Journal of Futures Studies, September 2021, 26(1): 91–100
Communicating the Future: Foresight as Mindfulness – An Interview with Sohail Inayatullah
Bes Pittman Baldwin, Principal Futurist at Best Futures Forward, Durham, NC USA
Sohail Inayatullah, UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies, Sejahtera Centre for Sustainability and Humanity, IIUM, Malaysia ; Professor, Tamkang University, Taiwan ; Futurist-in-residence, Government of Abu Dhabi, Culture and Tourism, UAE
* Web Text version of each JFS paper here is for easy reading purpose only, for the valid and published context of each article, please refer to the PDF version.
Bes Pittman Baldwin (BPB): As I begin my career as a professional futurist, I’d like to hear about your experiences in working with clients and ask for advice along the way. Will you please describe a story or situation where you were able to effectively communicate what foresight is and why it is important, so that the client’s response was ‘ah ha, I get it!’…?
Sohail Inayatullah (SI): While focusing on what works is important, I would like to begin with a discussion on what has not worked, with the intent to learn from failures. What does not work often has more “energy” – it certainly affords a greater opportunity to learn.
The first example is from Australia, where the Ministry of Local Government Planning held a major conference and asked that I give the final address. There were 550 attendees – about half were mayors from local communities and the other half were economic and strategic planners. In general, the mayors – as I was to find out – were a conservative group. It was a dinner meeting, held in a beautiful venue, but culminating a long day that had left the attendees tired (and thirsty, it turned out).
In my speech, I spoke on the emerging issues that rural areas need to come to terms with including gender equity and the end of traditional meat. The audience found the emerging issues overly challenging, and as I spoke, I could feel them turning off, with the energy in the room becoming increasingly negative. The Minister’s aides could tell the tone of the room had changed, as well, and sensing there might be political issues as a result of my speech, they fled the room. Attendees talked over me and yelled insults as I spoke. As the speech wore on, it became clear that many in the room were drunk – and the more I spoke, the more they drank.
In retrospect, I should have stopped and said, “Look, you all are tired, you don’t really want a keynote, and you certainly don’t want a keynote that challenges your paradigm, so let’s do something else.” I was nervous and uncomfortable with their reaction, but I was not able to make the transition to process these feelings and connect with the client, so the evening was a disaster.
At the end, as I walked to the exit, I found 25 or so people waiting in line to thank me. I asked what was going on because I concluded the group hated my speech, but these folks were from the local offices of environmental planning who were on the front lines of managing for long term challenges and trying to make future-oriented progressive change. Their reality was that the conservative mayors they worked with did not care about longer term challenges but were only interested in maintaining their traditional way of life (and getting re-elected). It turned out, I really did connect with these environmental planners and they were grateful for my message.
The next morning, a bunch of hung-over mayors came to me to apologize. They said their behavior was indefensible and that they would never tolerate such action in a city council meeting. And now they wanted to buy my books! I couldn’t stop laughing, thinking how they believed a $20 purchase could erase what they had done, as though it was a penance. At this point, I chalked it up to a war story where the mayors had been wrong, despite my best efforts to help them think about the larger challenges ahead. However, in retrospect, I realized I had given the wrong speech. Once the energy in the room went sour, I should have stopped and met them where they were at, instead of where I wanted them to be at. I did not exhibit adaptability and agility. I stuck to the plan and was met with a poor result. This was a major learning for me.
About a year later, while presenting to a particular city and its councilors, I again faced resistance. Some of the councilors wanted the city to adapt to the changing future. Others believed that a futures strategy on climate change and digitalization was interesting but not relevant. With this group, it took a while, but I found what worked. First, it was ensuring that the long-term vision for 2037 linked with the electoral cycle. They were open to being visionary as long as I could connect the long term with their desire for re-election. Second, we personalized the future. We ran the participants through an inner visioning process of imagining their life in 2037. They closed their eyes and experienced the future. They then understood the choices they needed to make to ensure that their cities remained clean, green, and golden – and we were able to help them transform their metaphor (see Fig. 1).
Fig. 1: Transforming client’s metaphor – example #1 (Source: created by the author with the image licensed via stock.adobe.com)
Another case involved a project I worked on with an Indigenous group and the Ministry of Health. They wanted to explore the future of hospitals and health from the view of Indigenous people, but an important goal was to collect quantitative data on the future of Aboriginal doctors, nurses and other workforce issues. The Ministry wanted to use the assembled experts to gather data to inform and optimize their strategies and plans.
The first day was exceedingly difficult. People spoke over me and some of the elders turned their backs. At the end of the day, someone from the Ministry of Health office came up and said, “Horrible day!” But my response was, “Yes, but appropriate!” The Indigenous participants’ approach was grounded in their lived reality and their history as a people: colonized by priests, by warriors, and by bureaucrats. Why would we expect them to suddenly take a liking to a futurist? I told the official, “Come back and hang out tomorrow, and then decide.”
On Day 2 we stayed within their framework and while playing the Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) game (Heinonen, et al., 2017; Inayatullah, 2017), the group were clear that they were not interested in solely generating quantitative data. Instead, they wanted to imagine an alternative future where hospitals were safe cultural spaces. Indigenous culture lives and breathes family – it defines it – while the hospital rules allowed only one guest at a time. The tension between the needs of the administration and the needs of the community surfaced. We then focused on designing a hospital facility and care delivery system where spaces were culturally safe.
In moving to the CLA part of the workshop, the story began to shift from “tell me the data about the number of Aboriginal nurses” to “nothing changes until the Prime Minister of the country is Aboriginal.” The narrative moved from forecasting to redesigning hospitals to finally about making the entire country a place where Indigenous people feel and are empowered.
The “aha” moment was watching in real time during the CLA game when a member of the Aboriginal community, who wasn’t even part of the game, ran to the stage and announced that he was now the Prime Minister. The futures workshop focus shifted from information gathering to empowering. One of the Aboriginal elders – a woman who started out with an air of cynicism and a ‘don’t mess with me’ vibe – came up to me at the end, hugged me, and told me it had been one of the most powerful workshops of her life.
Of course, now there was tension with the Ministry as their data collecting objectives – the workforce issue – had become less important. However, this was resolved once those in the Ministry understood that for the project to succeed, trust needed to be cultivated and core assumptions about power needed to be challenged.
BPB: Reflecting on these examples, what was the specific value that your clients or workshop participants recognized from engaging with you, a futurist?
SI: These are examples of how I messed up but learned from the messing up, and then met the difficulty head-on – and in the end, the client as well as the workshop participants were happy. These workshops led to a number of positive outcomes, including a request by Indigenous leaders to use futures techniques in the renegotiation of the federal treaty. As well, my colleague and a workshop facilitator, Cherie Minniecon, won a grant to run a workshop on Indigenous science fiction at the Australian Comic Con and hired an artist to create Indigenous sci-fi images.
For me, an important value that I bring as a futurist is in being able to communicate and explain futures to different people in language that makes sense to them – and that language is different for every group.
BPB: In your book, Questioning the Future (Inayatullah, 2007), I enjoyed learning more about the different cultural elements in thinking about time, rationality, and agency in creating change in the future and how the guiding metaphors about the future can be different in different parts of the world – but strongly bound in culture and language.
What have you found to be the best approach for working with multicultural organizations that may have diverse stakeholders who hold vastly different worldviews? How would a futurist create a unifying metaphor of the future for such an organization?
SI: That’s something I’m working on: I don’t have a perfect answer for that. Organizations are different, of course, and require different approaches. One large international bank I’m working with has different organizational pillars with different styles. One group has a strong East Asian approach – with great respect for the president’s authority and expertise and a consensus view that the president and subject matter experts, such as economists, know best. But they also understand that changing conditions in the business landscape and evolving needs of customers, stakeholders, and clients are important and need to be included in the process. This organization is living that tension in worldview – does the expert still know best, or can we learn from weak signals and emerging issues coming to the surface in the changing world? They have begun to shift their narrative and transform their metaphor from “knowledge on a leash,” focused on infrastructure lending, to “knowledge with wings” focused on lending for the information and knowledge economy (see Fig. 2).
Fig. 2: Transforming client’s metaphor – Example #2 (Source: created by the author with images licensed via stock.adobe.com)
BPB: Over the arc of your career, in working with clients from across the globe, has your worldview changed?
SI: I was young – just 17 years old – when I came to the University of Hawaii and met Jim Dator a year later. We talked about different possibilities for the future, such as AI futures and green futures. We even talked about meditation. I had just started meditating and studying a South Asian philosopher, P. R. Sarkar, who spoke of the many contradictions in nations and government, gender equity, etc., who felt that this is the stage in history where we work these contradictions out, but who also believed that the future is bright. I also did work with Johan Galtung and the larger patterns of macrohistory during this time.
It became clear to me that we are in a grand transition and our role as futurists is to facilitate the transition. This idea reinforced for me many things that were weird in my twenties but that have now become accepted. Especially at the beginning of my academic career, a number of my professors and others advised me not to pursue the ‘can of worms’ that was futures studies – but to go to law school instead, where I would surely have more success and would not waste my potential. Over the course of my life, however, the opposite has happened. The things that were clear to me at eighteen have become reinforced. Those things that were once considered weird by non-futurists in the ‘80s and ‘90s are no longer thought to be weird, especially in the era of COVID.
Our main challenge for futures studies now is those ‘doing foresight’ as just another tool among many in their consultant toolkit. I believe futures work should be a transformative process for self and others that requires inner focus and commitment to learn and apply the theory and methods for application not just to the client’s situation, but also to our own personal lives. I believe the approach to futures has to be authentic – it can’t be faked, it either works or it doesn’t. In our family, we use CLA, futures wheels, futures triangle, and scenarios to think about the future for ourselves and our kids.
These futures techniques work for me, but I find they work best when I am fully present in the process. In those circumstances when my workshops don’t go as well as I would like, I find that it has been my inability as a facilitator or speaker to connect with the group and find out what people need in their particular situation, to be mindful and meet people where they’re at.
So, my worldview didn’t change so much as the world’s view has evolved. Futures studies used to be considered silly by some in the past but now the field has gained more credibility. We apply futures methods to ourselves and our family, try to connect with and meet people where they’re at, and be sensitive to changing conditions.
A good example of this is a workshop I did in Croatia after the war with a group of students in Dubrovnik, and it was clear they were still hurting from the war. We didn’t have a lot of time, so I launched too quickly into the ‘future can be great’ theme – how to make the impossible, possible. The students were not receptive, they were suspicious and cynical that I was trying to sell them more ‘American BS.’ No one wanted a two-hour lecture on positive thinking, on the pull of the future, they needed a dose of reality. I realized I moved too fast into the visioning aspect for this group and instead transitioned to discussion of the worst-case scenario. They weren’t ready for transformation, to envision a better future, but needed to have a better, more detailed understanding of how the worst-case scenario could be developed and articulated so they could own it.
After we finished this up, I suggested that we spend a few minutes on a best-case scenario and they were eager to explore the ways a better post-war world could be imagined. By slowing down, connecting, and understanding where this group was at, I was able to address their need to process what had happened before they could set their sights on a more desirable future. The best-case scenario proceeded to enliven them.
BPB: My next question is more of a practical one in blending theory and practice: Are post-structural analysis techniques easy for clients to understand, internalize, and use as a method (as with CLA)? Are there personality differences or specific characteristics that make this approach more successful for some clients?
SI: I love it but it’s rare to find myself in a group where there are futurists or academics in the room who are familiar with futures theory – I have a ‘theory slide’ but I rarely show it. More often, the stakeholders are leaders or others who are data-driven in their decision making. For these, I would work through ‘unpacking assumptions’ by showing empirical data about the failure rate for sales strategies that are based on incorrect assumptions – showing the transition that wrong assumptions lead to wrong strategies that lead to undesirable futures. The group confirms they’ve made assumptions about the past and present, then I ask about what assumptions they have about the future. Now that they are ‘in the game’ and recognizing their assumptions, we use these assumptions to help develop scenarios.
A good example is from a recent project with the largest energy transmission supplier in Australia. The Director of Strategy already loved CLA, having done scenarios, but now felt the company needed a new metaphor. It was a three-part process, with Day 1 working with the Head of Strategy and their team to find their own metaphor – and to learn who they are in the story of the intervention process. Day 2 was the senior leadership team looking at innovation projects such as wireless energy and renewables and ways the organization can expand their portfolio to include the future of renewables in the next ten years. Their story moved from the company being a semi-conductor to becoming an ‘energy orchestra’ in the future, with many contributing parts and technologies working together to create an integrated energy solution.
Day 3 was with the board, made up of 80% female leaders, who were brilliant in their vision that the company should take advantage of the generational shift happening and work to transform Queensland into a global leader in renewable energy. Their story moved from keeping the lights on as a ‘reliable transmission tradesperson’ to being the Energy Genie. At the end of the last day, we brought the board and senior leadership together. They made a commitment to making this shift, recognizing that the world is changing, the climate is changing, and young people are demanding a response. They said, “Either we can play the old world of fossil fuels or we can be a global energy leader.” Some of the senior leaders voiced their hesitancy and brought up potential challenges, but the board chairwoman stood up and said, in a very Picard-like way, “Be bold, be bolder than you’re willing to be. We just explored the future of energy to 2030. Let’s start with our desired future and work backwards. We just did backcasting, now make it real.”
This was a powerful moment. I’ve worked with many male CEOs, male Ministers and Prime Ministers, and other men in senior leadership positions, but I find that there is a significant difference in working with boards that are gendered equitably or those that are majority women. We know that – they’re less conventional, they’re more open to changing the current world system, as they have fewer benefits from remaining in the past paradigm.
Most executive-level leaders are skilled at using narrative to frame issues and communicate strategy. They understand the power of storytelling and don’t confuse the idea of ‘life as narrative’ with data analysis. CEOs understand the need for and value of creating and concisely communicating a metaphor as the best way to use narrative in leadership. This means that when I work with higher level leaders, they can more easily understand and work through critical analysis techniques such as CLA. The higher up in the organization the stakeholder group is, the easier it is to use CLA and other post-structural methods.
Another strategy is to use directionality to explore the stages of thinking about the future. The first stage is anger about the injustice in the world, as the students in Dubrovnik showed. Occupying this stage makes it difficult to envision a positive future because folks need social justice and greater equity. People at this stage have an immediate need to move from injustice to justice. The second stage applies to those in a position of privilege who are looking for risk mitigation strategies. i.e., how to reduce the risk of disruption so these folks can fully enjoy their position. The third stage is where futuring is about opportunities, which is a good place to introduce emerging issues analysis. Once we’ve reached this third stage, the audience is ready for scenarios and assumptions. At this point, we can explore critical thinking by looking at narrative and CLA. It’s important to understand where the group is because I want to take them on the journey through these stages.
BPB: How do you diagnose a client’s readiness for futures work, especially for a group with whom you’ve never before worked?
SI: Well, of course, I try to meet the client beforehand and hang out so I can get to know them and better understand the group’s real needs. Sometimes, it turns out they don’t need me and I try to recognize this early. Other times, the real need only becomes obvious during the course of the workshop. One example of this happened with a large group of pharmaceutical executives from different companies. We worked through the process but I noticed at the break that everyone went to the window to admire one participant’s new Ferrari. It was hard to call them back to the meeting but it provided a great clue that developing scenarios based on the WHO Global Health Strategy (with the goal to improve global public health) would likely not resonate. Rather, they were more interested in influencing the government ministers for policy changes that might increase profits and in gaining access to the Australian National Health System formulary for their companies’ products to increase sales.
Not all of my pharmaceutical experience is like this, however, though the tension exists between the desire to serve patients and the company’s need to generate profits. Once, I worked with a group at the Singapore headquarters of an international drug company. The team members there were very engaged in our process, and although the CEO thought the ideas generated in the workshop were good, he wanted to confirm alignment with the corporate headquarters in New York. But the participants (mid-level managers) in the room were adamant – they felt called to the mission of changing the world for patients and were more interested in pursuing the triple bottom line than in pure profit taking. For them, working to develop and market medicines was about making the world a better place – to help patients live longer and be happier and healthier.
But the best project I’ve done for health has been with a cancer society that sponsored a workshop for leading oncologists. We were very intentional about designing the workshop to ensure equitable representation across culture/race and gender, as well as representation of patients. It was such a powerful meeting! We developed a view of healthcare delivery that was preventive, participatory, and valued the importance of the healthcare team going along with patients on their journey to ensure the best outcomes. Everyone has their own story about hospitals, drug treatments, and care providers – but we were all looking for ways to make the patients’ journeys better. The oncologists, who are used to being held in high esteem (almost as mini-gods), were very engaged in the program because we provided data on patient views, new technologies, and examples of how they could better understand the patients’ needs in the healthcare system. In effect, we worked together to provide tools and understanding so the oncologists could become better mini-gods.
For me as a futurist, this highlighted the need to design the process with greater representation of world views – the CLA view – to create a better, more potent product that has the potential to be transformative. If I limit the process to a single world view, I can still come up with scenarios, but they are unlikely to have as great an impact on the stakeholders.
BPB: I am currently working with middle school students to teach futures literacy skills and competences, using games and activities as part of an extracurricular Futures Club. Will you please tell me about some of your experiences working with students and educators?
SI: I worked with a group of about 60 principals from a brilliant, progressive Catholic school system in Australia. When I suggested to the director that we bring in students to the workshop, his response was, “That would be the coolest thing ever!” We talked during the meeting about disruption and potential changes coming in the education realm, but when the students did their skit about the future of schools in 2030, their view included an app called ‘Tinder of Education.’ In this scenario, the traditional hierarchy would shift so that students would play a more prominent role in directing their educational journey while teachers and principals would serve as facilitators. Students could swipe right or left to accept or reject the teacher or principal, depending on their individual learning needs.
BPB: Ha, ha! Yes, I read about that in the paper you sent about the Brisbane Grammar School case study in JFS (Inayatullah & Roper, 2020) – it was an amazing idea and a compelling scenario!
SI: It was a bit of a generational culture shock because I’m not on Tinder and the principals certainly wouldn’t admit to being on Tinder. During the role playing of a ‘day in the life of students in 2030,’ the tensions of this scenario became clearer. You should have seen the look of horror on the faces of the principals and administrators when they saw how they could be removed after thirty years of service to the community with one swipe. This turned into a debate and ‘negotiation’ with students, who wanted more technology-based independent learning. The principals were willing to concede the students’ technology demands, including AI, but they insisted on maintaining traditional activities such as sports and spiritual community. Of course, these changes will take a decade or more to be integrated into the system, but it was clear that any conversation about the futures of education must include students. It sounds obvious to a futurist, but it was a challenge to include students in the room while expecting principals to share honestly about their lives as school leaders.
BPB: And there’s the power dynamic at play, as well. Were the students at your workshop from the principals’ schools?
SI: Yes! It was interesting to see the reactions of the principals, which ranged from “This is the coolest thing ever” to “Oh my god, I’m horrified.” On the last day during the recap, one of the key principals spoke up in resistance – the pendulum swing became apparent. He said, “This has gone too far – what are the next steps we can really do?” We met again with the leadership team and agreed to take an additional 40 members of their staff through another workshop in September, realizing that futures work is a stepwise process. It’s not one speech or one workshop and everything changes.
This idea of transformative change being a stepwise process has come up in other workshops, as well. I remember one minister in Malaysia from an engagement with the government, where we were helping develop their national university strategy. We had already done a lot of work, thanks to Professor Zainal Abidin Bin, who was head of their leadership academy. Finally, someone from the ministry suggested we convene a meeting with multiple stakeholders – the minister, every university president, and every dean in attendance. What an opportunity – I was ready to go! We took them through the process and came up with a vision for the futures of university education. We developed a number of fantastic ideas, such as micro-accreditation, the digital university, and the ‘flat’ university, for example.
I was thrilled, but things soon took a turn. The minister who sponsored the workshop got up to talk with everyone and told them, “I have a meeting next week with the Prime Minister, who will ask for my advice on these initiatives. Which of you will support me in pitching these ideas?” Only twelve of the participants raised their hands – about 15% of the group – and while the minister looked at me in disbelief, I could see the wheels turning in his head as he imagined talking to the Prime Minister about innovation in education with such little support from the university leadership. I told him, “This is not bad, we got 15% in this first phase. We have to keep working on this.”
Later, the minister came to thank me but he also chided me. He told me, “Thank you so much for the work you are doing, but of course you understand that social change doesn’t happen as the result of a workshop or a speech. It’s a complex, gradual process to convince university presidents, administrators, and even students that these changes are important and necessary.” I was happy we were able to surface some of these innovative ideas, and some of them even made it into the National Plan. But I learned from the experience.
BPB: Well, those ideas will percolate and evolve in the minds of the participants, who will share their workshop experience with others – and these ideas will develop and spread, just like a virus. The next time you ask for a show of hands, I bet it will be more supporters than fifteen percent.
SI: I hope so. Speaking of virus spread, COVID-19 has certainly put pressure on the education sphere to create rapid change in the system. What were considered ‘crazy’ ideas in August 2017 (when we held the meeting in Malaysia) are no longer crazy. These initiatives are now considered to be required if the university is to survive. Recently, a study described in Asia Sentinel (Hunter, 2020) forecast that up to half of Malaysian universities would become bankrupt unless they were able to shift to the new paradigm. These crazy futures ideas have rapidly moved from an interesting idea to an imperative. My favorite quote is from Anita Hazenberg, head of strategy and Director of INTERPOL Innovation Centre, who said that futures in innovation used to be a nice thing to have, but now it’s a must-have.
BPB: At last! To have it be recognized as essential is rewarding.
SI: I’m grateful to Dator and Galtung, all the greats who taught us how to do this work. I appreciate the way you’ve framed this interview, with questions that demonstrate we need both theory and practice. The stories and anecdotes I shared show the ways I’ve learned to improve my practice, both personally and with others – what’s worked for me and times that provided opportunity for learning and improvement. All of this is grounded in theory. The work we do is all possible because we have access to theories on organizational change, forecasting, inner spiritual change, as well as theories on post-structuralism – all theories that inform our work. Theory and practice in a dance…
But our value as futurists goes beyond the workshop setting. Shrii P. R. Sarkar tells us that we are in the middle of a grand transition. As futurists, our role is to facilitate this transition. That requires learning and a solid foundation in theory to achieve the inner focus needed for the transformative process for self and others that futurists should bring. We learn and apply these methods and techniques to help governments, leaders, organizations, and institutions but also use them in our personal lives. Our field is more than methods – we cannot just theorize the transition, as best as we can, we need to become the transition.
So, I would ask you, where do you play in this space?
BPB: (laughing) Well, I haven’t played much in ‘pure futures’ but my recent work in pharmaceutical development and clinical research strategy and planning helped pushed me over the futures cliff. This work was quantitative, using data analytics to create projections of study timelines, research subject location and availability, and enrollment rates for clinical studies. In a highly-regulated ecosystem with relatively long-term development timelines and large potential for disruption, I found it difficult to endorse such a linear approach without considering system complexities and uncertainties. I realized I would be happier in a foresight role and took the plunge into ‘full-time futures’ after working part-time on my graduate degree at Houston.
The work I’m doing teaching futures literacy concepts to middle school students has been very rewarding. I decided to start small and prototype my ideas for a Futures Club with a local independent school (Durham Nativity School) that is based on the NativityMiguel model. The young men at this school, who are from financially-disadvantaged families, enroll for four years of middle school, supported by full scholarships. After that, students are supported in their goals to attend an independent college preparatory high school or boarding school, followed by college or university – a twelve-year commitment of support from the school. I volunteered in this school as a tutor in the past and loved working with these kids. The school is truly transformative for them and their families, putting them on a new path for the future.
Given the current political and social situation in the US and the global climate crisis, I feel compelled to help give these young men the tools they need to envision and create a future where they are the change makers and the leaders who can make a positive difference in our community.
I’m using games, improvisation, and other fun activities as the framework to teach futures thinking content, so it’s been enjoyable and challenging for me to take futures studies theories and present this content in a way that’s engaging, meaningful, and age-appropriate but also fun (see Fig. 3 below). Having all of your theory – and that of other futurists – to serve as the foundation has been very helpful for me in creating a culturally-appropriate curriculum to help these boys appreciate their agency in creating a better future. I’m learning from them, as well – especially trying to tease from these kids what their worldviews are, as young men of color or those whose families immigrated from other countries.
SI: Yes, this is a great opportunity for the CLA process to work. Starting with the current story, then helping them work toward a transformed story, and using the transformed story to enhance agency. Scenario building won’t be of much use for these students.
Fig. 3: DNS Futures Club teammates enjoy an improvisation game (image used by permission of author)
BPB: My plan, before COVID interrupted it, was to have the students create stories of the future where they are the hero. Have them imagine a future where they will design solutions for our community’s unique future problems and create a better future for all of us. I recruited a local artist to help the kids create artifacts from their hero stories and we secured gallery space for our futures art installation. Unfortunately, the coronavirus lockdown canceled our plans before we were able to make much progress on this aspect of the Futures Club program. It was fun while it lasted, though, and I think this is the direction I’ll continue for the next several years – to bring futures thinking to students and the community to help democratize foresight a bit more in our community.
SI: My partner, Ivana Milojević, wrote a book of Serbian book of fairy tales (Izgarjan & Milojević, 2012; Milojević & Izgarjan, 2014), which traditionally are told as violent stories where the female characters are abused and subordinated, and rewrote them with strong female characters who achieve great things. She received a grant from the Ministry to hold workshops with students who use the stories for their own rewriting of the future. The younger ones draw, the older one write – exactly what you’re doing – and it really worked well.
BPB: That’s fantastic – thanks for pointing me in Dr. Milojević’s direction! I’m interested in reading her work and will plan to reference and build on this for my Futures Club curriculum. I also appreciate the UNESCO report you sent on co-creating educational futures (Inayatullah, 2020) – it’s very helpful!
Thanks very much for your time and for sharing these stories! It was great fun to have this conversation about how futurists can communicate the future in ways that are transformative for the futurist as well as their client. I’ll keep in mind the need to be adaptable, to be mindful, to connect with clients, and meet them where they are in communicating ideas about the future for better foresight.
References
Heinonen, S., Minkkinen, M., Karjalainen, J., & Inayatullah, S. (2017). Testing transformative energy scenarios through causal layered analysis gaming. Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 124, 101-113.
Hunter, M. (2020, April 2). The collapse of Malaysian Private Universities. Asia Sentinel. Retrieved from https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/the-collapse-of-malaysian-private
Inayatullah, S. (2007). Questioning the Future, Methods and Tools for Organizational and Societal Transformation. (3rd ed.). Taipei, Taiwan: Tamkang University Press.
Inayatullah, S. (2017, April). Causal Layered Analysis. Prospective and Strategic Foresight Toolbox. Paris, France: Futuribles International. Retrieved from https://www.futuribles.com/en/group/prospective-and-strategic-foresight-toolbox/document/causal-layered-analysis/
Inayatullah, S. (2020). Co-creating educational futures: Contradictions between the emerging future and the walled past. UNESCO Education Research and Foresight Working Paper 27. Futures & Foresight Science 2(1), e27. Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ffo2.27
Inayatullah, S., & Roper, E. (2020, July 21). Let’s get flexible: Brisbane Grammar School navigates the COVID-19 crisis. Journal of Futures Studies. Retrieved from https://jfsdigital.org/2020/07/21/brisbane-grammar-school/
Izgarjan, A., & Milojević, I. (2012). Ko se boji vuka josˇ? Moc´ne pricˇe za odvazˇne i radoznale, (Who is Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf? Awesome Stories for the Courageous and Curious), Eduko, Novi Sad.
Milojević, I., & Izgarjan, A. (2014). Creating alternative futures through story telling: A case study. Futures (57), 51-61. Retrieved from
http://www.metafuture.org/library/creating_alternative_futures_through_storytelling.pdf