Verge: a general practice framework for futures work

Back in 2004, my friend Michele Bowman and I started working on an environmental scanning service to offer corporate clients.  Out of those discussions emerged what we thought of at the time as a new taxonomy for conducting scanning.  As most folks involved in futures (foresight) work know, the most common frame for scanning or discussing trends and emerging issues (TEI) is STEEP: Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, and Political.

The basic idea in using STEEP or any related or similar arrangements is to ensure a complete sweep of the environment, overcoming a group's natural biases or blindspots.  It's simple and useful.

Being academically trained futurists out of UH Manoa, we, of course, weren't satisfied with this and were looking for something fresh.  My original idea was to try and "anthropomorphize" the taxonomy and look at how people experience or view things in daily life.  While I'm not entirely sure I achieved that original objective, what resulted was a new set of categories, collectively named Verge:

• Define: the concepts, ideas, and paradigms we use to define ourselves and the world around us
• Relate: the social structures and relationships which define people and organizations
• Connect: the technologies that connect people, places, and things
• Create: the processes and technologies through which we produce goods and services
• Consume: the ways in which we acquire and use the goods and services that we create
• Destroy: the ways in which value is destroyed and the reasons for doing so

 Originally intended to frame scanning, this set got shared and communicated over the years to a number of professional futurists and client groups and has become a general practice framework, a framework that is easily applied in virtually all aspects of futures research and foresight work.  Like the general practice tool of Implication Wheel, which is used by many professional futurists, Verge is used for scanning and research, for forecasting and scenario construction, and for exploring implications.

And like any generally useful tool, it constantly gets interpreted and adapted for local use.  And I would expect it to continue to evolve.

Now to work on the next tool...