6: Conversations with Self

The details about the Conversation with Self - the space where we can surface our foresight capacities.

This conversation focuses on individual thinking about futures and making clear the assumptions that inform that thinking. The table below shows the type of activity taking place in this conversation, the theories underpinning how this conversation has been framed, the primary question that must be asked of ourselves and the desired outcomes we are seeking.

Overview

This conversation space is ontological in nature, in the sense that individuals are asked to challenge and expand their assumptions about futures, and to understand just how and why they think about futures as they do. This thinking about futures is informed by the neurological processes of episodic foresight and creativity, and psychological attributes of temporal preferences and openness to new experiences. The primary question to be asked in this conversation focus on expanding and deepening your understanding of how and why you engage with futures.

In this conversation, individuals engage with their ontological beliefs about images of ‘the future’ they consider to be valid to identify underpinning tacit assumptions. This conversation takes place inside individual minds and consciousness – it is a conversation with self, enabled by critical reflection processes that involve self-challenge – questioning our assumptions, our behaviours, our perception of reality and how we engage with futures. This conversation enables us to consciously consider the validity of our assumptions and why we accept some futures as valid and reject others.

In this process of self-challenge, we become aware of their foresight capacities, a shift in awareness that allows perceptions of how we use the future in the present to be articulated. This is also the space where futures consciousness starts to emerge which can be defined in terms of five dimensions: time perspective, agency beliefs, openness to alternatives, systems perception, and concern for others. It is also where autonoetic consciousness is activated, a self-reflective capacity that emerges when we remember the past or imagine the future that enables us to reflect on our experience in those mental spaces.

Aim

The aim of this conversation is to understand the world ‘in here’ in more depth – a reframing of assumptions about futures that enables new perspectives to emerge as we use our innate capacities to imagine possible futures. In this quadrant of individual consciousness,  individual foresight capacities develop as we recognise both the range of anticipatory assumptions that shape the types of futures we imagine – which range from open to closed – and hold an explicit awareness of the range of possible futures in the present. This is the space where existing mental models that shape our assumptions about ‘the future’ are challenged, a process that is ongoing and strengthened each time a person engages with a futures process. It is also the space that expands in an ontological sense (Tuomi 2018) as we begin to make conscious use of our foresight capacities and agency – and even accept futures that might have been rejected previously.

Indicative Approach: Critical Reflection

This way of thinking requires us to be exceedingly critical about ourselves, to be open to seeing other perspectives about reality, and to continually reflect on our actions in social contexts. It can be uncomfortable because it requires us to recognise in very overt ways how our thinking shapes our interactions in our realities and our personal roles in those interactions. Discomfort arises because new information challenges existing assumptions to a degree that these assumptions are no longer acceptable to us, because doubt enters our thinking as we encounter new information that contradicts what we previously viewed as ‘right’. We begin to find and surface our assumptions and understanding about how we actually make sense of reality - and our futures - begins to emerge.

It is this discomfort that presents the most significant barrier to expanding minds to new thinking and new perspectives, primarily because when the brain’s pattern recognition processes engage in the face of new information, their default position is to reject the ‘new’ as irrelevant. De Wit and Meyer in their book Strategy Synthesis (2010, p. 33) describe this rejection as cognitive rigidity:

People are generally inclined not to change their minds. Once people’s cognitive maps have formed, and they have a grip on reality, they become resistant to signals that challenge their conception … Once an interpretive filter is in place, seeing is not believing, but believing is seeing. People might have the impression they are constantly learning, but they are largely within the bounds of a paradigm.

Cognitive rigidity means it is unlikely that we will change our minds unless we are either already operating cognitively at a high thinking level that is actively seeking the new and novel, or we are challenged to the degree that our cognitive map is demonstrated to be invalid. This cognitive rigidity is also why the conversation with Self is the most critical – and difficult – because we must be able to move beyond the constraints of often deeply held assumptions about futures before we can apply reframed thinking in practice. Finally, impact in this conversation is discernible only when a person can articulate the changes occurring in their thinking – which, in the context being explored in the Futures Conversations Framework, would occur in a futures process.

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