Exploring the Perspectives of Futures-Futures Literacy meets Design Thinking

17th-20th June in Stockholm, Sweden.

This session is hosted by the Project consortium of Erasmus + Knowledge Alliance “Becoming Future-oriented Entrepreneurs in universities and companies – beFORE (2017 – 2019)”

Starting with a brief introductory talk on the project beFORE and Futures Literacy the main part of this session will be a workshop.
The workshop is oriented to create plausible images of the future on Work-Environments in 2030. With creative approaches like story-telling, role-playing, and the like the challenge for the participants and their team will be to understand the point of view of a different person envision her desirable and undesirable futures and explore another team’s narrative through role-swapping. The aim is to establish an understanding of how a point of view can change the perception of a future and thus influence the decision-making process.

What is Futures Literacy?

Futures Literacy is the capacity to acquire, design and use anticipation and knowledge about possible futures to enhance our comprehension of the present complex world. Futures Literacy also instrumentalises the future so that it can serve as a tool, a system or process for making choices, and acting – for individuals, organisations as well as societies. According to Riel Miller of UNESCO, Futures Literacy improves the capacity to detect and give meaning to change, uncertainty, and discontinuity, and thereby become more capable of initiating learning processes.

beFORE project introduction

We see the following challenges facing academia and business today:

  • Universities slowly update their Entrepreneurship Education curricula according to market needs and global challenges.
  • Educational offer in the field of Futures Studies is not widely and evenly distributed across Europe.
  • Knowledge and good practice exchange between educators of Futures Studies (incl. practitioners) and academics representing other scientific fields is limited.
  • University students, entrepreneurs and academics need capacities for analysing and navigating their professional future challenges.

In our opinion foresight capacity building is instrumental to nurture future-oriented individuals. How to do that?

  • let’s start from building foresight capacities at entrepreneurship and management faculties….
  • let’s blend traditional methods for strategic management, with methods that enhance our capabilities for thinking and exploring the future…

Within beFORE project, we aim to tackle the above-mentioned challenges through the development and release of the Futures Literacy e-learning / online courses for university students and professionals such as: business representatives, academics and researchers (representing non-Futures Studies community).

Creative workshop (up to 20 participants)

In this session we would like to invite you to get a taste of Futures Literacy

As entrepreneurs, academics, or students we plan and imagine our future. The ideas and visions of our desirable futures influence today’s decisions. We act according to our individual values and expectations, which accumulate as the complex ecosystem we are a part of. With our decisions we shape our future and simultaneously the future of our organization, business, or university. How this future in 5, 10 or 20 years will roll out we now can only anticipate.

What we can work with are present images of the futures, which we plan, we hope for or reject. To tackle today’s decision making better, a change of perspective can be helpful. Using the design process as a structure, the workshop with the topic “Future Work-Environments” wants to take a peek into the year 2030.

Discover a stranger’s viewpoint and explore their images of the future. In teams you will take on the point of view of a persona. You will detect their values and attitude towards the topic and learn to understand their issues. In a phase of ideation, you will go into their hopes and fears and establish a firm point of view to create a narrative about a desirable future for your team’s persona.

Now it’s time to swap narrative – learn about the life of an unidentified persona – evaluate and compare it to your own. Play detective, who’s hidden behind that narrative? The end is marked by your team, in the role of your original persona, presenting the unidentified persona’s narrative – in a fun and colourful way.

Who are we aiming the workshop at:

  • Academics focused on related subject areas (futures studies, strategic foresight, strategic
    management, innovation management, risk management, entrepreneurship, engineering);
  • Corporate training providers, HR managers;
  • Business Foresight & Management Consultancies;
  • Industry representatives and other RTO clients, partners and stakeholders;
  • Students of business and engineering faculties.

Information about the project and partner organisations is available at futureoriented.eu

For further information about the session please contact the session lead ollenburg@institutfutur.de and the project co-ordinator: anna.sacio@itee.radom.pl