Content uploaded by Riel Miller
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Riel Miller on Mar 24, 2022
Content may be subject to copyright.
Using the future to think about local labor markets
Dr. Riel Miller, Head of Foresight at UNESCO, Paris;
Mrs. Lydia Garrido Luzardo, Head of The Millennium Project Uruguayan
Node, Montevideo;
Mr. Kacper Nosarzewski, Partner at 4CF sp. z o.o., Warsaw
Organized with funding and logistical support from UNDP and ORMET
Report of a Futures Literacy UNESCO Knowledge Lab (FL UKnowLab)
Bogota, Columbia, November 25-26, 2013
February, 2014
Contact
For questions and comments, please contact
Dr. Riel Miller
Head of Foresight
UNESCO
r.miller@unesco.org
Using the Future to Think about Local Labor
Markets in Colombia
The Futures Literacy UNESCO Knowledge Laboratory (FL Uknowlab) was conducted on the 25-26th
of November 2013 in Bogotá, Republic of Colombia, with a group of 28 participants from Regional
Labor Observatories (Red de Observatorios Regionales de Mercado de Trabajo, RED ORMET), the
Ministry of Labor, the National Apprenticeship Service (SENA), and the United Nations Development
Program (UNDP). The event was designed as a “knowledge laboratory”. In other words a learning-by-
doing process that engages the collective intelligence of the participants to generate new knowledge.
For reasons of effectiveness and efficiency in achieving the laboratory's goals the future was used as
the main reference point for structuring the laboratory's conversations. When used in the context of a
knowledge laboratory the future is particularly powerful tool for revealing underlying systemic
assumptions and providing new analytical insights, even beyond existing frameworks.
Participants in the FL Uknowlab were able to analyse and question the methods and goals that inform
their current on-the-ground efforts to assist with the allocation of investments, the sharing of
information, and the coordination of organizational activities in local labor markets. Participants also
started to enlarge their own capacity to both use the future and conduct scientific research by gaining
practical familiarity with the Discipline of Anticipation and knowledge laboratory design and practice.
Lastly, in the context of on-going action-research being conducted by UNESCO, this event contributed
to the advancement of innovative approaches to both knowledge creation and the use of the future to
formulate collective choices.
The design of the event, with a clear training objective and foresight theme, was prepared by an
international group of Future Studies experts, Dr. Riel Miller, Head of Foresight at UNESCO, Paris;
Mrs. Lydia Garrido Luzardo, Head of The Millennium Project Uruguayan Node, Montevideo; Mr.
Kacper Nosarzewski, Partner at 4CF sp. z o.o., Warsaw, in close collaboration with Mr. Javier García
Estevéz of UNDP Colombia and with important inputs from the regional labor observatories and
Ministry of Labor in Colombia, provided by Mr. Oscar Fabian Riomaña Trigueros. (Annex 1 presents
the agreed design). The event was hosted by the Ministry of Labor and UNDP at Grand House Hotel
Bogotá.
On the morning of the workshop the specification of the FL Uknowlab design was adapted in real-time
in order to incorporate the insights provided by an in-depth discussion with the Vice Minister for
Employment & Pensions, Hon. Juan Carlos Cortés González, the Director of Regional Labor Markets,
Mrs. Juana Paola Bustamante as well as by Mr. Javier García Estevéz of UNDP Colombia and Mr. Oscar
Fabian Riomaña Trigueros, Ministry of Labor.
Page 2
Introduction
Today, worldwide, a series of emergent political, economic and social phenomena are generating new
categories of value-creation, altering the nature and organization of work, enlarging the role of
learning, changing the meaning and practice of age-based landmarks like retirement, and diversifying
the objectives and means for making investments. No wonder old norms and institutions are being
called into question. And no wonder that part of this moving landscape involves changes in the
conception and construction of collective efforts to understand and influence the world around us.
Many of the familiar patterns and sources once used to make sense of the world are no longer adequate
for capturing or making sense of what is going on. As a result people are experimenting. In all walks of
life, efforts are underway to invent and discover sense making systems that can embrace the richness of
complex emergent novelty.
Today the field of labor policy is being transformed by changes taking place in the nature of work, the
systems for organizing the allocation of time to value creating activities, and the methods used to
understand and share the meaning of changes in the distribution of human activity in daily life. Such
innovations call for new research methods as well as a capacity to explore new avenues for expressing
and organizing human agency. Disruptive changes, ones that signal the inadequacy of existing
paradigms, also mark the emergence of new ones. This means that government policy and policy
makers are faced with a dual challenge - improving the old and inventing the new.
With respect to labor market foresight that attempts to discern the future of employment and skills, the
old can be understood as processes that extrapolate economic change with sufficient detail and
sufficient accuracy to undertake supply side planning and demand side adaptation. However, as
decades of experience have demonstrated, medium and long-run labor market forecasting is not a
particularly useful way to think about the future of work. This is not only because of significant lags in
training systems and technical difficulties in meeting rigorous data and modelling specifications, but
more importantly due to the fundamentally complex evolutionary nature of economic systems.
Recognition of this reality partly accounted for the shift away from labor market planning to
framework type policies in the 1980s and 1990s for OECD countries. Currently the expansion or catch-
up/convergence of industrializing countries and the crisis of “de-industrialization” of developed
countries makes it tempting to return to the old planning - forecasting approach for thinking about the
future nature and structure of human work activity. While at the same time suggesting that something
more is needed.
This two-day FL Uknowlab was designed to assist participants in making sense of the changes taking
place around them as well as helping them to see that they can use the future in new ways. Through
learning-by-doing knowledge creation, action-research for understanding local labor markets,
participant's gained insight into: a) the developments taking place in the way the future is integrated
into efforts to understand and act in the world today, and b) the emergence of new approaches to the
mutual creation of knowledge and work. Participants expanded the range of their analysis without
abandoning important and still significant tools for thinking about the future and informing policies
that can make existing systems work better.
Through the FL Uknowlab they expanded their capacity to detect and make sense of repetition and
difference, the old and the new, that are at the core of policy making. At the end of the process
participants were able to “walk on two legs” - understanding the difference between closed and open
systems thinking, between efforts to improve or optimise already existing systems and efforts to
perceive and invent new and/or disruptive system configurations. The FL Uknowlab focused the
collective intelligence of participants on their anticipatory assumptions These assumptions play a key
role in defining systemic boundaries, thereby helping to distinguish between endogenous and
exogenous continuity and change. By deepening and enlarging participant's capacity to use the future
and generate time-place specific knowledge, this FL Uknowlab enabled policy makers to be innovative
and context sensitive.
Advanced Futures Literacy Course for Policy Makers
Page 3
Objectives
The FL Uknowlab covered four specific objectives:
• Develop participant's practical capability to use anticipatory systems to identify and analyze
today's emergent phenomena for policy purposes;
• Gain a deeper understanding of the latest development in the field of foresight, including the
different tools and networks that are advancing the field;
• Address current pressing policy issues through a hands-on foresight process.
• Invent, design and discuss prototype anticipatory systems projects for Colombia.
Both English and Spanish were used during the event, with the support of simultaneous interpretation
provided by the host. The slides used by the international team during the event are attached to this
report as Annex 2 (available upon request)
Methodology
The FL Uknowlab follows a learning curve sequence that is intended to engage the collective
intelligence of participants. The idea of collective intelligence is that everyone knows things, not always
explicitly or articulately, and that when we make an effort to share meaning we are obliged to clarify and
seek shared meaning. Through this conversational process information is revealed, new meanings and
even phenomena discovered and shared sense making emerges (which is not the same as consensus or
agreement - indeed there can be a clarification of disagreement). Of course this search process is
incomplete and biased in many ways but since it is collective it is also more diverse, at a minimum in
terms of different points-of-view due to age or gender or personal history, and it offers the potential of
making explicit specific, time-place unique, information that the participants carry with them into the
conversation. This is why the creation of knowledge through collective knowledge creation processes
(or knowlabs) is one of the main ways to “research” the anticipatory assumptions that we use to imagine
the future.
The design of this particular FL Uknowlab agenda involved both learning-by-doing and learning by
viewing techniques, with intertwining lectures and workshop exercises in groups. The emphasize was
on the practical dimension of foresight applied to labor market studies and labor policy, exploring the
developments taking place in the Discipline of Anticipation and how such advances can be applied to
labor market policy analysis and implementation.
DAY 1
Session 1 Introductions (1 hour)
Introductory lecture on the evolutions of foresight in the last decade and lessons-learned from the latest
research into the Discipline of Anticipation, Futures Literacy and complexity studies.
Lecture by Dr. Riel Miller
Session 2 Thinking about the future (1 hour)
Epistemology and Ontology - using the future to create knowledge.
Lecture by Mrs. Lydia Garrido
Session 3 Foresight toolbox (1.5 hours)
Review of foresight tools, from probabilistic forecasting to scenario thinking, to early warning systems,
and rigorous imagining.
Presentation by Mr. Kacper Nosarzewski Page 4
Session 4 Futures Literacy exercise Phase 1 (1.5 hours)
Work in groups and reporting back focusing on the futures of labor market in Colombia. Expectations
and Hopes: revealing anticipatory assumptions. Analysis of the images created using Causal Layered
Analysis method, facilitated by the international team.
Group work
DAY 2
Session 5 Futures Literacy exercise Phase 2 - Part 1 (45 minutes)
Reframing. A Hybrid strategic scenario method with rigorous imagining (RI) to elaborate a
discontinuous scenario. Presentation of the Learning Intensive Society (LIS) model used for the
purpose of stretching beyond the business-as-usual horizon, to question assumptions and incumbent
models.
Presentation of the concept and model by Dr. Riel Miller.
Session 6 Futures Literacy exercise Phase 2 - Part 2 (2.5 hours)
Group task is to invent non-predictive scenarios, to create multi-dimensional, multilayered
descriptions, a snapshot of the future of work in Colombia in a discontinuous, different future. During
the exercise we are going to identify key anticipatory assumptions in this discontinuous imaginative
narrative.
Plenary presentations and exchanges.
Session 7 Anticipatory administration Reframing for innovation within a closed system (0.5 hour)
Closed systems are not a favorable environment for exploratory activities from within and often do not
allow change unless under strict control and without questioning the systemic assumptions. That is
why the task of applying exploratory foresight to the field of policy is a challenge.
New theory of Anticipatory Governance.
Presentation by Mr. Kacper Nosarzewski.
Session 8 Futures Literacy exercise Phase 2 - Part 3 (2 hours)
Learning by doing exercises: Prototype and Test. Break groups write a report to UNESCO about the
role of the Observatories in the LIS in Colombia. Effort was given to describe specific anticipatory
processes/projects to pursue the strategic objectives for Colombia in the present. The aim is to develop
some prototypes that illustrate and test an anticipatory systems approach.
Plenary reflections and discussions.
Session 9 Discipline of Anticipation. (0.5 hour)
Understanding the potential of anticipation in order to enhance the capacity of policy makers to reach
societal objectives. Overview of key application issues and follow-through learning. An open
discussion followed for 0.5 hour providing feedback and follow-up ideas.
Talk given by Dr. Riel Miller
The training sessions closed at 18:00 local time on the 26th November.
Advanced Futures Literacy Course for Policy Makers
Page 5
Main outcomes
The participants, working at the local level on labor market challenges in Colombia, and the event's
sponsors, the UNDP in Colombia and the Ministry of Labor, were all concerned with advancing socio-
economic development. From this perspective, the FL Uknowlab generated the following conclusions.
First the participants and sponsors received clear confirmation of the intuition that led to
investing in this event - that there was indeed a need to assess and enrich the tools being used
to formulate and implement labor market policies by gaining a deeper understanding of how to
use the future.
Second, there was an important recognition, directly related to existing activities and practices,
that to achieve local labor market objectives as well as broader regional and national
aspirations it is necessary to acquire new capabilities. In particular the capacity to use the
future and collective intelligence processes that are efficient in generating locally specific
knowledge that enables the invention and deployment of new methods for formulating and
implementing collective action.
Third, that there are clear and readily available methods for enhancing the practical capacity to
use anticipatory systems to identify and analyze today's emergent phenomena for policy
purposes through learning-by-doing processes such as the FL Uknowlab.
Regional economic and cultural identity (e.g. impact of the coffee industry) and regional specificity of
the observatories played an important role in the discussions, demonstrating the ability to evoke and
give meaning to specificity in a broader, often international discussion. Spontaneous feed-back from
the participants was collected, including inquiries into technical aspects of exploratory foresight
methods and practical upgrades to the existing methodology employed by the RED ORMET members.
Participants were able to make direct connections between what they were learning in the workshop
and their existing models and knowledge creation systems, i.e. macroeconomics, regional development,
etc.
In summary, participants in the FL Uknowlab acquired both new skills and a new understanding of
their current activities that will enable them to move forward in applying the latest developments in the
field of foresight to the challenges they face. The FL Uknowlab, as intended, provided context specific
meaning for the newest policy-oriented foresight techniques. Participants gained an appreciation of the
role of the future and collective intelligence action-research in producing the sense-making necessary
for collective action - a new approach to creating and enacting “public policy”.
Finally a clear desire was expressed by participants and sponsors to pursue further the development of
Futures Literacy and apply the Discipline of Anticipation to the work they are doing at both the local
level and at national/global levels. Interest was also expressed in finding ways to engage sectoral specific
actors in more advanced anticipatory process such as the FL Uknowlab. Subsequent to the event a set of
follow-up options have been developed and are under discussion for implementation.
Main findings
Current pressing policy issues were identified through the FL Uknowlab's hands-on foresight process.
Key elements of the RED ORMET epistemic landscape took on new meaning and became sources of
inspiration for new questions and potentially new solutions. Participants were able to reconsider such
central issues as the relationship between formal and informal activities, exogenous and endogenous
growth, education-employment planning, and knowledge sharing processes/content amongst diverse
actors at all levels - local-regional-national-global. The ensemble of methods, carefully designed as a
learning voyage, allowed participants to discover and appreciate the repetitions and differences that
characterize the emergent and evolving context for value creation at the local, national and global Page 6
Advanced Futures Literacy Course for Policy Makers
levels. Participants started a process of developing new goals and capabilities for sense making, data
processing, analysis and reporting.
Prototype anticipatory systems projects for Colombian labor market observatories were tested during
Session 8. This exercise offered an opportunity to display new vantage points that had been provoked
by the reframing process and reflected the creative dynamic across groups and amongst individual
participants. Through this process participants were empowered to call into question existing
definitions and organizational forms of welfare-provision - examining the biases introduced by
conceptual and organizational frameworks that reflect paternalism and the dominance of the dualistic
supply-demand conceptual framework. Participants also started to seek new systemic solutions,
pushing the frontiers of the RED ORMET current theory and practice. For instance they observed that
it may useful to:
• Build the capacity to generate real time profiles of productive activity - enhancing the quality
of information available for both initiating new value-added activity and improving the
efficiency of existing activities/recruitment/networking.
• Redefine the expected and operational relationship between the so called supply side of
skills, through education, and the demand side, opportunities defined by already exisiting jobs
in order to escape from a planning approach to the creation and deployment of wealth creating
capacity.
• Engage and make sense of cultural assets, the locally specific knowledge and traditions that
generate in-situ meaning, in order to enhance the efficiency of information sharing for
creating wealth.
• Give a clearer productive meaning to human and social rights, including transparency and
openness. training and learning that are part of collective rights.
• Find ways of giving local meaning to global connectivity.
• Empower local self-organization and self-management by enhancing local capacities ti use
the future .
• Build new relationships and cross boundary partnerships, for instance between workers and
employees, crafted out of jointly invented aspirations and collective intelligence based
understanding.
• Discover and initiate new information creation processes and places by exploring
systemically different assumptions about time, space and authority that encourage the
articulation and negotiation of sense making amongst diverse actors - public, private and
social.
• Build up new infrastructures that enable real-time information creation and access outside of
current barriers and conflicts.
The notions of temporality, multiple futures, reframing, desirable and probable future, plausibility,
ontological status of present and future, optimization, contingency, novelty, exploratory approaches
were all evoked and discussed through the FL UKnowLab's, a hands-on deliberative process.
Participants, were able to express and debate a range of strongly held systemic perspectives, providing a
large conceptual space for thinking about the on-going transformation of socioeconomic models.
In Practice
The group as a whole was cooperative and engaged with the process enthusiastically. Participants
appeared relaxed and able to express themselves and ask questions freely. Much of the process was
conducted in the local language and when there were terminological or translation questions there
were sufficient resources available to successfully arrive at shared understandings. Cooperation within
the break-out groups was also enthusiastic, with different participants taking turns in presenting and
changing roles within the teams.
Page 7
Page 8
Contact
For questions and comments, please contact
Dr. Riel Miller
Head of Foresight
UNESCO
r.miller@unesco.org
!Page 1 of 1!
Annex 1
Using the future to think about local labor markets
A Futures Literacy UNESCO Knowledge Laboratory
Red de Observatorios Regionales de Mercado de Trabajo,
Bogota, Colombia
November 25 to 26, 2013
Today, worldwide, a series of emergent political, economic and social phenomena are generating
new concepts of value-creation, the workplace, learning, retirement and investment as well as
calling into question old norms and institutions. Part of this changing landscape involves the way
we conceive and construct collective efforts at understanding the world around us. Many of the
familiar patterns and sources used to make sense of the world cannot effectively capture or make
sense of what is going on. As a result people are experimenting. In all walks of life efforts are
underway to invent and discover better ways of understanding a world full of the old and new,
the dangerous and beneficial, the discouraging and hopeful.
In this context governments around the world are working to develop new capabilities, including
the way the future is used for decision-making1. These initiatives range from the military, where
it is well known that the challenge is to move beyond preparing to fight the “last war”, to the
President’s or Prime Minister’s office where the diversity of circumstances calls for a command of
many different ways of thinking about the future. The field of labor policy is no different.
Transformations are taking place in the nature of work, the systems for organizing the allocation
of time to value creating activities, and the methods used to understand and share the meaning of
changes in the distribution of human activity in daily life. Such disruptive changes not only upset
existing paradigms but also mark the emergence of new ones. This means that government policy
and policy makers are faced with a dual challenge – improving the old and inventing the new.
With respect to labor market foresight or efforts to discern the future of employment and skills,
the old can be understood as processes to extrapolate economic change with sufficient detail and
sufficient accuracy to make supply side planning effective. However, as decades of experience
has demonstrated, medium and long-run labor market forecasting is not a particularly useful way
to think about the future of work. This is not only because of significant lags in training systems
and technical difficulties in meeting rigorous data and modeling specifications, but more
importantly the fundamentally complex evolutionary nature of economic systems. Recognition of
this reality was partly what accounted for the shift away from labor market planning to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1 For a recent summary:
http://www.iss.europa.eu/fileadmin/euiss/documents/Books/Yearbook/2.1_Foresight_in_governments.pdf
UNDP – ORMET – UNESCO
Advanced Futures Literacy Course for Policy Makers
Bogota, Colombia Page 2 of 2 November 25 to 26, 2013
!
framework type policies in the 1980s and 1990s for OECD countries. Currently the expansion or
catch-up/convergence of industrializing countries and the crisis of “de-industrialization” of
developed countries makes it tempting to return to the old planning – forecasting approach for
thinking about the future nature and structure of human work activity. While at the same time
suggesting that something more is needed.
This two-day Advanced Futures Literacy course will help policy makers to understand this
context for thinking about the future. On the one hand, there are improvements taking place in
the way predictive models are constructed and used, on the other hand, entirely new approaches
to the mutual creation of knowledge and work are emerging. The point is not to abandon
important and still significant tools for thinking about the future and informing policies that can
make existing systems work better. Rather it is to help today’s policy makers to better understand
how to expand their tool set and improve their capacity to detect and make sense of the
repetition and difference, the old and new, that are at the core of policy making. This course uses
a learning-by-doing approach to explore the developments taking place in the Discipline of
Anticipation and how such advances can be applied to labor policy.
Main Focus:
• Develop participant’s practical capability to use anticipatory systems to identify and
analyze today’s emergent phenomena for policy purposes;
• Gain a deeper understanding of the latest development in the field of foresight, including
the different tools and networks that are advancing the field;
• Address current pressing policy issues through a hands-on foresight process.
• Invent, design and discuss prototype anticipatory systems projects for Colombia.
The training will be carried out in English and Spanish.
UNDP – ORMET – UNESCO
Advanced Futures Literacy Course for Policy Makers
Bogota, Colombia Page 3 of 3 November 25 to 26, 2013
!
DAY 1
9:00 Welcome
10:00 Session 1 Thinking about the future
Epistemology and Ontology – using the future to create knowledge
Objective: The aim of this session is to introduce participants to the key aspects of the
Discipline of Anticipation – the concept of anticipatory systems and Futures Literacy as a way to
use the future for decision-making.
Presentation:
a. What is the future? (introduction to the Discipline of Anticipation; distinguishing contingent,
optimized and exploratory futures)
b. Different ways of trying to know the future (from prophecies, divination, science fiction,
utopias, or other more systematic – predictions, futurology, prospective, foresight)
c. The relation between ontology and epistemology. Introduction of suitable approaches used
for each case: (trends, delphi, scenarios, the day after, anticipation). References to labor
foresight in Colombia to date.
11:30 Session 2 Overview of Future Studies methods
Objective: By reviewing the outcomes of Session 2 the aim is to underscore participants’
(awareness) of how anticipatory assumptions (values and expectations) are framing not only the
imagined future, but also the basic attributes of policy analysis. This then follows with a brief
overview of the range of methods/tools in the foresight toolbox, as well as an introduction to the
generic design tool (dubbed the knowledge laboratory or “microscope of the 21st Century”) that
uses collective intelligence to create knowledge.
Presentation: A review of foresight tools, from probabilistic forecasting to scenario thinking
and rigorous imagining. Discussion of systems thinking and social change, giving meaning to the
concepts of trends, weak signals and disruption. An overview of horizon/environmental scanning
as a systematic method to map social, technological, economic, political dimensions) weak
signals. Two case studies: The Future of Work (Apollo Research Institute, 2012); The Future of
Learning: Preparing for Change (Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, 2011); References to
skills forecasting to show how the empirical methods of labour forecasting relate to exploratory
futures.
12:30 Lunch
UNDP – ORMET – UNESCO
Advanced Futures Literacy Course for Policy Makers
Bogota, Colombia Page 4 of 4 November 25 to 26, 2013
!
13:30 Session 3 Setting the Stage
Participants are requested to prepare in advance a set of bullet points that describe
a) what are the current challenges facing the Colombian labor market and labor policy;
b) what are their needs and expectations for this course
Overview of the learning-by-doing approach and the remainder of the course agenda.
14:30 Session 4 Futures Literacy exercise Phase 1
Expectations and Hopes: revealing anticipatory assumptions
Part 1 - 20 minutes: Participants close their eyes, count to ten and imagine waking up in the long-
run future, for instance 2040. First participants jot down four different post-it notes that describe
what they expect it will be like. This is not a story about how things occurred, it is a present tense
description of what they expect the world to be like (a snapshot not a movie). Then each member
of the group presents what they see in the snapshot of the long-run future. After the discussion
the participants can revise or add to the post-its and then put them up on the board.
Part 2 – 20 minutes, repeat the exercise, but this time participants describe a desirable or ideal
long-run future and note the values that lead them to consider a particular future desirable
or “good”.
Part 3 – 40 minutes, using Causal Layered Analysis categories to make sense of the anticipatory
assumptions. Causal Layered Analysis (CLA). This methodology helps to know below the
appearance of the surface of a social phenomenon. With this technique we can explore deeper
levels of thinking and practice (Litany, System, Worldview and Myth/Metaphor).
Part 4 – 40 minutes, reporting back to plenary.
16:30 Session 5 Futures Literacy exercise Phase 2 – Part 1
Futures Literacy Phase 2: Reframing. A Hybrid strategic scenario method with rigorous
imagining (RI) to elaborate a discontinuous scenario. The Learning Intensive Society (LIS).
Objective: use of a model-device for reframing, escaping from the probable and preferable to
imagine the possible with systematic creativity and creating systematically. The aim of this
technic is to help us to imagine and describe a snapshot of a systemically distinct labor society as
manifested by substantive discontinuity between the current and imagined future. To be clear,
UNDP – ORMET – UNESCO
Advanced Futures Literacy Course for Policy Makers
Bogota, Colombia Page 5 of 5 November 25 to 26, 2013
!
there is no suggestion that this LIS (or UIS) is likely to happen or even desirable, the point is to
experience the power of our anticipatory assumptions in shaping the futures we imagine and the
potential to address the hard task of inventing paradigmatically distinctive futures.
Presentation:
a. Introduction of some key concepts in FS Part 2: Complex thinking, heterogeneity and
spontaneity, ‘change in the conditions of change’, emergence, novelty.
b. The LIS (or UIS) model-device. Developing a ‘space’ for imagining possible futures. RI
involves two distinct challenges – imagination and rigour. Synergy conditions for transition
scale change: technological, economic, social and governance dynamism.
Day 2
9:00 Session 6 Futures Literacy exercise Phase 2 – Part 2
Taking the LIS model-device as an example (a rigorous imagining one). In breakout groups the
task is to invent new frameworks (non-predictive scenarios), to create multi-dimensional, multi-
layered descriptions, a snapshot of the future of work in Colombia in a discontinuous, different
future. During the exercise we are going to identify key anticipatory assumptions in this
discontinuous imaginative narrative. Plenary presentations and exchanges.
!
11:00 Session 7 Anticipation and policy-making – Part 1
Objective:
a) Understand the potential of exploratory futures in the extension of capabilities and freedom
(Senian sense) and how anticipation theory and method allows an expanded interrogation of the
potential of the present (new questions).
b) Understand and learn how to use and apply anticipation in decision - making related to the
future of work.
Learning by doing exercises: Prototype and Test.
Break groups will select specific aspects of the contrasting futures/assumptions to pose new
questions about policy. Effort to describe specific anticipatory processes/projects to pursue the
strategic objectives for Colombia in the present. The aim is to develop some prototypes that
illustrate and test an anticipatory systems approach.
12:30 Lunch
UNDP – ORMET – UNESCO
Advanced Futures Literacy Course for Policy Makers
Bogota, Colombia Page 6 of 6 November 25 to 26, 2013
!
13:30 Session 8 Anticipation and policy-making – Part 2
Plenary presentations and discussion.
15:30 Session 8 Review of the Discipline of Anticipation.
Objective: Understand the potential of anticipation in order to enhance the capacity of policy
makers to reach societal objectives.
Presentation: Overview of key application issues and follow-through learning.
Open discussion: feedback/evaluation and follow-up ideas.
17:00 Closing
Dr. Riel Miller, Head of Foresight, UNESCO
For 30 years Riel’s work has concentrated on how to use the future to assess and direct the
potential for socio-economic transformation in the private and public sectors. He started his
career at the OECD Economics Department in 1982 and has worked as a Senior Manager in the
Ontario Civil Service (Ministries of Finance; Universities; Industry) and for the International
Futures Programme at the OECD for a decade. In 2005 Riel founded a specialized global
consultancy, xperidox futures consulting, that helped clients to use the future strategically. His
clients range from the Governments of Ireland, UK, Norway, Scotland, Finland, Canada, Korea,
Singapore, Romania, France, etc. to international organizations like the United Nations
Educational, UNESCO, OECD, the European Commission and the UNDP to private
companies like Cisco Systems, Philips, Alstom, Gemalto, Poyry, Promethean, etc. to regional
governments like the state of Catalonia, province of Ontario, etc. Riel is currently Head of
Foresight at the Bureau of Strategic Planning at UNESCO, coordinating global projects to build
foresight capacity and advance the futures literacy worldwide.
Kacper Nosarzewski
As a foresight practitioner, promoter and proselyte, Kacper represents the emerging school of
professional foresight, one focusing on the use of anticipation to reach strategic goals in fluid and
uncertain environment. He is currently a partner at a Warsaw-based strategic foresight and
analysis company 4CF and an expert in foresight and communication accredited at the Polish
Chamber of High Technology. Over the last years he has worked with public clients such as
World Health Organization and “Lewiatan” Employers Confederation on strategic foresight, in
addition to assisting numerous companies from FMCG, Hi-Tech and retail sectors improve their
adaptive capacities. He is a member of the Polish Node of The Millennium Project and Board
Member of the Polish Society for Futures Studies. He is also implicated in the current UNESCO
UNDP – ORMET – UNESCO
Advanced Futures Literacy Course for Policy Makers
Bogota, Colombia Page 7 of 7 November 25 to 26, 2013
!
“Scoping Global/Local Anticipatory Capacities” project. His previous career has been linked to
the international energy sector, working i.a. with Veolia Environment.
Lydia Garrido
Social Anthropologist specialized in Social Change and Development. Researcher in
Technologies, Innovation and Social Inclusion in FLACSO Uruguay (Facultad Latinoamericana
de Ciencias Sociales). As a practitioner of anthropology of anticipation she pays special attention
to emergent processes in contemporary societies and how communities perceive and use the
future, with the objective of generating knowledge to strength individual and social capacities.
She is member of the Sectorial Councils of Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, and ICT in
Uruguay (Gabinete Productivo), coordination spaces between government, academia, workers
and employers for the definition of public policies for the sector. She is also member of the
Latinoamerican Nanotechnology and Society Network/ RELANS. She is the articulator of the
Uruguayan Node of The Millennium Project, Global Futures Research, and member of the
Planning Committee of Millennium Project. She is also involved in the current UNESCO
“Scoping Global/Local Anticipatory Capacities” project.