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Part I
Discovering anticipation in the 21st century
Towards Futures Literacy?
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1 Sensing and making-sense of Futures Literacy
Towards a Futures Literacy Framework (FLF)
Riel Miller
Futures Literacy (FL) is a capability. A futures literate person has acquired the skills needed to decide why and how to use their imagination to introduce the non-existent future into the present. These anticipatory activities play an important role in what people see and do. Developing a detailed description of this capability to ‘use-the-future’ calls for an analytical framework that can clarify the nature of different anticipatory systems and guide both research into FL and its acquisition as a skill. Such a framework is presented in this chapter, focusing on the sub-set of anticipatory systems and processes that humans use when they consciously imagine the future.
The first section briefly presents a case study in order to introduce the key concepts of the Futures Literacy Framework (FLF). The second section spells out some of the main analytical challenges that the FLF is meant to address given that FL is as an emergent and evolving capability. The next section describes the FLF in detail, explaining the different ontological and epistemological categories that are used to map FL. The fourth and final section provides two illustrations of how the FLF can be used. The first part explains how the FLF can be used to situate and design Futures Literacy Laboratories (FLL), a general-purpose tool that reveals anticipatory assumptions (AA), and then a more specific task-oriented sub-category of FLL designed specifically for the research agenda of this project regarding novelty, the FLL-N. The second part discusses how the FLF can be used to situate the theory and practice of Future Studies (FS) in ways that clarify why particular tools are more or less appropriate for specific tasks as well as pointing to the potential to both deepen and enlarge the discipline beyond the boundaries of currently dominant theory and practice.
Searching for Futures Literacy in Sierra Leone
In early 2014, in the aftermath of a horrific civil war, but before the devastation of the Ebola epidemic, UNESCO organised a FLL-N in Freetown, Sierra Leone (Case Study 5 in Chapter 5). The Lab was designed to explore the transition from ‘youth’ to ‘adult’ in the Sierra Leone of the future. On the face of it this task involved one of the most universal ways of ‘using-the-future’: imagining ‘growing-up’. Age progression is the familiar model we apply when we imagine that a crawling baby will learn to walk. Personal experience has forged this frame, we all know that in due course – assuming nothing unusual happens – the baby will ‘grow-up’, which is why we do not chastise a baby for not yet knowing how to walk. Nor do we apply intensive remedial therapy because we are worried that crawling will impede walking. We make sense of the crawling baby through the frame of the temporal journey from infant to child to adolescent to adult.
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This ‘growing-up’ story is accessible and perhaps even the dominant template humans use to imagine the future. The frame of ‘growing-up’ (Goffman, 1974), with its pictures of the tomorrows we will catch-up with or converge on, enables us to sense and make-sense of what a baby is doing now. And it is a clear illustration of how people ‘use-the-future’ by deploying an anticipatory system (AS) to understand the present. For most people, this kind of elementary anticipation comes automatically, without the need for explicit awareness. And since they do not need to think explicitly about the anticipatory systems and process they deploy to ‘use-the-future’, people rarely consider that the future can be ‘used’ for different reasons and with different methods. For example, in the Sierra Leone FLL-N a diverse group of participants, spanning different ages, origins and professions, were startled when they discovered that by breaking with the simple ‘growing-up’ frame for imagining the future they could expand what they sense and make sense of in the present.
Through a co-designed, highly context-sensitive collective intelligence process that used different futures, the participants in the Sierra Leone FLL-N became aware of their anticipatory assumptions (AA), making it possible to invent futures less constrained by the frame of catching-up or converging with today’s idea of an adult or yesterday’s idea of what it meant to ‘grow-up’. By undertaking a learning voyage that developed their futures literacy they were able to call into question the frames that confine the transition from youth to adult to a set of pre-existing rites of passage along linear and hierarchical paths to old age. Instead participants in the Sierra Leone FLL-N explored and invented alternative images, definitions and conditions for autonomy, responsibility, trust and wisdom in their specific post-conflict community. They challenged terms like ‘youth’ and ‘adult’ that for them obscured more than revealed the actual lived experiences and meanings of people’s current roles and positions in their local community.
Initially, participants were surprised that the frame of ‘growing-up’ turned out to be inadequate, even counter-productive. But as their capacity to ‘use-the-future’ developed they started to not only imagine different futures but also learn that there are different kinds of anticipation. Both the meaning of ‘becoming responsible’ and the avenues for getting there changed. Different imaginary futures enabled new ways of seeing the present. As participants started to become futures literate they began to understand the power of anticipation in shaping what they see and do.
The sequence of the FLL-N as an action learning process unfolds as follows.
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1 Participants experience and become explicitly conscious of how the future plays a central role in what they perceive and pay attention to in the present.
2 By changing the way they ‘use-the-future’ participants started to realise that they can anticipate in different ways and thereby imagine different futures.
3 By putting together the first and second insights participants begin to understand that imagining different futures changes what they could see and do in the present.
4 By imagining different futures participants become aware of their own capacity to invent the underlying anticipatory assumptions (AA) that shape their of-necessity fictional descriptions of the later-than-now. By starting to acquire FL they become better at rooting their AA in their own history and specific socio-economic-cultural context. Participants begin to reassess their perceptions of the present, depictions of the past and aspirations for the future.
5 Through engagement in the knowledge co-creation processes of the FLL-N participants begin to acquire the capacity to design this kind of collective intelligence process that enables them to choose why and how to anticipate, contributing to the acquisition of the skills that make up FL.
The structured processes of FLL as a general-purpose tool for revealing AA shows that people can use different kinds of future, for different reasons and by deploying different methods. The FLL-N customised for this project generated evidence that being futures literate facilitates the discovery and invention of novel phenomena in the present. Designing these processes as well as testing different hypotheses about FL requires a systematic and comprehensive analytical framework that enables both practitioners and researchers to distinguish why and how to ‘use-the-future’ for specific ends in particular contexts. This is the role of the FLF and a key step towards gaining a better understanding of the evolving capability of FL.
The challenge of mapping an emergent and evolving capability
Efforts to conduct research into defining and mapping FL need to take into account its continuously emerging and evolving aspects as well as the acquired stock of what is ‘already known’ about ‘using-the-future’. FL as a capability is reflexive, in the sense that through practice people invent and redefine the way they ‘use-the-future’, and it is constructive in so far as the constant ‘use-of-the-future’ plays a role in building up the world around us – including why and how we anticipate (Misuraca, Codagnone and Rossel, 2013). The challenge of developing an analytical framework for understanding FL, already a moving target, is compounded by the fact that many theories such as complexity and anticipatory systems theories, and practices such as action learning and collective intelligence knowledge creation (CIKC) processes that enable people to sense and make-sense of FL are only now starting to appear in explicit and coherent form.
At the outset of this effort to define and map FL then, it is important to note that both the results reported in this book and the FL Framework (FLF), elaborated in order to provide a theoretically and analytically grounded approach to FL, are necessarily of an exploratory, preliminary, tentative, and even inventive character. Research into such emergent phenomena need to not only seek out the relevant strong- and weak-signals, but also try to account for the possibility that engaging in such inquiry can actually generate or invent new concepts, relationships, processes and even systems. As Popper argues in the following quote:
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(‘Two New Views of Causality’, Popper, 1990, p. 17, emphasis in original)
The FLF sketched over the following pages reflects today’s evolving conditions for thinking about the future and picks up on the research and experiences of many people, across many fields of theory and practice. In particular, the research results reported here have benefitted significantly from the work done on: anticipatory systems (Rosen, 1985; Nadin, 2010a, 2010b; Rossel, 2010; Tuomi, 2012; Miller and Poli, 2010); complexity (Ulanowicz, 1979; Rosen, 1986; Ehresmann and Vanbremeersch, 1987; Kauffman, 1995; Delanda, 2006; Poli, 2009); management (Snowden, 2002; Stacey, 2007; Wilenius, 2008; Fuller, 2017); governance (Sen, 1999; Mulgan and Albury, 2003; Unger, 2007; Boyd et al., 2015); knowledge creation/management (Nonaka, 1994; Wegner, 1998; Tuomi, 1999; Lewin and Massini, 2004; Paavola, Lipponen and Hakkarainen, 2004; Latour, 2005); human agency/behaviour (Archer, 2002; Kahneman, 2012); and Futures Studies (Slaughter, 1996; Ogilvy, 2002; Bishop and Hines, 2006; Godet, 2006; Masini, 2006; Miller, 2007b; Inayatullah, 2008; Fuller, 2017; Ramírez and Wilkinson, 2016). Other fields of both practice and research, running from design thinking (Kimbell, 2011) and participatory decision-making (Scharmer, 2007; Kahane, 2012; Hassan, 2014) to the widespread implementation of action learning (Adler and Clark, 1991) and action research (Hult and Lennung, 1980; Robson and Turner, 2007) in many different contexts, have also played an important role in the discovery and elucidation of why and how people ‘use-the-future’.
Of course, FL is not the first capability to be analysed by researchers and philosophers. FL, like many such general and regularly practised capabilities, can be described from different perspectives, including philosophical and applied, cognitive and prescriptive (Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2011; Poli, 2015). Skills like reading and writing have been defined and analysed on the basis of different theories, such as Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development (Wadsworth, 1971), and practices like genre-based learning-to-write pedagogies (Rose and Martin, 2012). Widely dispersed social capabilities can also be described in macro-functional terms (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977; Bauman, 2013; Giddens, 1991; Beck, 1992), as in the case of the general society-wide diffusion of the basic capacity to read and write, a central aspect of the transition from peasant to industrial society (Miller, 2007a). The bottom line is that efforts to describe such cross-cutting and frequently used capabilities must go beyond static approaches that only see repositories of knowledge ready to be downloaded by receptive citizens, consumers or students. Over time, as contexts change and new phenomena emerge, the nature of a capability such as what it means to be ‘literate’ or in this case futures literate, at personal and societal levels, also evolves (Trilling and Fadel, 2009).
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The need to simultaneously detect and invent FL calls for a research methodology that is capable of discerning continuity and difference in the processes and categories of ‘using-the-future’. As it turns out, addressing this kind of double or recursive analytical challenge is precisely one of the vocations of FL. ‘Using-the-future’ to understand the present already attempts to address a chicken-and-egg type conundrum. Or to use another metaphor, the effort to map FL is like having to invent the thief who is then able to catch a thief. Gregory Bateson expresses this notion of engaging in knowledge creation where there is reciprocity between ‘product as process and process as product’ by inventing a term: “metalogue” (Bateson, 2000, p. 1). Gathering evidence about why and how people ‘use-the-future’ calls for this type of ‘metalogue’ methodology, a double movement design that enables researchers “to learn from actors without imposing on them an ‘a priori’ definition of their world building capacities” (Latour, 1999, p. 20). In other words, research into FL is challenging...
