Manoa Alternative Futures Method

The Manoa Alternative Futures Method is the signature technique of the Hawai'i Research Center for Futures Studies, developed by Jim Dator at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. Its founding axiom is that 'the future' cannot be predicted, only alternative futures can be imagined, so the purpose of foresight is not a single forecast but a set of qualitatively different images broad enough to bound the space of what might plausibly happen. Dator's central empirical claim, distilled from decades of futures work, is that the enormous variety of credible long-range scenarios collapses into four generic images: continued growth, collapse, discipline, and transformation. The method seeds these four archetypes with emerging issues — weak signals not yet visible as trends — to stretch participants' images of the future and produce a usable, divergent scenario set.