A Practitioner's Experience of Using Field Anomaly Relaxation (FAR) to Craft Futures -Guy A. Duczynski

[Scenarios] provide a relatively unbounded forum for creative thoughts and ideas regarding organisational renewal such that novel concepts and imperatives for change could be expressed within a broadened perspective of the future. * page 2

Many emergency response organisations: law enforcement, military, fire fighters, paramedics and disaster relief, to name just a few, use scenarios on almost a daily basis to sharpen their capacity to deal with the unexpected. Their common characteristic of being necessarily focussed on the short-term does not reduce the valuable use they make of scenarios and scenario thinking. Through a comprehensive set of 'what if' statements and structured events they are able to rapidly cycle themselves through a bewildering array of problem situations. The result of this focussed training and the associated flexibility of mind it demands is a highly agile team that can rapidly adapt structures, techniques and procedures to overcome situations in which indecision, hesitancy and lengthy planning are not options. Pilots undergo multiple repetitions of emergency situations in simulators to create this necessary rapidity of response and action in order to reduce problem-solving to an instinctive sequence of behaviours, in effect allowing the mind to remain clear and unencumbered to deal with those few unique contextual aspects that are outside the domain of previous simulations. * page 2

These scenarios, and more importantly the use of them for long-term planning, are certainly not predictors of events, nor are they attempting to forecast the likelihood of particular situations they simply aid in the provocation of new ideas. * page 2

Russell Rhyne, the original architect of the Field Anomaly Relaxation technique, advocates adherence to a four-step process to projecting futures (Rhyne, 1974, 1981, 1995 & 1998):

• Step 1: Form an initial view of the alternative futures that could unfold within the area of interest.
• Step 2: Construct a language using Sectors that will become the dimensions of describing the area of interest; and Factors, which become the alternative states within each Sector and array these on a matrix to form Whole Field (full sector range) descriptors of all possible configurations.
• Step 3: Eliminate those factor pairs that are illogical or cannot co-exist, forming a reduced set of whole field configurations.
• Step 4: Position the surviving whole field configurations on a 'tree' whose branches represent possible future states and transitions from one configuration to the next.

* page 3

The process adopted involved: generating a large list of drivers, with the criteria being that they must be beyond the organisation's ability to influence; compressing this list of drivers into broadened 'themes' that embodied the main thought being presented as the driver; and then entering step 2. * page 4

Rhyne (1981, p. 349) has identified the importance of doing something useful with the results (purposeful action is the neat term that Checkland has provided us with) of futures thinking that engages a wider body of thought about change “…the payoff from projections of this kind [FAR] usually dribbles away unless solid uses for them are visualised from the start and pursued * page 4

The first step was to identify the drivers that would be most influential in shaping events. As stated earlier these drivers need to be beyond the planner's ability to influence, the only acceptable response being adaptation. (…) These (…) drivers were then collapsed using affinity diagrams to reveal the major forces at work.* page 5

To make the future believable it is necessary to string the transitions into a plausible history that marks out how a future world could evolve from the present. * page 8

Having constructed the Faustian tree and, thereby, creating a series of pathways through which the single future trajectory may travel, a set of rich narratives are called for. These narratives link the present to the future in a manner that adds substance, depth and most importantly breadth, effectively putting 'flesh on the bones' of the earlier, more structured thinking stages. * page 9