Thinking beyond immediate priorities or short-term futures, to imagine longer time horizons, can help reframe priorities in the present. It also involves appreciating macro-history and the fact that things can change very quickly or slowly on both short and long time scales.

Being able to see with a clear view what you can do in the present to enable changes which may help current and future generations. This sense of agency involves ensuring future generations also have agency and can make their own choices and express their own values.

Holding awareness of one’s own cultural positionality and intersectionality while engaging with others to produce intergenerational equity. This entails being reflective of your own values and points of view, which are keys to developing competences necessary for adeptly navigating complex contexts with a diversity of people from different cultures and backgrounds.

This is the ability to empathize across time – past, present, and future – to appreciate the perspectives, needs, and priorities of the dead, the living, and the yet-to-exist.  One has empathy for another person’s situation and acts accordingly.

This focus area involves growing skills for making sense of newness arising from complex systems and innovating in relation to change. It helps people be more inventful, resourceful, and agile in the face of the unknown.

These functions rely on imagining and discussing probable developments or desirable future states when considering choices, setting priorities, and taking action. This focus area targets learning to distinguish between probable and desirable futures, becoming aware of when you are using them, and being willing to switch modes as needed.

Co-producing equitable conditions for the present, near future, and further future is a key focal area. This entails taking actions today which advance equitability in all of its forms and contexts, not only among various generations (living or yet to come), but also on the basis of human rights.