2. Three Conversation Dimensions
These three dimensions underpin the design of the Futures Conversations Framework.
These three dimensions underpin the design of the Futures Conversations Framework.
1. An Integral Frame
An integral approach to futures integrates people, culture, process and context. It brings the invisible and visible parts of the organisation together. It recognises that people create the future in their daily conversations, decisions and actions that are in turn shaped by their mindsets, assumptions and biases. This is the frame that helps us put the human back into becoming futures ready. I call it integrated thinking which is not a new term, but one that focuses us on the need to consider both the invisible and visible sides of organisations.
2. A Foresight Lens
A foresight lens enables us to escape the constraints of status-quo thinking and the present, to use our episodic foresight capacities to create and remember simulations of possible futures. Foresight allows us to locate ourselves in those futures, and depending on your temporal orientations and openness to experiences, you can remember the detail of those futures in your present, creating "memories of the future" - a term coined by Ingvar in his study of the neuroscience that allows us to experience the past, present and futures.
We all have a foresight capacity - it is an innate human capacity, with specific neurological processes that underpin it. The issue in today's world is to recognise that capacity, surface it and use in when we are thinking about futures. To build the knowledge and skills we need to use futures today, to explore them not predict them, to prepare for them, not react to them. Foresight helps us build our futures agency - our ability as individuals and organisations to shape the future - and our futures literacy - our ability to recognise the assumptions we use when we imagine futures.
3. Conversation Spaces
Being ready for the future emerges when we create time and spaces for conversations about futures. These spaces take form when people come together to use their futures agency and their futures literacy, explore ideas and assumptions about the future, think in multiples and grapple with emergent future's complexity. These spaces focus not only on process and ticking boxes, but also on bringing people together to think differently and to find the new and novel in the present.
Attention must be paid to each of these dimensions in the design of foresight processes.
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