Futures Literacy Masterclass (Live-online)

Do you work with futures and foresight, leadership, strategy, community management, business development, or innovation? And do you want to enhance the use of the future in your work life? This masterclass will help you deepen your futures praxis and help you cultivate a more inclusive anticipatory culture in your community or organisation and to innovate towards hope, rather than out of fear.  

As part of our efforts to democratise futures literacy, an essential capability for the 21^st century defined by UNESCO, the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies has designed a targeted masterclass hosted by the UNESCO Chair in Anticipatory Leadership and Futures Capabilities that explores different building blocks for enhanced anticipation and emphasizes emergence in futures work.  

Who is this for?

This masterclass is designed for anyone with some experience with futures and foresight, as well as innovators, strategic planners, educators, business developers, and designers alike, who wish to enhance their work.

This masterclass will provide you with:

The focus is on futures literacy as a capability and as a process that allow you to explore alternatives, becoming aware of biases, misguided assumptions, and to challenge the poverty of imagination. Through interactive engagement and action learning, combined with a balanced blend of theory and exercises and tangible tools, this masterclass will inspire and enhance your uses of the future.  

This masterclass is practice first, theory later, design last oriented and guides participants towards a theoretical and practical understanding of futures literacy and its design principles for enhanced uses of the future.  

It includes:

• Live-online instruction and facilitation by CIFS advisors 
• Immersion into CIFS approach to futures literacy and how it enhances futures and foresight work  
• Resources and presenter slides (provided during and after masterclass) 
• LinkedIn certificate of course completion badge 
• Personal 1-year Futures Membership of CIFS 
• Networking opportunities with like-minded futures peers 

About the course

As futures literacy is best practiced and learned through experience and in relationships with others, you will work together in teams with other futures interested peers to explore the futures literacy framework and to prototype your own experience. Our facilitators will bring their certified knowledge and expertise from working with anticipation as a public good through arts, culture, and education. 

• A futures literacy laboratory – to better understand futures literacy dynamics and how to use collective intelligence processes and sensemaking as learning, you will experience a brief futures literacy laboratory on a common topic.  
• Futures literacy – after the experience we will dive into the more theoretical parts of futures literacy and why it was declared as an essential capability for the 21^st century by UNESCO.  
• Decolonizing Futures - Learn about how the environment surrounding you influences the way you think about the future - and how an understanding of this can expand your horizon, open you up for novel ideas, and hold space for diverse imaginations 
• Participatory Futures - Learn about the vital approaches for inclusive futures work and involving the public in exploring and shaping potential futures and fuelling public debate 
• Myths, Metaphors and Narratives - Understand the impact that underlying myths, metaphors, and narratives have on individual, organisational and communal self-understanding - and how reinventing them can aid you in achieving your aspirational future.  
• Psychologically safety – Understand how to create a workplace environment free from interpersonal fear and how to hold a safe space in which participants dare take interpersonal and intellectual risks. 
• Futures literacy concept design – To ensure that you can link the futures literacy framework to your own practice, you get the opportunity to design a prototype of an experience in groups. 

Testimonials

Format

This masterclass is facilitated live-online, with 3,5 hours per live session (including breaks), and requires you to be comfortable with working on Miro (we provide a few tutorials). It consists of a mixture of interactive exercises, lectures, and hands-on online workshop activities. Throughout, we will contextualize and discuss what we have learned and how it provides value for your praxis. 

Seats are limited to secure close interaction and feedback throughout the activities in the masterclass. 

Dates, times, and sign-up

We offer different options tailored to different time zones. We add new course dates on a rolling basis. The following course dates are currently available:

• Option 1: Mar. 13 - Mar. 14, 2023
  09.00 - 12.30 (CET) // 12.00 - 15.30 (GST) // 19.00 - 22.30 (AEDT)
  Suitable for Eastern hemisphere time zones

To sign-up and secure your seat, please add the course date of your preference to the cart and proceed to checkout.

For Futures Partners and Futures Members, please sign-up using the special sign-up form here.

In case of cancellation, please read our course cancellation policy.

What is expected of you prior to the masterclass?

As a part of the experience and for community-building purposes, we ask you to send a photo of yourself, two lines on your recent experience in futures work, your LinkedIn (optional), and a visualisation of the future as you see it to nl@cifs.dk. 

In addition, we offer exclusive trainings that enable you to cultivate futures literacy in a particular thematic area within your organization or community. Please reach to Senior Advisor, Nicklas Larsen to learn more.