Change in the conditions of Change

When it’s not only the climate that is in transition.

Elles Kazemier and Loes Damhof, Hanze UNESCO Chair Futures Literacy in Higher Education

Maybe one of (many) lessons to be learnt from COVID 19 is how we were caught up in daily routines and how rarely we anticipated massive disruption as a game changer. Now, reluctantly getting used to ‘new normals’ while anticipating new stability, a renewed sense of urgency becomes noticeable as well. It is the urgency to use this ‘big pause’ as an opportunity to finally get serious about this planets’ wellbeing and the collective human actions needed. And although times have always been uncertain and complex, our assumptions on continuity are now being tested more than ever before. When we perceive the world as more uncertain, we tend to develop a stronger need to actively respond to that, wanting to eliminate that uncertainty. And the last thing we need is to feel uncertain, or even paralyse, ourselves.

Not for an ambitious organisation as EIT Climate KIC: while aiming to take the lead in creating pathways towards a more sustainable future, the organisation took on the bold task to change along with it. How? By learning how to become more futures literate.

Futures literacy is the capability that allows for using different futures to innovate the present. To develop this capability across EIT Climate KIC and within its Deep Demonstration programs, it engaged in an initiative called Futures Literacy across the Deep (FLxDeep): an international consortium of futurists, researchers, trainers and futures literacy experts coordinated by Finland Futures Research Centre at University of Turku. Over the past year-and-a-half, key actors from several EIT Climate KIC Deep Demonstrations were (re)-introduced to Futures Literacy (FL) through a variety of approaches ranging from embedded peer coaching to inventing ways to practice this new skill (see Futures Literacy in EIT Climate KIC: 2019–2020 ). In this post we give a first glimpse of the learnings and impact that came out of one of these activities — a Futures Literacy Facilitators Training offered to key Deep Demonstration actors.

FLxDeep partner Hanze University of Applied Sciences developed this train-the-trainer program to ensure futures literacy as a capability was enhanced and could continue to be implemented within systems transformation approaches. A basic design principle of any HUAS futures literacy training is a learning-by-doing process: Futures Literacy Laboratories can be used as an instrument to complement processes, the capability of futures literacy needs to be nurtured first. Therefore twenty EIT Climate KIC staff members participated in a three module training, resulting in three independently designed Futures Literacy Interventions.

The first module offered the opportunity to experience the three phases of a Futures Literacy Lab and to explore its purpose and design. The second prepared the trainees to apply the Futures Literacy Framework (see Transforming the Future, Miller 2018) within EIT Climate KIC by building futures literacy narrative capacity and by designing prototypes of futures literacy interventions. The last module enabled facilitating these interventions, reflecting on it and also addressed next steps to make use of futures literacy as a capability. Insights derived from this training make clear that the capability of futures literacy is synergetic with the ambition to enable system-level transformations in addressing climate change.

So when reflecting on the program, trainees observed four key elements about the capability while being in transition: it helped them to rethink the present, to take new empowered action, to slow down, and to use futures as tools for transformation.

Futures Literacy enables to re-examine the present

The starting point of the training was a Futures Literacy Lab that explored the Future of Collective Action, building on EIT Climate KIC’s game changing ambitions. Trainees made their predictions and hopes for the future explicit by elaborating on multiple futures: probable, desirable and alternative ones. Overall they pictured probable futures that describe tech-heavy, human-centered worlds, where polarisation and inequality are rampant. Their dreams in their desirable futures however, touched upon a pan-human society, where nature is an integral part of our lives and tech is here solely to support us. A reframe scenario, an alternative future that is neither desirable nor probable, challenged trainees to identify their assumptions or the gaps in their scenarios. The reframe painted a future where we could only use our physical bodies in the fight for climate change. This revealed underlying assumptions on the increasing reliance on technology and the decreasing need for competition. Other assumptions implied the systemic continuation of infrastructure and organisation in place to tackle climate change. By examining these assumptions in the final phase of a Lab, trainees had an opportunity to rethink the present and surface new questions:

Taking action causes winners and losers. How do we balance individual needs with collective action? How can we leave the safe technology bubble to create meaningful change? What are the new forms of government that would enable the desired future? Are we radical enough? Can we tell different stories than only stories of loss? To what extent is Futures Literacy helping the future of the privileged? What are we willing to lose if we want to win?

These fundamental questions were accompanied by more practical ones on how to implement futures literacy as a tool, like: how to incorporate this methodology of futures thinking into daily work. Or, on how the processes and timelines should look like and on how to communicate this to a broader audience. And in a training that aims to build futures literacy facilitations skills, these how-to-questions are as valid as the more existential ones. However, futures literacy is a new way of thinking that does not ask for quick fixes, but instead requires questioning those quick fixes. The second and third module therefore challenged the trainees to first embrace the fact that, before they can use FL tools in their daily work, they need to enhance their understanding of the capability as well.

After the training participants reflected on their learning by addressing to what extent they developed their own futures literacy capability and in what ways they imagine futures literacy to be beneficial to EIT Climate KIC processes. They expressed, among other things, an enhanced feeling of empowerment, the necessity to slow down and their views on futures literacy as a tool for transformation.

Breaking the cycles

Wishful futures and action

Keep moving forward

Futures literacy empowers

Exploring multiple futures requires imagination since the future only exists in our imagination. So when we anticipate, we are merely using the future, not creating her. Our anticipations however, have a profound impact on how we think and act in the present, and by opening up ways we anticipate, we create more options in the present. This can be liberating:

I think that the future is much more about the now — it’s much more looking through different types of lenses or at least pushing yourself to question your lenses when looking at the present or how you interact with the present (….) the link is much stronger between the present and the future (….)

Several trainees used this lenses metaphor for futures and for good reason: it is not our actions in the present that shape the future, it is how we look at the future that shape our actions in the present. If we only use one pair of glasses, our vision becomes limited, but using multiple lenses can help interpret the world more broadly. Seeing opportunities in emerging novelty or having multiple futures at our disposal can be confusing, or even overwhelming. As the EIT Climate KIC trainees point out in their reflections: it is not easy to imagine beyond certain realms, or to work comfortably within pluralities. But seeing through these different lenses actually fosters a sense of empowerment as well; suddenly we feel we have more say in how we make sense of this world:

If we break the mental model that we are just extrapolating into the future, somehow in that novel space new realities can kind of come in to be.

By imagining multiple futures we are able to see new phenomena in society that we did not include in our mental models before. Feeling we have only one future, or maybe even no future, can be paralyzing, but stretching our imagination and looking through different lenses can empower us:

The future is not a wave that comes over. You can swim and take direction. And our swimming gets better”

New ways to see the

Future, query assumptions

Shape different tracks

Futures Literacy is slowing down in times of urgency

As with acquiring any capability, it involves practice and taking the time was often challenging for EIT CKIC staff, being practitioners in a field with a sense of urgency. Allowing ourselves to learn a new capability however, means allowing for the time to practice it as well. Throughout the training trainees were asked to slow down and reflect during carefully built exercises. A cultural immersive exercise (ENKI) for instance allowed participants to touch base with a deeper purpose: why are we doing what we are doing in the first place?

Who am I, wanting to change the future and why do I want to do it? I think this is a question that is pretty powerful and is re-questioning my agency as well: why do I want to have agency? There you go back to this core question: what is my motivation and underlying assumptions? And I think this kind of thinking is pretty helpful to perhaps not feel that I need to have the agency as an individual, and that I need to find ways to enable this agency to become more powerful by connecting to others.

Collectively listening to ENKI also opened up the conversation on the challenges of being part of an organisation in transition itself. Fighting for change while changing the conditions of change, can push any of us into cultivating a stronger sense of urgency, the desire to step into fourth gear and make quick decisions. Slowing down and taking time to be in the present can help us pay attention more carefully to the world around us and make sense of whatever emerges:

These are futures that are not already here, but we are configuring them now. So we can learn better and we can see — if we look with the lenses of the future- what is happening now that is enabling this future. That can help us to better see the ways and the assumptions and the emerging movements or yes, events in the system that can allow us to get to the future we want.

Futures literacy as a tool for transformation

When asked what role participants saw for futures literacy within the EIT Climate KIC approaches to systems innovation, participants shared several insights. They for instance see futures literacy as helpful in thinking systematically about alternative pathways in conversation with their stakeholders, albeit challenging:

We try to analyze and look at systems with challenge owners who have the problems and want to find the solutions. Often they are super biased because they are so much into the system and so much into the present time and solving the posing problems, that it is difficult for them to think in the long term. And it also is difficult for them to reformulate that. I mean, first recall and acknowledge that they have assumptions and then reformulate and reframe them in a way that can free their mind to look for alternative and innovative ways. I think futures literacy does this wonderfully

I am thinking of many types of experts we will meet and we met along our journey, who are not necessarily innovators, system thinkers or edge cutting experts. They can be very traditional engineers or policy makers which would be immediately retaining themselves by using this type of approach — I could help there: to try to bring this tool a bit closer to them.

Another notion that was mentioned, is the capability of FL to identify our underlying beliefs and values that are often overlooked when we focus on hard data alone:

What I find extremely powerful Is the possibility to systematise beliefs and individualities and collectivities. Beliefs and societal values which we can not do and we have not been able to do through ‘hard science’. I really see the opportunity here to do that and to be complementary.

Within the sense-making community of EIT Climate KIC, futures literacy is seen as a potential powerful boost for what is already happening:

How could we, if we talk about sensemaking as a muscle, have a protein injection of FL? If we bring these together into the same cauldron, what hybrid process would emerge? If we are making sense of what has already transpired, bringing futures into our thinking, that would allow us to shift from past focused to bringing in the future.

HOW we change

So what are some preliminary lessons we can learn from the journey EIT Climate KIC has undertaken? There is a definite impact noticeable when it comes to the understanding how to use the future for different purposes. And yet, while implementing futures into our thinking, we also start to realize that trying to change society may not be enough, we also need to look at how we change, and whether we can embrace complexity as we try to change the conditions of change. Futures literacy can help people do that, but as with any capability the how, where and when requires taking the time to practice, reflect, and experiment with bringing this skill into use.

Even in times of great urgency.