Why Futures Literacy Improves the Efficiency and Effectiveness of Foresight

Описание: Worrying about the future is quite a popular pastime at the moment. New scenarios, forecasts, and what-if exercises abound. Yet, as many practitioners know, such popularity is cyclical and most foresight efforts to assuage anxieties about the future will crash into the wall of disappointed expectations and the normalisation of relative degrees of turbulence over time. “What do you mean there is no clear goal, nor ironclad means to get there?? What’s the point? In any case, craziness is the new normal.” Perhaps this is a bit like the illiterate person who discovers that the literate person doesn’t have a lock on the truth even though they can read. A similar situation prevails for those who are futures illiterate - they expect foresight to deliver what it cannot. Furthermore, in a world where few can read and write the realm of the written word is inherently limited. Introducing futures literacy, as the competency that is built on the foundation of the diversity of reasons and methods for imagining the future as revealed by applying the theory of anticipation, changes the context for all efforts to imagine the future.

For over forty years Riel has been co-creating innovation, leadership and transformation in both the public and private sectors around the world. He has pioneered the 'discipline of anticipation' and one of the leading tools for engaging in both research and capacity building around futures literacy. He is a highly experienced designer of processes for thinking about the future. Currently Riel is working with universities, governments, companies, and think tanks from around the world to introduce an anticipatory systems and processes approach to understanding the attributes and role of the future. He has been appointed a Senior Fellow at: Ecole des Ponts Business School (France); U. New Brunswick (Canada); NIFU (Norway); U. Witwatersrand (South Africa); Future Africa at U. Pretoria (South Africa), and East China Normal U. (China).

He was formerly Head of Foresight and Futures Literacy at UNESCO in Paris, from 2012-2022 . In the 1980s and 1990s he worked in Ontario, Canada for a range of institutions, including the legislature, trade unions, and the public service (Ministries of Finance; Universities; and Industry). In 1995 he joined the OECD in Paris to work in the International Futures Programme. In 2005 he founded an independent consultancy – xperidox (which means knowledge through experience) to advise clients on how to use the future more effectively .

Since 1988, when he managed his first major participatory foresight exercise (Vision 2000), Riel has designed hundreds of applied futures projects around the world, large and small scale, public and private. He is an accomplished and innovative designer of processes for using the future to make decisions in the present. He is an experienced keynote speaker, project manager, master of ceremonies, university lecturer, workshop leader, and group facilitator. He is widely published, with works that cover topics such as the future of: innovation, research, money-finance, public services, education, the Internet, identity, information technology, the knowledge society, regional development, health, universities, telepresence, AI, etc. Riel has an extensive international network and a solid track record of creativity.

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