When HR Education Becomes World-Making: Introducing Relational Futuring

This week in Belgrade, I stood in front of a room of management educators at the 12th Responsible Management Education Research Conference and asked: What if HR education became a site for world-making, not just workforce management?

Because that's not what we do, is it? We teach recruitment strategies. Performance management systems. Employee engagement metrics. We teach students to be good administrators of other people's working lives. We call it professionalism. We call it rigour. We rarely call it what it actually is: training people to reproduce the world exactly as it already exists.

And right now, that world isn't working for most of the people living in it.

What We're Actually Teaching

There's a concept I keep coming back to: used futures. It's Inayatullah's term for the way we project the past forward and call it the future. In HRM education, used futures look like this: teaching students about "the future of work" as if automation, gig economy platforms, and AI-driven performance tracking are inevitable weather systems we simply adapt to, rather than choices someone made that we could choose differently.

We teach students that disruption is technological. That change is external. That their job is to help organisations adapt, optimise, survive. We don't tend to ask: adapt to what? Optimise for whom? Survive at whose cost?

Mariappanadar calls these costs negative externalities — the psychological and social damage imposed on employees, families, communities when we treat people as resources to be managed rather than lives to be considered. Burnout. Precarity. The anxiety of never quite knowing if you're productive enough. We know these costs exist. We just keep teaching as if they're inevitable.

So when a student tells me "I thought HR was just admin," I don't hear a failure of imagination. I hear exactly what we've taught them to expect.

Relational Futuring: A Model for Teaching Otherwise

For the past year, I've been working on something I'm calling Relational Futuring — a pedagogical model that treats the future not as something to predict or adapt to, but as something we make together, through care and imagination and a willingness to sit with difficult questions.

Relational Futuring: Three established frameworks generate three new pedagogical capacities at their intersections

The Three Foundations

The model starts with Joan Tronto's ethics of care, which has been teaching me that vulnerability and interdependence aren't problems to solve — they're the actual conditions of being human. That matters for HRM because it means we can't keep pretending that people are autonomous agents who just need the right incentives. We're always already responsible for each other.

Then there's futures literacy — the work of Riel Miller and Roberto Poli — which argues that how we imagine the future shapes what we do now. If the only future we can imagine is more efficient, more optimised, more extracted, then that's what we'll build. But imagination isn't just wishful thinking. It's a practice we can develop.

And finally, arts-based pedagogy. This is the work of people like Barone, Eisner, Springborg and Ladkin, who insist that some things can't be analysed into understanding. You have to make them, hold them, look at them. It's a way of thinking that lets you hold contradictions without collapsing them into false resolutions.

These three frameworks aren't new. What's new is what emerges when you weave them together deliberately, relationally, in pedagogical practice. The model's contribution isn't the frameworks themselves — it's the three capacities that arise at their intersections.

The Three Connecting Capacities

Here's where the model becomes more than the sum of its parts. When you weave these frameworks together, three new capacities emerge — and these are what students actually develop:

Anticipatory Responsibility sits at the intersection of Ethics of Care and Futures Literacy. It's the capacity to recognise that imagined futures create present responsibilities. Students learn to ask: if we know this future is probable, what are we responsible for doing now? If we prefer a different future, what must we refuse to create? This makes students stop mid-case study and ask, "Wait — are we assuming this future is inevitable?"

Embodied Ethics emerges where Ethics of Care meets Arts-Based Pedagogy. This is using creative practice to explore ethical tensions that can't be resolved through analysis alone. When students make collages about the future of work, they're thinking through their hands, making visible the contradictions between what they're taught to value and what they actually care about.

Imaginative Attentiveness is where Futures Literacy and Arts-Based Pedagogy intersect. It's the capacity to notice and question dominant narratives about work's future — to see that "the future of work" is a story someone's telling, and to ask who benefits, whose labour it makes invisible, what alternatives it forecloses.

When these three capacities work together, something shifts. The classroom stops being a place where students learn to manage other people's working lives and becomes a space where they learn to imagine — and begin building — different worlds entirely.

What Makes It Relational

I'm calling this Relational Futuring because it refuses the idea that futures thinking is an individual cognitive skill. The future isn't something you imagine alone and then implement. It's something we make together, in relationship, through dialogue and disagreement and the slow work of figuring out what we owe each other.

Every element of this model is relational:

• Care ethics centres interdependence, not autonomy
• Futures literacy works through collective imagination, not solo prediction
• Arts-based methods create boundary objects — artefacts we can gather around and think with together

This isn't pedagogy about relationships. It's pedagogy as relationship. The learning happens in the space between people, not inside individual heads.

What This Looks Like in Practice

I've tested this model most thoroughly in a three-phase classroom intervention: students map signals of change (attentiveness), create collages of alternative futures (imagination), then reflect collectively on ethical tensions and commitments (responsibility).

One group juxtaposed space exploration with childcare statistics and images of war. Another layered mental health headlines over zero-hours contracts and productivity dashboards. These weren't pretty. They weren't coherent. They were truthful in a way that essays rarely are.

But the phases aren't the point. The point is that when you create pedagogical space for these three capacities to develop — when you ask students to attend to whose futures matter, to imagine otherwise through creative practice, and to take ethical responsibility for what they're building — something shifts.

Not always. Not for everyone. But often enough that I knew we'd touched something real.

What Actually Happened

Let me tell you: this did not start well.

Students were baffled. A few were annoyed. One asked, quite reasonably, what making collages had to do with HR.

I didn't have a good answer at the time. I just said: trust me, we'll see.

And then, gradually, something shifted. Not for everyone. Not all at once. But enough.

One student said: "I used to think of HR as something you do to people to make the business work. Now I see it as a space for imagining what kind of world we want to work in."

That sentence is worth more to me than any module evaluation score.

Because that's the shift I'm after. Not better technicians. Not more strategic thinkers. But people who understand that their professional choices are world-making choices. That every policy is a small architecture of possibility or constraint. That "best practice" is never neutral — it's always serving someone's version of what matters.

What This Means

Here's what I think we're getting wrong in HRM education: we've taught students that the future is something that happens to them, and their job is to help organisations adapt. We've made them passive. We've made them complicit. And then we wonder why they graduate and reproduce exactly the systems that are failing us.

Relational Futuring is my attempt to teach otherwise. It's an attempt at regenerative pedagogy — education that doesn't just sustain existing systems but actively creates conditions for renewal, justice, and collective flourishing. To create a classroom where the future is something we interrogate, imagine, and make together. Where care isn't a soft skill but a political commitment. Where students learn to ask not "how do we manage people?" but "what kind of work, and what kind of world, do we actually want?"

It's messy. It doesn't always work. But when it does — when a student looks at you and says, "I didn't realise I had a choice" — that's when you remember why any of this matters.

What Happens Next

I'm putting this out now, before it's polished, before it's turned into a journal article with the edges sanded off. Because I think this work needs to live in practice, not just in publication.

If you're teaching HRM, people practice, organisational studies — if you're tired of teaching adaptation and want to try teaching world-making instead — I'd love to hear from you. Try this. Break it. Remake it. Tell me what works in your context and what doesn't.

Because the future isn't something we predict. It's something we make. Together.

Because HR education shouldn't just prepare people for the future of work — it should help them imagine the work of the future.