Futures Wheel
The futures wheel is a structured brainstorming method for thinking through the consequences of a change. Created by Jerome Glenn in 1972 and now a staple of the foresight toolkit, it writes a trend, event, or decision in the center of a page and radiates outward: spokes lead to the direct, first-order consequences; from each of those, further spokes lead to second-order consequences; and the ripple continues to third and higher orders. The visual web that results makes the cascading implications of a change tangible, surfaces indirect effects that linear thinking misses, and reveals where consequences reinforce or contradict one another. Simple enough to run on a whiteboard yet powerful enough to anchor serious foresight work, it organizes intuition about how change propagates.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Glenn, J. C., & Gordon, T. J. (Eds.). (2009). Futures Research Methodology, Version 3.0. The Millennium Project. · ISBN 9780981894119
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.