Taxonomy of futures skills – needed?
November 15, 2011 in Uncategorized
To my great surprise I found that, in Martha Nussbaum’s list of human capabilities, the only capability which clearly refers to the future is practical reason. It consists of the capability to understand what is good, and critical reflection of one’s own life as well as it’s planning. (Nussbaum, Martha C. 2000. Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
The other surprise was, that Bloom’s favored taxonomy of skills does not include a single skill clearly oriented towards the future. His division of the skills into three dimensions, the cognitive, the affective and the psychomotor dimensions (knowing/head, feeling/heart and doing/hands), is though useful in characterizing skills concerning futures. In futures literature there has been given lists on futures skills, but I would like to provoke discussion by presenting my own list. The problem is, that because futures need a holistic treatment, all the skills needed in the present are needed also when creating futures images and making them useful for goal-oriented action. The difference is, that the object of work in this case are futures, something which do not yet exist in the physical world, though they do exist in human minds and societal structures. Read the rest of this entry →
