We use the future everyday: when we plan what to eat for dinner, when we ruminate on life after COVID, when we demand action on carbon emissions and racist policing. But when we stop to think about the future itself, rather than what we want to happen in it, something quite profound can begin to happen. Karl Popper spoke of the ‘poverty of the imagination’, whereby fallacies of determinism begin to colonise our understandings of what is possible, and our hopes and fears begin to obscure the emergent, unpredictable nature of our complex world. As Riel Miller has said: “We betray the potential of our imagination to illuminate and invent the present if we cannot be liberated from the tyranny of using-the-future to win.” Our heterodox world of resistance has a host of compelling images and narratives of the future encoded into it, but how often do we make all of their assumptions explicit, play with them, and test and nurture our resilience by troubling them? This workshop has three stages, following the Futures Literacy Novelty Laboratory model (FLL-N): Reveal, Reframe, and Rethink. Each stage is carefully designed to guide participants from utopia, into uncertainty, and back again, availing of co-creative heuristics from Critical Futures Studies to distil the myths of our ‘anticipatory assumptions’, and to point the way to a ‘decolonisation of the future’, so that life is lived values-first in the present, rather than in anguish over the plainly unforeseeable. We will take as our subject matter on this journey: ‘futures of the regenerative economy’