Avainsana-arkisto: futures studies

CELEBRATING FUTURES MEANS CELEBRATING LIFE

28.02.2020 ffrc Kommentoi

Sirkka Heinonen:

Futures thinking has finally become an academic discipline (in a few universities) while its pragmatic and light version – called foresight – has emerged as a critical strategic field for governments, cities, organisations and companies. Futures education is entering schools at all levels, even if only with the first baby steps. Futures communication could be described as an area and empowering approach through which you can highlight the essence and need for futures thinking and creation i.e. futures literacy. The awareness and visibility of futures literacy can be strengthened through various campaigns and celebrations.

World Future Day

For several consecutive years now, the Millennium Project has organized the World Future Day on March 1^st, now hosted by The Millennium Project in collaboration with:

Again this year anyone can celebrate futures and attend the World Future Day via the Zoom. This celebratory event consists of volunteers, mostly from the Millennium Project network, facilitating futures discussions at 12 noon in their own time zone. You can come join the conversation whenever you want. Updates will be available online. This is a very globally inclusive, participatory, discussant, inter-cultural and inter-generational celebration of futures which can engage new actors in the field of futures studies, foresight and anticipation.

Finnish Futures Day Extended to Futures Week

Since the International Futures Day falls on a Sunday this year, celebrations are moved to the 6^th of March in several locations, such as here in Finland. The goal of Futures Day is to alert the large masses of Finns for one day to discuss what kind of futures we want to create. The Futures Day concept works like the originally Finnish grassroot innovation Restaurant Day i.e. anyone in their community can organise their own Futures Day with the materials provided on the website (the Finnish site). You can even post your own event on the Future Day website.

The Finnish Futures Day is actually extended for the whole Futures Week through events that inspire people to conversations about dreams and fears of the future they face. This is in order to strengthen futures awareness and make futures thinking visible. The Finnish National Foresight network also organises a Foresight Friday event on “Shaping the Future: Between Continuities and Disruptions”.

40 years of Finnish Society for Futures Studies – celebrating futures the whole year of 2020

The Finnish Society of Futures Studies (FSFS) is actively involved in organising and attending Futures Day events, extending futures celebrations for the whole year. This is because the Society, established in 1980 with Professor Pentti Malaska as its first President, is now celebrating its 40 years anniversary. These events will make futures thinking, its forms, means and goals, visible to the public, not only to the society’s 700 members.

Examples of futures events in 2020 – besides regular annual seminars, are TOP TEN seminar on Future and Power, seminar on theoretical and philosophical foundations of futures studies, summer seminar on our joint futures and actors making them, as well as a special issue of FUTURA journal (4/2019) on the past 40 years with interviews of 25 acknowledged futures researchers active within the FSFS.

Celebrating the history of futures activities and communicating it to younger generations is quintessential – both in learning about the very diverse paths that can lead to systematic futures work and in encouraging younger actors to enrichen the field and boldly open up new avenues and angles. A call for videos of visualising futures, especially scenarios, will also be opened soon.

100 years of University of Turku

Futures celebrations are intensified with the celebration of the 100^th Anniversary of the University of Turku. With the Finland Futures Research Centre (FFRC) as its department and with the new futures basics course TULEVA that is obligatory for all master’s programme students at its School of Economics the University of Turku can be metaphorically called “Futures University”.

In June the 21st international FFRC conference will be organised on ‘Learning Futures – Futures of Learning’ in Helsinki in co-operation with the Finnish National Agency for Education (EDUFI). The conference includes a special session “Millennium Forum”, organised by FEN (Foresight European Network) and the Helsinki Node of the Millennium Project, the latter one celebrating its twenty years of activity. There you can simultaneously celebrate learning and learn to celebrate – both are equally educational.

Futures Studies as Life Supporting System

The above mentioned examples of campaigns and celebrations aim at enhancing the awareness and visibility of futures thinking and futures studies. Such futures communication is needed not only for making wider circles in society conscious of the potential and benefits of futures work, but also for nudging more stakeholders to concretely use futures and foresight material and results in their strategic processes.

Serious futures work becomes a synonym for survival strategies. My claim is that every organisation, government, company, NGO etc needs a futures strategy to cope and succeed. In a nutshell, futures strategy means traditional strategy enhanced by longer time-frame, systemic view, holistic approach, out-of-the-box thinking, aided with peripheral vision (Day & Shoemaker 2006) and other futures methodology (Glenn & Gordon 2009; Heinonen, Kuusi & Salminen eds 2017). Accordingly, futures literacy and foresight skills become a necessary prerequisite for survival – they embody a life-supporting system if their results are harnessed to tackle the mega-challenges hovering above humankind’s head like Damocles’ sword. This allegory highlights that with great fortune and power comes also great danger. Humankind thinks of itself sitting in the king’s throne, in power over nature, in control of technology. This no longer applies – there are existential risks looming above us by a hair’s strength such as climate change, cyberterrorism, pandemics, artificial super intelligence.

In the Millennium project Future of Work/Technology 2050 scenarios (Glenn 2019), a key distinguishing feature of different assumptions about how artificial intelligence evolves from the current specific or niche applications-competent artificial intelligence (Artificial Narrow Intelligence ANI) towards that of capable of solving a wide range of tasks similar to humans competence (Artificial General Intelligence AGI) and still further towards artificial intelligence that becomes superior to humans’ performance in most tasks (Artificial Super Intelligence ASI). What if ASI then realises and decides that humans are detrimental to life on earth and draws certain conclusions?

From the point of view of biology, the purpose of life is to produce as many offspring as possible i.e. to reproduce and maintain the population. From the point of view of many religions, the purpose of life is to live in contact with Higher Being and to use his or her own special skills for the benefit of others. The purpose of Futures Studies has already been crystallised by Ossip K. Flechtheim (1966) to combat great global problems such as poverty, war, inequality. Wendel Bell (1997, 111) saw as the overriding purpose of futures studies “to maintain or improve human well-being and the life-sustaining capacities of the Earth” with nine sub-purposes all tightly bundled together under this umbrella.

Therefore, a relevant question for all participants of the Futures Day, Week or Year is to also address such mega-questions as purpose of life and how futures studies could concentrate on them more efficiently – how to use the special foresight skills to benefit fellow humans, other species, and the planet? The mega-challenge of climate change is deeply intertwined with this endeavour. Electricity production based on even 100% renewable energy is already technically possible (Breyer et al. 2016). However, because of institutional obstacles, fossil industry lobbying, and political indecision, the transition is slow. However, when there’s a will, there’s a way. The Club of Rome published its Climate Emergency Plan (2019), there are scenarios for pathways to emission-free futures (e.g. Heinonen & Karjalainen 2019), and there are pioneers such as Greta Thunberg.

Both the speed and scale for action in face of global challenges matter. In futures field, we can adopt 100% futures consciousness, if we only choose so. Every step, event, campaign and working/learning process celebrating futures thinking and futures literacy is noteworthy. In memory of Bell’s line of integrative prospective thinking: we have to reason, choose and act, correspondingly. Everybody is invited to these empowering futures celebrations.

Sirkka Heinonen
Ph.D., Professor Emerita
Finland Futures Research Centre
University of Turku

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References

Bell, Wendell (1997). Foundations of Futures Studies. Human Science for a New Era. Volume I: History, Purposes and Knowledge. Transaction Publishers, New Jersey.

Breyer, Christian; Heinonen, Sirkka & Ruotsalainen, Juho (2016). New consciousness: A societal and energetic vision for rebalancing humankind within the limits of planet Earth. Technological Forecasting and Social Change.

Club of Rome Climate Emergency Plan. A Collaborative Call for Action. By members of the Club of Rome: Sandrine Dickson-Déclève, Ian Dunlop, Andres Wijkman with support from Martin Hedberk & Till Kellerhof, 16 p.

Day, George & Schoemaker, Paul (2006). Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak Signals That Will Make or Break Your Company. Harvard Business School Press.

Flechtheim, Ossip K. (1996). History and Futurology. Meisenheim-am-Glan, Germany. Verlag Anton Hain.

Glenn, Jerome (2019) Work/Technology 2050 – scenarios and actions. Orders.

Glenn, Jerome & Gordon, Theodore (eds) (2009). Millennium Project Futures Research Methodology Version 3.0.

Heinonen, Sirkka & Karjalainen, Joni (2019). Electrification in Peer-to-Peer Society – New Narrative for Sustainable Futures. FFRC eBook 1/2019. Order print copies.

Heinonen, Sirkka & Karjalainen, Joni (2019b) Pioneer Analysis as a Futures Research Method for Analysing Transformations. In: Poli R., Valerio M. (eds) Anticipation, Agency and Complexity. Anticipation Science, vol 4. Springer, Cham.

Heinonen, Sirkka, Kuusi, Osmo & Salminen, Hazel (eds) (2017). How Do We Explore Our Futures? Methods of Futures Research. Acta Futura Fennica 10, Finnish Society for Futures Studies. Helsinki.

Nurmela, Juha & Viherä, Marja-Liisa (2019). Miten minusta tuli tulevaisuudentutkija? – 25 aktiivia tutkijaa kertoo (How I became a futures researcher – stories by 25 active futures researchers). FUTURA 4/2019, 5-34.

Article photo by Sirkka Heinonen.

Futures studies – discipline of hope?

27.03.2019 ffrc Yksi kommentti

Minna Santaoja:

Having worked in the Finland Futures Research Centre (FFRC) over a year now, I have come to think of futures studies as a discipline of hope. My background is in environmental social sciences, which in general is a problem-oriented field. Much valuable critical work is done there, and much of that work is not only pointing out the problems but also proposing and actively searching solutions to them. Still, I think there is something unique in the futures studies approach that manages to bring about hope in ways that more traditional social science approaches don’t.

The hopefulness of futures studies comes from its unique relationship towards time and the active look forward that is present in all research carried out within the discipline. The strength comes about also from some of the founding principles of futures studies: 1) future cannot be known, 2) future is not predetermined, and 3) future can be affected. The methods specific for futures studies aim at sketching out different images and scenarios for future, which at best help us make more informed choices and decisions in the present and choose between the paths toward desirable and undesirable futures.

The hopefulness of futures studies comes through in various ways in all the different projects carried out at the FFRC, and I think the hopefulness is positively reflected in the working spirit within the centre as well. The umbrella of futures research brings together people from diverse backgrounds, which allows for transformative collaboration and thinking. Methods development to be able to know about future is constantly ongoing at FFRC and some of the developed methods are intriguing in how they allow the use of imagination and creativity in ways that many traditional scientific disciplines do not seem to permit. The wellbeing of the personnel is emphasized and I have found it quite unique that FFRC invests two whole days twice a year in form of the development days to bring all the personnel from the three offices together to share knowledge about ongoing projects and common topics.

Most of the projects carried out within the centre have somehow the idea of sustainability at their core, be it about energy systems, future food or about the futures images of young people. What brings a positive and dynamic atmosphere and a different feel from a strictly academic university department are the many practice-oriented projects carried out at FFRC. Aside from basic research, in many of the projects the FFRC researchers engage with different groups of actors in the society, trying to find solutions to problems together, developing future thinking and foresight skills.

But is the hope false, misplaced? Sometimes I cannot help thinking what is the worth of scanning the horizon for the unlikely and quirky, looking for weak signals, wild cards or black swans, when the megatrends such as ecological crises are screaming at our face. But then I remind myself that everything world-changing starts from small beginnings. While foresight is grounded in past developments and current needs, the problems we are facing today, climate change and the sixth mass extinction of species to name some, are wicked in nature. It means they are deeply rooted in many levels and sectors of the society, in the daily activities of individuals and organizations, and as such, there is no philosopher’s stone, no simple solution to the interconnected problems; they need to be worked on simultaneously. One of the values of futures research is to identify the improbable and study it, and by bringing it forward make it part of the solution.

When writing about hope, I am reminded of the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thurnberg, who has emerged as the moral beacon of our time for the climate movement. In her powerful speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, urging the world leaders to act upon climate change, she said: “I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.” There is wisdom in the young activist’s words. Is hope, after all, misplaced, is it keeping us from action?

For research to maintain its credibility and objectivity it is necessary to keep a certain distance from the daily societal turmoil. However, the pressure is rising for the research community to get involved as well. Given the severity of the ecological crisis and the urgency for action, in light of the IPCC 1.5 degrees report for instance, many researchers feel they cannot just sit back and let the research speak for itself. In Finland, over 1200 researchers signed a letter of support for the children in school strike for climate. At the same time, the Academy of Finland has included sustainability in its funding criteria and a lively discussion has emerged on the sustainability of research practices. In the forthcoming Sustainability Science Days in Helsinki, sustainability in university strategies and compensating for air travel emissions e.g. when going to scientific conferences will be discussed. These are all signals that the research community is stepping up for sustainability.

In light of the above I wonder whether it is enough if futures studies presents itself as the discipline of hope – should it rather be the discipline of action? I think it is of critical importance that ethical discussion is inherent and ongoing in futures studies as well as in all disciplines. We need to ask ourselves whether the work we do, the methods we use and the way we communicate support societal transformation for a more sustainable future. Action can mean many things, and as outlined above, we need to work on all fronts for sustainability transition. But I think research and societal engagement IS action – action should be placed on scientific knowledge. So perhaps I reiterate: futures studies is the discipline of hope, developing tools for action towards sustainability.

Ph.D., Researcher Minna Santaoja
Turku Institute of Advanced Studies (TIAS), Finland Futures Research Centre (Tampere office)

Photo: pixabay.com

Orienteering with the Futures Map

17.11.2016 ffrc Kommentoi

Petri Tapio

Futures map is a metaphor introduced by a Finnish futurist Osmo Kuusi. He sees the future as a terrain including many possible paths. The futurist’s task is to define plausible alternative paths in this terrain, the scenarios. The paths can concern business branch development options for a client company, societal sector development for public administration, or, for example, career options in personal life management for individuals. I here illustrate the problematics concentrating on energy issues in businesses.

Including strategic thinking and especially the backcasting concept to the metaphor of futures map brings corporate foresight process close to the orienteering sport. In backcasting, the actor sets a goal where to strive for and finds out alternative scenarios, how to get to the goal. Similarly in orienteering, you set a goal, a control on the map, where you wish to run as efficiently as possible. You figure out the alternative routes to the control and try to think beforehand which of them is the fastest. Uncertainty is inherent in decision-making as you do not know for sure which alternative is the fastest.

You also need to consider the risks in strategic foresight as well as orienteering – should you make a short route and stroll through a swamp taking the risk that it is so wet that you actually lose time with the shortcut. Or are you playing it safe and take the easy route of longer distance but easy terrain. For example, are you investing to new technology that promises to solve your production problems or use existing technology more efficiently?

According to my personal experience in the Turku School of Economics orienteering team some controls are really difficult to find. There are four possible reasons for the difficulty:

1) The terrain is heavy, for example having consecutive controls on top of two hills and between them a deep valley. For example reducing energy consumption of a firm is a task that requires lot of work rather than simple tricks. In this case consistency and diligence are called for.

2) The control is difficult to find as it is in a terrain where you see very little forward and get easily lost. For example you wish to take into account all relevant aspects affecting the company’s economic, social and ecological sustainability. In this case it is important to check the map for a clear location and use the compass to move forward.

3) Your skills are not trained well enough, that is you know where to go, but do not know how to get there. This is the case for example when there are no experts of energy saving in the company. This just requires better education in futures research methods.

4) You are lost in the first place. For example you have no quantitative information of energy consumption in the firm that could be used in the strategic decision-making process. In this case you should turn back to the last place where you knew for sure where you were. Think calmly, get the information you need and only then move forward.

When orienteering, you need a compass to know the directions. It does not tell you location but it tells you which way north and other compass points are. I think the parallel for a compass in orienteering with the futures map is consciousness of your values. Ethics form the basis for responsible business (see Matti Minkkinen’s earlier blog post).

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The author is Professor in Futures Research and responsible for the postgraduate studies of Futures Studies in the Doctoral Programme of Turku School of Economics.