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…
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By Nic Kaftan The future no longer arrives as a distant planning horizon. For many leaders it enters the coaching room as overload, compression, reactivity, and the nagging sense that today’s decisions are being made with yesterday’s frames. They are asked to stabilise teams, respond to AI-mediated change, navigate institutional fatigue, and still offer direction. The problem is not simply pressure. It is the way imagined futures already organise the present. During the pandemic and after, leaders I coached often described feeling “chased by change.” One senior executive, after mapping the pushes of the present and the weight of inherited…
by Virginia Robin The growing emphasis on lawyer wellbeing, particularly since around 2010, reflects the legal profession’s attempt to respond to a systemic challenge. While this paper draws primarily on empirical research relating to lawyer wellbeing within Western common law jurisdictions – principally the United States, with broader references to the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada – the challenges raised may nevertheless resonate with legal practitioners in other jurisdictions. The applicability of the solutions proposed, however, may necessarily vary across different legal systems and cultural settings. Concern for lawyer wellbeing entered legal discourse as early as the 1980s, yet only…
by James Balzer and Giuseppe Dal Prá This essay introduces the Horizon Summit framework as a structured anticipatory governance approach. The heuristic of this framework is displayed in Figure 1. The framework is situated within the growing field of anticipatory governance (Guston, 2014; Poli, 2017; Tõnurist & Orlik, 2025), which seeks to embed future-oriented reasoning into institutional decision-making. It accounts for historical vulnerabilities of policy ‘subjects’ that must be overcome (Horizon 1), scenarios that provide policy optionality and directionality to overcome these vulnerabilities (Horizon 2), and the long-term characteristics of these policy scenarios, including the preferred future (Horizon 3). See…
by Ozioma Egwuonwu, Marimar López & Makēda Gershenson Introduction Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) offers a distinctive futures-oriented approach that penetrates multiple layers of reality—from surface events to deep cultural myths—to reveal hidden assumptions and unlock transformative possibilities. Central to CLA’s power is its engagement with metaphor, which functions as a foundational architecture shaping how individuals, organizations, and societies interpret their worlds and envision change. On May 3, 2025, in Lisbon, Portugal, twenty-five individuals with diverse experiences and interests gathered for an intensive masterclass on Causal Layered Analysis. Unlike conventional futures workshops centered on slideshow presentations, this learning journey was designed…
by Brooke Ferguson, Dr Dylan DeLosAngeles & Dr Kristin Alford Part 1: Introduction MOD. Located within Adelaide University, MOD. (Museum of Discovery) is a future-focused, interactive museum working at the intersection of science, art, and innovation in South Australia. Through its dynamic annual exhibitions, the museum showcases how research shapes our understanding of the world to inform, imagine and create possible futures. BROKEN was MOD.’s 2024 exhibition. It spanned eight galleries, explored six complex systems and welcomed over 85,000 visitors. The exhibition facilitated experiences for visitors to practice creating alternative and hopeful futures, imagine multiple pathways towards those futures, and,…
by Greg Landry. Urban and rural polarization can be defined as the political, social, economic, and cultural divide between urban and rural areas. If left unchecked, the implications of polarization include an increase in prejudice and discrimination, slower economic development, and an inability to address societal challenges (Elderman Trust Barometer, 2023). In Canada, dimensions of urban-rural polarization appear frequently in the mainstream media. Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) is a futures methodology that uses a layered approach by deconstructing and reconstructing complex social problems. The classical methodology unpacks issues across four levels: litany, systemic causes, discourse/worldview, and myth/metaphor (Inayatullah, 1998, Inayatullah et…
José Ramos and Sohail Inayatullah Introduction For eight decades, the global order has been defined by the architecture of the post-WWII Bretton Woods system and the presiding influence of American hegemony. Today, that foundation is fracturing under the weight of profound contradictions. From the rise of internal authoritarianism and economic isolationism to the genocide in Gaza, the invasion of Ukraine and escalating tensions with Iran, Venezuela and NATO, the United States is in a deepening crisis of legitimacy that will reverberate across the globe. This symposium, published in JFS Perspectives, seeks to situate these contemporary dynamics within a grander…
José Ramos and Sohail Inayatullah This symposium brings together rigorous analyses of state power, including the state of Israel’s creation of the humanitarian crises in Gaza and the trajectory of United States domestic and foreign policy. We recognize that in the current political climate, such critiques are often met with labels of “antisemitism” or “anti-Americanism”. However, we state unequivocally that these contributions are rooted in a commitment to human rights and the accountability of nations, not in prejudice or a lack of patriotism. The Distinction Between State Critique and Bigotry Regarding the critique of the State of Israel, we affirm…
Ivana Milojević Genocidal Histories, Presents, and Futures: A Gendered Reading To ask whether genocide has a gender may, at first glance, appear to be a category error. One is an act of annihilation; the other, a map of identity. Perhaps the connection has been slow to emerge because both genocide and gender are relatively recent arrivals in public discourse. The term genocide was coined only in 1944 by Raphäel Lemkin. Likewise, the current conceptualisation of gender has its origins in the work of Simone de Beauvoir, particularly her seminal text The Second Sex (1949), in which she famously asserted,…