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147
OCTOBER 2023 COMPASS
F U T U R E S L I T E R A C Y :
I M A G I N I N G A N A L T E R N A T I V E
T O O B E D I E N C E A N D
A U T H O R I T Y
By Riel Miller
Image source: Canva
commandments and ‘preservationism,’
continuity and control.
Seduced and diminished by ex-post stories
of heroic winners, the conquerors of
tomorrow, purveyors of monocultures of
the imagination, wonder and joy
evaporate, alienation overwhelms the
meaning of novelty, emergence,
improvisation, and ephemerality. Being is
reduced to making bets, picking winners.
Perception narrowed down to the
calculation of the probabilities of ‘being
right.’ Prestige dissolves into legacy, the
heavy hand of path-dependency, fear of
difference, and antipathy to change.
Instead of cultivating the capacity and
confidence needed to celebrate the
unexpected, the creative gifts of a novelty-
enabled universe, we build bastions of
continuity, crafting the fragility and
brittleness of stability at any cost, refusing
the agility and resilience of diversification,
the dance of birth and death that are the
only path to experimentalist resilience. We
laud intelligence not wisdom.
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Imagine a world in which no human
obeyed another human because of fear, or
rank, or expected benefits.
What an undesirable fantasy, without the
constraints and guiding forces of
established authority, the continuity of
known punishments and rewards, no one
would work or acquiesce to the laws of
land and property. Released from the
authority of the boss, teacher, or leader,
murder and mayhem would prevail. Even
progress and order, not to mention the
fruits of innovation and betterment
through competition, would disappear
without the majesty of entrenched
authority and the authority of entrenched
majesty. Furthermore, such a scenario is
totally unrealistic, at odds with ‘human
nature’ and history. No one imagines such
ridiculous worlds, don’t give it a second
thought.
The thing is – people can and do imagine
such worlds, across different cultures and
languages. Regularly and consistently,
when invited to wander in the non-
probable and non-preferable imaginary
landscapes of a Futures Literacy
Laboratory (Miller, 2018). In hundreds of
co-created ‘living laboratories’ people have
been invited to embrace reasons and
methods for imagining the future that go
beyond the obsession with colonizing
tomorrow by controlling what happens. All
around the world, hailing from all walks of
life, the participants of Futures Literacy
Labs have applied their collective
intelligence to imagining worlds that break
the confines of today’s prevalent and very
ancient ‘monumentalist’ and bureaucratic
social orders. They imagine communities
that function outside the box of millennia
old systems of authority and obedience,
Image source: Canva
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OCTOBER 2023 COMPASS
Image source: Unesco.org
importance of identifying and respecting
the fundamental (ontological) difference
between these two imaginaries is both the
inescapable necessity of constantly making
irrevocable bets based on whatever
version of credible/legitimate certainty
prevails at the moment, and the equally
incessant emergence right now of the
novel and unknowable in advance.
Furthermore, paradigmatic distinctiveness
applies, since these two categories of the
human imagination do not use the same
concepts, methods (epistemologies), or
goals. One is about knowing and the other
about not–knowing.
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OCTOBER 2023 COMPASS
WHAT’S THE POINT OF IMAGINED
FUTURES?
Unleashing the imagination from the
confines of probability and teleology
(pursuing goals) may be doable, but why
bother? If imagined futures are not being
used to prepare or, plan for the future,
what’s the point?
One answer is that an explicit awareness
of the diversity of reasons and methods
for imagining the future opens a bridge or
door to recasting the positionings of
human agency, the vantage points for
formulating our intentions and volition.
Call it an escape hatch from the long-
standing and ultimately self-annihilating
arrogance of pursuing superiority over
everything, from other humans to the
universe that surrounds us.
Exploring such a path, diving into
understanding human anticipatory
systems and processes beyond the
predictive, expanding the why and how of
imagining the not-past, not present, points
to a radically different scenario. One in
which targeting a specific fulcrum that
could change the conditions of change
(yes, an intertwined double movement)
alters the relationship of humans to the
creativity of the universe. Could humans
be nourished, rather terrified by the
differences that are change, abandoning
our vain (both senses) attempts to stand
apart from the flow of the emergent
present?
What makes these two ‘appendages’ of our
imagination different is that one is
dedicated to planning and the other to
enabling perception in the present to
escape from the confines of planning. The Image source: Canva
Imagining human life as exuberant
difference seems in keeping with the joys
of a universe that is creative.
Only I cannot even begin to imagine the
actual workings of such a non-teleological,
non-hierarchical way of being. Not
because of a lack of political alternatives,
as there is a long and inspiring
constellation of various utopian scenarios
anchored in the critique of
extractive/authoritarian social orders, but
because all of those agentic frames are
teleological -- wrapped in the garb of
progress and the aspirations/morality of
creating a better future (Miller, 2022).
From a futures literacy perspective, or
more accurately the dominance today of
futures illiteracy, the phenomena that
might serve as the conditions for
imagining the unimaginable do not exist –
hence the unimaginability.
So how can I know if a futures literate
future is a better future?
How can I know how to construct or
pursue such a future?
What are the policies, formulas,
admonitions to ‘make a difference’, to
proclaim ’what is to be done,’ that so
dominate today’s search for hope?
I do not know, and I don’t want to. For
these would be the wrong questions – the
ones that simply reproduce a crushing fear
of not-knowing and the desperate and
narcissistic pursuit of winning.
Instead, what about ramping up capability-
based conceptions of reciprocity – what we
gift to each other – particularly by inverting
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OCTOBER 2023 COMPASS
But it is not enough to grasp the
distinctiveness of the two legs, it is also – at
this point in human history – essential to
recognize that for most of humanity the
importance of the ‘other’ leg and the
relationship between the two legs –
remains invisible. Which, in turn, means
that we live at a time prior to any of the
changes in the conditions of change that
might be wrought by the advent of
widespread futures literacy. As Edgar
Morin, the French philosopher, has put it
“we live in the prehistory” of our species.
WIDESPREAD CULTIVATION OF
FUTURES LITERACY
The seed of this ‘What if?’ is the framing
assumption that somehow there emerges
a set of learning/transmission habits
(maybe evolutionary progeny of
indigenous wisdom facilitating processes
(Yunkaporta, 2020; Sveiby and Skuthorpe,
2006)) that enable the renewed and
widespread cultivation of futures literacy
such that all humans acquire a practical
awareness of the role and the impact of
different reasons and methods for
imagining the not-present, not-past. If this
were the case, how might it change our
relationships to continuity and
discontinuity, planning and improvisation,
legacy and spontaneity, generality, and
specificity? Could the fears and comforts,
alienation and despair that describe so
much of the last few millennia fade into
the memories of childhood’s past? Would
we still need to ‘resort’ to ‘separated’
incarnations of moral authority, enforcers
of the collective that disintegrate without
mechanisms of punishment, surveillance,
and the uniformities of scalable
massification?
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OCTOBER 2023 COMPASS
the typical effort to know what we are
‘giving’ to the future? Accepting that we do
not know and cannot know and are not
acting in the name of an unknowable
future but in our own name, our values
now.
WIELDING OUR IMAGINATION
The idea is to redress the imbalance in
why and how humans wield this
spectacular aptitude – our imagination.
Not as a solution or promise of
transformation. Particularly since the
concepts, analysis, and conclusions are still
too deeply rooted in the past, too tied to
the dominant ontological and epistemic
conventions, the pervasive tendrils of
millennia of aspiring and promising
salvation. The more modest hope is that
we can spark some experiments, playing
with transitional ideas, departures from
the conventions, habits, rituals, and
expectations of today’s debilitating pre-
occupation with colonizing tomorrow.
Enhancing the human capacity to be free
is not a race for ultimate power and
omnipotence, but an invitation to taste
humility, experience an enhanced ability
to sense and make-sense of difference,
embrace change and ephemerality, live
consciously with each other and with our
universe, not against it. To become
better able to listen and dance to the
music of this universe, which like all
music, is made up of the presence and
absence of sound’s vibrations, certainty
and uncertainty, repetition and
difference, knowing and
Riel Miller is one of the world’s leading
authorities on the theory and practice
of using the future to change what
people see and do. He is recognized as
an innovative and globally experienced
project initiator, designer, and
manager. He is widely published in
academic journals and other media on a
range of topics, from the future of the
Internet to transforming strategic
processes. He is an accomplished
keynote speaker and facilitator. Riel
Miller’s lifelong ambition is to put the
richness of complex emergence at the
service of humanity's capacity to be
free. To reach Riel, contact him through
his LinkedIn page:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rielmiller
Riel Miller
not-knowing combing into the song of
being. And this dance combines
choreography and preparation with
improvisation and spontaneity in the
moment – the authority or confidence that
is the vitality of expressing the
entanglements of life from within.