My futures thinking was initially shaped and influenced by the works of Professor Sohail Inayatullah. I studied my Masters Thesis under Sohail’s supervision and have been schooled in the practice of Sohail’s ‘Six Pillars Framework’. I credit much of my skill as a futures workshop facilitator to Sohail’s wonderful stewardship and innovative theories and methods. I have also been influenced by the scholarly research of Professor Ivana Miljevic, Dr Marcus Bussey, Professor Emeritus Richard Slaughter, Professor Jim Dator, Dr Peter Hayward, Dr Joe Voros, Associate Professor Emeritus Peter Bishop, Dr Andy Hines and Professor Emeritus Wendell Bell.
My futures practices stands on the shoulders of these scholarly futurists and their academic research. I use academic futures thinking concepts and foresight methods to question the relevance of the futures narratives we tell ourselves. Hence, to engage in the analysis of the future, is to examine oneself. An exercise in existentialism, personal agency and ways to reduce our anxiety about the unknown. Existentialism as it relates to answering our purpose, need for knowing, controlling or finding meaning from ‘the future’. Existential futures thinking is a way of thinking about your attitude to resilience and adaptation. Consequently, existential futures thinking is a re-framing of the concept of ‘The Future’. Hence our first re-frame is all to do with futures plural. Meaning being able to hold the tension of futures pluralism, more than ‘the future’ rather many futures possible. A second effect of existential futures thinking is to exist in the liminal spaces between certainty, the know and comfortable and their transition to the possible. Existential futures thinking asks “What makes meaningful futures today?” , “How can we live our futures as an eudaimonic present?”.
My facilitation style is based on a therapeutic, cultural,critical and action learning practices. I am relational in my futures facilitation processes. My personal philosophy is based on a commitment to lifelong learning and critical thinking approaches. Which means I will question more than tell you the answers. My use of foresight methods and futures thinking concepts seek to assist and support you through a process of re-framing rather than re-affirming of what you already know, think or hide. I will seek to understand your “why” and how this why informs and becomes a personal politic for continuance of a privileging future. Why this or that futures matters over other futures. I will want to know where this story of the future came from? I will want to know, specifically ‘What you think the future will be like?’ and ‘How such a future will occur?’ and ‘Why you believe this to be realistic?’, You may want me to make my own forecasts and predictions of your future. However, this is not my preference, as I would be simply giving you ‘My version of your future!’ . I would rather engage and facilitate you and your people in an exercise of co-authorship. Authorship of your preferred future. A preferred future as an alternative to your present or forecast/prediction. A preferred future as a new narrative or story to tell and enact through your own choices (Agency).
Therefore, I will use futures thinking analysis and imagining as an opportunity for you to creates alternative ways of knowing the concept of the future. By knowing, thinking and feeling the concept of the future differently, we can address the barriers or lack of motivations that inhibit our ability to adapt and change your story of the future or more poignant, the present. By utilizing Futures thinking concepts and methods, we will create new and previously un-imagined cultural spaces. By creating different ways of knowing you get to create the means to replicate critical thinking analysis in your culture. You find yourself, thankfully avoiding the undesired futures, You get to liberate your intellect from obsolescence. Your culture becomes one that emancipates and invites our intellect to move beyond the structural limits that keep us ignorant or nostalgic. Thus there are many future benefits possible for each of us; the challenge is an incentive ourselves to become uncomfortable and to be able to answer the question “Why our current futures narratives may need to change is because……?”..
After 10 year of consulting both nationally and internationally, I am competent in foresight delivery. I taught post graduate futures thinking and futures leadership for five years at the University of the Sunshine Coast until 2015, I frame my approaches to foresight and futures thinking as an combined exercise in relational leadership and foresight.In other words knowing who and what personal narratives/assumptions are ‘driving your bus? and why and how to use futures possibilities. My approach will ask you to question your own current approaches and concepts to foresight practice; to find other ways of knowing and using the concept of the future to integrate.To integrate, both client and futurist are required to engage in critical questioning, introspection and synthesis all in real time. Introspection can assist with gaining perspectives other than the known and comfortable. My approach is aimed at disrupting your known and comfortable, (even my own). To enable you (& me too) to review our contexts with different eyes, to challenge our assumptions, thoughts and worldviews. By doing so, ‘other futures’ as possibilities and choices can thus emerge for consideration.
Leadership in the 21st century can no longer be about the views of a few at the expense of the many; equally the many need to exercise agency in their leadership. The leadership phenomena I argue has the potential to become adaptive and effectual if Leadership is situated in the philosophy of being relational, emergent and inclusively foresighted. By being relational, I mean creating multiple entry and exits points or spaces for individuals to exercise their leadership phenomenon. Emergent through being emotionally and psychologically present in ambiguous contexts and co-authoring in their foresight introspection and choices
Leadership is an inherent human conditions implicit within all of us as humanity. A future thinking concepts and specifically the use of foresight methods creates many forms of freedoms for the individuals to access and exit the leadership phenomena. Such freedoms benefit the accessing of other forms of unimagined leadership phenomenon. What is traditionally privilege, either by and peer recognition or the intellectualism of leadership, and what are the historically privileged constructs of leadership. Such social constructions simply privilege leadership histories over alternative leadership futures, alternative constructions requires alternative worldviews and stories.
Relational Leadership Foresight is a process of using futures thinking and foresight methods to challenge how we access and make sense of the leadership phenomena. This is because futures thinking concepts & foresight methods enable us all to step outside our privileged and dominant intellectual constraints and enable us to re-construct meaning making and intellectual ways of knowing on leadership. Furthermore, futures thinking and foresight enables us all the opportunities to reimagine our and other versions of leadership concepts, and phenomena through critical examination and discourse. However, the most transcending aspect of a ‘relational Leadership foresight’ approach to leadership is the opportunity to explore and rescripts or displaces our existing leadership futures stories. Thus, the future of leadership is continually being critically examined, rewritten and enacted through participatory, critical and anticipatory action learning foresight case study applications.
My practice is predicated on five key values. These values held by myself are enacted so that others may benefit. These are:
In more recent times in the futures field, there has been a shift from anticipating the future to the exploration and co-creation or rather experiencing a ‘co-authorship of futures’. This co-authoring as contemporised versions of foresight experiences, creates inclusive spaces to question and create the future with a shared responsibility. Thus, a community of futures experience is more to do with creating foresight spaces and discourses that are inclusive of the diverse and unfamiliar perspectives and a tolerance for the emergent. The necessity to shift foresight approaches is more to do with a world which is becoming increasingly ambiguous, complex and uncertain. Thus, no one foresight way is the right way, rather simply historically or politically privileged ways. To get ahead of the 21st century change game, futures thinking concept and foresight methods need to enable us to invoke our capacity to influence the future rather than passively receiving the future forecasted or predicted by others. The challenge for leaders and leadership in the 21st century is not to get the future right, rather to ensure the future is relational and reflective of the desires and hopes of the stakeholders they represent. Thus, 21st century leadership requires not only a capacity to anticipate, rather also a capability to creatively engage others, to ‘question the future!’ All of us as leaders need to own our complicity in colonizing the future at the expense of possible transformations.
Thus, all of us, at some time, need to question how we have come to know and use the future. The challenge is to become more apt in our usage of the concept called “the future’. The main fundamental shifts in recent approaches to futures thinking and foresight praxis is through the use of critical thinking futures methods. These methods specifically seek to challenge and disrupt cultures and practices that may no longer be useful or relevant. Once named and explored with voracity, other desired or alternative futures may thus be considered.
This ‘disruption of the future’ can be done respectfully through the phenomenon of relational leadership in conjunction with foresight. I call it ‘relational leadership foresight’ . First, in a ‘relational leadership foresight’ culture, leaders seek to co-invent the future through layered, relational and dialogical foresight engagements. Second, no longer today is it possible or less expected by others, for the leaders to get the ‘future right’, to predict and anticipate with accuracy. Rather, leaders today have the potential, are expected, even demanded at times, to share, include and let go (in part) their responsibility/agency for creatively imagining, envisioning and implementing the future. Final, for many of us, the concept of ‘the future’ seems to reside as something outside of our being, outside of our present, something that we have to work towards, be patient in our receiving, a reward to be received, a goal. Alas, before we receive ‘our future’ we must endure!
However, this way of thinking about the future is a misconception, a myth to be challenged. The idea/way of thinking that the future is outside of us, out there in the distance, as something to be worked only serves to do us a dis-service, as leaders, a disservice to our futures possible. This way of futures thinking denies our recognition in our innate foresight abilities to believe, to imagine, having hope. As humans we all have agency to influence the future. As I have learned from the wisdom of seminal futurists, who suggest “The ‘future’ is not an empty space but like the past, an active aspect of the present. Meaning, it is not something out there! Rather, we live our future today through our todays/present assumptions, our present narratives about the future” Change the present narrative about the future, we change who we are today. Hence, the future is more usefully understood as being a reflection of which we are today, a mirror of our imaginations, beliefs and narratives. We tell ourselves today stories about tomorrow, which really are stories about who we are in the present. We have to find alternative stories to displace today’s story.
Furthermore, for each of us we all have our own unique take on the future. As individual as we are, we all have unique imaginations, ideas and ways of knowing, thus no one future is more valid or legitimate as another, just privileged or different. Consequently, we can understand futures as ‘futures plural’ rather than singular. Meaning, the many futures possible resides in each of us, as a construct of realities, as imaginations, visions, ideas, pragmatics, images, and knowledge bases as scenarios. Scenarios focus on revealing and testing assumptions about the future. All of these concepts are as diverse as we are as individuals, both historically and futuristically speaking.
As a philosophical and psychological construct, the future, or rather futures/futures thinking are about understanding, questioning and interrogating our own personal & organisational narratives as futures stories, and to critique their continued effects. If we want to change the effects, then we need to name, identify and then change our assumptions supporting our futures stories. Simply, we need to question the narratives about the future for continued relevance. Thus we can use the future narratives as an asset, an alternative resource to be deployed.
