Whose Futures Matter?

How foresight can make the future more inclusive

It was unlikely that this article would ever get written. The authors, a diverse group of professional futurists, were spread out across the world: one in India, one in Thailand, one in the USA, a few of us in Europe, and one travelling back and forth between parts of Asia and Africa. We were unable to physically meet due to lockdowns and other restrictions. There was never a moment when we were all able to coordinate busy work schedules, time zones, childcare, long-distance relationships, and much-needed time off to make plans together at the same time. And we all seemed to have different and unconnected things that we wanted to say. Our present realities were so diverse, our ideas so varied, it seemed at times impossible to get our act together and produce something that would make sense.

But we had a point to prove. Differences in our realities and viewpoints were not a problem we had to solve. They were a reality we wanted to acknowledge. We were determined to turn our diversity into an asset by accommodating each other’s needs and concerns, by disagreeing openly and not trying to reconcile or eliminate contradictions, and by giving each other a platform to express ourselves. The result is this eclectic set of reflections you’re about to read. This is inclusion. This is what we aspire to.

Differences in our realities and viewpoints were not a problem we had to solve. They were a reality we wanted to acknowledge.

We know our discipline and practice are stronger and more effective when they are diverse, but we may still miss opportunities to ensure that is the case. In this article we take a dose of our own medicine, and reveal the dimensions of our own process that are potentially subject to bias—and how we seek to do better. If you practice foresight, we hope that this reflection will lead you to interrogate your own process and make it (even) more inclusive. If you do not practice foresight, you are thinking about the future all the time whether you realise it or not! We hope that this reflection will lead you to seek new perspectives on the future to learn from diversity in the present.

Include different concepts of future

In strategic foresight we do not believe that the future or knowledge is ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered. It emerges in the present through our collective perception, imagination, exploration, discussion, negotiation, and action. All of this usually takes place implicitly, and is subject to bias, power dynamics, path dependency, and institutional constraints. Structures sustain themselves by creating the future in their own image. The status quo may masquerade as neutrality, even when it’s heavily biased. No one and no institution is immune to structural racism, misogyny, heterosexism, and other forms of oppression—even those who make it their business to make the future as open and shared as possible. As futurists, we seek to reveal and test the ways in which our organisations’ anticipation of the future is biased and limited. This requires a diverse set of viewpoints to challenge baseline assumptions.

There is an over-reliance on data and a tendency to focus on forecasting rather than foresight, which is tied to the worldview that if we follow all the steps in the right order there is a way to know, discover or find the future. This is based on dominant narratives rooted in the colonial history of our world which have a desire to precisely define anything that’s unknowable or beyond what we can conceive. This is a trap and illusion that needs to be avoided in our work. We need to think about how we can expand and shift our view. The future is not a distant place we are trying to find, but a shared space that we’re trying to co-create. This intention can influence the way we practice, who participates in our processes, who designs them, and for what outcome.

The future is not a distant place we are trying to find, but a shared space that we’re trying to co-create.

The desire to identify the destination is also based in a Western modernist view of time as a linear entity where we are moving from the past into the present and towards the future. What happens when you engage with cultures and communities that have a cyclical understanding of time? It’s difficult because it can seem like they see the future as flat or as a representation of the past. This kind of oversimplification should be strongly challenged. The real problem is that we don’t have the vocabulary and syntax to interpret what that exploration of the future looks like. It’s about expanding our vocabulary versus excluding concepts, approaches, or worldviews that don’t fit into the neat categories we feel comfortable with.

Include signals that aren’t on your wavelength

Foresight activities generally begin with a scan of the horizon for signals of change, to see what is emerging in the form of trends and developments which are poorly understood but could grow in significance. This is where many futurists fall into an anti-diversity trap before they even get started: they only tune into signals that are already on their own wavelength, and classify everything else as “noise”.

A great deal of foresight literature produced in the West has focused almost fanatically on technological breakthroughs such as digitalisation and artificial intelligence. It is quite valid to argue that these signals of change are indeed indicative of significant junctures in economies and societies, and that organisations must pay attention to them. But critically conscious foresight should not assume that. From a diversity and inclusion perspective, the question to ask is why technological developments are so strongly regarded as signals worth tuning into. Why does technology occupy so much bandwidth in futures discourse?

Why does technology occupy so much bandwidth in futures discourse?

Could it have to do with the paradigm of progress, economic growth, and technology-led development that is core to the Western modernist view of future? In that case, technological breakthroughs may not really be the most momentous and fundamental changes of our time. Instead, they might just be the next chapter in a story of the future that has already been written by our societies: the story of the industrial revolution. This story, with its panacea of economic growth, protagonist wealth-creators, and villain saboteurs, is nothing new. It has told time and again from the luddites who destroyed textile machinery to the taxi drivers vilified in disputes with the technology firms who disrupt their working conditions. A radical, critical study of the future is needed to bring diversity of perspectives into the story, and allow the creation of something genuinely new.

What should we be paying attention to then? It is still important to discuss technological developments, but greater attention needs to be paid to context: their origins and implications. What values might determine the fate of different technologies in different contexts? What values affected by technology might be considered fundamental in other cultures, but not in our own?

In addition to questioning the salience of signals, inclusive futurists should also actively seek out signals which seem unfamiliar or irrelevant. We must be open to information that reveals our ignorance, and resist the typical reflex to bat it away as nonsense. We live in a world where the actions of a street vendor in a small town can spark a wave of political movements that topples regimes and whose effects are still unfolding ten years later. And where a disease outbreak identified in one city can lead to lockdowns affecting half the world’s population in a matter of months. The signals that aren’t on our wavelength give us a more inclusive view of the future—and they are the ones we most regret ignoring.

Include different imaginations of what the future might be like

Futures are not simply temporalities, moments in time, but spaces. Spaces for dialogue, spaces for the expression of deep senses of hopes, fears and losses. A large amount of empathy and humility is required to evolve around futures, and that, from all counterparts. Humility comes from both the heart and experience which, as we shall see later, calls into question the people we have in our team to make this apparent.

When participants engage in a futures process, they are plagued by the desire to do well. They engage in futures as a performance. Their understanding of probable futures is based on trends, currents they have isolated as what they believe you, futurists or their work supervisors, would like to hear. This necessarily implies a reproduction of contemporary systems and their oppressive flaws. One example of this is shown in a futures dialogue involving education specialists. They started with a scenario based on fast learning and fast understanding of anyone around the globe regardless of language and backgrounds. Participants were convinced of how positive and desirable their probable futures were. But their perspectives changed when they put themselves in the shoes of living beings in this probable 2050. One of them was a teacher now subcontracted by a large tech firm with no interpersonal relations with her students and stressed out by the obligation to meet daily quantitative requirements (12,000 students a week!). 

Whenever we produce new scenarios articulated around our images of the future, we build an ecosystem. We are fortunate to help advance a discipline which specialises in understanding why and how we anticipate, or to use our jargon, the structures and functions of human anticipatory systems and processes. Anticipation studies are interdisciplinary by essence and allow for a more holistic dialogue between anthropologists, biologists, jurists, political scientists and philosophers. We are at the core of complexity theory.

Anticipation studies are interdisciplinary by essence and allow for a more holistic dialogue between anthropologists, biologists, jurists, political scientists and philosophers.

Are you open to using other futures tools than horizon scanning? Do you, yourself, train to use tools you have never used before? Do you explore participatory futures and games or believe them to be too childish and therefore to be censored from your work with the government? One thing is for certain: change is emerging but change definitely has to be intentional.

Include thinkers who do not call themselves futurists

Futurists have discussed our power both as coordinators of foresight sessions bringing in experts, and our experience as people, as participants. Inclusive futurism means seeking experts who are more representative of the world we live in, who understand the communities we are working with. There are many dimensions to this, but having access to more inclusive networks is absolutely critical. Also, being conscious of who gets to be a part of these networks is a deeper level of inquiry that we must interrogate. Before we convene a panel, we also need to be conscious of who is best poised to engage with our audience, and use that as an entry point for choosing panellists. Serving the purpose needs to take priority, versus finding a well-known name or trendy person in the field who we follow online but who may not be able to connect the dots and push the discourse.

We are also aware of the need to find creative ways to engage our internal institutional communities. For example, we can hold tutoring sessions of five or six people within our organisation so people unfamiliar with foresight can talk and learn in a safe space. This can enable the kind of interdisciplinary discourse we need to elevate the foresight field internally. Similarly, horizon-scanning meetings and other simple interventions can create engagement within organisations when coupled with asking questions like “why and how does this matter?”.

Lastly, there is a need for us to take a more intentional look at how our language, our nomenclature of ‘futurist’ or even ‘foresight’ practitioner limits deeply who we might find and engage, and include (or have feel included). As futurists, who do you have in your team? The usual suspects? If so, it might be about time to ask why: do you require them to have ‘foresight’ on their CV? How many years of experience in the discipline and what futures tools do you require? Do you know of profiles at the periphery of studies you know nothing about, especially critical methodologies: situated-mediated identity theory, narrative poetics, Pelias’s methodology of the heart, buen vivir, Theatre of the Oppressed, Nzuri theory, research methods in Africana studies, design as a mode of listening, PVEST with youth, or psychology studies? Looking at diverse practitioners on the ground who may not identify as ‘futurists’ is a very important entry point to moving towards the kind of inclusion we want to see, and for that we need to move beyond our echo chambers.

Include the voices of censored and marginalised groups

Censorship appears to be uncommon in strategic foresight work but communications experts have discussed how products are often tailored for different audiences, which is more about amplifying the receptivity of audiences to the work rather than explicit censorship (although sometimes sensitive areas like geopolitical tensions can be intentionally tamped down to avoid negative reactions).

Unlike their muted concerns over censorship, there is large concern among futurists over the exclusive nature of futures work where vulnerable populations are rarely heard from, with some expressing the need to break our monopoly over futures work by empowering other groups (e.g., indigenous) to craft and promote their own futures. Many futurists are not academically trained in futures, and instead learned along the way: what if we could train more Black, Brown, and queer people, and those based in the global South? There are also systemic challenges rooted in the way our institutions function: do we pay the interns we train? Are we ready to hire outside recommendations made by the networks of futurists we have? Do we encourage rotation for younger profiles in senior positions, or do we hire people ‘for life’? Some encouraging practices are already occurring, funded by universities (such as the University of Montreal), and conducted by UNESCO through Futures Literacy Labs. Aspects of the UN Futures Literacy Summit (8-12 December 2020, open registration) are also meant to address these needs.

In addition to inclusivity concerns, some foresight practitioners worry about whether their work is ever used. Even in institutions and organisations where foresight work is valued, practitioners sometimes see foresight outputs used in an incorrect manner, for example to justify or service existing agendas instead of to challenge them. Because the future is constructed, we should always be aware of whom it is being constructed for and what purpose it will serve. These considerations bring into focus an important question for any futurist to constantly ask themselves: who and what is served by your work?

Include diverse needs in defining your purpose

Having a say on the future should be something everyone has the chance to do, because the future belongs to us all. However, many futures processes in the public sector continue to lack user centricity and remain inaccessible for many, especially when it comes to geographic and intergenerational representation. Strategic foresight in government or international organisations is often a top-down exercise. It is mostly done in isolation, involving just a handful of experts from similar schools of thought, and often not based on the idea of involving a broader stakeholder group represented. And even if there is an intention to open up foresight processes to a wider, more diverse group of stakeholders, designing for greater inclusion and diversity is made difficult by the lack of tools that allow for more participation. There is ample room and need here to explore the potential of open-innovation and crowd-sourcing platforms to enhance inclusion and diversity in foresight.

Another challenge is the foresight-strategy-action nexus and the lack of future awareness: in government, futures intelligence obtained through foresight remains oftentimes underused, especially when it comes to strategy or policy creation. Many strategies are constrained through the shortermism of political cycles they are bound to. While foresight looks beyond the expected, politically driven or motivated strategies are rather interested in the near future(s). If you know that your next political cycle will start in four years, why should you invest in thinking about the interests of groups who will not be affected until much later? In a similar vein, foresight for development purposes remains constrained by the lack of future awareness and the necessity to do the “fire fighting” first before moving on to the bigger, long-term picture.

Finally, the pursuit of evidence-based policy making—as is the current practice—tends to define future action based on past experience. Foresight, however, lacks such evidence since the future remains unwritten; and that unwritten future may disproportionately concern certain groups like future generations, whose interests are underrepresented in our current institutions. To be leveraged for more inclusive policy planning and design, foresight needs to overcome its “retrospective” bias and embrace the uncertainty of possible futures. Rather than solely informed by “what happened”, forward-looking policies should also take into consideration questions such as “what could happen”, and therefore be stress-tested against possible evolving futures. At the same time, in looking to the past, a deeper and transparent historical analysis of the root causes of current inequity and imbalance need to be understood and acknowledged, if we want to be able to effectuate change in the future.

Include diverse interests in your fundraising strategy

Strategic foresight risks becoming part of an architecture that recreates or reinforces systems of oppression when practical funding imperatives prevent it from serving a range of interests. Funding foresight work generally requires a strategy for ongoing engagement with recognised resource-holders, whether large-scale donors, philanthropists, companies or finance ministers. Futurists have noted that such engagements require making those holding the purse strings feel comfortable and secure. Practitioners should examine whether the drive to meet funders’ needs excludes perspectives which could have created social benefit. This is especially true in the public sector, where futures work is a public good that carries the attendant obligation to meet a diverse array of public needs, including those that may be underserved and underfunded by the government at large.

Examine whether the drive to meet funders’ needs excludes perspectives which could have created social benefit.

Practically, fundraising often requires a balancing act between offensive and defensive strategies. Examples of such strategies include adopting language funders are expected to find resonant or familiar, such as “resilience” or “future-proofing”; folding foresight into an established budget line item or attaching project outcomes to a specific budgetary priority; and prioritising topics that have a proven track record of garnering high-level interest. Performing this balancing act can absorb significant mental and emotional energy, as well as institutional resources. Some futurists have noted that redirecting resources towards ongoing engagement can lead to sacrifices being made to the quality of the work that is produced.

Futurists should stop to ask themselves whether their fundraising strategy risks not only a quality tradeoff, but also whether it precludes inclusivity. Are historically marginalised voices or novel perspectives typically only included in your team or unit’s project design when it becomes an explicit funder or institutional priority to do so? If so, what creative solutions might exist to fund work that puts both quality and inclusivity at its core?

Bringing it together

Diversity is necessary but not sufficient to build the futures we want. Inclusion means valuing people’s differences and perspectives, and integrating them into the way an organisation or society functions. It is the sense that we belong and can meaningfully contribute to a group. Inclusion concerns everyone. As futurists our social responsibility and the quality of our work are inextricably linked. All of us must challenge ourselves to do better, to hold ourselves accountable as a community, and to confront biases and blind spots in our minds and our institutions, because they are the ones who decide whose futures matter—and whose lives matter.

About us

The authors of this article are ?zge Aydogan, Pupul Bisht, Kwamou Eva Feukeu, Sandile Hlatshwayo, Alanna Markle, Joshua Polchar, and Prateeksha Singh. Our experiences include a variety of ethnicities, geographies, educational backgrounds, genders, sexual orientations, and organisations. It would be surprising and disappointing if we all agreed on everything. We therefore disclaim any suggestion that this article represents the views, position, or recommendations of any organisation or its members. It should be interpreted as a set of reflections to invite a dialogue, not an attempt to speak on behalf of any individual, group, or organisation.