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.