The Double Hexagon

Run it as two passes. First plot the communal events along a labelled timeline — global recessions, local policy shifts, a pandemic, a national milestone. Then ask everyone to add personal milestones alongside — a job change, a child born, a move, a loss.

The conversation that surfaces between the two is the artifact. Why did that year matter to you and not me? Whose history is the room implicitly using as the default? Especially useful at the start of any longer engagement to ground a mixed group, and a quiet way to make difference visible before the futures work begins.

Act as a workshop facilitator. I'm preparing a "shared histories /
shared futures" timeline for a group based in <REGION OR COMMUNITY>,
covering the last <N> years. List 10–15 communal events likely to
anchor the group's recent past — policy shifts, crises, milestones.
For each, suggest one question I could ask the group to surface why
that year mattered differently for different people in the room.

Drawing on Inayatullah, S. (2008). "Six Pillars: futures thinking for transforming." Foresight, 10(1), 4–21 — Pillar 1 (Mapping), which uses timeline exercises to ground a group in shared past before projecting forward.

Peter Hayward's adaptation of Fred Polak's work on images of the future. Surfaces where a group's sense of agency actually sits, before strategy conversations get abstract. If you can, run it twice across the engagement — once now, once after scenarios — and watch how positions move. The debrief is the point; the positioning is just a way in.

For the focal concern <YOUR TOPIC> in <YEAR>, voice four people
standing at different positions on Polak's two axes — (i) the future
getting better vs worse, (ii) I can influence it vs I can't. One
paragraph per position, spoken in first person, grounded in the lived
experience that shapes that stance. The aim is to seed a debrief, not
to rank the stances.

Hayward, P., & Candy, S. (2017). "The Polak Game, Or: Where Do You Stand?" Journal of Futures Studies, 22(2), 5–14. Adapts Polak, F. (1961). The Image of the Future.

Joseph Voros's popularisation of an earlier visual cone (Hancock & Bezold) building on Henchey's typology. The forbidden ring tends to be the most generative — it surfaces the futures the group treats as unspeakable, which is usually where the most interesting design space lives.

Done early, this makes the room's assumptions visible before the question is even named — which is the kind of thing that's much harder to surface later.

For <YOUR TOPIC> in <YEAR>, populate the Voros futures cone with
three entries per ring:
- Projected — extrapolation of today's trajectory
- Probable — what most people expect
- Plausible — consistent with known drivers but not assumed
- Possible — anything not ruled out by physics
- Preposterous / Forbidden — futures the field treats as unspeakable
For each entry, flag the assumption that moves it inward or outward.

Voros, J. (2003). "A generic foresight process framework." Foresight, 5(3), 10–21. Visual cone from Hancock, T., & Bezold, C. (1994); typology from Henchey, N. (1978).

A good focal question is specific enough to invite signals but loose enough to be surprised by them. Test it by asking whether two people in the room would interpret it the same way — if not, sharpen. Beware questions phrased as binaries ("will X happen?") since they tend to collapse the space the rest of the work is trying to open.

Help me sharpen a focal question for futures work.
Topic: <YOUR TOPIC>
Timeframe: <YEAR>
Audience / decision-maker: <WHO>
Draft 5 candidate questions of the form "What might X look like in
Y?" — each opening a different angle (system, lived experience,
governance, infrastructure, relations). For each, flag whether two
readers would interpret it the same way, and whether it secretly
collapses into a yes/no.

Generic practice across foresight programmes; framing techniques are common in strategic and design briefs.

Walk the group through the seven prompts in relation to the focal concern. Phrase each as a question for the specific topic and timeframe:

• K — Keep. What should be kept going for Topic Y in Year X?
• A — Away with. What should be done away with?
• N — Never. What futures do we never want to go to?
• C — Challenging. What issues might be faced along the way?
• I — Important. What's personally at stake for the team — the actual skin in the game?
• L — Learn. What might the organisation (or community) learn from this?
• S — Strengthen. What present habits, practices, or relationships can be strengthened?

The point isn't to be exhaustive on any one prompt. It's to surface the obvious — the things everyone already half-knows but hasn't said out loud — so that scanning, sense-making, and scenarios have something to push against rather than starting from a blank page.

Walk through the KANCILS prompts for the focal concern <YOUR TOPIC>
in <YEAR>. Give 3–5 candidate answers under each:
- Keep — what should be kept going
- Away — what should be done away with
- Never — futures we never want to reach
- Challenging — issues likely to be faced along the way
- Important — what's personally at stake for the team
- Learn — what the organisation or community might learn
- Strengthen — present habits or relationships worth strengthening
Keep the answers concrete, not aspirational.

Choo, E. (2022, June 16). "Grounding the present for the future — KANCIL." Scalable Analysis / Open Source Futures (Medium).

Originally a Toyota quality tool. In a futures setting it's used to surface the deeper driver behind a stated concern. Don't be precious about hitting exactly five — the point is to keep going past the first satisfying answer.

Apply the 5 Whys to this problem: <STATED PROBLEM>.
Ask "why?" five times, each time digging into the previous answer.
Then state, in one sentence, how the fifth-why problem differs from
the surface one — and suggest one reframe that the deeper driver
invites.

Originated by Sakichi Toyoda; formalised in Ohno, T. (1988). Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production. Productivity Press (Japanese original 1978).

From Sohail Inayatullah. The four are usually drawn as a stack or iceberg, but we'd suggest treating them as connected nodes — ideas move between them with some loose causal linkage rather than living on one tier. Start anywhere and draw connections where you see them.

The myth/metaphor node is the hardest to articulate and often the most useful — it's where reframes come from. If a workshop only reaches litany and structures, it's worth running again.

Run a Causal Layered Analysis on <YOUR TOPIC>. Give 3–5 entries at
each layer:
- Litany — headlines, statistics, surface accounts
- Systems / Structures — institutions, policies, incentives holding
  the litany in place
- Worldviews — assumptions, paradigms, ideologies underneath
- Myth / Metaphor — the deep stories the issue lives inside
Then propose two reframes by altering the myth, tracing what shifts
upward through the other layers.

Inayatullah, S. (1998). "Causal layered analysis: Poststructuralism as method." Futures, 30(8), 815–829.

STEEP (sometimes PESTLE / STEEPLE) is a sorting taxonomy, not a research method. The point isn't to have neat categories but to notice gaps — if your scan has 40 Technological signals and 2 Social, that imbalance is itself a finding.

The +++ matters because most interesting signals don't sit cleanly in one bucket. Adding optional dimensions for your question (Religious, Generational, Infrastructural) usually serves better than forcing fits.

For the focal concern <YOUR TOPIC> in <YEAR>, list 5 emerging
trends or signals under each STEEP+++ category — Social,
Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political — plus one extra
dimension that matters here (Legal, Values, Demographic,
Infrastructural, etc). Flag signals that sit across more than one
bucket, and note which buckets feel over- or under-represented.

Aguilar, F. J. (1967). Scanning the Business Environment. Macmillan. (Introduced as "ETPS"; later expanded into PEST, PESTLE, and STEEP variants.)

The discipline is in sources. Pick three or four feeds outside your default — trade journals from adjacent fields, regional newsletters from places you don't normally read, fiction, even subreddits. A good scanner notices what hasn't been named yet.

Capture lightly. A line, a link, a date. Heavy templates kill scanning practices faster than anything else.

Act as a horizon scanner for <YOUR TOPIC>. Surface 10 weak signals
or edge stories from outside the usual feed — adjacent industries,
regional sources, fiction, subcultures. For each, give: a one-line
description, where I'd plausibly read about it, and what it might be
an early indicator of. Favour the not-yet-named over headline news.

UK Government Office for Science (c. 2004). Foresight Horizon Scanning Centre Guidelines. (Established the contemporary practice as a formal foresight method; widely adopted by the OECD, Singapore Centre for Strategic Futures, and others.)

Bill Sharpe's framing. Both an analytical and a generative tool — you can use it to map signals, or to surface disagreement. People often disagree about whether something is H1, H2, or H3, and that disagreement is the point.

Apply the Three Horizons framing to <YOUR TOPIC>.
- H1 — today's dominant pattern, and the signs it's fading
- H3 — the emerging future glimpsed in fringe signals, and how it
  might grow
- H2 — the disruptions, tensions, and transitional innovations between
Give 4–6 items per horizon. Then flag the items most likely to be
disputed between people who'd call them H1 vs H2 vs H3 — that
disagreement is the point.

Sharpe, B. (2013). Three Horizons: The Patterning of Hope. Triarchy Press. Developed with the International Futures Forum (IFF).

Different from mind-mapping — concept maps have labelled relationships on the lines, not just connected nodes. Forces you to be explicit about how things relate, which surfaces hidden assumptions.

Take these signals about <YOUR TOPIC>:
<PASTE SIGNAL LIST>
Cluster them into 4–6 themes. For each pair of related themes, write
a labelled relationship — a short verb phrase that names how one acts
on the other (e.g. "reinforces", "constrains", "displaces"). Output
as a list of theme nodes and a list of labelled edges, ready to draw.

Novak, J. D., & Gowin, D. B. (1984). Learning How to Learn. Cambridge University Press. (Method developed by Novak at Cornell, 1970s.)

From Jerome Glenn. The second and third rings are where the interesting stuff is — first-order consequences tend to be obvious. Don't try to be exhaustive; the value is in following one or two chains far enough to surprise yourself.

Run a Futures Wheel from this driver: <DRIVER>, in the context of
<YOUR TOPIC>. Give:
- 5 first-order consequences (direct effects)
- For 2 of those, 3 second-order consequences each
- For 1 of those second-order, 2 third-order consequences
Pursue depth over breadth — the interesting findings sit 2–3 rings
out, not at the centre.

Glenn, J. C. (1972). "Futurizing Teaching vs. Futures Course." Social Science Record, Syracuse University, 9(3), 26–29. (Invented 1971.)

A causal loop diagram is one specific systems tool — arrows between variables with + or − labels, loops marked as reinforcing (R) or balancing (B). Donella Meadows's leverage points list is the natural companion.

Be wary of over-modelling. The diagram is a thinking aid, not a deliverable.

Build a causal loop diagram for <YOUR TOPIC>. Identify 8–12
variables. For each connection, give polarity (+ or −). Name each
closed loop as reinforcing (R) or balancing (B). Output as:
1. Variables
2. Edges with polarity
3. Named loops, each with a one-sentence story
Finally, flag 2–3 candidate leverage points using Meadows's hierarchy.

Forrester, J. W. (1961). Industrial Dynamics. MIT Press. Meadows, D. H. (1999). "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System" (expanded in Thinking in Systems: A Primer, 2008).

Sometimes called the GBN / Schwartz method. The hard work is choosing the two axes — they should be drivers where the direction is genuinely uncertain, not just "good vs bad" thinly disguised. Each of the four worlds should feel coherent and surprising on its own.

For <YOUR TOPIC> in <YEAR>, propose three candidate pairs of
critical uncertainties — drivers where the direction is genuinely
unknown, not just good vs bad. For the strongest pair, build the 2×2
matrix: name each of the four worlds with a 2–4 word evocative title,
plus a 2–3 sentence sketch of what life there looks like. Each world
should hold a real contradiction.

Schwartz, P. (1991). The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World. Doubleday. Method developed at Royal Dutch Shell (Pierre Wack) and Global Business Network (GBN).

Dator argues these four roughly cover the space of how futures get talked about. Each archetype has its own internal logic — continued growth assumes the present pattern keeps scaling; collapse assumes something breaks; discipline assumes constraints get tighter and accepted; transformation assumes a qualitative shift in what counts.

For <YOUR TOPIC> in <YEAR>, sketch one scenario under each of
Dator's four archetypes:
- Continued Growth — the present pattern keeps scaling
- Collapse — something fundamental breaks
- Discipline — constraints tighten and are accepted
- Transformation — a qualitative shift in what counts
Each scenario in ~4 sentences: what's normal, what's contested, who
wins, who loses. Avoid cliché caricatures of each archetype.

Dator, J. (2009). "Alternative Futures at the Manoa School." Journal of Futures Studies, 14(2), 1–18. (Refined over decades at the University of Hawaii.)

Two tests for a scenario worth keeping: (1) is there a contradiction or tension inside the world — if it's all good or all bad, you've written a poster, not a scenario; (2) does a non-expert reader come out feeling something — curiosity, unease, recognition.

Expand this scenario sketch into a 1–2 page narrative set in <YEAR>:
<SCENARIO SKETCH>
Anchor it in one inhabitant's day. Include at least one internal
contradiction (the world is not all good or all bad) and one sensory
detail that doesn't exist today. Show texture rather than explaining
the system. End on a moment, not a conclusion.

Kahn, H., & Wiener, A. J. (1967). The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years. Macmillan. (Established the narrative scenario as a forecasting form at RAND / Hudson Institute.)

The aim isn't to pick the "best" scenario — it's to find robust moves that pay off across more than one. If nothing in your strategy survives, that's itself a finding worth taking back.

Take this current strategy or plan: <PLAN>.
Run it against each of these scenarios:
- <SCENARIO 1>
- <SCENARIO 2>
- <SCENARIO 3>
- <SCENARIO 4>
For each scenario, name: what survives, what breaks, what becomes
irrelevant, what new move emerges. Then identify the 1–2 robust moves
that hold up across more than one world.

van der Heijden, K. (1996). Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation. John Wiley & Sons. (Wind-tunnelling formalised from Royal Dutch Shell scenario practice.)

Distinct from forecasting. Forecasting projects forward from now; backcasting reasons backward from a chosen end-state. The signposts (intermediate markers) are the actionable output — they tell you what to watch for or work toward in the present.

The preferred future in <YEAR> is: <DESCRIBE PREFERRED FUTURE>.
Work backward in steps.
- Year −1: what had to be true a year before?
- Year −5: what had to be true five years before?
- Year −10: what had to be true ten years before?
For each step, give: 3 conditions in place, 2 signposts noticeable
from today, and 1 actor who had to move first.

Robinson, J. B. (1982). "Energy backcasting: A proposed method for policy analysis." Energy Policy, 10(4), 337–344. See also Holmberg, J., & Robèrt, K.-H. (2000) and the Natural Step framework.

A test of whether a scenario is liveable, not just describable. If you can't get past breakfast without making something up, the scenario is underspecified.

Useful to write from at least two different inhabitants — power doesn't sit the same way everywhere in a world, and the contrast often reveals more than the writing itself.

Write a single day in the life of an inhabitant of this world:
<WORLD DESCRIPTION>
Choose a specific person — name, age, role. Walk through morning,
midday, evening. What do they make, who do they care for, what do
they queue for, what do they avoid? Include small frictions and small
joys. Don't explain the world; let it surface through what's mundane
to them.

Borrowed from user-centred design (Cooper, A. (1999). The Inmates Are Running the Asylum) and adapted for speculative scenarios via Johnson, B. D. (2011). Science Fiction Prototyping. Morgan & Claypool.

Various canvases exist (Superflux's, IFTF's, others). Pick or adapt one. The taboos cell is usually the most useful — every world has things it can't talk about, and naming them sharpens its distinctness.

Fill in a worldbuilding canvas for this scenario:
<WORLD DESCRIPTION>
Cover each cell:
- Governance — who decides, how
- Economy — what's valued, what's traded
- Infrastructure — what's built, what's broken
- Rituals — daily and seasonal practices
- Taboos — what cannot be said or done
- Language — the new words; the old ones that drifted
Keep the cells internally consistent. The taboos cell is the test.

Zaidi, L. (2017). "Minimum Viable Worldbuilding" framework. Building on the worldbuilding practice of Alex McDowell (USC World Building Media Lab).

A creativity heuristic, not a futures method per se. Useful in worldbuilding when you have an object from today (a vending machine, a passport, a payslip) and want to ask what it becomes in a different world.

Apply SCAMPER to this object or practice from today: <OBJECT>,
imagining it inside this future world: <WORLD>. For each prompt, give
one variant:
- Substitute (a material, role, audience)
- Combine (with another object or practice)
- Adapt (borrow from somewhere it doesn't belong)
- Modify (scale, intensity, rhythm)
- Put to other use
- Eliminate (remove the obvious part)
- Reverse (flow, actor, or purpose)

Eberle, B. (1971). SCAMPER: Games for Imagination Development. D.O.K. Publishers. Adapted from Osborn, A. F. (1953). Applied Imagination.

Especially useful for service or interaction questions inside a scenario — what does it feel like to queue for this, to ask for help, to be turned away? The point isn't theatre quality; it's the noticing.

We're bodystorming a scene inside this world:
<WORLD DESCRIPTION>
The scene is: <SITUATION — e.g. queuing for X, asking for help, being
turned away, ending a relationship>.
Walk me through it as an 8–12 beat embodied rehearsal — each beat one
move or one line of dialogue. Note where a body would hesitate, where
it would freeze, where it would lean in. Capture what the head would
have missed.

Coined by Colin Burns at IDEO: Burns, C., Dishman, E., Verplank, W., & Lassiter, B. (1994). "Actors, Hairdos & Videotape — Informance Design." CHI '94 Conference Companion. Later formalised in Buchenau, M., & Fulton Suri, J. (2000), Experience Prototyping.

A low-stakes generator. Especially good for breaking out of an analytical headspace and getting into making mode. Use the resulting things as seeds — most won't survive, one or two might be worth developing.

Draw me a Thing from the Future using these four cards:
- Arc — Growth / Collapse / Discipline / Transformation
- Terrain — e.g. school, clinic, kitchen, temple, transit, courtroom
- Object — e.g. document, garment, toy, signage, container, ritual
- Mood — e.g. tender, brittle, vindictive, casual, reverent, dazed
Fill in any blanks. Output a 4–6 sentence description of the artifact
as if catalogued in a museum: what it is, who used it, what it
implies about its world.

Candy, S., & Watson, J. (2014). The Thing From The Future (card game). Situation Lab.

Sometimes called a diegetic prototype — film-theory shorthand for an object that belongs inside the story-world rather than commenting on it from outside. The aim is plausibility, not polish. Mundane objects (a receipt, an SMS screenshot, a parking ticket) often work better than spectacle, because they meet the viewer at eye level rather than asking to be admired.

I want to make one diegetic artifact from this world:
<WORLD DESCRIPTION>
Suggest 3 candidate objects of different kinds — a piece of
packaging, a printed form, a notification screen, a poster, a parking
ticket, a receipt. For each: who issued it, what it's for, what
mundane details would make it convincing without explaining the
world. Mundane beats spectacle.

Kirby, D. (2010). "The future is now: Diegetic prototypes and the role of popular films in generating real-world technological development." Social Studies of Science, 40(1), 41–70.

Julian Bleecker / Near Future Laboratory framing. The artifact reads as if it's already real; the context tells you how it got there. Pairs well with experience prototypes.

Write a design fiction set in this world:
<WORLD DESCRIPTION>
Format: <NEWS CLIPPING / LEAKED MEMO / PRODUCT REVIEW / MANUAL PAGE /
SUPPORT-LINE TRANSCRIPT>.
Keep it 250–400 words. The artifact should read as if already real —
voice, masthead, byline, dateline, conventions of the form. Don't
explain the world from outside; let context leak through tone,
references, and the banalities of the form.

Bleecker, J. (2009). Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction. Near Future Laboratory. See also Sterling, B. (2005). Shaping Things. MIT Press.

Often the most challenging step because it forces the world to be governable, not just imaginable. Useful even when the speculation isn't policy-focused — every artifact has an implicit governance behind it.

This artifact exists in <YEAR>: <ARTIFACT DESCRIPTION>.
Draft the legislation, regulation, or institutional rule that had to
be in place for it to exist. Output as:
1. A one-line title for the instrument
2. The relevant clauses, in plausible policy register
3. The actors who pushed it through (and who lost)
4. The political compromise embedded in it
Treat the world as governable, not just imaginable.

Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT Press. Extended into policy practice by Anab Jain / Superflux (e.g. Mitigation of Shock, 2017).

The participant is the instrument. The aim is to surface reactions that you couldn't have predicted from inside the team. Capture verbatim quotes — they tend to be the most useful artifact afterwards.

Help me script a low-fi experience prototype for this artifact in
this world: <ARTIFACT + WORLD>.
Output:
1. The setup — room, props, briefing in under 60 seconds
2. The walkthrough — a 6–10 beat sequence the participant moves through
3. Moments to watch for — hesitations, requests for clarification,
   refusals
Verbatim quotes are the prize; design the prototype to provoke them.

Buchenau, M., & Fulton Suri, J. (2000). "Experience Prototyping." DIS '00: Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. ACM, pp. 424–433.

Borrows from service design. Useful when the speculation isn't a single object but a relationship or a system — applying for something, being granted something, losing access to something.

Map a service journey through this world: <WORLD>, for this user
task: <TASK — e.g. applying for X, being granted Y, losing access to
Z>.
Output as 5–8 touchpoints. For each, give: channel, action, what the
user is feeling, what's invisible to them. Flag where the journey is
likely to break and where unexpected emotion shows up.

Stickdorn, M., & Schneider, J. (2010). This Is Service Design Thinking: Basics, Tools, Cases. BIS Publishers.

The discipline is to make it about noticing, not deciding. Decisions can come later. The most useful debrief outputs are the disagreements that surface and are left held, not resolved.

I just ran <EXERCISE — e.g. a scenario walk-through, an experience
prototype> with <N> participants. Generate a debrief structure: 5–7
prompts for a round-robin where each person speaks once. The prompts
should invite noticing, not deciding — what felt true, what
surprised, what they resist. End with one prompt that surfaces a
disagreement worth holding rather than resolving.

Candy, S., & Dunagan, J. (2017). "Designing an Experiential Scenario: The People Who Vanished." Futures, 86, 136–153. (Formalises the experiential-futures debrief cycle.)

A futures-design process is rarely linear and almost never one-pass. The iteration is the practice, not a coda — most engagements run the hexagons two or three times over before something useful surfaces.

Here's what came out of our last cycle:
<NOTES>
Help me decide what to carry forward. Output three options:
- A sharpened version of the focal question
- A second scenario worth deepening (and which one to drop)
- A prototype worth building further
For each, give: the case for, the risk, and the smallest next move.

Generic to design and futures-design practice; iterative cycles are a defining feature across IDEO's design thinking, the experiential-futures cycle (Candy & Dunagan, 2017), and earlier action-research traditions (Lewin, 1946).