Futures Friday: A Look Back at Looking Forward — Teach the Children Well

Originally published on December 4th, 2020

There’s no time like the present to get cracking on my new year’s resolutions, so this week I am starting a new series called Futures Friday where I take a look back at the past week or so and reflect on my study of futures.

Recently I started on my journey to the future by going back to school to get a master’s degree in foresight, or futures studies. I thought this week I would share why, and why it is so important that everyone studies futures.

Quite simply, humans are humans because of our ability to think about the future. Many things differentiate us from other species, however, our incredible ability to not only think about possible futures but to communicate those visions to others is fundamentally what makes us, well, us.

If thinking about futures is a critical part of who we are, then doesn’t it make sense that we get better at it? While we are all futurists inherently by being human, we all need to learn how to be better futurists, and this learning starts at an early age. Kids, in fact, are some of the best futurists there are. They are not constrained by what is plausible, or even possible. They have an imagination that is often crushed by the forced practicality of growing up.

As adults, we need to be practical to get the day to day done. However, we cannot adequately prepare and plan for the future if we continue to separate the facts of practicality from the fiction of the future. And to be clear, the future is always fiction by definition. As adults, we feel better though if we try to make this fiction as much fact as possible, then we can understand it.

Ask a kid to draw an invention from their mind. Chances are as adults we may have a hard time grasping it. We are already using our worn-out tool of practicality. That, and honestly sometimes those crayon drawings are not that good. However, in the child’s mind, there is not only a Whizycopter 3000, there is a whole world of people that fly the Whizycopters from house to house, waving at each other, and dropping candy for everyone. There are colors swirling around in those young minds that adults cannot even see.

Obviously, the imaginations of children are not the blueprint of the future. And that is the point really this week. What is the blueprint of the future? Is there a way that we can take the strong imagination skills of children and apply a more mature practice to develop plausible futures? How can futures help us prepare and plan for change and uncertainty? There is a way to do this, it is called futures thinking, or foresight.

Futures thinking is a skill, much like reading and writing. So is critical thinking. While we learn a lot in school about facts, dates, and important skills like science, it is just as important that we teach critical and futures thinking (which includes imagination).

To be clear, we are at a crisis point. We are at many crisis points. Global warming, sustainability, and even the current pandemic, I believe that all of these issues are in crisis because of our failure as a species at futures thinking. It is not about predicting the future or imaging the next gadget, it is about being prepared, and not surprised by, the world which we have built. These crises are global issues that cannot be solved by a handful of professionals. It will take pretty much everyone to change the world, and therefore everyone should have the skills to do so.

And There’s More…

If you want to learn more about futures studies and more, check out some of these great links.

The Origin of Consciousness

I love the videos that Kurzgesagt — In a Nutshell produces. This is one on the origin of consciousness.

FuturePod’s podcast with Tom Lombardo on Future Consciousness

Institute for the Future’s Futures Thinking Class

JT is a futurist, storyteller, and solutions lead for the data consultancy productOps and is currently in the Master of Science in Foresight program at the University of Houston. The views and opinions here are not associated with anyone except JT.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.