Futurist, author and hall of fame speaker, Crystal Washington equips organizations with the knowledge they need to become “future-proof.” As a technology strategist and certified futurist, she makes complex artificial intelligence, social media and app technology easy to understand and accessible for everyday people. Washington’s clients include Fortune 100 companies, including Google, American Express and Pfizer.
As one of Forbes’ 50 Leading Female Futurists, she appears weekly on season two of the Emmy-nominated show Life 2.0. She’s also appeared in numerous publications, including Entrepreneur and Bloomberg Businessweek, and major television networks regularly call on her as a tech expert. Washington is the author of “One Tech Action” and “The Social Media Why.”
Net Assets: You are a futurist, and you've written and spoken about technology for more than decade. Did your interest in technology stem from your childhood, your time in school or at some later date?
Crystal Washington: I'm a millennial, though a “super old” millennial, so a whole lot of technology was not a part of my childhood. I did, however, have an obsession with puzzles. From babyhood, my family would get puzzles, and I would put them together, even when I couldn’t talk. As an adult, I tend to see things in a fragmented way and then try to figure out how we can put them together and make them more efficient.
Later on in my childhood, a cousin lived with my family off and on when his father was deployed. He and his father were very much engineer minded. I remember watching him take apart our TV when my parents were gone and take apart the radio. He would rewire things. This led to my adoption of technology a little bit later, like late middle school, early high school, and I looked at it as a way to solve problems. How can people connect better through technology? How can we use technology to be almost superheroes?
Net Assets: As a futurist, what have you observed about kids’ use of technology today that’s exciting and that’s concerning?
Washington: What's exciting is that kids don't typically have the same fears that other generations have because they're almost born with an iPad in their hand.
Many kids do have fears around privacy, though, which is something that my millennial generation didn’t consider. With the rise of social media, we thought, “My life is a reality show and I'm a special butterfly and everyone can watch me.” Gen Z's and Alphas are a lot more protective about privacy. They've seen others who are older have things leak out, and then maybe college opportunities taken away or jobs lost.
What concerns me is that some kids aren't developing the social skills that they would normally have. This is specifically because of the pandemic, especially smaller children that were born during the pandemic or very young at the start of it. Many don't make eye contact when they're talking.
Even older kids, in middle school and high school hallways, they don't necessarily make eye contact all the time when they talk. Recently, in fact just two days ago, I ran into a gentleman who was telling me that his daughter and her friends tend to run what they're going to say through ChatGPT because they don't want to say something that can be taken the wrong way. That can make conversation awkward.
Net Assets: At the level of businesses and organizations, what are you observing in how institutions adopt new technology like generative AI? Where are they getting hung up, and where should they be putting their energy instead?
Washington: What I’m seeing right now is the Wild Wild West. It's a little bit of everything.
You have some organizations that are embracing technology to the point where I actually think it's dangerous. I am also a consultant, and sometimes I have to ask, Why are you implementing this? What stops do you have around it? How are you training your people before they put your sensitive data into ChatGPT of all places? Sometimes other resources can give you the same outputs without carrying as much risk. So some organizations are innovating almost out of fear. They're trying to outrun the bear that is their competition and irrelevance.
And then you have on the other far end, some organizations that are run by Luddites, people that came up around the era of the tough boss, going by gut instinct, that kind of stuff. When I speak with those folks, sometimes I make them a little angry — not intentionally; I'll even tell them beforehand, some of you are not going to like what I'm about to say, but data trumps gut instinct. Now we have access to more ways to parse data. Humans cannot compete with AI when it comes to parsing and making sense of data. Some are feeling new technology is infringing on their territory, without recognizing that it will actually make them more effective in their role if they utilize it.
Most companies are somewhere in between. They might have leaders that are excited about the technology but employees that are digging in their heels because they're afraid that they're training their replacements. In other cases, at places I’ve keynoted, employees wanted access to a lot of the new technology, and the company was dripping it out with training wheels — for good reason. I explained to the employees that I agreed with leadership.
Even the most technological organizations right now are flailing, trying to figure out what innovation should be in an age where change is happening so fast. To understand what’s truly happening you need to ask a lot of questions. When I’m consulting and speaking, sometimes leadership says one thing, but then a survey of employees will show something different. There is so much ongoing change, and there is no playbook for what we're experiencing right now.
Net Assets: Are there any commonalities among organizations that are handling the change well?
Oftentimes the frontline people in any organization are seeing things that leadership is not seeing, really important stuff. They have data that is closer to what constituents, students, parents, whoever the end client is in a scenario, really think and feel than anybody in leadership will.
Washington: When I think about the organizations that are doing the best job at implementing new technology, it's still a messy process, but most of them are creating teams of people that represent different parts of the organization. And they're having these discussions and putting in guardrails and figuring out next steps, but it's an ongoing discussion.
Most of them are taking suggestions from frontline people. Whether they utilize them all that’s a different thing, but they have good systems for allowing those comments and suggestions to come in and provide feedback on what they're implementing. Oftentimes the frontline people in any organization are seeing things that leadership is not seeing, really important stuff. They have data that is closer to what constituents, students, parents, whoever the end client is in a scenario, really think and feel than anybody in leadership will.
I was consulting for a large hotel company, and I said, I’m going to need the shoeshine guy in here as well as housekeeping. I was not joking. There are things that people will say to John the shoeshine guy that they're not going to say to the front desk agents, and that they're certainly not going to say to the general manager. So I don't mean that getting the frontline involved is a nice-to-have; it’s essential. They have the information that will help you make smarter decisions.
Net Assets: Before becoming a consultant and speaker, you leveraged social media for business gains, and you’ve written about that technology. Is anything we learned over the rise of social media relevant to the rise of generative AI?
Washington: With social media, it felt like we were playing the game as the rules were being written, and I think the same is true with generative AI. Now we can see that social media has so many far-reaching implications we never dreamed up when it first came out. We did not know how it impacts suicide rates or depression, or kids’ ability to communicate or buying behaviors. We never thought it would make girls think about how their bodies look. We were just like, “Oh, this is fun. Everyone can connect from the same school.”
There are so many things that we just had no idea social media would impact, and I think generative AI is going to be the same way. It may be more positive or more negative; we don't know. But it can’t hurt to test what the impact might look like in terms of ethics. I do think we need to start thinking about mental health and information retention — where could this go and play that out.
Sometimes we’re so obsessed with individual freedoms that we're not thinking about the fact that we are doing serious harm to our kids and future generations. We need a more holistic, long-term approach.
Futurists consider different scenarios that are not just possible, but probable. And then we trace them to their rational ends to envision the best-case scenario and worst-case scenario, and decide what we want to do about that. We live in a time when, especially in this country, but on some level the global landscape too, we're very short-term thinkers. We're not thinking about what's going to happen in 20 years or even 10 years, which is very different than our grandparents and great grandparents, whose generations built this incredible highway system and many other things that have lasted decades.
For us to use new technology and it not to use us, we have to get back to that mode of thinking. It’s only now that we're getting to cell phone bans in class and schools, way, way later, as a result of short-term thinking. The wonderful schools your folks are working in need to be considering: What do we want our citizens to be like 20 years from now? And then reverse engineer what technology needs to go into our children to produce those results and what technology needs to come out from our children.
Sometimes we’re so obsessed with individual freedoms that we're not thinking about the fact that we are doing serious harm to our kids and future generations. We need a more holistic, long-term approach.
Net Assets: What’s one thing our audience can look forward to at your talk at the 2025 NBOA Annual Meeting?
Washington: I think today our biggest challenge and our greatest opportunity is to figure out how to live in this new world of change without being overstressed. Schools can guide students and parents through this as well. In my presentation, I'm going to share a strategy for that. It's a very different way of looking at the world. For anybody who decides to embrace it, it'll make adapting to this rapid change a lot easier.
Net Assets: We're very much looking forward to seeing you up on stage in February, in New York City.
