The futures dilemma:to be left behind or make a difference

- Thank you, professor, that you agreed to give an interview for a special issue of the World Futures Review. And to make a start to our conversation, I would like to ask you, a renowned futurist, to describe our current world. What would you distinguish today in comparison with the previous eras?

- As a futurist, what I focus on when I present this topic is heterogeneous nature of our times. By heterogeneity, I mean the following. The normal argument is that time is accelerating together with social changes. While I accept change is accelerating, especially demographic and technological change but change is heterogeneous—different for different people, ages, and parts of the world—and that is what causes the conflict. Artificial Intelligence may be erupting in one part of the world, but other parts are quite traditional, agriculture, and industrial. There is slow time and quick time, and disruptive time—all at the same time. The simultaneous nature of time, plus understanding that everyone—even in a small village—anywhere in the world knows or has heard about these changes, make this time a unique one. Thus, the rate of changes differs: it is so quick in some places and not so quick in the others.

The second part is the convergence of changes, from demographic to political to genomic and machine learning, etc. Those changes themselves make this a unique time. And the lesson people forget about this is not just technology or demographics, but is the nature of what you might say understanding of consciousness, how people become aware of themselves. It is the mind revolution or meditation revolution or simply the sense that we aware that we are the species. I would put these three things about this period as really unique.

- So, you have mentioned that in some parts of the world changes are coming very quickly, while in the others things still follow the traditional track. From the traditional perspective, people have always placed their hopes and aspirations into the future. A wish for something better has been there, in the reality that is coming. Now we see two distinguished group of people who are either pessimists or optimists about the future. Why is this happening? Why should we change this traditional perception now?

- Let me use this illustration. If I look into my father’s village, it has not changed so much over the last thousand years. Strict social hierarchy and the patriarchy remain, the landlord is still there, and subsistence farming continues. In contrast, is my mother’s village. They have sanitization, they have Wi-Fi, TV, and a Facebook page (Kolo Tarar—the global village). Though these two places are physically close to each other, the change is quite pronounced.

- The second part was the expectation of linear progress—the end of religion and dogma. However, we are seeing a dramatic pendulum swing. In my work, with Johan Galtung on Macrohistory—the study of grand patterns of changes—we asked a number of core questions. These included: what is linear in the sense of stages when things are getting better (this is a theory of progress); what’s cyclical in terms of decline; and what is a pendulum. The argument now can be very clearly made that many people feel a part of the progress—like women’s rights, LGBT rights, dramatic changes in technology—difficult. They do not long for a different future, they long for the traditional past. They are hoping that things will slow down and they can go back to a world where they felt comfortable.

It is the changing nature of change that makes us uncomfortable. I had one CEO who went to one of my courses a few years back, but his story has stayed with me as it is foundational. When we did one activity about the inner process—how to come to terms with our changing life—he said that his metaphor of life is playing tennis. When he would to go to meetings, he always knew there would be a clay court. He had learned how to excel at being a clay-court player. Now when he goes to the meetings, he no longer knows what the rules are—whether it was a grass court or a hard court or a clay court? And sometimes he finds out that he is not even playing tennis. So, suddenly the nature of changes had changed. And he was not sure what to do, and he was in my view wisely asking, “What is a better metaphor that I can understand the changing world?” So, we changed his metaphor from a man who plays on one court to a man who can play on multiple courts. So that meant for him re-skilling and excelling not just at IQ, but TQ (technological intelligence), EQ (emotional intelligence), and SQ (spiritual intelligence). His view was, “The world is changing I need to adapt.” In contrast, many prefer a return to the used future—what they used to know. “The world is changing and I’m going to ensure that the other people adapt.” However, I will still insist on patriarchy, I will still insist on hierarchy. I don’t need to change: reality does.

We see many people finding the changing world difficult, wanting their past. This is the pendulum. We go from one extreme to another extreme. We swing between many things, for example, religious systems and scientific systems; progressive politics and traditional politics.

- A very relevant example! Thank you for this illustration of futures studies being not only an academic discipline but something applicable to our daily life. And what you have mentioned, helps us to understand that futures studies change our perception of reality, our personal narrative, and metaphors we are using from day to day. But what else can we get from futures studies?

- Originally, traditional meanings of foresight were technical, expert-based, and highly qualitative. What I learned from my teacher, Professor Jim Dator in the 1970s was that Futures Studies had to be participatory. And what I learned is that participation is not just better represented, but the use of different ways of knowing. It is always asking not just “who’s not in the room?” but what ways of thinking are we missing. In recent years, we have moved from technical futures to futures methods and tools that are epistemologically sensitive and deeply inclusive. To me, this inclusion is crucial for a better product, a workshop, an outcome, particularly for a national outcome, because more voices are heard.

I ran one workshop in rural Australia. It was a 2-day workshop, and we focused on a rural health transformation. The second day we had a vision exercise and it was based on 5Ps: Prevention, Precision, Personalization, Participation, and Partnership—a new model of health. It was a great vision, but they were concerned their vision was too far away. That’s the center of your question. And one of the directors in the workshop said that it was an amazing vision, but it was 2030–2040. “I need something for today, - he said, - for the next 3–4 years” So, I stopped the meeting and did what we call an “open space technology.” I asked, “Who wishes now to make this vision real and take some steps onward?” This is called the “Monday morning question.” 10 people raised their hands and said, “Here are things we are excited about.” And I said to 50 people in the room to go to the table they find the most fascinating. Seven tables filled and we came up with seven research questions, design questions, and initial action learning projects. Once the meeting of top managers was over, the executive director said: “All seven projects are funded.” Meaning, you now have funding to make your research questions real. The conclusion was that the vision of 2030 or 2040 found a way to be activated in that case in 2017.

Part of what we do is to make the vision impossible to create a new road. But if we do that and leave people behind, we have to meet people where they are. I think, this is the kind of Futures Studies I enjoy the most: linking Horizon 1 where I am too busy, and Horizon 2, the space of uncertainty, ambiguity, anxiety with Horizon 3, the stage of vision. In the mentioned workshop, we create a bridge.

Some futurists try to act as bridge-makers talking about trans-humanism and us living a thousand years. It is tricky and they are not bridging with the concerns of someone who is in an impoverish place where the life-span is 40 years. For me, the role of a futurist is to create a vision, enable it, and act as a bridge-maker between tomorrow and today.

- It is a very meaningful and binding metaphor. Giving examples, you have mentioned about several workshops. You run them around the world. How does your audience differ and what causes those differences in your opinion?

- The difference tends to be the level of suffering. This has taken me many years to learn. I remember, I was doing a workshop in Croatia after the war there. The audience felt that I was too positive, I was too visionary. And in the midst of the flow, we had to change the question “what is your preferred future?” that I like to start with, to “what’s the worst-case scenario?” By addressing the trauma, the pain in the room, people were able to express their fears. Once we did that, it became easier to move toward what was preferred, what was the best case. A community with trauma reacts differently to a community with high income, high participation, and high gender equity. They want to create even a greater future, to find more opportunities. For others, leaving the trauma is the first step. I am working on a new piece for UNESCO titled “The Stage Theory of Futures.” Stage One is “It’s not fair!” For people at this stage, the most important is how I make the world safer and more just. Methods and tools need to address perceptions of unfairness. Stage two is “risk mitigation.” Now people have some success in the world and they need some methods and tools to ensure that this success will not disappear. There I use scenarios. People at this stage do not need a better world; they want to make sure that the bread they have will not be stolen. Risk mitigation works best for them. Once we have done that, we move to opportunity creation. Often, individuals become stuck in avoiding risk. You are not moving; your world is changing, and you think how you can be better. Here we use emerging issues analysis. What are the emerging opportunities and how I can go from fear to possibility, or in others words, from fear to a better future? And once I have taken them there, I ask the next question “how do I create alternatives?” which are the right possibilities. And we use a way to emerge from four to six possibilities, and people move further. We then move toward directionality, the future we truly wish for.

So, the main lesson for me I have learned is to meet people where they are. Some do not need to talk about Artificial Intelligence. They want their pain to be addressed and try to find more justice. I work with Ivana Milojevic, my partner at Metafuture, who has developed a toolkit to help those in conflict. She merges conflict resolution theory with futures methods, focusing on tools to find ways forward when conflict arises.

- It means that futures studies are not only about some technique and technical things but also about some psychology. One has to be very sensitive to the audience in front of which they stand.

- Yeah! Absolutely! I remember, when I was very young, I gave one speech and I was very technical that time, certainly more than I should have been. I gave quantitative data on an emerging sector. And I remember well a CEO fell asleep during my presentation. Was it because he was sleepy? No! I gave a wrong speech. I was not communicating! I thought that communication was a giving data. Then I realized that communication is an act of connection between the two ways of knowing of two people. Now I use multiple ways of knowings: role plays, games, meditation, lectures, workshops, participation, etc. I always try to find out what the framework is to optimize what I need, what they need, what we need.

- So, it means that methods that futures studies and foresight use do not differ much from methods used for teaching kids with a regular change of activities every 15–20 min that they do not fall asleep and do not lose their attention.

- 100% right and truly correct! And we know from the research that a day after the lecture, from 80 to 90% of the information is forgotten. Every group needs a different approach. For example, when I work with people over 70 or 80 and I say, “Let’s vision 2040” they reply, “We’ll be dead!” I remember I was in the workshop The Future of Aging and people said, “Look, we can’t vision 20 years ahead.” We then shifted the time horizon to 5 years and focused on next steps.

- You have also mentioned the use of scenarios at a certain stage. How would you evaluate the process of scenarios planning nowadays and, let us say, 20 years ago? Is it easier or more difficult?

- It’s much easier now!

- Why?

- Twenty years ago, few organizations engaged in scenarios. Now it is easier because many people use them. When I start a workshop now, 50% have done scenarios because it is common in many businesses and government sectors. However, it is more difficult, because people have been trained in the Shell scenario method, which is “the uncertainty 2x2 method.” I rarely use that method. Therefore, a part of my work is “decolonizing” them from the Shell method. Because, firstly, it creates artificial constructs of four futures. And those futures will not tend to deal with outliers as well—pandemics, for example. Secondly, they do not include the organization or the person in that future. They are designed in a way that the person who brought them to life is not a part of that future. The Shell method takes away agency. That’s why a lot of my work suggest that there are better ways to construct scenarios.”

I use a different scenario method. But there are two of my favorites. The first one is the integrated method. First, I ask, “What do you prefer?”, which tends to be very idealistic, but it engages people asking what they want. Then I ask people the next set of questions, “What do you discern that you forgot? What is missing? What can’t you see?” Now they bring in the opposite, the Hegelian dialectics. The third step is integrating and connecting the preferred with the disowned. And after that, we look for something we have totally forgotten but that can change everything. So, this method I find more useful because people are engaged and involved, and in any scenario they are not a bystander or outsider.

And the second method I use a lot these days is “No Change,” which means if we do nothing, what happens. People ask themselves: if we do nothing, then marginal change happens; if we do 2–3 short activities that are politically safe, what happens. When I see movement from “no change” to “marginal change,” now I can ask “what is adaptive change?” For example, how do we adapt to aging society? How do we adapt to gender equity? AI? Robotics? The end of capitalism? The internet of everything? Driverless cars? Global governance? This method helps people to become involved in dramatic change asking, “how do we adapt to that?” Are you going to be left behind or do you want to make a difference? And the last thing I ask is, “what is the radical scenario? What if all our assumptions are wrong?” So this makes people move from where they are to where they can be. This creates amazing meta-conversations that challenge the core assumptions of the future.

So, we have gone from a very few people doing scenarios to many people doing them. But many of those scenarios while useful to some extent, ultimately fail as agency is secondary to the process. They wish to mitigate risk not change the self or the world.

- During our conversation, AI, robotics, and new technologies have been coming here and there. But I feel that futures studies are more “human” than any other academic discipline and it could be compared, let us say, only with philosophy. However, AI and Big Date are almost irrevocable part of everything everywhere. Do you think that 1 day these innovations will conquer futures studies making people a supplementary human part of it? In what ways the fetishism of AI and robotics are colonizing the field?

- Brilliant! I totally agree with you! That’s why I always say that in Futures Studies we have some people who say that they are futurist, but they are just forecasting more robots or going to Mars or more AI. That’s not Futures Studies. Such people just make a particular forecast about one technology. This begins the process, but it is a narrow approach. We want to open up the conversation, not close it through the pretense of knowing. For example, with aging, we might ask: “Will we live longer because of artificial intelligence or because of meditation and healthy diet and designing cities with low pollution and high community?” I think that’s what you are saying.

Some scholars say that we will only live longer because of genomics and removing from the picture social and spiritual factors that create better health. Therefore, our role as futurists is to challenge the assumptions we make about the future.

However, the second part for me of what you are saying is the human aspect of change. If we have technology in our hands and we do not change the capital structure, it means that we all are working more with lower attention. In the future, what will AI with deep participation and deep spirit will look like? In that future, we all are working 1 day a week with the designers of the future engaged in meditation, dancing, music, and emotional connection. The purpose of technology is to free our humanity, not create an AI fetishism. I absolutely agree with you, and our role as futurists is totally disrupt conventional discourses of technology, bring in the spirit, community, and nature. We have to see those different ways of thinking about the future that enhance participation, equality, and slow time. The latter is utterly important because it gives us the ability to decolonize time and feel we have more time. If time slows down, we become more mindful and live more enhanced life.

- Could you elaborate a bit more on what you have just said, describing ethical issues that futures studies raise now as never before?

- For me, the ethical issue is “Am I epistemologically clean? Am I aware of my own biases, my own narrative?” Always, when I run workshops or lectures, I say, “We should speak our story from where we stand.” All of us are biased. And if I say, “Here are my biases and my preferences, here is my metaphor,” it creates an opening space where people will tell their stories. In a way, we are clean if we say, “Here is my worldview instead of this is the truth.” And you can see from what I am saying that I believe in multiple perspectives, meeting people where they are, participatory anticipation, etc. So, once we begin with our biases, then the ethical frame is “I’m clean and open.” I move from ethics to narrative. And what is the story behind an ethical statement? Once I am aware of the story, then we can have a far more informed and nuanced view of ethical cost there.

- I like the examples of questions you give in our conversation. Questions are very important in any kind of research. How can we learn asking right questions in futures studies?

- It depends on what type of a futurist you are. Some futurists want to optimize organizational performance. So, they use scenarios, risk navigation, trend analysis to help them optimize in today’s world that they can be better. This is option one. Option two, reveals people who are here not to optimize but to disrupt and say, “lets rethink what do we, how we see reality.” They are intentionally provocative. They show up just to ask crazy questions, to get people uncomfortable, and in that state lead them to a new strategy And we see “futures of optimizers” v. “Futures of disruptors.”

The third type of futurist is a visionary one, when people want neither disrupt nor optimize but to find out “who are we truly? What are our concrete purposes?” They want to work with purpose and vision; they work on alignment. For me, first of all, you have to make clear whether you want optimize or to work toward purpose or be provocative. I try to get people and myself very clear in every situation about what role I wish to play in the questioning process.

But I think what I get from your question is, again, the role of a futurist in Futures Studies is in the continuous process of questioning. That takes us deeper and takes us broader, and moves us from the future that is colonized by the external to the future that one might argue to some extend is more authentic to who we are and where we wish to go.

- And this process is closely linked with both theory and practice. You yourself are a prominent theorist and practitioner. What is the right balance for a futurist between these two components, theory and practice?

- I will tell you my experience. In my view, the theory is text, but in a workshop setting if you bring theory, people disappear. I tell every audience that what I am going to do is backed by decades of theory from great futurists like Galtung, Dator, Shrii Sarkar. But I also say, “In this workshop, we are not going to be theoretical. We are going to meet you where you are, and you are here for strategy and transformation, for new ideas; and we are going to create a process for that.”

However, futurists who only do facilitation are not grounded in theory. They do not know why they are doing what they are doing and they seem lacking a bit of gravity. For each of us, we need to be grounded in theory and practice, narrative and values. And in the setting, we are in—generally, it is a workshop setting—what I want being created is also important. If you are writing a book, then, of course, theory is always to be the foundational. We should always know the theory and always understand the practice. And this is going back and forth to me because theory gets developed from practice. We cannot start from theorizing and impose our ideas to the real world.

- So, theory is important for your self-development, but, at the same time, practice helps you to check whether you—and your audience—understand that theory or not and apply ideas in practice.

- Yes! Practitioners, in my view, can work effectively though they do not know the full range of the menu; they know only one food on the table. Knowing theory, we know many possible meals, including fasting.

- Excellent metaphor! Sounds very philosophical. However, coming back to earth. You have recently visited Kazakhstan to deliver a workshop for the top governmental representatives. What is your impression of the event and the audience?

- First of all, the engagement in the futures was fantastic! There was a group from BTS-Education company with Sayasat Nurbek. Their presentation on the future of the labor market in Kazakhstan—what jobs would disappear and what new jobs would come—I found very fascinating. That is the good part. The difficult part is that Kazakhstan still needs to overcome a traditional approach in its structural development. It is important to generate new ideas, build new structures that can support them, create possibilities. I hope that after that workshop the attendees will take some methods, tools, and ideas and work on promoting futures literacy as a key component for the country. It means methods and tools plus broad engagement through the country. All in all, I am happy and could have been even more.

- What do you think can help Kazakhstan to promote this discipline here?

- Some hints are these: have theory at the universities; ensure broad based workshops from kindergartens to universities to workers; have a national project like “Kazakhstan-2040”; collect quantitative and qualitative data; use CLA to sort out the litany from the narratives.

In my view, Kazakhstan can lead the rest of the region in this field. So, good data, good stories, mix them together. I know, you want to go fast, but you have to bring everyone with you.

- And education plays a critical role in these circumstances.

- Absolutely! When I did a city-broad based project, our insight was that you have to have academics who collect the data, political leaders who have interest, and citizens. This is the triangle: political leader with academics and citizens. All three have to be there. Because political leader will say what makes it relevant, citizens will say what helps us on the journey, and academics will say whether what you say is true or false.

- The complete involvement of all levels of society is important.

- Yes! And you can segment. Like with political and business leaders, you can have a separate workshop. Then another one can be for citizens. Because if you mix them together, then people become anxious and nervous. Therefore, the design part is crucial for a national project.

- The last but not least question. Futures studies is much about trends and emerging issue. People mostly concentrate on trends not realizing that emerging issues can change everything dramatically. What do you consider those emerging issues in futures studies?

- Looking back and talking about emerging issues, I know that in the 1990s, when I was doing the city futures, the healthy city was such an issue. Before that, cities were the place of the three Rs: Rates, Rubbish, Roads. But in the 1990s, people started to imagine cities and self-consciously tried to be healthy, with healthy sports, measuring health, congestion, pollution. Then, in the early 2000s we talked about world after meat. Many groups said, “Please, do not talk about that. It scares us.” So those were two emerging issues: the healthy city and world after meat.

Now in 2020 the emerging issues that I have started working and still working at are the global governance, gender equity, and what the world would look like after the nation state. One of emerging issues I am tracing was recently mentioned in an article in the Economist. It says, “Imagine now the world where people could travel as much as capital” The authors mentions that 80 thrill dollars of efficiency lost by road blocks to migration. They said that if you change migration laws, the global productivity will go up dramatically. The authors were not talking about fully free boarders, but a way to make easier for people to move and it would create an incredible surplus.

Another emerging issue that is less important now than 20 years ago but still have to draw our attention in the context of overpopulation that would continue is what the world looks like with depopulation. I wrote a piece in 1996 about that and everyone thought that I was crazy. People asked, “What do you mean by ‘de-population’?” In 2020, we know that the China worker retiree ratio was seven to one and is now almost two to 1. Then you start thinking what would the pension scheme look like in Europe and Asia? What would the world look like if we live much longer with fewer people?

And of course, 20 years ago we almost never thought of renewable energy. Now it has moved to a trend. But here is the pendulum comes back and we start the conversation again. So those are some things I am playing with now.

- Thank you, professor, very much for such an interesting, thought provoking, and deeply human conversation about futures studies! Personally, I would like to wish you productivity and new ideas that you develop into new theories and share with us in your workshops.