August 27, 2018 by Steve Gould

Recently, I was in Africa to facilitate foresight education to six African countries. This foresight initiative was a consequence of previous foresight workshops facilitated by Sohail Inayatullah from UNESCO in Africa. I had been recommended by Sohail to the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations. The FAO was considering sponsorship of a futures thinking education program. The idea of the program was to introduce delegates from the six participating countries to explore the merits of a) foresight concepts and methods and b) in application to the future of food safety. Specifically, to build national capacity on foresight related to food safety, and which participants can apply in their work environments to launch a process of food safety foresight to better enable early identification of and preparedness for food safety issues.

Each of the delegates had many years of experience (thus)  experiential travels in food safety policy and strategies. However, in spite of these travels, the delegates were travelers who continued to explore the known and comfortable in food safety. Traveling invites us to explore the unknown and uncomfortable. Traveling invites in our acute awareness of the uncertain, the ambiguous and can invite in spaces for alternative perspectives. We can travel and still colonize our travels to fit our norms, our comfortable and known. Or we can travel to disrupt ourselves, we can travel to transition through our defaulting schema, to transition through our dominant ‘ways of knowing’ contexts, realities, cultures and especially our forecasted future. Rather, travels be they literally or in the case of the African foresight program, traveling into other ways of knowing can be done via psychologically, intellectually, social culturally, socio-constructing, critical introspective and spiritually. We can transition from the default to the alternative, from the subjective to the objective, from the impossible to possible. We can transition through traveling…..

Let me share how I came to see evidence of this transition through traveling…..phenomenon. I noticed during my engagement from the delegates feedback that something had changed in regards to their narrative on Mycotoxins ( food born toxins) . Participants had just finished the foresight method ‘Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) on food disease and found themselves engaging in a re-framing, a transitioning from the old narrative of eradication to a new narrative of leverage. From Mycrotoxins told from the story of ‘the unwelcome relative’ who came to stay and never left; To a story of a relative that creates incentive for us to go out and work beyond our home and seek out our community. (Metaphorically meaning to working in collaboration with other African countries in food disease safety). So rather than trying to deal with Mycotoxins as an individual country, as a problem to eliminate, to accept Mycrotoxins legitimacy and benefit of existing, to facilitate our desire to collaborate across boarders. Thus, delegates could use the presence of Mycrotoxin as an incentive’s for prevention results rather than cure strategies. From an unhatched egg to productive chicken.

This transitioning of the Mycrotoxin story came from traveling into other narratives, transitioning into other stories, other ways of knowing and seeing Mycrotoxins. Transitions from traveling “From……….To!”.

As George Lakoff argued that language carries metaphor, thus stated “Framing is about getting language that fits your worldview. Its is not just language. The ideas are primary – and the language carries those ideas, evokes those ideas (Lakoff 2004,p.4). The challenge for the delegates was to transition their preferred language used to frame the story of Mycrotoxins…!

CLA was and is an effective method to facilitate the transitioning of narratives beyond those that limit or bind us, that keep us stuck in the tar pit of old narratives. Let me finish with this thought by (Taleb 2007, p.xxvii) who states, “You need a story to displace a story, metaphors and stories are far more potent than ideas; they are easier to remember and more fun to read ..hear”, So go ahead and tell your travel through transition stories as displacement of the known, as adaption in action….

References

Inayatullah, S 1998, ‘Causal layered analysis: Poststructuralism as method’, Futures, vol. 30, no. 8, pp. 815-29.

Lakoff, G 2004, ‘Don’t think of an elephant: Know your Values and Frame the Debate; The Essential Guide for Progressives’, Chelsea Green Publishing, Vermont USA.

Taleb, N 2007, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Penguin Books, Limited.