Our seemingly tumultuous present was perhaps once considered somebody’s ‘future’. At this moment, we hold social, cultural, political, and economic concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) applications and the associated narratives of technological peril, tensions over governance and regulation, and implications for dignity and job displacement. Increasing global-scale energy demands and environmental costs are unfolding against a backdrop of climate crisis, rising inequality, economic and geopolitical uncertainty, and supply chain dependencies and disruptions.
There is ongoing attention surrounding escalating living costs, stagnant productivity growth, media polarisation, algorithmic amplification, and ongoing hybrid warfare and sovereignty conflicts. These challenges have varying degrees of impact—some inform our daily experiences, while others subtly influence broader societal and environmental structures including national security, democratic stability and economic resilience.
Where did these futures come from? People and organisations are all constantly confronted with choices in the present. The outcomes of these choices are futures; futures made by who is making those choices and for whom the choices are made. How might we best approach the choices we make today to better inform the future of tomorrow? How might we think about, describe, and visualise our futures and enact them in the present?
Futures research, futures studies, futuring, fore- sight, and strategic forecasting (broadly defined), and their associated methods, attempt to do this. They comprise a constellation of pre-histories, cultural interpretations and applications that are sometimes effective, sometimes unproductive, and sometimes even exclusionary and harmful.
As a complementary way in, we offer Cybernetic Futures as a primer through a series of papers titled Feedforward: A Guide to Creating Hopeful Futures. This initiative, underpinned by a cybernetic to enhance the capability to act, aims to foster skills for an anticipatory outlook, inspired by cybernetic principles, methods, tools, and examples. We propose that Cybernetics Futures offers a way to think about futures as a system.
Our work is indelibly informed by Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country (land, living, sky, water and kin) on which the ANU School of Cybernetics is situated in Kambri (Canberra). This is a place that has always been somewhere people meet, learn and build hopeful futures informed by Country. And we also acknowledge Country across the continent where we have been fortunate to travel to and learn from.
By sharing these explorations, we aim to equip decision makers, industry leaders, researchers, and community advocates with new tools and knowledge they can deploy in their own contexts.
Each Feedforward paper serves as an invitation.
Cybernetic Futures#
We opened this introductory Feedforward paper with a reflective epigraph from a systems-thinking founder, Kenneth E. Boulding, who said when contemplating the future: “prepared to be surprised”. In the 1960s and subsequent decades, Boulding and his sociologist wife, Elise Boulding, dedicated their lives as activist scholars helping people to see more nuanced and sophisticated images of the world and what could be.
Elise Boulding asked, “If negative imagery about a feared future can produce positive action, what will positive imagery about a desired future produce?”.
The Bouldings encouraged the development of new research methods and theoretical approaches focused on dealing with the complexity of global social systems.
At the ANU School of Cybernetics, we are tapping into the futures orientation of cybernetics, imagining and creating hopeful futures to address the evolving challenges of the 21st century. Cybernetic Futures offers us generative and critical ways of thinking and doing to navigate future actions, informed by the past, by governing in the present, for the hopeful re/imagination of systems.
Why Cybernetics#
Cybernetics has many origins over time and place. We have been attentive to the Macy Conferences on cybernetics that took place in New York at a time of upheaval, change and hope post-World War II. These discussions brought together a range of thinkers from across the disciplinary spectrum, “where every participant was open to learning from others, where they held their knowledge lightly, and permitted it to be shaped by others’ expertise”. The deliberate disciplinary diversity of the people involved helped cultivate a shared curiosity to apply knowledge-building through action. We believe this approach serves us well as we reimagine our futures in our present.
Since its founding, the ANU School of Cybernetics has produced various outputs that link hidden histories, contemporary uncertainty, and futures. These include The New Cybernetics: Lessons from the Last Great Redesign (2020) and Australian Cybernetic: A Point Through Time (2024). We have sought to (a) introduce a cybernetic perspective to leadership in Redefining Leadership in the 21st Century: (2022), (b) understand cybernetic and potential future systems with Custodians & Midwives: The Library of the Future (2022), Backbones and Blueprints: Cybernetic Approaches to the Metaverse (2023) and (c) innovate new, lifelong ways of connecting, learning, making, and instigating positive systems change through ANU School of Cybernetics education and engagement initiatives. Building on this work, we are also introducing a new body of futures-focused knowledge and practice in academic settings through our research projects, workshops, symposia, and residencies, as well as through the design and delivery of a research-informed and internationally and nationally recognised education initiatives, including a Master’s program, PhD program and the Learning Experiences program.
These partnerships and conversations align to an attitude and an application of cybernetics that British historian Andrew Pickering describes as “performative experimentation – trying things out to find out how the world will respond, and then responding to that – a kind of looping and spiralling back and forth I call a dance of agency”.
Cybernetic Futures embodies the robust reflexivity that Pickering describes, where we combine critical thinking with critical doing.