What is Futures Thinking? Why Futures Literacy?
Futures thinking is not about crystal ball gazing or prophesizing to predict the future but rather it is a transdisciplinary or meta-approach to studying possible, probable, and preferable futures.
Futures thinking is a rational, creative, reflective, and contemplative process of engaging citizens to be aware of and question their ways of knowing the future to create contingencies, alternatives, and strategies to innovate, and transform today.
As a process, it invites you to know that our worldviews and contexts create value.
The goal in futures thinking is to make sense of thinking and meaning in questioning and disturbing the way we anticipate the future. The values and the stories that we create and share with others, personal or collective, create futures.
While futures or foresight at this level is primarily “thinking” driven and often seen to be academic, it is very much learning-based and action-oriented. The approach being stakeholder and learner-based, futures thinking enables participants to generate content and new insights – to define and undefine the future. According to Sohail Inayatullah, the future or futures are: 1) not neutral; 2) that futures studies are not about, though to a certain extent, not a prediction but insight; and 3) that values, belief systems, and culture have roles to play in describing and creating reality – alternatives and preferred.
But there is more to that, I would add that the future can be created through engaged foresight (Cruz, 2018), and through the process of deep reflection, immersing in the future accentuates the power of the inner self to will and to consciously experience and feel the preferred and transformed futures today (Cruz, 2014).
Why Futures Literacy?
Futures Literacy is not a tool or a technique but rather like reading and computer literacies, it is the ability to use our imagination to anticipate and create the future in diverse ways. It is a capability, a competency that employs and builds on a human’s natural capacity to foresee and imagine the unknown unknowns to innovate the present.
Futures literacy is the ability to anticipate and create invisible stuff – the future – through improvisation, experimentation, and invention (Miller, 2018).
It uses collective intelligence and through a futures literacy laboratory, a futures literacy workshop unpacks and makes obvious otherwise dormant assumptions of the future. Futures Literacy laboratories are spaces where participants learn and experience the different ways of using the future and the different kinds of futures (Miller, 2018).
Why Use the Future?
The outcome of futures literacy events workshops, seminars, forums, informal conversations, classroom, training, etc. could be new questions, new ideas, insights to design, proof of concepts, and prototypes of alternative, preferred, and, or emerging futures.
Using the future to innovate the present requires the understanding and application of a spectrum of futures literacies (i.e. knowledge of futures theories, concepts, tools and techniques, games, and applied futures). Like history where we focus the study or analysis of the origins and implications of the past to the present and extrapolate this into the future, futures thinking utilizes our capacity to anticipate and imagine plural possibilities to transform strategies in the present.
Futures literacy uses images (imagined or real), values (contexts and experiences), and meanings (the way we interpret stories and data and reframe things and stuff) to explore, anticipate, negotiate and create alternative future worlds and anticipate the emergence (Miller, 2018; Cruz, 2014).
A Learning Journey
Again, futures thinking, and futures literacy is a learning journey. It is not the tools and techniques per se that are important. There are 30 or more anticipatory tools and processes available online. The effort, thinking, and the questions we ask provoke learning and reflection. The tools, however, are critical to futures thinking activities. But facilitators can innovate in the way they design their futures literacy events or workshops.
The end of the futures literacy workshop is to develop the capacity of participants and stakeholders to use the future to innovate today.
Even more important is to engage them to learn the value of improvisation, novelty, and experimentation. Being aware of and learning how to challenge and question used and default futures and exploring the invisible and imagining the non-existent; to learn how to use the imagination to change the conditions of the change are the purpose of futures literacy.
References
Aceron, A. & Cruz, S. (2018). Youth Leadership and the use of the future. Transforming the Future, Anticipation in the 21st Century. UNESCO & Routledge Taylor and Francis Group. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781351047999
Bussey, M. & Slaughter R. (2012). Futures Thinking for Social Foresight. Tamkang University Press.
Cruz, S. (2018). Playground for Inclusion: The LAO PDR Futures Literacy and Policy Visioning Workshop. https://engagedforesight.com/2018/11/02/playground-for-inclusion-the-lao-pdr-futures-literacy-and-policy-visioning-workshop/
Cruz S. & Young D (2018). Report on Workshop on Data Analysis and Youth Policy Development in Lao PDR: Futures Literacy and Policy Visioning. Unpublished.
Cruz, S. (2017). City Futures. Future News. The Futures Foundation, 17(5). http://futuresfoundation.org.au/media/2017/06/June-2017.pdf
Cruz, S. (2015). Introduction to Futures Studies, Teach the Future. https://library.teachthefuture.org/product/introduction-to-futures-studies/
Cruz, S. & Hernando A. (2015). Philippine Vigan City Futures Report. https://www.wfsf.org/resources/leala-project-reports/philippines-vigan/126-philippines-vigan-city-futures-report/file.
Inayatullah, S. (2015). What Works Case Studies in the Practice of Foresight. Tamkang University Press.
Inayatullah, S. (2017). Gaming, Ways of Knowing, and Futures. Journal of Futures Studies, 22 (2). http://www.metafuture.org/library1/FuturesStudies/GamingWaysOfKnowingFutures.pdf
Inayatullah, S. (2008). Six pillars: futures thinking for transforming. Foresight, 10(1). https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/14636680810855991
Inayatullah, S.(2007). Questioning the Future: Methods and Tools for Organizational and Societal Transformation. Tamsui, Taiwan: Tamkang University Press.
Miller, R. (2018). Sensing and making sense of Futures Literacy, Towards a Futures Literacy Framework (FLF). Transforming the Future, Anticipation in the 21st Century. UNESCO & Routledge Taylor and Francis Group. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781351047999
Miller, R. (2018). Transforming the Future, Anticipation in the 21st Century. UNESCO & Routledge Taylor and Francis Group. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781351047999
Miller, R. (2010). Futures Literacy – Embracing Complexity and Using the Future. Ethos, 10 (10).
Miller, R. & Poli, R. & Roselle, P. (2018). The Discipline of Anticipation
Foundations for Futures Literacy. Transforming the Future, Anticipation in the 21st Century. UNESCO & Routledge Taylor and Francis Group. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781351047999