A short Q&A on learning about futures literacy

Here is a select list of questions and brief answers that arose after the recent three day Futures Literacy introduction I ran on behalf of the Dubai Future Foundation. https://www.dubaifuture.ae/events/introduction-to-the-discipline-of-anticipation/

Thank you to one of the course participants for posing the questions.

1) What did you mean by substitution and complimentary change and how does it fit into our discussion?of futures literacy??When we imagine the future we do so on the basis of different reasons and using different methods. One of the reasons is to think about change and one of the methods is to look at change from different perspectives. Changes can be categorized in different ways. One common approach, particularly for tools (technologies), divides change into three types. One is a change that substitutes x for y but does the same thing only better or in a different way. Such substitution may give way to other kinds of change, but at first the desktop computer was a substitute for the typewriter and only later did it open up different ways of organizing work. More one-to-one, a traffic light substitutes for a traffic cop. A second category is change that reinforces existing activities or plays a complimentary role rather than simple substitution – I like to use the example of the telephone allowing people to do things they could not do before – such as making it easier to see each other in person even though people worried that distance communication would substitute for F2F (a similar fear is haunting social media). Finally there is a third category of change – emergence. Something that could not be imagined before it happened, like the relationship between the automobile and suburban life or climate change. Henry Ford would have been surprised to find out that the mass production of cars created the conditions that made suburban sprawl and CO2 build up possible. The link to futures literacy is that in order to be futures literate you need to understand why and how your imagination works and one of the ways it works is by thinking about change.?

2) If someone asked you why we couldn't predict the Covid 19 pandemic, what would be your simple answer? The simplest answer is that it is not possible to predict the unpredictable. A surprise is a surprise. If a phenomenon does not surprise you then it is not a surprise, it is something you expected, that you were already familiar with. It is repetition. As it turns out pandemics are familiar phenomenon. Someone predicting that there will soon be a pandemic is a regular occurrence. Eventually, these predictions may come to pass. But the component of a storm or a pandemic that is surprising, and in this sense non-predictable, is that the conditions in which the event occurs are always different. Indeed every moment is different as time and space change. Now is not the same as a second ago, the emergent present in a 'creative universe', is always unique. The conditions of that moment only exist at that moment - made up of repetition and difference. The Covid-19 pandemic was unique, like all such surprises, because the conditions were specific to the moment – global tourism, global supply chains, reduced concern for public health, less interest in public goods or ‘the commons’, decline of certain kinds of authority and power over people, knowledge, information, etc.?Given these unique conditions there was no way to even imagine the strangeness (unknowable in advance difference) of what actually happened.

3) You mention that we are our tools, that there is no separation between us and tools, what do you mean? Why are we our tools??I wear glasses and cook my food with heat and communicate through my phone, etc. These are all expressions of my way of living and being. My tools do not force me to do anything, even if social context can create conditions for conformism and habit. I can eat food raw or shout out the window but mostly I cook my food and use my phone. I'll give you an example of why tools are not destiny, are not causes but expressions of our ways of seeing the world and habits. Teleconferencing was something we could easily do 50 years ago, but we didn't. We privileged F2F. Building circular economies and low footprint communities was doable 100 years ago, why did we not do it? Instead we built skyscrapers. These are social choices, not technological ones. Our tools are us in the sense that it is our behaviours, desires, fears and hopes that shape what we imagine our tools can do for us and what we actually do with them – for peace or for war.

4) You mentioned the metaphor of a 'fish in water', what do you mean when you say that the fish doesn't know that it's in the water and how does this relate to our discussion?of futures literacy??What I'm trying to evoke is the difficulty of becoming aware of your context. Most of the time our context is so familiar, taken for granted, that it is difficult to imagine something else. We get locked into thinking that the ‘world’ only exists in the way that we understand it. Fish only know water. Being able to imagine outside our all encompassing context is relevant for futures literacy because being futures literate can liberate your imagination from some of these constraints – it is a way to notice things that don’t make sense in the world as you know it. To extend the metaphor, think of a fish that notices stones or even insects falling into the water – how can it find a way to ask where those objects come from? Realizing that our imagination is constrained and that there are reasons and methods to move beyond the constraints is one of the key benefits of futures literacy.?It is a way to become better able to sense, make-sense, and invent difference.

5) How does what you mentioned about 'tacit to explicit'?relate to our discussion?of futures literacy??There is much tacit knowledge. Things you know but don’t say or even think in your own head – you just use them without stepping back or noticing or giving voice to what’s in your head. There is a large literature on this topic – but the relationship to FL is simple in the context of Futures Literacy Labs – when you ask people to say out loud the futures they have in their heads they are obliged to make explicit what was often only tacit or unsaid. This is a direct way to get people in touch with the futures they imagine and begin to see why and where such imagined futures come from and the different purposes imagining the future can serve.

6) You mentioned that to reframe is to be open, can you explain further??This is a difficult one – but perhaps one way of looking at reframing is by referring to the fish in water metaphor above. Our imagination works within many boxes (frames) – breaking outside those boxes is what reframing is about in a generic sense. Once you have identified the parameters (box) that you use when you describe imaginary contexts/situations you can then break out of that box. But, since there are many boxes (narrative and analytical frames), there is a choice as to which box to go beyond. My preference, related to giving people an opportunity to learn more about anticipatory systems and processes, more about the different categories of anticipation-for-the-future and anticipation-for-emergence, is to go beyond the box of anticipation-for-the-future. In other words to illustrate what it means, in practical learning-by-doing terms, to describe an imaginary future in such a way that it offers an opportunity to see that there is more than one reason (purpose) to imagine the future. In other words, get people to play with imagining what it might be like to be in a world that was imagined for a different reason than planning - imagined for emergence, not 'for the future'. This changes what kind of future is being imagined and this different kind of future needs to be imagined in ways that are different than those imagined for the purpose of making bets on tomorrow. When this different, unfamiliar reason for imagining the future is at the origin of the reframing 'scenario' it obliges people to play in a context that disassociates (reframes) both the purpose of imagining the future and the methods used to generate non-probable and non-teleological futures. They experience both the difficulty and feasibility of using-the-future, their ability to imagine the not-past, not-present, for something other than planning and get a taste of the extent to which focusing our conscious (explicit) imagination exclusively on planning (anticipation-for-the-future) blinds us to emergence (to difference, to change). It is worth noting that in everyday life and in many 'indigenous' communities AfF is less dominant than it appears in the discourses and narratives of those whose exclusive aspiration is to colonize the future, to conquer tomorrow for good or evil. Which is one reason why reframing in order to reveal AfE is important - it offers a way to cultivate a competency, futures literacy, that makes difference easier to accept and understand, allowing for a repositioning of human agency away from the pursuit of superiority, control, and dominance, towards greater openness (less fear, more humility) to the incessant creativity of our universe.