Scanning

Inquiry Prompts

• What surprising, contradictory, or anomalous developments have you noticed recently?
• What is happening at the fringe of your field that the mainstream is ignoring?
• What are people doing differently - even in small numbers - that could scale?
• What assumptions about "how things work" are being quietly challenged?
• Where do you see contradictions between what people say and what they do?

Practitioner Notes

• - Look beyond your usual information sources - scan patents, academic pre-prints, subcultures, and emerging markets
• - Use Webb's CIPHER lens: seek Contradictions, Inflections, Practices, Hacks, Extremes, and Rarities
• - A single signal means little; clusters of signals reveal emerging patterns

Frameworks

Inquiry Prompts

• What are the dominant megatrends shaping your domain over the next 10-20 years?
• Which of these trends are "hard" (driven by demographics, physics, regulation) and which are "soft" (driven by preferences, culture, sentiment)?
• How are multiple trends converging to create new conditions that didn't exist before?
• What counter-trends or backlash movements are emerging in response?
• Which trends are accelerating, and which are plateauing or reversing?

Practitioner Notes

• - Use Burrus's distinction: Hard Trends will happen (plan for them); Soft Trends might happen (influence them)
• - Map trends across all STEEP domains to avoid blind spots
• - Look for trend convergences - the most disruptive changes emerge where multiple trends intersect

Frameworks

Inquiry Prompts

• What social shifts (demographics, values, behaviors) are reshaping your landscape?
• What technological forces are creating new possibilities or rendering old models obsolete?
• What economic dynamics (inequality, new business models, resource flows) are at play?
• What environmental pressures (climate, biodiversity, resource limits) constrain or redirect the future?
• What political and regulatory forces are opening or closing pathways?

Practitioner Notes

• - Kelly identifies 12 inevitable technological forces - use them as a checklist for technology drivers
• - Distinguish between drivers you can influence and those you cannot
• - Map the relationships between drivers - they rarely operate in isolation

Frameworks

Inquiry Prompts

• What technologies in your domain are on exponential cost-decline curves?
• Where are you seeing convergence of multiple improving technologies creating 10x better/cheaper solutions?
• What is the current position on the S-curve of adoption for key innovations?
• What "impossible" developments might become inevitable within a decade?
• Where are incumbents most vulnerable to disruption - and most in denial about it?

Practitioner Notes

• - Kurzweil's Law: the rate of change itself is accelerating - don't project linearly
• - Seba's key insight: disruption comes from convergence, not single technologies
• - Watch for the "tipping point" - adoption accelerates suddenly after years of slow growth

Frameworks

Inquiry Prompts

• What is the "litany" - the surface-level narrative about this issue as told by media and popular discourse?
• What systemic and structural causes lie beneath the litany?
• What worldview or paradigm legitimizes the current system - what does it take for granted?
• What deep myth or metaphor underpins this worldview - and what alternative myth could replace it?
• If you changed the foundational metaphor, how would the entire issue reframe?

Practitioner Notes

• - CLA works from surface to depth: Litany → Social Causes → Worldview → Myth/Metaphor
• - The deepest layer is the most powerful lever for transformative change
• - This is where futures work becomes genuinely radical - questioning what is "natural" or "inevitable"

Frameworks

Inquiry Prompts

• What events - however unlikely - could fundamentally disrupt your domain overnight?
• What are you assuming "could never happen" that history suggests eventually does?
• If the most destabilizing possible event occurred tomorrow, how would your strategy survive?
• What cascading second- and third-order effects would a wild card trigger?
• What "unthinkable" scenarios should you think about precisely because they are unthinkable?

Practitioner Notes

• - Use the Futures Wheel to map cascading consequences of a wild card event
• - The value is not in predicting wild cards but in building resilience against them
• - Combine wild card thinking with scenario planning - insert a wild card into each scenario

Frameworks

Inquiry Prompts

• What are the immediate, first-order consequences of the trend or event you are examining?
• What second-order effects emerge from those first-order consequences?
• Where do consequence chains interact, creating feedback loops or amplification effects?
• Which consequences are reversible and which create permanent path dependencies?
• What consequences are most people overlooking - and why?

Practitioner Notes

• - Start with one central change and radiate outward systematically
• - Look for where consequence chains from different trends collide or reinforce each other
• - Third-order consequences are where the most surprising - and strategically valuable - insights hide

Frameworks

Inquiry Prompts

• When you look at the full landscape of signals, trends, and drivers - what patterns emerge?
• What surprised you most in your scanning? What challenged your prior assumptions?
• Where do you see convergence - multiple forces pointing in the same direction?
• Where do you see tension - forces pulling in opposite directions?
• What are the most critical uncertainties - the things that could go either way?
• What questions do you have now that you didn't have before?

Practitioner Notes

• - Resist the urge to resolve ambiguity too quickly - sit with the complexity
• - Share your scan with others and listen for what they see that you missed
• - Document your key uncertainties - they become the raw material for the Imagining phase