by Zabrina Epps
To my fellow futures community,
Ruben Nelson of Foresight Canada admonishes that it is a governing board’s obligation to understand the changing contexts of the landscape within which an organization resides. A board, along with an Executive team, has an “obligation to stipulate the ends of the organization – ends that are relevant to the emerging future” (n.d.). I have been a board member who has emphasized how essential strategic foresight is to the future relevance and existence of an organization. Thus, as I complete the Association of Professional Futurists (APF) Emerging Fellows program (although I continue to emerge as a futures practitioner), I offer the following three observations as the leadership and members consider how to grow the futures fields and ensure the delivery of high quality service wherever we are called to facilitate the development of futures consciousness and capacities. First, we would do well to enhance the pathways for welcoming new futures practitioners into the futures and foresight work. Second, it is incumbent on us to accelerate and coordinate the work of futures literacy and competencies among the youth. Finally, to accomplish these two efforts requires an acknowledgement and willingness to dismantle barriers to the work, which could include adding more on-ramps to welcome emerging futures practitioners.
Pathways for emerging practitioners
As futures and foresight practitioners, we seek out emergence. We look for signals that go unnoticed in day-to-day living to understand what could be emerging just beyond “out there.” However, historical systems within ingrained worldviews, myths, and metaphors, weigh heavily on our work despite the fact that existing systems have always had to adapt to change. Those that haven’t ceased to exist (or have been forced to conform involuntarily). For this reason, it is important for the fields of futures and foresight to become as diverse as possible; to have as many observers of “out there” as possible. If your teams are homogenous or lack representation across, social, economic, ethnic, geographical, linguistic, or other strata, then I invite you to consider how much more effective your team could be with additional perspectives - additional stories.
A unique feature of the emerging fellows program is that members of two incumbent cohorts vet the applicants and recommend the next cohort. We toil through each application to ensure that the next cohort are diverse in thought, interests, locations, and experiences. We also look for unique ideas about the futures the applicants envision to ensure that their contributions will enhance the futures fields. After completing the program, the questions that come to mind (for myself and my fellow emergent futures professionals) are, where do we go from here? Will we be invited to collaborate on the important issues that we have shared during our meetings or with those of you who have visited us? How can we be of service to the work of futures around the globe?
Access for youth
I learned about the APF while volunteering for World Futures Day (WFD) about three or four years ago. Since then, I have had the pleasure of co-facilitating with a student during the WFD-Young Voices event, which featured youth facilitators and participants who discussed futures from their respective locations around the world. I featured some of the youth perspectives in my previous blog about post-schooling. Young people from every continent brought their unique stories about how futures literacy can impact their daily lives and empower them to create positive change. I have reviewed proposals from youth through the New Generation Foresight Practitioners (NGFP) - Young Voices competition. The projects that those applicants proposed spanned every discipline including economics, environmental sustainability, food security, leadership development, and renewable technology (to mention a few). Here is an opportunity to incubate these ideas beyond the winners of the competition. And, why couldn’t the development of these ideas be integrated into the students’ daily learning instead of ancillary to their curricula.
At the 2023 World Futures Forum in Dubai, Adam Sharpe and colleagues from UNICEF introduced a playbook for how to engage youth in futures work. The authors make the case for involving youth more by stating:
“In fact, young people have a right to be part of any conversation about the future they will inherit. And they need to develop the skills, knowledge, and confidence to thrive in a rapidly changing world (p.i).”
The playbook delineates six steps to effectively engage young people in futures work. Each step in the process draws on the young people's experiences and allows them to reflect on their imaginations. The process raises their awareness of themselves as agents of change, while allowing them to consider important aspects of change that they need to develop.
1. Vision of the future
2. Current state
3. Pathway to the future
4. Identify obstacles
5. Personal futures
6. Discuss and reflect (p.44).
The playbook concludes with the following appeal:
“With young people’s natural curiosity, critical-thinking skills and the drive to make a difference, equipping them with a deep understanding of the trends, patterns and forces that shape our world can enable them to become proactive and empowered agents of change” (p.45).
Many vantage points
Unlike many fields that require specific academic or apprentice pathways to entry, futures fields provide myriad access points depending on the emerging professionals’ interests. Although, there are concerns that some approaches ascribed to futures fields don't necessarily follow traditional methodologies. However, these could be opportunities to extend more energy and resources to new practices of thought. For example, I want to shout out my fellow cohort member Samista Jugwanth, a water engineer, who presented to APF about how she employed futures tools and methods without using futures terminology. By using plain language, Samista built a connection with her audience, which helped influence their response to the futures work she facilitated. Having practitioners and scholars from varied backgrounds can only enhance the benefits of futures work to shift global challenges and elevate our thinking about possible, probable, and alternative futures.
What matters most to me
As my time as an emerging fellow comes to a close, I reflect on the two years that I have spent getting to know so many of you. My fellow colleagues in the program and I met several times each month to review various foresight tools and methods as described in EF Program Director Patricia Lustig's book on strategic foresight, as well as other articles and materials. We had unique opportunities to meet with authors of seminal works and practitioners who have shaped the futures and foresight fields. I met many of you in 2023 at the WFSF Conference in Paris and at the APF Gathering in Washington, DC. I continue to learn from those with whom I've made acquaintances, and while supporting youth development, with Teach the Future. As I approach the new year, I feel much more confident in my ability to employ futures tools as I continue my leadership development and governance advisory work. I am ready to serve.
For me, the core of futures and foresight is freedom. Imaginations are FREE! I am an African American woman in the United States. I am disconnected from my heritage. I am disconnected from the language of my people. I'm disconnected from the food and the history, from which I am rooted, somewhere on the continent of Africa. The only places where I can truly connect to that history are in my imagination and my visions of the future. What futures and foresight allow me to do is to see myself, and people like me, in a state of freedom where the future has not been colonized.
References:
Lustig, P., (2017). Strategic Foresight: Learning from the future. Triarchy.
Nelson, R., (n.d.). Strategic Foresight: A New Obligation for Boards of Directors.
Sharpe, A., Naides, S., Choi, Y., (2023). Designing a Youth-centred Journey to the Future: A Youth Foresight Playbook. UNICEF Innocenti – Global Office of Research and Foresight.
Images Credits:
Emerging Fellows 23 & 24, (October 2024). Futuring the APF Emerging Fellows Program. APF Emerging Fellows’ Session.
World Futures Day-Young Voices 2025. https://www.teachthefuture.org/all-events
Africa Flags Map (2021). Copyright: © pereirashop - http://www.redbubble.com/people/pereirashop. Designed by limitlezz.
© Zabrina Epps, 2024
Zabrina Epps, Ph.D., has been an APF member since 2019. She is an education futurist, leadership coach, and researcher. She is a Fellow of the Marie Fielder Center for Democracy, Leadership, and Education at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California. She has served on her local Board of Education, taught as an adjunct communications instructor, and advised educators, students and leaders.
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