The Discipline of Anticipation Foundations for Futures Literacy 1

• Published in: Transforming the Future pp. 51 - 65
• Main Authors: Miller, Riel, Poli, Roberto, Rossel, Pierre
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2018
• Edition: 1
• ISBN: 9780367855888; 0367855887; 113848587X; 9781138485877
• DOI: 10.4324/9781351048002-3

This chapter discusses the Discipline of Anticipation (DoA) by focusing on the ‘Anticipation’ component, and the ‘Discipline’ component. The DoA provides ideas and tools that can alter and expand the role of anticipation in shaping what humans perceive, including people's capacity to make sense of novelty. This is because the theory and practice of the DoA develops and extends the categories and methods of anticipation that can be used to improve discovery and sense making. The DoA reflects a range of convergent and divergent aspects of the present. As a field of knowledge, the DoA can be sustained and improved through scientific effort. A discipline offers at least three advantages: depth, identity, and legitimacy. The DoA is a discipline precisely because it has its own territory of knowledge. The chapter presents two ways of understanding how the DoA is organized, namely Futures Literacy (FL) and complexity.