Futures literacy enables us to become aware of the sources of our hopes and fears, and improves our ability to harness the power of images of the future, to enable us to more fully appreciate the diversity of both the world around us and the choices we make.

Futures literacy rests on the human mental faculty that enables us to imagine. It is a broad competency for understanding how and why humans make use of their capacity to imagine the future, it can be used in many ways, and it pre-exists our ability to walk or talk. It enlarges the field of future studies to include both planning and improvisation. It involves combining a broad palette of planning horizons and methods with what might appear to be a surreal or absurdist imagination, detached from deterministic purposes and methods. It asks us to focus on the theory and practice of anticipatory systems and processes as they are lived, in biological, ecological and evolutionary frameworks.

Futures literacy is available through the discipline of anticipation, which can be trained and refined to establish familiarity with the unfamiliar. The discipline of anticipation is the ability to become aware of assumptions about the future, and mastering it allows us to view uncertainty as a resource, rather than an enemy of planning. By imagining different futures, individuals can become aware of their capacity to shape and invent new anticipatory assumptions, and the act of shifting this ability to anticipate from an unconscious to a conscious state is the start of becoming futures literate.

The goal of fostering futures literacy is to enable people to shape their own imaginations through the dreams and nightmares that arise out of the anticipatory assumptions they adopt in order to describe the future