The world is overwhelmingly chaotic as the international system buckles. The placid era of cooperation that marked the 1990s and early 2000s is increasingly looking like a winner-takes-all competition among a handful of great powers, even as the world is succumbing to the opportunities of new technologies and the challenges of climate security. It all boggles, and that’s not even including all of the risks that don’t make it to the top of the charts.
Lily Boland wants to help policymakers get a greater handle on these future risks, both to understand them individually and how they intersect with each other. She is the Strategic Foresight Fellow at the Converging Risks Lab of the Council on Strategic Risks. In that role, she designs unique foresight games that bring people together to explore alternative realities and their implication for our own.
We talk about the techniques of foresight and how it differs from forecasting, what can be learned through games, how and why people change their mind, and what are the most under-reported risks that we should all pay more attention to.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, please visit our podcast.
Danny Crichton:
Before we get going, let’s talk a little bit about the work you do.
Lily Boland:
The Converging Risk Lab is an institute at the Council on Strategic Risks. We have three different institutes. They all kind of cover different topical foci. So we have a Jane E. Nolan Center on Strategic Weapons. They cover weapons of mass destruction: nuclear, chem, bio, radiological. And then we also have a Center for Climate & Security, which was actually our first institute and is really focused on bridging those two worlds. And then at the newest lab, we merge subjects and look at converging risks across the other two institutes. So we’ve done projects looking at the intersection of climate, national security and nuclear energy.
We’re convening people from all of those different fields to do things like exercises and games. Overall, our mission is to prevent strategic surprise by identifying points of risk convergence.
Danny Crichton:
How did you get into wargaming? It’s a very narrow category of people that stumbles into this!
Lily Boland:
Yeah. I feel like I’ve reached an even narrower niche now by blending foresight and gaming. There are very few of us doing that multimodal approach. I’ve heard it called all sorts of things: mixed methods, people blending, forecasting, foresight.
I didn’t necessarily start off that way. I got into wargaming through crisis management simulation. I did two master’s degrees: a dual master’s program with Sciences Po in Paris and with King’s College in London. And by the time I had hit that point in my education, I wasn’t really sure career-wise where I wanted to go.
My first semester at Sciences Po, I took a crisis simulation course run by a former NATO general. He did a course for the whole year of my master’s degree in Paris, where there was not a second where you were not technically in role play. He could email you at 10:00 PM and ask you to prepare all these documents for the next day.
He created a scenario: a fictional war, a fictional country, fictional leaders. And it was such a detailed opening scenario that he later confided in me that he had spent almost a year designing it. But I found it to be a really fascinating way to apply what I had spent years training for. I had no idea that was its own kind of career, like crisis management, simulation designing, that kind of thing.
By the time I was preparing to move to London to do the second part of my master’s at King’s College, London, I was really excited to see that they had a whole bunch of courses on wargaming, led by David Banks, who was my wargaming professor and my mentor and everything.
Danny Crichton:
King’s College is a massive hub for wargaming. The United States has kind of pulled back over the last couple of years, but King’s College has really picked it up. Lots of academics focus on it, really trying to build it into a field.
You say you focus on this world of foresight. Maybe I do also, but just don’t realize it. So can you explain a little bit more? When you say the field of foresight, what does that look like? What are some of the techniques you’ve used from that field in your own work?
Lily Boland:
At its core, foresight is just a systematic way of looking at the future. Call it future studies. There’s a whole lot of lingo used to describe it. And not everyone agrees whether they’re a foresight practitioner or not. It often gets conflated with forecasting. It is not forecasting.
Forecasting has some predictive quality to it, where you are looking probably on a much smaller timescale and you are using more quantitative outputs. And you’re claiming that because you’re taking in all this data, you can predict to some extent that something will play out in a certain way.
Foresight doesn’t try to acknowledge any kind of predictive qualities or anything. You’re really just projecting outward and trying to think about all of the plausibilities of how the future could play out. So foresight’s often a better tool than forecasting in cases where people are coming in with a really strong conviction about what they think will happen and you want to challenge the scope of their understanding of the future. You pick apart those assumptions through different foresight exercises.
Foresight’s a very systematic approach, and that’s why I like to attach it to the front end of game design, because it has a step-by-step process for actually assessing factors and things that are pushing and pulling the future in different directions. It also wants you to look at history to see what events might have shaped where we are now, and then pushing that forward.
Foresight doesn’t try to acknowledge any kind of predictive qualities or anything. You’re really just projecting outward and trying to think about all of the plausibilities of how the future could play out.
You are still grounding yourself in data and evidence. Sometimes that gets lost if you’re only doing one exercise, like a scenario planning exercise or using one foresight tool in isolation. But similar to wargaming, you don’t really want to just play something once and have that be the end of it. It’s important to have more iteration and more play tests so that you get a variety of results.
Foresight’s really more of a field of structured brainstorming techniques and learning how to challenge people and challenge their assumptions and get them better at anticipating things they may not otherwise expect. It’s a way of managing uncertainty.
Danny Crichton:
I think it’s interesting. Being a venture capital investment firm, we at Lux are not this formal, but I do think we do a decent job of what you’re describing. We do pre-mortems, we do pre-stories. We’re saying like, “Well, what would take this and make it a 100x company? What were the factors that would have come together that we said, if A and B and C combined, that’s where the multiple is going to come from and this is going to be an exponential return.” And then on the flip side, even at the growth stage, we say, “Well, what would have been those factors that we would have been shocked by? Would we be shocked by a regulatory change? Would we be shocked by technology competition?” We want to be able to get ahead of surprises. You started out with this when you went over CRL’s mission in general, which is to reduce strategic surprise.
But I go back to something you said a couple of minutes ago — obviously some people come into these scenarios with a lot of experience, but they have one narrative in their head. They have a very specific direction they want to go. We had Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner, on the podcast a few years ago and he said, “No one ever changes their mind.”
I’ve hosted enough games to believe people do change their mind, or at least change a personal opinion. But we also know folks who don’t. What is the strategy? Is there a magic toolkit?
If I can get them to acknowledge that they’ve expanded their understanding of a topic or they’ve expanded a definition of something to include something new — that to me is a huge success.
Lily Boland:
I hate to use the phrase “case by case,” but it often is case by case. My metric for a successful game or exercise is if someone has remarked that their understanding of a topic has expanded.
These policymakers are presented with so many different things in a day, if I can get them to acknowledge that they’ve expanded their understanding of a topic or they’ve expanded a definition of something to include something new — that to me is a huge success. And I have had that happen in really poignant ways.
One that comes to mind is that we ran a multifaceted crisis game in South Korea on this renewable energy project we’ve been working on. A couple of people fought me on the premise of the scenario of that game: we had projected outward into 2045 or something, and the world’s a lot warmer. People are really upset. There’s a global greening movement and tens of thousands of Koreans mobilize to protest. Everyone fought me on that scenario in the room.
In that moment, I would always want to humble myself. I was with a bunch of people who are experts on things I’m not an expert on. I’m in their country. I want to listen. But the dispute was just based on the fact that they didn’t believe Koreans would take to the streets against their own government. And flash forward eight months later, martial law was declared, and that’s what happened in December.
But in that room, they were fighting something so hard because they hadn’t seen it happen in so long, and they couldn’t really conceive of it. But we can’t predict how people are going to respond if all of a sudden we don’t have winters. If all of a sudden we don’t have water access, if groundwater depletes. And that’s really the foresight coming through: I want you to think about what is plausible. So for a moment, don’t fight me on it anymore, just try to consider it.
At the end of that exercise, the same people who did not want to do it came to me and said that, through the game, they understand now that when they talk about national security, they also need to talk about climate. The game expanded their definition of what national security is for South Korea. Huge win.
It is really challenging to change people’s minds. But to me, if you’re a good game designer, you’re getting people to play out of their comfort zones and into that magic circle of immersion, where they don’t want to leave.
Danny Crichton:
I like the idea of the magic circle because I do think immersion matters a lot. You have to have that kind of immersion that comes from gaming to really consider the full scope of the changes that are underway going into the future.
But let me turn to some of the policy topics you work on. Maybe we’ll start with nuclear because that’s one of your passions. I can’t think of a year in the last decade or two in which more has changed in nuclear. Massive shifts, thanks to the Ukraine war and Russia, massive shifts in East Asia, between Japan, Korea, China and others. What’s going on? What’s under-reported?
Lily Boland:
The news coming out of APEC and the deal to give Korea the technology to build a nuclear-powered submarine is fascinating. If we look at it in the context of AUKUS — a foundation of that agreement was to give Australia the same thing. But you have Korea that already has the technology. They’re one of the top leaders in nuclear energy exports and production, although the new Lee administration does not necessarily want to rely on nuclear energy too heavily.
It’s hard not to be depressed about the way the world’s going when it comes to new nuclear technology in general.
So I’m interested to see how his energy plans, which are more heavily based on renewables, shift with Korea taking on this new agreement. And I’m interested in what kind of impacts we’ll see, diplomatically speaking, across the Asia-Pacific region, especially if it’s going to be seen as some sort of new threat.
It’s hard not to be depressed about the way the world’s going when it comes to new nuclear technology in general, though. I got a little bit excited about the Korea situation only because they are innovators in nuclear, and I’m interested to know how they take that on.
We just put out a report on tactical nuclear weapons and their implications, which debates what tactical even means and whether we actually have tactical nuclear weapons. I personally — and throughout this conversation, I’ve not been representing CSR’s views and especially now in the nuclear space — I would say I don’t think they’re going to be stabilizing or anything remotely or solely tactical. To me, anything related to nuclear is strategic and has strategic implications.
We did a whole foresight report on that and potentially plan to turn it into a game. With tensions being high, everything with the Ukraine war, it’s hard to remain optimistic. But I don’t want to go only into doomsday talk.
I will say, news coming out of Japan: I’m not really sure how either Japan or South Korea are going to go. I don’t think Korea’s in a position where it wants to piss off China. They have their own special economic relationship with China that’s outside of ours. They have their own offensive and defensive military compared to Japan, which does not. And I just heard some Japanese parliamentarian a few weeks ago was questioning the new prime minister, Takaichi, whether or not she considers Japan to be a colony of the United States.
Interesting things all around happening over there. I think it’s a tense situation to introduce yet another type of nuclear power technology.
Danny Crichton:
My solution to nuclear threats is to just live in Manhattan, since we will be the first to be bombed. And then everyone who survives — the 20 million people left — can figure out all the implications when the rest of us are all gone.
We’re almost out of time, but you obviously cover a lot of issues at the Council. So when you think about all of them, what is one that doesn’t get enough attention, enough funding, people don’t care enough, but you are very concerned?
Lily Boland:
Ecological security.
Danny Crichton:
Meaning like wildlife, wildlife trafficking or ...
Lily Boland:
That’s all part of it.
Danny Crichton:
Forests, forest management?
Lily Boland:
Yeah, all part of it. I would say ecological security isn’t a phrase that’s widely used. It’s kind of where climate security was about a decade ago. Ecological security covers everything that’s not related to the climate. So we’re looking at ecosystem collapse, biodiversity loss, algae blooms, all these other things.
And they have these tipping points. So something like groundwater depletion or reduction: full depletion is that tipping point. And it’s something that scares me a little bit more than climate.
If we were to surpass one of these thresholds, like the Amazon die back, for example… if we go past the point of no return burning the Amazon up, it’s going to start to be the largest producer of emissions instead of being a carbon vacuum. Those feedback loops that we could trigger — and we will trigger them as humans unless we intervene — is what’s keeping me up at night.
