The Critical and Decolonial School

The dominant image of foresight is predictive: forecast the trend, size the market, name the year. The critical and decolonial school rejects that image. Foresight here is not about getting the future right but about surfacing the assumptions, discourses and power arrangements that make some futures thinkable and others unthinkable. This module works through the school's central instruments, Sohail Inayatullah's causal layered analysis, poststructural critique after Foucault, Jim Dator's four generic futures, and Riel Miller and UNESCO's futures literacy, and closes on the contest over whose futures are centred and whose are erased. Throughout it applies the tradition to concrete cases, including a worked reading of the sovereign-cloud debate, so that critique becomes a working method rather than a posture.

causal-layered-analysis
critical-futures
futures-literacy
decolonial-futures
poststructural-critique
used-future

14 min · Core

Causal Layered Analysis

Sohail Inayatullah's causal layered analysis reads a future at four depths: the litany of headlines, the systemic causes beneath them, the worldview that frames those systems, and the myth or metaphor at the deepest layer. The method is not only diagnostic. By working down through the layers and then back up, an analyst can reframe a problem and open alternative futures that surface-level debate never reaches.

~4 min

By the end you can

Name Inayatullah's four layers and what each one captures.
Explain why analysis conducted only at the litany layer produces shallow futures.
Apply the four layers to a concrete security case to reframe it.
Describe how moving back up the layers generates alternative futures.

Four layers, not one surface

Sohail Inayatullah developed causal layered analysis to stop foresight collapsing into argument about the surface. He proposes reading any future at four depths. The litany is the visible layer: headlines, official statistics, the taken-for-granted framing repeated on the news. Beneath it sit the systemic causes, the economic, political and technological structures that produce the litany. Below those lies the worldview, the deep assumptions and ideologies that make a given system seem natural. At the base is the myth and metaphor, the unconscious story or image that holds the whole edifice together. Each layer is real and each demands a different kind of question.

Why the litany is a trap

Most analysis, and almost all public debate, never leaves the litany. It reacts to the headline, proposes a fix pitched at the headline, and calls that foresight. Inayatullah's point is that a future built only at the litany layer is shallow and short-lived, because it never touches the structures or beliefs that generated the problem. To take a security example, the litany of ransomware is the count of attacks and the ransom paid. The systemic layer is the insurance market, the cryptocurrency rails and the patching economics that make attacks profitable. The worldview is a model of security as perimeter defence and of crime as an external intrusion. The myth beneath is the fortress: the belief that safety comes from higher walls. An intervention aimed only at the count of attacks leaves all three lower layers untouched.

Reading down, then reframing up

The method's power is that it works in both directions. Reading down deepens diagnosis; reading back up generates alternatives. Once the fortress myth is named, an analyst can ask what a different metaphor would make possible, a garden that is tended rather than a fortress that is walled, a body that builds immunity rather than a border that is patrolled. A new metaphor licenses a new worldview, which permits new systems, which changes the litany. This is how causal layered analysis produces alternative futures rather than a single forecast: it changes the story at the bottom and lets the change propagate upward.

A worked reading: sovereign cloud

Consider the European debate over the sovereign cloud. At the litany layer sits the reassuring claim that data held in a European data centre is under European control. The systemic layer is harder: the United States CLOUD Act reaches data held by American-headquartered providers regardless of where the servers physically sit, so location of hardware does not settle jurisdiction. The worldview beneath is a territorial conception of sovereignty, the assumption that control follows physical geography. The myth at the base is digital independence, the comforting image of a self-sufficient European technosphere. DSI's own SEAL-0 work turns on exactly this gap between the litany and the systemic reality. Read this way, the debate is not about where servers live but about which story of sovereignty a continent is willing to believe, and that is a question the litany can never reach.

Reading down deepens diagnosis; changing the myth lets a new future rise upward.

Check your understanding

Answer each from memory. Your results are saved in this browser and count toward your readiness — sign in (account panel above) to keep them across devices.

What are the four layers of causal layered analysis, from surface to depth?
Why does causal layered analysis treat the litany layer as a trap?
In the sovereign-cloud reading, what sits at the myth layer?

13 min · Core

Poststructural Futures

Poststructural foresight treats the future as discourse rather than destination. Drawing on Michel Foucault, it asks how particular futures come to seem natural and inevitable, whose interests they serve, and what they silence. Its central diagnostic is the 'used future', a future inherited unthinkingly from someone else, and its method is deconstruction: taking a dominant future apart to expose the choices hidden inside it.

~4 min

By the end you can

Explain what it means to treat the future as discourse rather than fact.
Define the 'used future' and recognise it in practice.
Describe deconstruction as a foresight method after Foucault.
Identify whose interests a dominant future serves and what it silences.

The future as discourse

Poststructural foresight begins from an uncomfortable claim: there is no single future waiting to be discovered, only competing accounts of it, each carrying the fingerprints of whoever made it. The tradition borrows from Michel Foucault, whose work traced how what counts as knowledge is bound up with power, how the categories we treat as natural are historical products that could have been otherwise. Applied to the future, this means an analyst does not ask only what will happen but who is speaking, from what position, and what their account of the future makes it possible or impossible to say. A forecast is a piece of discourse before it is a fact, and it does work in the present regardless of whether it comes true.

The used future

Inayatullah gives the tradition its sharpest tool with the idea of the used future: a future a person or organisation carries without having chosen it, inherited second-hand from a culture, an industry or a more powerful actor. A city that plans for ever more cars is living a used future imported from mid-century Detroit. A ministry that equates development with replicating the growth path of a former coloniser is wearing a used future stitched elsewhere. The danger of the used future is precisely that it feels like common sense; it is invisible until named. Much of the practical value of this school lies in helping an organisation notice that the future it is straining toward was never actually its own.

DeconstructionA poststructural foresight method, after Foucault, that takes a dominant future apart to reveal the concealed choices, interests and silences behind its air of inevitability. as method

The working method is deconstruction: taking a dominant future apart to reveal the choices concealed inside its air of inevitability. Faced with a confident claim, that artificial intelligence will inevitably automate a given profession, say, the deconstructive analyst asks a specific set of questions. Who authored this future and who benefits if it is believed? What alternatives does its framing quietly rule out? What must be silenced for it to appear natural? Which binary does it rest on, human against machine, developed against developing, and what does that binary hide? The aim is not cynicism but disclosure: to convert an apparently settled future back into the contested set of choices it always was.

What the silences reveal

The most revealing question a poststructural analyst asks is what a dominant future leaves out. A future of smart cities framed entirely around efficiency and sensors silences the people who will be surveilled by them. This is why the school pairs so naturally with DSI's standing stance, that outcomes are better explained by structure than by anyone's stated morality, and that the honest analyst names who pays. A confident future almost always has an unmentioned bill, and someone specific is holding it. Deconstruction is the discipline of finding that bill and reading the name on it before the future is adopted as if it were nobody's choice at all.

Deconstruction turns a settled future back into the contested choices it always was.

Check your understanding

Answer each from memory. Your results are saved in this browser and count toward your readiness — sign in (account panel above) to keep them across devices.

What is a 'used future' in Inayatullah's sense?
What does treating the future as discourse, after Foucault, direct the analyst to ask?
How does the poststructural school connect to DSI's standing stance?

13 min · Core

Dator's Four Generic Futures

Jim Dator and the Manoa school hold that the future cannot be predicted, only used, and that the useful move is to work with a small set of generic images. Dator argues that almost every image of the future collapses into one of four: continued growth, collapse, discipline, or transformation. Holding all four at once guards an organisation against the single-forecast trap.

~4 min

By the end you can

State Dator's second law and its implication for prediction.
Name and distinguish the four generic futures.
Explain why using four images beats betting on one forecast.
Map a real debate onto the four generic images.

The future is used, not predicted

Jim Dator, founder of the futures programme at the University of Hawaii, gave the field one of its most quoted lines: any useful idea about the future should appear ridiculous at first. Behind the provocation is a serious claim, sometimes called Dator's second law, that the future cannot be predicted because it does not yet exist to be observed. What foresight can do is help people imagine and rehearse futures so that they act more wisely now. The Manoa school he built treats images of the future as tools to think with, not bets to win, and that shift from prediction to use runs through everything that follows.

Four images that recur

Working across decades of foresight material, Dator observed that the countless specific futures people imagine reduce to four recurring archetypes. Continued growth is the official future of most institutions: more of the same, expansion continuing along its present curve. Collapse is the breakdown of that curve through war, ecological failure, financial crisis or systemic exhaustion. Discipline is a future that pulls back deliberately, organising society around a value such as sustainability, faith or equality and accepting limits to protect it. Transformation is the arrival of something qualitatively new, often technological or spiritual, that changes the rules of the game rather than continuing or ending the old one. The four are not predictions; they are the corners of the space in which real futures fall.

Why four beats one

The discipline of the method is holding all four at once. An institution left to itself defaults to continued growth, its official future, and is then blindsided when reality delivers one of the other three. By forcing an analyst to develop a serious version of collapse, discipline and transformation alongside growth, Dator's framework insulates against the single-forecast trap, the error of investing everything in one confident line. It is a cousin of scenario planning but leaner: rather than crafting bespoke scenarios from scratch, an analyst tests a question against four known shapes and asks which signals would tip the world toward each.

Mapping a live debate

Take the future of artificial intelligence in the workplace. The continued-growth image is steadily rising productivity with AI as another tool. The collapse image is mass displacement, deskilling and a legitimacy crisis for institutions that cannot absorb it. The discipline image is deliberate constraint, regulation, licensing and negotiated limits that subordinate the technology to a chosen social value. The transformation image is a qualitative break, a reorganisation of what work and human contribution even mean. None of these is the answer. Their value is that an organisation that has thought seriously about all four will recognise which one it is drifting into far sooner than one betting solely on the first.

Holding all four archetypes at once guards against the single-forecast trap.

Check your understanding

Answer each from memory. Your results are saved in this browser and count toward your readiness — sign in (account panel above) to keep them across devices.

What are Dator's four generic futures?
According to Dator, why does foresight not predict the future?
Why does an institution left to itself tend to be blindsided?

12 min · Core

Futures Literacy

Riel Miller and UNESCO reframe foresight as a human capability rather than a set of forecasts. Futures literacy is the skill of using the future for different purposes, drawing on the science of anticipatory systems. Its sharpest distinction is between using the future to prepare and plan, and colonising the future by imposing a single expected image on it.

~4 min

By the end you can

Define futures literacy as a capability rather than a forecast.
Explain what anticipatory systems contribute to the idea.
Distinguish using the future from colonising the future.
Describe why different purposes call for different uses of the future.

A capability, not a forecast

Riel Miller, working through UNESCO, shifted the question from what the future will be to how well people can use it. Futures literacyRiel Miller and UNESCO's concept of foresight as a human capability: the skill of using images of the future for different purposes, grounded in the science of anticipatory systems. is the capability to draw on images of the future for different purposes, the way ordinary literacy is the capability to read and write rather than any single text. A futures-literate person can tell when they are using the future to optimise a known system and when they are using it to notice novelty they had assumed away. The framing is deliberately democratic: it treats the ability to imagine and use futures as a skill any person or organisation can build, not a service bought from experts who claim to know what is coming.

Anticipatory systems

The idea rests on the science of anticipatory systems, associated with the theorist Robert Rosen, which observes that living and social systems act now on the basis of models of what is to come. A seed, a firm and a state all behave in the present according to an internal image of the future, whether or not they can articulate it. Miller's move is to make that hidden anticipation explicit and examinable. Once an organisation can see the image of the future it is unconsciously running on, it can ask whether that image still serves, and can deliberately swap it for another suited to a different purpose. Futures literacy is, in this sense, the discipline of getting your anticipations out where you can inspect them.

Using versus colonising the future

The distinction that gives the idea its edge is between using the future and colonising the future. Using the future means drawing on it for a chosen purpose, to plan, to prepare, or to open the imagination to what is genuinely new. Colonising the futureImposing a single expected image of the future as settled fact, foreclosing alternatives and pre-empting other people's ability to shape what comes, as opposed to using the future while holding it open. means imposing a single expected image onto it and treating that image as settled fact, which quietly forecloses every alternative and pre-empts other people's ability to shape what comes. A government that declares one growth path inevitable is colonising the future; a community that rehearses several possibilities to decide how to act is using it. The same forecast can do either, depending on whether it is held open or closed.

Different purposes, different uses

Because the future can be used for different ends, futures literacy insists that the analyst be clear about which end is in play. Preparing for likely events, planning toward a preferred goal, and opening perception to novelty are distinct activities that call for distinct uses of the future, and confusing them produces bad work. Treating an exercise meant to expand imagination as if it were a prediction contest, or treating a genuine planning decision as if it were a creative game, muddles both. The futures-literate organisation matches the use of the future to the purpose at hand, and knows that the most dangerous move is to let one expected image quietly colonise the rest.

The same forecast can open the future for a purpose or close it as settled fact.

Check your understanding

Answer each from memory. Your results are saved in this browser and count toward your readiness — sign in (account panel above) to keep them across devices.

What best captures Riel Miller's idea of futures literacy?
What does the science of anticipatory systems contribute?
What separates colonising the future from using it?

14 min · Core

Pluralising and Decolonising Futures

The decolonial turn asks the political question the rest of the school implies: whose futures are centred and whose are erased. Dominant foresight has largely been written from the industrialised North and quietly universalises its trajectory. Decolonial and Global-South scholarship insists that many futures exist, that some have been actively suppressed, and that foresight is therefore a contest over legitimacy as much as over evidence.

~4 min

By the end you can

Explain why the future is plural rather than singular in this tradition.
Describe how dominant foresight universalises a particular trajectory.
Recognise decolonising futures as a contest over legitimacy.
Apply a non-partisan, structural reading of who is centred and who pays.

Many futures, not one

The decolonial turn in foresight starts from a claim the rest of the school implies but rarely states: there is no single future for humanity, only many, and the appearance of one is itself a political achievement. Scholars in this tradition, drawing on thinkers such as Arturo Escobar and his idea of the pluriverse, a world in which many worlds fit, argue that the standard image of the future is provincial dressed as universal. When one civilisation's expected trajectory of growth, technology and development is presented as the future, the futures held by others are not merely different; they have been rendered invisible. Pluralising is the first move: insisting that the plural, futures, is the honest word.

How a particular future universalises itself

Dominant foresight has largely been produced in and for the industrialised North, and it carries the assumptions of that origin without announcing them. Development framed as catching up, modernity framed as a single ladder, technology framed as inevitable progress, these quietly install one trajectory as the destination for everyone. The effect is epistemic erasure: ways of knowing and imagining time held in Indigenous, African, Andean and other traditions are treated as folklore or as obstacles to be overcome, rather than as living alternatives. A future that presents itself as neutral and universal is often the most parochial of all, because it has forgotten it was ever a choice.

A contest over legitimacy

This reframes foresight as a contest over legitimacy rather than a competition of forecasts. The question is not only which future is likely but which futures are permitted to count, whose imagination is treated as expertise and whose as superstition. Decolonising futures means widening the circle of who gets to author the future and on what terms, and refusing to let one tradition's expected image quietly colonise the rest, to borrow the previous lesson's phrase. It connects directly to futures literacy: a genuinely futures-literate world is a plural one, in which the capability to imagine and use futures is not monopolised by a single centre.

The non-partisan discipline

A crucial guardrail keeps this from sliding into advocacy. Naming that the Global South bears the costs of futures imagined elsewhere is not the same as romanticising it or enlisting it as an ally in someone's cause. DSI's standing stance holds here with particular force: explain outcomes by structure rather than by anyone's professed morality, and name who pays without adopting their banner. The Global South appears in this analysis as a structural casualty of futures authored in the North, not as a virtuous party in a moral contest, and the erasure cuts in more than one direction. The decolonial reading is therefore analytical before it is political: it exposes the structure by which some futures are centred and others erased, and it insists that a serious analyst account for both the centring and the cost.

Decolonial foresight names the centred future and its cost without adopting a banner.

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Answer each from memory. Your results are saved in this browser and count toward your readiness — sign in (account panel above) to keep them across devices.

Why does the decolonial school insist the future is plural?
What does 'epistemic erasure' describe in this reading?
What keeps decolonial foresight analytical rather than advocacy?

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