Futures Literacy and the Capacity to be Free: Designing the Conditions for Agility, Openness, and Critical Thinking

The Department of Design will host an evening talk by Riel Miller, former Head of Foresight and Futures Literacy at UNESCO. To join the event, please register by completing this form.

Abstract and themes

The scientific revolutions of the 20th century and the unmistakable signals from our indifferent planet urge us to fundamentally reconsider humanity's relationship with the universe. Complexity and emergence have become widely recognized as inherent, all-pervasive conditions of existence, not variables to control or manage. This awareness challenges the mono-culture of politics as planning, grounded in deterministic ideologies focused on predefined outcomes. Instead, it invites us to embrace purpose as a continuously evolving inquiry, cultivating wisdom from lived experience, reducing the path-dependency of excessive investment in the pursuit of goals, valuing the bounty of difference that sparks improvisation, spontaneity, and the effervesce of the ephemeral.

However, the enabling of this scenario requires a profound break — away from rigid adherence to continuity, hierarchy, legacy, and certainty, the entrenched pillars of a colonizing approach to the future. Making such a break requires, in part, a disruptive change in the dominant ways human communities transmit hope and fear across generations. To this end, futures literacy emerges as a requisite capability, nurturing more open perceptions of novelty and greater improvisational agility in individuals and organizations.

Redressing the imbalance in the formation and use of imaginary futures also facilitates the recognition that there is a fundamental difference between perception and choice. Which in turn cultivates profoundly different experiences of human agency – deconstructing the conflation of goals with plans with decision making. Thereby nourishing a diversity of meanings and identities that go well beyond those of the heroic commander.

These are the patriarchs that pursue glory with the claim they will ‘secure’ the future by preserving (improving) the past. Widespread futures literacy does not serve their interests. Similar to those who could not discern any good reason for investing in universal reading and writing, ‘emperors’ throughout the ages have preferred to maintain their dominance of humanity’s imaginaries. Those in power have been served very well by the reproduction of a millennia long restriction of imagined futures to those who claim to know the future and be able to create it.

By ensuring that most people’s imaginations remain asleep (ignored and under-exercised) those at the top of pyramids of knowledge and power turn the fundamental attributes of this universe, its perpetual enabling of differences (of change/novelty), into a source of terror that can only be alleviated by having faith in the grand leader’s claims that they are best suited to set the goals and make it all happen. They say “Trust ‘papa’, quiet your imagination, go back to sleep, leave the imagining to me. I know (from the past) how to ‘secure’ the future.”

What is at stake here is not the realisation (or not) of ‘better’ futures. There is no way to know what or how to cause what will be considered a better future when the future arrives. And there is no way that humans ‘create’ the future – our universe and emergence are much more open, novel, marked by omnipresent difference, than the ‘plans of mice and men’. This is a pretension we need to abandon, or continue to pay the price of our alienation from our universe and the ultimately self-destructive relationships of our species as we attempt to dominate other humans and the world around us.

What is at stake is the comfort, wellness of our species as it lives with difference as experience and change. What is at stake is the potential of our species to abandon its mono-cultural obsession with winning choices, futures prepared and pre-empted. Instead, we can wake up to difference and the virtues of embracing diversification as a more promising foundation for resilience. That is the imagined promise of designing-in futures literacy, of changing the conditions of change by nurturing a competency – not a specific outcome, but an invitation to wake up to the splendour of a creative universe.

Bio

Starting in March of 2022, after a decade as Head of Foresight and Futures Literacy at UNESCO in Paris, Riel joined several communities seeking to transform why and how people use-the-future. From the outset of his career, in 1982 at the OECD, Riel has accumulated hundreds of hands-on experiences, all around the world, designing and implementing efforts to think about the future. He is an experienced and innovative educator, a pioneer of the field of futures literacy and the ‘discipline of anticipation’. He is widely published in academic journals and other media on a range of topics, from the future of education and the Internet to the transformation of leadership and productivity. He is an accomplished keynote speaker and facilitator. His unflagging ambition is to find ways to put the richness of complex emergence at the service of humanity's capacity to be free.

Recent and Current Roles:

• April 2025 – Present: Senior Fellow, DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada
• June 2024 – Present: Visiting Faculty, Department of Education, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
• January/February 2024: Visiting Fellow, Ng Humanities House, Stanford University, USA
• March 2023 – Present: Senior Fellow, Futures Literacy Incubator at Future Africa, University of Pretoria, South Africa and Senior Fellow, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
• April 2022 – Present: Senior Research Fellow, J. Herbert Smith Centre, University of New Brunswick, Canada and Senior Fellow, Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education (NIFU), Norway
• April 2022 – December 2024: Senior Fellow, University of Stavanger, Norway
• March 2022 – Present: Senior Fellow, Ecole des Ponts Business School, France