From “What Is” to “What If” in Construction

Nicholas Badminton: How do we make the industry attractive to young people?

Chris Langiza: Mhm.

Nicholas Badminton: In a world where there's convenience and everyone wants to be a YouTuber.

Chris Langiza: Welcome to the Power of Construction. We are recording live at Groundbreak and I am Chris Langiza and I am joined today by Nicholas Badminton. Thank you for joining us.

Nicholas Badminton: Thanks very much Chris. It's great to be here.

Chris Langiza: It's awesome to have you. Um, now you've got a pretty interesting background. You've been living in the world of futures since you were a young child in the UK growing up in a slaughterhouse time and kind of uh, got bit by the futures bug at a young age where you were exposed to the usborne, uh, book of Futures. Can you tell me a little bit more about that background and how you kind of got into futuring and, and what it means to you?

Nicholas Badminton: So I mean the Osborne Book of the Future was just this amazing book, lots of illustrations, great for kids. It was part of my school book club and me and my dad sat down, he's oh yeah, let's get you this book. And sort of blew my mind. I eventually uh, about three or four years ago went and bought an original copy, cost me like 350 bucks. And then my friend Tom, who's a uh, Tom Cheese m writer who's another futurist, he ended up writing the, the forward from it like you know, green with envy over here and it got republished. So that was really cool. Um, but it was really a book that took us to a point in the future. It was like the year 2000. Uh, it was absolutely fantastical. You know, there's all these ideas of what the future city looks like in terms of solar power and green spaces and things that we still wish that we had today in many respects. And also like robots everywhere, AI everywhere of course, uh, flying cars, hyperloop everywhere like, and you know, and all these, all these things are old ideas that still spoken about and in the UK it was interesting. There's a lot of programs on TV like Tomorrow's World, whatever that just really dragged me into it and really inspired me to, to go deeper. I mean did computing, went to university, eventually did applied psychology computing, specialized in artificial intelligence and linguistics and organizational psychology. So quite, quite far ahead of, of others doing that as well. And then worked at the coal face of data for a good 20 plus years and analytical systems and multiple industries, you know, so it's been an interesting ride and, and the last 15 or so years I've been focused on the future's work and um, and that's been fascinating because it really helps sort of detach a little bit from the work that we have to do today to look for possibilities. And that dislocation is really important I think, for, for any business. But then connecting the futures back to where we are is also part of the secret sauce.

Chris Langiza: Well, and you also talk about, you know, that futures can be designed. Right. Uh, not something that we just have to live through the change. We can actually make an impact on what those futures look like.

Nicholas Badminton: Yeah.

Chris Langiza: Can you talk through them a little more for me?

Nicholas Badminton: Yeah, sure. Um, so there's not a future. There are multiple futures, there's a plurality. If you think about foresight and futures work, there's, that's really important distinction. So, um, you know, if you're trying to create a future, you're doing the wrong thing. You have to work out what a number of different people need. And, and it's interesting when you're building spaces very much like the space we're in or big industrial facilities or whatever, they have to have that flexibility to be able to, you know, really uh, create a place for multiple futures to sort of unfold as well. Right. So, um, that sort of imagining of the futures ahead of us is so, um, very, very much important for the modern context of business and construction as well.

Chris Langiza: And when you tie it back to business. Right. You talk a lot about foresight and foresight being that kind of convergence or uh, the combination of long term horizons and alternative potential paths like you just talked about in futures. How is foresight different than what our very traditional business strategy type of interactions that we do in our jobs every single day.

Nicholas Badminton: So anything less than 10 years is strategy. You're thinking about what products we can take, uh, what we can build, what we can plan, what we can deliver. Futures steps us away into a speculative area of inquiry. There's actually zero risk to do futures work because it's cognitive, it's on a whiteboard, but it's on paper. Right. So it's an idea that's really interesting. And strategic foresight is an ability to reflect what we find or what possibilities exist at uh, those 10 or 15 or 20 year uh, horizons and reflect that against our strategy today and really work out where the gaps are. You know, thinking about data growth and data center growth, or thinking about resiliency and water, energy, food and what's needed in an industrial facility or a large building full of employees where you have to have like 4,000 people, you have to feed them, you have to keep the lights on, you have to, you know, have, have, you know, black water systems or gray water systems in there as well. So, so that's, that's, that's what I think about when, and foresight is a really nice term to just, you know, the foresight of knowing what comes next. But it's a bit woo woo when you're like that. So you have to really ground it in some process. Right.

Chris Langiza: And do you think we do enough of this futuring? I mean you talk about how this can really be a competitive advantage to companies that do this. Well, like do we need to spend more time doing this than we do today?

Nicholas Badminton: I mean the answer is always yes. I mean I'm a futurist, like hope engineer. Like you know, maybe you need to

Chris Langiza: do a little bit less and we need to do a little bit more.

Nicholas Badminton: So what's really interesting is, um, I've got a lot of colleagues in a lot of different places, um, and people that I've mentored and people that have mentored me that do futures work in companies like GE and Amtrak, um, Lego, um, Joanna Lencover over at Lego, my friend Catherine Roy over at Dallas, um, Google, you know, people that really embed themselves in the organizations as futurists. So people are stepping up to do the work. Um, that one piece of work I did with Google just pre pandemic ended up with a consideration of global expansion and billions of dollars being invested in Africa, you know, and they, they, you know, what, what signals do we see? Well, Africa is gonna be going to be 4.2 billion people by 2100. Lagos, Nigeria is going to be 88 million people by 2100. Imagine a city of 88 million people, right? Imagine what just needs to exist and how it gets created and the mishmash of the systems and the construction projects that have to happen to make that work. Right. So yeah, I mean that's all been really important. And more and more people are going to be doing futures work. It's expensive when you get things wrong, right? Especially in construction. We know the stories of like after two years, three years, even 10 years. Well, that didn't work. We have to take that out whatever because of changing environments or changing external um, pressures or tensions with futures work, we can actually identify some of them now and speculate their likelihood of existence. Right.

Chris Langiza: Well and what I love about that is what I'm hearing from you is that featuring is part of the business strategy just on a different time horizon. Right. And it's the amount of time we're spending thinking about things that might happen.

Nicholas Badminton: Yeah.

Chris Langiza: Uh, to then come up with a strategy. Okay. If it does happen, how do we go ahead and capitalize on those things as a business? And I think your Google examples are really, really good one.

Nicholas Badminton: Yeah, I mean it's, it's supercharging strategy. It's putting on steroids. Right. Um, a strategist that looks at futures ahead of them. Like it's just a better strategist. Yeah, right, yeah. Um, it's like in advertising it's like uh, you know, creative with no strategy is okay. Creative, but strategy informed. Sorry, strategically informed. Advertising creative has got connection. Yeah. And there's some sort of analogs between, you know, advertising creativity and futures and creativity. Um, to really help people tell the stories and have the feelings of what a future is like. And that's a really important part of the mix as well.

Chris Langiza: And you talk about this exercise of futuring and foresight and you have a very distinct approach to that that you recommend. Can you tell us a little bit more about your positive dystopia framework? Uh, and what the concept of signals, trends, scenarios and storytelling, what does that mean? And how do people put that into place today?

Nicholas Badminton: Yeah, so I wrote a book called Facing Our Future. And uh, in that book, and I've got a background where I used to speculate on the worst case scenarios that could happen in the world. I ran an event for about six years. It ended up happening in Vancouver, Toronto and San Francisco. Um, and companies like Microsoft and JP Morgan would support the event and it would be, it was called the uh, black mirror of TED talks. So 15 minutes, five speakers for, um, five speakers, 15 minutes per speaker. No, no bio breaks, no like no hors d' oeuvres and wine, you know, just like, like dark futures. And that's what it's called. Um, and that sort of evolved into something where I encourage people to start considering how bad it can get. We're kind of living in an industrial revolution, uh, 300 years in, where a few people make all the money. Right. There's a lack of equity, we've got collapsing systems, we've got industry that's struggling, political sort of, you know, structures that uh, are challenging globally. Um, and that sort of drove me down. Now when we start to consider the principles behind that um, sort of existence and it's kind of dystopian when we start to reflect that. And this sort of relates to hope a little bit with positive um, scenarios where you do have equity and ownership, participatory, like design a number of the. We're talking about today. Um, and we have positive futures, but when you have the two pictures together and you reflect them against each other, you can see what we've been getting wrong, what we could do better and how to actually end up at a point where we're delivering a better and more positive future in total. And it's quite interesting, the book, I mean JP Morgan put it on their summer reading list, gave it to 2,000 of their young executives, really started to really, um, hit a nerve because we're delivered very challenging times every single day. Right. And we have done for decades. Um, so if we can look ahead to a better world and we can start to co create that, I think that's going to be good for humanity as a whole.

Chris Langiza: And so for those of you if you haven't read the book, um, I highly recommend you go. I've read it, it's fantastic. And one of the things that I really started to think about as I was reading it is how do I start to think about how I spot these signals like earlier and, and how do I create the space for myself to go out and do that? Do you, do you have any recommendations on how do you train yourself to start to look for what these signals are out in the market?

Nicholas Badminton: I mean there's something called the frequency effect, sometimes known as the Bard Meinhof phenomenon, where you, once you see something once, you'll see it everywhere. Right. And that's what I've trained myself to do. I, I read a lot and uh, I read a lot of articles, I read a lot of academic research papers that, you know, Twitter used to be an amazing place of futurists to exist and a lot of them like, like ran away. There was a massive exodus away from that blue sky and LinkedIn and even Reddit and Futurology on Reddit have been really great places for conversations and to find things and uh, I mean even setting up Google, uh, alerts on like subject areas like the future of X, the future of whatever industry really starts to deliver different opinions as well. And once you start to gather and you scan for these signals, you see the emerging trends, you to see it everywhere, you start to join the dots and they become scenarios that start to play out. It becomes incredibly powerful. You kind of become president, you kind of, it becomes second nature. But I'm going to warn all of you that at the beginning when you start doing the research, you're going to get to the point where one, you feel you might have learned too much and it's absolutely challenging to Think about how we're going to move through it.

Chris Langiza: Yep.

Nicholas Badminton: To get to a better place, a better future. And what you have to do is create some resiliency and acceptance of that's how things are today and how people are talking, but also making a choice to build more positive paths forward. Right. And that's kind of uh, what I've been working towards for a very long time.

Chris Langiza: Well, and I love that. And I think about sometimes when I look for signals and I think a lot of us do this. Right. We look for signals from inside of the places that we know. Right. So we, we look for signals from inside of our industry. Whether we're in construction, we're an owner that has to build. But uh, I also find that sometimes one of the most meaningful places to look outside. Right. And we were, we were having a conversation about food earlier.

Nicholas Badminton: Right.

Chris Langiza: Which is like an interesting, you don't think about the crossovers, but there are a lot of what's happening in the world of food versus what's happening in the world of construction.

Nicholas Badminton: Yeah, that's right.

Chris Langiza: Is that something that you recommend to folks is don't just look inside of where you are, but look, look broader.

Nicholas Badminton: You know, I, I did a keynote yesterday on construction. I'm doing a keynote tomorrow about um, you know, uh, um, food products, healthcare products. Next um, week is finance. The, and the following Friday it's going to be education. The real benefit of being able to look in so many different realms. And all the keynotes I do and all the research, it's all customer like interviewing people and whatever is, you just broaden that perspective in that spectrum and then you start to see the stories overlap, the Venn diagrams and as it becomes incredibly busy and you start to see like whole new chains of events. So one example um, to make this come alive is around self driving vehicles. So uh, myself, my son and my wife, uh, we, we, we went in a self driving vehicle in Phoenix earlier this year. I normally showed a video in my, in my longer keynotes of that and it was amazing. And then it was boring. It was just another taxi. Right. But what's really interesting is this. So the promise of self driving cars is fewer accidents on the road. The promise of fewer accidents on the road is less people die. Less people die, there's less organ donors. Okay. So then we start to think about, okay, now we're going to grow human organs in pigs. That's great, uh, what do you do with the leftover pig carcass once you've harvested the human organs Human pig bacon. So it's a. Yeah, I don't know, people are pulling faces. But it's a weird chain of events that we find ourselves in and we continually find ourselves in. So when you start to do the work, you start thinking weird like me about all these strange chains of events. But there's, there's a real, there's a real benefit to this in your industry. You can start to see the second and third order effects and you can start to plan for what might come next. And when you do that, you're always going to have an advantage over someone that does not do that.

Chris Langiza: So let's talk about how to put that advantage to work. Maybe uh, specifically in construction. Right.

Nicholas Badminton: Yeah.

Chris Langiza: We've got a lot of work to do with workforce. Right. We have a lot of labor shortage. Productivity has been a uh, challenge in our industry for quite some time. We're seeing new ways to use data and drive decision making as we move forward. And you know, I think there's a lot happening around how do we design and what do we design based on? What is the world around us need? You know, we're seeing more sustainable design, we're seeing new ways of rapidly iterating on design. You know, our industry has really struggled with like the productivity stagnantation in, in our space.

Nicholas Badminton: Yeah.

Chris Langiza: When other industries improved. Why do you think that has happened?

Nicholas Badminton: There's so many like macro and micro effects here. You know, how do we make the industry attractive to young people?

Chris Langiza: Mhm.

Nicholas Badminton: In a world where there's convenience and everyone wants to be a YouTuber, you know, it's a real challenge. I mean, uh, so there's that side of things and people aging out in the industry. I mean by, by 2050 there's going to be three people over the age of 65 versus kids under the age of 5 years old. So we, we're going to have to have an older population still working, still doing the work. But there's going to have to be that automation in the workforce. It's gonna, I gave an example earlier. I think it's FBR's, uh, Hadrian X where they redesigned what the building is, what the brick is and the, you know, the robot, the vehicle that lays the brick. That's kind of what needs to happen to the construction industry. Right. We talk about modularity, we talk about circularity and reuse and whatever. These are going to be significant drivers of the future of construction. Just because it's a lot more simple to build.

Chris Langiza: Mhm.

Nicholas Badminton: A smaller medium scale and large scale Right. Using, um, those kinds of technologies. But we also have to shift expectations about what is going to get delivered. It doesn't mean that we expect less, it means that we expect different.

Chris Langiza: Yeah.

Nicholas Badminton: And that's not a bad thing.

Chris Langiza: I agree. That's definitely not a bad thing. I want to do a slight pivot here. And you said something about kids wanting to be YouTubers, which is actually an interesting crossover though, because you talk a lot about storytelling and writing science fiction.

Nicholas Badminton: Right.

Chris Langiza: And you know, when we talk about potential futures, I think we have to paint a picture of what's possible. And I don't know that we do the best job of that in construction. So maybe, candidly, maybe we need some of the younger generation to come in and help us create some storytelling. Like, can you talk a little bit about how you use storytelling to, to paint these potential futures and to get people to really, like, engage with them to see what's possible?

Nicholas Badminton: I mean, there's nothing more inspirational, um, and connective than imagery. And sure, you've got the written word. You know, there's a multimodal effect of getting inspiration or feeling something about a situation. I mean, I do speculative fiction, I do design fiction. Objects that don't yet exist, but something that could potentially exist. And that gets you asking questions. Right. Um, so there are a number of different things. Now. I've done it with clients. I think I just showed you on my phone. I'm speaking to a food client tomorrow. And I was like, what does a box of Cellular Pork look like? Where? And I created this Kellogg's box of Cellular Pork with a fox on, on the box. Basically giving the thumbs up and winking. You know, what does that look like on the shelf next to Cellular Chicken and Secular Cellular Beef? And you suddenly, like, what? You know, we can walk in. Suddenly you get a feeling of what that the shock or the opportunity or whatever. I mean, um, I think I saw something. Dubai just announced its plans for its City in 2050. And it's these like, mid journey, um, images of like, something that's likely not going to be Dubai in 2050.

Chris Langiza: Yeah.

Nicholas Badminton: But what's interesting is the suspension of belief and the suspension of what comes next or what's expected. It's really valuable to really push people into a new realm, but we have to also not become complacent or just treat that as fiction. When we can actually start to think that this might be real, then that connects us more deeply to a possibility. It's like a good film, you know, if you've seen the film her. Uh, we've seen the film Gattaca or Minority Report is ah, is one that's often I use that one, right?

Chris Langiza: Yep, yep.

Nicholas Badminton: You know the interfaces they had, people like Jaron Lanier that was um, really reimagining virtual reality, whatever thinking about the design of the film and what that looks like. Philip K. Dick, uh, wrote the short story that the film came from. Right. So but we can't just write it off as fiction. We have to think about, you know, what's that reality. And uh, it gets really, really interesting when we do that.

Chris Langiza: And it's really clear that there's a big human component to all of this futuring and foresight. And you know, you mentioned the ability to connect with that, right? To believe with it, to engage with it. But sometimes when we look at those things we go, oh crap, uh, I'm kind of scared of this potential, right. And there's some fear that comes along with that. And also that fear that maybe of like we don't know how to deal with what if this happened.

Nicholas Badminton: Right.

Chris Langiza: So construction tends to be a pretty risk averse industry. And if people are afraid of the pictures that we're pointing of the future, is their fear valid? Um, and how should we think about that? Should we lean into and to make it more of a reality or should we try and find a way to maybe flip that future?

Nicholas Badminton: I mean it's quite interesting. Like fear is a raw and visceral response to uh, an unknown. When we can start to paint pictures of things ahead of us. The that we have big questions about. They're not unknown anymore. M. They're potentialities. If you can start to do. The fear sort of dissipates a little bit. Right. And it's like saying, you know, how do we prepare? So I just flew through Denver, uh, International Airport yesterday. And you go into the washroom and the washroom is also a hurricane shelter. Right? That's kind of what it feels like to me. Like in terms of thinking about futures. Work is like, you know, when is something that's a known quantity applied to an unknown situation. You know, the hurricane will come and actually transforms what it does becomes m really interesting. Right. When we start to explore in those kinds of ways, right. And it's like an iPhone, right? Pick up an iPhone and uh, you know, take, take a nail and knock, knock the nail in with it. It's not an iPhone, it's a hammer. You start to like think about these things and it starts to sort of suspend that belief. The, the Unknowns ahead of us create a fear. Um, and so we can actually, I'm not fearful of our future. I'm absolutely realistic. And if people are scared and some people come up to me, they're like, nick, I'm scared about climate change. And it's like, yes, it's your raw, visceral response to where you live, what that means and whatever. If you live in Orlando, you can't get insurance for your house. If you live in Toronto, it's still like 25 degrees centigrade up there right now. And it's like middle of October. Right. It's like nothing good is going to come from this. But what do you do? You actually create resiliency and you put the mechanisms and the processes in place to really survive those situations.

Chris Langiza: Right.

Nicholas Badminton: And humans are good at survival and resiliency and finding ways to thrive. We forget this.

Chris Langiza: Well, and you talk a lot about being a hope engineer, right. And I think a lot of that resiliency and the opportunity to be able to thrive in some of these situations is finding that hope. Right. Is there, is there something that you would recommend to folks on how to create that hope, that we can either get through it or that we can achieve it. Right. And make these things a reality?

Nicholas Badminton: Yeah, I mean there's lots of research around hope. Like students have got a higher level of hope and they've been, you know, they've been motivated by someone or they're given, uh, an incentive. That's quite a hopeful incentive. Achieve more businesses, achieve more executives, achieve more teams, see, you know, high hope executives and go further and become hopeful themselves. Companies performance lifts, you know, as, as a whole, I mean, building hope is, is one of the things I think is going to be, you know, a superpower in an organization. And uh, and we've often forgot it, it's been discounted. Um, just did an executive session where someone rolled out the old trope of, you know, hope is not a strategy, you know, and, and that was co opted by a ton of politicians and whatever. But actually in certain contexts, hope is all we have. And it's much better to have that than to feel hopeless, because that achieves nothing. Right.

Chris Langiza: Well, it's a feeling that we can all gravitate to, right? It's a feeling as a human, we, we all have hope.

Nicholas Badminton: Yeah, it's a feeling. But there's also researchers like Charles, Charles Snyder, um, Rainbows in the Mind was his pivotal paper around this, where you set audacious goals and agencies driven pathways forward, you know, making things happen. Um, because we know where we're going, the futures work, I do give them a further horizon to go even further and faster. And not many people have done that. I've written a book about it that's coming out next year. But it's really interesting to think just at the basic, you know, how many times do we sit in our organizations and get together on a weekly basis and just celebrate the work that we do? We do it like once a year at, uh, a conference, and we write, you know, some principles on the wall that we have to believe in or whatever. But, hey, how much do we really celebrate exactly? You know, what John has done or what Deborah has done or Sashi has done this week, because it's made a difference and how that ripples through the organization, that's going to be how we start to build hope in organizations and teams.

Chris Langiza: Well, I love that. And you mentioned giving it time to actually create and happen. Right. When you talk about futures, we're not talking about things that are going to happen in the next three to five years. We're talking 20 years, 50 years sometimes. Right. And so we have to give ourselves the time and the space to get there. And I think that gives us more hope that, hey, you know, a year went by and we didn't make as much progress as we thought we would. Well, we still have 19 more to go in order to make a difference on these things.

Nicholas Badminton: Uh, there's an idea in futures work called protopian futures. Protopia is the idea that you can imagine better futures, 10 plus years, but every year we make progress towards, uh was a phrase originally, uh, coined by Kevin Kelly. Uh, my friend Heather Vesson did some work on that as well. And Monica Bilsquite talks about these participatory futures, but protopian futures, like every year we can deliver on that step towards it. So it's like, so when you hear a country leader and they're like, we're going to be zero carbon by 2075, and everyone's like, that's brilliant. And everyone sort of, uh, applauds them, it's a lot better to frame it that way and then actually have some targets on a year by year basis on decarbonization of an economy, reduction of emissions, year by year by year by year, what progress? We have to remember that even though we imagine futures ahead of us, if we really want to deliver on them, like in construction or otherwise, you have to measure it year on year in terms of progress and understand that, uh, it could take a while to get there. If you look at our industrial revolution today, it's created over 300 years.

Chris Langiza: Yeah.

Nicholas Badminton: And you know, when, when there were steam powered trains like 300 years ago, you know, we, we weren't, we weren't aiming towards landing on Mars or landing on the moon. Right. But what we were doing was year by year, innovation, year by year. What happens is as you make that uh, progress, there's more, more invention, more innovation, more sort of unfolds and unfurls and then it changes the futures as well.

Chris Langiza: So there's an adaptability do you think, in construction. A lot of times we're talked about as an industry that hasn't changed in hundreds of years. Right. Do you think that we are lacking a bit of confidence in today? And that's been our barrier to think of big futures coming ahead of us in the future because we haven't seen as much change.

Nicholas Badminton: I think it is confidence, I think it's investment, but it's also belief. Um, what's interesting about participatory like futures is we can take people along on the journey with us. Right? We can, we can. How many times do we have conversations with our clients that uh, are commissioning projects and asking them to really look further than their current requirements. Right. To really go beyond. It's really interesting in the Middle east what's happening in Saudi Arabia and Dubai and what are they really pushing it out there? I mean they've got the investment behind it as well. You know. Neom, um, the line. Yep, yep. Absolutely insane. But you know what, in 50 years time it's going to exist in a form that's going to be incredibly impressive. Yeah, it's like the, you know, I live in Toronto, the fastest growing city in North America and it just grows and grows and grows and grows and grows. Uh, it continues to do so based on a future vision of, of, of, of productivity and sort of that, that engine of, of economic growth in Canada. Right. And it's really, really important.

Chris Langiza: Has future thinking taught you anything about how you live right now and kind of living in the present?

Nicholas Badminton: That's a really great question. Um, it's, it's taught me to really cut through the noise. Everyone wants you to buy a widget. Everyone wants to, to buy the dream. Everyone, every tech, uh, entrepreneur wants you to believe that the world is going to be better by you buying their software or, or investing in, in their platform. Right. I mean the, the bottom line is you have to cut through the noise and qualify if it's true.

Chris Langiza: Mhm.

Nicholas Badminton: Right. Um, because there's there's millions of startups out there. What provides value? Companies like Procore. How did, how did you grow to be so significant in that industry? How is something like uh, OpenAI become so significant in that industry or Amazon or whoever else? It's just because they found ways to help people in a simple sense deliver on what's critical on a day to day basis. Right. And um, being able to understand what that looks like in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years is going to be so important.

Chris Langiza: Well, and um, I mean I think the key thing that you just said there is you have to think about not just what they're doing right now, but are they going to be aligned with what you think the future is going to be and are they going to help you deliver on what's necessary there in the future? Right. And it's not just about like immediate need and solve. It's it's about, hey, how are you helping on this journey?

Nicholas Badminton: Yeah, for sure. And uh, and the word journey is the correct piece.

Chris Langiza: Yeah.

Nicholas Badminton: Um, how many times do we invite our clients to come on a journey with us?

Chris Langiza: Yeah.

Nicholas Badminton: Um, and how many clients are willing to invest? It gets interesting when you have a conversation with a client and you don't want to work with them because they don't want to do the work. Um, and the ones that really do step up are the ones that are really going to reap the benefits and are really going to empower you and give you the energy for change as well.

Chris Langiza: Love that. Or at the point where I ask you a few, uh, rapid fire questions, go for it. They're super easy. Um, is there a book that you would recommend to our listeners?

Nicholas Badminton: Um, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's the most hilarious book. It's absolutely fantastic. Um, is it serious? Is it about futures? I don't know. It certainly takes us into a number of possibilities that are very strange. Also talks about simulation a lot. So it gets you thinking about that.

Chris Langiza: Yeah, I love that book. It's fantastic. What's your go to source for gaining maybe a different or informed perspective? I'm really interested to hear this answer from you.

Nicholas Badminton: From me? God, I was going to say the news, but no, it's really, really difficult to say that. I've got a number of people in my think tank and they're all over the world and they're doing different work and we speak once in a while and sometimes we have projects and we come together, we do them together. So that's one I've Got tons of friends that are doing really radically interesting R D. I think the counterculture always used to be a space for creation and pushing boundaries. I think that the counterculture has almost been squeezed out of existence in 2025 and everything's become sort of homogenized through social media and normalization, whatever. You know, what was this? Steve Jobs? You know, look. Oh, Apple. Here's to the crazy ones. We're going to find more crazy people in the world, right? We're going to celebrate them and it's really, really important. Yeah. All right.

Chris Langiza: If you could give one piece of advice to your younger self, uh, what would it be?

Nicholas Badminton: Um, start working on futures 20 years earlier than you actually did. It's been such an interesting ride for the last 15 years. Um, who knew that this could be what I do and it would have, you know, significant effects on the work that my clients do in the world at large. Um, it's really difficult when you think about that. Ah, I've got a five year old. What would I tell my five year old to focus on? Focus on just developing your own personality independently of the algorithms that are trying to make us, ah, homogenized consumption machines love it. And even back then, be careful of the Internet. That's what I'd say to myself.

Chris Langiza: Uh, this one, you're uniquely qualified for this. What one trend or innovation do you think is going to shape the future of construction?

Nicholas Badminton: It's the water energy food nexus.

Chris Langiza: Yeah,

Nicholas Badminton: we really, we're already starting to see calamities around the world in terms of water sovereignty. Can Canada, where I live, it's got 21 of the world's fresh water. I always joke that, you know, Canada is known for oil. We're going to be known for like, you know, water tankers. Right. It's kind of interesting if you think about it, but the water energy food nexus is so critical, and it always has been. But now we're in a world where we're under duress from climate change, from collapsing systems, um, from over consumption. So we kind of have to work out how that sort of plays out. But we've got the technology, we got the wherewithal. There's going to be trillions of dollars invested in it. The construction industry is the industry that's going to build this infrastructure. The engineers are going to take us into new realms of possibility and the futurists are going to say, hey, in fifty hundred years time, what if the world was at this level of heat, this level of chaos in terms of weather and these kinds of growth in city contexts, and how are we going to thrive and survive for the next 20,000 years as humans?

Chris Langiza: Awesome. And then, last one. If construction had, uh, an industry tagline, what would it be?

Nicholas Badminton: Wow, I'm regressing to my advertising, uh, brain. If it had a tagline.

Chris Langiza: Yeah.

Nicholas Badminton: I don't know. I'm not. I'm not stumped off on Chris, but this is interesting. If I had a tagline, this silence is. Is palpable. Right? I'm really, really. Do you know what? It's really interesting. It's actually a good futures project. Right?

Chris Langiza: Yeah.

Nicholas Badminton: Uh, what would be the tagline for construction in 20 years? Let's. Let's do that. Construction in 20 years. Rising from the grips of collapse into a new wide world. All right. It's kind of horrible, but there you go. Uh, love it takes a while to do these things.

Chris Langiza: Awesome. Appreciate it. Well, thank you all for joining us, and thank you for being here at Groundbreak. Um, if you've liked the content that we've had today or on any of our other podcasts, please, like, subscribe and share, and we'll keep bringing you the conversations with leaders who are harnessing the power of construction.