Sohail Inayatullah met the Futures Studies in Hawaii, at the age of seventeen. At university, he took his first courses in future studies, did not stop and continued to study other things: law, history, philosophy; he obtained a doctorate in Macro-History and then, in Australia, began researching and working for universities and international organisations, finally obtaining the UNESCO Chair on Futures Studies [The UNESCO Chair on Futures Studies is an initiative established by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation – UNESCO – to promote research, education and capacity building in the field of futures studies – ed.] Sohail Inayatullah was awarded the first UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies in 2016, now holds that chair at the Sejahtera Center for Sustainability and Humanity, Malaysia, and is a Professor at Tamkang University, Taipei (Graduate Institute of Futures Studies) and Associate Professor at the Melbourne Business School at the University of Melbourne. He is also editor of the Journal of Futures Studies, the leading publication in the field.
A great inspiration for futurists around the world, Sohail Inayatullah is the creator of the Causal Layered Analysis (CLA), a methodological framework for the understanding and analysis of complex social issues and problems, now considered a fundamental tool in strategic planning, future studies and forecasting to more effectively model the future.
It is easy to summarise the trajectory of one of the most influential and important futurists of our time in one paragraph. At the same time, doing so does not do justice to the man and his work who, over the course of several decades, defined methodologies, created the main frameworks and contexts with which to think about the future, and who today moves constantly, week after week, across the planet, attending conferences, meeting people in companies, communities and organisations of various kinds, such as, for example, a few weeks ago the senior staff of Interpool in the Singapore office.
This interview was written in the same spirit in which it began, i.e. with a sense of immediacy and urgency, starting with Sohail Inayatullah’s way of proposing himself: his e-mail reply to our invitation for a videocall simply said: ‘I am free now, if you are too: I have to leave in an hour but now would be good. This is my Whatsapp number‘. An unparalleled openness and availability. A few seconds later, the time to connect Milan and Vienna via smartphone, it was like entering the serene and welcoming room, as Sohail Inayatullah is, of the future. A word that, he is quick to point out, should always be used in the plural.
The future of teaching
Futures, then: very different and richer, more articulate, more interesting than we can imagine.
First of all, because we have arrived at a particular moment in which something that has been brewing for decades is coming to fruition: since the post-war period, to be precise. In fact, the technological innovations of the last sixty years have come of age more or less now, and we are all gradually realising this, year after year, mainly because of the dizzying speed with which tools and paradigms change. But what is happening now, explains Sohail Inayatullah, has to do with people, organisations and companies, not microchips.
“Futurism is the study of future things, alternatives to each other and in some cases to be preferred and in others not. Futurism looks not just at things but at the world behind them: not just one future but the many that are possible and the ways to move towards one or the other. Today, however, something new is happening: much of what futurism said has become true because it is happening, and this is changing many other things, especially from the pandemic onwards. For example, if we talk about education, now ChatGPT has arrived: do we still need teachers in a world with ChatGPT? No, we don’t need them any more, if we think about those who do a frontal lecture. They really are no longer needed. What we need instead are the co-creators, the people who support the students’ emotions; we need the people who are guides, advisors, allies. Today, at a moment’s notice, it is clear that the role of teachers has completely changed: from being the vectors for transferring content from books to students’ minds, teachers have now become guides and facilitators. We have been talking about this for more than 20 years, but with the pandemic it happened and with ChatGPT even more so”.
First lessons from home, with videos and a different way of thinking about teaching, now artificial intelligence poses a completely different approach. This is the first of the three changes Sohail Inayatullah talks about in this interview. And the most profound, even if the least understood so far, because the future of teaching for all grades, which we have to decide now, willy-nilly, will have repercussions for a very long time but we will only see the consequences in a decade or more.
“The things we have been talking about for a long time, such as the population decline in your country, are now becoming real. The population decline has been talked about for decades, it has been predicted for a long time. Meanwhile, while the debate was only centred on overpopulation, the process of population decline as a result of falling birth rates began. It is only now that the conversation is shifting to this topic, and futurists have found themselves in a position to help set an agenda that is suddenly very urgent and sought after by politicians and the public alike.
Possible futures and the role of the Futurists
It is an example of the role of futurists and the possible uses of futurism and foreseen or foreseeable futures. The changes that Sohail Inayatullah brings as examples in this interview are initially three: food, security and education. The pandemic, a topic that had been talked about in future scenarios long before Covid’s arrival, has somehow also acted as a social wake-up call: it has shown those who only believe when they touch with their hands that things can actually happen and that scenarios and predictions make sense. Hence, the hunger for futurists these days. Although it is certainly not universal.
“Not everyone wants to change: there are figures and professionals who oppose it, row against it, or simply want to get to the end of their careers. One newspaper editor said to me: “Change everything and the press sinks? Then I will go down with the ship!”. Not everyone wants to change. For example, the change regarding genders and the way they interact in society, moving from the hegemony of one gender to equal opportunities and the more profound changes taking place today, causes daily resistance and second thoughts‘.
Sohail Inayatullah, schools must accept new challenges
The meaning of artificial intelligence, which our newspapers (and others) have been filled with, according to Sohail Inayatullah is however more nuanced and complex than we are telling it. Having finished the basic research phase, we are now actually modelling the products and applications.
“We use AI, but we don’t lose jobs because of AI. Companies don’t hire computers, instead they hire people who know how to use them. People who know how to value technology are hired: business graduates did not lose their jobs when the calculator and then Excel came along, but only on the condition that they knew how to use them. I interviewed ChatGPT to ask him what is its individual metaphor and what scenarios for his future to be drawn based on Causal Layered Analysis as an approach to alternative futures. The conversation was interesting and rich. But the point is to understand how to use AI, not to get scared or caught up in the enthusiasm of certain products over others. We don’t yet know which model and which paradigm will win. However, the sense of the possible changes is clear. The challenge in schools is to accept it, not to find out whether it exists, why it exists. It is to understand that it has to be integrated and that indeed, it changes everything and releases a lot of energy. In UAE schools everyone can use artificial intelligence: there is no negative judgement, but the exams are done in such a way that you cannot find the answers using ChatGTP‘.
“In general, the challenge for schools is to change the way they work and start teaching other things: critical thinking, philosophy, emotional skills. Schools have to change very quickly, starting now, and they have to teach things that are useful tools for the way they shape not only their teaching but also their subsequent needs to operate in society. Useful tools for operating in the world. What changes in an extraordinary way must first of all be the role of the teacher, who must become advisor, curator, guide, counsellor, emotional support. This is the best time for teachers: they will be able to do what they love best and will no longer have to get lost in bureaucracy or the mechanical aspects of the job. Instead, they will have to help make a difference and help students grow by teaching them ways to think, not what they have to remember’.
Change is linked to narratives
Change, however, is also and above all related to changing the narratives and metaphors we use to define ourselves or to ‘see’ the contexts in which we move. Law enforcement is a perfect example, according to Sohail Inayatullah. In Singapore, Interpol has had its third control and coordination centre since 2014 (after the first in Lyon and then the one opened in Buenos Aires in 2011). It is in Singapore that it is possible to explain what the difference is between the security needs of society and the strategies to respond to them by the international organisation of criminal police of 195 countries and the real world. That is, the Dark Web.
“During a meeting with the executives, it was enough to show them that in five minutes it was possible to enter the Dark Web, identify a gun seller and buy a stock of automatic rifles, fixing payment and delivery, to make them realise that the world is indeed different from their schemes and narratives. This was necessary to give a concrete example of what the world looks like, what the changes have been like and what the scale of the challenges are. If the topics today are the environment, digital, technological innovation, the questions then become: do we have an idea of what corruption is for the green sphere? And for the digital world? For the area of privacy and intellectual property? Do we have the categories to think about these kinds of crimes and the ways to counter them? How do we imagine all this?.
“The narrative has to be redefined but the objective, i.e. to make sure the world runs safely, in the case of Interpol remains the same. But for other organisations it need not remain the same. For Interpol, what is certain is that it has now become much more difficult than before, or at least different, to pursue the goal of world security. Knowing this, however, allows you to shape the future the way you want it. It is like the problem of climate change, which governments did not want to talk about for various reasons, but after the pandemic that showed that things that were predicted but considered ‘impossible’ could happen, it became something else. The covid, by the way, has been a tragedy in many countries, including with you in Italy, but it has also been much more. For example, it was a way of slowing down and rethinking how to do so many different things. Without being able to travel, we started to use technology in a different way and this provided an opportunity to look at some possible futures of using technology for teaching, as we were saying. But the pandemic and the lockdown also allowed us to rethink how we travel, once the borders reopened. Or how one works, with smart working’.
Here the change is deeper and is happening now. It is a change close to that of food. Meat that is produced in a laboratory or vegetable meat have become a fundamental element of a change in sensitivity caused by global warming. But they are also a cultural change because the food model based on animal meat – and therefore intensive livestock farming and all that goes with it – is a purely Western narrative (it is Western cultures that are the main consumers of animal meat) that has held back alternative visions of food and the whole chain behind it.
“Shaping a different way of eating,” says Sohail Inayatullah, “also brings with it different choices: the use of technology or other types of resources and natural approaches? What relationships – not only technological, economic or cultural, but also spiritual and existential – identify alternative futures to choose one? We start by sampling synthetic and vegetable meats, and from there we build the path by searching together, thinking, talking, discovering“.
There is a divergence between work and social reality
Technology and the lockdown, for example, on labour in Europe and the US, have made it clear that companies are moving in a divergent direction from what is really happening in the underlying social reality.
“There is a need for connection, but the point is that work is still imagined as factory work, where there is an assembly line, a control over the presence and activities of workers, a remuneration based on effort multiplied by the time it is performed. Instead, we have entered a profoundly different era of work, whose basis should not be control and time but trust and result. A time when for knowledge workers a project that took a month can be done in 35 minutes with ChatGPT. We need to unlearn and relearn how to do things: both for those who do them and for those who pay to get them done. There is a huge space to bring people’s spirit into another mode of operation. We need to find stories to make all people happy, moving from ‘hard’ work to ‘smart’ work with a positive attitude. This shift in mindset and narrative will also change factories, which have become smaller and have robots that do many things, so the way of control and fatigue changes completely here as well. The narrative that is emerging is that people want a completely different work in the balance between time of effort and time of life: they want to live, to travel, to see other places, to take care of themselves, to have time and to go slow, not faster. This has also changed the way people travel’.
Think and act like a futurist (it is not enough to talk about the future to be a futurist)
The work of the futurist is stimulating also and because it is work that binds together completely different skills and areas of knowledge: all-encompassing. But it is also a job that allows one to meet many different people, to actively participate in processes of change and understanding. Sohail Inayatullah is enthusiastic about meeting different groups of people every week in different countries with the most varied problems and needs imaginable. Change, the futurist’s work, comes through meeting people’s needs and the ways they see and imagine them. We need to have places where we can be face-to-face, interactively connected. It goes through a confrontation that is not based on and above all does not end with a PowerPoint presentation or a talk followed by a taxi ride to the airport and another destination the next day.
“We are not here to scare or give false dreams. This work takes me into situations I don’t know, into rooms where I am not the smartest person, and my aim is to have a method to facilitate those who are there. My purpose is to work with others: in this activity there is an emotional intelligence and a spiritual part because it is necessary to be connected in a deeper way. When people want to move forward, to look to the future, they don’t want to be worried or agitated. They want to be confident that they can move forward. So you also have to work through the traumas and pain that prevent you from moving forward: they have to be welcomed, healed and cured. And then you need to have read philosophers and historians, as well as scientists and economists, to grasp the meaning of complex, rich, difficult situations. One needs to understand what is changing and what is not changing, and who the changing groups are. Usually only those who live outside the castle of certainties, but not all want change for the good: some seek to change the rules for personal gain rather than collective good. All draw and desire possible futures. I believe that futures in which we are all the better off and not just a few are to be preferred: there are ebbs and flows of history that one must know and therefore have read your Giambattista Vico for example. There is an idea at the basis: that of connection, which is the way people have ideas’.
In a world where green and energy are becoming increasingly relevant, the cultural leap for an energy utility is to build a new metaphor and form of narrative to represent its value in a radically changing context. This shift is essential.
“Thinking like a futurist means asking what is the real story of what is going on. With great honesty the Financial Times at the time of the subprime crisis wrote ‘We don’t know what the real story of this crisis is: is it a crisis of the banks? Of the regulators? Of the mortgage market? Of middle-class income?” These are the kinds of questions that need to be asked in order to find answers. We need to be open to looking at these kinds of questions for the opportunity they offer in identifying the narrative we are in and understanding how it might be changed towards a future that radically transforms the world below“.
“For example, an electricity company, whose idea of itself is that of an energy provider, how does it transform and change its narrative in a world where it is the users’ homes that produce energy with renewables, such as photovoltaics? The idea for them is to become subjects that guide users to new adventures, making them choose the adventure they want for ‘their’ energy, the energy they have produced with their solar panels’.
“We need to change the point of view, as I did with a group of Olympic athletes from the new one who had learnt from childhood to be super-competitive by looking for the ‘golden second’, the fraction of time that turns a lifetime of sacrifice and effort into a gold medal. To these people, who outside the pool, when their careers are over, are unable to adapt to a world in which values are other than that of competition at all costs, I proposed the idea of the ‘golden life’, made up of cooperation to live a life of value by collaborating with others: at work, in the family, in private, in society. It is the change of narratives, which are the way we function as individuals, society and groups‘.
Futures, in the end, are the stories we tell ourselves.
