Why We Should Speak "Futures" Fluently

I love languages and am so grateful for each one I’ve been able to learn. It is always a joy for me to delve into grammar, conjugations, idioms, history, slang, and metaphors. I immerse myself in the diversity of languages and the opportunities they offer me: I navigate different contexts, consume various media, navigate through codes, and speak and switch between them. It allows me to engage in conversations, think, dream, and feel in different ways, with different people, beyond the restrictions of a single language. I dive into another pool and draw from the beauty there. If words were my language, I would want to communicate, express, describe, and live in as many as possible. What if we think of language beyond the literal and include all forms of expression we can use? Art, like music, poetry, and painting, are forms of expression - they are tools on one hand and a voice on the other: artworks speak to us if we listen, empathize, and perceive them sensually. They are languages, in small and large scales and in connection to each other. This is about the competence to express oneself and the ability to communicate. What if I advocate that we should speak "futures" fluently? How does my love for language competence relate to speaking in futures?

Thinking about futures, critically reflecting on present assumptions, questioning worldviews, imagining, dreaming, and being brave enough to translate these into action strategies are competencies we can and must acquire. Like a language, consisting of different dialects and forms. There are methods and approaches for this, such as critical, decolonial, and feminist ones, which aim not to reproduce violent thought patterns and translate them into futures imaginations. It is also about fostering the understanding of the future as something that can be shaped, not just predicted. Futures Literacy, as UNESCO formulates it, aims to uncover “hidden, unexamined, and sometimes flawed assumptions about current and past systems” and how these influence our ideas of futures. Thinking about the future can simply involve training in futures research that helps individuals and organizations acquire new competencies and skills. On a deeper level, future thinking can help develop a more effective strategy. By understanding alternative, familiar, and rejected futures, organizations can become much more innovative. On a deeper level, thinking into the future can build capacities. It is not so much about making the right predictions or finding the right strategy, i.e., using the right tools, but about strengthening our confidence to shape the future we desire. Future-oriented methods decolonize the world we think we want - they challenge our fundamental concepts. They deconstruct. Capacity building empowers the individual - this is liberating and frightening for many, as the security of having others make decisions for them disappears (see Sohail Inayatullah on "futures thinking as a skill").

It is one side of the coin to acquire the "literal" competencies, such as sharpening one's perspective, testing methods, thinking anew, and applying them to one's contexts. The other side focuses on trusting one's imagination, which can materialize in realities. Every time I learned a new language, my biggest hurdle was testing what I had learned: engaging in conversation, making mistakes, being corrected, and eventually speaking more confidently and trusting my abilities. From that moment on, it was only magical. I had to train. It is the same with immersing oneself in the worlds of Futures Thinking, and we at Superrr want to create these spaces to invite civil society organizations and initiatives on this journey. Training this muscle (as my colleague Nandita describes in her blog post) and strengthening trust in one's imagination - critically, disruptively, and decolonial. What this means and how it can look, we will explore more precisely in the coming weeks and share our insights with you. Who knows, maybe we will not only learn a language together but create new forms? Become fluent and "literate" in this?