Article
Romano Theunissen1*
1Independent Researcher and Consultant, South Africa
Abstract
This article critically re-examines the Futures Cone, a foundational but frequently misapplied tool in foresight practice. Often treated as a forecasting method or creative prompt, the Cone is reframed here as a relational and epistemic scaffold that only gains meaning through reflective, participatory processes. Drawing on foresight theory, decolonial perspectives, and design facilitation, the paper introduces a five-stage framework to guide its responsible use. Grounded in narrative, emotion, and historical inquiry, this approach restores the Cone’s original intent to organize complexity and hold space for plural, situated possibilities.
Keywords
Critical Futures, Futures Cone, Participatory Methods, Pedagogical Framework, Temporality
Introduction
The Futures Cone is one of the most recognizable and enduring visual metaphors in futures studies. Once a symbol for the multiplicity of possible futures, its ubiquity in workshops, slide decks, and strategy sessions has paradoxically diluted its meaning through misuse and oversimplification. Practitioners frequently treat it as a forecasting framework or idea-generation prompt, roles for which it was never designed.
This critique is not new. Users have long cautioned against the Cone’s objectification as a method (Voros, 2017; Gall et al., 2022), warning it reduces complexity. Yet despite these warnings, the Cone continues to be misunderstood and misapplied, often stripped of its context, history, and depth. The issue, however, is not with the Futures Cone itself, but rather with how it is applied, without reference to its roots, theory, or facilitation. In some cases, it has been stripped of nuance altogether, becoming a decorative gesture rather than a meaningful tool for thinking (Voros, 2024).
This paper argues for a reframing of the Futures Cone, not a rejection of it. It aims to re-establish the Cone’s relevance by critiquing its use and introducing a five-stage framework, the Cone Framework, for its repositioning in foresight practice. Drawing on reflective-practice methodology grounded in foresight facilitation, the critique presented here emerges from patterns observed across fieldwork, public discourse, and practitioner spaces. The proposed framework synthesizes foresight theory, learning theory, and design facilitation to offer a practical and conceptually rich alternative.
In doing so, this paper clarifies the Cone’s epistemic role and offers a grounded alternative for foresight practice, education, and pedagogy. Theoretically, it explores the epistemic assumptions that underlie the Futures Cone and how they evolved. Practically, it offers a five-stage facilitated approach that makes the Cone meaningful again. And educationally, it provides a mechanism for not only teaching Futures and Foresight methods but also embedding a ‘reflective way of thinking’ into the process. The paper maps the Cone’s evolution and introduces a structured, epistemically grounded alternative for its use.
Origins And Evolution Of The Cone
Before becoming a visual shorthand for multiple futures, the Futures Cone began as a set of conceptual distinctions. One of the earliest articulations came from Dr. Somporn Sangchai in a working paper published by the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies in 1974 (republished in Journal of Futures Studies, 2024). Building on Daniel Bell and others, Sangchai introduced a typology of alternative futures: the immediate, probable, possible, and distant. He argued that the more abstract the future is, the further away from the present it lies, with the immediate future followed by the probable, then the possible, and finally the distant. Sangchai also differentiated between desirable and undesirable futures, which he saw as cutting across this typology. While Sangchai himself did not publish a formal diagram, in his introduction to the reprint Inayatullah (2024) describes Sangchai’s typology as the invention of the Futures Cone and as the first articulation of spatiality in futures thinking.
Sangchai’s typology was expanded on by Norman Henchey (1978), who outlined four types of futures: the possible, probable, plausible, and preferable. These categories functioned as typologies, intended to prompt reflection on which futures were likely, desirable, or worth pursuing. Henchey (1978) drew heavily on earlier work by Bell, Polak, and Toffler, situating his typology within a broader intellectual lineage, though without reference to Sangchai’s contribution.
The cone as a visual tool emerged in the 1990s through the work of C.W. Taylor (1990), who developed the “Cone of Plausibility” while at the U.S. Army War College. Designed to support scenario work, Taylor’s model emphasized the extrapolation of trends and the construction of plausible scenarios. It included both a forward-facing futures cone and a backward-facing past cone to track trends over time (see figure 1). Taylor described the cone as a forecasting process used to extrapolate sequential consequences along timeline projections (Taylor, 1990).
Fig 1: The Cone of Possibilities by C. W. Taylor, 1990.
Taylor’s model was an exercise in plausibility rather than preferability. Its orientation toward prediction places it closer to strategic planning than to exploratory or normative futures work.
The modern Futures Cone, organized around multiple alternative futures, was developed by Clem Bezold and Trevor Hancock in the early 1990s (Taket, 1993; Hancock & Bezold, 1994). Building on Henchey, their diagrams mapped the relationship between futures radiating from the present (see figure 2). While not widely adopted initially, these versions laid the groundwork for what would become the most recognizable Cone and the version formalized by Joseph Voros (2017).
Fig 2: Futures Cone model developed by C. Bezold and T. Hancock (1993).
Voros’s interpretation of the Futures Cone, published in the early 2000s, expanded and clarified the structure. He added categories like the “preposterous” and positioned the Cone as an epistemic map, a way to organize, not generate, futures thinking (Voros, 2003; 2017). Voros emphasized that the Cone is not a forecasting tool, but a cognitive aid to hold and structure multiple possibilities. In his writings, Voros reiterates its value as a framing device, one that resists closure and maintains openness to multiple narratives (see figure 3).
Fig 3: The Futures Cone diagram by J. Voros (2003)
However, this conceptual distinction is often lost in practice. Scholars such as Sohail Inayatullah and Maree Conway have noted the widespread use of the Cone without attribution or reflection (Voros, 2024). It frequently appears in foresight workshops, presentations, and reports with no mention of its origins or conceptual basis. Detached from theory, it is used as a visual prop rather than an interpretive device, part of a broader pattern in which futures tools are stripped of context and applied as templates (Sardar, 2010; Escobar, 2020).
In a recent effort to address such concerns, Gall et al. (2022) systematically reviewed existing cone models and proposed a version that incorporates technical and conceptual improvements. Their model modifies the cone’s shape to expand exponentially over time, reflecting increasing uncertainty. It also redefines wild cards as disruptive influences across multiple trajectories, incorporates “black swans” (high impact, outlier events that are typically identifiable in hindsight) and “unknown unknowns” (transformative events that lie beyond our current imaginations), and introduces the Clarke-Dator Boundary to mark the limits of what can be imagined (see figure 4).
Fig 4: Revised Futures Cone by Gall et al. (2022)
Notably, Gall et al. reposition preposterous futures outside the cone, challenging the idea that all futures fit within a single conceptual space. They also emphasize bidirectional influence: not only does the present shape the future, but the futures also influence the present. Acknowledging historical complexity, they depict the past as a non-linear path, shaped by contingency rather than causality. These adjustments bring the Cone closer to contemporary understandings of systemic complexity.
Yet, for all its innovations, the Gall et al. model retains a fundamentally linear structure, beginning from a single “now”. It does not fully engage with more radical critiques that call for recognizing multiple presents or plural pasts. While it improves on earlier models, it remains susceptible to the same risks of being applied without facilitation, stripped of context, and mistaken for method.
A more radical expansion comes from Christophilopoulos (2021), who introduces the “Cone of Everything”, rooted in special relativity and the Minkowski spacetime model. His diagram incorporates both a futures and a pasts cone, echoing Taylor’s structure but extending it conceptually. By elevating the past to a cone, Christophilopoulos highlights that just as there are multiple futures, there are also multiple pasts, shaped by each observer’s position in space and time (see figure 5).
Fig 5: The Cone of Everything by Christophilopoulos (2021)
This change reframes the Cone not just as a diagram of possibility, but as a relational construct. The present becomes contested and contingent, an intersection of overlapping trajectories and imaginaries. Christophilopoulos’s model challenges the neutrality of “the now” in most cone diagrams and introduces ontological plurality that aligns with critical and decolonial futures work.
Similarly, Terry et al. (2024) introduce the “Entangled Time Tree” as a decolonial tool rooted in African Futurism and Indigenous storytelling. They advocate recognizing multiple pasts, relational time, and narrative diversity as essential to just and sustainable futures, echoing the Past Cone’s conceptual lineage.
Today, the Futures Cone appears in a range of contexts, from UN foresight programs to corporate workshops, policy labs, and more. Despite its widespread adoption, the tool is often deployed superficially, as an organizing mechanism, a slide graphic, or a conceptual placeholder. Rarely is it used in ways that reflect its intellectual and philosophical depth (Christophilopoulos, 2021; Gall et al., 2022).
While the Cone was never intended to generate content, its strength lies in helping make sense of what emerges through reflection, dialogue, and critical analysis. Used without that groundwork, without asking whose futures are being imagined, from what perspective, or in relation to which histories, the Cone flattens complexity rather than surfacing it.
Reclaiming the Cone requires more than refining its structure. It requires a re-situating of the tool within a practice that is epistemically humble, historically informed, and contextually grounded. No diagram, however sophisticated, is neutral (Escobar, 2020). As the field of futures studies expands, the misuse of its core tools risks undermining its critical potential. To reframe the Cone is to reframe the role of method itself, not as a shortcut to insight, but as a scaffold for inquiry. This reframing is not just technical; it is pedagogical and epistemological.
The Shape And Time Of The Cone: Visual Futures And Temporal Assumptions
The Futures Cone is not merely a diagram. It’s a symbolic device that encodes assumptions about time, space, and possibility. Most visualizations depict the present as a singular point from which futures radiate outward in symmetrical arcs (Gall et al., 2022). As the cone expands, futures become more speculative, ranging from probable to preferred, plausible to preposterous (Voros, 2003; Dator, 2009). This reflects modernist and western assumptions that time moves linearly from now into the future, that the future is open, shapeable, and external, and that the present is a neutral, shared launch point for collective anticipation (Nowotny, 1994; Adam, 2008).
While the Cone is usually interpreted temporally, it is also spatial. Its symmetry, radial expansion, and single-point origin implicitly encode assumptions about how futures occupy space. Hardin Tibbs’ Strategic Landscape model makes this dimension explicit by mapping futures thinking onto terrain: the star (vision), mountain tops (scenarios), chessboard (strategy), and jungle (institutional constraints). According to Inayatullah and Sweeney (2020), these metaphors allow practitioners to spatially locate themselves before they temporally project ahead. When applied to the Cone, it becomes more than a timeline; it becomes a landscape. Linking Cone and Landscape together foregrounds how diagrams are never neutral. They enact assumptions about both where we stand and when we imagine, revealing that futures are always situated in a particular space-time.
This logic is often naturalized in futures work, but it is neither culturally nor ontologically universal. It reflects what Sardar (2010) critiques as a Western model of “future-ism”, a future obsessed with progress, novelty, and expansion, often at the expense of relationality and memory. The cone’s structure reinforces this. Its geometry implies predictability, its radial symmetry suggests neutrality, and its forward tilt implies a temporality that is directional and instrumental. As Escobar (2020) notes, artifacts such as these often enact onto-epistemologies, they do not merely represent futures but perform certain worlds into being.
Alternative temporalities disrupt this model. In Māori cosmology for example, time flows in reverse to Western expectations. The word mua refers to “the past” and to “that which is in front,” while muri refers to “the future” and “that which is behind” (Mead, 2003; Royal, 2009). This inversion implies that the past is known and visible, it’s before us, while the future is obscured and unseen. Such temporal stances emphasize guidance from ancestral knowledge, prioritizing relational responsibility over forward-looking ambition. Similarly, in Australian First Nations traditions, Dreamtime (or Tjukurpa) is not a mythic past but a co-existing temporal domain in which ancestors, land, and law are entangled (Yunkaporta, 2019). Time here is non-linear and recursive, anchored in relationships between kin, country, and cosmology (Yunkaporta, 2019; Rose, 2004). Futures are not imagined as separate from the past, but as reactivations of storylines, remembered, honoured, and renewed.
In the ontologies of many East African ethnic groups, notably the Akamba, Kikuyu, Ankore, and Latuka, time is also understood through logic that contrasts with Western linearity (Mbiti, 1969). Mbiti (1969) differentiates between Sasa – an immediate time encompassing the present, recent past, and near future, and Zamani – the ancestral or mythic time into which events “enter” only once they are remembered, ritually acknowledged, and woven into memory. According to Mbiti, the distant future has little status in these societies as it isn’t real until it’s lived. The emphasis lies on the continuity of obligation, not the anticipation of transformation. Kwasi Wiredu (1996) further argues that time in Akan society, predominantly based in modern Ghana, is event-based rather than abstract. Moments are marked by social or ecological happenings such as “when the rains come,” “after the harvest,” or “when the elders meet” rather than by measured time. In this framing, time is relational and experiential, not linear and empty. It is a field of action and connection, not a container of options.
These conceptions expose how the Cone’s geometry privileges a particular kind of thinking around time. Its single-point present assumes that all participants occupy the same “now”, while its forward-facing structure implies a shared orientation toward progress and novelty. This is not how time is lived or imagined in many parts of the world. For those embedded in non-western cosmologies, the present is not a platform for control but a threshold of remembrance, where ancestral obligations are carried forward and time is folded into relationship. As Whyte (2018) argues in the context of Anishinaabe thought, futures are not abstract projections, but collective responsibilities inherited from deep time and shaped by land, kin, and historical continuity.
Wildman and Inayatullah’s 1996 work on ways of knowing and pedagogy illustrates how cultures learn, narrate, and locate the future differently, through stories, metaphors, and participatory practice. Such community-grounded epistemologies decenter linear time and uniform space, aligning with plural temporalities. Incorporating these ways of knowing into the Cone guards against a monolithic present and legitimizes multiple sites of anticipation within the same system.
If the Cone were to embody such logics, it would need to be reimagined. Perhaps as a spiral (Inayatullah, 1993), a braid, or a constellation, where past, present, and future are entangled rather than sequenced. Rather than expanding away from an origin, the future might deepen, loop, or reverberate. Instead of growing more speculative with distance, it might become more grounded, shaped by memory, ceremony, and relationship. In this sense, the Cone becomes not a map, but a mirror, reflecting the assumptions of those who use it.
These different temporal approaches and understandings are not a call to discard the Cone, but to hold it critically and contextually. To reflect and ask, what kind of time does it presume? Whose futures does it accommodate? Whose temporalities does it marginalize or erase? As Escobar (2020) insists, futures work must reckon with both epistemology and ontology, with the worlds it presumes and produces. A decolonial and relational foresight practice must therefore open multiple futures and also multiple times. It must resist the impulse of linear projection, and instead make space for temporal multiplicity, for futures that are ancestral, cyclical, ceremonial, and ecological. Only then can the Cone serve as more than a diagram.
Misuse Of The Cone: The Fallacy Of Methodology
Despite its conceptual richness, the Futures Cone is often reduced to a procedural shortcut. In many foresight workshops, it begins with simple prompts: “Draw a cone. Place sticky notes.” Participants sort ideas into probable, preferable, or preposterous. What’s typically missing is interrogation of assumptions, origins, or perspectives. The Cone becomes a container for surface-level creativity rather than a catalyst for critical reflection.
Gall et al. (2022) caution against this reduction. They argue the Cone was never intended as a method, but as a cognitive aid, a visual device to provoke thinking, not to replace it. Applied in isolation or with predefined categories, the Cone becomes a shortcut: a way to look like someone is engaging in foresight, without doing so.
A persistent problem is the treatment of the “present”. The Cone is almost always depicted as beginning from a single, fixed point, a “now”. This implies consensus, as if one shared present leads to all possible futures. But as scholars like Nowotny (1994) and Adam (1998) argue, the present is not neutral. It is fractured, uneven, and experienced differently across time, place, and social position. One person’s “now” may be another’s past, or future. By erasing this multiplicity, the Cone flattens complexity into a false universal.
This brings us to what Whitehead (1929) called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”, mistaking abstract models for reality. In the case of the Cone, the diagram is objectified, treated as a concrete framework rather than an interpretive tool. Its symmetrical shape can obscure the messy, incoherent, and relational nature of futures. It gives the illusion of rigor and control, even as it bypasses the uncertainties it claims to represent. This misuse reflects what Slaughter (2002) critiques as the technocratic drift in foresight practice, where forecasting tools displace more reflexive, socially constructed understandings of futures.
Beyond misuse, the Cone, like many foresight tools, is frequently misattributed or not attributed at all. This issue has surfaced in practitioner spaces such as LinkedIn, where Joseph Voros (2024) expressed frustration over the widespread use of the Cone without acknowledgment of its intellectual lineage. He noted that while he formalized and expanded its structure, the tool is often credited solely to him or used with no attribution at all. Maree Conway echoed this concern, calling such omissions “shameful”. These critiques point to a broader anxiety within the futures community that tools are being decontextualized, stripped of meaning, and reduced to icons.
Yet even Voros himself has made attribution missteps, for instance, omitting C.W. Taylor’s “Cone of Plausibility” in his earlier accounts (Voros, 2017). This illustrates the difficulty of tracing intellectual provenance in a field with overlapping genealogies and informal circulation. While attribution has proven to be challenging, misattribution is not merely an oversight. It alters how tools are interpreted, reproduced, and taught. It reinforces the false notion that these tools are timeless templates, rather than context-bound constructs shaped by specific epistemologies, philosophies, and institutional needs.
While misattribution and misuse are distinct, they are interlinked. Together, they contribute to the reduction of foresight practice into diagrams and deliverables, stripped of conceptual and ethical grounding. Over time, this tendency aligns with what Sardar (2010) and Escobar (2020) call the “over-instrumentalization of futures”. Tools like the Futures Cone are extracted from their roots and applied in technocratic exercises, scenario sets, policy visions, innovation pathways, without questioning underlying assumptions. In these contexts, the Cone can reproduce dominant narratives, reinforce power structures, and marginalize alternative imaginaries. It becomes a neutralizing device, not a liberatory one. Rather than opening space for new futures, it narrows the field to what is already legible, and palatable, to institutions.
This risk is amplified when the Cone is used without critical self-awareness. When foresight tools are not paired with narrative inquiry, questioning, or positional awareness, they often conceal more than they reveal. The Cone’s structure lends itself to visions of “preferred futures”, but these are rarely interrogated. Preferred by whom? For whom? Under what assumptions? Without reflexivity, the Cone can reinforce dominant desires rather than surface excluded needs. What passes as foresight may, in practice, be a form of future-making that privileges present power.
In my own practice, I have twice used the Cone in ways that, in hindsight, reproduced its limitations. Once with a leadership group in a global health organisation, and another with secondary school students, participants generated scenarios and placed them on the Cone, labelling them across the full set of archetypes. When prompted with deeper interrogation, discussions unravelled, especially around the categories of “plausible” and “preferred”. Without such questioning, the Cone would simply have perpetuated the very power and privilege we were meeting to transform.
This does not mean the Cone should be discarded. But it must be recontextualized. It cannot be a starting point for foresight, but an arrival point, a structure that gains meaning only after listening, contextual grounding, and epistemic reflection. Used this way, the Cone remains valuable not because it explains the future, but because it organizes our relationship to it. It becomes not a method, but a moment of method, a way to see what futures emerge after the harder work is completed.
Reclaiming The Cone: A Facilitated Five-Stage Approach
If the Futures Cone is to remain relevant in futures practice, it must be approached not as a point of departure, but as a point of arrival. It should not be the first diagram on the wall, but the last, the result of a structured, reflexive process. When introduced too early, the Cone prematurely imposes categories on thinking that should remain emergent. When used later in a process, it helps make sense of complexity that has already surfaced. In this way, the Cone becomes not a method, but a consequence of method, a cognitive aid that gains meaning through the work that precedes it.
It is true, as Gall et al. (2022) and others have argued, that the Cone is not a methodology, a position that I agree with. But to stop there is to risk futility. The more productive task is not to critique the misuse of the Cone, but to build better scaffolding around it. The five-stage approach proposed here offers one such framework: a structured pathway that leads toward the Cone. Each stage is informed by theory, grounded in participatory facilitation, and designed to construct a richer “present”, one capable of holding multiple truths and generating more inclusive, intentional futures.
An updated cone
To build this scaffold, we must first define the Cone it supports. This model draws selectively from the work of Taylor, Voros, Christophilopoulos, and Gall et al., while adding features that better reflect plurality, complexity, and situatedness:
- The Past Cone: Rather than starting from a singular now, the model includes a backward-facing cone to reflect that the present emerges from multiple, intersecting histories. These include:
- Mainstream pasts: dominant, institutional narratives
- Ignored pasts: visible but excluded histories
- Forgotten pasts: erased or suppressed narratives
- Cultural pasts: locally significant histories
- Myths/Metaphors: symbolic or affective historical frames
- A Plural Present: Rejecting the point-based “now,” this model depicts the present as a spatial zone, representing divergent lived experiences, contested realities, and asynchronous temporalities.
- Nonlinear Trajectories: Futures unfold not in straight lines, but through looping, intersecting, and recursive paths, reflecting complexity, feedback, and disruption.
- Porous Boundaries: Echoing Gall et al., the cone uses dotted lines to signal epistemic openness: futures once deemed implausible may become possible.
- Expanded Scenario Typologies:
- Preposterous, Possible, Plausible, Probable, Projected, Preferred, and Undesirable futures.
- This includes formal institutional forecasts (projected) and ethically concerning trajectories (undesirable)
- Containment of Imagination: The cone captures all that is imaginable at a given moment, not to sort what is valid, but to reflect how cognition, culture, and context shape what is envisioned.
This model is not merely a diagram but a conceptual structure. It repositions the Cone as a dynamic site of inquiry, one that holds multiplicity, not consensus, emergence, not endpoints.
Fig 6: The Updated Cone
The Cone Framework
With this updated Cone, a new framework can now be constructed around it. This five-stage framework, designed for participatory workshops, takes users through the different aspects of the Cone without explicitly mentioning it. Participants uncover present narratives, explore their origins, unpack drivers of change within context, explore future scenarios, and use the past and present to develop new strategies and initiatives to create chosen futures. These stages are laid out below.
Stage 1: Uncovering the present
Activity: recruit or repel
This stage begins not with trends or forecasts but with feeling. The “Recruit or Repel” exercise invites participants to articulate how they perceive their organisation, institution, or community through the lens of personal resonance. Participants are asked: If you were at a school reunion, and met someone you wanted to recruit or repel from this organisation, what would you say? These prompts allow participants to surface emotional, cultural, and ideological signals about the current state of things, many of which go unspoken in formal analysis. Responses are gathered, themed, and discussed not for their accuracy but for their affective truth.
This stage draws on Weick’s work on sensemaking, where meaning is formed retrospectively through interaction and shared language (1995). It also resonates with Milojević’s concept of emotional foresight, which acknowledges that the future is not imagined solely through logic or evidence but through hope, fear, desire, and attachment (2024). The knowledge uncovered here is tacit, intangible but influential, and sets the tone for deeper inquiry.
Stage 2: Understanding the past
Activity: timelines
After surfacing emotional patterns, participants explore their origins through multiple pasts (mainstream, ignored, untold, cultural, and mythical). Participants map these origins, pairing them with timelines of lived experience. This process, while being a mapping process to understand the past, also serves as a diagnosis process uncovering when and where feelings started.
This stage avoids producing a singular history. Instead, it constructs a mosaic of remembered, forgotten, and reinterpreted narratives. It is grounded in decolonial temporality, particularly Escobar’s call to honour alternative ways of knowing time (Escobar, 2020). Terry et al. (2024) similarly argue for the necessity of engaging multiple pasts, drawn from African storytelling traditions and Indigenous speculative practices, as a means of resisting dominant, linear narratives and fostering more ecologically and socially just futures. Social memory theory and narrative foresight also inform this work, recognizing that the past we remember shapes the futures we imagine. By juxtaposing official timelines with personal ones, participants identify patterns, ruptures, and silences that continue to structure the present.
Stage 3: Understanding the present
Activity: Futures Triangle
This stage returns to the present, but through a more reflective, grounded lens. Participants use Inayatullah’s Futures Triangle (2023) to explore the interplay between the pushes of the present, pulls of the future, and weights of the past. For the first time, analytical elements are introduced: trends, drivers, constraints.
Crucially, this happens after emotional and historical grounding. As Milojević (2024) reminds us, imagination is shaped by emotion, and so too is memory. Placing analysis after affective and narrative inquiry respects this epistemic sequence.
This stage reinforces the idea that the present is not neutral. It is shaped by contradiction and power. Tools like the Futures Triangle, often assumed to be neutral, carry embedded assumptions. Escobar (2020) emphasizes that tools must be situated within their contexts. Therefore, the positioning of this stage helps participants interrogate the present not as “fact,” but as a negotiated construct.
Stage 4: Imagining futures
Activities: CPSM, 2×2 Matrix, Dator’s archetypes
After emotional context, historical roots, and present dynamics are surfaced, participants begin to imagine futures. Multiple methods may be used here:
- CPSM (Change Progression Scenario Method): Best Case, Worst Case, Adaptive, Regression, Marginal Change (Milojević, 2005; Inayatullah, 2023)
- 2×2 Matrices: Based on critical uncertainties
- Dator’s Four Archetypes: Continued Growth, Collapse, Discipline, Transformation
The chosen method is based on facilitation style, participant background, and context. CPSM aligns well with this framework as it mirrors the prior emotional arc. However, regardless of the method, the goal is not consensus but plurality, to imagine multiple, divergent, and sometimes conflicting futures.
Only after scenarios are developed is the Futures Cone introduced as an organizing structure. Scenarios are mapped into Cone categories (e.g. plausible, projected, preposterous), prompting further reflection. Repositioning a “Best Case” scenario as merely plausible, or even preposterous, often provokes valuable discussion.
This stage is not just about creativity. It demands critique:
- What is happening here?
- What assumptions are shaping this future?
- Who benefits, and who is excluded?
- Here narratives become tools of inquiry, not just outputs. Futures are interrogated, not idealized.
Stage 5: Returning to the present
Activity: backcasting or commitment setting
The final stage brings the process full circle. Participants return to a present now reframed through emotional, historical, and strategic insight. Using John Robinson’s (1990) backcasting method, they identify the conditions, decisions, and commitments necessary to move toward chosen scenarios. This also includes risk mitigation, contingency planning and many other outputs depending on the circumstances the participants find themselves in. Alternatively, participants could engage in commitment setting, choosing actions aligned with the futures they wish to build or avoid.
This stage grounds the Cone in practical application. Rather than ending with possibility, the process ends with responsibility. The Cone now becomes a platform for transformation design. Theoretical grounding comes from strategic foresight, anticipatory governance, and transition-oriented fields that link imagination to intervention. The workshop loop is closed, not with prediction, but with accountability.
Visual integration: rethinking the cone
In this model, the Futures Cone is not the entry point, it is the midpoint. It sits between sensemaking and strategy, between imagination and decision. Visually, the Cone can be reimagined not as static, but as a dynamic interface. Around it, the five facilitation stages form a series of inputs, shaping and enriching the futures placed within it (see figure 7). The present at the base of the Cone is not a given, but an outcome, co-constructed through reflection, dialogue, and plurality. When used this way, the Cone regains its original power to hold complexity, not simplify it.
Fig 7: The Cone Framework
Reflections From Embedded Facilitation Practice
While this framework is theoretically grounded, it has also been tested across diverse settings. Various iterations of the Cone Framework have been implemented with executive MBA cohorts, non-governmental organisations, intergovernmental bodies, and corporate teams. These engagements have surfaced key lessons about its facilitation and contextual adaptation.
First, clients often request visibility into the framework during the planning process. While the model is designed to unfold inductively, with each stage building experiential and epistemic depth, many clients want to preview the structure. This is often a matter of organisational culture and planning style. In such cases, it has proven effective to share a simplified visual version of the framework, omitting typological labels such as “plausible”, “preposterous”, or “ignored past”. When presented as a graphic agenda or high-level arc, this disclosure does not disrupt the integrity of the experience. The key is to retain flexibility in how the process is framed and facilitated during the session.
Second, the emotional intensity of the first two stages should not be underestimated. Stage 1 and Stage 2 routinely surface deeply held and personal views, including disillusionment, grief, institutional memory, and uncomfortable truths. These early stages are often emotionally draining, especially when dominant narratives are challenged or previously silenced experiences are named. Practitioners should anticipate this, creating space for decompression through breaks, journaling, or reflection. Attempting to rush through these stages can result in emotional spillover that negatively impacts later stages.
Third, the choice of scenario method in Stage 4 significantly shapes the process. Across multiple settings, the Change Progression Scenario Method (CPSM) has proven particularly effective. Unlike 2×2 matrices or archetypal models, CPSM extends naturally from the Futures Triangle introduced in Stage 3. This continuity reduces cognitive load while encouraging divergent thinking. CPSM also resonates with participants’ emotional and narrative momentum, producing scenarios that are accessible and meaningfully distinct. That said, other methods (e.g., CLA In-casting, Dator’s Four Archetypes) may be preferable depending on analytical capacity or engagement context.
Fourth, scenario classification using the Cone is often contentious and generative. Mapping scenarios onto Cone categories such as “plausible”, “preferred”, or “preposterous”, can provoke resistance. Participants may feel that a hopeful or visionary future is being devalued if labelled implausible. To address this, practitioners are encouraged to frame classification not as judgment, but as inquiry. Reframing questions like Preferred by whom? Undesirable for whom? Under what conditions? helps participants explore positionality and assumptions rather than defend fixed visions. This moment often generates some of the richest conversation of the process.
Fifth, insights derived from workshops are inherently shaped and limited by the participants’ composition. As with all participatory foresight methods, a homogeneous group tends to produce similarly biased outcomes. While diverse outcomes are not impossible for such groups, their perspectives will always be constrained by their lived experiences. Although practitioners commonly pose the question, ‘who is not in the room?’, it does little to bring diverse perspectives into the room and can lead to more marginalization. To foster robust outcomes and develop effective strategies, participant groups should aim for maximum representativeness, ideally mirroring the diversity of the relevant institution.
Finally, timing matters. While the framework can be delivered in a single day, the most impactful sessions often span two days. This allows for more thoughtful pacing, especially between emotionally dense and cognitively demanding stages. Stage 5 can, if necessary, be moved to a third day or handled asynchronously, though this is not recommended as energy and cohesion can be difficult to maintain.
In sum, this framework is not a plug-and-play tool. It demands adaptation, attunement, and skilled facilitation. Its effectiveness depends as much on how it is used, as on what it produces. These lessons affirm that the Cone, when scaffolded through a deliberate process, can still serve as a critical and catalytic device for futures thinking.
Contributions To Theory and Practice
This reframing of the Futures Cone contributes to both the theoretical and practical development of foresight. It responds to a long-standing tension in the field between accessibility and depth, between the demand for usable tools and the risk of epistemic flattening. Shifting the Cone from a methodological device to a scaffolded, reflexive process, The Cone Framework reclaims the Futures Cone. In doing so, it opens new pathways for its responsible, situated use.
Contributions to theory
This paper reconceptualizes the Futures Cone not as a forecasting template, but as a relational and epistemic scaffold that only gains meaning through prior facilitation, emotional grounding, and plural temporal engagement. Theoretically, this framework locates the Cone within the expanding terrain of critical futures thinking. This aligns with Ramos’ (2015) call to articulate futures studies as a pluralistic field-in-motion, constantly evolving through new epistemologies and practices. Rather than treating the Cone as a neutral model of temporal logic, it is reframed as a tool embedded in epistemic choices: what counts as knowledge, whose futures are made visible, and what assumptions structure the present. This interpretation draws from decolonial theory (Escobar, Sardar), systems thinking, and narrative futures, emphasizing that foresight tools are never culturally or politically neutral, they are entangled in meaning-making processes. Terry et al. (2024) offer a complementary intervention through their Entangled Time Tree, a decolonial heuristic grounded in African storytelling, ecological knowledge, and speculative traditions. Like the updated Cone, their model resists linear, universalist time in favour of entangled temporalities shaped by multiple pasts and relational presents. They propose that stories function as mechanisms of power, healing, and diversification, reframing temporal knowledge as both affective and political. Their work reinforces this paper’s core argument: that futures thinking must be grounded in situated, culturally embedded ways of knowing that honours memory and difference. This also echoes findings by De Vos et al. (2024), who describe the Cone as a boundary object, a tool whose meanings are co-constructed through participatory use. Their empirical research demonstrates how the Cone functions not as a static diagram but as a flexible heuristic shaped by facilitation, context, and interpretive labour.
The Cone Framework also critiques the instrumentalization of futures, the tendency to reduce foresight to fast-moving outputs, deliverables, or innovation sprints. Instead, by embedding the Cone within a process that includes memory, emotion, and positionality, the framework reasserts foresight as both an ethical practice and an epistemological intervention. It challenges practitioners to ask not just what futures are possible, but how those futures are imagined, from where, and by whom.
Contributions to practice
Practically, the model offers a replicable methodology that can be used across sectors. In organisational strategy, it supports leaders in surfacing internal dynamics that shape strategic possibility. In government foresight labs, it encourages participatory design that is grounded in lived experience, not only trend analysis. In community-based futures, it offers a respectful process that centers the voices of participants rather than extracting data from them. And by grounding the exploration in emotion and feeling rather than logic, it allows for the emergence of forgotten and ignored histories, especially in indigenous foresight practices.
What binds these applications is a shared set of principles: humility, participation, and reflexivity. The methodology does not assume the present is stable or shared. It does not treat participants as blank slates. It begins with the idea that knowledge is situated, and that responsible futures work must be responsive to context. Rather than promising clarity, the process allows for complexity. It turns the Cone from a static tool into a relational one, capable of adapting to the communities and conditions in which it is used.
Contributions to futures education
This approach also offers an intervention in futures education. The Cone is often one of the first tools taught to students of foresight, design, and strategy. But when taught in isolation, it risks becoming a shallow simulation, a template into which students insert assumptions rather than question them. The Cone Framework provides educators with a way to teach the Cone with context, grounding it in lived experience, critical reflection, and multiple temporalities.
This has relevance for design, business, and policy schools, where foresight is increasingly included but often reduced to tools and frameworks. Reintroducing the Cone as a midpoint in a larger process challenges students to consider not just outputs, but origins. It asks them to move beyond superficial inquiry and into structured, ethical engagement with possibility. In doing so, it equips the next generation of practitioners with not just tools, but with ethical frameworks and responsible judgement.
Contributions to foresight pedagogy
Lastly, this framework contributes to foresight pedagogy by offering a structured process that blends affective, narrative, analytical, and strategic modes of learning. Unlike foresight models that center on tools or typologies, this framework is rooted in the sequencing of epistemic shifts, from emotional resonance to anticipatory action, reflecting both how participants learn and how futures are constructed.
Drawing on Inayatullah (2004), Milojević (2024), and Miller (2018), this model treats foresight not as a neutral planning toolkit but as a facilitated learning journey. It enables participants to unlearn dominant narratives, engage with plural histories, explore imagined futures, and ultimately return to the present equipped with new commitments and frames for action.
To make this pedagogical logic explicit, the table below outlines the learning arc across five stages of the facilitation process. Each stage is characterized by a particular learning mode, cognitive operation, and foresight function, together forming the scaffolding through which anticipatory literacy is developed. These terms are drawn from a synthesis of foresight theory, learning theory, and design facilitation, and are defined within the context of this framework.
Table 1: The Pedagogy Table
| Stage | Learning Mode | Cognitive Operation | Foresight Function |
| 1. Uncovering the Present | Affective / Narrative | Emotional Sensemaking | Surfacing emotional and ideological models |
| 2. Understanding the Past | Critical Historical / Narrative historical / Decolonial History | Narrative Contextualization / Critical Memory Work | Revealing underlying structures / Surfacing layered and contested histories |
| 3. Understanding the Present | Analytical | Strategic Framing / Tension Mapping | Mapping forces of change |
| 4. Imagining Futures | Imaginative / Ethical | Narrative Construction / Scenario Framing | Generating and interrogating future narratives |
| 5. Returning to the Present | Strategic / Normative | Integration / Action / Commitment Setting | Translating insight into direction and action |
- Note. The terms used in this table reflect a hybrid vocabulary drawn from critical foresight, learning theory, and design pedagogy. While some terms, such as backcasting or sensemaking, have established definitions in foresight and related literature (Weick, 1995; Inayatullah, 2008), others, such as affective sensemaking or critical memory work, are coined here to capture the specific cognitive and emotional work observed in facilitation. Their use is not to formalize a typology, but to describe the distinctive shifts in thinking and feeling that occur across stages.
Conclusion: The Cone As Compass, Not Crystal Ball
The Futures Cone is not dead. But it is often misused, misunderstood, and misapplied. This article has argued that the problem is not with the Cone itself, but with the way it is treated: as a shortcut to futures thinking rather than a structure for organizing its outcomes. When deployed without context or care, the Cone becomes a hollow gesture, an appealing visual metaphor that conceals more than it reveals. But when facilitated correctly, and embedded within a deeper process of reflection, narrative, and imagination, the Cone retains its value. It becomes not a crystal ball, but a compass, something that helps us orient ourselves, without pretending to predict the path ahead.
Reclaiming the Futures Cone requires a shift in how we use tools in foresight. It means recognizing that no diagram is neutral, and no method is complete without ethical grounding. It means embedding tools within processes that are participatory, reflexive, and historically aware. The five-stage model proposed here is not the only way to achieve this, but it is one approach that takes seriously the need to build a meaningful present before projecting into the future. It challenges practitioners to begin with memory, emotion, and complexity, not with emerging issues, megatrends, and ungrounded scenarios.
Gall et al. (2022) are right to assert that the Futures Cone is not a method. Their critique serves as an important reminder that visual tools can be mistaken for frameworks or processes when they are, in fact, heuristics. However, as this article argues, the Cone can become methodologically significant when embedded within a broader facilitation practice, one that surfaces emotion, memory, context, and power. In this sense, the Cone becomes more than a diagram: it becomes a consequence of method, not the method itself. The risk lies not in using the Cone within methodology, but in isolating it from the critical processes that give it meaning. When it emerges through reflective, situated, and ethically grounded practice, the Cone can act as both a map and a mirror, revealing where we could go, but also where we stand.
This reframing is especially urgent as futures thinking becomes more visible and institutionalized. As foresight makes its way into policy rooms, boardrooms, and classrooms, we need more than toolkits, we need integrity. We need futures work that resists speed, resists spectacle, and resists the temptation to simplify what is complex. The Futures Cone, when used well, can support this kind of work. But it must be placed in the service of something larger than itself.
The future of foresight is not just about better tools, it is also about better relationships: with time, with place, and with each other. A next generation of foresight practice needs to be relational, plural, and grounded in the stories we carry, not just the diagrams we draw. When we use the Futures Cone to hold that complexity and not erase it, it becomes a tool worth keeping.
Acknowledgements
Independent research and consulting can be a lonely road. I am deeply grateful to those who helped bring this article into being. Katrina Botelho and Prateeksha Singh offered thoughtful notes and probing questions on earlier drafts. I also thank the editorial team at the Journal of Futures Studies for their guidance throughout this, my first solo publication journey. Finally, my thanks to Ahmet Alphan Sabancı, whose conversation and spirited debate on whether the Futures Cone is “dead” prompted me to formally document my ideas and practice.
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