Challenging Assumptions

Session 3.3 – Deepen

This session dives deeper into the world of assumptions. This session explores the power dynamics behind assumptions, asking critical questions about who gets to define the future, whose assumptions are seen as legitimate, and whose are excluded from dominant futures thinking. We also see examples of tools to challenge our assumptions.

Dominant Narratives and Assumptions

Assumptions rarely arise in isolation—they sit within larger cultural narratives that define what futures seem imaginable or desirable. These narratives often feel natural or inevitable, but they rest on normative, structural, and political assumptions, shaped by culture, history, and power. The future, as anthropologist Arturo Escobar (2018) notes, is not a neutral space but a contested arena of competing visions and imaginaries, which are instruments of social reproduction.

❗ Not all assumptions are innocent and equal: some are amplified and normalized, while others are ignored or silenced. Dominant narratives concentrate power and narrow futures. Challenging them expands who is seen, heard, and served.

These questions are especially relevant in educational contexts, since education often privileges certain models of teaching, research, and knowledge production. Futures imaginaries influence e.g. which policies get funded, which innovations are pursued, and which knowledge counts in education and research. Futures thinking challenges us to unpack these narratives and explore more inclusive, just, and sustainable alternatives.

Pause and Reflect

Reflection on dominant narratives in business education

  • What is a dominant future narrative in your field?
  • What assumptions underpin it?
  • Whose values or priorities does it reflect?
  • Who define the future? Which voices are excluded?

Assumptions as Instruments of Power

Assumptions often reflect the worldviews of influential actors—political institutions, corporations, global media, academic elites—and can reinforce hierarchies by making certain futures seem inevitable and others unthinkable.

“The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

William Gibson

Assumptions can reproduce privilege by embedding dominant values such as efficiency, profit, and control can be embedded in strategies, educational systems, and futures practice.

Consider who sets the agenda in mainstream futures thinking:

  • corporations promoting innovation for profit
  • western academic institutions defining knowledge standards
  • policy elites prioritizing economic growth and national security

These actors often share assumptions about “progress” that can marginalize for example Indigenous knowledges, alternative cosmologies, or post-capitalist visions.

If dominant imaginaries go unchallenged, we risk recycling the status quo: techno‑fixes for systemic problems, global “solutions” that erase local contexts, or “smart” futures that ignore inequalities.

Decolonial and Plural Futures Thinking

Decolonial thinking seeks to delink from modern/colonial logics that have defined progress, development, and knowledge (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018). In futures thinking, this means creating space for many ways of knowing and imagining—a “pluriverse,” where many worlds are possible.

Futures thinking can help:

  • Surface and challenge dominant assumptions
  • Value alternative cosmologies and epistemologies
  • Create inclusive, contested futures spaces

However, this requires new tools and new ethics: comfort with discomfort, deep listening, and rethinking what “futures” means across cultures and contexts. Through reflection, dialogue, and collaborative inquiry, we can start asking questions that challenge our assumptions.

One can prompt discussions by asking:

  • What would a “pluriverse” of assumptions look like?
  • How do dominant assumptions about the future marginalize certain communities or ways of knowing?
  • What if we take seriously futures imagined by Indigenous communities, feminist thinkers, the Global South, or climate justice movements?

Pause and Reflect

Assumptions embedded in academia
* What power structures shape university curricula, and how do they reflect assumptions about the future of knowledge?
* What changes would foster more inclusive futures thinking in higher education?

Using futures methods to challenge assumptions

We now move from critical reflection to action by applying methods that surface, critique, and disrupt and transform anticipatory assumptions. We will explore some futures tools and methods designed to work with anticipatory assumptions.

Causal Layered Analysis (CLA): Working with and disrupting assumptions

Causal Layered Analysis (CLA), developed by Sohail Inayatullah, is a tool that helps expose and reframe assumptions. It is powerful because it surfaces layers of assumptions that are often hidden under institutional discourse. It can open a different entry point for thinking beyond the expected and imagining alternative futures.

CLA analyzes a situation across four levels to expose and reframe assumptions:

  1. Litany—the surface‑level narrative (e.g., headlines, statistics)
  2. Systemic causes—underlying structures and systems
  3. Worldview—cultural or ideological assumptions beneath the system
  4. Myth/metaphor—deep stories and symbols shaping imagination

Example: A university facing enrollment decline:

“Students aren’t enrolling like they used to” (litany)

CLA helps unpack this: Are tuition models outdated? (system)

Are we assuming all students must follow traditional degree paths? (worldview)

Is our mental image of the student still “young, full‑time, and on campus”? (myth/metaphor)

Learning activity suggestion: Any assumptions around here?

Let’s try looking for assumptions looming everywhere!

Step 1: Choose one source below (or your own) that presents a future vision. It can be a piece of media, government white paper, corporate foresight document, or the like.

Step 2: Scan for embedded assumptions. What is taken for granted?

Step 3: Describe those assumptions and analyze them using CLA.

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Session 3.4 – Try it out!