Technological automation has made human involvement in many processes unnecessary, and global economic recession has left many unemployed. If these trends continue, what types of structures must be designed in order to redirect the wasted productivity and surplus mental power that is currently sitting idle? Clarifying a vision is one of the most powerful mechanisms for engaging a team, organization or community and getting them excited to push forward into new territory.
A successfully designed product or service should intentionally impact the thoughts and behaviors of society and culture, and serve as an example of the mindset and values of its creators. So, what does this future humanity look like? Creating that clear vision is a precursor to planning, and a key to creating the conditions to mobilize a group of collaborators around a common goal. Identify underlying values and beliefs, and discuss which ones to keep and which to abandon. Identify relevant events, developments, and trends that may have an impact on moving to a preferred future.
Create a preferred future vision that is clear, detailed, and commonly understood. All participants, or at least a critical mass, should feel a sense of investment or ownership in the vision. Translate future visions into action goals. Plan for action: Build in specific planned steps with accountabilities identified. Create a structure for implementing the plan, with midcourse corrections, celebrations, and publicizing of successes. As responsible, forward thinking humans, we all want to create a better future.
But what does it look like? Have we defined it? Have we described it? Who are we within it? What does interaction look like? If our idea gained mass adoption, what would that mean? What does that world look like? As an extension of visioning, scenario development is where the power of narrative comes in.
Throughout human history, we are defined by the stories we tell each other and ourselves. We create meaning and understanding by the way we remember our stories, like personal cargo that we carry in our minds. Our surroundings, natural or designed, are artifacts and objects within those stories. It is often suggested to create a minimum of three scenarios when considering future events or situations by identifying futures that are possible , probable , and preferable.
A Surprise-Free Scenario : Things will continue much as they are now. An Optimistic Scenario : Things will go considerably better than in the recent past. A Pessimistic Scenario : Something will go considerably worse than in the past.
A Disaster Scenario : Things will go terribly wrong, and our situation will be far worse than anything we have previously experienced. A Transformation Scenario : Something spectacularly marvelous happens — something we never dared to expect. Once the stories has been written that describes what each of these scenarios looks like, the conversation can begin.
What is the likelihood of each of these? What is the desirability? What are the correlating values of the people? And most importantly, what actions can be taken today to steer the ship and design towards or away from the various scenarios? Two common methods for determining a potential course of action are forecasting and backcasting.
In this method, the sequence of events or steps that led to that goal are imagined and defined, so that a roadmap to that desirable future is created. In either case, the scenarios generated serve to illuminate pathways to action. Futuring: The Exploration of the Future.
Foundations of Futures Studies. The Art of the Long View. December 8, at pm. Venessa Miemis said:. CoCreatr said:. Can you see what is NOT there? The missing category for me is [Spiritual]. May it complement your toolkit. Openworld said:. Data can be gathered, at least for affect on the lower range of the spectrum, on the affect felt by individuals and groups.
This can be done through body language, social network message analysis, voice stress analysis, bio sensors, etc. To do this, one might turn to E. These could be called lumenes, or replicating qualities of spirit. My sense is that as we learn and gain experience, we invest our attention and affect in the higher end of the spiritual continuum.
How to test this? One might devise experiments in which people at different ages witness of transcultural or transpecies acts of generosity. The experiment could then give them choices as to whether to invest in spreading such lumenes, or spending the same resources to advance a narrower memetic or genetic agenda.
Reference Inayatullah, Sohail. You can find all ongoing outputs related to this project via the PEC mini-site on Research to Action.
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About Us Research to Action R2A is a website catering for the strategic and practical needs of people trying to improve the uptake of development research, in particular those funded by DFID. Home About Us Cookies Contribute. The goal in futures thinking is to make sense of thinking and meaning in questioning and disturbing the way we anticipate the future.
The values and the stories that we create and share with others, personal or collective, create futures. The approach being stakeholder and learner-based, futures thinking enables participants to generate content and new insights — to define and undefine the future.
According to Sohail Inayatullah, the future or futures are: 1 not neutral; 2 that futures studies are not about, though to a certain extent, not prediction but insight; and 3 that values, belief systems, and culture have roles to play in describing and creating reality — alternatives and preferred. But there is more to that, I would add that the future can be created through engaged foresight Cruz, , and through the process of deep reflection, immersing in the future accentuates the power of the inner self to will and to consciously experience and feel the preferred and transformed futures today Cruz, Futures Literacy is not a tool or a technique but rather like reading and computer literacies, it is the ability to use our imagination to anticipate and create the future in diverse ways.
Futures literacy is the ability to anticipate and create invisible stuff — the future — through improvisation, experimentation, and invention Miller, It uses collective intelligence and through a futures literacy laboratory, futures literacy workshop unpacks and makes obvious an otherwise dormant assumptions of the future. Futures Literacy laboratories are spaces where participants learns and experience the different ways of using the future and the different kinds of futures Miller, The outcome of futures literacy events workshops, seminars, forums, informal conversations, classroom, training, etc.
Using the future to innovate the present requires the understanding and application of a spectrum of futures literacies i. Like history where we focus the study or analysis of the origins and implications of the past to the present and extrapolate this into the future, futures thinking utilizes our capacity to anticipate and imagine plural possibilities to transform strategies in the present.
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