Futures Thinking Tools

 Resources for Tomorrow

 1.  Imagination, courage and integrity are our best resources. They are an integral part of future thinking.

 2.  There are also two excellent texts that map futures thinking and some of the tools and strategies futurists deploy to disrupt the present so that we can experience it anew: as a surprise! 

• Richard Slaughter with Marcus Bussey (2005) Futures Thinking For Social Foresight. Tamsui, Tamkang University Press  

• Sohail Inayatullah (2005) Questioning The Future: Methods and Tools for Organizational and Societal Transformation. Tamsui, Tamkang University Press [Link]

3.  The ability to reflect, to sit in silence, dwell in the moment - yet step outside it. 

The Vision 

Futures thinking can help your organisation, your business, your community and your school by loosening the bonds of habit that maintain old and often dysfunctional patterns in place. In doing this of course, futures thinking can also help people individually re-imagine their potential and reclaim their future. 

The most basic futures tool, yet the most powerful, is the question. A question holds within it a quest, a journey or process that moves us across unknown terrain. In myth this terrain was filled with obstacles, dangers, monsters and seduction. A true quest is open ended and is energised, not with reference to the goal, but rather by an attitude of acceptance, by courage and imagination, by simplicity and determination. 

Gandhi once said: "The seeker of truth is often required to grope in the dark." 

Futures thinking is about this quest, this groping in the darkness of habit and ‘dull compulsion': personal and social ignorance. The quest is not so much for truth, as for an understanding that the present is not absolute, it is much more fragile and temporary than habit and power would have us believe. We can evoke a qualitatively better tomorrow from the potentiality that lies hidden within the social and personal identities that dominate us today. 

Some Questions

What are our reproductive futures?

What are the futures for oil?

Does Capitalism have a future?

Does truth have a future?

Will there be a planetary civilisation? And what about community?

What are the futures of terror?

How can we generate a shared sense of direction for our organisation?

What are the futures for schools?

Will robots have rights?

Will democracy survive?

Do institutions always need to kill creativity?

What are the futures of religion?

Can we be creative and commercial and still remain true to ourselves?

What can I do for my children to create a bright future for them? (With out stealing other's futures) 

The Practice

Questioning is where futures thinking starts. With an eye on the future horizon there is much to do today. 

Genealogy

We need to unpack how we got here. Ask: what historical processes determine who we are? What does our society hold dear and what does it fear? What forces created our organisation?  What histories have been suppressed? What myths sustain us? 

Mapping

We also need to look at the main driving forces at work today? What trends are there? What can we know about tomorrow based on today's symptoms? Can we map these? Can we learn from the possible futures in order to act on the present? This leads to: 

Creating Alternatives

Can we build the personal and social resources necessary to engage today creatively? What capacities are needed in order to achieve this? 

Ordering

We need to ask what is it that holds the world together today? How is the present ordered to make it legible? What organising principles exist that frame our questioning? Direct our thinking and aspirations and also prohibit certain forms of quest. There are legitimate and illegitimate questions. There is also silence. 

Immanence

How do we enter silence? What can we know? What known unknowns are there? and what unknown unknowns? What dreams wait the telling? What mystery awaits to be engaged? What ‘magic' unleashed?

Evocation and the Power of Possibility

Tackling such questions provides the back drop to deeper futures think. Here we look to emergence, to what is present today in seed form that might bring about unexpected change tomorrow. What possible wild cards are there? What is present in the unknown that might just be discernible amidst the ebb and flow of present concerns and constraints? Can we access this? can we innovate? Better futures are possible. 

Transformation

Futures thinking is an exciting social technology that allows us to transform ourselves and our world. Its methods, tools and concepts build bridges between our aspirations and our lived reality. Futures thinking evokes the best in us and transforms our world. 

Futuresevocative.com can help you apply futures thinking.