1. Futures Conversations - Overview

An overview of the Futures Conversation Framework, used to design integrated conversations.

All futures activities, from forecasts to visioning, causal layered analysis to the Millennium Project, have a direct impact on the present: they can change peoples’ perceptions, make them aware of dangers and opportunities ahead, motivate them to do specific things, force them to invent or innovate, encourage them to change and adjust, galvanise them into collective social action, paralyse them with fear, empower them, marginalise them, or tell them they and their cultures and belief systems are important or unimportant. (Zia Sardar, 2010, p. 184).

Sardar’s quote reminds us that thinking about futures, imagining possible futures, and enacting those futures happens in the present – and that this act of thinking about futures can change peoples’ perspectives on the present. Miller (2018) asserts that the future exists in the present in the form of anticipation, while Adam and Groves (2007, p. 32) define it as “present futures amenable to contemporary futurist inquiry” and Slaughter (200…