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Transcending the learning futures flatland: a futures-orientated perspective for higher education leaders. Luke van der Laan University of Southern Queensland Australian Centre for Sustainable Business and Development
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Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Jan 21, 2015

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Presentation to "Follow the Sun" Digital Futures Conference April 2010
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Page 1: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Transcending the learning futures flatland: a

futures-orientated perspective for higher

education leaders.

Luke van der Laan

University of Southern Queensland

Australian Centre for Sustainable Business and Development

Page 2: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Follow the Sun – learning futures

• ‘Spaceship Earth’ – humanity hurtling through space

• ‘Time machine Earth’ – inexorable movement through time

(Bell, 2003)

An inspirational challenge to leaders – not only are the people

mapping learning futures,

space travellers;

they are also time travellers.

BUT only have a one way ticket toward the future.

Page 3: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Structure

• Flatlands – a critical view

• Sustainability: the challenge and the imperative

• Futures Studies: an alternative perspective

• Foresight, futures thinking and strategic thinking.

• Evidence of how to smother innovation.

• Leadership model for realising creative emergence

Page 4: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

Lord Kelvin, British mathematician, physicist, and president of the British Royal Society, spoken in 1895.

Page 5: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Flatlands – A Critical Approach to Futures

• Early Futures / Futurology: Prediction, forecasting and control.

• Led to a reductionist framework for futures work – the ‘flatlands’

of futures work (Wilber, 1995)

• Implication: Insufficiently understood and problematised change.

• Technology-LED paradigms remain dominant.

• Consequence – constrained futures / futures paradigms.

Page 6: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Flatlands: the background

• Instrumental rationality discovered by Western industrial civilisation

led to raw technical power – the power of emerging technologies.

• Notions of growth, optimism and vitality and economic dominance.

• Western-style progress and design has overwhelmed contemporary

developmental models: ‘the way things are’, unquestionable,

hegemonic (Slaughter, 1998)

• ‘Pop Culture’ and ‘Pop Futures’- reinforce the paradigm Flatlands.

Page 7: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Flatlands: now

• Metamorphosed power – shift from ‘Western’ to ‘globalised’

designs embedded in dominant paradigms (Still predominantly

controlled by traditionally Western culture)

• Underpinned by western-style culture, society and economic

models.

• Technological civilisation carrying with it success & dynamic

opportunity BUT also creating significant polarities and

broadening gaps in distribution and access.

• Global Forecasts largely fail to list major changes in the higher

education sector in the top 10!

Page 8: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

That idea is so damned nonsensical and impossible that I'm willing to stand on the bridge of a battleship while that nitwit

tries to hit it from the air.

Newton Baker, U.S. secretary of war in 1921, reacting to the claim of Billy Mitchell (later Brigadier General Mitchell) that airplanes could

sink battleships by dropping bombs on them.

Page 9: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Flatlands: Learning Futures

• Terminology acknowledges the domain and work in Alternative

Futures

• Caveat

• Possible examples:

– ‘Generation Theory’ based research

– ‘Past Success’ breeding failure

– ‘The’ future of education

– ‘Dominant Approaches’ to education

– ‘Language’ dominance

– ‘Technology led’ as opposed to technology enabled

– ‘Universal Connectedness’ not really connected

Page 10: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Sustainable Higher Education

“Sustainability and sustainable development are not problems or projects amenable to reductionist thinking

leading to a solution or an end point, indeed no-one knows what the conditions are for sustainability or

sustainable development” (Loveridge, 2009)

Page 11: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Sustainability

• Ability of systems and organizations to continue indefinitely while

consistently exercising provident care (Senge et al, 2006)

• Common counter-intuitive responses to the future

– Reductionist thinking to make sense of complexity?

– Short-termism to manage complexity?

“you will realise that you cannot reduce your risk by simply letting the long

term take care of itself … for in complex systems, even doing nothing

could have escalating consequences” (Stacey 1992, p. 18)

Leadership imperative to transcend dominant paradigms and open up the emergence of innovation.

Page 12: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Obstacles

“Given a choice between changing and proving that it is not necessary, most people get busy on the proof.” John Galbraith

• Future phobias, paradigm paralysis, info mania, reverse paranoia (Gelatt, 1993)

• Sense-making is done in terms of families, tribes, religions and nation states – organisations reflect the same self-interested focus / myopia.

• Strategies for sustainability will fail if myopic views are not transcended.

• Connection between human consciousness and physical world is not esoteric – it is an imperative and leads to living organisations.

Senge et al., 2006, Learning for Sustainability

Page 13: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

A severe depression like that of 1920-21 is outside the range of probability.

Harvard Economic Society, Weekly Letter, November 16, 1929.

Why have so few economists foreseen the credit crunch? Her Majesty the Queen’ question to the London School of

Economics, 2009

In recent years economics has turned virtually into a branch of applied mathematics, and has become detached from real-

world institutions and events … What has become scarce is a professional wisdom informed by a rich knowledge of

psychology, institutional structures and historic precedence

Prof. G Hodgson et al. in a formal response to the Queen’s question, 22 July 2009

Page 14: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

‘The Future’

"The future doesn't exist, never did, and never will. By definition,

the future hasn’t happened. And when it does happen it

becomes the present, and then quickly becomes the past"

(Gelatt, 1993)

• Removed from empirical observation and from present choices?

• Too random and complex to be understood (bounded

rationality)?

• An open epistemological space / domain of uncertainty?

A ‘blank canvas’ for expressing viable images of the future shaped

and influenced by decisions and actions in the present.

Page 15: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Is man at present a self-willed being who creates his own futures; or is

he a time-bound creature clinging desperately to today for fear of

what tomorrow may bring?

There is no volition without an object, and the object of a volition is that

a fiction of the mind becomes a fact. de Jouvenal, 1967

Humans have the innate creative ability for imagining the future. Polak,

1961

MOVE FROM PREDICTION OF THE FUTURE TO SHAPING HOW

THE FUTURE MAY EVOLVE

Page 16: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Futures Studies?

“The methods of futures studies include tools for describing

possible, probable and desirable variations of the present and

drafting possible images of the future. By looking at the variety

of different possibilities, we can come closer to shaping the

future – rather than predicting it. Future studies offer valuable

tools to understand and shape the development of our

societies.” 13th International Conference, 2011, Finland Futures

Academy University of Turku

Page 17: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Understanding the Future

• Plurality of discourses / epistemology

• Foundational Futures Concepts

– Used Future

– Disowned Future

– Alternative Futures

– Alignment

– Models of Social Change

– Uses of the Future

Page 18: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Foundational Futures concepts

Foundational Concept Question

Used Future Have you purchased a used future? Is your

image of the future yours?

Disowned Future Have what we excelled at become our

downfall? Have we pushed the future away?

Alternative Futures The same future means making the same

mistakes – Future Shock. Have we explored

alternative viable futures? Have we prepared

for uncertainty?

Alignment Have we aligned our futures landscape? Is our

inner alignment in-step? BAU – Strategy – Big

Picture - Vision

Your Model of Social Change Do we believe the future is positive / bleak,

open-ended or out of our control? Do our

actions today create the future? Have we

explored the impact of our future?

Use of the Future How and to what extent do we use our insight

and foresight? What levels of the future are we

engaged in changing?

Inayatullah, 2008

Page 19: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Levels of Using the Future

What level of ‘using the future’ do you desire?

• Training? Helping to create new skills?

• More effective strategy? Facilitating innovation?

• Creating capacity? Decolonising, deconstructing the anticipated

future?

• Emergence? Paradigm shifts? New Futures?

• Meme change? Changing the ideas that govern institutions,

society? (Dawkins, 1989)

• Microvita change? Changing the fields of reality? (Sarker, 1991)

“Futures Thinking ultimately can go so far as mapping and

changing memes and fields of reality” (Inayatullah, 2008)

Page 20: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Futures / Futures Studies / Futures Research /

Prospective

A PRACTISE TO TRANSCEND THE DOMINANT, LITANY

BASED PERSPECTIVES OF

THE FUTURE

BY DISCOVERING, PROPOSING, EXAMINING AND

EVALUATING POSSIBLE, PROBABLE AND

PREFERABLE FUTURES

Page 21: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Why a futures studies perspective?

• Need for broader preferred futures:

– Need for transdisciplinary systematic view of the future.

– Need for viable integrated views of the future (Integral Futures)

– Need for a causally layered views of meaning (Causal Layered

Analysis)

– Need for multiple views of the future (Alternative Futures)

– Need for a ‘memory of the future’ (Foresight: individual and

methodological)

– Need for epistemologically viable views of the future (Futures

Literacy)

Page 22: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

So what?

• Post-normal times / post-normal capabilities.

• Futures management for a futures-orientated time.

• Competitive advantage or differentiation?

• Stimulating creative emergence / innovation / strategic thinking.

Page 23: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

I think there is a world market for about five computers.

Thomas J. Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

Page 24: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

How forward?

A pragmatic hybridisation of disciplines to achieve the Triple-V approach (van der Laan, 2011)

LOGIC:

1) Open up creative / imaginative VIABLE possible futures (foresight

capability and futures thinking)

2) Enhance Strategic Thinking to capture and make VISIBLE a preferred

future

3) Formulate VALUABLE innovative strategies – and shape future

NEED:

Leaders that can activate the process and have;

• Future Orientated Thinking

• Individual Foresight

• Strategic Thinking capability

IN ORDER TO ACHIEVE;

• Social Foresight - developing foresight capacity in a critical mass of

members of organisations, systems, societies.

Page 25: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Foresight / Strategic Thinking

• Role of foresight (make VIABLE) and strategic thinking (make

VISIBLE) recognised as imperative (to making VALUABLE).

• Investigation of relationship between individual foresight,

strategic thinking and strategy formulation.

• Structural Equation Modelling (SEM)

• 101 CEOs (34%), 110 Senior Managers (37%) of large Aus and

South African organisations

• 62.5% Post-Graduate level qualification

Page 26: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Foresight / Strategic Thinking

Findings:

• Foresight and Strategic Thinking are a)distinct and b) positively

associated cognitive capabilities.

• K-12 and undergraduate education positively moderates the

relationship between foresight cognitions and analytical cognitive

capacity within the context of formulating strategy.

• Exposure to futures concepts / methods positively moderates the

relationship between foresight and the generative / creative

cognitive capacity within the context of formulating strategy.

Van der Laan, 2010

Page 27: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

• Organisations that have a predominantly rational / transactive

strategic mode are likely to suppress the generative / creative

strategic thinking of its leadership.

• Those elements of strategic thinking that are creative,

innovative, time-orientated, ambiguous and yielding greater

levels of emergent strategy are suppressed (-.25 correlation)

Consequences:

Innovation / creative emergence is less likely

Available human capabilities are suppressed

Organisational strategy remains static and directive

Page 28: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

• Future-orientated thinking :

– Creatively imagine infinite hypothetical future possibilities in order to foresee and adapt to environmental changes.

– Generative process of creative problem solving and divergent thinking in order to detect gaps in knowledge, patterns and trends.

(Fortunato and Furey, 2009)

• Individual Foresight

– human ability to creatively envision possible futures, understand the complexity and ambiguity of systems

– provide input for the taking of provident care in detecting and avoiding hazards while seeking to achieve a preferred future.

(van der Laan, 2010)

• Strategic Thinking

– strategic thinking is regarded as a synthesis of systematic analysis and creative (generative) thought processes

– that seek to determine the longer-term direction of the organisation.

(van der Laan, 2010)

Page 29: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Leadership Model for Innovation

• Significant empirical evidence suggests importance of foresight

and strategic thinking in facilitating generative / creative /

innovative emergent strategies.

• Plus need to transcend ‘flatlands’

• Requires a leadership model that is viable, visible and valuable

(Triple-V) in mapping sustainable learning futures.

Page 30: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

Triple-V Model

STRATEGY FORMULATION

FORESIGHTSTRATEGIC THINKING

ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGY

PROCESSES

VIABLE VISIBLE VALUABLE

Orientation to Time

Framer Foresight Style

Analytical / Systems

orientated

Cognitions

Creative / Generative Cognitions

Age

Foresight Education

Industry Experience

Education Level

(van der Laan, 2010)

Page 31: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

The Futures of Learning Futures?

• Familiarity with symbolic and methodological aspects of futures

(how are alternative futures produced and examined)

• Enhancement of ‘foresight’ literacy (using futures concerns as

sources for projects and creative initiatives)

• Encouragement of constructive and empowering attitudes (shift

negative attitudes to constructive preferred futures)

• Development of future-orientated thinking and leadership

• Support ‘ big picture’ thinking (and the continuity of change)

(Slaughter, 2002)

Page 32: Transcending learning futures flatlands fin 12apr

They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist…

General John B. Sedgwick, Union Army Civil War officer's last words, uttered during the Battle of Spotsylvania, 1864

But we can hit the sun!