Riel Miller and Maree Conway discuss how we find and promote the crack in thinking so that people can open towards complexity and uncertainty and help them think differently to find emerging futures?
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
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Send your questions and comments about this podcast to Riel and Maree at futurepod@protonmail.com
Transcript
Peter Hayward: I am pretty sure that we would feel that our work makes people better able to navigate a complex and uncertain world. But is that the case?
Maree Conway: The anticipation for emergence, I think, is a bit scary in the current world. Because I have this thing about uncertainty and complexity in organizations and they want to get rid of them rather than dive into them. So how do we help people think differently to find emerging futures?
Riel Miller: The way in which we confine our imagination to the presumptuous, pretentious, arrogant, controlling and determining the future. This created unbelievable fragility, brittleness and even further enhanced and reproduced an approach towards the world around us that is fundamentally about conquest. It's about conquering the future, colonizing tomorrow and there's a really sort of serious problem with a lack of a shared theoretical foundation because it means that we just get caught up in this kind of dead end of, oh yeah, I need to come up with a scenario really quickly because the world's changed.
Peter Hayward: Those are my guest today on Futurepod. Returning to the Pod for a conversation together Riel Miller and Maree Conway
Welcome back to Futurepod, Riel and Maree.
Riel Miller: Great to be here. Yeah. Thank you.
Peter Hayward: Fantastic to have you both. Some of the original recordings back in the first year of FuturePod, which is a pandemic ago.
Riel Miller: Yeah, time flies.
Peter Hayward: So Riel, I'm going to start with you because this conversation started when I reached out to you. Cause I thought it was about time you got back on Futurepod and you agreed to come back, but you suggested that we extend an invitation to Maree to join us. And so Maree's here with us as well. So over to you, Riel. What's the conversation? What's the topic that you want to talk to with Maree?
Riel Miller: I wanted to pick up on a theme that Maree and I have been actually, I think dealing with for well over a decade. When we did work with the Association of Professional Futurists, but also World Future Studies Federation going back well over, over a decade ago. Which was really the, one of the underlying themes. And I just had a little exchange with Jim Dator about the sense that, and Jim put it in his recent book, he said look Gender Studies and Queer Theory, for instance, things that he said they've been very successful in becoming part of the Research community. And in that sense, insofar as they're topics of of research and teaching, they become avenues for supporting action and practice in the community. And, of course, it's a reciprocal dialectical and also synergistic relationship between what goes on in the research community and what happens out on the street. And it's still striking to me despite the obvious salience of the future, the extent to which the Future Studies community and the discussions around, let's call it, research into the future have had very little success compared to the scale of the issues and the obvious importance that people attach to thinking about the future, acting on the future, et cetera.
And the argument that I'm making here is not one that, that in any way diminishes or in some senses tries to eliminate or critique the existing the work, the body of work and the diversity of work being done in the futures field. It's really to say that there's been an ingredient that's missing and that ingredient is to summarize, it is a strong theoretical foundation which provides an overarching language, not a fixed language, but a language that evolves. That would allow people to not totalize or eliminate or, reduce or homogenize, but rather to be able to exchange language. And at the same time, to take up the wonderful invitation that I think is topical and long overdue. Which is to take a pluriepistemic, a multiple ways of knowing the future and I think the current moment calls for a theoretical foundation for future studies that is inherently pluriepistemic.
And I believe that the anticipatory systems and processes framework, and I'm writing some articles to this effect at this moment that is a crucial direction for the field. And it's one that I believe, and this is a strategic but also tactical proposition, I believe it can make inroads into the academic research community because it provides us with a very clear kind of structure for saying here is what we're studying. We are not studying scenarios. We are not studying visions. We are not studying the artifacts and the kind of epiphenomenon of planning. What we're studying is we're studying the sources and origins of the human imagination.
The future is inherently an exclusively when it comes to conscious human futures, thinking about the imagination and how can we understand what structures that imagination. Where it comes from and the role that it plays. And here again, I think making to me what seems to be a critical distinction. What role does it play first of all in perception and not necessarily in choice? Choice is important, but perception and choice are not the same thing. And here I'm trying to, in some sense, define the terrain for research in rather restrictive ways. And I think the restriction does have an epistemic bias to it, but it's an epistemic bias that I think can take advantage of the notion of pluriepistemic character of the imagination.
In other words, we can look for evidence, we can test hypotheses, we can communicate findings, we can refine this pluriepistemic phenomenon, which is the imagination. If we understand it as anticipatory systems and processes, in other words, the future does not exist. The future is something that can have a presence in the present, but only through our imagination. That is the way in which we deploy anticipatory assumptions, anticipatory systems, anticipatory processes. So that's my, take on things at the moment. It has lots of implications for the way in which we think about the world, the way in which we deal with climate change, the way in which we deal with for instance anxiety and mental fatigue in the face of the changes taking place in the world around us et cetera. But fundamentally that's the kind of thrust of this scientific proposition. Maree and I discussed it over over the summer, and I just wanted to be able to have a chance to exchange and share the bits and pieces of that conversation that Maree and I had with you and with the Futurepod community.
Maree Conway: When I came back from Sofia and after we'd had some conversations, I was moving in this direction anyway, but I moved my work to how we think about futures in terms of conscious foresight use. And finding those assumptions that underpin our imagination. Why some people engage with futures, some people resist so that's what I'm trying to do at the moment. Develop some sort of framework that's practical for people to be able to challenge their assumptions about futures. Individually, collectively, organizationally. But for me, I guess, the biggest issue I keep coming up against in my head is that the futures field has escaped us. It's terminology's gone wild. There's a new word every day. There's some sort of new process every day. I'm exaggerating, of course, but it's all about the process. It's all about let's develop a better scanning system. Let's develop a better workshop program. I'll write this article for publication about a case study.
Riel Miller: Let's use AI.
Maree Conway: Oh I was just going say, I was just going to say that. That I read an article, a general article for review recently. They identified changes, then they gave them to AI to interpret, to analyze the changes and come back, statistically analyze the changes. They used AI to write the scenario narratives. AI is about the past and the present. How can you rely on it to write scenario narratives? I was just shocked.
Peter Hayward: So you said that a lot of the conversations that happen in the field, both academically and also professionally and practically, like people looking for a better planning process, a different way of doing scenarios or, even creating embodied scenarios and experiential and are you saying we shouldn't be doing that? Or are you saying we should be doing that and we should be doing a whole lot more?
Maree Conway: We should be doing that but it shouldn't be our only focus. And it seems to me at the moment that it is our only focus. I know there's people out there whose focus is theoretical. But when I read things and get papers, it's all about this process I've developed, or a case study, or a review, a literature review of scenario planning. And it's like we're converging instead of diverging in the field. I don't think, I think the APF for example, they'll hate me for saying this, but they're they're struggling with how to position the association globally. And that's, I can understand why. There's a group of really clever professional people and there's practitioners, there's academics, there's people who have just decided that I want to be a futurist and write to me and say, how do I be a futurist? It's just we're so scattered, and as Riel was talking about, there's no kind of cohesive theme or idea that actually brings people together.
So we do all this wonderful work that has no impact. So people then do a lot of work on how do we evaluate our work, to show that it's good and valid, and it makes no difference. So the thing that I see missing from all of this is what goes on up in our brains? How we think, and the assumptions we use to allow our imaginations to go wild or to keep them constrained. When we were at this course that I went to Riel, I think he just blurted it out one day and said, the future doesn't matter. And I went, pardon? What do you mean the future doesn't matter? But it's not that the future doesn't matter, it's just that as Riel said, it doesn't exist, it's unknowable. It's a temporal space that we know about but we can't do anything about it. And I started to flip my writing around to say that, what we actually do when we do futures is to reframe the present, going back to Pierre Wack. He was right. To re-perceive the present. To change our thinking. Our perspectives. Our perception. And then we can find these new actions that we can take to actually make change that means something because I just think now in our systems today, I feel like we're hitting our heads against a brick wall.
Riel Miller: Yeah. If I can just pick up on that point I think something, perhaps in the Pierre Wack kind of tradition as well, the issue here is experimentalism. The issue is experimenting. The issue is exuberance. The issue is almost excess. And creating the confidence, the awareness, the inner dynamism of thinking and kind of mental entrepreneurship in light of all the things going on in the world around us. Which I think have always been going on. In other words, reconciling or enhancing our sense of being part of this complex, emergent, novel universe where the certainty that we have about uncertainty is something that is good and makes sense to us. And that's where taking up this anxiety and the urgency that people feel. And there, Maree and I completely agree. We've got tons and tons of stuff going on because COVID ripped away the complacency of I know what's going to happen tomorrow. No you don't. And it's not even an issue of long term or short term. So it's not I have to wait 30 years or 20 years. Please give me permission to imagine change by thinking 20 years into the future. No it's five days. It's two days.
And the other thing that the pandemic did, which I think is also very clearly signaled by climate change is that we have our arrogance. And what I mean by the way in which we confine our imagination to the presumptuous, pretentious, arrogant, controlling and determining the future. This created unbelievable fragility, brittleness and even further enhanced and reproduced an approach towards the world around us that is fundamentally about conquest. It's about conquering the future, colonizing tomorrow and there's a really sort of serious problem with a lack of a shared theoretical foundation because it means that we just get caught up in this kind of dead end of, oh yeah, I need to come up with a scenario really quickly because the world's changed.
Maree Conway: Yes, and I think that desire for control, and that's what strategic planning is all about finding the right future. And strategizing around that and only that and but I often wonder how does that get changed? Yes, I don't know.
Peter Hayward: I've just got a question. This seemed, you weren't saying it, but it sounded like, this notion of what used to be called phenomenology, in the work of Husserl. Which once upon a time, sat within a fairly broad psychological field. And we had a number of schools of psychology. Is that somewhat like what you're saying? That we need a more grounded approach as to how we have concepts and hold on to concepts or drop concepts away.
Riel Miller: Yeah. Yeah.
Maree Conway: I think that's like the meta frame. Yes. I'm thinking that I think about my family and my relations when I do this work. I'm thinking I try to explain my work to them and what I do and they don't understand at all. And I keep thinking how can I reach them? Because they make decisions every day that shape the future or our futures. And I guess that's what got me started on this thing about, we constrain our imaginations because we have assumptions. And as you said in the course Riel, there's no imagination. All imagination is based on assumptions and we rarely sit back in a futures process and actually map out those assumptions that we hold. That the culture holds. That the organisation holds. Because the assumptions are unconscious. So I think that's what I'm trying to do to make overt that before we even engage in this thinking.
Riel Miller: Maree, just coming out of the APFN, the Asia Pacific Foresight Network meeting in Kuala Lumpur, which was in many ways, a wonderful tribute celebration and testimony to the power of preferred futures seen from a causal layered analysis perspective. Sohail was there and so were many others and preferred futures, desired futures are still just one set of futures. And I think that this is when you start to talk about assumptions it's difficult to say why are you thinking about the future if it's not a future you want? I agree with that. But that is not actually the only reason to think about the future. And the same thing goes for a probable future. It's probable that I'll get across the street if there are no cars in the vicinity. So I'm feeling good about that. And that probability is obviously an important future to think about. And the probability that we believe because we accept the models and the assumptions around climate change are obviously very important for informing the different scenarios that we play out in our heads.
There's the component which takes us beyond probable and desirable. To say, how is the future confining our perception of the present because it's based in the past. And a probable and a preferable future can only be anchored in the past. Whereas the present has elements of the world around us that have no precedent. And certainly no precedent for us specifically because we're often unaware of stuff. But even it has things that are entirely unique from the point of view of the universe. So how do we ensure that our ability to disregard the imperatives of probable and preferable imaginaries doesn't simply confine us to reproducing the past as best we can. Fortunately, from my point of view, we fail miserably. Okay. Cause if we really managed to do what we said we wanted to do, I think we'd be, it'd be a terrible thing.
Because we'd be just creating things that we think are, father knows best forever. That, that would be catastrophic. But when I try and think about the diversification that I come back and Peter to the point about rooting this in biology seems to me to be helpful. In other words, if we understand that anticipatory systems are simply a fundamental attribute of all living organisms. It is not just a nice invitation to think about the diversity of anticipatory systems. It's an observation. It's evidence that there are diverse and different anticipatory systems. This points to an ontological. What is the future? And here we get right at your phenomenology point, which is that, that if I want to distinguish different kinds of futures, like I want to distinguish different kinds of physical things and have categories, then I need to be able to say, what is a different future? And there, I think a probable future is not the same as a desired future. And I think a future that is imagined outside of the context of probability and desirability, what I call, anticipation for emergence. This is actually different ontological future. And because the ontology is what it is different the way of knowing it is different. And this becomes really I think a very fertile terrain for the field because it encompasses the diversity of different kinds of futures. It encompasses the diversity of different ways of knowing. And it gives us a really I think a dynamic, not a static, but a dynamic way of taking advantage of all the futures thinking that goes on because of course people are thinking about the future from morning until night.
Maree Conway: And it's neurologically wired into us to be able to do that. It's the thing about different ways of knowing. That in an organization that's doing strategic planning, in my experience, which was a long time ago now, you could run a really good process in the organization, bring it back to the executive group. And they made the decision. And ultimately it's the CEO that makes the decision about what the future is for the organisation. And so all that work done with people in the organisation is lost. And they don't value the strategy. They don't value the outcomes. And if you said to them, we've been trapped. what we should be doing is looking at the preposterous futures. But even that traps us in a way. What is a different future? The anticipation for emergence, I think, is a bit scary in the current world. Because … I have this thing about uncertainty and complexity in organizations and they want to get rid of them rather than dive into them. What you said about what is a different future and it's got to be one that's emerging. So how do we help people think differently to find emerging futures?
Riel Miller: This is the link to futures literacy because if it's a capability, we're really in a different ball game. So people are going to still make bets. Okay. If you put your money on the line and you're the CEO of a company and you want to determine what the bets are going to be, go for it. If you're cooking dinner for everybody and they've all chipped in their opinion, but you're going to be the one that's going to actually, hold the frying pan. You're going to cook the dinner you want to cook but the issue becomes what's the difference between a world in which only a few people can read and write. In other words have the pretension of being the ones who think about the future and who understand what it means to forecast. What it means to do a Delphi and the expert comes along and you layer it on an organization, you lay it on a community, or you lay it on children who say, yeah, mama and papa said, I need to get a good diploma to get a good job and the world is so uncertain. I really need to hang on as best, to for dear life. To the flotsam and jetsam of the sunk ship because otherwise I'm going to be, lost.
No. Let's think about a context where we can be much less brittle, much more agile, much more ephemeral, much more improvisational, because all of us can read and write. In other words we're in a context where we're fabricating less brittle, less stressful, less anxiety inducing contexts because instead of putting ourselves in opposition to complexity, we really swim and surf in it. Because we're part of it and it is part of the world that we cannot escape. There is a certain poignancy to all this, but also, I think there's a very practical payoff. Which is that when people can develop the capability, when you have a community that can read and write instead of a community being illiterate, when you have a community that is able to distinguish probable, preferable, emergent and understands the humility of human agency with respect to complexity, we do not create the future. People go, Whoa, what's wrong? You mean we're not creating tomorrow? No. Humans do not create the future. We live in a universe that is much more emergent than that. It's not deterministic. And today does not determine tomorrow. It's something that emerges from the incredible creativity of this universe, of which, humans are such an obvious example. So it's really, I think, It feels ripe. I don't know about what you guys think, but it feels ripe.
Peter Hayward: The APF have extended their most significant futures work to have a specific category to look at indigenous ways. I just had a person on FuturePod talking about Afrofuturism and African Futurism. That person also talked about Indofuturism. I wonder whether this Western dominated perspective of futures thinking is starting to fray and other epistemologies from other cultures are starting to influence and start to say actually, we've got a different way of understanding futures. They may still have preferred, but they may anticipate in different ways because they come from a different cultural space.
Riel Miller: There's this reciprocal relationship obviously and I don't mean to focus excessively on the academy, nor give the academy a first mover privilege. It's in the let's use the French expression. It's ‘dans L’air du temps’ . It's in our current context historically. People are finding their resources with respect to their imagination inadequate. They don't feel that it's sufficient. And so they're searching, they're looking, they're exploring. And I think that this notion of the violent character of the dominant way of using the future. And it's not to say that the way we use the future is the source of all evil but there's a part of it which is, I think, a really powerful and dangerous thing. Which is that if certainty is the goal, and we inculcate people with the notion that uncertainty is dangerous and the biggest threat. And so we remain children who want to be protected by Papa. Because we need to be defended, and we need to be in this world that's a cocoon. Then essentially, we've created the conditions for continuing all the oppressive regimes that we know of. The hierarchical, status based, divine truth. And if we can begin to crack open that monopoly of the way to use the future that I think we're in some sense is creating fissures in the crucial ecosystem of knowledge creation, knowledge sharing, knowledge legitimacy. Knowledge is for me, it's pretty much the be all and end all learning and understanding the world. Is the only metaphysical premise I really latch onto.
And so here we're in a position to just nourish, cultivate, tend the garden in a variety of different ways. And so the Academy, the point that I was making at the outset, but also our associations the world's future studies federation, which is going to be celebrating its 50th anniversary next month in Paris. I think there's an exciting opportunity here, and to a certain extent, I would say a responsibility, which is to try and push the theory of futures so that it can be part of what's going on. Including this, I think, fundamental issue around Indigenous ways of knowing and indigenous ways of living which I believe are deeply damaged and imperceptible from the point of view of the future as certainty. Because that's what creates the imperial versions of of truth and the imperial versions that lead to empire and empires, which destroy indigenous communities.
Maree Conway: Yes. And I think That what I'm trying to do personally is find a way to crack open a part of that. And I don't know if you read my Ph.D. thesis, but I quoted somebody whose name I don't remember now, about cracking open university futures. And that was an indigenous writer, and that was some of the best literature that I actually read. I found lots of new ideas in there. But I still keep coming back to the reality that in the western part of existence, we're trapped. We're trapped. Our thinking is trapped. Our systems are trapped. And I guess that's what's driving me now, to try and find a way to crack open our thinking. The ontological bit about it was in my thesis as well. It's the ontological expansion thing that if you can't allow yourself to engage with different ways of thinking, different ways of knowing, so that you do get that ontological expansion, because in what I write all the time is that once you get that, and people say this all the time, your foresight capacity is becoming conscious. It becomes conscious. You're becoming aware of different ways of knowing the future, and you begin to see the world differently and that's what's driving me and my work, because it happened to me. I went through that. And you then approach thinking about futures in a different way, but when the field is focused on scenario planning or whatever, how do you get the shift happening?
Riel Miller: I think one of the aspects of that is just building up the capability. So what I try not to do is say what's going to happen or how it's going to happen. Because to a certain extent, if I can be so bold as to say, we're carriers of the old problems, because even if we can evolve and our thinking can change I still feel constrained and burdened in ways that are positive to a certain extent. But also I don't want to see live forever meaning things need to be forgotten, things need to die, things need to end. And so I can try my best to reinvent my language, to reconsider my positioning. I am a product and a carrier of some pretty nasty stuff. And even if I denounce it I really don't feel that I should have the pretension to believe that I can invent something. Really, that's different. It's going to take time and generations and we're missing a lot of language. Really the word the future. The way it's used in English. It just drives me completely crazy. In some other languages there seem to be some more. It seems to be less where is it? Let me find it under the table. Can I see it? Can I touch it? Yeah. Yeah. Also, the word foresight these days, and again, I'm not trying to... throw a cat in amongst the pigeons but, it has a very practical meaning and people use it and that's all fine and good, but it is constraining to our ability to invent new ways of
Maree Conway: I recently wrote a post that was titled Foresight is not an Approach. That it's a cognitive capacity. And that we're now using it as an adjective to describe everything in the futures field, and that's what I mean about terminology's gone wild. People have just used it without really knowing what the meaning is. What the essence of foresight is really about. And I've had to rethink a whole lot of what I did in the past. I have to go back and rewrite all my articles. But yes, I get what you're saying about we're carriers of nasty stuff. But I just think this whole terminology thing. Yes, I know it's been discussed lots of times. But what is the futures field? And I try really desperately not to talk about the future anymore. It's futures, there's always futures. What's the crack? Where do we crack open? What's the leverage point? Because people don't recognize that they're carrying around a lot of nasty stuff. And that's affecting how we think about our futures. That we think we can control them, because that's what we've been brought up to think. That's the quandary for me. How do I, how do, where do you find that crack?
Riel Miller: Peter, sorry, sorry Maree. Do you, do FuturePod... Brings you into the confluence of the different perspectives. Do we have the fissures and the cracks and the liminal and the kind of enlargement and the letting go?
Peter Hayward: I think we do. I'm just collecting little tiny snippets of what's going on. I just did a podcast with a group of people who've written a book called Bringing Futures to Life and then the subtext of the title is We Are Not Futurists. They come from an art installation background and they have the language of building things and taking people into things and they suddenly realized that they could use these installations for people to have conversations about what they wanted to create for themselves and their families and their communities and they've been doing this for over a decade now. And this to me is indicative of what I'm hearing when I listen to the conversations that I'm privileged to hear. Is people who are just finding ways to be helpful. People are finding creative, culturally appropriate ways to engage with people as to what they want to do with their lives in the present. And they often don't see themselves as part of the futures community because they're not academically trained to do this. And I think I am hearing and meeting people who are doing a lot of what you are speaking of. Which is talking to people in a way that is approachable and helps them deal with their lives now and allows for emergence and they are not seeing themselves as futurists. These people who play with design, art, culture, Indigenous backgrounds. And I actually think we have got so much potential in the field. It is much bigger, richer, and dynamic than what I ever saw from, my small time in the academic.
Riel Miller: Yeah. Yeah. I think that was in part why I wanted to have this conversation with the three of us. Because I think that there's this opportunity here to enhance the openness and the receptivity of the research side. And at the same time really benefit and plug into the richness and contribute to the richness of futures thinking throughout society. And there are the graduate students and the MA students. And there's the whole issue around that I getting pulled into quite a bit of young people who are having real trouble with the future and feel that there's, where am I going to find hope? And so that also pushes us to say let's work on making this just more conversant. More reading and writing becomes part of everyday life. You take it for granted and being more futures literate is really something I think we should be able to take for granted because it just makes life more interesting and easier in so many ways. It's not to say that everything is written in the written word and that everything's words and language, but when we have such unbelievable capabilities, like the human capacity to speak and the human capacity to anticipate cultivating that, enhancing it to a certain extent, augmenting it. Through experience and through accumulated wisdom, it's just, seems like such a an important thing for us to do right now. Yeah,
Maree Conway: Yes, I think my perspective at the moment is very focused and I'm not quite sure what my next steps will be. But that whole thing about thinking about us, if we can build that openness and receptivity, if we can open up our minds and get that ontological expansion, then we can have, we can develop futurist consciousness. We can develop foresight. We can have future agency and we can have hope. I think hope is one of the critical elements of our work, because we live in this environment at the moment that squashes hope. But if we always have hope, always have some idea of where we're going and what we want to do. Helping people live their lives now and be more open to emergence. I think that's, yes that's the pathway.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. The thing that I hear and I think Reil's absolutely on it, is that we live in a highly dynamic, uncertain, complex world. The more we hold on to certainty, the more brittle we become. And... Human resilience in the face of unlimited uncertainty is one of those things that arises from hope. And futures consciousness is that we may not know what the future holds, but we can take tremendous care about what we do right here, right now. I think you would have heard me say it Maree, that I actually think we're Presentists more than we're Futurists.
Riel Miller: Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Absolutely.
Peter Hayward: Because that's the only place we can act. We can only act in the present. And the future's there to help us act in the present.
Riel Miller: Yeah. And that's where you express your ethics and your values. If you're not expressing them now, then what are you going to postpone them? Or do them in the name of somebody who doesn't, who's not there yet? No that's our that's being. A full person now. Yeah.
Peter Hayward: There's no way you wrap this but look Riel thank you. Thank you for the creativity and the courage and the goal to bring both myself and Maree into this space. And again, one of the things that I would love, and I hope when we have these conversations in Futurepod, is that others who listen decide that they wouldn't mind picking up the conversation and taking it somewhere else. Yeah, exactly. So from my point of view, if we have at least... provoked and stirred up people's thinking such that someone else says we want to pick it up and take it somewhere else, then I think this conversation has just done everything it could have done in terms of opening up and in Maree's language, is a tiny crack.
Riel Miller: Wonderful. Thank you so much.
Maree Conway: Thanks Peter.
Peter Hayward: I hope Riel and Maree's conversation got you thinking a bit differently. Maybe starting your own crack. And if you have questions for any future conversation we have with them, then please reach out to us at the Pod. Our contact details will be in the Show Notes. Futurepod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the Pod please check out the Patreon link on the website. I'm Peter Hayward. Thanks for joining us today.