UNESCO Chair for the Future of Finance

Financial Anticipatory Systems Thinking

The question of value is at the heart of all the major challenges we face today. While the notions of values and purpose are increasingly at the heart of our societal and environmental challenges. We believe that what we are able to see and do in the world, both individually and collectively, depends on gaining a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the future.

Developed over a decade ago by UNESCO, Futures Literacy is the capability to consciously « use the future », rather than just a tool to control it. At École des Ponts Business School, we have decided to leverage the methodology designed by Riel Miller and his team at UNESCO. We are part of a network of researchers and educators dedicated to changing the way we think about the future and positively impacting our world.

All you need to know about the Chair in 2'50

Interested in shaping the future of Finance? Contact us!

Top 3 reasons to support and join the UNESCO Chair for the Future of Finance

1. Contribute to addressing the major challenges of our times

Our (eco)system has reached its limits. And if the system is to endure, we must somehow reinvent it. Our goal is to develop our ability to better understand the structural and existential challenges the system is facing today – environment, demography, technology, inequalities, globalization, etc. And as a cardinal point, the question of value and how it translates into our systems of exchange, planning, risk management, and our capacity to imagine and therefore create an emerging and novel future.

2. Develop your organization’s capability to “use” the future

By contributing to the development of Futures Literacy within your organization, the Chair contributes directly to your ability to transform emergence into opportunity and performance. The Chair allows your teams to benefit from a solid and proven methodology to become fully “future-prepared” using the 2 pillars of future studies: planning and emergence.

3. Learn and innovate through Futures Literacy Labs (FLL)

These are ‘living labs’ that use action-learning to rapidly build skills and insights from a more advanced appreciation of the attributes and role of the future. FLLs are an effective process of collective intelligence to discover and examine the elements that shape and limit our ability to imagine the future – our anticipatory assumptions. FLLs provide participants and their organizations with the power of the futures we imagine, to influence what we see and do in the present.

Download our presentation

Click here to download the presentation in French

Discover our initiatives to open new routes for the Banking and Insurance sectors

In the fall of 2019, with our partners, we supported two parallel and complementary initiatives in futures literacy in the financial sector:

A Futures Literacy Lab leading up to the 47th Global Congress on Banking Transformation that took place in Paris on 17 and 18 October 2019;
A Futures Literacy Lab as part of Climate Finance Week Ireland, which took place in Dublin from 4 to 8 November 2019.

What did we learn about Finance and financial inclusion?

We invite you to download this article by Martin Calnan, our Director of Executive Education, and Riyong Kim, Director of Decision Metrics and Finance at EIT Climate-KIC:

Call for PartnersUNESCO Chair on Financial Anticipatory Thinking Systems

Our objectives are ambitious. We want to identify and investigate all the assumptions that condition the way we think about value. We need to understand how our financial system impacts and is impacted by each category of economic agents. We mean to explore new paradigms and initiate ground-breaking innovations.

We are looking for partners willing to invest with us in this research and make a positive impact on finance and society.

Interested? Watch Martin Calnan – who is leading this initiative at our business school – introducing the Chair on Financial Anticipatory Thinking Systems at the 47th Congress on Banking Transformation. And use the button below the video to contact Martin and share your interest.