This is an excerpt from the article Eight Questions With Featured Grey Swan Guild Member: Sylvia Gallusser
Global Futurist — Founder & CEO @Silicon Humanism, Board Member @Grey Swan Guild, Mentor @Sustainable Ocean Alliance
Our Eight Questions is part of our ongoing series profiling some of the amazingly talented members of our global Grey Swan Guild and get behind the curtain of what makes them think and sense the world differently and more effectively than others.
Sylvia Gallusser — born in France, burnished in San Francisco Bay
Bio: Sylvia Gallusser is an inquirer of our future, conducting foresight research on work, education, mental health, transhumanism, and well-aging. She is involved in the future of our oceans with the Sustainable Ocean Alliance and has launched an Ethics and Philosophy of Futures Group with the Association of Professional Futurists.
Sylvia has been advising 500+ tech companies on their strategy. She is a published author of fiction with Fast Future Publishing and facilitates workshops on go-to-market strategy, and futures studies.
A Sensemaking Metaphorical Tool You Personify:
A violin (technically strings have a metal core). We need method and practice to master the instrument so that the sounds actually produce music. Metaphorically, it connects our left and right brains, our rational mind and creativity, for augmented sensemaking.
1. Who are you/ what makes you tick?
An artist and a multidisciplinary thinker, interested in creating the future.
A global futurist, using both rational lenses from a variety of disciplines (history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, business strategy, design) and creative approaches (future fiction, arts, music).
2. What are some of the important questions that you are making sense of nowadays?
How to safeguard our mental health, individually and collectively.
How to enjoy the advancement of technology and still keep our sanity thanks to “tech-free bubbles” connection to nature, exercising, healthy enjoyable nutrition, community bonding, intergenerational initiatives, as well as artistic, intellectual, and spiritual nourishment.
3. How are some of the ways you go about making sense of the world?
I have developed a Strategic Foresight methodology based on multidisciplinary thinking, foresight tools, storytelling, and strategy consulting.
Looking back to better look forward > Scanning for signals of the future > Worldbuilding/Storytelling > Backcasting > Action Planning
4. What is overhyped? What is underhyped?
Immortality is overhyped.
Mental health is underhyped.
5. Who is at your sensemaker last supper? Four people?
Amanda Gorman, our National Youth Poet Laureate (arts)
Shankar Vedantam, host of Hidden Brain (human behavior, social science)
Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and Homo Deus (history, futures)
Fabian Gallusser, mathematician, my husband (for his extensive scientific knowledge)
(and my mom for the food!)
6. What big and small question would you love answered or solved?
Big: End child abuse and feminicide.
Small: Is there extraterrestrial life?
7. When you are not thinking deeply about the world, what else are you passionate about in your day to day life?
Painting, playing music, learning Mandarin, doing jigsaw puzzles, playing board games and escape games with my children, playing tennis, running marathons.
(Also drinking matcha latte).
8. What do you enjoy about being in the Guild, Global League of Sensemakers and the News Wrap team?
The diversity of profiles, backgrounds, and perspectives.
The collective intelligence and co-creation.
Having made friends from all over the world during the pandemic (and hopefully meeting them in person one day!)
Find Sylvia at:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sylvialeroux/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sgallusser
Her Company: https://siliconhumanism.home.blog/
Silicon Humanism 