Futures Literacy and Radical Imagination

For educators who want to help students engage with uncertainty rather than just prepare for it.

Most futures education in business schools is actually prediction education. Students learn to scan for trends, model scenarios, and develop strategies for probable outcomes. The implicit message is that the future is something coming towards us, and our job is to read it accurately enough to get ready.

Futures literacy starts from a different premise. The future is not a fixed destination. It is unfinished, contested, and shaped — in part — by what people believe is possible and worth fighting for. Teaching students to engage with it seriously means something other than forecasting. It means helping them develop the capacity to imagine otherwise, to ask whose futures are being assumed, and to locate themselves as people who can actively shape what comes next rather than simply adapt to it.

That shift is harder to achieve than it sounds, and it requires different pedagogical tools than most management education currently offers.

What futures literacy actually means

The term comes from Riel Miller and UNESCO's work on anticipatory systems. At its simplest, futures literacy is the capacity to use the future in the present, to be aware of the assumptions, hopes, and fears that shape how we engage with what's coming, and to hold those assumptions lightly enough to imagine alternatives.

What this is not: scenario planning, trend analysis, or strategic foresight in the conventional sense. Those are useful tools, but they tend to start from what is probable rather than what is possible or preferable. They develop the capacity to predict more accurately rather than the capacity to question why certain futures feel inevitable in the first place.

Futures literacy, by contrast, invites what might be called anticipatory pluralism: the ability to hold multiple, competing, contradictory futures simultaneously without rushing to resolve them. It asks students to sit with uncertainty as a productive state rather than a problem to be solved.

For HR and management students, this is both practically and ethically urgent. The people and organisations they will work with are already living inside futures that weren't designed with them in mind. Futures literacy gives students the tools to notice that, and to ask what they might do differently.

Futuring as inquiry

One of the frames I find most useful is futuring as inquiry: treating the future not as a prediction to be made but as a question to be explored. This reframes the educator's role too. We're not teaching students what the future of work looks like. We're teaching them how to hold the question of what it could look like with rigour, curiosity, and ethical seriousness.

Futuring as Inquiry: What It Means to Treat the Future as a Question develops this frame directly. It's worth reading alongside When HR Education Becomes World-Making: Introducing Relational Futuring, which sets out the broader argument for why HR education in particular needs this reorientation. HR professionals are not just preparing people for the future of work. At their best, they're helping shape it.

What this looks like in practice

Futures literacy develops through doing, not just thinking. The methods I use are deliberately creative and embodied, because purely analytical approaches tend to reproduce the very assumptions they're meant to unsettle.

The postcard exercise asks students to write to their present self from an imagined future professional identity: "Dear 2024 me, here's what you need to start doing now to become the HR professional this world needs..." This simple act does several things at once. It makes the abstract personal. It moves students from passive observers of possible futures to active participants in constructing them. And it surfaces assumptions about what the profession is for that more conventional tasks rarely reach.

Visual collaging for futures work lets students explore multiple possible futures simultaneously through image, metaphor, and juxtaposition rather than argument. When a student places images of technological innovation alongside images of environmental crisis, or holds childcare statistics next to space exploration imagery, they are doing something analytically sophisticated. They're practising anticipatory pluralism: the capacity to hold contradiction without premature resolution. Playing Our Way to Different Futures explores a related approach through LEGO Serious Play and the Climate Play methodology.

Speculative scenario work with an ethical edge goes beyond "what might happen" to "who benefits from this future, and who doesn't?" Students develop detailed possible worlds and then interrogate them: what assumptions does this future make about work, care, value, and who counts? This connects futures thinking to the critical HRM questions that should run through any management education worth the name.

The opening question is a smaller but underrated move: beginning any session with a "what if" rather than a "what is." The Opening Question explores how this simple reframe repositions students as capable of imagining alternatives from the very start of a session.

The resistance worth naming

Futures work meets a particular kind of scepticism in business schools: the suspicion that speculation is not rigorous, that imagination is not academic, and that anything which can't be measured or modelled isn't really knowledge.

This scepticism is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing, because it points to something real about how management education has been designed. It has historically privileged prediction over imagination, analysis over creativity, certainty over productive uncertainty. Futures literacy challenges all of that, which is why it can feel threatening to students and institutions alike.

The response is not to argue that futures literacy is "just as rigorous." It's to make the epistemological argument plainly: that learning to hold uncertainty, to imagine alternatives, and to ask whose futures are being assumed is a form of intellectual sophistication that analytical tools alone cannot develop. And that in a world of genuine complexity, it is also more practically useful.

The question underneath this pillar

Futures literacy in management education is ultimately a question about what we think students are preparing for. If we think they are preparing to manage existing systems efficiently, we design one kind of curriculum. If we think they are preparing to navigate, question, and sometimes reshape those systems, we design something different.

Teaching Otherwise is committed to the second view. Not because it's more optimistic, but because it's more honest about what the world actually requires of the people who will work in it.

The posts in this section move between the theoretical and the practical, between the why and the how. They're written for educators who want to do this work and need language, methods, and occasionally company.