Futures Literacy

A brief introduction to Futures Literacy, its basic concepts and why it’s important.

What is Futures Literacy?

Put simply, futures literacy is your capacity to recognise and know how and why you are imagining possible futures.

Everyone can imagine possible futures and describe them in the present. This ability to tell stories about the future is possible because we all have taken-for-granted assumptions that we use to describe ‘the future’' in those stories. Making these assumptions explicit is the first step in recognising the human capacity of anticipation (Lesson 5).

Futures literacy is essentially your conscious ability to know:

• what types of futures you need to be imagining (different assumptions generate different futures),

• why we are imagining these futures now (for what purpose),

• how to imagine futures (methods),

• who is imagining the futures (context), and

• when to use futures in organisations (timing is critical in organisations)

Instead of planning for one future and trying to reduce the complexity of the present (essentially futures illiteracy), futures literacy allo…