Episode 164 / Sarah DaVanzo / L'Oréal Groupe USA / VP, Consumer & Market Insights & Foresight (Futures & Cultural Intelligence)
Innovating the Future of Data, Analytics, Insights and Foresight
Sarah DaVanzo’s role as VP, Consumer & Market Insights & Foresight (Futures & Cultural Intelligence) only scrapes the surface of a complex career within L’Oréal Groupe and beyond, focused on staying ahead of the trends, imagining the future and communicating through data visualisation. Her Shiny New Object is made up of two key projects that connect us with the future and with insights of all types: strategic imagination and applied curiosity.
Sarah’s career spans 22 countries over 20 years and she has always been committed to innovating in data, analytics, insights and foresight. With a “thirst for the world” and interests spanning both the creative and the strategic side of business, she ended up working in marketing naturally. As Sarah puts her, “that just put [her] on a trajectory of wanting to explore both inner worlds and outer worlds… [her] lust for understanding cultures and insights and foresight around the world, just took [her] around.”
Now in New York City working for the L’Oréal Group’s US business, she helps the Innovation funnel of over 30 brands sync with trends, anticipate change, improve relevance and design for the future. She’s led assignments such as The Future of Beauty 2030, The Future of Skin, and The Future of Hair.
Sarah’s guiding principle throughout her work on insights and foresight has always been to find ways to make the data visually clear and easy to interpret. On the one hand, she leads efforts to capture insights all the way into the consumers’ minds (as she calls them, “inside sights” i.e. immersing herself in the persons’ lives). On the other hand, she relays these insights in actionable, visual ways through data visualisation.
This leads us to her two Shiny New Objects, synonymous with two key projects she has been working on: strategic imagination and applied curiosity. Sarah aims to show that there is a creative aspect to data and insights and foresight. The fact that creatives and tech people in the marketing world have been seen traditionally as two different entities is wrong: in fact, combining the two will deliver the best results, both in how insights are gathered and in how they are then communicated. Showing the data in creative and imaginative ways is allowing more to be made of it in the future, while also hopefully drawing in more diverse voices.
Sarah’s ambition is to diversify both inputs and outputs when it comes to creating products. Since “tomorrow is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” she wants to make sure that “tomorrow” is diversely created.
You can find out more about Sarah’s innovative futurist work through her project Curious Futures, a non-profit that shows the future through data in curious ways that aim to get people interested – “creating the art from the data of the future.” Additionally, her second project is Insight Alchemy, an artist collaboration that has produced a risograph printed zine teaching how to mine insights and to refine them into usable foresight.
Listen to Sarah talk about her tomorrow-ing, the four modalities of curiosity that she employs with her team, and why diversifying insight and foresight is important, in the latest episode of the podcast here.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Tom Ollerton 0:25
Hello, and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of automated creative, and this is a weekly show about the future of the industry. Every week I chat to someone about their vision. And this week is no different. I am speaking to on a call with Sarah Davanzo, who is VP consumer and market insights and foresights futures and cultural intelligence, at the L'Oreal group. So we don't have much podcast left because of the length of your job title. So I would love you to give the audience an overview of who you are and what you do.
Sarah Davanzo 1:02
Hi, thank you, Tom. Well, I've been innovating the future of data analytics, insights and foresight or futures, for 30 years and spent 20 years or two decades doing this in multiple countries in Asia and multiple countries in Africa, and Europe and South America. So I'd say that, yeah, today I am with L'Oreal. I've been here for five years. And it's, it's all about the future of aI think, data in analytics, insights and foresight, and the creative and curious things that you can do in this space.
Tom Ollerton 1:41
So what was the start of that journey? Did you come out of college going: Yep. I want to be talking to some guy on a podcast in a few decades' time? Or did you start with that in mind? Or where did it all begin?
Sarah Davanzo 1:55
Well, it actually began growing up in Manhattan as a kid, and going to the international school, at Columbia University, where I was exposed to different cultures, and kids from all walks of life, and really got a thirst for the world. And I think that's probably where I started to recognize as a really young kid, what, you know, the curiosity muscle is, and then that, you know, you couldn't be the parents create the monster, right? Through the education. And that just put me on a trajectory of wanting to explore both inner worlds and outer worlds and around the world. And I had always had a creative bent and a strategic mind. So that took me to marketing, you know, I think the marketing world attracts polymaths, right? And so my lust for understanding cultures and insights and foresight around the world, just took me around. And I ended up back at home full circle back in New York.
Tom Ollerton 3:06
So what is the most useful thing that you spent your own money on, that you use for work?
Sarah Davanzo 3:14
So it's actually two pieces of technology that are going to when I first mentioned it, everyone's gonna be like, okay, like, that's, that's obvious, but let me explain why. So one is an iMac Pro, the most powerful iMac you can possibly have, and having always had that at my disposal, saving my money. But for now, close to 15 years, whatever was used in the professional realm. And I'll explain that in a second. And that because that's been recently connected to an Oculus quest. And the reason why they've been so powerful for my work over the past, I'd say, especially the past decade, is that I think in the world of data and analytics, there is expressing insight and foresight, through images, and being able to present what you're finding in data visualizations, and infographics, and videos, podcasts. I think it's critical, and having the tools of a designer has been a game changer. Like for example, you know, having that tool allowed me to make a newspaper of the future, over a weekend, you know, if I was working on a PC, I could never do that. And so, you know, building a newspaper of the future future newspaper 2030 was a way to just demonstrate insights, but also the future in a compelling way. And recently, producing virtual reality 360 films with like, super cheap little cameras, you can get off of Amazon, you know, and then editing those into immersive experiences. Whether it's for you know, of consumers in their homes like ethnography 360, or whether it's actually sitting with folks from diverse worlds around the world, and a Metaverse kind of room, a virtual room to be able to imagine the future and co-create the future, or it might be, you know, sitting and actually conducting research with futurists, in an augmented way. So those tools, the technology, I think it's critical to, for my work, at least, to express and to transform the insights, the data, the the insights and the foresight.
Tom Ollerton 5:44
Yeah, I saw a lovely image a while back where it was, it was talking about data in terms of like Lego bricks, and they said, like data was just a pile of red bricks, blue, yellow, green, and so on. And then it talks about data visualization, the data was all the bricks in a mess. And then data visualization was green, red, yellow, and blue. And then storytelling was a house made of LEGO. And I saw that really...
Sarah Davanzo 6:16
Really great analogy.
Tom Ollerton 6:18
Yeah. So and, and that's what I really want to know is, tell me about the Oculus quest bit how, like your CEO using 360 cameras, and you're going out and you're telling stories through through filming, is that, have I got that right?
Sarah Davanzo 6:33
Yeah, yeah. But there's an aspect to it. So. So that's very unusual, because I think VR insights, you know, I call them inside sights. Because you're inside the person's life, right? So inside sight, so I like, say, the chamber, we're gonna do some inside sights, like rolling their eyes. But the idea is, is, you know, is to really, if you can't go there, especially in COVID days, you bring "there" here, right? And what's really cool is usually, traditionally, you're doing research, right? That's, like only the only like, five people can sit in the person's living room or follow the person around their ethnography with the shopper, you know, whatever, research, it's limited. And, you know, this way, there's shelf life, like everyone in the whole company, or the organization can experience immersively what that consumer experience might be, or that, or that research, or that what I call tomorrow-ing, right, that tomorrow-ing the future exercise might be, but I think it's also super critical to understand that VR alone doesn't do it. So I use a practice, which is, I use sensory on top of the VR. So if I'm going to someone's home, right, and and we're, we're doing like it like, recently, there were like four Latina Gen Xers, Gen Z-ers I'm sorry, teenagers trying to understand their lifestyles, what we'll do is we'll take little elements of their home, what smells, the smell the clothing, what I've seen, I like stealing their stuff. That's kind of creepy. But you know what I mean, like, we're emulating what's around their environment, in a full sensory way. So we can recreate like a petting zoo. You know, like a library of touching and feeling objects that can be smelled untouched and unexplored, whether it's photographs from their, you know, their home, or elements and artifacts to be touched. And what I found is like, this is like uber empathy building. Because not only does one feel like they've been in the intimacy of that person's life, but then they're able to actually, you know, really experience through the senses. And what, you know, the full modalities of curiosity, there are four modalities of curiosity, you know, know that, did you Tom, did you know that?
Tom Ollerton 8:48
I didn't know that. I've got a feeling I'm gonna find out?
Sarah Davanzo 8:53
Well, I mean, the obvious is intellectual curiosity. Everyone's always, you know, exploring intellectually, and, well, people in the insights and marketing world will say, you know, talk about asking questions and being the golden question and all that, that's great, but there are three other modalities of exploring the world, and animals do, you know, explore the world the same way? So first of all, visually, so visual exploration and discovery, you know, seeing patterns, deeply observing, looking around being a super looker. You know, noticing is a way in which humans and animals can explore or be curious, the behaviors. That's a skill. That's hard these days when we have our faces and phones and on screens, right? They say our eyesight has like become really, really difficult these days to see the horizon. Apparently, a lot of I don't know if that's nearsighted or farsighted. But distance seeing is being challenged with all of the in your face screens and so forth anyway. So the second mode of curiosity is feeling right so some people explore the world through, you know, bungee jumping and food and exploration of, of emotion and emotional, you know, mood modulating manner of exploring exploring a feeling through your emotions going to your, your, your carnal senses, a lot of thrills there right thrill seekers. And then we have a separately but somewhat similarly to the last one is doing right people are experimenters building, making doing poking, you know, that's the history of inventing and innovation is curiosity applied curiosity but in the exploring through the making the doing so wrapping that up we have we have we have those at sea we have those that feel we have those that think and we have those that do, see feel think do. Right, it's it can be mapped on an xy axis with the system one and system two, I'm not going to go there. Anyway, I think that bringing in augmented and virtual reality really helps with expanding our curiosity muscles, I've noticed that I've seen you know, innovation sprints or prototyping sprints that would normally take, let's say, two days be conceived in a morning. So literally in you know, a quarter of the time.
Tom Ollerton 11:15
So I'm gonna have to move you on to what feels like a pointless question. But that's the structure of the podcast. But okay, so as a marketing podcast, in all of this fascinating experience, what's your top marketing tip? In a world where you're putting you're putting your business in the living room, smelling the food that they cook, feeling that feeling the hem of their garments? What, in amongst all of that madness and inventiveness, what is your marketing tip that you find yourself sharing most often?
Sarah Davanzo 11:48
So, again, it's going to go back to the concept of applied curiosity. But let me explain it in this context, because that sounds like a throwaway. Like everyone's curious, right? Look, imagine you're at a dinner party. Or you're meeting somebody, right? You're at a dinner party, a person who's leaning in and asking you questions, who's curious about you, you like them, you like them more than the person who was ignoring you, or find you indifferent or walks away from the circle, while you're telling a story or talks over you and so forth. So think about that. Brands are like people we know that. So you know, the idea here of being genuinely curious, in your constituents and your target, really, and I mean, at all four ways. Are you feeling them? Are you sensing them? Are you not just asking questions about them? Are you experimenting and making with them? Right? Are you observing deeply, looking at patterns and watching them? I mean, I think I learned that very early on in my life as I started this conversation with, but it was given to me by a mentor, in not so many words, I've crystallized the language, but the genuine sincere interest in your target shines through. I mean, I think it's evident and consumers feel it in the brands. And I think, you know, kind of taking that dinner party example, and thinking about how can I create a dinner party with my target audience, and make them feel really special? And like, I'm interested in them, and welcomed. And I'm asking and inquiring and leaning in and co-creating with them? And so all the things I said, I think it leads to marketing that and then I'll then I'll be all in this point where I think, I think the new brand metric of health is not just like a classic engagement and, you know, brand health metric or, you know, I think it's really how curious are your customers? Or your target audience is about are you as a brand, I think, a curiosity index or metric is paramount. Because if I'm not curious enough about the product, I'm not going to be even remotely interested in trying it or retrying it so keeping me interested and engaged through the curiosity loop of also being interested in me can be measured. And I think that's a high like a more elevated way. In this day and age of everyone you know, the classic competing for attention. I think using the metrics of curiosity and in in marketing, it can be a kind of more of a more modern take on brand health. What do you think?
Tom Ollerton 14:36
So your marketing tip is Be curious on all four levels?
Sarah Davanzo 14:43
Yeah.
Tom Ollerton 14:43
But then measure how curious your audience is in you. Yeah, so yeah, good luck selling that. But I love it, don't get me wrong.
Sarah Davanzo 14:56
I'm not worried about the like.
Tom Ollerton 15:00
I can imagine some people remember that, but what is the how would you measure inbound curiosity? How would you measure curiosity from an audience to a brand?
Sarah Davanzo 15:10
Oh, so first of all, very classic social listening super easy. You know, obviously search listening is clearly the most obvious. Right search listening? Or is the person searching you? You know, are they looking for you and, and going digging deeper, but you can also analyze the language. So here's a great example. So there's a tool called Answer the public. It's a search listening tool. It's actually, you know, anyway, answer the public dot, I think.com. You can look it up. It's out of the UK, I'm sure you probably come across it. But what's interesting about that tool is that it parses Google Search by the types of questions that are being asked. So I got in on answer the public early days when it was piloting, to basically have the tool to measure curiosity, because if a consumer is asking "What is Doritos?" Okay, obviously, it's a very early stage of the brand, the lifecycle of the product, what is what is, you know, what is talk about? You know, what is, is a very fundamental question. Now, when you can get a sense of, when the questions are, "what is? where do I find? where do I buy? you know, how much does it cost?" you can read the kinds of questions that are being asked about a product to gauge the level of interest, and also the maturity of the brand in the marketplace. Now, when you get on later on in life, you start to see, what if I, what if I hack this, what if I combine Doritos with, I don't know, pizza? What if I, you know, the kinds of questions would be, how can I DIY Doritos, how can I make them at home? I'm just giving you examples of the elevation sophistication of the types of questions that are asked in the search, indicate very clearly how engaged the audience is about with the product, and what which level of maturity, or stickiness product has in the psyche of the audience. So that's like, why can you know, we don't have time to talk about 100 different other ways to measure it. But that's a metric that's quantitative, that will show the level of curiosity inbound.
Tom Ollerton 17:27
This episode of the shiny new object podcast is brought to you in partnership with MADfest. Whether it's live in London or streamed online to the global marketing community, you can always expect a distinctive and daring blend of fast paced content, startup innovation pitches, and unconventional entertainment from MADfest events, you'll find me causing trouble on stage recording live versions of this podcast and sharing a beer with the nicest and most influential people in marketing. Check it out at www.madfestlondon.com.
So we're at the halfway stage now. And we're gonna move on to your shiny new object which is strategic imagination and applied curiosity, won't be a surprise at this point. And you've, you've completely blown the structure of my podcast, but in a beautiful way. So let's roll with it. So. So tell me more about strategic imagination and more about applied curiosity.
Sarah Davanzo 18:29
Okay, sorry for blowing your podcast.
Tom Ollerton 18:32
It's a great conversation. I'm very happy about it.
Sarah Davanzo 18:38
All right. Well, I mean, look, I'm gonna elaborate on this because hopefully, you're getting the point, is that there's this creative aspect to data and insights and foresight. And I started this off with the conversation around the technology to enable someone who's not a trained designer to be able to at least make you know, a modicum of kind of creative outputs, you know, that help with the analytics or the communication or the transformation of the insights of foresight. But okay, it's a space of strategic imagination. I think it's underrated, meaning, I think we're, you know, you have creatives on one side of the marketing world, and then you have the analysts or the insights folks, and I don't agree with that separation of church and state, I think that, you know, we're seeing a blending. First of all, the world is getting much more competitive. We know that there's an increasing favorability for generalists versus specialists, especially with the gig economy, right? Being able to kind of stretch your bandwidth of where you can kind of work. So I've been playing with the idea of, okay, how can we take strategic topics about data and insights and, you know, quantitative foresight, but do dissect these and reframe these topics, in ways that are accessible and not lofty and understandable, but also in really creative and imaginative ways to bring in diversity into some of these conversations and, and I'll get back to the diversity thing in a second. So, I have been, for the past couple of years collaborating with artists around the world.
And the two projects I'm really, like, excited about are completely different, but they share a lot of similarities. So one is called Curious Futures. You can see it on the website, curiousfutures.com. And that's all about basically showing the future through data, in curious ways to get people interested in foresight, strategic foresight and futures tomorrow-ing, you know, imagine the future who wouldn't normally be in on it on the conversation. So for a little background, the context of foresight of the futures world is notoriously skewed, it's skewed white, it's skewed male, it's skewed middle age, it's skewed developed markets. You know, my website, Curious Futures is the data that shows the skew. So we're not getting a diverse in, you know, we're getting a lot of bias in the foresight world. And so what we did is we analyze data, again, through from this unfortunately, through the biased community of futurists and presented in a data visualization that shows the bias really clearly, but also presents it in a really accessible way. So anybody like a teenager, or someone who's a lay person, not really familiar with foresight can start to interact with the future. And my hope is to start engaging in the conversation of being involved in rethinking the future with these, you know, more and more close, inclusive way. But what was cool about this project was, it was a collaboration of diverse futurists from around the world, who has a lot of quantitation, quantitative data analytics that went into it. So what's depicted is actually the vision of the year 2030 in data visualization, which is a synthesis of 123 futurist trend reports about the year 2030. So it's a meta analysis, and a date of is, but it's just beautiful. And we've created an app that's interactive, so you can use it in workshops, and there's the newspaper of the future and all kinds of stuff there. And then, okay, so that's one project, right. So that's, that's creating the art from the data of the future.
Then, the other project, which has similarities is insight alchemy. And insightalchemy.io is a website. It's also a collaboration with an artist. And a really cool printing company that best specializes in risograph printing. So risograph printing is from the 1970s. It's like a 1970s, Japanese photocopy machine. But it uses vegetable inks. And it's done away with the colors laid over like a lithography. And there, every piece is unique, but it can be produced kind of mass because it's like a photocopy machine. It's like a mimeograph. And what we did was we designed a little zine, which is what you call like a book, handmade book using risography. And we designed a zine, I wrote it and collaborated with Hannah, the artist, in Germany, and we got lucky and Brooklyn printed it and we created this little didactic tool, there's a way to teach insights, like how to mine insights, how to refine insights, what's the future of insights and features, you know, talks for 25 features on the future of insight, and all these little charts and tricks. And kind of mnemonic devices to kind of remember best practices like they're like anatomy of an insight and all that kind of stuff. So, again, also features quantitative research that I conducted two years ago with the insights community around the world on what you know, how do you find insights? And how do you discover and all that stuff, so and the anagram strategic imagination, so it features it, so both of these outputs are data vizzes data visualizations, totally different, completely, absolutely, completely different look and feel really different artists. But what they do is they are highly imaginative, but highly strategic. And they also both carry in it what you know, they exemplify applied curiosity, and they also teach the four modalities of curiosity and, and so forth. So I'm playing around with this idea of the merge between the creative, completely creative, imagination driven world, which is like, you know, even sci fi and futures, imagine, you know, design fiction and so forth. And data analytics and, you know, hard data and insights, if you will, practices and creating, I guess, I have to say, you know, it's you know, creative outputs that are artifacts that can maybe bring people in and
I don't know, I guess I hope that I'm remembered in my career for spawning new careers, and opening minds and challenging the paradigms of the industries of data analytics, insight and foresight. And I really hope that I bring, you know, get people thinking differently about these the space and imagining new new capabilities, and very importantly, bringing in diversity, you know, people who would not normally be attracted to these worlds into these spaces, so that we can hear their voices, and they can be part of the insights and foresight world. But back to that curiosity point, made in the beginning, but also I think the output will be better, like the apple, but much better if we have more inclusivity overall. So I guess it's a I guess this is like a sneaky way to attract inclusivity I hadn't really thought about until right now.
Tom Ollerton 25:55
So I'm gonna have to do the drab thing, of bringing you back from the future on a long bit of rope pulling you back in. And, like, how, how does this work for your day to day, right? So, two very interesting sounding projects, and clearly the passion you have for the future and bringing diverse perspectives into it is incredible. I love that. But you work for L'Oreal, you sell cosmetics, what's the link?
Sarah Davanzo 26:31
Oh, jeez, every day. So the 2030 meta trends, you know, obviously informs foresight work and the way that we analyze the future and look at the trends that we're, you know, focusing in on but it highlights the fact that when we're doing new work, which we're doing all the time, that we have to bring in diverse and we're talking not just, you know, people of color, we're talking about people from developed markets in emerging markets, people who have abilities and who are, who are who are with ableism, or challenged people who are, you know, on the margins of society, as well as the everyday, you know, urban and rural and so forth. It reminds it's a reminder, and it shows us very clearly how to not be biased and go with the established, predictable for future, if you will. So that's one aspect. The other is that with my teams, I use the four modalities of curiosity all the time, we use it with innovation sprints, we use it with insights work, we do foresight initiatives, so we try to attack each project with four modalities and even structure the teams to make sure that they're well balanced, and that we have a full representation of the modalities, because that's another way of being diverse, is ensuring that you've got thinkers, and lookers, and pokers and doers. And not just you know those, because you can skew very easily organization skew, male skew. And then, yeah...
Tom Ollerton 28:00
I'm just curious to know that I get the the process and please say if you can't answer this question, it's totally fine. But like, what is the output? Is your output like a deck to the marketing team, deck to the NPD team, deck to the C-suite going look, you know, my thing is, through these feelers have noticed that x is going to happen? So therefore we need to make a product that does Y is that? Is that it? Or are you there to do kind of occasional presentations to wow everyone, to make people think differently? So okay, really curious to know like, what is the output of your work in a commercial context?
Sarah Davanzo 28:37
Oh, absolutely. So it's a couple of things you just said. So the output is absolutely innovation, driving new product development in terms of better products that are more equipped to the market because we've had more diverse voices. And we've explored the space using our four modalities of curiosity, for example, so the products are just award winning and better, better products that clean up the market and a more competitive, then separately, there are two levels of corporate strategy. One is long term, you know, obviously strategic foresight, which are, you know, Mergers Acquisitions, as spaces for the business development for the company, which is ongoing. And then there's more short term which is cultural intelligence and information that would be used to drive social brand marketing activations, issues management, crisis management of the work that my team does feeds into all those areas of the work organization.
Tom Ollerton 29:37
So in the Matrix trilogy, you're the Oracle basically.
Sarah Davanzo 29:41
No, no, actually, well, that's really funny because then if you did that, then it would have to be the collective hive mind, it's not me, I'm the what he called the medium, the medium of the community. So it would be the input from the diverse inputs from all over the world. Right, so I'm just synthesizing it, whether it's through VR, through newspapers of the future or games or, you know, whatever the hell. But it's my job is more probably more synthesis. Yeah. Right.
Tom Ollerton 30:14
So we're way over time here, but I need to ask you this question. So the reason that I use the maybe clumsy analogy of the Oracle within the Matrix is there's that scene when the Keanu Reeves character knocks over a vase. Andhe says, I've broken the vase or something. And then the Oracle says, well, were you going to do anyway if you hadn't thought about it? And there's this idea that like, you know, is the future something that happens to you or something you create?
Sarah Davanzo 30:44
Both.
Tom Ollerton 30:45
And there's a guy, he lives very near me who I should probably introduce you to if you don't know already, a guy called Kay who did a video in 2015 have a like dystopian video of what it would be like to live in a completely VR reality. So you wake up and then there's like, you know, there's an advert on everything his watch has like 17 different faces. And he's Black Mirror before there was Black Mirror pretty much, walking in the in the supermarket, and like different products and adverts are leaping up from the, you know, the island stuff, and the pics and every facet of life. He just created a scenario and it took him three years to make this video and obviously, video, but that's the thing. I think you've seen it. I'm sure. Yeah, the interesting thing was is because he'd spent all this time thinking about what does a heads up digital display VR AR, how does that work in a supermarket? How does that work in the street? How does that work in the bathroom? How does it work in the kitchen? How does that work at work? So people were coming to him because he was basically the world authority on it, because he just thought about it more than everyone else.
Sarah Davanzo 31:59
Wow.
Tom Ollerton 31:59
But because like not, he was just imagining what they could be if there was no cash or infrastructure issues. It was just like, the way he went to end like straightaway. So therefore he was the expert, even though he'd never built those things. But businesses went to him said, Oh, could you help us build this for you know, x y z. So really, like in that Oracle Matrix sense. He sort of he has created the future by thinking about it. So it's art influencing tech and science, the rest of it. So I'm really curious to know, if you, you feel that you're in your process of futuring, that you are actually making the future as opposed to describing what it's going to be like.
Sarah Davanzo 32:41
Yeah, so tomorrow is in fact, a self fulfilling prophecy, which is the whole purpose of the stuff I'm doing, all the shit I'm doing is essentially that to basically ensure that the tomorrow-ing is diversely created. So when we have foresight, outputs, that's driving investment as driving acquisition, it's driving infrastructure, policy, it drives, you know, education, it plants the seeds of the future. It's like I say, it's self fulfilling prophecy. So we have to ensure that it's diverse and inclusive, to imagine possibility. So that is imagine, you know, strategic imagination. I think that bringing in new voices and being more inclusive in a space is really critical to ensure that we have all kinds of options at our disposal, and not necessarily a future that's represented by what I said, you know, a minority of the of the of the of the population. It's like the dogs designing for the full Animal Kingdom, right, we want to have the animal kingdom design for the animal kingdom.
Tom Ollerton 33:44
That is a great way to finish a wonderful podcast, Sarah, thank you so much. It was a lot of fun. If someone wants to get in touch with you, what's the right way to do that, and what makes a great outreach message to you.
Sarah Davanzo 33:56
A really good way to get in touch is actually on LinkedIn with a video message, which are so easy these days, because it's like, super clear. And to the point and you know, I think it cuts through all the email, I get tons of email, and half of it goes to spam. So a video like little quick little clip on LinkedIn is super clear, go to the two websites, curious-futures.com for all that work, and then insidealchemy.io for that work, and there's ways there's contact information on both of those, but, you know, reach out and share your thinking with me. I like to hear other people's points of view even criticism be critical.
Tom Ollerton 34:39
What a treat, Sarah, thank you so much.
Sarah Davanzo 34:41
Thank you so much, Tom.
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