They call me Futurist

I am often called futurist. I don’t particularly like the label although it’s far better than the term futurologist. It is not apposite for someone who is mostly concerned with today’s dynamics and events. Clearly I have a stake in our collective tomorrows. I have been thinking and writing about what’s ahead for our species and our societal compartments for many years.

Studying possible futures through any lens is inherently uncomfortable due to its uncertainty and complexity. Personally I find the study of history equally uncertain, given its authorship – a story most often written by elderly and wealthy white men on the victorious side of events.

An example to which I often refer are the opposing views on biological behaviour offered by the naturalist Charles Darwin, whose observations were confined to the warm waters around the Galapagos islands, and the Russian geographer Pyotr Kropotkin, who observed nature in the cold tundra of the arctic. Darwin saw competition within and between species everywhere he looked, while Kropotkin saw only cooperation. Our preference to trust opinions by a British naturalist rather than a Russian anarchist resulted in misinterpretations of Darwin’s work on the evolution of species that could have been avoided had we also taken Kropotkin’s discoveries into account.

This is possibly why the most favoured approach to the study of alternative futures in the West has been through the development of tools which force deductive reasoning and analysis. As comforting as these might be, they also have the unfortunate effect of circumscribing creation of new knowledge and then repackaging it into the most familiar, accepted, and acceptable ontological framework – that of industrial economism - along with its technocratic and socio-political origins.

Thus, even the most radically innovative future scenarios (including all the escapist science fiction that’s out there) are really only extrapolations of the current worldview (moral code) and world-system resulting from that narrative. Humanity remains at the centre of everything while the “more-than-human” world is peripheral, and therefore inconsequential to most people. This is why the results we get, from both quantitative and qualitative tools, are so often predictable and banal and less than useful.

Even considering the tension between destiny and desire we set up the need for much wider thinking than is usually forthcoming from the “Scenarios-R-Us” futures community.

For this reason alone I find myself veering away from conventional tools and methods per se, especially those that have their genesis in the Eurocentric tradition, preferring to incorporate inductive reasoning, polyocularity, multicultural dialogue, intergenerational design, complex systems thinking, and indigenous wisdom traditions into my repertoire of possibilities.

While it’s true that I have formulated new approaches to sense-making, and the curation of transformational experiences through a combination of visualisation, mapping and dialogue techniques, these invariably integrate a variety of new ‘tools’ within a non-directive, inclusive, and fluid-like praxis.

Over and above using the standard futures knowledge base and accompanying toolkit there are several ways in which we can enhance our approach to studying possible futures, such as interdisciplinary collaboration, long-term systems thinking, predictive analytics and modelling using AI, multiple stakeholder engagement, as well as the use of ethical frameworks such as decolonisation and degrowth archetypes, for example.

By incorporating these approaches, we can enhance the rigour, relevance, and effectiveness of studies focused on understanding and preparing for a future we might not want but need to accommodate. We might also be able to avoid imposing purely technocratic, tired, or used futures on a generation that has altogether different expectations, resulting from the need to think about their relationships with each other and the planet in totally new ways.