PLANNING Riel Miller, Kushal Sohal, Anna De Mezzo

FUTURES LITERACY: A DANCE BETWEEN IMPROVISATION AND PLANNING

By Riel Miller, Kushal Sohal,

Anna De Mezzo

MOSTLY, at the corner café, when someone asks you a question and you say: “I don’t know”, the expectation is that there is a way to find out. It is assumed that knowledge is attainable even if it isn’t immediately at hand. Same expectation applies to a somewhat stronger admission of ignorance – such as “No, there isn’t any way to know”. Even then, the typical reaction is not that the topic is irremediably unknowable, rather that there is just some obstacle that needs to be overcome. Today the default view is that humans can gain knowledge of anything. All we have to do is put our minds to the challenge. A comforting confidence in light of the widespread assumption that as a rule wanting to know is good thing. Who can argue with the proposition that it is better to be informed than not?

Well, perhaps surprisingly the study of human anticipatory systems and processes, points to situations where the affirmation of unknowability and the rejection of the desire to know are fundamental to enhancing human perception. Perhaps the most familiar situation where this stance towards knowing is a prerequisite is when dancers or musicians improvise. By definition planning, a score or choreography, that lays out the notes or steps in advance, is the opposite of improvisation. When an artist improvises, on the basis of considerable, usually planned, mastery of many pre-conditions, they do not and should not know in advance what they will do. No additional or better information is needed. Nor should they aspire to know what notes or movements they will use in advance. Since both are irrelevant, nay contradictory, to the invitation of improvisation – to be unplanned, generating novelty in the emergent moment.

Fine, as far as it goes, but improvisation is for marginal creatives and the negligent who failed to plan sufficiently, right? After all you should know in advance and if you don’t you just didn’t try hard enough or pay sufficient attention to what was either already known or at least knowable. Why get blindsided by a pandemic? Why do things that end up moving the planet off of the climate patterns that were formative of today’s path dependent and brittle ways of organizing the species’ activities? Should’ve known better, right? Alternatively, could it be that these unanticipated situations are, at least in part, due to living with the expectation that the future is knowable and therefore fair game for human manipulation? From the Delphic Oracle to your favorite reigning deity of the moment the promise has been that at least some expert knows what’s going to happen. In the land of the blind the one-eyed person is king, of course.

Only, as we gather knowledge about the different reasons and methods humans deploy to harness their ability to imagine

situations that are later than now we begin to discover that abandoning the double-barreled premise, that the future is knowable and that we should strive to know it, actually blinds us. Or, to put it in terms of planning versus improvisation, it inhibits our ability to both create and take advantage of novelty. Which is rather obvious once we look at how people actually engage with their anticipatory systems and processes. Try sticking to the plan for a conversation, a marriage, or the search for meaning over a life-time. Nope. In these situations the abandonment of planned, pre-conceived futures, is the pre-condition for sensing and making-sense of the previously unknowable – what didn’t and couldn’t exist on the basis of prior conditions. If you insist on your past futures (the futures you imagined in the past) you will simply remain unaware and/or unable to invent the novel. Complexity, the inescapable creative state of our universe, enables and entails improvisation.

So, what have we been observing at UNESCO over the last decade as we attempt to explore and describe the diversity of human anticipatory systems and processes? That planning and improvisation are both present in the actual why and how of using-the-future.

The evidence of this dual presence arises in the Futures Literacy Laboratories, experiential action-learning voyages codesigned by UNESCO and local champions aimed at making explicit and making sense of participant’s anticipatory assumptions— namely, the reasons and methods they use to imagine the future. In a recent FLL, UNESCO worked together with the Disaster Risk Reduction unit of the United Nations (UNDRR) to explore the future of Disaster Risk Governance.

Both disaster and governance are inextricably linked to the future (on the one hand futures to be avoided and on the other futures to be mastered). And in both cases, the tendency is to search for knowability, or the next best thing – probability.

What happens in an FLL is that participants begin to expand their awareness of anticipatory systems and processes. Of course, the standard predictive approaches to imagining the future emerge from the Lab, but so do traces and hints of other reasons and methods for imagining the future. On July 14th until 16th UNDRR and UNESCO co-designed and implemented a Futures Literacy Lab (FLL) on the future of Disaster Risk Governance. The lab involved 26 participants from the Asia-Pacific region, covering a fair diversity in terms of age and profession and representing both the private sector and international organizations. A team of 14 local and international facilitators guided the Lab through the three days. The objectives of the Lab spanned from exposing participants to Futures Literacy to increasing capacity for youth and young professionals on the topic and changing the mindset around traditional approaches to Disaster Risk Governance. A report of the process and what was learned will be forthcoming, but what is already clear to the UNESCO FL team is that the Lab once again generated evidence of the diversity of anticipatory systems and processes. Participants revealed many different anticipatory systems and processes that use probabilistic imagining as an approach to controlling the future. The Lab also generated preliminary evidence of other ways of using-the-future, ones that open up different perceptions of the present, such as sources of fragility, and different ways of thinking about enhancing resilience.

The FLL offered participants an opportunity to experience how lettinggo of planning the future, even when using multiple and open futures, opens up new fields of perception. The Lab also demonstrated how difficult it is to let go of the dominant reasons and methods for using-the-future. Participants are unsure of why and how to combine planning and improvisation. It is hard to grasp and practice, what in Futures Literacy terms involves both ‘anticipation for the future’ (AfF) and ‘anticipation for emergence’ (AfE) (see Transforming the Future, 2018). The experience of revealing the anticipatory assumptions, including those related to the purpose of imagining the future, is only the beginning of a longer learning voyage.