In a fast-changing world, we may be hesitant to see any contribution that poetry could possibly bring to dealing with modern challenges. At 4CF, will believe that poetry could play a significant role. Gregory Bateson, a renowned biologist, explains: “One reason why poetry is important for finding out about the world is because in poetry a set of relationships get mapped onto a level of diversity in us that we don’t ordinarily have access to. We bring it out in poetry. We can give to each other in poetry the access to a set of relationships in the other person and in the world that we’re not usually conscious of in ourselves. So we need poetry as knowledge about the world and about ourselves, because of this mapping from complexity to complexity” (Bateson 1972).

Inspired by this statement, 4CF, Finland Futures Research Centre, and Climate-KIC organised a 1.5 h workshop at the Learning Futures – Futures of Learning conference. The intention was to discover how long-termism as a theme and poetry as a method can be integrated into processes that support personal and collective futures literacy.