A Sofia Futures Literacy Summer School reflection

I started this post after the Summer School and finished it last week - delayed so I could reflect on the challenges to my thinking.

I wrote this post while I was still in Sofia waiting for my flights back to Australia after the conclusion of the Futures Literacy Summer School, which I have to say generated a mind shift for me. The one I knew was lurking in my mind for some months now, the one I’ve been waiting to emerge. I have edited it a little since then, but the main reflections are the same as they were a month ago.

The Summer School is about the Futures Literacy Lab - both theoretically and in practice. The Labs are not about ‘the future’, they are about reframing the present. How to do that? Stop relying on images/scenarios of ‘the future’ as a clue to our actions today. Images are important to expand our thinking and give us hope, but only if the imaginations underpinning them have been expanded beyond used futures. In this sense, it is not ‘the future’ that matters, it’s how we perceive the present - where we use our imaginations - that matters.

Why? Because our unchallenged perceptions today are what allow us to be satisfied with used futures, to accept our systems as they are today, without seeing there are other ways to do things. To be unaware, trapped in only one way of knowing reality, and missing other options that are waiting for us to find them. And we do this unconsciously. We are unaware of the big picture, the forces at work on our lives and the planet, and our complicit acceptance of them.

I also finally understood at the Summer School that my lingering doubts about our preoccupation with scenarios, at least those that bound thinking to a particular frame - were confirmed. Seeking futures that largely end up as a fun process or a used future is not a good use of time. These outputs are actually blinding us to a foundational aim of futures studies and anticipatory thinking. This aim is, and has been since Wack’s work at Shell, re-perceiving the present to allow us to find new thinking, new perspectives, and new actions today.

In my work as a consultant using scenario development over many years, I now realise I knew subconsciously that their impact is often low. Unless done well, the mind shifts Wack wrote about are unlikely to emerge. I didn’t articulate this realisation until after I had finished using them in my practice though, when I had time to reflect on how I operated as a consultant. I did see the ‘light bulb’ go on in some workshops, but often the switch was deliberately turned off by closed thinking.

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My view now is that the success of any futures process depends on the depth of thinking about the present, and self-awareness about that thinking in the facilitator and their ability to help participants to begin to find that deeper cognitive capacity. I call that cognitive capacity foresight, while you might call it something else. The point is if our thinking is not able to understand that ‘doing futures’ is primarily about thinking in new ways in the present, we will continue to create scenarios that may meet client needs but that do very little to change the assumptions that underpin the thinking of people who created those scenarios. Hence the used futures.

This is thinking more deeply and expansively about the present to find new perspectives and new actions - whether we talk about foresight or anticipation. These two views are about being/becoming aware of our constrained perceptions of our constructed realities in the present and understanding how bounded those perceptions are by our assumptions. Realising this frees our imaginations from the constraints of the present, so we can imagine new futures in the present.

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The past is knowable but gone from our influence, ‘the future’ is not important because it does not yet exist. All that matters (for me) in our present and how we think about and change our current circumstances that we are leaving for future generations. A new frame is needed where we seek not the certainty of corporate scenarios and the need to have the right future. Instead, we need a frame that is grounded in all we can change, influence, and leave for future generations, one that is informed by our expanded ontological capacities, new perceptions and the exploration of new actions right now. Our imaginations used today are the trigger for this new, expanded thinking, where we move beyond the certain, the known, and the right, demanded, used images. It is the sort of futures we want for people who will inhabit whatever futures emerge over time that we need to imagine, not those required by our organisations today for a strategic plan.

When future generations think of their ancestors what will they think of us? That we reinforced the present over and over again with our unconsciously limited imaginations and our thinking, or that we opened our minds to the new in the present, the once thought impossible, unthinkable and ridiculous and, even lacking data. That we failed to realise that it is our assumptions that made us think our imaginations were not real and therefore not valuable in the present, that made us maintain our used futures, and constrain the application of our foresight to these formulaic processes.

Using our imaginations to reframe the present as one we want to leave for future generations is something we can do, individually and collectively. Our foresight helps us to imagine the new in the present - but how we challenge our imaginations to expand, to move beyond our assumptions of what we think is real, to move beyond our eternal search for certainty to beyond uncertainty is up to us to work out. We are looking for a space where our imaginations are not constrained by corporate need but what we want to achieve in the present that will not harm our emerging, latent, not yet knowable futures. The present is our playground, with our foresight and our imaginations as our tools.

Now I know only too well that this is antithetical to much I have written over the years, and maybe there is much that you can’t accept - right now. I ask you only to hold these ideas in your mind with non-judgement, to see if something new emerges for you.