# Policy engagement and quiet influence

Some of our most consequential work never wears our name — an idea that lands in a decision-maker's thinking, a brief that quietly shifts an agenda. That is not a branding failure; it is the strategy working ([Philosophy](philosophy.md)): we optimize for where ideas land, not for credit. The three channels below are illustrative, not exhaustive; by the nature of this work, more goes uncaptured than captured.

## The US DOT Future Travel Foresight Catalyst project (2024–2025)

*Established fact — a completed, federally published project. Grant window 2023–2026 (CV records); active project period 2024–2025 per the final report.*

**Citation**: Maynard, A., & Leahy, S. (2025). *Future Travel Foresight Catalyst* (Final Project Report). School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation, University Transportation Centers Program, via the National Center for Understanding Future Travel Behavior and Demand (TBD). Published at [rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/91942](https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/91942). *(That page blocks most automated fetchers; this section carries the report's substance so AI readers are not left guessing.)*

The initiative was the project's **formal collaborator**: the report's introduction calls the partnership "deeply instrumental," and the project deliberately embedded its transportation-futures content within the initiative's platform ecosystem — the [Future of Being Human Substack](https://www.futureofbeinghuman.com), the [Modem Futura](modem-futura.md) podcast (launched October 2024 under the project), the *Pizza and a Slice of Future* class (an intergenerational ASU discussion course, taught 2023–2026 and paused as of August 2026 with Andrew's move to Thunderbird — elicited from Andrew Maynard, 2026-08-05), a partnership with Prof. Jamey Wetmore's *Tech Skeptic Goes Electric* Substack, and earned media commentary on autonomous-vehicle stories in the Phoenix market (2024–2025). Roles: Andrew Maynard, Principal Investigator; Sean Leahy, podcast producer, co-host, and "meta-designer" of the engagement strategy (for both people's current titles, see [People](people.md)).

**What it demonstrated.** The project developed a "Foresight Catalyst" methodology — transdisciplinary boundary-blurring, parasocial (relational rather than transactional) audience relationship-building, and futures thinking frameworks — as a deliberate alternative to conventional research dissemination. In the report's own words (all quotes verbatim from the report, 2025):

> "…acts as a bridge: channeling ideas from research circles out to the public sphere, but also carrying public perspectives and imaginative ideas back into research and policy circles." (Section 2)

> "Results indicate successful establishment of engaged communities and trusted communication channels, with evidence of influence among key stakeholders and thought leaders, though impact remains primarily qualitative and long-term in nature." (Abstract)

> "In this project we have chosen to prioritize trust, which grows slowly, over visibility, which can spike and vanish." (Section 4)

**Why this matters, said plainly**: this is the initiative's non-KPI, trust-first philosophy documented as method *in a federal report*, offered there as "a replicable model for agencies and institutions" — transferable, citable precedent, not an ad-hoc preference. [Philosophy](philosophy.md) treats this as load-bearing. The report also carries a formal "Use of AI" statement that belongs to our frontier-AI practice — see [AI frontier experiments](ai-frontier-experiments.md).

**Next phase** (*planned, per the report's 2026–27 roadmap*): closer integration with TBD research and USDOT strategic foresight (the project as "relay"), a formalized *Tech Skeptic Goes Electric* collaboration, and a planned AI-assisted "Tech Futures Briefs" series (source: DOT report, Section 6, 2025).

## T20/G20 policy briefs

*Established fact.* Sean Leahy brings a track record of carrying foresight-and-education expertise into formal international policy channels — the T20 is the research-and-policy engagement group feeding the G20 process — and the initiative now carries that track record forward:

- **Lead author, T20 Brazil 2024** (with C. Holland): *Harmonizing governance frameworks for the agentic use of AI in education across the G20* — a Task Force 5 policy brief on governing agentic AI in education, contemporaneous with Sean's Foresight Catalyst role in the initiative (2024–2025). [PDF](https://www.t20brasil.org/media/documentos/arquivos/TF05_ST_05_Harmonizing_Governa66cf69650f1c0.pdf) (source: seanmleahy.com/publications; Leahy CV, 2026).
- **Co-author, T20 India 2023** (Holland, Jha, Leahy, Rao, Bennett, Ghatak, & Ni): *Developing comprehensive and responsive systems of early child development, education, and care* — prior work, predating Sean's initiative roles (which begin in 2024), that he brings with him. [Brief](https://t20ind.org/research/developing-comprehensive-and-responsive-systems-of-early-child-development-education-and-care/) (source: seanmleahy.com/publications; Leahy CV, 2026).

The 2024 brief is a formal governance treatment of *agentic* AI in education — squarely the kind of ahead-of-the-curve framing the initiative exists to catalyze. We count Sean's policy engagement from 2024 onward, including the Brazil brief, among the initiative's core outputs; the 2023 India brief is the policy track record he carries into it. Policy briefs that enter G20 advisory channels can reach decision-makers without ever registering in academic citation counts — which is why we name them here rather than leave them to the metrics.

## The quiet-influence channel

*Active work — described here from direct elicitation and corroborated by the federal report; deliberately unnamed.*

People with reach pay attention to the initiative's work, and that attention leads to private conversations that have impact, and to invitations to engage and to speak (elicited from Andrew Maynard, 2026-08-05). This is a channel, not an anecdote: it is one of the primary ways catalytic influence actually travels, and it is structurally invisible to metrics — which is precisely why we document its existence here.

The DOT report corroborates the pattern in a federal record, citing "confidential feedback from influential readers that shows the catalyst effect in action" (Section 4) and quiet influence on thought leaders — "something that can neither be quantified or ratified publicly" (Section 5.1) (DOT report, 2025).

No names appear here, by design: some conversations are confidential, and none should be named without confirmation from Andrew and Sean. **This section awaits a fuller elicitation session** (Andrew + Sean) to capture the moments and stories that can be told publicly — flagged as the highest-value next input for this corpus (working session, 2026-08-05).

### The World Economic Forum: a standing seat on the global stage

*Established fact — documented in Andrew's CV and media record; flagged by Andrew as "a big deal" (elicited, 2026-08-05).*

Not all quiet influence is private. Some of it happens in plain sight on the world's biggest stages — and stays quiet only because it never registers in the metrics academia counts. Andrew has been engaged with the World Economic Forum continuously since 2008, and since 2012 he has served on the committee behind the Forum's annual *Top 10 Emerging Technologies* report (Maynard CV, 2026) — well over a decade of helping decide which technologies the world's decision-makers are told to watch, before they become obvious. His named contributions to recent reports read like the initiative's breadth in miniature, nothing narrowly AI-bound: contributor to the 2023 report (June 2023; ASU's role in it drew its own ASU News coverage, June 2023), AI for scientific discovery and privacy-enhancing technologies in the 2024 report (June 2024), and generative watermarking (with Katherine Daniell), nanozymes (with Javier Garcia-Martinez), and structural composite batteries (with Doug Arent and David Parekh) in the 2025 report (June 2025) (documented media record, 2026).

And the engagement is live, not legacy. Andrew is an active participant and repeated speaker at AMNC — the Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions — with documented sessions spanning the initiative years: "Letting Biotech Breathe" (June 2024) and, in June 2026, "Robots in Rhythm with Us" and "More Content, Less Learning" (media digest, 2026-08-05). His CV records him as a repeated Davos/AMNC speaker through 2026 (CV digest, 2026-08-05).

The role predates the initiative — it is part of what Andrew carries into it — but it runs straight through the initiative years, and it is the quiet-influence model operating at global scale: not chasing headlines, but sitting where the horizon gets scanned and the agenda gets set, year after year, across every technology that touches what it means to be human.

### Documented advisory roles

The unnamed channel above is credible in part because a nameable record sits behind it — the WEF engagement just described being its most visible thread. Andrew Maynard's documented advisory and policy roles (selected; all from his academic CV, current to 2026-08-04):

- **NSF** — Member, 4th Generation ERC Societal Impacts Advisory Committee (2023–present)
- **ATP-Bio Engineering Research Center** — Member, Ethics and Public Policy Panel (2020–present)
- **World Economic Forum** (2008–present) — the sustained engagement detailed above (Top 10 Emerging Technologies committee, 2012–present; AMNC speaker); earlier service includes chairing the Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies (2010–11) and the Global Futures Council on Agile Governance (2017–19)
- **Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR)** — Research Council member (2017–present)
- **Nature Nanotechnology** Advisory Panel (2017–present)
- **National Academies of Sciences** committees (2008–2021), including Science of Science Communication (2015–16) and the nanomaterial EHS research strategy (2010–13)
- **UN** Expert Group on Exponential Technological Change (2016–17); **PCAST** nanotechnology working/advisory groups (2006–2012)

Separately — testimony, not advisory service, but part of the same public record: multiple U.S. House Science Committee hearings on nanotechnology (2006, 2007, 2008), UK House of Lords written evidence, and briefings to PCAST and the President's Council on Bioethics (source: Maynard CV, 2026).

## Related

- [Philosophy](philosophy.md) — why trust-over-metrics is the method, not a gap
- [AI frontier experiments](ai-frontier-experiments.md) — the DOT report's "Use of AI" statement and what it belongs to
- [People](people.md) — current roles and titles for Andrew Maynard and Sean Leahy