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Dr. Riel Miller is
one of the world’s
leading strategic
foresight designers
and practitioners. He
has recently been
appointed Head of
Foresight at UNESCO
in Paris. For further
details see:
www.rielmiller.com.
ANTICIPATION: THE DISCIPLINE OF UNCERTAINTY
by Riel Miller
Futurists are haunted by an unresolved
problem – how to deal with the
unknowable and novelty rich future.
Most futurists in the APF and elsewhere have
accepted for some years now that prediction and
probability are limited ways of thinking about
the future. But knowing what does not work is
not the same as knowing what does. The paradox
of futures is that we can’t find ways to ‘know’ the
future, but rather we need to find ways to live and
act with not-knowing the future. This requires the
discipline of anticipation (DOA).
What is Disciplinarity?
Discipline is by definition an encounter with
constraints. In this sense the development and
description of a discipline, be it the mastery of
a stonemason or the expertise of an economics
professor, is based on how practice confronts and
works within the limits imposed by the discipline.
Once a discipline is well established, the terms
and institutions that define and limit the practice
become familiar and obvious. For instance, in the
mid-twentieth century economics as a university-
based discipline was consistently defined in
introductory textbooks (such as Samuelson) as
the study of the “allocation of scarce resources
amongst competing ends.” Such formulations,
as well as the systems that reproduce and alter
disciplinary knowledge, evolve over time. This
short essay is not meant to offer a comprehensive
analysis of the theory and practice, debates and
experience, power and history that give rise to
and reshape the contours of a discipline. Rather,
considering the contributions of the APF and the
experiences of futurists around the world, the
focus is on the need for disciplinarity and an initial
sketch of what such a discipline entails.
Why Disciplinarity?
The motivating hypothesis of this piece is that
the time has come for futurists to collaborate to
develop a discipline concerned with the nature,
role and use of the future, both in human systems
and more generally as part of our efforts to
understand our anticipatory universe. There is
a number of reasons, summarized briefly here,
that justify an effort by futurists to elaborate a
discipline:
Philosophy and science have opened
up new ways of defining the universe and
understanding what is the future.
Due to specific attributes of the present,
success in using the future without a discipline
is reaching its limits – both in terms of the
quality of the processes and outcomes.
Values and tools, aspirations and daily
practices are generating the potential to use
the future differently, but this potential cannot
be grasped without the assurance – depth of
knowledge, trustworthiness, legitimacy,
visibility – afforded by disciplinarity.
The emergence of a discipline of
anticipation, focused on defining and using
the future more effectively, is already
underway. By making an explicit commitment
to this project futurists can both enhance the
speed and quality of the work.
A discipline offers at least three advantages:
1. Depth: that by circumscribing what
is legitimately included within the claims of
knowing, a discipline can focus on developing
an expertise (specialization), deepening its
theory and practice;
2. Identity: through such specialization, and
the specialized language that goes with it, both
the practitioner (from apprentice to master)
and the outsider (layperson) can identify the
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discipline as concerned with a specific subject
matter and why it is trustworthy;
3. Legitimacy: depth and identity help
to foster responsibility and legitimacy
– the foundations (but not a guarantee) of
trustworthiness and motivation for investing
in the stocks/flows of a discipline (which
include reputational assets and attention
to excellence).
The Discipline of Anticipation
(DOA)
When framed as a discipline, ‘anticipation’
entails the acquisition and use of a set of design
principles for thinking about the ‘later-than-
now.’ When someone becomes more capable
at anticipation they become better at using the
future to understand the present. They are more
capable because they are better able to do three
general tasks. They can (1) clarify the specific
purposes of thinking about the future;
(2) establish a consistent relationship between the
aims of futures thinking and the methods used to
do so; and (3) achieve greater sophistication, as is
to be expected when disciplinarity brings greater
depth, clarity and legitimacy. These are accepted
attributes of mastery acquired through learning.
My initial propositions for general design
principles for the Discipline of Anticipation
(DOA) fall into four categories:
1. A descriptive proposition that defines what
is the future.
2. A sensemaking proposition that calls
for an anticipatory systems point-of-view for
the discipline as a whole.
3. A taxonomic proposition that distinguishes
the three distinct but practically overlapping
forms that conscious anticipation can take in
the present.
4. An organizational proposition that offers
rules for conducting and organizing
anticipatory processes according to the
principles of the scientific method (hypothesis
testing and external review).
The Discipline of Anticipation –
An Initial Specification
1. The future defined. The DOA assumes
that the future is defined by four fundamental
attributes of our universe: the practical
irreversibility of time; birth and death –
difference and repetition; unforeseeable
novelty; and connectedness.
i. Time is irreversible and continuous/
contiguous. ‘Time travel’ cannot be done.
Despite the multi-dimensionality of time/
space there is no way to leap from the
present into the past or future. So, in
practical terms, the future does not exist
outside of the present. The future is a
presently imagined ‘later in time.’
The Components
of the Future
“I believe it is useful to assume
that ‘the future’ will derive from
three components. One will be the
continuation of things found in the
present, and also found in the past
The second component will be
things that existed in the past, but not
in the present, that will appear again in
the future – and their opposite: things
that did not exist in the past but are
very much a part of the present but
that will not exist (or be as important)
in the future. These things often appear
as cycles or ‘spirals’.
The third component will be novelties
– things that do not exist now and never
existed before, but will in the future.”
- James Dator,
Alternative Futures for KWaves
Source:
http://www.futures.hawaii.edu/
publications.html
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reality. As a result we live in a universe
where there can be inertia and rupture,
continuity and transformation as well as
inter-dependence. This means that the
future (i.e., what we imagine in the
present) can be about preservation,
destruction, and the capacity to perceive
and act on emergence.
Planted on this foundation the
Discipline of Anticipation can offer
practical ways to describe, locate and track
change in its many guises, while consistently
and effectively understanding that the ‘later
than now’ is always imaginary.
2. Anticipatory systems. Anticipation
is a ‘real’ attribute of the present, embedded
within the functioning of physical and social
phenomena as they re-emerge and emerge into
the present. The anticipatory systems
perspective explicitly seeks to take into
account the full range of inanimate and
animate anticipation. This is critical for
disciplinarity because it sets the general
framework for trying to understand and use
the vast range of specific forms of anticipation
– forms that are also context specific.
Taking an anticipatory systems perspective
assists the discipline to make distinctions
across forms and context, linking tasks
and tools according to consistent principles
and observations.
3. Categories of the potential of the
present. Categorization of different ‘kinds’
of anticipation, distinct definitions of what
is the future in the present (‘being without
existing’), facilitate the practical task
of imagining the future. The three types of
future that exist in the present, and need to be
distinguished by futurists in order to enhance
the sophistication of anticipation, are:
(1) contingent futures that can be imagined as
the outcome of external forces;
(2) optimization futures that assume systemic
continuity and implicitly or explicitly
‘colonize’ the future by assuming that specific
outcomes will pertain; and
(3) novel futures that have no imminent cause
but spring into existence, altering the present.
Of course, all three categories interact and are
inter-dependent. These categories are
particularly helpful in applied anticipation,
taken up in the next principle.
ii. Birth and death, difference and
repetition. In our universe new entities and
entities of entities (assemblages) can come
into existence, emerge in the present, be
born and can also disappear or die.
Without this basic premise dynamics or
change cannot exist and the ‘later than now’
would just be the same as ‘now’. Continuity
also occurs, as what is now is then repeated
in the after. This gives rise to a number of
categories of the future in the present,
including ‘latency’ which is the potential of
phenomena to become and to repeat,
manifesting emergence and inertia
over time.
iii. Unforeseeable novelty, the determinants
of which do not fully exist in the present,
means that the present only partially
determines what happens ‘later than now.’
Novelty, something from nothing, emerges
in ways that can fundamentally alter the
present. Even if we had perfect knowledge
of all aspects of the present, and perfect
models of how all aspects of the present
interact, the emergent present would still
contain surprises. This means we live
with creative causality as well as
continuity causality.
iv. Connectedness takes many forms, but
what it means for the ‘later than now’ is that
there are connections and interactions that
span time, acting across different levels of
Anticipation is
an attribute of
the present that is
embedded in physical
and social phenomena
as they emerge.
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first category); and the third is a more normative
and sometimes imaginative image of hoped-for
tomorrows. In practice, though, the predominant
response is to seek out lines of probable cause –
using trends, drivers and other sources of ‘likely’
(or unlikely) outcomes – that attempt in one way or
another to discover ‘how the future might unfold.’
As a result the purpose and methods of
anticipatory thinking tend to be dominated by
probabilistic analysis. Which, as is generally
accepted, must rest one way or another on
continuity-type causal explanations. This excludes
novelty that cannot be imagined through causality
and cannot be identified from within a rigorous
probabilistic framework. The search for causal
continuity narrows both the definition of the
future and the methods for apprehending it.
It is worth noting that the DOA does not
constrain how we go about imagining the future.
Today’s futurists have access to a wide and
refined panoply of tools. Professional futurists
have an impressive toolkit, ways of undertaking
anticipatory thinking that range from Jay Ogilvy’s
‘scenaric stance’ and Sohail Inayatullah’s Causal
Layered Analysis to the Ken Wilber-inspired
Integral Futures and the Global Business Network’s
four-quadrant scenarios. (The last two are discussed
elsewhere in this book). All of these techniques
and many more are potentially useful, depending
on the context. The point is that disciplinarity
can help practitioners to insist on embracing the
fundamental unknowability of the future and
4. The practice of the DOA as a capacity.
Since the Discipline of Anticipation is a way
to use the future to learn (creating knowledge)
it is therefore a form of research or cognitive
engagement/construction. Consequently
the DOA as practice consists of activities that
always involve narrative (sense making),
collective intelligence, and framing/reframing.
This is a scientific meta-framework for sensing
and making sense of the present that ensures that
the way we use the imaginary future is consistent
with the three preceding principles.
Each of these premises is necessary, and
all are inter-dependent. Taken together, these
are design principles for using the future. Or,
to put it in different terms, building a more
complete and rigorous connection between the
definition of what is the future, as emergent,
rich, and unknowable novelty, and how to gain an
understanding of the imagined future, through
the narratives we invent in the present, calls for a
set of design principles that take into account the
four premises of the Discipline of Anticipation.
Of course, the conventional position in much
of the futures community is to use a threefold
categorization that distinguishes probable, possible
and visionary, or preferred, futures. The first is
based mostly on models and data that forecast
the future probabilistically using the past; the
second is rooted in scenarios that tell more or
less imaginative stories about different ‘possible’
futures (often difficult to distinguish from the
The Creative Mind
In The Creative Mind (1911), Henri Bergson
argued for turning on its head the common sense
view that possibilities precede actual choices. He
argued that it is experience that precedes possibility
and that we ‘see’ the options in the past once we
know the present.
The following thought experiment helps
to illustrate this hypothesis: Imagine you come to a
fork in the road without knowing which one to take
to reach your destination. You turn left and discover
it is the wrong direction. It is then – at that moment,
constructed in the reflexivity of our actions and
inter-actions, that you know that you made a
mistake. Only now, the possibility of turning right
exists in the past.
Novelty can be understood in a similar way, it
inspires the identification of possibilities in the past.
These are possibilities that could not be known in
the present because the future of complex realities
is unknowable. Such possibilities arise not because
of ignorance (something that could potentially be
known) but because creative novelty happens and
changes what we know and reflexively construct in
the present, including possibilities in the past.
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to include anticipatory methods and goals that
are liberated from the reductionist constraints
of probability, continuity and the reductionist
projection of existing frames into the future.
Conclusion
Few aspects of our conscious reality are as
powerful as the imagined future for determining
what we do. For organizations like governments
and firms, and families and communities, the future
is often the primary reason for doing (even being).
By helping to use the future better, in particular
by diversifying the use of the future away from
heretofore dominant methods – such as probability
and planning – and embracing the ambiguity of
creative novelty, the development and diffusion
of the Discipline of Anticipation can change what
people and organizations do. It offers one way
to reconcile the way we use the future with the
aspirations we have for our capacity to be free.
There is no way to know if this will be ‘better’ or
‘worse,’ there is no way to know what will happen,
but at least human hubris may be tempered by the
exigencies of a discipline that seeks to enjoy the
amazing creativity of our universe.
With thanks to my colleagues in the APF, the
FuMee group, and the editor of this volume,
Andrew Curry.
Further reading
Curry, Andrew and Wendy Schultz, (2009),
“Roads Less Travelled: Different Methods,
Different Futures,” Journal of Future Studies,
May, Vol. 13, No. 4.
Fuller, Ted and Krista Loogma, (2009),
“Constructing Futures: A Social Constructivist
perspective on foresight methodology,”
Futures, Vol. 41, Issue 2.
FuMee 3, “Unfolding the Present, Spontaneity
and Mercury’s Arrow,”
http://fumee.co.cc/?page_id=7.
Mermet, Laurent, Ted Fuller and Rudd van der
Helm, (2009), “Re-examining and renewing
theoretical underpinnings of the Futures field:
A pressing and long-term challenge,” Futures,
Vol. 41, Issue 2.
Mermet, Laurent, (2009) “Extending the
perimeter of reflexive debate on futures
research: An open framework,” Futures,
Vol. 41, Issue 2.
Miller, Riel, (2011), “Being Without Existing:
The Futures Community at a Turning Point?
A Comment on Jay Ogilvy’s Facing the Fold,”
Foresight, Vol. 13, No. 3.
Miller, Riel and Roberto Poli, (2010),
“Anticipatory Systems and the Philosophical
Foundations of Futures Studies,” Foresight,
Vol. 12, Issue 3.
Poli, Roberto, (2010), “An Introduction to the
Ontology of Anticipation,” Futures,
Vol. 42, Issue 7.
Rossel, Pierre, (2010), “Making Anticipatory
Systems More Robust,” Foresight,
Vol. 12, Issue 3.
Tuomi, Ilkka, (forthcoming), “Foresight in an
Unpredictable World,” Technology Analysis and
Strategic Management.
