Unlocking the Power of Futures:
Insights from Riel Miller
In this interview, we speak to Riel Miller, an expert in futures studies and futures literacy. Riel is a renowned authority on using the future to inspire transitional change. With a career spanning the OECD, Ontario Government, and UNESCO, he has extensive experience as a project initiator, manager, and advisor. His unflagging ambition is to find ways to put the richness of complex emergence at the service of humanity’s capacity to be free.
Question: Can you share a brief overview of your area of expertise and its relevance to the futures field?
Riel Miller: My area of expertise lies in futures studies and futures literacy. Over the course of my career, I have delved into the exploration of why and how we use the future. I began by observing the power of images of the future and people’s desire to believe the future is knowable, and credibly certain. This desire to know the likely future was understandable, but also seemed highly deceptive. Since it is evident that by definition the future does not exist and that the only certainty is uncertainty. So, over the course of four decades of working with people to imagine the future it gradually became evident that there are different kinds of futures that are imagined in different ways, for different reasons, and in different contexts.
The capacity to distinguish different kinds of futures and understand the why and how of these imaginaries is the ‘skill’ I called ‘futures literacy’ (FL). When someone is futures literate they are able to comprehend the nature and role of different kinds of not-past, not-present. Being futures literate contributes to a better understanding of the sources and impact of distinct imaginaries, such as ideologies and the search for certainty, on what people are able to see and do.
Without this literacy, individuals are susceptible to confusion, anxiety, and fear. They are unable to grasp the power of imaginary futures on both perception and choice. Gaining a better understanding of the diversity of futures includes the ability to imagine non-probable, non-desirable futures. As a result, it becomes easier to escape the tunnel vision that arises from a preoccupation with planning tomorrow. Diversifying why and how the future is imagined assists people’s efforts to sense and make sense of novelty. Detecting and discovering/inventing the meaning of phenomena that repeat or differ from one moment to the next is more difficult if perception in the present is confined to what matters for extrapolations of the past.
Through my work designing processes that explore the future for governments, companies, and communities, I have realised that using the future effectively is a competency that can be developed. To enhance futures literacy, we need to better understand the underlying anticipatory systems and processes involved in imagining different kinds of future — including what might be considered non-futures (non-probable, non-desirable). Like any scientific effort to test and refine a theory, in this case of ‘the future’, it is important to develop methods and tools that, like microscopes in a biology lab, allow the otherwise invisible elements of why and how people imagine the future to become visible. By identifying the anticipatory assumptions it becomes practical to distinguish the diversity of reasons, methods, and implications of imagining the not-past, not present. This better command of this amazing human faculty then offers significant payoffs, not only in terms of being able to match tools to tasks (such as foresight, forecasting, divination, emergence, etc.), but crucially enlarging perception in the present to include more of its constantly unexpected novelty.
Question. Could you share some insights about the importance of understanding different kinds of future for the practical application of our capacity to imagine in governments, companies, and everyday life?
Riel Miller: Futures literacy plays a crucial role in today’s world by enabling a more effective relationship between human agency and complexity. Through my work in designing and organising hundreds of Futures Literacy Laboratories in various countries, I have witnessed its practical application and impact firsthand.
Over and over again I’ve been able to experience what happens when people become aware that they can move beyond their typically banal and ‘colonised’ imaginaries to invent new, non-probable, non-desirable descriptions of the not-past, not-present. Strikingly it is not some new goal or objective or overarching vision that comes to the forefront, but rather an awareness of both the power and ease of diversifying our imagination as a determinant of perception in the present. This realisation confirms an even stronger sensation, that the origins of our hopes and fears, aspirations and motivations, are not locked into only one way of living the relationship of humans to the world around us — control and determinism, fear and antipathy to uncertainty.
In the last four months, since February 1st I have co-designed and facilitated 17 Futures Literacy Labs, from South Africa and Mexico to Martinique, Turkey and China. Engaging with a highly diverse range of participants and topics. In every case, the take away was a realisation that everyone is able to gain a better understanding of why and how they imagine and the implications of this enhanced capacity for them as individuals and as members of organisations, communities, and networks. The Labs offer participants a structured experiential learning-by-doing process that invites them to explore and challenge their existing images of the future. Here the analogy of ‘futures literacy’ to the more familiar ‘reading and writing literacy’ offers a strong insight into the meaning of cultivating capabilities rather than seeking to realise pre-defined goals.
As participants in a Futures Literacy Lab begin to acquire greater futures literacy they begin to see the world around them differently. This is not only an enhanced perception of the previously imperceptible novel phenomena that did not exist or had no meaning in the past. But crucially a slight shift in the location of the nexus of sensations, frameworks, and images that define our constantly evolving relationships with the world. Participants move from the precarious and anxiety-inducing perch of the quest for certainty to a sense that there might be another way to relate to the creativity of this universe. There are alternatives to casting humans in the role of ‘masters’ that can and must control tomorrow. A boundary is crossed by experiencing a different terrain for ‘human agency’.
“The pretension that humans can determine or shape the future is one of the fundamental sources of our alienation from the world and each other. We have positioned ourselves as colonisers, conquerors of tomorrow for too long. The planet is sending us a message, without malice or ideology, it is time to change why and how we use our imagination.”
Question: In your opinion, what are the key skills or mindsets that individuals and organisations need to cultivate in order to reconcile fundamental uncertainty with the desire for better futures?
Riel Miller: In my opinion, individuals and organisations need to develop the capabilities that make complexity (non-deterministic novelty) and the relational nature of the world easier to comprehend. Comprehension is not a guarantee of better. Comprehending physics enabled humans to invent the atomic bomb — which may yet bring about the end of our species. I’d like to suggest that by understanding anticipation better, the forms imaginary futures take in the present, humans can harness their futures literacy to change the meaning of better. Instead of being driven by the imperatives of imposing our will on the future, we could let go of wanting to know or determine.
I don’t think such a transition can happen overnight. After all, we’ve been pursuing monumentalism-administrative approaches that instrumentalize the future for the purposes of control and reproducing the past for millennia. But like all experiential processes that somehow incorporate learning it may be feasible to become less arrogant, less detached from the world — as if we can stand outside it and conquer it. And instead find less fragile, less defensive, less path dependent ways of living as part of a creative universe. Modest becoming and joyful being that dances on both legs, the one of planning and the other of improvisation.
On the upside, embracing complexity gets us beyond the futile search for certainty and offers a perpetual and inexhaustible source of creativity, playgrounds for our imagination. On the downside, old structures meant to reassure by reproducing the past become even less meaningful. Not an easy transition, particularly if it can’t be sold on the basis of promising a better future — only one where we are more at ease with the universe we actually live in.
Question: What unique insights or perspectives can participants gain from you at the retreat?
Riel Miller: I suspect you’ll guess that I’m convinced that there is nothing unique about futures literacy. Quite the opposite, it is universal, in so far as we all use a variety of anticipatory systems and processes every day, all the time. From this perspective the ‘ah ha’ moment isn’t about anything I’ve invented or discovered, it is simply about accompanying the learning voyages that allow people from very different backgrounds to realise that they can use-the-future (their ability to imagine the not-past, not-present) for different reasons, using different methods, in different contexts. First and foremost this is not about navigation or ‘getting somewhere’ it is about feeling the wonder and mystery of this universe.
Read more about Riel’s work in the futures and foresight field.
Transforming the Future: Anticipation in the 21st Century
human futures insight for the futurati
SOIF’s next Strategic Foresight Virtual Course starts in September 2023.
