Temporalizing Internal Consistency: Using the Futures Triangle as an Organizing Device for the Emplotment of Anticipatory Narrative Ecosystems

Introduction

Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.” (Winterson 2009, 62)

Jim Dator famously noted in ‘Dator’s Laws of the Future’ that any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous (Dator 2019). The question then arises, how might those who craft ideas about the future imagine spaces that are ridiculous but plausible? How might stories about the future challenge and provoke while maintaining an adequate degree of internal consistency requisite for suspension of disbelief leading to the transportation of audiences?

The futures triangle is a well established tool for mapping competing dimensions of plausible futures (Inayatullah 2005). While the term “images of the future” is the descriptive language commonly employed (Polak 1961), this paper seeks to more explicitly center the futures triangle as a method for negotiating narrative ecosystems in the futures space, and the messy socially constructed emplotment of stories about the future. The plausibility of a future, and the competing dimensions of the future made explicit and visually manifested by the futures triangle, lays bare the internal consistency, or lack thereof, of the socially constructed future. By employing various frames or organizing subsystems within the triangle, a rich and nuanced map of the future story system reveals itself in a process that is both imaginative and epistemologically archeological.

Futures Triangle and Scenario Formation

The six pillars framework positions the futures triangle as a mapping tool in the first stage of the framework, along with other methods such as shared history and futures landscape (Inayatullah 2008). The intention of employing the futures triangle in the initial stages of a futures exploration is to “map today’s views of the future through three dimensions” (Inayatullah 2008, 7). These three dimensions are the pull of the future, push of the present, and weight of history. The futures triangle acts as a temporal organizing container for narratives in the present as they relate to the future domain topic.

The futures triangle is also used in the fifth pillar - creating alternatives - of the six pillars framework, as a tool to derive content for scenario creation. The multi-single variable scenario method takes images of the future, and/or drivers of change, surfaced during the futures triangle mapping activity, and uses them to develop high-level scenario narratives about the future (Bussey et al. 2008). The futures triangle has also been applied to specific domain spaces to articulate preferred future scenarios from the positionality of the three dimensions. Milojevic adapted the futures triangle, in particular reframing “push of the present” to “push towards the future”, with the other two dimensions, weight of the past and pull of the future, acting as a sort of binary of plausibility, from which 3 narrative discourses emerge: utopianism, reformism, and traditional conservativism (Milojevic 2005). Similarly, Fergnani proposes the application of the futures triangle in the scenario formation phase of a futures workshop or research project. Employing the futures triangle “allows the futures researcher/practitioner to understand how scenarios relate to each other on the three Futures Triangle dimensions at a glance… i.e. pulls, pushes and weights” (Fergnani 2019, 186).

While these approaches are a useful and generative re-application of a highly adaptable method to scenario planning, the focus is on the worldbuilding, metadiscourse, or storyworld component of the narrative formation. The futures triangle as an organizing device can be extended even further beyond the worldbuilding stages of future conceptions into ever higher degrees of fidelity and concreteness and applied at the quotidian “everyday” future level of abstraction (Cowart 2022). The three tensions of the future can support the negotiation of the high fidelity, personal speculative narratives that are at the foreground of the scenario storyworlds as well. While the futures triangle conventionally supports the building of robust backdrops on the theater stage, we next consider the futures triangle’s usefulness in the foreground construction of the characters and stories that strut upon that stage.

Stories That Work: Internal Consistency = Suspension of Disbelief = Transportation

Any well told story has an internal consistency to it, a logic that provides a level of believability through the consistent application of rules within the storyworld that enables the reader or audience to suspend disbelief and transport or immerse themselves into the storyworld (Green 2021). An image or story about the future works similarly by the perceived plausibility of that future as defined or felt by the audience versus the more general realm of what is possible. Without a requisite degree of plausibility the intended audience, or a subsection of the intended audience, will not suspend disbelief, and therefore will not be transported into the future-space, inhibiting the activation of individual and collective imaginaries.

Crafting and maintaining internal consistency requires a logical ordering of knowledge within the narrative, a configurative relationship among and between the moments of the story. In other words, the emplotment of the future story - what Ricoeur refers to as the “poetic ordering” (Carr 1986) of the configuration of speculative moments of time into a unified narrative including but not limited to the storyworld or backdrop of the story, character interactions, and the selective reveal of particular events and moments in time. There are fairly simple and straightforward dimensions of internal consistency as well as more elusive compositional breakdowns. If a character is facing a climate-related disaster in India that has knocked out the power grid and telecommunication systems, they cannot conveniently phone someone in a moment of peril for help. This is a “hole” in the plot, a gap in the internal consistency. Internal consistency, however, can also be much more nebulous. A person can watch a movie, or read a book, and the story just doesn’t “ring true” to them. While far more difficult to diagnose and correct, this too is an example of internal consistency, or lack thereof. Somewhere in the complex configuration, the poetic ordering, is a hole in the story that allows this particular audience member to escape suspending their disbelief and find themselves outside of the story, no longer transported.

The relevance of internal consistency to the telling of stories in futures has been noted in previous articles that focused on scenario construction and refinement as well as the critical role of internal consistency in what is now commonly referred to as applied science fiction (The Applied Sci-Fi Project 2022). “The well-written science fiction story simulates its own reality, compelling the reader to co-participate in the act of creation by engaging both his emotions and intellect. The story “works” if the characters and their environment are portrayed with internal consistency and logic” (Livingston 1978, 164). In exploring various taxonomies of techniques for scenario construction, suggested techniques for ascertaining internal consistency include Cross-Impact Analysis and Morphological Field Analysis. Techniques such as these “could be used to check the internal consistency of the images of the future, and perhaps also the consistency of the paths towards these futures” (Börjeson et al. 2006, 735). In step six of his process for developing scenarios, Schumacher instructs scenario writers to:

Check for Consistency and Plausibility. The simple worlds you have just made are not yet full-fledged scenarios, because they probably have internal inconsistencies or lack a compelling story line. There are at least three tests of internal consistency, dealing with the trends, the outcome combinations, and the reactions of major stakeholders (Schoemaker 1995, 29)

Internal consistency is necessary for the suspension of disbelief. Suspension of disbelief “is used to describe our acceptance in art of the most fantastic worlds whose premises, actions, or outcomes we would question or reject in reality” (Tomko 2017, 1). It is this willingness to believe temporarily and emotionally that which is not real. While Riceur spoke of emplotment and “poetic ordering” in the construction of narrative, Coleridge, widely acknowledged as the originator of the concept, refers to the suspension of disbelief as a “transfer from our inward nature a human interest, and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing moment of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (Coleridge 1984, 174). The effective poetic ordering of a future provides the narrative scaffolding and imaginative structure for the audience to adopt a poetic faith.

Once again in the futures space, the suspension of disbelief has been focused more explicitly at the scenario level. “For scenarios to aid in imagining the future, the author has a responsibility to foster the reader’s willingness and ability to suspend disbelief, to invite the reader along the journey and to keep him or her there” (Frittaion et al. 2010, 1157). Of note is the challenges that can arise in relation to suspension of disbelief and scenarios, in large part due to the translation from the worldbuilding or storyworld narrative of scenarios to high fidelity stories derived from those storyworlds, as well as the common confusion of lumping low fidelity and abstract scenarios with high fidelity concrete stories that inhabit the prospected world.

Transportation to another place in time is enabled by the suspension of disbelief and facilitated by a higher degree of fidelity. This allows for an increased vividness and valence which translates into a more intensely imagined experience of the future world and a heightened evaluative capability (Lee et al 2021). It should be noted that narrative theorists have suggested common descriptions of transportation are potentially problematic and “there are risks in foregrounding metaphors of relocation and containment” (Caracciolo 2022, 25). Immersion need not privilege escapism; immersion can enable awareness. This is a helpful distinction for futurists and social innovators concerned with the ethics of crafting aspirational futures in challenging and traumatized spaces.

The plausibility of futures is a contested space of differing perspectives.The future’s triangle acts as an organizing device for narrative ecosystems in futures imaginaries. While the discipline of futures has long advocated for multiplicity and alternative futures, alternative voices have not always been heard. In an effort to find plausible futures for the many, we risk privileging preferred futures for the powerful voices that are already politically and culturally amplified. On traditional futures practices and the need to decolonize futures “multiplicity… does not guarantee plurality” (Bisht 2020, 218). The futures triangle can act as a method for defining a degree of coherence and internal consistency, plausibility, in considering a representation of the future, without collapsing voices, perspectives, and competing swarms of anticipatory stories into a homogeneous representation of the future. The futures triangle acts as an organizing device for these narrative ecosystems of contested and competing dimensions, capturing but not collapsing, possibly allowing for the suspension of disbelief and transportation of the plurality at the forefront of prospective narrative ecosystems.

Case Study Vignettes

To articulate this alternative usage of the futures triangle as an organizing device for anticipatory narrative ecosystems, three case study vignettes are described below: application of assumptions of change, stakeholder personas in transition design, and applications in experiential futures.

Assumptions of Social Change

Change is foundational to futures thinking. After all, if things didn’t change, what purpose would futures thinking serve? Octavia Butler famously noted “All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you” (Butler 1993, 3) succinctly capturing the reciprocal relationship between inbound and outbound change. Extending the metaphor of touch as the inciting incident of change, the question then arises: in what ways has the touch produced change? Something has changed, but what exactly has changed and how and why did it change?

In their work on futures thinking and pedagogy, Peter C. Bishop and Andy Hines note that “Almost all sociological research is about social statics, the modern term for which is social structure, and almost none is about social dynamics, what we now call social change” (Bishop and Hines 2012, 113). Central to the study of social change are the perspectives that drive assumptions about social change. “Any social science model operates from a particular set of perspectives” (Galt and Smith 1976, 32). Galt and Smith suggest perspectives in the social sciences can be broken down into four dichotomous categories of orientation: value, time, level of analysis, and viewpoint. The value orientation dichotomy of positive-normative is suggested as a way of organizing objective versus subjective perspectives on the social sciences. Time orientation, always of particular interest to futurists, is synchronic and diachronic, to describe whether the passage of time is considered in the model of change or not. Levels of analysis captures the implied distinction between the particularistic and the holistic, which the authors prefer to the more conventional “fallacy of composition” inherent in the micro and macro binary (Galt and Smith 1976, 40). And finally, viewpoint, labeled as emic or etic, in which the social science research focuses on categories of reality endogenous to the group under observation and of concern to them, or exogenous to the group and of concern to the researcher (Galt and Smith 1976).

A comprehensive but not exhaustive list of models of change and the critical assumptions associated with each provides an overview of the ways in which we view change differently and how it may influence our perceptions of how, why and when societal change occurs. (Table 1)

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Table 1.

Critical Assumptions Supporting Theories of Social Change.

Theory of Change	Critical Assumption
1. Progress	Universal standard of value and worth
2. Development	Consistent direction
3. Technology	Materialism and the means to manipulate it
4. Culture	Power of ideas
5. Cycle	Recurrence of macro states
6. Conflict	Struggle among interest groups
7. Market	Competition among producers and consumers
8. Power	Direction by a specific group
9. Evolution	Successive interactions with the environment
10. Emergence	Bottom-up independent agent

In a workshop setting bringing together the futures triangle and assumptions of change, students or participants are first asked to articulate a day-in-the-life future for themselves with a 20 year point of arrival. They are then tasked to complete the “Change Exchange” game, developed by Bishop, Blizzard, and Frewen, to heuristically capture an individual's assumptions of change. Finally, they share their short stories and assumptions of change, and co-construct a rich web within the futures triangle between where they locate their own assumptions of change along with the three dimensions of the futures triangle.

Participants often find conflicting and seemingly contradictory relationships between their image of the future, their assumptions of change, and the three temporal dimensions of the future, as well as how others interpret the situatedness of these elements and the relationships between them. For example, while an individual's assumptions of change are power and conflict, and they locate their future story as dominantly driven by the pull of the future, others interpret their future story and assumptions of change as being weighed down heavily by the past. Other examples include dominant assumptions of change acting in competing temporal dimensions, such as culture and the privileging of ideas situated with weight of the past, while power is associated with the pull of the future, raising generative questions around a particular representation of the future, and how an individual is negotiating and attempting to reconcile the plausibility of this particular future with their assumptions of change.

In some instances, students associate certain assumptions of change explicitly with the three dimensions of the future. In this sense, the locating of a story in the larger storysystem within the futures triangle is defined less by the content of the futures imaginary, but rather the assumptions of change privileged by the individual. For example, the weight of the past as being synonymous with cyclical assumptions of change. In this instance, the weight of the past anchors a futures narrative due to an individual or collective belief that, colloquially, ‘history is doomed to repeat itself.’ The pull of the future is synonymous with ideas, in which the inspirational and conceptual possibilities inspire those predisposed to ideas and culture as drivers of change versus the aspirational image itself. And finally, the push of the present as synonymous with power or conflict, compelling the present forward by brute force. See figure below. (Figure 1)

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Figure 1.

Futures Triangle and Assumptions of Change. Source: Wizinsky, Matthew. (2022). “Triangle of Change.” Unpublished manuscript.

Viewed through this particular overlay of the three dimensions of the future and assumptions of change, the plausibility and internal consistency of a future narrative necessitates representative assumptions that contextualizes and makes sense of the assumptions of change. In a complex storysystem web, temporal gravity and assumptions of the means by which this gravity can shift are entangled. By this line of reasoning, those creating the futures triangle are at least somewhat agnostic to the images of the future in the discourses of the domain, situating narratives based off of assumptions of change derived from the images of the future to articulate the plausibility of future stories.

The goal of this activity is to surface sub-story systems expressed but not necessarily explicit in the emerging futures discourse in the focus domain space and lay bare the individual and collective assumptions of what has historically shaped change, what is shaping change (or holding back change) today, and what is assumed will shape change in the future, all specifically related to the interrogated plausible future through an assumption of social change lens. This activity serves to create a more explicit three-dimensional representation of the futures triangle, the emplotted, semi-emplotted, and pre-emplotted future, adding additional dimensions to the triangle and depth to the negotiated and contested space of plausible futures.

Questions that arise in this activity might include: are the dominant assumptions of change expressed by the individual or stakeholder group equally dominant across all three dimensions of the futures triangle? Where are certain assumptions more dominant temporally? Why might that be? How would shifting the location of these assumptions, or the center of the temporal gravity, re-envision the plausible contested image of the future under examination?

Stakeholder Personas in Transition Design

Transition Design (TD) is a transdisciplinary approach that seeks to support systems-level transitions (Irwin et al. 2015). TD explicitly refuses to concretize a process that must be followed, but instead advocates for an approach of engaging with stakeholders in participatory discovery, exploring both the deep history and long-term aspirational futures of stakeholders that are part of the wicked problem, and rejecting silver bullet solutions in favor of ecologies of intervention meant to nudge the system slowly over time to address the unintended consequences inherent in any disruption within a complex system.

In the early stages of TD, stakeholder mapping organizes the voice of those most directly affected by the wicked problem by documenting their hopes and fears for the future. These hopes and fears are then mapped across stakeholder groups to surface lines of agreement, disagreement and complexity (ambiguity). These rich webs of prospection can be reframed as speculative story systems, entangled with each other. (Figure 2)

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Figure 2.

Hopes and fears stakeholder mapping in transition design.

The futures triangle acts here once again as an organizing device to locate the three tensions within each stakeholder group by taking hopes and fears and emplotting them within the futures triangle and thereby locating the narrative discourses and ensuring rich, multi-temporal stakeholder personas that are varied and at times contradictory. In the example above, Long Term Residents are expressing the push of the present, Developers the pull of the future, and The Air is expressing the Weight of the Past. While all three stakeholder groups are in broad agreement, their temporal positionality is not aligned. In this case, the co-construction of the future can be accomplished by recognizing that perceived misalignments may be more indicative of the temporal positionality than that of the desired future.

Returning to methods for decolonizing futures, the futures triangle in this context seeks to amplify diverse perspectives, locating and organizing, but not resolving these tensions. Plausibility of any particular future is an interconnected web of agreement and disagreement, and hopes and fears of futures. This method of persona formulation or character construction aids in the crafting of rich narrative milestones and vision creation later in the TD approach.

Questions that might arise in this activity include: how divergent is the weight of the past implicit in the persona of the stakeholder most adversely affected by the wicked problem with the pull of the future implicit in the persona of the stakeholder group most privileged in the current system? Where might lines of disagreement or complexity converge temporally, perhaps finding affinity in the timing of the future? And how might we retain the polyphonic quality of the stakeholder voices?

Applications in Experiential Futures

The experiential futures ladder provides a replicable and rapid movement from abstract setting to the concrete domestication of a future artifact or instantiation. (Candy and Dunagan 2017) In interviews with experiential futures practitioners and in the application of the experiential futures ladder in classroom and social innovation spaces, the opportunity to add an additional rung to the ladder, to increase the concreteness factor in temporal and storytelling dimensions, presented itself. Jake Dunagan, pioneer in the experiential futures space, is worth quoting at length to appreciate the nested and entangled story systems that emerge in the process of designing an experiential future:

“So you have to have a world, we build out that world and that narrative. Now, that's not necessarily the moment or the scene that we created the situation… that situation that you might be in is not always in the scenario, explicitly, but it's implied or built out from the world itself. So it has to exist there. So if you do this right you've got that story… What moment of that story are we going to tell? And it's already nested or embedded in a larger narrative… And then if you're doing it right, the kind of take off moment that you get the real thrill out of it is when it feels like you're just describing what's there rather than creating it.” (Dunagan, Jake, personal communication, August 29, 2022)

What Dunagan makes explicit here is twofold: the high fidelity moment in time derived from the world, and the internal consistency, the logic of the moment when extracted from the more abstract rungs of the ladder; the larger storyworld or living story system. Experiential futures practitioners effectively draw a thread from the storyworld of the scenario, through the situation and stuff levels, to arrive at a high-fidelity moment in time that acts as the entry point into the larger narrative. This high-fidelity moment, the “spark” level, is added to the experiential futures ladder to make explicit to new and emerging experiential futurists what is already practiced by those in the field. (Figure 3)

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Figure 3.

Experiential futures ladder.

The futures triangle provides a level of stability and internal consistency, a container that acts as not just the tensions but the conceptual boundaries of what is plausible in a given future context. There is a fractal nature to materializing the future. While previous work (Milojevic, 2005) highlights the value of employing the futures triangle at the scenario level, rather than the mapping level (in experiential futures ladder parlance the “setting”) the futures triangle also adds significant insight at the spark level. Returning to Dunagan’s comment that getting it “right” means “you’re just describing what’s already there,” indicates the spark is holographic; the whole of the story is in the parts. Using the futures triangle as a practical and heuristic tool at both the scenario and spark stages of constructing an experiential future is like the old adage of measure twice, cut once.

Use of the futures triangle in the spark conception stage supports the generation of helpful questions and considerations such as: How much are we asking of the audience to accept in order to be transported and close the experiential gulf between the present and this particular future moment? To what extent does this moment of time, this entry point into the larger storyworld, acknowledge the weight of the past (presumably the present or nested present (Hodgson 2013) of the audience)? To what degree is the present of the future believable and consistent? And is there temporal momentum in this future space in which a future for the future is at least hinted at, in order that we may have a, what we might call, “living” rather than “dead” or terminal future?

For example, during a day-long experiential futures event at the University of Houston in the Spring of 2022, several encounters with the future illustrate this internal consistency. A “Future of Government” experience began by volunteers ushering citizens into a retro-classroom space reminiscent of a community center. Citizens were shown a short video that explained the importance of regularly “calibrating” their civi-twin preferences. The video and the physical environment were retro in nature, drawing on past experiences with voting in small town America. Then, one at a time, citizen-participants scanned their calibration ID onto a sensor which activated a series of images to begin appearing on the screen, as sensors measured minute facial expressions, pupil dilation, etc., in order to determine individual voting preferences. Images of female empowerment, violence, animals, among others, flashed across the screen. At the end of the collage, citizen-participant’s previous and recalibrated preferences were displayed. Finally, participants were “thanked” for being good citizens and were offered light refreshments and snacks, including small cupcakes with the American flag on them.

The experience was meant to articulate a future world in which a form of distributed democracy operated emergently by having avatars vote on behalf of citizens on an ongoing basis. This particular moment in time was the regular maintenance necessary to ensure accurate calibration of these voting avatars to accurately reflect individual citizen preferences. Here we can see a sophisticated consideration of the storysystems and the futures triangle: the affective space of the room and the video drew upon traditional imagery of small town or middle American voting; several clever references drew on the current narratives of democracy under attack and challenging the legitimacy of elections; and finally, the pull of the future, the aspirational possibility that democracy can be distributed and each citizen can have their voice heard through a shift in cultural acceptance of technological mediation of democratic processes. In this experiential future the three dimensions of the plausible future act upon each other to illuminate a high fidelity moment of time that has an internal consistency and allows participants to transport into this future storyworld. (Figure 4)

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Figure 4.

Future of Government (Kiran Lee Carpenter, Jeremy Wilken, Alicia Llewellyn, Jonathan Casiano).

Conclusion

At present, there is no universally accepted definition of plausibility in the futures field (Fischer and Dannenberg 2021). This paper has delineated between scenario narratives as low-fidelity storyworlds versus high-fidelity stories about the future. The paper takes an explicit storytelling approach to the application of the futures triangle and draws a largely one-to-one relationship between plausibility and internal consistency. Perhaps utilitarian conceptions of plausibility are as malleable and adaptive as the futures triangle itself.

The elegant simplicity of the futures triangle allows for almost limitless iterations, synthesis with other tools, and applications. Like any useful mapping device, it organizes and distills complexity into manageable representations. Anticipatory story systems can benefit from the application of the futures triangle to define temporal boundaries and negotiate the requisite internal consistency of the future space under investigation. The establishment and maintenance of internal consistency through the emplotment of the future narratives allows for the suspension of disbelief and the transportation of diverse audiences into the storyworld. This transportative capacity of story is critical in order to vividly imagine and evaluate possible future worlds in order to learn from them and take action in the present.