In this Futurepod episode; Riel Miller and Maree Conway discuss the urgent need for a theoretical exploration of the role and potential future of futures thinking.

Futures finding its place as a discipline

Rial Miller contemplates how futures thinking might find its future place in the academic research space. No pun intended. He noted that unlike gender studies or queer theory, futures studies as a discipline has not achieved its own legitimate placement within the research community, despite the fact that thinking about and acting toward the future, has never been more important.

Futures as a discipline faces some semantic challenges

The very word ‘future’ denotes some kind of destination that we can imagine and seek out, as if  the ‘future’ were hiding under a table and it is up to us to discover it. Likewise the term ‘foresight’ has its own challenges, both terms are laden with historical baggage that in Riel’s view, makes the repositioning of futures work challenging without a new language to shape our thinking.

Futures work seems preoccupied with process, methodology, tools and terms

Maree Conway also suggests that the discipline’s preoccupation with the ‘how’ has allowed us to mask the unresolved root challenge that futures as a discipline faces. What is it we do?  What is it that we as a discipline do?

• Not (just) scenario planning

• Not (just) visioning

• Not (just) artifacts

• Not (just) concerned with the epiphenomenon of planning

Both Maree and Riel are concerned with the sources and origins of the human imagination as central to futures thinking.

We can look for evidence.

We can test hypothesis

We can communicate findings

We can challenge our own assumptions about the future

What we actually do when we do futures is to reframe the present.To re-perceive the present. To change our thinking and our perspectives. It is only then, that we can find new actions that we can take in the present, to actually make change. So in this sense, futures thinking is also very much grounded in an intentionally divergent view of the present, and the way in which this shapes our capacity for imagined futures.

We can refine this pluri-epistemic phenomenon, which is the imagination. Our ability to imagine alternative futures both within and especially beyond, the context in which we have shaped our own knowledge and beliefs.

If imagination is central to futures thinking, then as futurists

• How can we understand what structures our imagination?

• Where do we understand imagination comes from?

• What role does it play in perception? 

What futures thinking needs is a strong theoretical foundation 

Riel argues that more than ever, what is needed for the discipline of ‘Futures’, is a strong theoretical foundation (and new evolving language) that enables people to take this pluri-epistemological posture towards our futures imagination.  His thesis lays out:

If we understand futures thinking as a series of anticipatory systems and processes then we acknowledge that the ‘future’ in any singular sense, does not exist. Our imagined futures then, emerge as a result of our own assumptions, bias, worldviews and perspectives on the world which are necessarily contextually-subjective to our own experience.

If our imagined futures are contextually related to our own experience; to imagine alternative futures beyond our own experience (worldviews, values, bias) then we must acknowledge that futures thinking is inherently anticipatory, participatory and emergent.

If we agree that futures are necessarily anticipatory, participatory and emergent - then we must both 

• Acknowledge the role of dominant western discourses in shaping imagined futures and 

• Intentionally seek to expand our futures frame to deliberately invite alternative epistemologies in order to imagine alternative futures outside of our own frame.

The intention cultivation of a strong pluri-epistemological theoretical foundation provides futures as a discipline, with a shared platform for what it means to cultivate futures capability.

Will AI replace futures practitioners? 

Further demonstrating Maree’s point around the discipline’s preoccupation with process; she notes anecdotal discussions surrounding the use of AI  to synthesize and even scenario plan. I also, have noticed conversations online ‘will AI put futurists out of a job’, and ‘here’s how to get OpenAI to create futures scenarios with these prompts’. As if the very value of futures thinking is the synthesis of such narrow context stimulus, and that AI could potentially fulfill the same determinist imagination role that futurists play. The issue here isn’t the use of AI in replacement of futures thinking; the real danger is two-fold:

It perpetuates dominant and imperial futures thinking. AI generative ability is based on past and present knowledge to synthesize and to imagine. So whilst AI can indeed identify potential causal relationships within the narrow context of its knowledge - it cannot do what is most required of futures thinking, which is to invite alternative epistemologies and non-standard ways of seeing and knowing into conversations about the future. Ai will simply reinforce western-centric colonized versions of imagined futures, to our detriment.

It reinforces the framing of futures thinking as the exploration of a linear causal relationship between information and imagination. When in fact, as a discipline, our aim should be to think more expansively beyond dominant forms of information, worldview, symbolism and semantics.

We must seek to decolonise futures thinking

Maree Conway argues that the way in which our underlying assumptions, bias, worldviews and perceptions shape our capacity (and the nature of) our imagination is self-limiting and prevents us from taking a more ontologically expansive imagination of possible futures.

They contend that both probable and preferred futures, are anchored in the past, in that they spring from an imagination bound to its present historical, social and epistemological contexts and confines. The challenge with this frame is that we now live in a world which contains elements for which there is no precedent. How then, do we incorporate these components into our imagined futures? Those futures which emerge outside of the context of the probable and the preferable, represent different ontological futures. That is to say, they do not spring from the ontological basis that we have historically anchored our imaginations to.

The ontology for ‘anticipative emergent futures’ is different. Therefore the ‘ways of knowing’ are also different. Which offers us fertile ground in its encompassing of a diversity of futures and epistemologies. Which in turn, offers us as a futures community, a dynamic way of taking advantage of futures thinking.

We must run toward complexity and uncertainty

Both Maree and Riel contend that people tend to run from complexity and uncertainty; or seek to reduce or contain it entirely. This approach in itself, puts us in opposition to complexity, reinforcing that complexity is to be avoided. This kind of posture binds our futures thinking to the historical (and self-limiting) frame of our own experience, epistemology and therefore imagination . . and directs it toward the goal of controlling or dominating complexity. Even this framing of futures thinking, legitimizes imperial versions of truth and perpetuates the very colonizing of futures thinking that we seek to break from, delegitimising indigenous futures and non-mainstream epistemologies that have much to offer.

Moreover, given the nature of the world we live in, this bipolar posture toward complexity renders us brittle and vulnerable, in a world where uncertainty and complexity is increasingly the norm.

Is Western-dominated futures thinking showing itself to be insufficient?

The rise of indigenous futures, indo-futurism and the continued evolution of afro-futurism, is already demanding an ontological expansion of futures thinking as new ways of knowing and being, infiltrate futures work. The question being discussed here, is how do we help people to think differently about emerging futures? 

We need to cultivate ontological expansion

A pluri-epistemic approach to futures imagining builds our foresight capacity, shaping it as more ‘conscious foresight’; enabling us to identify the contextual systems at play in our own imaginations and cognitive foresight approaches and push to expand beyond those boundaries by inviting more anticipatory and participatory futures input, and necessarily, other epistemologies.

We should swim with complexity rather than run from it

Anticipation for emergence welcomes uncertainty. What’s more, it provides fertile ground for futures thinking and repositions the idea of human agency toward a position of humility in the face of complexity. It also repositions futures thinking away from tools and methodologies, and toward a deeper sense of understanding (and agency) as it relates to the epistemology and ontology of futures work and how this surfaces in futures literacy, and more importantly, futures agency.