, right? So it’s you know, you have to have something meaningful to say and it has to have a certain quality. But you just also have to you have to say enough stuff that you are relevant for a bunch of different discussions. So, you know, unless you have a massive name recognition and one book can is basically just turning that name recognition into sales. For most of us, books is it’s just a way to express yourself. Obviously share a position, but it is to become known as someone who has something to say. And then in different contexts, you know, pre-COVID, I guess we were all monetizing this through speeches, right? So a book was a gateway to get a paid speaking, you know, engagement, which would pay for, you know, not only the publication of the book, if you paid for it yourself or even just would pay for sort of three months of the of the writing time. Sure. A just by one speech. Right. So it’s very radically different ways of monetizing from what one might assume as an.

Peter Winick So let’s go backwards on that. There are a couple of ways and there is a I don’t believe there’s one right way that folks go about writing a book. One is they have a high level of specificity. And I’m writing this book exactly for these type of people in these situations where it will fit like a custom made suit. Then others say, Well, I’m writing the book because it’s a forcing mechanism to get me to get my thoughts clear. Others write books that are a way to sort of broadcast along, you know, a longitudinal research study or whatever. Do you have a what’s your style?

Trond Arne Undheim You know, I guess I am atypical in that way.

Peter Winick I’m not we have one consistent thread is. Yeah.

Trond Arne Undheim Exactly. You know, I’m not.

Peter Winick Writing this book.

Trond Arne Undheim Because I think I can monetize it. I write a book because I have to like this Covid boom, this pandemic aftermath. Yeah, but why did I write it? I wrote it because I realized this was not going the way many people thought. And I realized this in late January, and I thought, I’m not a medical professional. I’m not going to run around and volunteer. You know, I have kids. I don’t want to expose myself to the virus itself. What can I do? I can write. Because I started to see that there were there were technology elements of this crisis. There were non sort of public health elements and definitely things that went way beyond public health. They went into expertise areas. You know, I had dabbled in public health, consulted on public health, but I realized the discussion wasn’t really where it needed to be, which is this is going to define this decade, and we better be prepared for those kinds of discussions either ever, you know, beyond the economy, beyond public health, it’s a much larger debate about where we want to go with our society. So I wasn’t really thinking this is going to give me land, me speaking gigs or exciting job opportunities or anything. But of course, you know, I am conscious that making a position for myself, touching on public health, it opens up the door to some opportunities, hopefully, you know, in that direction. But also, I think for that book, it coincided with sort of this realization that I’m more and more, you know, I’m moving myself into more of a futurist type identity, which is a very specific thing. And it’s actually took me a long time. I mean, you could maybe.

Peter Winick Some of my.

Trond Arne Undheim Marketability, you know? Sure.

Peter Winick So if we take Covid and then we take futurist, right? So as opposed to innovation, etc., then what I would expect to be hearing from you down the road is not so much a public health issue, not so much the economic impacts of Covid, but as a futurist, what how will we all be interacting, thinking, working? What are all the impacts of Covid? I mean, obviously, first phase is where I want to get out of this thing healthy, right?

Trond Arne Undheim Yeah, I mean, there are some imperatives, but Yes, exactly. So that those are the things that I’m starting to focus on. And the thing is, you know, future work is a thread that goes back to my Ph.D. 20 years ago. Anthony and I subsequently wrote on leadership from below. So this idea actually of being a little bit of a counterintuitive thinker and a little bit of a contrarian is especially on future work, that’s something that has been consistent throughout my work. I’m, for instance, not one that thinks that we’re all going to love this remote work situation. There are reasons why this has taken a very long time to take hold.

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Trond Arne Undheim So there are no.

Peter Winick One I think any time anytime we go through change, whatever that changes or there’s a new technology or disruption. People get into a binary mindset. So I remember 20 plus years ago when e-learning first became a thing, everybody said, my God, you will never go to a workshop again. We’ll never be in classrooms again.

Trond Arne Undheim Yeah.

Peter Winick The reality is the first wave of e-learning was awful. It was. It took you three hours to download. It was basically a bloated PowerPoint, so it was awful. And then where we’re learning landed was in a blended world. Like there are times where E is better. There’s times where face to face is better and more often than not it’s that combination. So I think the future of work thing, we all got thrown into the future. Yes. You know, somewhat unprepared and unexpectedly. And, you know, there’s a lot of conversation about this. We’ll never you know, we’ll never go back to office situations. And there’s others, you know, you know, so I can’t wait to get back. So.

Trond Arne Undheim Yeah, so, I mean, it’s that whole thing. It’s that whole thing. And I and I would say both for learning and for work. And they’re obviously interrelated. This whole blended idea is something that I’ve been advocating for a long time. The shocking thing with e-learning is that I thought we were much further because these debates have been we have had these debates already for four decades. But I think with e-learning, we were stuck. I think the experts and I would consider myself sort of at the fringe of that. I kind of thought that we had pretty advanced tools, but it was skills that was the issue. And once, you know, the great masses would start, you know, deploying these things, that we would actually be in a different step change in e-learning. But I think having looked at the last three months of Covid, it’s also. Parents that we actually don’t have very advanced tools yet we thought we had. And I think the paradigms are generally correct now, but we still need to have these killer applications that truly make a difference because otherwise we are going to go back to not so much blended, but you know, we’re all going to, you know, pretty much step back to where, you know, universities, for instance, you know, have been stuck in a teaching. And, you know, one way learning model that originated not 200 years ago, but I mean, nearly a thousand years ago. Sure. You know, these are enormously long timelines. So. Yes. Futurist, which is actually, for me, a controversial statement because futurist implies, you know, something about the future, which you per definition as an academic, you really can’t. So it’s been a pretty rough journey for me even to just say I’m going to start embracing this label and it may have consequences. A lot of people don’t like it and.

Peter Winick Well, you may even that term futurist through the lens of thought leadership. Again, there’s a spectrum. There’s others that are almost pretending to read crystal balls, which is not possible. There are others that are basing predictions on actual research and logic and saying, Yes, I can’t predict with certainty, but here are 2 or 3 different paths and I can put some probabilities on it based on the variables I know today. Exactly, Rick. All subject to change at any time.

Trond Arne Undheim Yeah. I mean, so I’m going to be that kind of annoying futurist, you know what I’m saying? It’s more scenarios.

Peter Winick There’s a lot of footnotes.

Trond Arne Undheim Than certainties, but a little bit of footnotes here and there. You know, I can utter that. The extreme statement here and there and I have opinions. So that qualifies me, I think, to be relevant and interesting. But I also feel like it’s important to not just have these futurists that are so certain about themselves that they are making all these pretty obviously falsifiable prognostications. That’s the other challenge for being a futurist. I mean, these things can be falsified overnight, right? Incorrect. Falsified a bunch of people overnight. It’s pretty interesting.

Peter Winick Well, you’re right. Everybody’s coming out of the woodwork now as an expert. But I don’t remember meeting, you know, reading one thing a year pre-COVID about be prepared for this with the I mean, we talked about pandemics and things, but to the level and the scale and the scope and the level of impact that we’ve all been going, I have.

Trond Arne Undheim No interest.

Peter Winick Other than in a science fiction movie.

Trond Arne Undheim In fact, even that, because think about it, in science fiction movies, you do lockdowns take the lockdown issue. We locked down a little city in, what was it, Mississippi or something, you know, in contagion or outbreak.

Peter Winick Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Trond Arne Undheim You lock down a little city with, you know, 10,000 people or 8000 inhabitants. That’s nothing. We have locked down a world and we are about to lock it down again in in this intermittency scenario that, you know, is now playing out. Exactly according to my book, which was written in February. So I would have to say for me, my book is going to be my best calling card because it is a very, very extreme set of five different scenarios that undoubtedly will not all happen. And they will happen as surely as that. But if you understand scenario method, you see that I have you know, I have charted some, you know, a course that we are on a path that we might be on, and that’s the point.

Peter Winick So, so let me ask you, as we start to wrap up here, put on your futurist cap and then further put on your lens of thought leadership. What do you see as sort of the future of thought leadership potentially as a result of what we’ve gone through? So obviously, I mean, we were talking a little earlier and we’ll speaking sort of up in the air, but in any I hate to say predictions, but any educated hypotheses around the future of thought leadership based on where you are today.

Trond Arne Undheim Yeah, I think that you are very well positioned in the sense that thought leadership is going to come back with a vengeance. You know, there is just no alternative to a knowledge based view on the next decade. There is absolutely no alternative. The only alternative is complete ignorance and the presence of, you know, these absolute strongmen that would just kind of kick through their perspectives. And they’re going to we are going to coexist as thought leaders with those people, both in a business context and in a political context. But the backlash against sort of like thinking that, you know, everything based on zero information is going to be that we’re going to need a lot of thought leaders and they’re going to be in demand, whether there’ll be out there. And, you know, you guys will be out there on the speaking circuit. So I think it’s more due biddable, right, to be someone that.

Peter Winick Somebody modality I mean, thought leadership not speaking. That’s just the format, right?

Trond Arne Undheim That’s just the format. And we have all, you know, adjusted. And I think as we learn more about these mass virtual events and how to do them much better, for instance, we need to get rid of this tethering to the screen. I mean, you and I are not tethered to a screen. It’s ridiculous. I mean, you know, just switching from a dynamic to a car to a microphone so I can move back and around you. We have to regain movements and mobility. And once we do that, we can be thought leaders at a distance, no problem. And that’s going to be, I think, a significant pent up demand for true thought leadership on many, many issues. They won’t be the same one.

Peter Winick I think true is the key issue. So I think that just to dovetail on the point that you made in the bucket of thought leadership, there has been other things thrown in there like motivational, like, you know, all that sort of stuff which may or may not have its place in the world relative to people need to feel good and people need to be entertained and all that sort of stuff. But right now, it doesn’t feel like we have the mental room for that. I mean, listen, we can go watch Netflix and be entertained, which is great, But I mean, they need to be thoughtful now.

Trond Arne Undheim You’re right. I mean, there’s a space for a joke during a speech, but I think, yeah, no thought leadership is going to come back massively and it’s going to.

Peter Winick Learn.

Trond Arne Undheim Pretty fast.

Peter Winick Good. Wow. Thank you for that. That’s interesting. And I’m a little biased, so I hope you’re right. Yeah, right. Well, this has been great. I appreciate your time and your effort and looking forward to seeing. Well, I hate to say, you know, sort of what unfold, how much of that sort of you have had thoughts about early that unfold. And it’s not to me it’s not about I don’t I don’t think the measure of a futurist is accuracy. It’s accuracy relevant to the assumptions at the point in time those were made. And I think that’s a mistake people make because, you know, the variables change all the time. You can’t solve for X when X is a moving target, you.

Trond Arne Undheim Know, and I think, you know, a thought leader is is a conversation leader. You are stimulating a conversation if you are expected to solve problems here. Now you are just a consultant again or you know, it’s a very different role. The thought leader stimulates debate and you are more like a philosopher in that sense. You know. You know, you’re stimulating something where the answers cannot all come from you for sure.

Peter Winick Excellent. Well, thanks so much. Good to talk to you today. All right.

Trond Arne Undheim Take care.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. To reach me directly. Feel free to email me at Peter at Thought Leadership Leverage dot com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.