undertake the task of decision making – in all areas of life. The idea rests on the simple notion that at different times in history humanity is both able to embrace and produce different types of decision making capabilities or skills.

Today, as we begin to acknowledge both our power, to alter the planet, and our limitations, by understanding complexity, the meaning of freedom in changing. What seems to be happening is that past ways of assuring survival and pursuing our aspirations are no longer adequate. The pains of this failure are manifest everywhere – from suicide terror to personal burnout. Even as the accumulation of technical know-how generates ever more powerful tools our capacity to wield them falters. For a long time it was believed that a two pronged approach – mass-education and bureaucratic organisation – would be sufficient enabling conditions to deliver on the potential of a “free society” (open markets and electoral democracy).

We have outgrown this stage. The question is what next? Here the answer must be of the Trim Tab variety. Not in the sense of a single tool or a “big fix”, but in the sense of a small, almost subtle change that “goes with the flow” yet nevertheless changes everything. Futures Literacy is this kind of answer. In part because everyone is already doing it as they wake-up in the morning and decide what to do, who to be; and in part because there are some new, emergent conditions related to the practicality of living well in a highly dense and fluid networked knowledge society. Just as the industrial era’s factory and city really needed mass-education – with the behavioural and cognitive socialisation necessary for punctuality, obedience to authority, and acceptance of the anonymity scale economy specialisation – so too does the spontaneous, learning intensive society need Futures Literacy.

What is at stake is the basic decision making capacity of post-subsistence societies that have declared allegiance to the values of freedom, tolerance and diversity. As these societies evolve the hierarchical, planned, simplifying and uniform methods for solving problems and pursuing aspirations come increasingly into contradiction with reality. Now is the time to pay careful attention to the way past “success” can blind us to both the severity of failure in existing systems and the emergence of new ones. Futures Literacy is a way of shifting our attention to the way the old methods of “anticipation” now limit our thinking and actions to the point of threatening both our survival and our values.

What is futures literacy? It is the capacity to more fully understand the potential of the present by engaging in “rigorous imagining”. People who are futures literate can invent and tell stories about more ways of using the resources – time, communities, knowledge, market palaces, eco-systems – that are around them. A futures literate decision maker is more effective at taking advantage of today’s diversity, complexity, inter-connectedness and just-in-time delivery. They are better able to invent, understand and tell stories (scenarios) about the potential of the present.

What does it mean to be futures literate? Like with reading there is a difference between knowing the alphabet and understanding a complex text. There are different levels of futures literacy. At the basic level a futures literate person is continually aware that time is change. They also have a much more explicit awareness of the expectations and values that shape their (and their community’s) view of the future. But expectations and values pose a danger for thinking about the future by reducing the number of options to those we expect and prefer. Advanced futures literacy opens up choices enabling diversity and complexity to serve as sources of inspiration, sharing and action.

What can a futures literate society do better? Being futures literate helps decision people to see opportunities in today’s intricate, fluid and spontaneous world. In effect it is a new approach to innovation, efficiency and risk-management. In the past simplification, advanced planning, and linear decision making were all highly successful tools for improving efficiency, organising innovation and reducing risk. Now these industrial era tools defeat the learning organisation and society, wasting knowledge at every step. In marked contrast a futures literate society makes full use of the rich sea of information and the direct know-how/know-what of every person.

As per the requirements for this competition Futures Literacy is:
• Comprehensive — a Trim Tab type of idea based on holistic systems thinking.
• Anticipatory — alters the way people think and act based on critical phenomena (strong and weak signals) in the world around us today in order to change the way humanity identifies and acts with respect to imagined short-term and long-term futures.
• Ecologically responsible — offers a practical way to understand and act in ways that are consistent with what we value in nature's underlying processes, patterns and principles.
• Verifiable — because it is about learning-by-doing and experimentalism (not administration) it is fundamentally about rigorous empirical testing (but not empiricism).
• Replicable — because it is a practice, capable of being readily undertaken by others.
• Achievable — because people are doing it in order to cope with the reality of meaning, identity formation and conflict in the world around us today – which is what provides the incentives that underpin successful wide diffusion.

Futures Literacy is a response to the challenge addressed by Buckminster Fuller in his life and work. It builds on his genius, and those of many others, to offer a new Trim Tab; one that is emerging in the world around us, but needs the kind of innovative “design science" effort to discover, refine and diffuse that Buckminster Fuller's work exemplified. Futures Literacy is a "design science" application par excellence - one in keeping with the open, exploratory spirit of Fuller.

For further published details about Futures Literacy please see the following published works, all authored by Riel Miller:
- From Trends to Futures Literacy, Centre for Strategic Education, Seminar Series Paper No. 160, December 2006
- Equity in the 21st Century Learning Intensive Society: Is schooling part of the solution?, Foresight, Vol 8, No 4, 2006
- Futures Literacy: A hybrid strategic scenario method, Futures, No. 39, 2007.