Compare methods

	VERGE Futures Framework	Cone of Plausibility
Field	Futures Foresight Studies	Futures Foresight Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2005	2003
Originator	Richard Lum and Michele Bowman	Charles Taylor (cone imagery); popularized and formalized by Joseph Voros
Type	Scanning-and-ideation ontology for organizing signals of change across six domains	Scenario-framing pipeline bounding alternative futures around a baseline
Seminal source	Glenn, J. C., & Gordon, T. J. (Eds.). (2009). Futures Research Methodology, Version 3.0. The Millennium Project. ISBN: 9780981894119	Voros, J. (2003). A generic foresight process framework. Foresight, 5(3), 10-21.
Aliases	VERGE Framework, VERGE General Practice Scanning, Define-Relate-Connect-Create-Consume-Destroy, VERGE Ethnographic Futures Framework	Futures Cone, Voros Futures Cone, Cone of Plausible Futures, Plausibility Cone Analysis
Related	3	3
Summary	The VERGE framework is a general-practice scanning ontology developed by foresight practitioners Richard Lum and Michele Bowman to organize signals of change and stimulate ideation across six fundamental domains of human experience: Define, Relate, Connect, Create, Consume, and Destroy. Rather than sorting scanning material by the conventional STEEP categories — social, technological, economic, environmental, political — VERGE organizes it by the basic ways people make sense of and act in the world: how we define reality and meaning, relate to one another, connect across distance, create and produce, consume and use, and dispose of or destroy. This human-centered ontology is designed to surface changes and cross-domain interactions that category-based taxonomies tend to fragment or miss. Catalogued among the scanning and ideation methods of the field, VERGE serves both as a way to file environmental-scanning hits and as a generative lens for thinking through the implications of change.	The cone of plausibility, often called the futures cone, is a framing device for scenario work that projects a baseline 'expected' future and then bounds a widening cone of alternative futures around it by varying the key drivers and assumptions on which that baseline rests. Drawn from the present at the cone's apex, the trajectory fans out as it extends into the future, because uncertainty compounds over time and the range of futures that remain plausible grows wider the further out one looks. Joseph Voros, building on Charles Taylor's earlier cone imagery, formalized the device by nesting categories of futures — possible, plausible, probable, and preferable — within the cone, giving foresight practitioners a shared vocabulary for distinguishing what could conceivably happen from what could reasonably happen and from what is most likely. As Bishop, Hines, and Collins note in their survey of scenario techniques, the cone provides a disciplined way to generate and bound a manageable set of alternative scenarios.