Demystifying futures literacy, a key skill for climate innovation
Innovators can see and grasp more options for transformation in this climate emergency by learning and applying futures literacy. But what is this new capability? What’s its value? And what do you need to know to start using it?
Nicolas Balcom Raleigh, Consortium Leader, Futures Literacy across the Deep, Finland Futures Research Centre — University of Turku, Finland
Irianna Lianaki-Dedouli, Partner Leader, Futures Literacy across the Deep, FORTH-PRAXI, Greece
Futures literacy experts at UNESCO have been advancing theory and practice concerning the characteristics and potential value of a new human capability by holding Futures Literacy Labs in various contexts around the world since 2012. Based on this work they’ve proposed futures literacy as a skill worthy of worldwide prioritisation. This new literacy joins others — widely known literacies such as science literacy, media literacy, digital literacy, and data literacy. Like these other literacies, a widespread societal uptake would give humanity a new capability which can help us all thrive.
There is growing international interest in futures literacy. The UNESCO Futures Literacy Summit held virtually 8–12 December 2020 attracted 8000 attendees from around the world. In a message to the summit, UN Secretary-General António Guterres wrote: “Futures Literacy enhances our ability to sense, and make sense of, our ever‑changing world.”
In the context of these international developments, a consortium of six EIT Climate-KIC partners across Europe, led by Finland Futures Research Center, set out to delve into how futures literacy can help sustainability innovators invent new approaches to addressing climate change. Calling ourselves Futures Literacy across the Deep (FLxDeep), we ran a coordinated set of action research experiments over the course of 2020.
We aimed to introduce futures literacy to people involved in sustainability innovation, then help them develop the capability, and find practical ways to apply it toward their own innovation work to address the climate emergency. The work was extensive and included FLxDeep team members embedding into three ambitious systems innovation teams EIT Climate-KIC calls Deep Demonstrations — Long-termism, Just Transformations, and Net-Zero Maritime Hubs — where they co-created and tried integrations of futures literacy to larger innovation processes. The 2020 efforts also included training 20 Deep Demonstrations leaders and developing a business model for an FLxDeep Venture, now set to launch in 2021.
We’ve learned quite a lot in this inspiring journey. At many points, people would say, “We keep hearing about this futures literacy. But what is it? It feels mystical to us. How can we know more about it?” This essay responds to these questions, and sets out to demystify futures literacy.
The value of futures literacy
Futures literacy is a capability about expanding how we engage with our models of the future. It invites us to use different conceptions and ideas about the future as lenses for interpreting, understanding and seeing anew our world and ourselves in it.
Advocates for futures literacy believe this skillset enables people and their communities to comprehend potential for transformation and empowers them with a kind of agency that is well-suited to experimenting in uncertainty and toward unknown futures.
The value of futures literacy is sometimes difficult to grasp at first. Often, a person who is first introduced to it immediately wants it to be and do what they already do with futures — their default mode of ‘futuring’. For sustainability innovators, this default mode tends to be ‘solving by rallying others.’ We heard in interviews and conversations with various sustainability innovators we met about how they wished for better futures they could use to align people toward specific visions of sustainable transformation. However, futures literacy enables innovators to use futures in far more ways than this.
Futures Literacy and EIT Climate-KIC
EIT Climate-KIC is taking a leadership role in advancing Futures Literacy for climate change innovators. One way it is doing this is through the Futures Literacy across the Deep (FLxDeep) initiative. This initiative consists of a consortium of six partners in Europe who have been working in 2020 to introduce, develop, and apply futures literacy across the EIT Climate-KIC Deep Demonstrations and in wider society.
This consortium, of which we are a part, aims to find out how futures literacy helps sustainability innovators engage with ongoing uncertainty and complexity while addressing the climate emergency. Our ambition is to advance practical and scientific knowledge of what futures literacy can do for people who work toward systems innovation and societal transformation.
If EIT Climate-KIC were to achieve a KIC-wide uptake of futures literacy, it would be the first organization and innovation ecosystem of its size and scale to do so. Such a future could reinvigorate climate mitigation and adaptation efforts to tackle the climate crisis across Europe and across the seas.
Demystifying futures literacy
So, what specifically is futures literacy? What are its implications for how we work, learn and innovate together? How can you start to practice and learn it in your own work?
A useful starting point is to think of futures literacy as ‘a set of skills people have concerning futures’. (Note how futures is plural, we will come back to that in a moment.) A working definition for futures literacy that we use in the FLxDeep consortium is: ‘Diversifying how and why we use futures.’ This compact definition, developed in close collaboration with Riel Miller and the futures literacy team at UNESCO, features a high density of intended meanings.
It opens up when we unpack its conceptual parts: ‘diversify’, ‘how and why’, and ‘use futures’.
‘Use futures’ refers to what we do with our ideas about the future (e.g. imagine, generate, describe, discuss, analyze, work toward, avoid, play, reflect, etc.). With this meaning in hand, the idea of diversification takes shape. Diversifying how we use futures refers to gaining familiarity and competence with many modes or approaches to using futures. Diversifying why we use futures refers to being able to identify and vary the reasons or purposes for using futures for any given situation or context.
Futures literacy isn’t about knowing or reading the future. It’s about being aware that there are many ways and reasons to use futures, and finding ways to benefit from expanding your own set of ’how and why’ you ‘use futures’ through practice. And from our research in 2020, developing futures literacy has a significant social and inter-relational dimension — practicing with others is important.
What are futures?
Launching from the working definition, it’s helpful to dig into the question: What are ‘futures’ and why are they plural? Answers to this question takes us into some of the most cutting edge thinking from the academic field of the futurists — futures studies.
The first part of the answer can be found by considering human language. From a linguistic framework, words meaning ‘the future’ tend to carry the meaning ‘a time later than now.’ In addition to a word for the future itself, many languages have entire verb cases and grammatical structures dedicated to discussing the future — in English, for example, there are words like ‘will, may, might, could, etc.’ Through language many cultures can communicate about ‘a time later than now’.
The ‘futures’ to which Futures Literacy refers are the ones that exist in people’s minds as models, images, ephemeral glimmers, and ideas about what could happen next.
In the field of futures studies, a historical and apparently semantic debate has underlying conceptual implications. These debates have focused on when to use the singular word ‘future’ or the plural word ‘futures’. The World Future Society opted for the singular form in their name — because they wanted to emphasize that the whole world faces one future. The World Futures Studies Federation opted for the plural form — ‘futures’ — to be in closer alignment with the position of the Futuribles [2] in France and other advocates for using alternative futures [3]. This plural form, futures, carries in it the idea that at any given point in time there is potential for many different futures and people today have a role to play in creating which one ultimately materializes. In this intended meaning, the word futures refers to the many potential futures that could happen next.
Following in the same vein, in the capability called futures literacy, the plural futures is used instead of the singular future. In our field of futures studies, this choice at first appears to carry forward the previously established meanings — many possible futures. However, in futures literacy — the term futures not only refers to the many possible ways things could be in a time later than now.
The ‘futures’ to which Futures Literacy refers are the ones that exist in people’s minds as models, images, ephemeral glimmers, and ideas about what could happen next. Sometimes these futures are said out loud. Sometimes they are kept under wraps, never to be shared. Sometimes they are even unconscious and unexpressed, but somehow acting upon us. They can be hopes and fears, rational and irrational, evidence-driven or gut-level feelings, and ideas about what could or should happen next.
This intended meaning is similar to the Future Images concept offered by Polak and Boulding, and expounded upon by Slaughter [4]. Yet, in our view, futures literacy takes the idea toward new directions as we propose futures literacy is a capability concerned primarily with these futures — the ones that exist in our minds — the ones which we can know, invent, and use.
People often leave traces of all of these futures from their minds — they can be written down, spoken, shared across boundaries, and repeated. Some ‘futures left as traces’ become known to many people (e.g. flying cars; job-killing robots; or 3D printing) and enter into public discussions and framings of how the world is changing. Other ‘futures left as traces’ gain little attention.
You encounter these futures produced by people in the past — which UNESCO Chair of Futures Studies Sohail Inayatullah calls ‘used futures’ — frequently in your daily life. Traces of futures imagined by others appear for example as visions for a company or city, a new product announcement, a business plan, a research proposal, a speculative product design, a set of scenarios, or something your co-workers just told you they think will happen next quarter.
These traces are a welcome part of our world. They can support discussion and critique, and help people communicate the futures they have generated. But, they can also block the view of transformative potential. Additional futures from your own mind (now) and from the minds of your colleagues are necessary to notice new potentials for transformation. Knowing these and looking through them enables us to identify opportunities for innovation.
Start noticing futures
For the purposes of developing Futures Literacy as a skill it is helpful to distinguish between ‘the future’ and ‘futures’: ‘The future’ is a time later than now that does not yet exist and ‘futures’ are the contents humans place into that ‘later than now’ temporal frame.
Based upon this distinction between ‘the future’ as a time later than now and ‘futures’ as human generated contents pertaining to that time later than now — two aspects of our world become obvious. First, futures are products of the human mind — the imagination in all of its forms. They can appear in politics, public discourse, economics, international affairs, business thinking, design thinking, product development, or scientific research, as well as in our personal lives. As products of mind, they are entanglements of our life situations, experiences and assumptions about how the world works and what could happen next. Second, futures are everywhere — in every person, group, or organization. A process-oriented view of how these futures are produced, communicated, adopted, and reproduced allows us to locate them in work processes, daily life practices, and societal dynamics. Implicitly and explicitly, these futures exist and filter perception and drive action.
Pursuing futures literacy means developing skills concerning these kinds of futures — the futures in our minds. While some have argued we need to have a relationship to ‘the future’ as the time later than now — the future does not exist (yet) and we cannot have a relationship to it per se. Anything we can presently think of as ‘the future’ is only a specific assemblage of our own and other people’s imagined futures.
“One key idea in futures literacy is that these futures — the ones in our minds — are lenses through which we see and frame our world (and scaling up as far as possible, the whole universe).”
When we develop and apply futures literacy, we develop a relationship to futures we are constantly generating. The skills involved include varying what kinds of futures we are generating for which reasons, comprehending what assumptions underlie these futures, and having the tools and confidence to actively share, discuss, break, and reinvent these futures with others.
Futures literacy is a capability to engage and utilise something that is everywhere (futures) in order to better function in our world. When put this way, it is one of the most practical skills a person, group, organization, or society could learn.
Why is futures literacy important for innovators in the climate emergency?
One key idea in futures literacy is that these futures — the ones in our minds — are lenses through which we see and frame our world (and scaling up as far as possible, the whole universe).
As Miller has noted, futures shape our perception. When we perceive through too few kinds of futures — such as goal-oriented project visions or probabilistic projections — we tend to pay closest attention to the phenomena and transformation occurring in our world that fit with those futures. However when we stretch ourselves to look through several different kinds of futures generated for different purposes, we can see more aspects, pathways, and potentials of transformation, and opportunities for experimentation.
Sounds easy, right? We just need to mix more dystopias with utopias, desirable futures with probable ones, or even develop sets of alternative futures like has been done for decades in scenario planning and we will be Futures Literate. Let’s get started! Not so fast, there’s more…
Categorising futures
So far we have referred a few times to different kinds of futures. It must be noted that all of these kinds are subjective or inter-subjective. There are many classification schemes available in futures studies and all have their own uses. When introducing futures literacy via a workshop or lab, the classification we often ask people to try applying first is probable versus preferable.
Distinguishing between what we believe is likely to happen and what we want to happen is often difficult because probable and desirable futures are often intertwined. Often, our wishes or aspirations about the future are severely constrained by what we consider possible. Going through the effort of trying to separate your own probable and desirable futures is a useful starting point for expanding how and why you use futures.
However, in our attempt to distinguish among different kinds/types of futures we can go beyond possibility and desirability, and think of other dimensions related to permissibility, intentionality, and purpose. For instance, following the critical school of thought in Futures Studies we ought to take a critical stance and reflect whether a probable or desirable image of the future is actually an ‘official’ (ala futurist Jim Dator) or ‘used’ future generated and propagated by others and eventually imposed to us. These forms of criticality can aid a person in having greater awareness of the sources and limitations of the futures they are using to see the world through.
In parallel, developing an interest in exploring less comfortable kinds of futures such as strange futures, improbable futures, and radically transformative futures is helpful to developing futures literacy. These more unusual forms of futures help us move beyond preparation and planning purposes for futuring to also engage change, creativity and novelty.
The kind of futures too few are using
According to foundational work on futures literacy by Riel Miller (see this essay from 2015), diversifying the modes of using futures requires us to learn a way of using futures which is largely underdeveloped in society and even under-discussed in the field of Futures Studies.
Miller proposes a framework in which there are two broad ways people make assumptions about the future. One he calls Anticipation for Future and the other he calls Anticipation for Emergence. In the first category — for future — a person imagines a future because they have a strong interest in knowing something about those futures and what they imply for choices in the present. In the second category — for emergence — a person struggles to comprehend and make sense of ever-emerging novelty and appreciate the difference and diversity of our ever-transforming, complex world.
In the metaphor of ‘futures lenses’ — developing skills to sense and make sense of novelty and difference adds a whole new set of views we can take when looking at transformation. Miller points out that we need more ways to practice Anticipation for Emergence and become better at it as a society, not because ‘for future’ is the ‘wrong’ way, but because it is incomplete on its own. FLxDeep actively seeks to co-create practices for integrating anticipation for emergence in sustainability innovation processes.
In a nutshell, futures literacy calls for:
a) paying attention / being conscious when we use futures;
b) being reflective about the futures we use (our ideas, images, conceptions and sentiments about the future); and
c) being able to switch between different types of futures (eg probable, desirable, strange, transformative etc) for different purposes (eg preparation/planning or making sense of emergence).
Most importantly, it involves looking at our changing world through these many futures — for future and for emergence — and spotting opportunities to try something you didn’t realize you could try before.
Allowing futures literacy to be what it is while being what it is becoming
In the Futures Literacy across the Deep (FLxDeep) consortium, we appreciate complexity, novelty, and difference in our own innovation work by starting from the assumption that futures literacy takes different shapes in different contexts for different people. We are working as part of design teams for three of the eight EIT Climate-KIC Deep Demonstrations running in 2020 to help their design teams and challenge owners develop and apply Futures Literacy for their own systems-transformation ambitions.
Our expectation is that this skillset will emerge for these different groups of people in specific ways which are most meaningful to them. Therefore, our approach is to bring what we know about futures literacy, and learn together what futures literacy is for these specific Deep Demonstration teams. Our ambition is that the groups we work with find their own ways to develop and apply Futures Literacy that are practical and fully integrated into the demanding work of innovating to address Climate Change.
Learning futures literacy can feel mystical at times, but it is not. Perhaps this is because for millennia mysticism and futures were tightly interlinked. When we take as our starting point that the future does not (yet) exist and cannot be known, and whatever we consider to be futures are really just bubbling in our minds, sustainability innovators can then engage with processes for revealing, questioning, expanding, reframing and diversifying their ideas, conceptions and images about the future.
Futures Literacy is ‘diversifying how and why we use futures.’ From a relationship-oriented view of futures literacy, this implies any person or group can develop and apply the skill by being aware of how futures appear in their daily work and practicing switching among modes of futuring, kinds of futures, and reasons for inventing and using these futures.
Based on our experiences in FLxDeep 2020, we see great potential for futures literacy to enable innovators to use futures to innovate the present with greater resilience, creativity, and effectiveness. We look forward to what may happen next as futures literacy spreads through EIT Climate-KIC.
End notes:
[1] See Ed Cornish’s account of the founding of the World Future Society in its magazine The Futurist.
[2] The Futuribles made significant contributions to the way the European futures and foresight scene has developed. A classic futures studies text from this group is Bertrand De Jouvenal’s Art of Conjecture (1967, Basic Books, reprinted in 2012 by Taylor Francis).
[3] Leading voices for the concept of alternative futures include Clem Bezold who ran a foresight practice by the same name up until 2019, and Jim Dator who led the Hawaii Futures at U. of Hawai’i Manoa and developed a workshop methodology that operationalises the concept.
[4] See Richard Slaughter’s widely acclaimed PhD thesis, pg. 107.
FLxDeep (ty.fi/flxdeep) is co-funded by its six partners and EIT Climate-KIC.
