Who Gets to Imagine the Future? How Futures Games Are Democratizing Tomorrow
- Shermon Cruz
- Jan 23
- 8 min read
Updated: Jan 23
When I created Dreams and Disruptions back in 2019, I had a simple but radical question in mind: What if the very act of imagining the future could be an act of cultural justice?
Over the past five years, I've facilitated more than 250 sessions of this futures game across the globe—from classrooms to community centers, from youth workshops to corporate boardrooms. And in that time, I've witnessed something profound: when we create space for diverse voices to co-create alternative futures, we're not just planning for tomorrow—we're transforming who gets to shape it.
A Note of Thanks: This essay was inspired by and draws significantly from Elaine France's thoughtful academic paper, "Using Futures Games to Support Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy," written for her MA in Identity, Education, and Competences for Democratic Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (2025).
France's work examines how participatory futures game, particularly using Dreams and Disruptions as foresight game, operates at the intersection of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Education for Sustainable Development, offering valuable insights into how futures games can serve as platforms for intercultural dialogue and democratic competence-building.
Her analysis helped me re-articulate dimensions of the game's impact that I had also witnessed in practice. I'm deeply grateful for her rigorous engagement with this work and her contribution to understanding how futures literacy can democratize imagination.
The Problem with "Used Futures"
Here's an uncomfortable truth about the futures industry: for too long, it's been dominated by Western, often corporate, perspectives. When marginalized communities—indigenous peoples, communities of color, youth from the Global South—engage with traditional foresight work, they're often consuming what futurist Sohail Inayatullah (2008) calls "used futures": borrowed visions of tomorrow that reflect someone else's values, assumptions, and worldviews.
This isn't just academically and perceptually problematic. It's a justice issue.
If the future is something we collectively create through the choices we make today, then excluding voices from that imagining process means perpetuating existing power structures into tomorrow. We end up with futures that look suspiciously like the present—just with shinier technology.
Enter: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy
Recently, an academic paper by Elaine France (2025) examined how Dreams and Disruptions operates at the intersection of what educators call Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP) and Education for Sustainable Development. This framework, developed by scholars like Django Paris and H. Samy Alim (2014) and building on Gloria Ladson-Billings' (1995) earlier work on Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Geneva Gay's (2000) Culturally Responsive Pedagogy, flips the traditional educational script.
Instead of treating cultural diversity as something to overcome or assimilate, CSP recognizes that each learner's cultural heritage, language, and lived experience isn't a deficit—it's their superpower.
When we play Dreams and Disruptions, participants don't leave their identities at the door. They bring them to the table. That teenager from an indigenous community? Their ancestral knowledge about sustainable living isn't quaint folklore—it's critical intelligence for imagining resilient futures. For example, that first-generation immigrant navigating multiple cultural worlds? Their adaptability isn't confusion—it's exactly the kind of cognitive flexibility we need for navigating uncertainty.
How the Game Works (And Why It Matters)
The structure of Dreams and Disruptions is deceptively simple:
Choose a real-world problem that matters to your community
Select your parameters: Is this a weird future? A preferred future? Ten years out or a hundred?
Pick your drivers: Social, political, economic, environmental, cultural, ethical, spiritual forces
Choose your leadership type: Who's making the decisions in this future?
Stress-test your future: How might your scenario evolve after a crisis?
Create: Build scenarios, craft artifacts from those futures, tell stories
But here's the magic: by making these choices visible and deliberate, we're teaching a critical skill—the ability to recognize that futures aren't inevitable. They're constructed. And if they're constructed, they can be constructed differently.
We start sessions with what futurist Jim Dator calls the Second Law of Futures (as cited in Voros, 2015): "Any useful statement about the future should at first appear to be ridiculous." This permission to be preposterous, to think beyond the boundaries of what seems "realistic," is liberating. Einstein captured a similar sentiment when he said, "If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it." These principles create what I call “epistemological space” —room for ways of knowing that dominant culture might dismiss.
Then we ask: "Who is in the room but feels unheard?" This isn't performative inclusion. It's a structural intervention that names the power dynamics we're trying to disrupt.
Reflection and Next Steps
One criticism I've heard about futures work is that it's all imagination, no action. But Dreams and Disruptions includes crucial final phases: reflection and next steps. After exploring alternative futures, participants pause to reflect on what they've learned, how their assumptions shifted, and what possibilities emerged that they hadn't considered before.
Then comes the critical move: identifying concrete next steps. What can we do today, this week, this month, to move toward preferred futures or prevent problematic ones? This isn't about creating elaborate five-year plans—it's about connecting vision to action through tangible, achievable steps that participants can own.
This is where "anticipatory democracy" happens—a concept from futurist Alvin Toffler (as cited in Starseed Films, 2025). When communities can see multiple possible futures and understand the decisions that lead to each, they become proactive rather than reactive. They develop what UNESCO calls "Futures Literacy"—the ability to use or make sense of the future to navigate the present.
I've seen this transformation firsthand. Filipino youth who played the game developed such a strong sense of agency that they went on to advocate for climate policy changes in their schools and communities. In France’s case, a team of educators in Athens relied on the scenarios they had developed to overhaul their sustainability-focused curriculum. Corporate teams recognized how their current strategies were perpetuating "used futures" and began seeking more diverse perspectives.
The Risk: Futures Work Without Justice
But here's where I need to be honest: futures methods aren't ideologically neutral. They can just as easily be weaponized to extract knowledge from marginalized communities or to greenwash corporate agendas with the language of "co-creation."
This is why I'm careful about how Dreams and Disruptions is facilitated. We need to actively guard against what researchers Sophie Maraud and Samuel Roturier (2023) call the "extraction" of indigenous and minority knowledge—the unconscious (or conscious) mining of cultural wisdom without reciprocity or respect.
The question I always come back to is: Who benefits from this futures work? If it's only helping corporations optimize their supply chains or governments design better surveillance systems, we've failed. But if it's helping communities articulate their own visions of thriving futures and building pathways to get there? That's transformative.
What 200+ Sessions Have Taught Me
After facilitating Dreams and Disruptions more than 200 times, I've observed some consistent patterns:
Breaking down barriers: When we focus on collaborative futures—creating compelling scenarios, building plausible artifacts—cultural differences become sources of creativity rather than division.
Challenging assumptions: The simple act of imagining alternatives forces participants to confront their own biases about what's "realistic" or "practical"—usually code words for maintaining the status quo.
Developing democratic competences: Players develop critical thinking, empathy, systems thinking, tolerance for ambiguity, collaborative skills, and respect for human rights—all competencies needed for democratic participation in an uncertain world.
Redistributing epistemic authority: The game creates conditions where someone's grandmother's traditional ecological knowledge carries as much weight as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur's tech prediction.
The Right to Imagine
Researchers Yufei Wang and Yongyan Zhu (2025) write: "By including epistemologies from the Global South, we expand not only the content of future imaginaries but also the right to imagine itself."
This is what drives my work with the Center of Engaged Foresight and the Global South Futures Community. It's not just about creating more diverse futures scenarios—though that's important. It's about democratizing the very act of imagination.
Because here's the truth: if you don't see yourself in visions of the future, you're being told, implicitly, that you don't belong there. And if you're not included in imagining tomorrow, you certainly won't be included in building it.
Playing Forward
As we face escalating climate chaos, technological disruption, geopolitical instability, and widening inequality, we need all the imaginative capacity we can get. We need indigenous wisdom about reciprocity with nature. We need youth perspectives unencumbered by decades of "that's not how it's done." We need the creativity of communities who've always had to imagine otherwise because the status quo wasn't built for them.
Dreams and Disruptions is my attempt to create space for those voices. It's not perfect—no single tool could be. But it's a start. An invitation. A practice of what educator Paulo Freire (1970) called "conscientization"—developing critical consciousness about one's place in the world and one's power to change it.
So here's my invitation to you: Who's not in your room? Whose voices are missing from your future-making? What would change if you invited them not just to observe, but to imagine the preposterous, to disrupt, to dream?
The future isn't something that happens to us. It's something we create together—if we have the courage to imagine it differently or perhaps absurdly as Einstein would encourage us and the commitment to share that creative power.
Let's play.
Shermon Cruz is the founder of the Center of Engaged Foresight and the Global South Futures Community. He created the Dreams and Disruptions futures game, which has been played in over 200 sessions worldwide. Connect with him on LinkedIn or visit www.dreamsanddisruptions.com to learn more about bringing futures games to your community.
References
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). Herder and Herder.
France, E. (2025). Using futures games to support culturally sustaining pedagogy. MA Identity, Education, and Competences for Democratic Culture, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. Teachers College Press.
Inayatullah, S. (2008). Six pillars: Futures thinking for transforming. Foresight, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.1108/14636680810855991
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465-491.
Maraud, S., & Roturier, S. (2023). Producing futures for the Arctic: What agency for Indigenous communities in foresight arenas? Futures, 153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2023.103240
Miller, R. (Ed.). (2018). Transforming the future: Anticipation in the 21st century. Routledge & UNESCO.
Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2014). What are we seeking to sustain through culturally sustaining pedagogy? A loving critique forward. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 85-100.
Starseed Films. (2025, September 25). FUTURE SHOCK 1970 BOOK BY Alvin Toffler – Simplified [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/u7XC4_ZwV78
UNESCO. (n.d.). Futures literacy and foresight. Retrieved December 3, 2025, from https://www.unesco.org/en/futures-literacy/about
Voros, J. (2015, December 28). On examining preposterous! futures. The Voroscope. https://thevoroscope.com/2015/12/28/on-examining-preposterous-futures/
Wang, Y., & Zhu, Y. (2025). Unlocking futures literacy: Essential skills for students for an evolving world. Cogent Education, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186X.2025.2588021
Further Reading
Dreams and Disruptions Game
Official Website: https://www.dreamsanddisruptions.com
Learn more about the game, access resources, and explore workshop schedules.
Blogs by Shermon Cruz
Cruz, S. O. (2024, March 10). Beyond the Game: Exploring Future Worlds with Dreams and Disruptions. Medium.https://medium.com/@shermoncruz/beyond-the-game-exploring-future-worlds-with-dreams-and-disruptions-85a34a3e5a11
Reflections on the RSD12 keynote, exploring how Dreams and Disruptions has evolved into a vital tool and community for imagination-based futures thinking since 2019. https://rsdsymposium.org/radical-futures-unleashed/
Cruz, S. O. (2024, November 30). Dreams and Disruptions: A Game-Changing Win at the APF IF Awards for Inclusivity. Medium.https://medium.com/@shermoncruz/dreams-and-disruptions-a-game-changing-win-at-the-apf-if-awards-for-inclusivity-01caed64b8cc
Discussion of how gamification bridges foresight and inclusivity, making futures thinking accessible and democratic, particularly for marginalized communities.
Video Resources
IFTF Foresight Talk - Dreams and Disruptions: Gamification for the Future
Shermon Cruz shares the inner workings of Dreams and Disruptions, incorporating scenario archetypes, time horizons, indigenous drivers of change, and Sarkar's Law of the Social Cycle.
Radical Futures Unleashed: Igniting Your Imagination with Dreams and Disruptions (RSD12)https://youtu.be/4uezFtycDG0
Presentation exploring Dreams and Disruptions as a dynamic foresight platform for creativity and challenging assumptions.
FuturePod Episode 69: Making the Future More Elastic - Shermon Cruz
Podcast exploring Shermon's journey from Political Science to UNESCO Global Futures, discussing Futures Literacy, Causal Layered Analysis, and the Dreams and Disruptions game.
About the Center for Engaged Foresight
Website: https://www.engagedforesight.comThe Center for Engaged Foresight is a strategic foresight and futures innovation hub based in Manila, dedicated to advancing futures literacy through engaged foresight approaches, capacity building, and innovative methodologies like Dreams and Disruptions.
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