Futuring as Inquiry: What It Means to Treat the Future as a Question

A new chapter in the Elgar Companion to Management Education and the SDGs — and what it's been making me think about.

There's a moment that happens in almost every futures exercise I've run. Students are asked to imagine something — a world, a scenario, a version of work that doesn't yet exist — and for a beat, nothing happens. They look around. They wait. They want to know the right answer before they commit to saying anything.

That moment interests me more than anything that comes after it, because it tells us everything about how management education has trained people to relate to the future. We've taught them to predict. We haven't taught them to wonder.

A new chapter I've co-written with Tony Wall and Laura Dixon tries to take that wondering seriously. As a mode of inquiry, a way of engaging with uncertainty that is rigorous, ethical, and genuinely transformative. We're calling it futuring as inquiry, and it's been reshaping how I think about what futures literacy actually demands of us as educators.

The problem with futuring as technique

Futuring — the practice of using foresight methods to engage with possible futures — is gaining traction in management education. And that's good. We need it. But there's a risk that it gets absorbed into the existing logic of business schools as just another tool in the pedagogical toolkit. A technique to be delivered, assessed, and moved on from.

What the chapter argues is that this isn't enough. Futuring done well isn't a method you apply. It's a way of being in the classroom, one that asks students to sit with complexity, to tolerate not knowing, and to recognise that they have agency in shaping what comes next. That's a fundamentally different proposition to teaching someone how to run a scenario exercise.

The distinction matters. Because if futuring stays at the level of technique, it risks becoming another form of the reductionist thinking it's supposed to challenge. Another neat framework. Another box ticked on the way to a degree.

Three things that make futuring work: complexity, chaos, and choice

The chapter proposes three pedagogical features that, taken together, turn futuring from a classroom activity into something closer to a practice of inquiry. I want to share what drew me to each of them — and what I think they demand of educators.

Complexity is the starting point. Real futures aren't simple. They're tangled, interconnected, shaped by systems that don't behave neatly. If we want students to develop genuine futures literacy, then the learning environment needs to reflect that messiness. This might mean rich picturing, where students map a problem from multiple stakeholder perspectives simultaneously. It might mean live cases that unfold over time, where information changes and what seemed certain yesterday is no longer reliable today. The point isn't to overwhelm. It's to honour the actual texture of the world students will inhabit.

Chaos is where it gets uncomfortable, and where it gets interesting. The chapter makes a provocative case that some of the most powerful learning happens when pedagogical conditions are deliberately disrupted. Multiple conversations happening at once. Ambiguous instructions. Time pressure layered with uncertainty. This isn't about being difficult for the sake of it. It's about recognising that the kind of agility students need for an unstable world can't be developed in a perfectly controlled classroom. When students generate their own insights from within that chaos, they understand their own capacity. They begin to trust that they can improvise. That not knowing isn't the end of the story.

Choice is the counterweight to both. And this is the part I care about most. Complexity and chaos, without choice, don't produce learning. They produce overwhelm. The chapter is explicit about this: futuring literacies need to cultivate a sense that the future is something students can actively shape, not something that simply happens to them. This is where the work connects to anticipatory agency, the capacity to recognise your role in constructing preferred futures rather than just adapting to predicted ones. When students experience genuine choice within complexity, something opens up. They stop waiting for someone to tell them what the future looks like and start imagining it themselves.

The ethics of making people uncomfortable

The chapter includes a section that I think every educator working with futures methods should read carefully. It's about the ethical implications of deliberately introducing complexity and chaos into a learning space.

Because this isn't without risk. Students and colleagues may need different kinds of preparation. The chapter doesn't argue for abandoning these methods. It argues for doing them with care. Knowing your students. Being known by them. Having conversations about what might happen in a session before it happens, not in exhaustive detail, but in principle. Building trust before asking for vulnerability.

This is where futuring as inquiry meets Teaching Otherwise in a way that feels important to name. The three commitments I work from — care as curriculum, criticality as method, collective imagination as essential work — aren't separate from the pedagogical design of futures exercises. They're embedded in it. You can't ask students to sit with uncertainty and not first create conditions where that uncertainty feels survivable.

The chapter puts it simply: these environments don't require trust to function. But they flourish when trust is there. That distinction feels exactly right to me.

What this means in practice

If futuring is to be more than a technique — if it's genuinely to become a mode of inquiry, then it asks something of us as educators that goes beyond lesson planning. It asks us to be comfortable not knowing the outcome of a session. To value confusion as a learning signal rather than a sign that something has gone wrong. To design for emergence rather than just for delivery.

It asks us to hold complexity and care in the same hand.

That's harder than it sounds. It's also, I think, closer to what education at its best has always been. Not the efficient transfer of knowledge, but the slow, relational, sometimes disorienting process of becoming someone who can think differently about the world.

Teaching Otherwise and Relational Futuring

Looking back at the chapter now, I can see it embodies Teaching Otherwise principles even though I didn't set out to write a Teaching Otherwise chapter. That's what happens when a pedagogical stance becomes how you think rather than what you apply.

The ethical provocation section is the clearest example. The chapter argues you can't introduce chaos into a classroom without knowing who's in the room, what they need, how to build trust first. That's care as foundational to pedagogy, not incidental to it. And the insistence that futuring can't be reduced to technique, that it's a mode of inquiry demanding reflexivity and relationship, is what criticality as method looks like when applied to futures literacy itself.

The chapter also sits within the territory I've been calling Relational Futuring: a pedagogical model weaving together care ethics, futures literacy, and arts-based pedagogy to develop students' capacity for anticipatory responsibility, embodied ethics, and imaginative attentiveness. I didn't write this chapter as Relational Futuring. But it exemplifies the model's core claim: that futures literacy can't be developed through neutral, technocratic methods. Complexity, chaos, and choice don't work as pedagogical features unless they're held by care and relationship.

Strip that away and you're just making people uncomfortable for no good reason. Keep it and you're creating conditions where students develop genuine agency in imagining and building futures rather than just adapting to predicted ones.

The other work I'm doing — collaborative writing on joy and discomfort, the Joy Index mapping when learning feels alive, conversations emerging from RMLE — sits within the same territory. Not because these projects were designed as a coherent programme, but because Teaching Otherwise shapes how I approach any pedagogical question. These separate inquiries keep finding the same ground: what does transformative learning actually require, and how do we create conditions where it's possible without being extractive?

This chapter appears in Wall, T., Österlind, E. & Hallgren, E. (eds), The Elgar Companion to Management Education and the SDGs. Co-authored with Tony Wall and Laura Dixon.