If you’ve ever needed to explore the full impact of a proposed change, you’ll know how hard it can be to identify all possible outcomes. In situations like these, many people panic, and list the first consequences that they can think of, resulting in a list that’s shallow, incomplete, and tricky to analyze.
This is where the Futures Wheel can help. This visual tool gives you a structured way of brainstorming the direct and indirect consequences of a decision, event, or trend.
- The Futures Wheel Framework
- Paper or flip charts
- Markers
If you’ve ever needed to explore the full impact of a proposed change, you’ll know how hard it can be to identify all possible outcomes. In situations like these, many people panic, and list the first consequences that they can think of, resulting in a list that’s shallow, incomplete, and tricky to analyze.
This is where the Futures Wheel can help. This visual tool gives you a structured way of brainstorming the direct and indirect consequences of a decision, event, or trend.
How to Use the Futures Wheel
- Step 1: Identify the Change. Write the change that you need to consider in the center of a piece of paper, or on a flipchart. This could be an event, trend, problem, or possible solution.
- Step 2: Identify Direct, First-Order Consequences. Now, brainstorm possible direct consequences of that change. Write each consequence in a circle, and connect it from the central idea with an arrow. These are “first-order” consequences.
- Step 3: Identify Indirect, Second-Order Consequences. You now need to brainstorm all the possible “second-order” consequences of each of the first-order (direct) consequences that you wrote down in Step 2, and add them to your diagram in the same way. Then, repeat this by identifying the third-order consequences, fourth-order consequences, and so on.
- Step 4: Analyze Implications. Once you’ve completed all of the levels of the Futures Wheel, you’ll have a clear picture of the possible direct and indirect consequences resulting from the change. List these.
- Step 5: Identify Actions. Where the possible consequences that you’ve identified are negative, think about how you’ll manage them. Where consequences are positive, think about what you’ll do to take full advantage of them.
