Futures Literacy
“Something has changed inside us, as a house changes when a guest comes into it. We cannot say who has entered, we may never know, but there are many indications that the future enters us in just this way, to transform itself within us long before it happens.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke, 1902.
How can we assist students to become comfortable with problems they will face in their professional lives that they cannot solve, but for which they still need to make decisions?
Futures literacy rests on the human mental faculty that enables us to imagine. It is a broad competency for understanding how and why humans make use of their capacity to imagine the future.
There are a number of ways in which introducing students to foresight methods can help them become better decision-makers.
* Identifying the early signs of oncoming disruptive change, for example in a “horizon scan”, making use of sources such as news reports and expert consultation to identify developments that are not yet captured in hard data.
* Reframing and broadening the scope of what is considered relevant in decision making, for example by analysing cross-cutting sets of trends in multiple domains which could lead to large-scale shifts (‘megatrends’).
* Stress-testing plans and strategies against potential disruptions. One way to do this is by building pictures of alternative future worlds in which an individual or an organisation could find themselves (‘scenarios’).
* Engagement with futures can nurture empathy, enabling the mutual understanding of diverse points of view about the future and contributing to the establishment of common ground.
* Strategic foresight can help decision makers’ self-reflection, enabling them to articulate unasked questions, debunk implicit biases and identify assumptions that sustain their daily routines. Practising strategic foresight helps students build critical thinking skills primarily by inviting them to consider a diversity of perspectives and to question the status quo. Reflecting on their values, expectations and vision of the future can invite students to think critically about what they would want to change in the present and why. By challenging thought patterns, futures literacy can change the conditions of change — an important requirement for guiding transition processes in society and businesses.
* Foresight tools also enable participatory and collaborative learning by facilitating effective communication.
* Inspiring new ideas and perspectives for action and success. Creating alternative future scenarios, for example, empowers students, as it helps them discover their agency to influence the future and equips them with the strategic tools to work towards their desirable futures.
If you want to dig deeper Nesta has curated toolkits for futures here.
As always, our mindset frames the utility of these exercises. Our impulse to ‘solution-focussed’ thinking often truncates our sensemaking to ‘are we there yet?’
It is important to recognise that how people make sense of the world is undergoing a dramatic change. Emerging technologies, misinformation, and shifts in shared stories' continue to alter the kind of information we can access, how we interpret it, and whether we trust it. This in turn affects how we make judgments and decisions about ourselves, others, institutions, and issues.
Current and future disruptions to sense-making are relevant to policy makers in two broad ways. First, governments are sense-making institutions. They generate knowledge and distribute it to help the public make sense of the world. Second, the success of many policies and programs, including those designed to safeguard public health or sustain a healthy democracy, depends on whether or how the public makes sense of them.
This Canadian report maps out the key components of sense-making, identifies the forces driving change in sense-making, explores plausible futures that may arise from those forces, and highlights a range of policy-relevant implications that could emerge.
There are six key components to sense-making: The information ecosystem; natural and built surroundings; institutions; culture; sensing, feeling, and thinking bodies; and mental models. Each component has a distinct function that is essential to the processes individuals and groups use to gather and interpret information, construct meaning, make decisions, and take action. Though distinct, they are also connected to one another in a dynamic relationship that is constantly evolving as the world changes. This means that significant changes taking place in one component of sensemaking inevitably ripple through some of the other components, often with surprising outcomes.
Information ecosystem: The structures and spaces where we find and engage with information. Some of that information is raw and some is highly refined. It includes traditional information sources, such as the media, movies, and everyday conversations. However, it is increasingly dominated by digital interfaces and experiences, such as social media, online games, and streaming services. Today, despite unprecedented access to information, dominant digital technologies influence the information we encounter, and can interfere with our capacity to process and validate that information. Limited digital literacy means that some of the technologies shaping our experiences remain opaque and mysterious to most of us.
Natural and built surroundings: The physical environments that directly and indirectly shape our sense-making. Our senses, emotions, and cognition interact with our physical contexts in ways that affect how we experience the world. This includes built surroundings, such as public and private buildings, urban green spaces, and neighbourhoods. It also takes in natural environments, such as parks and wild spaces, and infrastructure, such as transit systems, electrical grids, and fibre optic networks, that shape how we access and process information.
Institutions: Organizations that produce and distribute knowledge as part of their core mission. Institutions take various forms and influence sense-making in different ways. They all share a degree of authority that derives from their inherent qualities, such as tradition, reputation, wealth, or age. An institution typically produces and distributes knowledge, while simultaneously championing a specific way of understanding the world. Familiar examples include traditional media, religions, governments, and universities. Novel entities, such as technology platforms and websites, are assuming the role of sense-making institutions—they are the new libraries, archives, and publishers.
Culture: The practices, customs, and material creations shared by a particular group or society. Culture includes common practices, activities, and ceremonies, and is a key determinant of sense-making. Its role is twofold. First, as the context in which we grow up, it sets a baseline of assumptions and expectations, including norms for understanding our world. This perpetuates unconscious biases by building them into future generations. Second, culture shapes the information we encounter. Some cultures share stories orally, others prefer text, dance, or visual media. Each of these media has a unique “language” with rules that shape the raw information we use to make sense.
Sensing, feeling, and thinking bodies: The internal systems that are humans’ primary filters on information and experiences. We might expect our senses, cognitive processes, and emotional systems to be ideally suited to the information ecosystems we create. This is not always the case. A range of cognitive biases and emotional factors can thwart our attempts to be rational. Likewise, aspects of the present information ecosystem are designed both to exploit and confound our biological capacities through engineered addiction, information overload, and emotional activation.
Mental models: Frameworks that help people understand complex concepts and systems. Mental models include both concepts (e.g. nation, gender, capitalism) and knowledge norms (e.g. humanism, the scientific method, and Indigenous3 ways of knowing). Most of us likely have hundreds of mental models that are internalized and operate without conscious application. Some of these paradigms are robust and others are flawed. Some probably contradict one another. But as a general rule, mental models function as sense-making “shortcuts” that help us deal with uncertain or highly complex circumstances.
Seven forces have the greatest potential to disrupt the processes we use to gather and interpret information, construct meaning, make decisions, and take action. These seven forces are: intensifying social surveillance, quantification and sorting; pervasive mis/disinformation; more and more powerful AI; less hospitable natural environments; convergence of the digital and physical; revision of shared narratives; and displacement of traditional knowledge authorities.