The futures we build: value-archetypes scenario-building tool

At the EU Policy Lab, we have been developing a scenario-building tool designed to shift how we think about the future. Rather than focusing on what different futures might look like, this approach asks a more fundamental question: how do values and attitudes shape the futures we create?  

Traditional foresight scenarios often rely on drivers of change and critical uncertainties. While valuable, these approaches tend to treat societal values as a backdrop that is usually assumed. Our work starts from a different premise: that values and attitudes are active forces that structure decisions, institutions and ultimately societal outcomes.  

The tool is built around a set of 'archetypal societies', each characterised by distinct combinations of dominant values and attitudes across domains such as attitude towards power, relationships with nature, attitude towards technology, etc. By exploring these archetypes, participants can build, compare, and contrast the present with different value-based scenarios, before articulating an aspirational vision of 'how' we should engage with a certain policy domain or issue.  

We recently presented a prototype of this tool during our PolyFutures conference (20-21 April). Participants were invited to step into one of the six archetypal societies and explore how public governance might function within it. Through an ‘incasting*’ exercise, they developed detailed perspectives across key dimensions of decision-making in public governance including: 

• Citizen representation and participation
• Information & knowledge ecosystem
• Power relationships & resources
• Governing procedures
• Global context 

The discussion that followed revealed how deeply values shape governance choices, which is something that otherwise often stays implicit. In many scenario-building exercises (or world-building in general), ‘values and attitudes’ remain in the background – present but rarely questioned. In our tool, we treat values and attitudes as key foundations of systems and changeable. Participants found that this shift opened up new possibilities for world-building, enabling richer and more nuanced explorations of future systems. 

Another insight emerged from the layered nature of the exercise. When confronted with abstract sets of values, we tend to label them quickly as ‘good’ (e.g. striving for high equity), ‘bad’ (e.g. self-enhancement) or to imagine them as leading to utopian or dystopian futures. However, as participants developed these worlds in detail, initial judgements often shifted thus uncovering hidden assumptions about values and attitudes. Combinations that seemed ideal, reveal tensions or unintended consequences; others that appeared problematic exposed unexpected strengths.  

As one participant noted, ‘When we first received our archetype, our first reaction was that it looked like a utopian, eco-idealistic society. But once we started digging deeper into how this society functions, how decisions are made, it started to resemble more autocratic regimes. The incasting shed new light on the impact the values and attitudes have on how a society functions’.   

This process highlights the importance of moving beyond first impressions. It is only through detailed exploration that the complex trade-offs and dynamics of value-driven systems become visible. Notably, participants observed that their vision of an ‘aspirational’ future evolved significantly after completing the exercise, suggesting that how we imagine better futures depends crucially on how deeply we interrogate our assumptions. 

The value-archetypes scenario-building tool will be made publicly available later this year following further refinement. In the meantime, we welcome opportunities to further test and develop it in new policy contexts.  

If you are interested in experimenting with the prototype, you can reach out to the JRC-EU-Policy-Labec [dot] europa [dot] eu (EU Policy Lab). 

*Incasting is a process during which you add details on a particular domain or topic to a more general scenario-outline