by Romano Theunissen

 

This article explores a new methodological adaptation of the Futures Triangle, a foresight tool developed by Sohail Inayatullah (1997). Traditionally employed in participatory workshops and strategic visioning sessions, the Futures Triangle explores the relationships between Pushes of the present, Pulls of the future, and Weights of the past. However, in-person or virtual participation is not always possible. This case study extends the triangle’s application to non-participatory, narrative-based datasets, demonstrating how personal testimonies can be coded as Pushes, Pulls, and Weights through textual and sentiment analysis. This is particularly valuable in situations where access to stakeholders is limited or unsafe.

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate how the Futures Triangle can be applied to collections of personal stories to surface Pushes, Pulls, and Weights within a community’s lived experience, offering structured insights into their present realities, future hopes, and structural constraints.

The outputs generated through this textual Futures Triangle analysis can also serve as structured inputs for scenario development. In particular, the results align well with Ivana Milojević and Sohail Inayatullah’s Change Progression Scenario Method (CPSM), which explores possible futures emerging from the interaction of Pushes, Pulls, and Weights. While this article focuses primarily on the analytical stage, it demonstrates how narrative-derived Futures Triangles can form the foundation for subsequent scenario development.

Using narratives collected from Afghan women following the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, this study tests and validates the Futures Triangle’s viability as a qualitative analysis tool in crisis contexts. At the same time, it proposes a new use case for the method: as a precursor to scenario development and policy design.

What is the Futures Triangle?

Originally conceptualized in 1997, the Futures Triangle maps three dimensions of change:

• Pushes of the Present: Tangible, observable drivers of change, such as trends, events, or social dynamics.
• Pulls of the Future: Imagined or desired futures that attract us forward. These are often rooted in values, ideals, or aspirational visions.
• Weights of the Past: Deep-seated barriers to change, including cultural norms, historical traumas, and structural conditions.

Together, these elements form a triangular framework that helps foresight practitioners identify both opportunities and constraints in navigating toward a preferred future (Inayatullah, 2023; Kuosa, 2023)

What distinguishes the Triangle from other foresight methods is its capacity to hold tension – between optimism and realism, between individual desires and structural forces, and between present dynamics and historical legacies. While the Triangle has typically been applied in group settings (e.g., workshops or interviews), its clear structure makes it a strong candidate for qualitative coding narrative material, an approach that has not yet been widely explored.

The Method

In this study, the Futures Triangle is used to analyze personal narratives, specifically fifty stories from Afghan women who have lived under Taliban rule since August 2021. These stories were randomly sourced from the After August database, a public archive of anonymized testimonies collected by UN Women, Zan Times, and other local organizations, with verbal support from the UN Women Afghanistan Country Office (After August, 2024).

This sample was drawn in April-May 2024 from the publicly available stories listed on the After August website. At the time of collection, each story was listed in a scrollable online format with consistent visual layout. Using an online random number generator, in this case random.org, 50 unique numbers were generated. These numbers were then used to find the corresponding story in the database as displayed on the public website and added to the research sample.

Each story was then analyzed using a narrative segmentation and thematic coding framework using the Futures Triangle. In practice, these segments typically consisted of individual sentences or short passages containing a distinct emotional or experiential claim. These segments were then coded as Pushes, Pulls, or Weights. These codes were logged and categorized using Google Sheets (see figure 1). This data was then exported to a visual mapping tool (Miro) and clustered thematically to identify broader patterns and shared themes (see figure 2 and figure 3).

Figure 1. Data coding framework used to extract and classify Pushes, Pulls, and Weights from narrative text.

 

The goal was to extract the Pushes, Pulls, and Weights expressed by the narrators of these stories, even if they were not explicitly answering foresight-related questions. This makes the method well-suited to retrospective application on existing narrative data. An essential feature for working in conflict zones or environments where it is unsafe or impractical to conduct in-person futures work. The method also provides a robust framework to generate sentiment and perform visual analysis in a way that maintains traceability as every coded comment can be traced back to the original story for review and monitoring.

Figure 2. The completed Miro-based thematic sorting, which uses the Futures Triangle, is shown here. The full board is publicly available in a ‘view only format’ at: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVJbIIbJc=/?share_link_id=609936765191

Figure 3. Sample cluster from Miro-based thematic sorting of Pushes. The full board is publicly available in a ‘view only format’ at: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVJbIIbJc=/?share_link_id=609936765191

While this study notes the timing of data collection (April–May 2024), the original publication dates of individual stories were not available through the After August archive. This limits the ability to analyze how themes may have evolved over time. Future work could benefit from time-staggered narrative sets. Nonetheless, the current sample offers a valid and thematically rich snapshot of women’s lived realities during a key period of political regression after the Taliban takeover in 2021.

This approach allowed for the triangulation of collective insight without direct participation, offering a respectful and rigorous way of working with vulnerable communities without exposing them to further risk. This method also ensured anonymity and randomness, reducing researcher bias.

Results

Pushes – Present Drivers of Change

From the fifty stories, 276 Pushes were identified and grouped into 17 thematic clusters. The most prominent of these included:

• Activism, Advocacy, and Protest (38)
• Job Losses and Work Bans (36)
• Fear, Anxiety, and Hopelessness (32)
• Education Restrictions (26)
• Violence, Harassment, and Enforcement (23)

These Pushes paint a stark picture of Afghan women’s current conditions under Taliban rule: education beyond sixth grade is banned for girls, women are barred from most forms of public employment, and restrictions on dress, mobility, and public life are enforced with intimidation and violence. Findings supported by the United States Institute for Peace in 2024.

Yet throughout these conditions, stories also referenced ongoing resistance, such as underground schools, informal economic activity, and digital activism. These instances demonstrate that the Pushes are not just oppressive – they are also generative, spurring new forms of resilience and survival within Afghanistan.

Pulls – Hopes and Aspirations for the Future

The analysis revealed 205 Pulls, organized into 17 clusters. Prominent themes included:

• Education Hopes (31)
• Hopes from International Community (40)
• Freedom and Choice (14)
• Jobs and Employment Hopes (17)
• Resilience and Fighting Spirit (9)

Pulls consistently reflected visions of gender equality and expanded rights for women, particularly in education, employment, and political participation. Many women emphasized education not only as a right but as a path toward liberation. Others envisioned futures where women occupy positions of leadership in government, civil society, and the arts.

A recurring insight was the pragmatic tone of the Pulls. Some women expressed hope for incremental progress, even if it meant working within the existing system. This strategic optimism contrasts with purely utopian aspirations, suggesting that Afghan women are not just dreamers but careful architects of change.

The Pulls also point toward a desire for support, not salvation, from the international community, echoing previous critiques of externally imposed feminist agendas not fit for local realities and cultures of Afghanistan (Khan, 2021).

Weights – Barriers and Legacies

A total of 277 Weights were recorded and sorted into 18 clusters. These reflect deep systemic and cultural barriers, including:

• Taliban Enforcement (49)
• Loss of Economic Opportunity (47)
• Enforcement through Culture, Society, and Family (34)
• Hopelessness (22)
• Return to Past Norms (21)

The Weights in this context are particularly complex. Many represent current conditions, such as Taliban-imposed gender restrictions – but function as reinstated historical burdens, echoing the first Taliban regime of the late 1990’s (Skaine, 2002; Nehan, 2022).

Unlike typical Futures Triangle applications where Weights represent historical or cultural baggage, many of these Weights were contemporary realities. This blurring is significant. The re-emergence of Taliban rule in 2021 has plunged many women into what previously might have been considered their worst-case scenarios, now actualized.

One of the most powerful thematic intersections came from stories that referenced both loss of progress (past gains in education and rights) and the re-entrenchment of conservative interpretations of Islam. These themes were often accompanied by a profound sense of betrayal – both by the international community and by Afghan male counterparts who were once allies.

Women fear a future that is a continuation or deepening of the present, the entrenchment of a future that looks like the past. The Weights demonstrate not just systemic and cultural barriers, but a form of collective trauma. This includes both formal restrictions and informal norms enforced by family, community, and religious authority, what Darwish, Hashim, and Afghani (2021) refer to as “hegemonic masculinities” shaped by decades of war.

Discussion: Expanding the Methodological Horizon of the Futures Triangle

This application of the Futures Triangle to textual analysis demonstrates its potential as a flexible, non-participatory foresight method, particularly useful in contexts of restricted access, high risk, or ethical complexity. By treating narrative data as a valid foresight input, this approach broadens the triangle’s reach while retaining its conceptual integrity.

Temporal Ambiguity in Pulls

One notable challenge relates to the absence of a future time horizon in the analyzed narratives. In traditional Futures Triangle processes, participants are often asked to imagine the future at specific time horizons (e.g., 2030, 2050). When participants are not given this time horizon, their stated hopes and aspirations – i.e. Pulls – lack temporal clarity.

This lack of clarity creates interpretive ambiguity: is a desire for education about returning to school next month, or about a future generation’s right to learn? While this complicates scenario development, it also reflects the lived reality of communities in crisis, where time is nonlinear and the future is often an abstract luxury.

To address this, future applications might incorporate temporal scaffolding into the narrative generation process, or explicitly code for time references when present. Alternatively, this limitation can be embraced as a feature rather than a flaw. Since communities in crisis operate within uncertain temporal horizons, any tool attempting to understand their aspirations must be able to hold that ambiguity.

Pairing with Scenario Methods

Once the Triangle is constructed from narrative analysis, it serves a valuable input for scenario development. In particular, the method aligns well with Ivana Milojević’s Change Progression Scenario Method (CPSM), which explores multiple scenario pathways emerging from the interplay between Pulls of the future, Pushes of the present, and Weights of the past. While this article does not apply CPSM directly, its conceptual compatibility with the Futures Triangle makes CPSM a logical next step in exploring the outputs from this Futures Triangle Sentiment Analysis.

Using the Futures Triangle Sentiment Analysis to first surface and analyze community voices from texts, then applying CPSM to explore scenarios, creates a powerful progression from narrative to scenario exploration.

From Method to Action

The ethical value of this method lies in its capacity to produce evidence-based insights from existing stories. This enables policymakers, NGOs, foresight practitioners, and activists to design interventions grounded in lived experience, rather than assumptions or abstract models.

In environments where direct participation is not possible, such approaches are not compromises, they are a necessity.

Generalizability

While Afghanistan was the focus of this analysis, the methodology is widely transferable. It can be applied to:

• Stories from refugee populations, asylum seekers, or displaced communities.
• Testimonies from survivors of climate change violence, and conflict.
• Historical or archival narratives for postcolonial or transitional justice work.
• Indigenous storytelling projects with sufficient ethical safeguards.

The Futures Triangle thus becomes not just a foresight tool, but a framework for ethical engagement, making visible voices of those often excluded from strategic conversations about the future.

Ethical Considerations in Data Use

Applying foresight tools to personal testimony carries significant ethical considerations and responsibility. In this method, stories are treated not only as data points but as expressions of lived experience often shared under vulnerable circumstances. This necessitates a heightened level of care in both the analysis and dissemination of research outputs.

Researchers and practitioners must navigate the line between insight and extraction. Even when stories are part of publicly available databases, ethical foresight work must ask not only, “Can we use this?” but “Should we use this – and how?”. This includes considering the intent of the storyteller, the potential for re-identification, and the implications of drawing conclusions that may shape policies affecting real lives.

The method used here does its best to respect anonymity and centers the agency of the narrators by avoiding interpretive overlays not grounded in their own words. Rather than ‘speak for’ these women, the Futures Triangle offers a structure for ‘listening deeply’. Still, ethical dilemmas remain, particularly regarding the ownership of narratives, the permanence of digital archives, and the potential for unintended consequences if findings are misapplied. In this case, many of these dilemmas were overcome through the anonymity built into the database itself as well as the verbal consent issued by members of the team who worked to get and archive the narratives themselves.

That being said, future iterations of this method could benefit from more co-design with representatives from the communities whose stories are to be analyzed, where possible. In settings where direct engagement is feasible, participatory validation steps where community members review and respond to coded insights could also strengthen the methodological rigor and the ethical standing of research outputs.

Ultimately, in foresight work, the future we imagine is shaped, not only by the voice in the room but by the voices we actively choose to amplify. Methodological innovations must therefore be matched by ethical considerations and innovations if we are to build just, preferable futures.

Conclusion and Next Steps

This case study demonstrates that the Futures Triangle can be effectively adapted as a method of textual and sentiment analysis, especially when working in high-risk or restricted-access environments. It provides a structure to extract Pushes, Pulls, and Weights from personal stories, surfacing both individual and collective future perspectives.

The method holds strong potential for use in humanitarian foresight, post-conflict futures, and feminist futures work. When combined with tools like Milojević’s Change Progression Scenario Method, it offers a complete pathway from narrative analysis to scenario creation to intervention design.

Future research might explore:

• Purpose-built datasets created with Futures Triangle framing in mind.
• Additional tools to manage temporal ambiguity.
• Hybrid applications with participatory validation workshops where possible.

Future research might also explore comparative analyses across gender, region, or age to reveal differentiated Pushes, Pulls, and Weights. Additionally, causal mapping of environmental, political, or cultural factors that influence these dynamics could further strengthen the method’s relevance for targeted policy, programming, or advocacy.

At its heart, this method affirms that futures thinking does not have to begin with the most powerful actors in society. It can begin with a story. It can begin with a voice.

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