The Three Tomorrows of Postnormal Times

Highlights

• A new and innovative method for futures research and foresight practitioners.

• Further enhancement and development of postnormal times theory.

• Development of new postnormal times concepts—Creep, Lag, and Burst.

• Analysis and design of varieties of ignorance and uncertainty.

• Introduction of the Menagerie of postnormal potentialities.

Abstract

The Three Tomorrows of Postnormal Times is a new method for foresight and futures researchers and practitioners. Designed and developed to explore the complexity, chaos, and contradictions of postnormal times and what might come next, the three tomorrows method uses a multi-layered approach to situate and analyze trends, emerging issues, and imaginings of the future(s), including complex, horizonspecific forecasts. In this paper, we provide a theoretical overview of the key concepts underlying our approach, including the three forms of ignorance and uncertainty as well as the Menagerie of postnormal potentialities, which we developed as a mechanism for challenging deeply held convictions, illuminating entrenched contradictions, and enlivening novel considerations.

Introduction

‘Everything changes and nothing stands still’. So said Heraclitus, as reported by Plato in Cratylus(402a), over two millennia ago (Sedley, 2003). But nowadays everything is changing at an accelerating pace on a variety of scales: social, political, cultural, technological, including geologic, as the emergence of the notion of the Anthropocene (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000) or the more radical concept of the Technopocene (Berthon & Donnellan, 2011; Sweeney, 2014) suggests. On a smaller, yet interrelated, scale, the very idea of what is the human body and what it means to be human is changing in ways seemingly beyond our control and capacity to comprehend the implications for what might lie ahead. As Enriquez and Gullans argue in Evolving Ourselves, we are intentionally and unintentionally changing the very conditions of possibility for evolution. While we have always adapted our being-in-the-world through artefacts, tools, and prosthetics, the compounded effects of our all-too-modern lives have ushered in an era of ‘unnatural selection’ and ‘non-random mutation’ (Enriquez & Gullans, 2015). Globally, rates of obesity in humans nearly doubled from 1980 to 2014 (World Health Organization, 2015). In the U.S. alone, the rate of autism rose by 119 percent from 2001 to 2010 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2015).

Moreover, the changes we are facing today are not incremental and isolated but occur simultaneously and are connected and interconnected. Often when these changes come together they create a sense of crisis, as noted by the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon. ‘The world’, he declared at the UN General Assembly in 2014, was ‘living in an era of unprecedented level of crises’ (Borger, 2014). The world faced a daunting list of crises – which ought to be read chaotic behavior – in 2014: Ebola, ISIS, Central African Republic, Gaza, Iraq, Myanmar, South Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, financial instability within the EU, and the deteriorating relationship between Russia and the West, in addition to the long-standing, and decidedly unaddressed, problems of climate change. What does it all mean?

All of the above adds up to a snap shot of our lives in postnormal times (Sardar, 2010, Sardar, 2015). In light of such far-reaching, rapid, and simultaneous changes – a major characteristic of postnormal times (hereafter PNT) – an important new question arises for futurists and foresight researchers and practitioners: are existing methods able to cope with futures that are intrinsically complex, chaotic, contradictory, uncertain, and rapidly collapsing in and upon themselves? Traditionally, Futures Studies deals with plurality of alternative futures by differentiating between plausible, probable, possible, and preferable futures (Henchey, 1978, p. 26). But what is probable in a world where uncertainty and chaos is the norm? What is plausible in futures dominated by contradictions? Are our conventional methods, such as forecasting, scenarios, and modeling fit for purpose in PNT? Do scenarios about future(s) take note of changing change? Do existing scenario modeling methods adequately allow for the requisite pluralism and polylogues, including amongst humans, non- and, un-humans, needed to confront PNT? How do we produce viable policies to navigate PNT? Or, to put it another way, do our stories about the future(s) tell us something meaningful that can generate policies and strategies to cope with complexity, uncertainty and chaotic behavior?

This paper provides a theoretical overview of the concepts comprising a novel method (The Three Tomorrows of Postnormal Times) we have developed to address the above queries. In this work, we outline what we believe is a pressing need for our methodological framework and how our approach fits into the field of Futures Studies. As this research builds off established and related concepts, we believe both casual and expert readers will benefit from reviewing the core readings of PNT theory (Sardar, 2010, Sardar, 2015). Ultimately, this paper represents the first in a series of research articles that will feature case studies showing the applicability of our method.