Field Anomaly Relaxation

Field anomaly relaxation (FAR) is a morphological scenario-construction method developed by Russell Rhyne in the 1970s for picturing how a whole societal or strategic system might evolve over time. It describes the situation through a small set of sectors — broad dimensions such as governance, technology, or values — each characterized by several alternative states, and arrays them as a morphological field whose combinations represent possible 'snapshots' of the system. Many of those combinations are internally inconsistent, so FAR 'relaxes' the field by removing anomalous configurations, leaving only coherent states of the world. Its distinctive final move is temporal: the surviving configurations are sequenced into plausible paths of change, producing scenarios as journeys from the present through a chain of consistent future states.