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Euro J of Education - 2015 - Miller - Learning The Future and Complexity An Essay On The Emergence
Euro J of Education - 2015 - Miller - Learning The Future and Complexity An Essay On The Emergence
4, 2015
DOI: 10.1111/ejed.12157
Introduction
The claims made in this article start from six simple propositions:
The first proposition is that the phenomena that make up the emergent
present can be divided into two very basic categories, those that display conti-
nuity and those that display discontinuity. Phenomena that repeat from one
moment to the next are characterised by continuity. Phenomena that are dif-
ferent display discontinuity or manifest a difference between a previous
moment and one later on.
The second proposition is that there are different kinds of discontinuity or
change, some that follow on from the past, like a child growing taller over
time, others that are inherently unknowable in advance, such as the invention
and implications of the atomic bomb, birth control pill or Internet.
The third proposition is that humans use sensing and sense-making capabil-
ities to identify and distinguish the continuity and discontinuity of phenom-
ena in the world around them.
The fourth proposition is that part of the human capacity to identify and give
meaning to continuity and discontinuity arises from the ability to use our
imaginations, in a variety of ways, to anticipate what does not yet exist. The
always imaginary future plays a key role in being able to distinguish and tell
stories about different kinds of continuity and discontinuity.
The fifth proposition is that the anticipatory systems and processes that
enable humans to think about the imaginary future influence sensing and
sense-making in ways that can make it easier or harder to discern or invent
different kinds of discontinuity.
The sixth proposition is that the basic learning cycle starts from the appre-
hension of forms of discontinuity or something that is unfamiliar or inexplica-
ble, the realisation of not knowing.
All these propositions form the foundation for the claim in this article that a specific
change in the conditions of change, the diffusion of Futures Literacy, is one way of
improving the capacity of individuals and organisations to: a) detect and give mean-
ing to discontiniuty, and b) thereby become more capable of initiating learning
processes (undertaking research of all kinds, from the banal to the sublime).
Put negatively, today’s dominant anticipatory systems and processes impede the
identification and invention of discontinuity (difference/change) and hence the ini-
tiation of learning. The lack of Futures Literacy (or the widespread state of Futures
Illiteracy) helps to explain why it is so difficult to achieve a better balance between
learning that is shaped by the supposition that what needs to be learned is knowable
in advance, what I will label ‘push’ education, and ‘pull’ learning that starts from
the discovery of not knowing something, initiating the search for hypotheses,
experiments, and evidence that eventually lead to understanding. Lacking Futures
Literacy, we are significantly less able to expand our anticipatory activities beyond
preparation and planning. As a result, it is difficult to find the motivation and capa-
bility to undertake and organise learning that goes beyond ‘push’ education that
rests on the presumption that we can know the future or impose today’s idea of the
future on the future and therefore know now what people ‘need’ to know in order
to find a ‘good job’, be ‘good citizens’, etc., in the future.
After exchanging the usual ‘how are you?’ and ‘nice to see you’, she starts to whis-
per, acting as if she was telling you a valuable secret. But what she is telling you
seems pretty incredible, even a bit crazy. She claims that there are immense resour-
ces all around us, but that we cannot see them. Furthermore, she asserts that there
is an easy way to see these resources and put them to good use. You exchange a few
more pleasantries and then you walk away scratching your head. Muttering under
your breath, ‘What the heck?? What is this treasure I’ve been missing? How come I
don’t know how to see it?’ Then you just conclude that she has lost it and that it is
best to forget all about her strange ideas.
For the second thought experiment, imagine that you are illiterate – unable to
read. All around you are amazing resources in the form of written texts. Someone
might tell you that it is not all that hard to learn to read and that if you did know
how to read there would be amazing resources at your disposal, resources that
would help you to navigate in everyday life, find new opportunities and share
what you know with others. In a society of illiterates, with few books and few
people able to read, you might come to the same conclusion as the thought
experiment above – what is this crazy notion that there are hidden resources, easy
to acquire, all around us. Nonsense. But if you are illiterate in a literate society,
with the written word all around, the opposite conclusion makes the most sense:
I must learn to read.
Now, a very brief history of the microscope. When the microscope was first
invented around 1670 it offered an amazing surprise. Hidden in a drop of water,
invisible to the naked eye, were all sorts of creatures. People exclaimed: how
amusing, how strange! Some 200 years later, after many breakthroughs in how to
conduct research and many demonstrations of the vast power of research to alter
people’s lives, the connection was made between the creatures seen in the drop of
water and the infections killing patients in hospitals. Doctors started to wash their
hands. Terrific, but it had taken 200 years to make sense of the invisible things
the microscope made visible. Today, a new microscope is being invented,
deployed, and tested. Like the microscope of old, it renders the invisible visible,
and like many scientific tools before, it takes time to fully grasp its utility. In this
case, the tool is collective intelligence knowledge creation processes. What I call
KnowLabs for short (see Box). KnowLabs take many and varied forms and are
being designed and implemented in many parts of the world by a wide range of
pioneers and practitioners. All these processes share a common operational goal:
to tap into the knowledge of a specific group of people at a specific time and
place in order to sense and make sense of phenomena of all kinds (see list of
topics in the box). The mechanism used to tap into this collective intelligence is
conversation and the catalyst or fuel that turns the heuristic is the challenge of
sensing and making sense of some aspect of the world around us. People bring
tacit and unarticulated thoughts together with the capacity to invent and negotiate
variables and meaning.
There are similarities with ‘crowd sourcing’ mechanisms, such as stock markets,
polling and Delphi techniques that collect and give meaning to diverse views. But
the difference is that the granularity or localism of KnowLabs points to a different
purpose and hence a different way of working. KnowLabs are about time-space
specificity, the uniqueness of every moment and place – the amazing richness of the
ephemeral. Here, collective intelligence is yoked to the elucidation of the here and
now, what is gone and no more soon after. This may seem futile and the opposite
FL KnowLabs are a specific example of the more general tool for harness-
ing collective intelligence to generate descriptions of reality. The FL
KnowLab uses anticipatory systems and processes as ways to structure
and direct a conversation about a topic (Miller, 2006, 2007, 2011).
Experimentation over the last decade aimed at testing designs and out-
comes of Futures Literacy Knowledge Laboratories (FL KnowLabs) has
demonstrated the effectiveness of collective intelligence knowledge crea-
tion processes designed with an understanding of anticipatory systems in
generating new questions (making sense of difference). This is not the
place to present the design principles and specific operational rules that
shape the customisation of the FL KnowLabs (UNESCO, 2011), however
the point of departure is indicative: The fundamental source of data in
intentional human anticipation is the descriptive model and vocabulary,
the assumptions and variables that enable us to consciously imagine some-
thing that does not yet exist – the future. Thus, the easiest way to map
and make sense of human anticipatory systems and processes is to ask
people to describe the future. To do so, they have no choice but to reveal
the assumptions and variables that allow them to generate an imaginary
later than now. Their ways of using the future are made explicit. This is
the first step to becoming Futures Literate.
In 2013 and 2014, as part of UNESCO’s role in advancing knowledge
creation, FL KnowLabs were conducted around the world (UNESCO,
2014). The aim of this project was to reveal anticipatory systems and
processes in different contexts and work on testing and refining the FL
KnowLab design so that it could be used easily and effectively to build
FL capabilities and better understand the emergent attributes of local
situations.
20-21 June 2013, Paris: Knowlab Design Test Session “Scoping the
Know-Lab: Tomorrow’s Knowledge Creation Microscope” A Primer
and Images
1st June, 2013, Baku: Scoping Global Anticipatory Capacities
11-12 July 2013, Brasilia: The Future of Science
15 July 2013, Sao Paolo: Changing the Way Universities Use the
Future?
19 July 2013, Chicago: The Future of Futurists
21-22 October 2013, Oslo: Innovation as Learning, Knowing as Learn-
ing, Knowing as Science: Imagining a Universal Innovation Society in
2040
25-26 November 2013, Bogota: Using the future to think about local
labor markets
28-29 November 2013, Rio de Janeiro: Imagining the Future of Science
in Society
13-14 January 2014, Paris: Imagining the Future of the Transition from
“Youth” to “Adult”
of what is considered the purpose of knowledge creation and the tools we apply to
creating knowledge. But it is the critical 180 degree flip needed to hone our capacity
to appreciate novelty through a tool that makes it easier to make sense of specificity
– the difference and repetition of every moment. This is the microscope of the 21st
century and, even as we deploy it, we hardly know what it is good for.
processes for determining targets in the future and mapping the best way to get
there. This preoccupation with causal or instrumentalist approaches to creating or
imposing today’s idea of the future on tomorrow largely crowds-out non-causal per-
spectives (or what has been called, long ago, ‘not-doing’). In effect, this results in a
lack of interest in spontaneity and improvisation; as well as a bias towards actions
that promise, through path dependency or sunk cost constraints, the ‘colonisation’
of the future. Choices that are ‘uncertainty proof’ have the attributes of pyramids
and monuments that last thousands of years, demonstrating that today’s ideas can
be imposed on tomorrow. To this kind of physical proof of the power of planning it
is worth adding the dominant form of narrative about the past, the story of the her-
oes who knew what they were doing and won the day. Again, this reduces interest
in mechanisms for sensing and making-sense of unknown unknowns as such phe-
nomena emerge. Focused on inventing or implementing the genius plan that will
impose today’s idea of tomorrow on tomorrow there is less interest in developing
the skills that underpin the capacity for spontaneity needed to take advantage of the
richness of difference: specificity and novelty (unknown unknowns) in the present.
Futures Literacy or How to Live With Complexity and Love It: The fourth observation
is that we can take advantage of the fact that we live in an anticipatory universe, which
is chock-a-block with anticipatory systems and processes, in order to become Futures
Literate. This is a learning-by-doing strategy that invites people to think about the
future in structured ways that help reveal the nature and functioning of anticipation.
Using the future to understand how we use the future. Certainly there are other ways
to learn about a subject, but since anticipation enters into so much of what we do and
is so central to both psychological and physical well-being, it helps to take a rather
practical, solution oriented approach. Furthermore, this strategy dovetails nicely with
the need for a pragmatic, user oriented response to the first three observations regard-
ing: the dominance of statistics in the way we describe the world, the lack of familiarity
with tools for grasping the unique, and the tunnel vision of action hero agency.4
Not-doing: The fifth observations is that an old ‘solution’ now seems very perti-
nent. Lao Tsu (1972) offered insights into the meaning and power of ‘not-doing’ in
the Tao Te Ching some 2500 years ago. Now, in 2015, not-doing takes on new sig-
nificance because it offers a practical way to understand and act on some of the key
discoveries of the 20th century. What I am referring to is a long and somewhat
familiar list of scientific advances that help us to better appreciate the richness of
reality, ranging from quantum physics and mathematical category-theory to theo-
ries of complexity, reflexivity and Senian freedom as a capability (Sen, 1999, 2009).
In effect, after a long period during which much of humanity sought various forms
of certainty, including ‘scientific certainty’, there is a new problem – how to inte-
grate the open creativity of the universe into our thinking. Close to 30 years ago,
Edgar Morin put the challenge this way: ‘We are still blind to the challenge of com-
plexity. . . This blindness is part of our barbarism. It makes us realize that we are still
in the era of barbaric thought. We remain in the pre-history of the human spirit.
Only the capacity to embrace complexity will allow us to civilize our thinking.’5
Finally, more as an invitation to further reflection than as a conclusion, I want
to point out that a ‘push’ approach to learning, rooted in the planning and prepara-
tion roles attributed to education, may bias human decision making towards
choices that generate excessive path dependency and undermine a more robust
resilience strategy – diversification. To be very speculative, this could ultimately
reduce the survival chances of the species. Or to condense down the hypothesis –
DISCLAIMER
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author in a private capacity
and do not in any way represent the positions of UNESCO or any other organisa-
tion or institution.
NOTES
1. Such contingent events are usually characterised as being from low to high
probability, low to high impact and can be incorporated into probabilistic
anticipatory systems by making a series of assumptions that close the model.
Yet, strictly speaking, even a trend as probable as the sun rising tomorrow is
only an assumption and our ability to know what will happen under the sun
remains non-existent, unless it turns out that time machines can be built.
2. The exception, of course, is the topic of this article: preparation that enhances
our capacity to make sense of the unknowable when it happens. This distinc-
tion is sometimes referred to as the difference between risk and uncertainty
(North) and it is one of the primary contentions of this article that preparing
for the unknowable involves significantly different anticipatory systems and
processes than closed system risk estimation.
3. Novelty can be entirely ‘local’ in the sense of being a new or ‘ah ha’ moment
for anyone, anywhere. This idea of novelty starts from where consciousness is
at, the couplet of realisation that ‘I do not know, so I seek to know’.
4. UNESCO will publish a book on the subject: Transforming the Future: Anticipa-
tion in the 21st Century, in 2016.
5. ‘Nous sommes encore aveugles au problème de la complexite. (. . .) Cet aveu-
glement fait partie de notre barbarie. Il nous fait comprendre que nous
sommes toujours dans l’ère barbare des idees. Nous sommes toujours dans la
prehistoire de l’esprit humain. Seule la pensee complexe nous permettrait de
civiliser notre connaissance’. Edgar Morin 2005, p.24.
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