We are faced with a problem that also presents, however, characteristics of opportunity. It is the need to decolonise futures, which today are increasingly perceived and imagined as children of the present imaginary: projections of the present, especially technological ones, towards a tomorrow in which essentially nothing changes. Projections of the present that have a consolatory dimension, especially for those who imagine them. These futures colonised by the present, instead, must be decolonised.
Sylvain Cottong is an economist, but very quickly became a futurist. As a strategy consultant, with his Exploring Futures, he deals with strategic forecasting and System Thinking, Futures Literacy and Futures Thinking. It operates out of Luxembourg, but moves throughout continental Europe, soon to be in Latin America as well. During the interview, with a video link between Milan and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, he talks about many things. Here we start with one topic in particular: science fiction.
Science fiction in Futures Thinking
“In Futures Thinking, science fiction has always played an important role, because the best authors in this field have constructed worlds that work in completely different ways from ours. Science fiction has also changed speed rapidly: since the days of Jules Verne, who wrote about his trip to the Moon more than a hundred years before it actually happened, projections have accelerated and become much closer. The science fiction that goes on Netflix recounts colonised futures, mostly by contemporary technologies, which evolve without, however, causing real systemic change. We have more powerful and perhaps transparent mobile phones, but nothing else changes: they are still mobile phones’.
“However,” continues Sylvain Cottong, “the role of science fiction is relevant on several levels. On the one hand because narrative and storytelling are very important for the Futures Studies: when you build scenarios you have to put together a narrative with a well-crafted story because people have to see and feel themselves in that scenario. You have to know how to narrate. Futures Thinking as a process is related to storytelling and storytelling: science fiction authors are very good at this“.
The accelerating forecasting times, the role of science fiction, but also the constantly changing scenarios, which need to be decolonised. What emerges from the very first bars of the conversation with Sylvain Cottong are a series of suggestions that run parallel and intertwine. Let us try to put them back into a linear order, while keeping as a mental note that many of the discourses intersect and link together at different times. The reason, as we shall see, is linked to a particularity of Cottong’s approach, namely thinking complexity, which the futurist calls System Thinking, and which is also reflected in this interview, in its own small way.
“It is difficult for me to define myself in a stable way: I change my mind every day, because if you define yourself in a certain way then you have to remain consistent and do that certain thing every day. I am an economist, of course, but like many economists who have discovered forecasting, and especially who have discovered that it works, I also saw that trends in the economy and society in general could also be approached from other, non-economic perspectives, such as sociological aspects.
The normal match between Design Thinking and Futures Studies
In recent years, European universities have started to build up Foresight programmes, notes Sylvain Cottong, which allow with a three- or four-year degree to enter this field of study. But there are also those who come from another model of thinking: that of Design Thinking, for example. A model in which more and more practitioners and experts perceive a lack of perspective: that is why the meeting of Design Thinking and Futures Studies is, according to Cottong, a natural match.
“I am an economist, a strategic consultant, a systems thinker and a practitioner of Foresight: I help companies, organisations, communities and individuals build their capacity to be resilient, obviously a capacity projected into the future. As a consultant I often do workshops on Futures Thinking to facilitate the expression of needs and then take this work back to action projects. In this way we move counselling and facilitation. One of my goals as a consultant is to work in such a way that my clients no longer need me in the future. This is because they need to be able to set up and start an internal process that allows them to manage the future. But there are also clients who simply want an isolated meeting, because they only want to do certain things and do not want – or are not ready – to create something more complex and transformative’.
Certainly, Cottong’s definition of Futures Studies is broad and captures different aspects, systemic, of organisations, individuals and societies. The terrain also includes philosophy, because we need to define what time is, i.e. what is “now” and what is “future“. But it is also a multidisciplinary terrain, touching on different aspects of reality, not just the central one that the company or individual thinks they have in front of them. It is here that the ‘systemic’ level appears for the first time, which is that of complexity and which, Sylvain Cottong thinks, is about what futurists do.
“One of the terms that is widely used today is ‘Futures Literacy‘. But in English, as in other languages [including Italian, Ed] being literate has two different meanings. It indicates basic primary schools skills, but it also indicates having sophisticated skills, for example in music or art history, or technology. It is this second meaning that goes in the direction of ‘Futures Literacy’, and it is an important meaning because it was introduced in 2012 by Unesco, which established its Futures Literacy department and laboratory. There are many possible futures from which we can learn and take something new to bring into the present. We can ‘live them’ and use the memories of these futures for our present.”One of the terms that is widely used today is ‘Futures Literacy’. But in English, as in other languages [including Italian, Ed] being literate has two different meanings. It indicates basic primary schools skills, but it also indicates having sophisticated skills, for example in music or art history, or technology. It is this second meaning that goes in the direction of ‘Futures Literacy’, and it is an important meaning because it was introduced in 2012 by Unesco, which established its Futures Literacy department and laboratory. There are many possible futures from which we can learn and take something new to bring into the present. We can ‘live them’ and use the memories of these futures for our present.
Going ‘further’ in time
“The futurist’s job is not to predict the future, but to have the ability to understand how to manage the future, complexity and uncertainty, bringing more resilience into the present because of what they have learned and had learned from possible futures. We can also use this process to transform the future, that is, to learn how it could be and understand how to move towards a certain vision: to anticipate cures, to anticipate crises, to see job or business opportunities’.
Futures have a problem that is not often thought of but which is crucial: understanding their boundaries. When do they begin? That is, how far into the future do you have to look? How far into the future do you use, when studying futures? This is not a peregrine question, because it actually touches and intersects with the other themes of complexity and system thinking.
“How much future do I use? It depends on the type of consultancy I am doing, i.e. the objective of the work. There is always a question to start with, and then a context, and then an area where the entity I am working with is moving. Some general indications apply, though. For example, the minimum time is ten years, because if you don’t move forward by a decade, you are no longer doing futurism but simply dealing with planning strategy. Mentally, it is impossible to get out of one’s own thinking for such a short-range future: the future in these cases is already thought out, it is already planned. Then, it depends on the organisation you work with and what you want to do. Twenty years is the basis to start thinking about what the world will be like and how to prepare for it. Because in twenty years there are changes that happen more clearly. It also depends on the type of sector you are in: there are industries where you plan in twenty, others in forty years. It depends on the context: if things in a certain area are moving faster, it may make sense to look closer, but if you need to explore further, you can go even further.
This, however, observes Sylvain Cottong, is an ‘optical’ way of seeing the future: a kind of cannocchiale that serves to focus on ‘objects’ at more or less close distances. In reality, the purpose is something else. There are techniques for going further. Further than the fog of time. Further than the curvature of the horizon.
“There are processes for workshops that are designed in a particular way: we can ask people who participate to draw a world in 300 years, which is the child of a complete reset of the present world. Thus, a long enough time (three hundred years) to build a scenario that is disconnected from the present time (the reset). In this way, people are freed from the anchors of the present. If, on the other hand, one thinks of 50-year scenarios, many people remain tied to what is now. In this case you take something from the past, something from the present and something from the future. We are not completely free if we do not completely destroy what we know. It is a fundamental effort because it is all about framing: what we think about the future depends on the assumptions we make about the future, what people believe to be facts but in fact are not. They are metaphors, value systems, beliefs. All these things together create our ideas of the future and part of our studies is to understand why things are the way they are and to imagine how they could be different. What could be different requires changing the direction in which you go’.
Drawing decolonised scenarios
Some science fiction authors are very good at drawing up this kind of scenario, to pick up the thread at the beginning of this meeting with Sylvain Cottong. It is the second plan to which the futurist referred: besides being able to tell their stories well, many science fiction authors are also good at drawing decolonised scenarios. Unlike what happens, however, when you look at what happens in other worlds and ways. With entrepreneur-visionaries in the world of technology.
A double example, related to the current events of recent years, enters the conversation in an overbearing way. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. The former has imagined several intertwined futures that make economic sense: from the ‘small’ (the decreasing prices of an established technology for building electric batteries for cars to enable an industrial enterprise such as Tesla) to the ‘large’ (the devastation of the planet that requires a migration to Mars and thus a series of technologies to be put in place, from rockets to robots and neural implants and AI, to make the move to Mars and its colonisation possible).
The latter, on the other hand, imagined the use of the network as a tool for social relations and then, fifteen years ago, reasoned in terms of platform development vectors, transforming the first Facebook from a desktop website into one of the very first smartphone apps when no one believed that the nascent social experience could make sense on a smartphone. Now, Zuckerberg is projecting his company and his product, social media, towards a completely different platform, the metaverse, betting on a longer timeframe for development (at least 10 years).
“Musk and Zuckerberg are certainly ‘tech futurists’ but not global futurists. And they live limited within their bias, their prejudices. Because ‘global futurists’ also consider changes in values in the society of the future. They consider total change, of everything. The end of capitalism, the end of the difference between the sexes, the end of relationships typical of a patriarchal society. Instead, Zuckerberg does not consider these changes. His are ‘already used futures’ or rather ‘colonised futures’, where their ideas in this case technological do everything. Zuckerberg and Musk colonise the future and leave no room for change. People have no room to change their minds. Societies don’t have it to evolve or transform. Will the metaverse that Zuckerberg is investing in together with thousands of companies pay off? Probably yes, but the reasoning is flawed because people and societies change: their ideas and values change,’ Sylvain Cottong invites us to reflect.
“That is why global futurists look at small changes instead of big trends. Trends are a phenomenon of the past, because they are based on data, so something that has already happened. And at some point they stop, they are no longer trends, because they interact with each other in a complex way and you do not know and cannot predict when and how they will change. The thing you do know is that within a society trends don’t go on forever. So I wouldn’t say that Zuckerberg or Musk are really futurists: academically they are something else. They build technology and automated capitalism, for example with artificial intelligence. These are things that feed capitalism and certainly make it more efficient. But are we sure that the current form of capitalism will be the kind of future we will have in ten or a hundred years?”
“Mind you, I am not anti-capitalist, I am an observer. Viewpoints change and maybe on Mars there really will be such an economy, or maybe not: it is not a given what it will be like if we ever inhabit the red planet. Many of today’s technologies to work assume that our system will go on for the next hundred years, but that is not the case. We don’t know, really, because no one knows the future. That is the essence of Futures Thinking: it allows you to identify things and think about them, question yourself. Making different assumptions leads to thinking different things. In the future there will not be the same moral dilemmas as there are today. It is all much, much more complicated than thinking about how a technology will evolve over the next few decades. It is the complexity that requires an appropriate way of thinking.
Futures Studies is a team sport
Future Studies is also a sport. Not a sport for individual athletes, though. They are a team sport. Which, as such, must be open and participatory. The more points of view there are in the room, the better the results of the futurists’ work will be. Of course, this can also be explained mathematically: everyone makes assumptions about the future, and thus creates a path to the future. Together, while it is useful to have a more objective view, this exercise requires that many people take part who have the most diverse assumptions and perspectives of the future possible: many people with different futures need to be integrated in order not to remain prisoners of an ‘echo chamber’, i.e. one of those contexts in which a state of isolation of individuals from the rest of the world is created. The same ideas are reflected and grown to over-represent a part of reality.
If you stand in an echo chamber with people who only talk about the future of technology, the future turns into a form of technology-only evolution. Instead, it is necessary to bring together a diversity of people who come from different worlds and bring with them different visions. Thus, heterogeneity is the rule, and facilitation is the method. One has to meet (and interact with) many other actors and roles in society to be able to paint possible futures. That is why the futurist’s sport is a group sport that must be as open and participatory as possible: otherwise, as Sylvain Cottong never tires of repeating, it is just an echo chamber, in which the same point of view is reflected, which does not lead to real evolution.
Futures Thinking as a model for learning and lifelong learning
But Futures Thinking is also a form of learning, a type of training. We have moved from a society where there was zero training after school to one where new things are learned every day. This is ‘Lifelong Learning‘, which in Europe was frozen in 2000 by the white paper by Jacques Delors and the Lisbon Treaty.
“The world is moving faster and faster and we see changes in the progress of society more often than in the past. That is why there is more interest in futurists today than there was ten or twenty years ago. However, many things have to change. The way people learn has to change so that the people in the company – and the company itself – become “Learning Organisations”. This process can be nurtured in many ways: one is micro-learning, the very numerous and time-consuming opportunities to enhance knowledge. However, the way to learn from possible and plausible futures, and not only from colonised and already expected ones, is based on the ability to enhance the learning space. Usually, one learns from the past and the present, thus from already codified experiences. Instead, you have to create scenarios and learn from these scenarios: this means expanding your personal and corporate learning space. This role of futures as a learning moment is fundamental to generating value, because it increases a company’s intellectual capital, which is what in turn gives value to its actions in the market. Therefore, when organisations are able to learn efficiently by expanding their learning space to incorporate possible futures, this means that those organisations are increasing their intellectual capital and that this in turn is increasing the value of the organisation itself. In order to achieve this, we need to work on the ways of learning in the company: Futures Thinking is one of the ways that needs to be incorporated’.
All this for one incontrovertible basic reason: the future is uncertain and unpredictable. At some times, however, more than others. Futures Studies have always focused on possible futures for the simple reason that, since it is not possible to define what the future will be, it is not possible to polarise reasoning and therefore no predictions can be made, only scenarios.
“What we see in the world today is a multipolarity that is both geopolitical and sociological as well as political. But there is still a sense of an advancement that in turn requires new narratives for the future of humanity. This can be decoded by looking at the changes taking place now. The question becomes: how do we find a new narrative for a multipolar humanity if we do not explore in different directions? There may be positive or negative futures, there may be some that are preferable to others, but as a phenomenon it is obvious that the method is to think of a future narrative of humanity in an open way.
“We all have different assumptions about the future. Then we also have other resources at our disposal. For example, we can tap into a very interesting area which is ‘Indigenous Wisdom’. They are people who know how to make predictions of the future that have been going on for generations and generations, and they are very different from ours as Europeans or North Americans, based on science and with an all-Western approach. Instead, there is much to learn from the way these people live and the way they relate to the realities that we look at. Today, there is more and more interest in this wisdom. This is because we need knowledge that also comes from alternative sources: we need alternative viewpoints that increase intellectual capital and increase the value of what we do‘.
Complexity is not for everyone
We come to the crux of complexity. The futurist, says Sylvain Cottong, must have an open mind and be curious. He must like complexity and he must like to think complexity. But it is not so obvious, because this is a ‘thing’ that is not for everyone.
“It is necessary to have a predisposition in this sense: many people run away from complexity because it is something that people’s brains do not like. Some, like me, on the other hand, are interested and like it. We need curiosity, tolerance, acceptance of diversity and dialogue, not debate. Everyone must be able to talk and everyone must be able to listen (debate for me is conflict, not listening). And we must think complexity, embrace complex thinking in a natural way. All this allows us to be more disciplined in our predictions but obviously requires many different skills. You have to know about technology, the history of international relations, the history of political doctrines, how the food system works, what the laws are and how big corporations as well as small companies work. And a thousand other things. You don’t have to be a specialist, instead you have to have a curious mind. Then, if you have that kind of exercise, discipline but also a predisposition and skills and culture accumulated over the years, you start to see that things align and you understand how complex systems work. You need experience, I repeat. It is not the only line of work where you need this kind of approach: journalists, for example, also need to have this kind of generalist, cross-cutting preparation. But then they don’t tell the future’.
“Today I know, as my personal history, that I always looked at the world as a futurist and that I looked at it from the point of view of a complex system. What I didn’t know, while I was studying economics, was that there are ways to organise this kind of attitude. Which is that attitude that makes you ask: why are things the way they are? Why are they not different? And if they were, how could they be? This has always been my way of looking at everything that has been done by human beings. I have gone through the theory and study of different approaches. One of the pivotal moments was meeting a great man, whom I met personally just a few days ago: Sohail Inayatullah, the creator of Causal Layered Analysis (CLA), a methodological framework for understanding and analysing complex social issues and problems, now considered a fundamental tool in strategic planning, future studies and forecasting to more effectively model the future.
“At the top layer of the CLA is what people talk about, what goes in the newspapers. Then, immediately below that, there is the system that produces the talk that goes in the papers: political, economic, social environment. Then, going further down, there are the values and beliefs that create the top level. And then, at the base of it all, there are the metaphors, the values that no one consciously knows they have but which are the ones that really create the world we live in. If we ask ourselves the question “Why are things the way they are?” we need to get to the metaphors to understand it. If we want to change the world, we have to go to the metaphors. If we don’t do that and change the top layers, the changes don’t last: it is the metaphors that create the change. Put another way, to change we need to redefine the metaphors. This was also my way of thinking, but without knowing the tool or this structure. In this reasoning, System Thinking is the way to look at how all things fit together. But it is a way of looking that, without a lens like the CLA’s, only allows one to think in a traditional way. You need both, and more”.
Anticipation for the future vs. anticipation for the emergency
For example, in conversations where the future is explored, the idea of anticipation for the future and anticipation for the future constantly emerges. With the former, one thinks of a company running scenarios on known trends and signals to try to build a certain scenario and develop an optimal path to reinforce its goals. It is an approach with which one reinforces one’s future without questioning one’s activities, one’s sector, one’s positioning: the goal is to be more resilient. You create images of the future but you do not question the metaphor of the future.
Instead, in anticipation for the emergency, other tools are used: new things are thought up without there being anything to protect the starting position. It is a profoundly transformative approach. Here we once again enter into overlap with other threads stretched by Sylvain Cottong’s argument: we all anticipate the future.
We all try to see if a car is coming as we cross the road, how far away it is and how fast it is going in order to understand whether we can cross the road safely or not. This is the anticipation of the future. Instead, emergency anticipation changes the frame of reference: we no longer need to cross the road but do something completely different. This allows us to prepare for another world. And this, Cottong explains, does not allow Futures Studies to be defined at one juncture, because you can actually use one method or the other, as they serve different things and work differently.
“Decolonising the future also means bringing back people’s capacity to act. It is a fundamental concept, because we have big problems and big discussions to deal with. Tech biggies are advancing at such a speed, for example with artificial intelligence, that nobody knows what will happen in two years’ time. The Tech future is being colonised very quickly. If we want to maintain control over what will happen from the point of view of the ability to imagine different futures, we will have to decolonise them and free them from this kind of influence from Tech companies. But it is complex and requires even more complexity to be able to do that’.
