Essay
Jonas Drechsel1,*
1Independent Futures Researcher, Berlin, Germany
Abstract
This essay argues that both academic futures studies and applied foresight practice require a new quality criterion: epistemological reflexivity. This means recognizing which epistemological stance you’re working from, understanding what it enables and constrains, and navigating deliberately between stances. Drawing on Sohail Inayatullah’s distinction between predictive, cultural, and critical epistemologies, and Nele Fischer and Sascha Dannenberg’s work on plausibility as a meaning-based category, the essay demonstrates how stance precedes method, that is, how fundamental epistemological positioning determines which futures become thinkable before we ever choose a technique. This insight echoes Donella Meadows’s (1999) identification of paradigm transcendence as the highest leverage point in systems: the capacity to step outside dominant frames fundamentally shapes what interventions become possible. Through practice cases from the Critique Circle framework developed within a network of critical futures practitioners, the essay shows how Applied Critical Futures Studies operationalizes epistemological reflexivity as strategic intervention within existing projects. The essay concludes by proposing that existing quality criteria for futures work, while valuable for assessing methodological rigor, remain epistemologically incomplete, measuring execution within a stance but missing the stance itself and the capacity to move reflexively between stances.
Keywords
epistemological reflexivity, plausibility, critical futures studies, quality criteria, epistemology
“Design Thinking is kind of like syphilis,” writes Lee Vinsel (2017). “It’s contagious and rots your brains.” He’s diagnosing how a promising approach to creative problem-solving devolved into what he calls epistemologically listless workshop theater: facilitators leading sticky-note sessions that produce nothing but the illusion of innovation.
By 2023, the diagnosis proved prescient. The MIT Technology Review documented Design Thinking’s erosion: “innovation theater” had become endemic, with organizations checking boxes without implementing meaningful shifts (Ackermann, 2023). IDEO itself, the methodology’s prime evangelist, laid off significant numbers of employees in 2023 due to declining demand. As Fayard and Fathallah (2024) conclude: Design Thinking “failed to deliver on its promise to solve the world’s thorniest social challenges” (p. 28).
Vinsel identified the mechanism: Design Thinking gives students power without knowledge, creative confidence without actual capabilities. What appeared as innovation was oversimplification of complex processes, replacing genuine transformation with the feeling of transformation.
The same epistemological erosion threatens Futures Thinking. Yet this umbrella term obscures important distinctions. When speaking of futures work facing epistemological challenges, this refers to two interconnected but distinct domains: Futures Studies as the academic, theoretical investigation of futures and their construction, and Foresight as the applied practice of strategic futures work in organizational and policy contexts. Both face the same fundamental problem, though it manifests differently across these contexts.
From a critical futures perspective, one could argue that in academic Futures Studies, sophisticated theoretical frameworks are deployed without epistemological awareness of their own positioning. In Foresight practice, methods produce predictable futures that reproduce present power structures while appearing innovative. Scenario workshops generate four futures differing only in degree, not in kind (Candy & Dunagan, 2017). As Inayatullah (2009) argues in questioning scenarios, standard approaches often produce futures that confirm rather than challenge present assumptions. Trend analyses extrapolate current trajectories without questioning the structures producing those trends. Delphi surveys aggregate expert opinion without asking whose expertise is valued, whose knowledge is excluded.
However, this critique itself risks reproducing epistemological privilege: The assumption that ‘reflexivity’ as articulated in European critical theory provides superior access to futures knowledge. The tension between claiming epistemological awareness and enacting it remains unresolved throughout this essay. What follows should be read not as resolution but as one situated attempt to operationalize reflexivity within futures practice.
This essay argues that both Futures Studies and Foresight need a new quality criterion: epistemological reflexivity. This means recognizing which epistemological stance you’re working from, understanding what it enables and constrains, and navigating deliberately between stances. As a practitioner trained in critical futures studies, I experience a gap between methodological sophistication and transformative impact that is empirically not yet fully captured. But this essay advances a more precise diagnosis: existing quality criteria for futures work, such as methodological rigor, stakeholder engagement, or practical effectiveness, are epistemologically incomplete. They measure methodological quality but miss whether futures work operates with epistemological reflexivity. They miss whether a project reproduces dominant plausibility structures or challenges them.
The problem isn’t the methods themselves. The problem is treating them as epistemologically neutral techniques, available for plug-and-play application. Epistemological naivety operates through a subtle mechanism: methods are applied correctly, stakeholders consulted appropriately. Yet the range of imaginable futures remains constrained. Why? Unexamined assumptions embedded in methodological choices themselves. An “episteme”, in Foucault’s sense, refers to deeper structures than paradigms: not just shared assumptions within a field but the foundational rules determining what can be known at all (Foucault, 1970). When futures work operates naively within a single episteme, the future remains safely colonized by present assumptions.
Ziauddin Sardar’s critique of the “colonization of the future” by Western epistemologies identifies precisely this mechanism: dominant forecasting methods systematically privilege certain cultural frameworks while excluding others (Sardar, 2010). His later work on “Postnormal Futures” extends this critique, arguing that in conditions of complexity, chaos, and contradiction, conventional forecasting based on stable epistemologies becomes inadequate (Sardar, 2015). His critique encompasses both epistemological positioning and methodological choices, revealing how what appears as technically neutral foresight practice actually reproduces particular worldviews.
There’s an alternative. It requires recognizing that stance precedes method. Before choosing any technique, we must ask about our epistemological commitments: whose knowledge counts, which futures we’re making plausible, and for whom. This matters particularly when futures work, whether academic research or applied consulting, aims at transformation rather than optimization, when dominant plausibilities demonstrably fail (climate crisis, authoritarianism, inequality), or when practitioners sense that methodological sophistication produces predictable rather than challenging futures.
This essay develops this argument in three movements. First, I examine why plausibility is the key to understanding epistemological dynamics in futures work, drawing on Sohail Inayatullah’s distinction between predictive, cultural, and critical epistemologies, and Nele Fischer and Sascha Dannenberg’s work on plausibility as a meaning-based category. Second, I demonstrate how Applied Critical Futures Studies operationalizes these insights through the “Critique Circle.” Third, I propose that epistemological reflexivity must become a quality criterion for both Futures Studies and Foresight.
Inayatullah’s Three Epistemologies
Understanding why stance precedes method requires grasping that futures knowledge can be structured fundamentally differently. Sohail Inayatullah’s (1990) distinction between three epistemologies remains foundational here.
Predictive epistemology, in Inayatullah’s framing, aims at accuracy and reliability, offering one future or a narrow range to prepare for. It treats the future as a state that will be, emphasizing empirical grounding, expert knowledge, and methodological rigor. When conducted reflexively, predictive work explicitly acknowledges its epistemological commitments. It asks: What trends can we extrapolate? What assumptions underlie our trend identification? Whose expertise are we privileging? The value lies in its capacity to reduce uncertainty through systematic analysis while remaining aware of the political dimensions of declaring certain futures “likely.” When conducted naively, predictive epistemology naturalizes particular futures as “inevitable” while obscuring the power structures producing those trajectories. Corporate foresight that assumes continued market dominance, technological forecasting that privileges innovation over equity, policy scenarios that take growth imperatives for granted: these aren’t neutral projections but active constructions that foreclose alternatives.
Cultural epistemology takes an interpretive perspective, focusing on different meanings and multiple stakeholder perspectives. It treats futures as culturally anchored, requiring negotiation among diverse voices. When conducted reflexively, it asks: Whose voices are included? What structural conditions shape who can meaningfully participate? When conducted naively, cultural epistemology performs inclusion without transformation, participatory workshops that invite citizens to imagine futures but constrain imagination within preset categories, reproducing inequality while appearing inclusive.
Critical epistemology adopts a post-structural stance, problematizing and deconstructing futures to denaturalize the present. It treats present constructions of futures as artifacts revealing contemporary power structures. When conducted reflexively, critical work maintains dual awareness: it deconstructs dominant futures while constructing alternatives, it questions power while enabling action. It asks: Whose futures are excluded? How does futures discourse naturalize existing power relations? How do we move from critique to reconstruction?
When conducted naively, critical epistemology produces endless critique without enabling transformation, deconstructing futures without reconstructing alternatives, analyzing power without challenging it. This is perhaps the most seductive trap: critical language deployed without critical effect, producing sophisticated analysis that changes nothing.
The distinction between naive and reflexive application is crucial. Naive application treats an epistemological stance as the only valid approach, unconsciously reproducing its limitations. Reflexive application consciously chooses a stance while remaining aware of what it enables and forecloses. A practitioner might use predictive methods for near-term planning, then shift to critical questioning when established trends fail.
These aren’t competing approaches where one is “correct.” They’re different stances toward futures knowledge, each valuable for different purposes. The question isn’t which epistemology to adopt but how to move reflexively between them. Epistemological reflexivity means recognizing which stance you’re operating from, interrogating what it enables and constrains, and navigating deliberately between stances as context requires. This differs from critical reflexivity (questioning power relations) by focusing specifically on epistemological positioning.
Plausibility as Mechanism of Epistemological Constraint
Recognizing this multiplicity still leaves a practical question: how does epistemological positioning shape which futures become thinkable? This is where plausibility becomes crucial. And here, language itself becomes part of the problem.
Nele Fischer and Sascha Dannenberg have developed a particularly rigorous account of how plausibility operates as “a meaning-based category foundational to the construction of presents and futures” (Fischer & Dannenberg, 2021, p. 11). Their framework fundamentally shapes understanding of how epistemological positioning translates into concrete limitations on imaginable futures.
Plausibility operates through two fundamental dynamics: coherence (internal consistency and alignment with present conceptions) and intersubjective construction. Plausibility refers not to truth value but to the coherence of arguments, to how we construct convincing narratives. When a ministry official calls a scenario “too radical to be realistic,” plausibility functions not as judgment of logic but of legitimacy.
Fischer and Dannenberg show that plausibility both enables and constrains. It makes futures accessible: we need overlap with current concepts to understand proposed futures. But this same overlap anchors futures in dominant present conceptions. Without deliberate interruption, methods systematically privilege futures aligned with present power structures. Why? Because these futures appear “plausible” within dominant frames. This is the mechanism through which methods reproduce status quo while appearing to open futures.
From critical epistemology, however, plausibility transforms from criterion to object of inquiry. The question shifts from “is this future plausible?” to “which present conceptions make this future plausible?”
This shift makes plausibility itself an object of reflexive inquiry. Alan Clardy (2022) extends this insight by arguing that futures studies produce representations of the future rather than knowledge in the classical sense, legitimizing multiple epistemological stances while complicating quality assessment.
The Epistemological Incompleteness of Quality Criteria
If multiple epistemological stances are legitimate, and if plausibility prefigures futures, are existing quality criteria adequate to this epistemological complexity?
Quality criteria in futures work have received sustained international attention across both academic Futures Studies and applied Foresight contexts. By “quality criteria” I refer to established frameworks like the German Netzwerk Zukunftsforschung’s 18 criteria (Gerhold et al., 2015, 2022), the World Futures Studies Federation’s (2018) accreditation standards, or Kuusi and Heinonen’s (2015) Futures Map. These emphasize methodological rigor, empirical grounding, and practical effectiveness.
These approaches establish futures work as a legitimate field with professional standards. They resist purely instrumental reduction. They acknowledge that futures work requires different quality criteria than retrospective research. Yet they share a limitation: they measure stance-blind quality. They can assess whether methods are rigorously applied but miss whether epistemological positioning is reflexively maintained. They can evaluate whether stakeholders are meaningfully engaged but miss whether engagement reproduces dominant plausibility structures or challenges them.
This creates a fundamental mismatch. The criteria operate primarily from predictive epistemology, emphasizing validity, reliability, empirical grounding. A critical futures project that successfully destabilizes naturalized plausibility assumptions could “fail” according to predictive criteria precisely because it challenges what dominant frames recognize as realistic. Conversely, a project that perfectly reproduces dominant plausibility structures could fulfill all standards while failing to denaturalize the present.
The cost is high. As Michael Godhe and Luke Goode (2017) observe, futures work risks becoming what Mark Fisher (2009) called “capitalist realism” in futures drag: appearing to open space for alternative futures while actually foreclosing transformation. Quality criteria that cannot diagnose this problem allow it to spread through methodological sophistication without epistemological awareness.
Applied Critical Futures Studies: The Critique Circle
Applied Critical Futures Studies addresses this by operationalizing critical insights through concrete interventions. Applied CFS offers frameworks that any futures practitioner, whether in academic research or applied foresight consulting, can deploy strategically: a mode to switch into when projects risk reproducing dominant plausibilities, when something feels too smooth, when consensus emerges too quickly. It’s not a separate methodology but a reflexive capacity, a way of pausing to ask: What are we not questioning?
From a critical futures perspective informed by Frankfurt School traditions, this represents methodological operationalization of ideology-critique: making visible the hidden assumptions that structure what counts as plausible future. Yet this framing immediately raises questions: whose epistemologies are being navigated? The Critique Circle emerged from western critical theory traditions. Can it navigate epistemologies that fundamentally challenge those traditions? Applied CFS as currently articulated may function as sophisticated tool for navigating within western epistemological pluralism while remaining blind to epistemologies operating through different logics entirely.
Following Haraway’s (1988) argument that all knowledge is situated knowledge, that we always see from somewhere, never from nowhere, this analysis must first acknowledge its own situatedness. The critique of futures work’s epistemological naivety, and the proposed remedy through Applied CFS, emerge from specific positioning that shapes what becomes visible and what remains obscured. This work originates from futures research conducted in Germany’s civil society space, at the intersection of NGOs, foundations, and mission-driven organizations. Through work with D2030’s Missionswerkstatt project and co-founding the Community for Critical Futures Studies, my practice engages primarily with actors seeking societal transformation rather than corporate optimization or state planning. This positioning as an independent consultant outside both academia and corporate consulting enables certain observations while foreclosing others. I work predominantly with organizations questioning growth paradigms, seeking participatory governance, operating within what German political discourse terms Zivilgesellschaft (civil society) and Gemeinwohl-orientation (common good orientation). This is neither neutral ground nor ‘decolonized futures’. It remains firmly situated in European contexts, welfare state assumptions, and particular notions of ‘progress.’ Most clients possess sufficient resources to afford epistemological reflection; most participants share educational backgrounds enabling critical discourse. This situatedness shapes the Critique Circle itself. It emerged from contexts where critical questioning is culturally valued, where facilitation budgets exist, where epistemological reflexivity can be professional practice rather than survival necessity. The Circle’s limitations stem directly from this situatedness: It may function poorly in contexts where power relations prohibit explicit questioning, where time scarcity precludes extended reflection, or where epistemological frameworks operate through different registers than explicit articulation. Acknowledging situatedness does not invalidate the analysis but specifies its scope: Applied CFS offers one possible operationalization of epistemological reflexivity, arising from and tested within particular contexts. Whether and how it transfers to other contexts remains an empirical question that cannot be resolved theoretically.
Throughout this essay, I distinguish between situatedness and stance, following Haraway’s emphasis on positioned knowledge. Situatedness refers to one’s material and social positioning in the world that shapes what becomes visible or invisible. Stance refers to the epistemological orientation one consciously adopts within that situatedness: The choice to approach futures work from predictive, interpretive, or critical epistemologies. While situatedness provides the ground from which one sees, stance represents the direction in which one chooses to look. Both matter; both require articulation. This positioning reflects particular privileges shaping what becomes possible in practice: economic security enabling independent work, educational credentials from German universities providing institutional legitimacy, white maleness affording epistemic authority in organizational spaces where futures ‘expertise’ remains typically coded masculine and western. These material and embodied realities shape which clients approach me, which interventions prove credible, which epistemological challenges I can articulate without facing immediate dismissal. Haraway’s insistence that all knowledge is embodied applies equally to knowledge about epistemological reflexivity itself.
Applied CFS differs from existing critical approaches in making epistemological navigation explicit within practice. From a critical futures perspective informed by Frankfurt School traditions, this represents methodological operationalization of ideology-critique. Yet this framing immediately raises questions: whose epistemologies are being navigated? The Critique Circle emerged from western critical theory traditions. Can it navigate epistemologies that fundamentally challenge those traditions? Applied CFS as currently articulated may function as sophisticated tool for navigating within western epistemological pluralism while remaining blind to epistemologies operating through different logics entirely.
Inayatullah’s CLA already recognizes the epistemological dimension of futures work. Inayatullah and Milojević’s (2015) development of narrative foresight emphasizes facilitators ‘stating their metaphor’: declaring their worldview and epistemological framework at workshop beginnings. This practice of explicit disclosure has value in certain contexts. However, Applied CFS distinguishes between epistemological disclosure (outer performance as procedural requirement) and epistemological reflexivity (inner practice as sustained awareness). While disclosure can become ritualistic, reflexivity operates as cultivated capacity shaping how practitioners navigate methodological choices throughout entire project lifecycles. Whether and how to communicate one’s positioning remains a contextual judgment. The capacity for reflexive awareness need not collapse into obligatory declaration.
Applied CFS builds on CLA’s epistemological foundation but operates differently. While CLA focuses primarily on vertical deconstruction, moving through layers from Litany to Myth, Applied CFS adds the horizontal dimension: deliberately moving between predictive, cultural, and critical epistemologies within a project. The Critique Circle operationalizes this capacity through four recursive movements that provide specific interventions for different epistemological challenges. This positions reflexivity not as workshop-opening ritual but as ongoing navigation, a sustained awareness of how one’s positioning shapes which futures become thinkable and which remain foreclosed.
Inayatullah’s (2020) distinction between strategic and transformative foresight illuminates this dimension further. Strategic foresight optimizes within existing paradigms (the ‘chessboard’ of current power configurations) while transformative foresight questions the paradigms themselves, opening space for fundamental reorientation. Applied CFS positions epistemological reflexivity as the mechanism enabling this transformation, not as methodological innovation to be added to existing practice but as cultivated capacity that changes the practitioner alongside the practice.
Epistemological reflexivity risks becoming its own orthodoxy, a tension I address below when discussing why this essay offers questions rather than standardized criteria. As José Ramos (2017) demonstrates, futures practice always operates within power relations. Applied CFS extends his Futures Action Research framework by embedding epistemological navigation as explicit practice. The Critique Circle generates observable interventions whose effects can be evaluated. When operationalized, reflexivity’s presence or absence becomes discernible in practice.
Fig. 1: The Critique Circle: Four Recursive Movements of Applied Critical Futures Studies
A network of practitioners and researchers has formalized this approach as the Critique Circle. (This informal German network, established in 2023, works to develop critical approaches accessible beyond academic contexts.) The Circle isn’t linear stages but a reflexive spiral structuring four movements (see Figure 1).
The four movements operate not as sequential steps but as recursive interventions. Each operationalizes a different aspect of plausibility work: denaturalizing what appears self-evident, analyzing structures defining plausibility, expanding plausibility spaces, and institutionalizing new plausibility logics. Each responds to a distinct epistemological challenge that methods alone cannot address. I illustrate these through what Yin (2018) calls “illustrative cases”: selected according to a criterion, projects where small epistemological shifts, inspired by the Critique Circle, produced tangible effects. This is the “Applied” in Applied CFS: not comprehensive methodology but strategic interventions, practical schwenks that practitioners can deploy within existing projects when dominant plausibilities threaten to foreclose alternatives.
Stören (Disturb)
Stören makes visible what appears self-evident, questioning taken-for-granted assumptions to open pathways for transformation. In an EU project to build digital platforms for foresight, the initial proposal suggested separate spaces for professional futurists, policymakers, and citizens. The intervention argued for one integrated platform enabling encounters between different knowledge forms.
This wasn’t about user experience design but about epistemological commitments embedded in infrastructure. Separate platforms naturalize hierarchies; they encode the assumption that expert knowledge must be validated before encountering public input, that policy analysis occurs in different registers than citizen imagination. The architecture shapes plausibility structures before anyone says a word: it determines whose knowledge can coherently contribute to which futures.
Integrated infrastructure creates conditions for co-production, for moments where a citizen observation about lived experience interrupts an expert trend analysis, forcing reconceptualization. The resistance was unspoken discomfort with dissolving familiar categories. The epistemological movement progressed from predictive assumptions (experts provide futures) to cultural recognition (stakeholders must negotiate) to critical awareness (infrastructure shapes who can speak).
Contrast this with the typical workshop where questioning fundamental assumptions like “economic growth equals progress” or “increased mobility equals development” is met with “let’s stay realistic”, where “realistic” functions not as description but as disciplinary boundary, marking which futures are professionally admissible.
Yet the integrated platform also created problems: harder traceability, diffused accountability, new power dynamics through rhetorical skill rather than insight. Flattening hierarchies doesn’t automatically produce better futures. This intervention operationalizes the shift from naive predictive epistemology (experts deliver futures) to reflexive cultural epistemology (different knowledge forms must be negotiated) to critical awareness (infrastructure shapes who can speak).
Verstehen (Understand)
Verstehen analyzes the power structures and knowledge orders that determine which futures appear plausible and which remain unthinkable. A project on sustainable cultural mobility confronted structural plausibility barriers embedded in funding systems.
EU funding programs privilege scalable interventions, measurable outcomes, innovations within existing frameworks. For cultural mobility, this means funding favors optimizing patterns over questioning mobility imperatives themselves. Futures like post-mobility cultures become “unrealistic” not because they’re implausible but because they’re incompatible with funding logics defining plausibility.
The intervention focused on understanding this mechanism: how funding structures don’t merely evaluate futures but prefigure which futures can be imagined. The language of grant applications (impact, scalability, deliverables) already contains epistemological commitments. To write a successful application is to speak a language that makes certain futures expressible and others unthinkable.
The typical failure mode: analysis that identifies power structures but stops there, becoming an alibi rather than pathway to intervention. This analysis demonstrates reflexive critical epistemology: not only deconstructing futures but analyzing the structures that determine which futures count as plausible.
Erkunden (Explore)
Erkunden plausibilizes the seemingly impossible, using alternative knowledge sources to make other futures cohere and become actionable. A scenario project for German insurance illustrates this. Standard inputs (industry trends, expert interviews, established datasets) produce standard scenarios: different configurations of digitalization, regulation, consumer behavior within existing insurance logics.
The team worked based on a Custom GPT that alternated between mainstream industry sources (McKinsey reports on insurance innovation) and radically alternative perspectives: Afrofuturist analyses of mutual aid traditions, feminist economics on care work and risk, indigenous concepts of collective responsibility. By oscillating between these knowledge traditions, the plausibility space was reconfigured. Futures that would appear “unrealistic” from industry perspectives became surprisingly plausible when grounded in actual existing practices: mutual aid societies, community-based risk sharing, reparative insurance addressing historical harms.
This operationalizes Fischer and Dannenberg’s “plausibilizing”: using alternative knowledge sources to make other futures cohere. Yet it also raises questions about appropriation. Who benefits when insurance corporations explore indigenous concepts? When does cross-cultural learning become extractive mining of alternative traditions for corporate innovation? The Critique Circle doesn’t resolve these tensions but makes them visible.
The typical version: providing “radical” alternative scenarios that everyone acknowledges as interesting thought experiments before returning to serious planning within familiar parameters. The scenarios become a ritual of openness that ultimately confirms existing boundaries. Oscillating between knowledge sources practices epistemological navigation: the capacity to move between frames to reconfigure plausibility spaces.
Verändern (Transform)
Verändern creates infrastructures that make other futures actionable, stabilizing changes and enabling new cycles of transformation. An educational service for organizational foresight capacity-building employs deliberate epistemological progression. Using a Three Perspectives on Futures workshop format, the facilitator moves from trends (predictive) through scenarios (cultural) to what Joseph Voros (2015) calls “preposterous futures” (critical), radically utopian possibilities that challenge present constraints.
In light of this development, one major NGO considered organizing a follow-up workshop devoted exclusively to preposterous futures. Their leadership recognized that their strategic imagination had become constrained; they were thinking primarily in plausible alternatives rather than transformative possibilities. The organizational response demonstrated how epistemological scaffolding expands the plausibility space within which transformation becomes thinkable.
Participants consistently report experiencing this permission, suggesting they intuitively recognized unspoken constraints but lacked frameworks to challenge them. The language of permission is revealing: it suggests these constraints were experienced as external rules rather than internalized assumptions. One participant reported: “I know how to think differently now, but my organization’s KPIs don’t recognize that as valuable work.”
Without structural support, participants leave workshops “inspired” but return to organizations where epistemological innovation remains unactionable, individual awareness meeting institutional inertia. The scaffolded progression through epistemological stances demonstrates how reflexive practice transforms organizational plausibility structures, making transformation thinkable by first making it epistemologically permissible.
The Oscillation
These four movements oscillate. The Circle requires moving between epistemological stances. This capacity prevents methodological ossification. These anecdotal cases suggest a systematic pattern: epistemological reflexivity operates through specific practical moves that existing quality criteria cannot capture. When platform assumptions were disturbed, standard criteria would measure whether stakeholder input was “adequately gathered” but not whether infrastructure design itself encodes epistemological commitments.
From a critical futures perspective, the ‘anti-method to method’ challenge cannot be definitively resolved through better methodology. The challenge is constitutive: any operationalization of reflexivity risks reducing awareness to procedure, transforming epistemological navigation into epistemological checklist. This paradox cannot be dissolved but must be inhabited: Practitioners must cultivate the capacity to recognize when epistemological reflexivity has calcified into epistemological ritual.
Existing quality criteria assess execution within an epistemological stance but cannot assess the stance itself or the capacity to move reflexively between stances. These four movements address precisely the challenge of making an ‘anti-method a method.’ Applied CFS is not a standardized methodology with fixed steps but a set of reflexive capacities. Practitioners learn to recognize epistemological positions, understand their limitations, and strategically navigate between them. This differs from methodological checklists by cultivating situational judgment rather than algorithmic application. The value lies not in following procedures but in developing the reflexive capacity to recognize when epistemological positioning constrains futures imagination and to intervene strategically.
The tensions Applied CFS addresses (between prediction and critique, between instrumental and emancipatory futures, between expert and participatory knowledge) are not exclusively western phenomena. These tensions manifest globally but take different forms: in postcolonial contexts as tensions between indigenous and imported futures knowledge, in post-socialist settings as tensions between plan-based and emergent futures, in Global South contexts as tensions between development paradigms and autonomy.
However, recognizing these tensions’ global presence differs fundamentally from claiming Applied CFS provides universally applicable resolutions. The methodology’s emphasis on ‘making epistemologies explicit’ may resonate in contexts valuing explicit articulation, while functioning poorly in contexts where knowledge operates through embodiment rather than articulation, through relationality rather than abstraction.
The risk, as critical discussions within ‘decolonising futures’ initiatives have highlighted (Drechsel, 2024), is that epistemological reflexivity becomes another universalizing western export. Applied CFS confronts this risk through acknowledgment: this operationalization of reflexivity emerges from specific traditions, works in specific contexts, and requires translation elsewhere.
An example from practice illustrates both potential and limitations. In a scenario workshop with a German sustainability foundation, the Stören intervention successfully surfaced how expert-driven planning reproduced epistemological hierarchies. Participants recognized that ‘stakeholder participation’ functioned as legitimation rather than knowledge integration. This example, drawn from approximately nine Missionswerkstatt workshops conducted between 2021–2024, illustrates patterns observable across comparable contexts. The irony is not lost: an essay critiquing futures work’s insufficient evidence base relies on practitioner experience rather than systematic documentation. This reflects the methodology’s current developmental state and independent practice constraints. The evidence base remains incomplete, a limitation requiring acknowledgment rather than rationalization.
However, this recognition was only possible because participants shared sufficient cultural capital to question expert authority. The intervention ‘worked’ because of shared situatedness. Workshop participants could afford epistemological experimentation; their positions permitted questioning expertise; the foundation’s mission valued reflexive practice.
When similar interventions were attempted in contexts where questioning authority carries social risk, where participatory discourse reads as western imposition, where time scarcity makes extended reflection economically impossible, the methodology’s limitations became apparent. Not because participants lacked capacity but because the specific form of reflexivity operationalized through Applied CFS presupposes conditions not universally present.
This illustrates epistemological reflexivity’s recursive challenge: the capacity to engage in explicit epistemological questioning is itself unevenly distributed and culturally specific. Applied CFS must acknowledge that its practice works best in contexts already valuing explicit articulation, contexts shaped by particular educational traditions and material resources.
Epistemological Reflexivity as Quality Criterion
If stance precedes method, what follows for quality criteria? This essay faces a paradox: formalizing reflexivity risks reducing it to checklist. The answer isn’t another list of standards but questions that make epistemological reflexivity operationalizable without reducing it to checklist items. These are questions that, when posed in a project meeting or evaluation session, tend to create a specific kind of silence: the productive discomfort of recognizing unexamined assumptions.
In design meetings, these questions tend to slow the room down: Which epistemological positioning are we adopting, and why? Which plausibility structures are we reproducing? Which are we questioning? Are there mechanisms for deliberate epistemological movement? Students realize methods are choices when they learn not only methods but the epistemological commitments they embed, when they receive training in epistemological navigation. Each question changes the pace of thinking.
These questions remain deliberately generative rather than prescriptive. As a practicing futurist with academic training, I approach this from applied contexts where rigid checklists often produce exactly the epistemological naivety we’re trying to avoid. The questions are designed to provoke ongoing reflexive inquiry rather than enable one-time assessment. The value lies in their capacity to interrupt taken-for-granted assumptions at different project stages, not in their potential to generate standardized scores.
Epistemological reflexivity is inherently context-dependent. What counts as appropriate positioning in a government policy context differs from a community futures workshop. Standardized criteria risk mechanical application without situational awareness, instrumentalizing the very reflexivity they aim to measure. These questions function as reflexive provocations, not assessment instruments.
This essay cannot provide fully operationalized standards. As a practitioner, I can identify the gap, that existing criteria measure methodological execution but miss epistemological positioning, and offer questions that make this gap visible. But developing field-wide standards requires broader disciplinary negotiation: What observable markers would reviewers accept? What institutional conditions support reflexive practice? Which evaluation mechanisms avoid reducing reflexivity to checklist? These questions exceed what one essay can resolve. What this essay can do is demonstrate through practice cases that epistemological reflexivity operates differently than current quality criteria capture, making the case that such criteria need development.
Evaluation requires qualitative judgment: Does the project show epistemological awareness? Does it question plausibility structures? Can it navigate between stances? These show in practice but defy standardized metrics. Yet this observation itself raises questions about authority: whose judgment, from what position, with what legitimacy? Reflexivity as practice also operates from power positions. When practitioners advocate for integrated platforms or alternative knowledge curation, whose interests are served? Applied CFS practitioners work within institutional structures that grant authority to some voices over others.
Reflexivity doesn’t transcend power; it operates within and through power relations. Epistemological reflexivity demands recognizing not only the power dynamics we analyze but those we enact. The question becomes: Do our interventions expand or contract the range of futures considered possible? And for whom?
Contexts and Constraints
Epistemological reflexivity has limits. It becomes necessary when futures work aims at transformation rather than optimization, when stakeholders bring conflicting worldviews that predictive work would flatten into false consensus, or when dominant plausibilities demonstrably fail to enable adequate responses. But reflexivity also faces constraints: clients demanding predictive epistemology, institutional structures penalizing critical questioning, insufficient resources for deliberation and expertise in multiple epistemological traditions. Applied CFS doesn’t pretend reflexivity is always possible or always appropriate. Sometimes the answer is working within constraints while maintaining awareness of foreclosures. Sometimes declining the project. Sometimes finding strategic moments for limited interventions.
If Stance Preceded Method: Implications for the Field
If epistemological reflexivity became foundational to futures practice within western academic and professional contexts, acknowledging this transformation may not apply universally, these contexts would transform structurally across multiple dimensions.
Within such contexts, professional futures training would require practitioners to develop epistemological autobiographies before learning methods. Graduate programs would integrate philosophy of knowledge, history of epistemology, and situated knowledge theory throughout curricula rather than segregating them as ‘theory modules.’ Accreditation would assess not only methodological competence but demonstrated capacity for epistemological reflexivity across diverse contexts. Practitioners would maintain reflexive journals documenting how their situatedness shaped project outcomes.
Methodologically, methods manuals would include epistemological specifications alongside procedural steps, not ‘use scenarios when…’ but ‘scenarios from predictive epistemology assume X, from cultural epistemology assume Y, from critical epistemology assume Z.’ Tool selection would be understood as epistemological choice with political implications, not neutral technical decision. Failed interventions would be analyzed not only for execution problems but epistemological misalignment. Quality assessment would focus less on precision of forecast, more on rigor of epistemic practice.
In these settings, within contexts where explicit articulation is culturally valued and practically possible, futures consultancies would routinely include in proposals not only methodological approaches but epistemological positionings, making explicit whose futures become visible, whose remain marginalized. Client briefs would be interrogated for their implicit epistemologies before proceeding. Standard project documentation would include not just ‘methodology’ but ‘epistemological stance and its implications.’ Failure would be reframed from ‘incorrect forecast’ to ‘our epistemological positioning prevented us from seeing what mattered.’
Research would require explicit situatedness articulation before presenting findings, not as disclaimer but as analytical necessity. Peer review would assess epistemological reflexivity alongside empirical rigor. Journals would reject papers claiming ‘objective’ futures analysis without epistemological specification. Cross-cultural futures research would center epistemological difference rather than seeking universal methodologies. Comparative studies would ask not ‘which method works best’ but ‘which epistemological positioning reveals what, and for whom.’
At the level of power, the question ‘who speaks?’ would precede ‘what do they say?’ in futures discourse. Futures conferences would begin with participants articulating their situatedness, making visible the field’s demographic and geographic concentrations. Funding for futures work would explicitly recognize that epistemological reflexivity requires time and resources. It cannot be added cost-free to existing projects. Indigenous and marginalized communities’ futures work would be recognized not as ‘alternative approaches’ but as epistemologically distinct practices requiring different evaluation criteria.
Ethically, futures work claiming to serve ‘humanity’ or ‘society’ without specifying which humans, whose society, from what vantage point would be recognized as epistemologically naive at best, colonizing at worst. Practitioners would acknowledge that epistemological reflexivity itself, as currently articulated, emerges from specific traditions and may not translate across all contexts. The field would cultivate comfort with epistemic uncertainty: recognizing that our most rigorous methods still see from somewhere, never everywhere.
Such transformation would not resolve futures studies’ epistemological challenges. It would make them continuously workable rather than perpetually deferred. The field would shift from seeking the right method to cultivating the capacity for epistemological navigation. This would make futures studies less confident in its pronouncements and more honest about its limitations, a paradoxical foundation for genuine authority. The measure of good futures work would become not predictive accuracy but epistemological integrity: the ability to see clearly from one’s position while acknowledging what that position cannot see.
Stance Before Method
The argument has moved through three linked claims. First, plausibility operates as the mechanism through which epistemological positioning shapes which futures become thinkable: Not as objective criterion but as intersubjectively constructed coherence that enables and constrains imagination simultaneously. Second, Applied Critical Futures Studies operationalizes this through frameworks like the Critique Circle that maintain critical edge within institutional constraints. Third, existing quality criteria assess methodological execution well but miss epistemological reflexivity: the capacity to recognize your stance, understand what it enables and forecloses, and navigate deliberately between stances.
This matters because futures work, whether conducted as academic Futures Studies or applied Foresight practice, always operates within power relations. The question isn’t whether to engage with power but how to do so with epistemological awareness rather than naive replication. When dominant plausibility structures demonstrably fail, climate crisis, authoritarianism, systemic inequality, treating methods as epistemologically neutral becomes untenable.
In practice, all three epistemologies appear simultaneously in any futures project. A workshop contains predictive trend analysis, cultural negotiation, and critical questioning at once. What matters is whether practitioners recognize which moves they’re making, understand what each enables and forecloses, and can navigate deliberately rather than defaulting unconsciously to predictive stances that reproduce dominant plausibilities. Yet recognizing this doesn’t guarantee transformation. Epistemological reflexivity is necessary but not sufficient. It creates conditions for other futures to become thinkable, but thinking isn’t the same as enacting.
Whether epistemological reflexivity can avoid instrumentalization remains to be seen. But the alternative, treating methods as epistemologically neutral, has demonstrably failed. Design Thinking’s collapse shows what happens when methodological sophistication replaces epistemological awareness. The brain rot spreads not when we lack methods but when we treat methods as sufficient.
The choice facing both academic Futures Studies and applied Foresight practice is stark: develop epistemological courage to question the stances from which we work, or watch methodological sophistication rot into performance. Whether this reflexive capacity can survive institutionalization remains an open question. The answer determines whether futures work maintains transformative potential or becomes another discipline reproducing the present in alternative costume.
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments: AI-assisted technologies (Claude) were used for structural development, argument refinement, and language editing. All conceptual frameworks, methodological innovations, case analyses, and scientific conclusions are the author’s original work.
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