21st century divination

This video was shot right after a workshop, devised and run with experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats, called New Divination Techniques for Generating Alternative Futures.

It was part of a large collective effort mounted by the international futures community late last year at UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation).

The Global Futures Literacy Design Forum took place at the organisation's headquarters in Paris and consisted of more than two dozen "learning-by-doing labs" curated, organised and facilitated by top futures researchers, teachers and practitioners from Oxford to Jamaica.

The event was open to the public –– I'm not sure of the final number of attendees, but some 600 folks registered –– and was explicitly aimed at demonstrating, celebrating, and extending futures literacy humanity’s capacity to imagine and use the future(s) in all sorts of contexts, for all sorts of purposes.

I was also involved in another session; Imagination and Creativity: Gaming the Future of Migration and Climate Change together with my fellow futurists John Sweeney (Qazaq Research Institute for Futures Studies), Anisah Abdullah (Strathclyde Business School), and Daniel Riveong (Futures Centre).

Thanks to the head of futures literacy at UNESCO, Riel Miller, I've collaborated with the organisation several times before, and I was excited when he approached me last year about the Forum.

Its key objectives were institutional on the one hand and disciplinary on the other: "One is to prepare the ground for a UNESCO Ministerial Summit on Futures Literacy in late 2020 by showcasing and refining a range of already proven techniques for integrating Futures Literacy into government activities. Two is to build awareness and networking related to the development and diffusion of Futures Literacy."

Here's the description of the our workshop on 21st century divination techniques that appeared in the event catalogue:

One of the greatest human foibles is our ability to find patterns in just about anything, imagining that random phenomena carry meaning. Might that trait, technically known as apophenia, also be one of our greatest gifts? In this experimental workshop – prototyped especially for this occasion by conceptual artist Jonathon Keats and experiential futurist Stuart Candy – participants are invited to re-visit ancient modes of divination and also to devise some new ones. Simultaneously playing with and against tradition, our aim will not be convergence and prediction, but to generate new and diverse possibilities for action by collectively exploring and exploiting some of our most powerful psychological quirks.

A note of personal context here: legitimate futures/foresight practice is at times misunderstood as or unfairly conflated with a kind of charlatanry. I've generally aimed to avoid adding any fuel to that fire by eschewing anything that smacks of soothsaying –– tarot, tasseomancy, astrology, and so on (well... except for this one time at Burning Man, when I agreed to play the Oracle... but that's another story).

The low level of futures literacy in the population at large often finds people projecting trope-riddled preconceptions and prejudices about what a futurist's job entails, and particularly assumptions revolving around a misplaced obsession with prediction, and it's already challenging enough getting people to engage seriously in thinking about possible futures without playing into their most unflattering assumptions.

However, I recognise that it's also possible to protest too much, and get trapped by personal policies that can become too rigid. So when Jonathon, a superb conceptual artist, experimental philosopher and writer whose work I've admired for years, proposed a collaboration around exploring the possibilities for 21st century divinatory practices, the spirit of his curiosity –– avoiding wild-eyed faith on one side or blanket disapproval on the other –– got me interested. I took a step towards getting over a long-ingrained aversion. As he pointed out to me in one of our pre-event design conversations, the air of suspicion, and even demonisation, that attaches to these practices in post-enlightenment Western culture might usefully be taken as a cue not to avoid, but to be curious about, what we're collectively avoiding or denying.

Jonathon and I are currently working to bring the process to other participants in other locations, so I won't say too much here in terms of workshop detail, but I think it's worth adding, as COVID-19 spreads around the world, that even those of us who have spent decades helping to prepare organisations for inevitable surprises, are challenged to reckon with the question of how effective, or otherwise, our efforts have been.

It seems about time for a dramatic, collective rethink of how we engage with future possibilities.

The full catalogue of UNESCO's Global Futures Literacy Design Forum is available in English and in French, and a range of additional videos describing other programs at the event can be found here.

Related:
> Barbershop Futures
> Transforming the Future
> La Chose du Futur à Paris
> Where Do You Stand?
> Using the Future at NASA
> When Reality Outruns Imagination (Coral Cross)
> On Playing the Oracle: Foresight 101 at TEDx (video)

Transforming the Future

Last week a book was published by Routledge and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) called Transforming the Future: Anticipation in the 21st Century.

Assembled by my colleague UNESCO futurist Riel Miller, it documents an ambitious effort to develop a framework for Futures Literacy, via dozens of engagements with diverse communities all around the world over several years. The research is ongoing; this volume presents the story so far.

What it means to be ‘futures literate’ …[is] emergent. People’s fictions about the later-than-now and the frames they use to invent these imaginary futures are so important for everyday life, so ingrained and so often unremarked, that it is hard to gain the distance needed to observe and analyse what is going on.
…
[Anticipatory assumptions] are the most basic component of anticipatory activities: these assumptions are necessary for all ‘uses-of-the-future’ because ‘imagination’ can only be elaborated on the basis of the underlying assumptions.
…
The research is concentrated on how to define and assess the extent to which someone has or can become futures literate by collecting evidence of her capacity to understand the nature and role of the [anticipatory assumptions] needed to ‘use-the-future’ in practice.

My own contribution to the collection, 'Gaming Futures Literacy: The Thing From The Future', springs from our work with UNESCO a few years back, which included producing a special (bilingual French/English) edition of The Thing From The Future to distribute to delegates at the Youth Forum held in Paris in 02015. The introduction, condensed:

Amid pervasive uncertainty and accelerating change, one of our great challenges, and opportunities, is to make high quality engagement with the yet-to-be more widespread.
…
The good news is that our repertoire of uses of the future, the set of available ways to map and manifest possible paths or waypoints ahead, is far from exhausted. Exciting vistas have recently opened up with foresight’s ‘experiential turn’ towards fuller exploration of design, media and games.
…
This chapter presents a case study of an experiential futures card game called The Thing from the Future, reflecting on it as a method for popularising and demystifying futures, and explaining the design mechanisms that make it tick. While undoubtedly a limited tool (like all tools), its potential significance as part of a wave of efforts to spread Futures Literacy which are actually enjoyable to use may give heart to those in search of new ways towards distributed anticipation and social foresight.

The whole chapter ‘Gaming Futures Literacy’ is available here.

A short video about the larger Futures Literacy Labs project was released by UNESCO last year, and can be found here.

And finally, thanks to Innovation Norway, the book Transforming the Future is available in full here.

Related:
> La Chose du Futur à Paris
> The Thing From The Future
> The Polak Game, or: Where do you stand?

La Chose du Futur à Paris

A special edition of The Thing From The Future was distributed to 500 delegates at the UNESCO Youth Forum in Paris last week.

Since 01999 the Youth Forum has been the institutional mechanism for youth (which in the UN system means people aged 15 to 24) to make recommendations to the UNESCO General Conference.

This 9th edition of the Youth Forum incorporated, for the first time, a process aimed at improving participants'  futures literacy, developed by UNESCO's head of foresight Riel Miller. The Future Literacy Knowledge Lab, or FKL, is described in outline here and in detail here [pdf].

From my perspective as an advisor and senior facilitator for the Forum, among the most notable elements of the experience was the juxtaposition of this process, aimed at exploration and emergence, with the formality and fixity of international diplomacy's default settings. Ingenious workarounds were required in order for delegates to be able to converse and co-create in small groups given the geometrically pleasing, but collaboratively disabling, furniture arrangements. The literally nailed-down meeting room configurations reflected a firm expectation of centrally managed, as opposed to open or peer-to-peer, conversations.

How does such an architecture shape what happens, and what doesn't? An instructive contrast may be found in the opening and closing circles of Open Space, a meeting format which both symbolically bespeaks and practically enables something very different; a fluid and participant-driven flexibility (see, for example, Harrison Owen, Expanding Our Now, pp. 82-83). Maybe someone has already compiled a pattern language of meeting spaces. There's much to learn from such cases.

In any event –– despite its best efforts, here the furniture's expectations were not allowed to triumph! Far-reaching futures discussions were had, assumptions were surfaced and questioned, alternatives were articulated, expressive future artifacts and prototypes were created.

And at the end of the Youth Forum futures workshop, a special bilingual English / French The Thing From The Future / La Chose du Futur * was distributed to all attendees, a concrete expression of the intention to democratise and distribute futures thinking far and wide. Now these hundreds of delegates have made their way home to communities all around the world, cards in hand.

Thanks to UNESCO, to Youth Forum delegates –– and especially to Riel Miller and team for their efforts to open space for possible futures, not only in the proceedings themselves, but through providing an experience and a tool to use again in days and years to come.

Of course distributing cards and rearranging spaces are fine ways to begin; meanwhile I wonder about working with the deeper cultural currents in play. How may we make a habit of inviting fuller versions of ourselves to show up in these formal and ritualised settings? How might we offer better hospitality to the unusual, the creative, the crazy and playful and magical and wild and unborn in each of us?  For when it comes to "serious" conversations about the future, these voices too seldom find any place at the table.

Related:
> The Thing From The Future
> The technology of public imagination
> Whose future is this?

* Very special thanks to Cedric Flazinski of N O R M A L S design lab, and to Sandra Coulibaly Leroy of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) for their invaluable translation assistance. And on a semi-related note: bilingual Emglish/French Playsheets for the game are available via the UNESCO website [pdf, A4].