Futures Glossary

The Futures Glossary is a multilingual collaborative collection of key terms frequently used in the futures field. The project emerged from a collective intelligence process involving more than twenty practitioners, scholars, and researchers from diverse disciplinary traditions and cultural contexts. The glossary’s purpose is to make visible the similarities and differences in meaning that arise when futures-related concepts move across languages, cultures, and practices. Each entry in the glossary is the outcome of a comparative process that brings together different linguistic and interpretive perspectives. In this sense, the glossary is not only a compilation of terms, but a space for exploring the role of language in how societies and individuals imagine, discuss, and engage with th…

Anticipation Coming soon Assumption Assumptions are implicit or explicit ideas that are taken for granted. Serving as building blocks of the models or frames that humans use when considering an issue, they influence how we act in the present. Assumptions about the future are usually called anticipatory assumptions. These assumptions can be imagined, although they are often rooted in the implicit or explicit ideas of the past and the present. They are important objects of investigation in the futures field. Complexity Coming soon Foresight Coming soon Imagination Coming soon Probability Probability is a future outcome that exists between the extremes of complete certainty and complete uncertainty: the future one bets their entire life savings on, and the future one thinks will never happen—with a multitude of possibilities in between and around, each of which can be defined as prob(e)able futures. Probability is something statistically likely to happen and frequently carries a mathematical meaning, which suggests a quantifiable outcome that can be calculated, analysed, and predicted with a degree of certainty. Resilience Resilience is the ability of entities and systems to cope with change and resulting adverse effects. This ability can include both anticipatory and responsive processes through which entities and systems can make sense of change and maintain, return to, or develop new ways of operating that are functional. These processes may involve the dynamics of withstanding, absorbing, or modifying change and its effects; adapting to them; self-transformation; or a mix of these dynamics. Developing or cultivating resilience is often a desired outcome of futures projects. Responsibility Responsibility is a state that is involved, explicitly or implicitly, in all futures activities. Today's actions have consequences later that must be considered. Likewise, all statements about responsibility involve the future and vice versa. Relevant responsibility may relate towards oneself, participants, partners, those who are not in the room, etc. In each case, a responsibility of someone for something toward somebody exists. Uncertainty Uncertainty is an inherent and unavoidable characteristic of complex, anticipatory socioeconomic systems that are regularly considered in the futures field. In uncertain contexts, future developments cannot be fully known, predicted, or controlled. In general use, uncertainty is often seen as an unpleasant state, but it is a necessary condition for emergence, novelty, and innovation. Navigating or even embracing uncertainty requires special competences and methodologies.