Whither FTA:

Struggling to Cooperate with Our Own Evolution

Ruben Nelson1

Abstract

This paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of the history and evolution of Futures

Research in general and FTA in particular. The intention is to offer, as a hypothesis, a

perspective that appears to us to: (1) Make deeper sense of the conceptual confusion and the

dominant themes that have marked FTA from the beginning. (2) Make deeper sense of some of

the themes now emerging in FTA. (3) Identify what appears to us to be a more promising path

forward for FTA. The quintessential characteristics of the preferred path is set out, as are some

of the major implications for the practice of FTA. The core thrust is this: On the more

promising path, the development and utilization of technology is driven by a passion to enable

persons, institutions and cultures to see, think through and meet the grandest human challenge of

the 21st Century – to learn to become aware of and to cooperate with their own evolution as

persons at every scale of our existence from individual to species; from local to cosmic. This

drive is contrasted with the still-current dominant driver of the development of technology – the

accumulation of money and power. The above claims are based on a methodology developed in

Canada for making more reliable sense of human persons, cultures and forms of civilization –

causal layered synthesis (CLS). The main features of this methodology are sketched, including a

fresh map of human development that flows from its application.

1 Ruben Nelson, Executive Director, Foresight Canada, 29 des Arcs Road, Lac Des Arcs, AB, Canada, T1W 2W3

+1-403-673-3537, rubennelson@shaw.ca

Introduction

“It matters when a people or enterprise are cast into history.”2

This point was often made by Northrop Frye.3 He thought the modern bias towards ahistorical

thinking was misleading, at best. Therefore, he was inclined to remind us of the degree to which

all human life was inescapably laden with, if not trapped within, its history. This thought, that

historical context matters, is not strange to those who pursue or apply futures research in any of

its forms. In the futures business context is king. It is assumed that if one truly and deeply

comes to understand the character and dynamics of the past and present context of that which

holds one’s attention, then both the present state and the future possibilities of that thing will

resolve into focus.

This paper is an attempt to think clearly about the future of Future-Oriented Technology

Analysis (FTA): This question, “What path would we take if we knew what we were doing?”

states the challenge somewhat baldly. Our approach is to utilize a futures research method

developed in Canada – Causal Layered Synthesis (CLS) – to shed a fresh light on the long

development of human cultures and forms of civilization.4 This method enables us to gain fresh

insights into the birth and evolution of Futures Research and FTA. Unsurprisingly, it is argued

that they both show the marks of the time of their birth – the mid Twentieth Century. We use the

map of human development that flows from the application of CLS to argue that it is

increasingly clear that the 21st Century will not be a replay of the 20

th. If this is the case, then we

need to update our practice of both Futures Research in general and FTA in particular in order to

align the way we undertake futures work with what we are now coming to know about the

nature, place and roles of persons, cultures and forms of civilization in history.

The logic of the argument is as follows:

CLS offers a fresh map on which we can plot the history of human development.

The map locates Futures Research, including FTA, as late Modern/Industrial

developments with the strengths, weaknesses and degree of coherence that would be

expected of a late Modern/Industrial development.

It is increasingly clear that our still-dominant late Modern/Industrial form of civilization

is not a sustainable form of civilization; that a shift towards post-Modernism is well

underway; that post-Modernism does not provide a basis for a new form of civilization;

and, therefore, that the next form of civilization, if there is to be one in a non-trivial

sense, will be a post-post-Modern form. (For reasons that will become clearer, we

characterize this new form of civilization as the Co-Creative form of civilization.)

If this reasoning is sound, then we who are today’s practitioners must learn to adapt the

practice of FTA in ways that put it in service of nurturing the emergence of a truly new

and co-creative form of civilization. Suggestions for such adaptations are made.

2 Northrop Frye, Journey without Arrival, a National Film Board of Canada film on the life and thought of Northrop

Frye, circa 1970. Now out of print. 3 At the height of his career as a literary critic and professor at Victoria College, University of Toronto, according to

the Citation Index, Frye was the third most quoted person in the academy. He trailed only Jesus and Marx. 4 The case for making a distinction between a culture and its form of civilization can be found at:

http://eruditio.worldacademy.org/issue-5/article/civilizational-paradigm-change

What follows is only an article. Therefore, much of the argument will be sketched, rather than

elaborated. The point is to outline an argument that states that there are good reasons to alter our

intentions for and practice of FTA.

Causal Layered Synthesis

Because CLS is neither widely-known nor well-documented, a brief history is in order. CLS has

been developed and utilized by the author for fifty years. It first emerged in the mid-1960s in his

graduate work at Queen’s University and Queen’s Theological College, both in Kingston,

Canada and at United Theological College, Bangalore, India.

At its heart is the insight that it is possible to map the development of human cultures and forms

of civilization against a ontological/epistemological (O/E) map with the following coordinates.

The X axis of the map measures the degree to which the dominant default ontological and

epistemological stance of a culture and form of civilization assumes that reality is (a) static,

timeless and unchanging (left end) or (b) dynamic, historical and in some sense evolutionary

(right end). The Y axis of the map measures the degree to which the dominant default

ontological and epistemological stance of a culture and form of civilization assumes that reality

is (a) relational and therefore contextual and that reliable knowing is itself relational (top end) or

(b) individuated into stand-alone pieces and that a lone individual can know reliably quite apart

from others (bottom end). See figure 1.

Civilizational O/E Default Settings

Figure 1

A few minutes reflection on the two ends of each quadrant will reveal the inherent character and

tensions of the dominant form of civilization and the cultures that exemplify it.5 We note that as

Stafford Beer often said, cultures are systems – the characteristics and tensions of each form of

civilization will be manifest in every domain of the cultures that exemplify it. As Northrop Frye

noted: “In what our culture produces, whether it is art, philosophy, military strategy or political and

5 If given a bit of coaching and time a group of people can ferret out the defining characteristics of a society that

exemplifies each of these quadrants with no additional information than that which is shown on figure 1. The work of such groups has been remarkably consistent and isomorphic over 40 years of using this exercise.

economic development, there are no accidents; everything a culture produces is equally a symbol of that culture.”i And, I would add, “and its form of civilization.”6

As one becomes comfortable with the defining characteristics of human life in each quadrant

questions such as these may be asked, explored and answered:7 Where were we as a species

when we first emerged in Africa 200,000 years ago? (top right) Where are limited-contact tribal

peoples even today? (top right) In which direction did agricultural settlement move those of us

who became settled over the last 10,000 years? (top right to top left) In which direction did the

emergence of a Modern/Industrial form of civilization move those of us who made that journey

from roughly 1000, CE to 1900 CE? (top left to bottom left) Where was Europe during the

Reformation? (moving from the top left into the bottom left) In which direction are those who

are becoming somewhat post-Modern moving? (bottom left to bottom right) In which quadrant

does a truly sustainable and humane post, post-Modern form of civilization lie? (top right) In

which quadrants do we find fundamentalism and so many other “isms” about which we are so

troubled? (the two left quadrants where true knowledge is deemed to be marked by timeless and

impersonal certainty). Relativism arises in the bottom right. Knowing reliably, but in the face of

relativity, is the deep challenge of the top right quadrant.

One can also plot the number of people in any given quadrant at any given time and the

directions of their movement, if any. For example, today the major traffic is towards the bottom

left quadrant. It is the result of a process widely called modernization or development. Those

securely in that quadrant are still outnumbered by those heading towards it. Ironically, those

who have lived longest in the bottom left quadrant are the most likely to be the ones leaving it.

The bulk of the Modern/Industrial people who are moving are headed to the bottom right

quadrant. However, some are heading back to the top left and a small minority to the top right.

Contrary to Francis Fukuyama’s earlier claim that the bottom left is “the end of history”8, the

human journey is far from over.

While this map can be used to generate non-trivial insights into our past and present conditions

and future potentials as a species, it becomes even more powerful when a simple, but powerful,

understanding of human consciousness, culture and forms of civilization are added to it. This

additional element is what turns the O/E map into CLS.

CLS is both causal and layered in the same sense that Causal Layered Analysis (CLA)9 is causal

and layered. That is, both assume that human consciousness, persons, cultures and forms of

civilization can and must be seen, understood and acted towards at more than one level. (CLA

has four levels, while CLS has three.) Both also assume that there are two-way causal relations

between the levels.

6 Frye, Northrop. “The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism”, Daedalus (Spring 1970)

7 Those who are familiar with Dave Snowden’s Cynefin Framework will recognize that the CLS quadrants map onto

those of the Cynefin Framework. In CLS the top right is complex, top left is complicated, bottom left is simple and bottom right is chaotic. We note that Dave Snowden uses his framework to distinguish among situations or conditions facing persons within an on-going culture, while we use them to distinguish among four types of human civilizations. 8 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Avon, New York, 1992.

9 Causal Layered Analysis. Developed by Sohail Inayatullah. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_layered_analysis

Synthesis is used to capture the fact that for human life to function, the various aspects of life

must be brought together in some semblance of a whole and integral experience. That is, there

are limits to the amount of incoherence and cognitive dissonance we can experience, as persons,

groups or a whole culture, without becoming dysfunctional, neurotic or psychotic.

The three levels of CLS are the levels of material reality, human thought and metaphor. The last

are those aspects of human consciousness that are prior to rational thought. This level is often

captured by images of the senses – especially by the metaphors of sight, hearing and touch.

“Hear, O Israel,” or “Once I was blind and now I can see” or “You touched me deeply” all speak

to this largely pre-rational level of human existence. Some refer to this level as the human

imagination. At the outer edge of human consciousness we find the almost wholly unconscious

ontological and epistemological presuppositions of a form of civilization and its cultural

manifestations. When these presuppositions change, a rare occurrence in human history, the

culture goes through what may be thought of as a phase transition or paradigmatic shift to take

on the characteristics of a profoundly different form of civilization. This process takes hundreds

of years. To date all such transitions have been slow, regional, optional, unconscious and

involving change on only one axis. As I shall argue, we now face the challenge of having to

make a transition that is rapid, scalable to global, required, conscious and entailing change on the

two axes. As I shall note below, it is the nature and scale of this challenge that will shape the

future of FTA.

The three levels of CLS are best treated as three levels of generality of the unified experience of

life and not as separate primordial entities. One may move in either direction among the levels:

from physical matter to imagination or from imagination to physical matter. In the former case,

we can say that matter minds; that human consciousness is shaped unconsciously by the physical

environment in which it finds itself. This insight – that socialization is a real phenomenon – is at

the heart of the social sciences, especially sociology, anthropology and archeology. Moving

from imagination to physical realities, we can say that mind matters. This insight – that creative

embodiment is a real phenomenon – is at the heart of every non-trivial spiritual and

psychological tradition. The theological word is incarnation. Imagination becomes flesh..

Because CLS was developed within a perspective that reflects the top right quadrant, all three

levels are surrounded by a golden thread. (See figure 2, below.) The golden thread represents

the recognition that within a relational and dynamic reality all human knowing is fraught not

merely with uncertainty, but indeterminacy. The best we can do is to achieve a quality of

knowing that, relative to that which we had previously, is somewhat more reliable. The

operational implication is that human life will be better if we learn to take a reflexive and even

meta-reflexive stance towards ourselves, as well as towards others. The point is that the

epistemic humility that is entailed by the top right quadrant is quite different in kind from the

epistemic humility entailed in either of the two left quadrants.

The CLS litany that captures this dynamic:

As we see the world, so we will think it and think it through.

As we think through the world, so we will act within it.

As we act within our world, so we will set ourselves up for success and failure in the

future.

The Three Levels of CLS

Figure 2

Since we tend to see, think through and act within our world in ways that we inherit

unconsciously from our culture and biology, best we learn to be reflexive enough to see,

think through and attend to the ways we routinely see, think through and act within the

world.

The reason is that in a profoundly changing world, it is likely the case that our inherited

and default ways of seeing, thinking through and acting will not be adequate to cope with

the emerging realities of today, much less tomorrow. In short, our root problem is not

counter-intuitive reality, but culturally-embedded counter-reality intuitions in which we

invest far too much confidence.

We note in passing that no culture has ever raised its young with such a precarious sensibility.

All have sought and still seek to ensure that even in the far off future we who are X will have

descendants who are still X.

Finally, we note also that there may be repetitive patterns or structures at each of the three levels.

In CLS, such structures/patterns are not seen or considered as a separate level. Rather, they are a

feature of each level that is inherently an aspect of each level.10

For a form of civilization or a

culture that manifests its defining characteristics, there must be a reasonable coherence among

the patterns of the three levels. When this condition is satisfied, we may speak of a paradigm of

a form of civilization or of a culture being paradigmatic of the form of civilization.11

10

The reason, of course is that the human brain has evolved to notice patterns and not merely isolated bits of data. 11

For an elaboration on the concept of paradigm see: http://eruditio.worldacademy.org/issue-5/article/civilizational-

paradigm-change

As the root paradigms of each quadrant resolve into focus, it becomes quite clear that each form

of civilization has its own default sensibility. In practical terms, cultures that express the same

form of civilization have far more in common with each other than they do with cultures that

embody a different form of civilization.

At a finer grain, it follows that our understanding of the realities of a given culture or person

depend not only on the peculiarities of the culture, but on the form of civilization it exemplifies.

Put simply, the major categories of life -- science, religion, food, men, women, gods, tools,

technology, weather, work – have a substantially different range of meanings in each quadrant.

Without the ability to specify the quadrant and its form of civilization, use of these or any other

major category leads mainly to confusion and misunderstanding.

In CLS, then, there are four main paradigmatic forms of civilization. Note that the four do not

correspond to the four quadrants. The reason is that an on-going culture cannot be formed in one

of the quadrants and one quadrant has two forms of civilization. The former is the case because

in the bottom right quadrant the perception of reality is too individualistic and time-limited for

deep, reliable and cross-generational cultural agreements to be reached. Only now is this

thought dawning on us. Mostly, it is catching us unawares. The latter is the case because the top

right is the space of both our origin and our destination as a species. Of course, we will arrive

back into that space as a very different animal than we were when some of us left over 10,000

years ago. We also note that ‘destination’ has a very different meaning in the top right quadrant

than it does in any other quadrant. Because the top right is marked by a dynamic and relational

reality, cultural evolutions will go on in that quadrant as long as we exist as human beings. In

this space, ours is truly a journey without arrival.

With this background, we shall use the CLS O/E map to shed light on the actual history of

Futures Research and FTA, of their present tensions and of a possible path forward.

The Emergence and Characteristics of Futures Research and FTA

We have noted that our Modern/Industrial cultures are cultures that exemplify the form of

civilization entailed by the defining assumptions of the bottom left quadrant. We can expect,

then, that the dominant ways that the future, science and technology have been perceived, valued

and utilized will be those that reflect the paradigmatic sensibility of the bottom left quadrant. It

will not be surprising should this turn out to be the case.

The deep defining characteristics of the form of civilization found in the bottom left quadrant are

these:

True, objective, knowledge does not change. It is timelessly true; the same forever and

ever. Such truth applies equally to all, without regard for place or space. Common-to-

all, objective truth is independent of all cultures, persons and particularities.

Subjective knowledge is a necessary aspect of one’s private life as a person. However, it

has no status when dealing with public realities that are common to us all.

Life is divided into two major sectors: those things that are common-to-all (public space/

affairs) and those things that are idiosyncratic to each (private space/affairs).

Human imagination/consciousness is largely privatized. Shared life deals mostly with

physical realities and the thought patterns necessary to deal with those realities.

All things can be understood by reducing them to their constituent parts. And, these parts

to their parts… all the way down. Put formally: there is bias to reductionism. Therefore,

boundaries that separate different things into their own separate sectors, silos or bureaus

are endemic.

Hard data is more reliable than soft data. Anecdotes are not the plural of data. Put

formally, there is a positivistic bias. Therefore, there is a bias that privileges technical

expertise.

Facts are quite different from values. Only the former bear on the nature and truth-value

of objective realities.

Science is said to deal only with public, objective, unchanging, common to all aspects of

life.

Each person is a stand-alone, primordially-separate individual. Therefore, societies are

constituted by social contracts among individuals.

Experts are critically-minded. They double and triple check their work. However,

personal reflexivity has no formal value in public, common-to-all space or work.

In essence, human life is seem as a production, consumption and accumulation function.

More is better than less. There is no concept of enough. Success is measured in one’s

command over goods and services and cash. Therefore, economic considerations trump

all others most of the time.

Such cultures are systemically superficial. Data trumps thought and thought trumps

consciousness.

Given the above, we now turn to Futures Research and FTA by asking, how would a culture that

exemplifies the above paradigmatic characteristics undertake futures research, especially

regarding technology, if it began to get serious about the work in the 1950s and ‘60s?

The logic of the above characteristics suggests we could expect to find that the following

features would be dominant. As we will note below there may be exceptions. However, the

exceptions will seldom be strong enough to make noticeable societal differences.

Forecasting, rather than foresight, will be the dominate activity. The point is to discern

and determine what the future will be, given present trends.

The future is not uncertain in principle, only in practice. The uncertainty of the future is

a function of our present inability to know and process enough information thoroughly

and fast enough.

It is meaningful to talk of futures possible, plausible, probable and preferred.

Linear, mechanical metaphors and models will dominate.

Quantification will dominate. Aspects of life not easily quantified will be ignored or

reduced to a measureable quantity. There will be little sense that anything important is

lost by doing so.

Soft, personal, data will be largely ignored on the grounds that it has no impact on

physical realities.

Societal and civilizational context will be largely ignored on the grounds that they have

no bearing on discrete physical realities.

Futures by telescope will be common – selecting and isolating a particular aspect of life

(a silo), be it a technology, a practice or a value, and forecasting how it will be different

at some time in the future, i.e. with no regard for its setting in life.

Technology will be seen as a discrete but vitally important dimension of human life – one

that is value-free and independent of human consciousness or culture.

Technologies will be assessed for their impacts on the economy and geo-politics, but with

little regard for any less-than-obvious impacts on human culture, let alone human

consciousness. The deep cultural assumption that technologies that make vast amounts

of money are, therefore, good will not be seriously challenged.

Religion has no place in normal futures work. One the one hand, it is a private affair. On

the other, it has no bearing on what the objective future will be.

Futures will be critically-minded, but largely un-reflexive.

The use to which futures work will be put will not be seen as the responsibility of those

who are futures practitioners.

The vast majority of the money invested in futures research will come from well-

established and well-resourced institutions, mostly governments and corporations.

Futures work, including FTA, will be harnessed to their current aspirations and

intentions, whatever they may be. Today, it is to become increasingly competitive

economically by innovating with science-based technology.

Those who develop ways of seeing, thinking through and acting towards the future that

differ substantially from the above will be marginal to the main work of the culture.

Futures work will not become robust enough to challenge the deep default view of any

Modern/Industrial culture – that its future is essentially to continue on the path it is on in

order to become a bigger and richer version of that which it already is. The thought that a

non-trivial transformation of its culture is either likely or required, will not reach a

critical mass of opinion leaders in public discussion.

Because futures work is inherently cross-disciplinary and because it may arise in different

places and be nurtured by communities with quite different motivations, the work will be

largely undisciplined and somewhat chaotic. Common language, definitions of good

work and shared self-understanding of the work will not emerge easily. For many,

futures work is simply any forward-looking activity that enhances our present capacities

to formulate policy and plan its execution in service of long-standing intentions.

Those who are familiar with the actual development of Futures Research and FTA over the last

65 years, will see they have developed in ways that are essentially isomorphic with the features

set out above. This observation does no more than state what Northrop Frye would lead us to

expect – futures and FTA were shaped by the dominant imagination of the time at which they

were cast into history and, at least to date, they have developed no more capacity to identify and

escape such bonds than has any other Modern/Industrial practice. Which is to say, hardly any at

all.

Those who are familiar with the actual development of Futures Research and FTA will also

know that from the beginning there have been contrary voices to those that came to dominate the

work. For example, European futures has always been noticeably more holistic and reflexive

than American futures. But then, this is true of European culture and its academies as a whole.

Given the very different experiences of both in the 20th

Century, this makes sense. Europeans

have had much to ponder as they experienced and considered almost a whole century of war or

near war conditions. Americans, on the other hand were not devastated, but invigorated, by the

European conflicts. Getting on with the job of growing America and making her great, in times

of war or peace, was simply doing what came naturally.

There are a few notable exceptions to the above generalizations. The Educational Futures Center

led by Willis Harman at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s is one. The Social Policy

Project of the Government of Canada in the early 1970s and the work of the Advanced Concepts

Centre of Environment Canada in the mid-1970s are others. The work of Robert Theobald and

Jim Dator also stand out as being substantially independent of their dominant cultures. The

common mark of each of these efforts is a deep appreciation of the systemic and developmental

nature of human understanding and human cultures. In this regard, each of these efforts can be

seen as post-Modern endeavours, struggling towards a post, post-Modern understanding of past,

present and future.

Of late, of course, many more voices have been added to this side of the ledger. Sohail

Inayatullah, Dave Snowden and Northrop Frye have already been mentioned. Oliver Markley,

one of Willis Harman’s colleagues, and Richard Slaughter must be added to the list of substantial

contributors. Obviously, this list is incomplete.

And, if slowly, the intellectual and emotional climate has been changing as several lines of

endeavour have developed since the mid 1950s. Today, they are beginning to map on to one

another. I think of hermeneutics, systems thinking, humanistic psychology, complexity theory,

the sociology of knowledge, queer theory, biological, ecological, environmental and earth

sciences, post-colonial thought, structuralism and post-structuralism.

Our Challenge: The Transition to a New Form of Civilization

No claim is made that the above-mentioned forms of thought are identical. They are not.

However, in terms of the CLS O/E map it is noteworthy that all of them move along both axes

from left to right and from bottom to top. It is slowly but irrevocably dawning on us that the

reality of which we are a part is best described in the top right quadrant of the O/E map.

The movement that has already taken place suggests that we are in living in the midst of a

profound transition, not only of human cultures, but of the form of civilization within which we

will live. Consider that for good and ill:

For the first time in human history, every culture is in motion on the O/E map.

For the first time in human history, the transformation of a form of civilization involves

both axes.

For the first time in human history, we face the challenge of making a transition in our

form of civilization rapidly, in a way that is scalable globally, as a requirement, and doing

so consciously.

For the first time in history, it is dawning on us that our taken-for-granted form of

civilization may not be sustainable in its present form; that we are facing the prospect of

existential threats to all of us, and not just some of us.

Should this perspective, that ours is a time of profound civilizational transformation, be at all

accurate, then it is not in the least surprising that turmoil reigns. Everywhere, we are literally

being driven off our inherited mental maps and models to a degree that for almost all is simply

unimaginable. Our inherited and default ways of knowing and making sense of life cannot

account for what is happening to us and why. That some are angry with others is completely

understandable, if tragic. That those who are being attacked cannot make reliable sense of what

is happening is also completely understandable, if tragic.

In short, as persons, communities, organizations, societies, whole cultures and forms of

civilization we are almost wholly unequipped and unprepared for the deep work of the 21st

Century – navigating the turmoil that will come with the explicit recognition that we must

embrace the civilizational transition we are in and learn to cooperate with our own evolution as

persons at every scale of our lives from individual to a species.

In this light, the question for FTA changes dramatically.

We can no longer afford to seek out those technologies that merely enhance our power and

wealth. We can no longer set aside the wider questions of the uses to which technologies will be

put or the ownership of such technologies. Now we need to devote ourselves to making longer,

wider, deeper and more integral sense of this moment in history in order to learn how to govern

ourselves and our common endeavours through a unique civilizational transformation. To date

this work is unassigned. As noted, few have taken it up. As noted, we have no well-developed

and well-supported infrastructure that is explicitly designed to help us ask, clarify and respond to

such questions as these:

What technologies would assist us in the new work of consciously shifting the ground of

our lives and cultures to a new footing?

What technologies would assist us to become more reflexive and even meta-reflexive; to

sort sense from non-sense in the new work that our species has never before had to face?

What technologies would increase our wisdom as co-creators of our lives, societies and

form of civilization?

What technologies would help us identify and guard against our propensities to wilful

blindness?

Implications of CLS for Our Practice of FTA

The overarching implication of a CLS perspective for FTA is that we learn to see, think through

and act in increasingly reliable ways in relationship to long-term civilizational transformations

within which we now live. More specifically, we must

1. Re-embed our perception and understanding of technology into human consciousness,

cultures and forms of civilization so deeply that we never again see, think or speak about

technology as if it is an objective, value-free, culture-neutral tool that can be assessed and

transferred as a reified and impersonal entity. Put positively, we need to understand that

human persons do technology in much the same way as we do food, community, sex and shared

hopes, fears and aspirations. None of these are independent of human persons, their histories,

cultures, times and places. An integral understanding of technology entails an integral

understanding of persons, cultures and forms of civilization. The converse is also true.

2. Embed our concern for technology in the wider work of the 21st Century – learning to

cooperate wisely with our own evolution as persons, groups, societies and cultures who

need to embrace the work of learning to see, think through and guide the transformation

of our form of civilization into a truly co-creative form.

3. Shift our focus from today’s science, technology and innovation to co-creating a creative

culture. As Peter Drucker often observed, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.” For

example, who will conceive, design, fund and create the world’s first centre of research

and practice devoted to co-creating a humane future in the midst of a civilizational

paradigm shift? This multi-billion dollar franchise has yet to be picked up.

4. Shift our language from futures possible, plausible, probable and preferred to futures

potential, professed, programmed and picked/committed to.

5. Learn to see technologies as carriers of consciousness and culture in order to design

institutions and built forms that increase our capacity to become and be wise, mature and

skilled enough to successfully undertake the work of intentionally co-creating tomorrows

that are reasonably wise, prophetic, visionary, courageous, respectful, secure, prosperous,

inclusive, innovative, sustainable, deeply humane and easily moved to both tears and

laughter.

6. Develop a well-honed reflexive and meta-reflexive sensibility in order to catch our mis-

takes as early possible.

7. Learn to forgive ourselves and one another. We face truly new work for which we are

unprepared.