How can the future be not only imagined, but learnt? The article on Futures Literacy in the latest issue of «weiter bilden» explains why our ideas about the future are crucial and how they can be consciously reflected upon and developed. An impulse for the TRANSIT community.
TRANSIT sees itself as a forum for questions about the future. At the heart of our projects, discussions and publications lies the aim of understanding societal trends and developing perspectives for adult learning and education. For us, the future is a field of work: something to think about, debate and imagine together.
All the more interesting, then, is the current issue of the journal weiter bilden (DIE Journal for Adult Education), which is dedicated precisely to this topic. Under the theme “Futures”, it brings together contributions from adult education on how education can enable people to deal with uncertainty, change and open futures.
All the contributions in the issue are worth reading. They address different aspects of the topic, ranging from historical perspectives to philosophical reflections on education. In this short post, however, I would like to focus on one article that is particularly relevant for the work of TRANSIT: “Futures Literacy: Competence-based approaches to the open tomorrow” (Futures Literacy: Kompetenzbasierter Umgang mit dem offenen Morgen) by Angelika Neudecker and Stefan Bergheim.
The future as a competence
The authors begin by introducing the concept of Futures Literacy, coined by the futurist Riel Miller. Futures Literacy refers to the ability to consciously engage with different possible futures. It is less about making predictions or forecasting the future as accurately as possible. Rather, the focus lies on making future imaginaries themselves an object of learning.
Every decision people make is based on assumptions about the future. Yet these assumptions often remain implicit. Futures Literacy aims to make these images visible, to question them, and to develop them further in a conscious way.
Neudecker and Bergheim describe Futures Literacy as a competence that enables us to use the future as a space for thinking and shaping. It combines six interrelated capacities:
- Complexity and uncertainty competence – the ability to deal with the openness and unpredictability of future developments.
- Multiple futures competence – the ability to imagine and compare several different possible futures at once.
- Imagination and assumptions competence – an awareness of the role of future imaginaries and the assumptions and models underlying them.
- Reframe and experiment competence – the ability to alter existing assumptions and develop alternative future scenarios.
- Novelty and emergence competence – the ability to generate new ideas and perspectives for the present by juxtaposing different futures.
- Agency and action competence – the ability to translate these insights into concrete steps and embed future perspectives in present-day action.
For the TRANSIT community, this approach may not be entirely new. In our trend report “Future Skills and the Future of Adult Learning”, we also engaged with the concept of Futures Literacy. One key insight was that many future skills frameworks are based on particular assumptions and images of the future – assumptions that are not always made explicit.
This shows that engaging with future skills is not only about identifying individual competences. It also involves making underlying assumptions visible, questioning them critically, and exploring alternative visions of the future.
Futures Literacy provides precisely this perspective. It reminds us that the future is not only an object of analysis, but also a product of our imagination. Different images of the future lead to different decisions in the present. By making these images visible, we can engage with them more consciously.
Futures literacy laboratories: Thinking about the future together
But how can we actually reflect on future imaginaries and question the assumptions behind them? Neudecker and Bergheim show how Futures Literacy can be fostered through so-called futures literacy laboratories .
Futures labs are workshops in which participants work systematically with images of the future. The process unfolds in four consecutive phases:
- Reveal: Existing future imaginaries are made visible. At the same time, the assumptions underlying these imaginaries are reflected upon.
- Reframe: These assumptions are then deliberately altered or challenged, giving rise to new and unfamiliar futures.
- Rethink: The different futures are compared and discussed, leading to new questions and thematic areas.
- Redo: Finally, the focus shifts to the present: what concrete steps can be derived for action?
Futures literacy laboratories are thus less a tool for prediction than a collaborative learning space. They make visible how differently people think about the future and open up new perspectives for collective action.
Why this is of interest to TRANSIT
This presents an exciting point of connection, particularly for a community such as TRANSIT. TRANSIT brings together people who wish to engage with societal transformation and questions about the future. In workshops, dialogues and events, we continually seek to explore possible developments in adult learning and education together and to design perspectives for the future.
In doing so, we have worked with different approaches in recent years: for example, with future scenarios, with playful formats on future skills, or with open dialogue formats in which different perspectives on future developments come together.
Against this backdrop, futures literacy laboratories can be seen as another interesting avenue. They focus less on potential developments themselves and more on the ideas and assumptions people hold about the future. The focus thus shifts away from the question “What will the future look like?” towards the question “What images of the future shape our thinking, and what happens when we change them?”