Discernment: The Skill We'll Need Most in 2036

Hi, I'm Nola Simon. I'm the host of the Hope and Possibilities podcast, and today I want to talk about a practice of the Institute for the Future, which is where I took my futurist training. They look at 10-year forecasts. One of the scenarios that they've created for 2036 involves discernment. And the title is "In 2036, discernment is the most essential human skill."

And so this is relevant for us as members of society, members of culture, and people who live and work, because you don't separate who you are at work from who you are at home. Discernment is actually a skill that allows you to adapt and adjust to all aspects of life. So I'm gonna read this to you because I do think it's a really cool way of thinking about where we are currently and where it is we maybe need to steer ourselves toward.

The era of seeing is believing is over. You can no longer provide the receipts because receipts are easily generated by AI and faked. A new skill set is required to make sense of the world and decide what is right, what is real, what is good, what is wise. This skill is discernment, the ability to judge what is trustworthy, relevant, and meaningful when evidence alone is insufficient and facts are unstable or contested. It combines critical thinking, contextual awareness, social sense-making, taste, and moral judgment to determine what is real enough, right enough, good enough, and ultimately wise enough to act on.

There's also a component of neighborism, prioritizing human local truths, first-hand judgment, and accountability to the people we interact with every day over national media or online discourse. By 2036, discernment has replaced empathy as the most widely considered essential soft skill to teach in schools, train for in workplaces, and cultivate in our personal lives. Major drivers of this change: the collapse of evidentiary authority as photos, video, audio, and data become easily faked, failure of technological fixes such as AI-generated watermarks, the persistent human need to know what is real and true in order to act and make good decisions.

So this really is an adaptive skill that fits into all aspects of our lives, and it'll impact relationships, how we work, how we trust, and really how we make future-focused decisions and how we assess the impact of the past as well. So it's incredibly far-reaching, and that's why it really caught my eye, because I've been talking an awful lot about the skills that we need for the future of work.

And soft skills, as many people have pointed out, are anything but soft. They're really complex, and as you can see the way they've defined discernment is a combination of heavy-hitting skills. It's critical thinking, contextual awareness, social sense-making, taste, and moral judgment. And so the way that we practice discernment now is setting us up for success in the future.

And I've done a few podcasts and I've written a few posts lately about how you can demonstrate the human skills, the skills that AI is bad at, right? So taste and judgment, how do you demonstrate that on an ongoing basis? And in a low-stakes way, we can look at art, at culture, at literature, at movies and TV, how we talk about that, who we talk about that to, how we use it to make sense of the world.

And a lot of times it is low stakes, right? On Threads the last few weeks we've been talking about Slow Horses and The Diplomat, and I've been writing about spoilers and the art of anticipation and why we hate spoilers but love Easter eggs. These are all examples of displaying taste and judgment and discernment, but also critical thinking about what that actually means if you change the stakes. So an example of how you change the stakes: Ed Sheeran earlier this year told the world that he had a Letterboxd account, and it was cute.

It was a way of him being relatable to fans who wanna perceive him as just another person. So yes, he's famous, yes, he's got lots of money, but he's really just like us because he watches TV and he wants to write about his experience and share his thoughts. And people found his account really quickly, and I think he ended up shutting it down just because it got overrun. But those stakes are low. Fast-forward to the summer when the Macklemore situation arose, where he declared support for Palestine and then got kicked off the tour by the owners of the stadiums.

And Ed basically mishandled the PR by not wanting to get involved. That lack of discernment, the critical thinking, the sense-making, understanding what the stakes were, really impacted him, because he didn't have that final decision. He's not the owner of the stadiums, and he was risking something by not actually taking a stance. Staying silent though is actually a stance and it blew up in his face, right?

Because although probably no one in the world expected him to be able to resolve a conflict like Gaza, what he fails to understand is the fact that he has such a platform. He has millions and millions of followers and has previously spoken out on other political situations like Ukraine. People expect him to have a level of accountability and authority that he took on to use, right?

So yes, he has lots of money. He's one of the most successful musicians in the world. But in terms of the level of money that he has, it pales in comparison to the people who actually own those stadiums and essentially run the music business and how that industry itself works. So the level of discernment to understand the difference of stakes in terms of who actually makes the decisions, who is being coerced, who is being intimidated and manipulated, and who is demonstrating courage in the face of impossible choices while people are dying.

'Cause you gotta understand that the stakes are not just who's going to a concert and making money, but you're supporting or not supporting a cause where people are actually dying, and that is incredibly important. So this is where discernment can have levels. But the reason why it's really important to practice your skills on this is because you can't always control the stakes and how they change and how you're perceived, and you need to practice in advance because you need to be able to deftly work between what is nice to have and what is essential.

And somebody that's in the public eye, I actually don't envy them, because the shift in narrative, the shift in perception, the way that your words can be perceived and misinterpreted because there's often not sufficient context, that's really challenging.

It's hard to get right, and even with the best access in the world, the only thing you can really do is own who you are and what you stand for and what your values are and operate from that basis. So that's an example of where discernment, the way that we're practicing it right now, has an opportunity to become a really essential skill. When I actually am practicing my skills and how I wanna grow, I look at things that are adjacent to what I actually wanna do.

So I practice calm. I practice meditation. I practice listening. I started the podcast and invited guests, not because I necessarily just wanted to have a platform and somebody to actually hear what I wanted to say. I noticed that I actually interrupted people a lot because I didn't feel heard, and I needed an outlet for my ideas, and so I was actually interrupting people a lot because I needed to express myself.

And so in part, I started my podcast so I could actually learn how to listen better and then feel confident enough to trust the situation that I could then express myself in a way that was productive and fruitful. And this is how this body of work has been created. It's not that I started a podcast just for the heck of it. I started it to practice a skill that I wanted to improve, and I needed to actually improve my critical thinking, my contextual awareness, the listening.

Are you listening to actually say something, or are you listening deeply and learning from a situation, making people feel seen and heard, and then asking questions to advance the conversation? What are you listening for? There's levels of listening. And then the other thing I do is I'm actually part of a few groups that are focused on language. So I'm part of a linguistics group. I'm part of a PR crisis communications group. And I am part of a group focused on trust and leadership. These are the skills that I look to learn more about.

And that's discernment, because I know that the majority of the work that I do surrounding futurism is mainly focused on communication, how we use language, how we understand, how we remember, how we anticipate, how we notice. Meditation, a big part of why I really enjoyed meditation and integrated meditation, so integrating meditation into walks and whatnot, is how that improves my ability to notice.

And noticing is a really essential skill and part of futurism because you're looking for signals and scenarios and foresight, applying foresight, building on all of those things that you notice and the convergence of how things are coming together. Those are all really adjacent skills. Of course, I'm practicing futurism, I'm consulting, I'm advising. A key part of that is listening. But a lot of it is also just even noticing and understanding people and how they themselves need to practice all of these skills as well, and that's discernment as well.

The other part of what is right, what is good, what is wise: who do you trust? Why? If you need to know everything, that's really not trust. That's where this debate about transparency comes in: if you have transparency, that improves trust. Actually it's the opposite. If you have transparency, you don't even need to trust because you can see everything. So trust is not required because it's being disclosed. You're actually doing something else in that situation.

So how do you learn to trust? And the irony is that often in order to trust, you have to be trustworthy yourself. You have to go first and behave in ways that other people are going to trust. And the more trust you give, the more trust you earn. That's the interesting part about trust. And what is real?

How do you observe people? When I'm looking at people, and I'm following people, and I'm researching, I'm reading their books, I'm looking for consistency in their behavior and their beliefs. And there are people that I've had actually even on the podcast where I've followed them for a long time. I've listened to their podcast. I usually only invite them when I start to feel that who they are on one platform really is who they are everywhere. There's consistency in the way that they think, the way that they show up, the way that they behave, the way that they comment, the way they engage.

They are who they say they are. And then still, it can actually change once you get them directly in a conversation. I had one guy I really wanted to like because he's Canadian, he's written I don't know, seven books. We're the same age. We know the same music. I wanted to like him, and he showed up with slides and presented to me like it was 2010, and I was a kid in his university class, and got really upset with me when I actually questioned some of his data and the way he presented or didn't present some of the information. I had another guy show up and in the middle of the podcast, which was actually being video recorded, he was talking but was also checking his phone. It's an hour call.

You couldn't wait 30 minutes to check your phone? Would you do that with anybody else? Is this who you are? Like, do you do this with the CEOs that you consult with? Would you treat them like that? So who are you and how do you decide who's important, who's deserving of your attention? And the fact that it was being video recorded and you didn't even consider that might come across in a certain way, and you're okay with that?

I was floored. And this is somebody that I had read all his books. I had noticed that my coach actually used him as an endorsement on her book and he reciprocated. I was confident in the productive conversations I'd had with him, and then he still showed up and made me feel like I didn't matter. You can think that you've got the best discernment in the world, and you can still be wrong. And that is where you really have to have a certain amount of self-awareness and be open to feedback and rethinking what it is you think. How do you unlearn what you knew?

How do you relearn new skills? And how do you keep assessing what it is you think? And that is really where discernment comes into play. So I hope that this is a helpful example. I am really excited about the idea of how we integrate futures thinking, the everyday futurism concept that I talk about, which is how do you wake up in a future scenario, whether that's six months from now, a year from now, 18 months from now, or 10 years from now?

How do you put this in play, and what pieces do you need to work on to have that idea actually come to fruition, right? If you wake up 10 years in the future, who are you living with? What does your breakfast look like? What do your habits look like? What does your work look like? Do you leave to go to work? Do you walk to work? What does work mean to you? Even being able to imagine the normal things that you do on an everyday basis now, and what that looks like if certain aspects change, helps you understand this.

And the Institute for the Future is actually a really good way to assess this. They actually talked about the possibilities of a pandemic ten years before COVID hit, and it was a scenario developed by an expert who develops video games. And they knew because of the scenario development that they'd done, this ten-year forecast, that people were gonna have a really hard time around rituals, like going to church, missing church, weddings, funerals, being present for babies being born, christenings, the rituals that fuel our life and mark transitions.

It was gonna be really difficult for people to not gather. The ritual of going to church and praying together and that community aspect that keeps people connected. Of course, you can move a certain amount of that online. That feels and looks very different for somebody who's never been online, right? So because they had people imagine what it would look like to wake up in those scenarios, and they mined all of the responses for commonalities, they were actually able to come in and advise governments about the responses and what the risks would be and how to adapt. This is where futurism can be very powerful, and discernment is a huge part of that.

We know more than we realize, and a lot of it isn't necessarily about knowing. It's about that sense-making part of it because we know what it is. We know what our lives are. We know how we would react. We are who we are. These are important skills. And this is the value of futurism. It's not just about little fantasy things like flying cars. It's these small decisions that become bigger decisions that snowball, that then become who we are as a society, and those are big questions.

Anyways, thanks for listening. I'd love to know what you think. I've got an experiment going to end up on the Canadian charts. I've realized that a lot of times the skills that I talk about are deeply related to careers, and also I'm talking about society and culture. So I have actually changed the categories for my podcast to match that, and I'm attempting to end up on the Canadian charts. Again, I think it's a civic duty to speak up as a Canadian about the signals and the trends and the scenarios I see playing out into the sovereignty of our nature and our future as a country. And that requires visibility, which means that I need to amplify Canadian voices, and this is my goal. So the easiest thing you can do to support that is to actually just subscribe to the podcast on whatever player you listen on. Thanks.