Implications Futures Wheel

The implications wheel helps you explore the positive and negative consequences of each scenario, revealing what might be desirable or undesirable for your city. Use it to stretch your thinking beyond immediate effects and understand how changes can ripple outward across systems and time.

This exercise is best done during a workshop, ideally including stakeholders.

1. Place one scenario at the centre of your wheel.
2. Brainstorm first-order implications - the direct consequences this future could have for your city, your work, or your residents.
3. Expand to second- and third-order implications - the consequences of those consequences. This step helps reveal deeper risks, opportunities, and unexpected linkages.
4. Repeat for all scenarios you have created.
5. Label each implication as desirable or undesirable, and discuss why with your team or stakeholders. Capture differing perspectives; they are crucial for building a shared understanding of what your city should work toward or avoid.

Visioning

Visioning is the process of imagining, defining, and articulating a preferred future for your city. While scenarios describe possible futures, a vision describes the future you want to create; the one that reflects your values, priorities, and hopes.

A vision exercise invites you to step into that future and describe it as if it already exists. The goal is not prediction, but aspiration: painting a vivid picture that can guide today’s decisions.

Hints and Tips

As you develop your vision:

• Begin with a headline: Imagine a future moment when your city has achieved a major success. What would a global newspaper say about it?
• Make it sensory and vivid: Describe what people experience in this future city: What do they see? hear? feel? How do they move, work, learn, connect, or care for each other?
• Be specific, not abstract: Avoid vague words like “inclusive” or “sustainable” without detail. Show what inclusion looks like in public space, or how sustainability shows up in daily routines.
• Include multiple perspectives: How does this future feel to different residents — a child, an elder, a worker, a newcomer, a community leader?
• Use creativity and play: Write short descriptions, sketch, map scenes, or list sensory details. Any format is welcome if it helps bring the future to life.
• Aim high: Visioning is about imagining a future worth striving for, one that motivates action and collective commitment.