Whole-pattern futures projection, using field anomaly relaxation

Abstract

The field anomaly relaxation (FAR) method for projecting whole-pattern future scenarios was designed with reference to the following postulates. 1. 1. Most policies will not come to fruition until years after they have been chosen, so evaluation of options should be done with an eye toward future contexts rather than present ones. The future cannot be reliably predicted; for that reason as well as for other comparably cogent ones, logical derivation of the best policy is infeasible. Therefore, judgment (the alternative to strictly logical analysis) must be used in final policy-issue resolution. 2. 2. Still, analytical exploration of the issue faced by a policy chooser can be an extremely useful heuristic aid to judgment. Judgments also are needed within each such study, however, and they should be made against the same future contexts to be used in terminally resolving the issue in question. 3. 3. Judgment is basically the same as intuition. As such, it is an event rather than a process—a sudden feeling that one option fits best within the judge's inner, gestalt appreciation of the infinitely fine-grained web of circumstance wherein the chosen alternative will have to “live” in the future. Future projections to be used as contexts for policy-related judgments therefore should describe whole, coherent, quasi-organic patterns of life in the field (in the Lewinian sense) of concern. Full and explicit description of such a field is impossible, so skeletal descriptions must be sought instead. Field theory points out some of the criteria to be met; other criteria derive from the importance of engendering similar gestalt appreciations of the described pattern in a number of different minds. The FAR method meets an extended list of such criteria, because it was designed to do so; we at PSI have been able to find no other method that meets all of them, or was ever expected to do so. FAR combines Lewin's social field theory, Zwicky's morphological approaches, and the relaxation methods of engineering. It does not attempt to derive the most probable future line of evolution within the social field addressed, nor even the most plausible. Neither does it follow deductive lines of analysis by trying to trace the consequences of competing assumptions for each of the several (in particular, seven) different aspects of that field that should be considered, since the uncertainties introduced in sucha dendritic approach cascade unmanageably. Rather, FAR brings component bits of information and insight together by focusing on the matter of internal consistency within putatively plausible patterns and sequences of patterns. It yields a set of comparably plausible scenarios for a chosen field, each descriptive of changing circumstances (rather than events) over a future span of one to three decades; the set rarely need number more than a dozen, in order to satisfactorily cover the perceived range of plausible change. It uses trend extrapolations only tangentially, as often to help expose implausibilities as to forecast the future. Its iterative approach is ordered, but mostly qualitative, and it is insistently holistic rather than reductionist in spirit. Part I of this paper elaborates the preceding argument and describes the FAR method in detail. Part II describes some of FAR's applications during the decade since it took form, together with some of the lessons learned from that work. It ends by inquiring into problems of effecting institutional applications of the new method, and into some potential extensions and refinements of it.