Working definition. "Future skills" names the abilities claimed to matter for work that does not exist yet. This canon uses the term so it can be found — and then argues with it: what survives a moving landscape is not a skill but a capacity.
Inherited meaning
The genre is older than the anxiety that currently feeds it. Every generation of technological change compiles a list — twenty-first-century skills, top tens for the fourth industrial revolution, frameworks by the acronym-load. The lists share two properties. They converge on abstractions — creativity, critical thinking, adaptability — because their compilers cannot know the tasks they are preparing anyone for. And they date quickly, because whatever concrete entries they do contain bind to tools with eighteen-month half-lives. A list of future skills is a photograph of present fears.
Meaning in the imagination economy
The distinction that matters: a skill is fitted to a known task landscape; a capacity is what you train when the landscape will not hold still. Operating a lathe is a skill. Saying what you mean at a resolution the work can act on is a capacity — it was worth having before the machines and it binds harder after them, because once execution is abundant, everything downstream waits on the saying.
This canon's answer is three capacities and an engine. Awareness receives the field — what exists, what constrains, what is absent. Direction chooses what should exist within it, and is the one the machines leave undone. Curation arranges what returns so that meaning becomes perceptible. And delegation hands the making over while keeping the answerability — the engine that lets the other three spend their hours where they bind. Direction decomposes further into the five capacities, which are separable and trainable; the GARDEN Loop is the working practice that exercises all of them in order.
How to use the term
Search with it; do not plan with it. When someone asks what they should learn, a list of tools answers this year's job description and expires with it. The honest answer names capacities and a practice — what to train, and the loop that trains it. Use "future skills" to meet the question where it is asked, and "capacities" the moment the real conversation starts.