Methodology
Analysis that begins with people, not projections.
“Behind every long-term challenge are people navigating uncertainty in real time. These experiences hold vital insights into the values, pressures, and aspirations that credible long-term governance must take seriously.”
Taylor Hawkins, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Foundations for Tomorrow
Download the methodology and framework
The full FGSA methodology and Future Generations Policy Framework are available as free downloads.
Future Generations Storylining Analysis
A methodology developed through this project to translate lived experience into actionable policy insight.
Future Generations Storylining Analysis (FGSA) emerged from a practical problem: many tools used to evaluate long-term policy impact are either too abstract to capture how change is lived, or too focused on immediate measurable outputs to account for what unfolds across generations.
FGSA integrates human-centred storytelling, Narrative Causal Layered Analysis (N-CLA), futures exploration, and Future Generations Policy Analysis into a single coherent process. While each of these practices exists independently, FGSA brings them together in a structured sequence that grounds foresight and policy analysis in lived realities, connecting individual experience to broader institutional and cultural dynamics.
It is interpretive in nature. It does not seek to predict specific futures. It offers a structured way to examine how present choices shape the range of futures that remain possible, and how policy decisions can expand or constrain the options available to generations yet to come.
Designed to support understanding, not verdict
FGSA’s purpose is to illuminate long-term consequences, surface tensions and trade-offs, and open space for dialogue about alternative pathways.
Storytelling as an analytical entry point
In FGSA, narrative is not decoration. It is how systems are examined and policy implications are interpreted.
Sequenced by design
The methodology’s contribution lies in its deliberate order - beginning with lived experience and moving through systems framing, policy evaluation, and futures exploration.
Built for transferable insight, not generalisation
Fifteen portraits cannot represent all Australians. They are not intended to. The aim is to identify recurring dynamics, risks, and leverage points.
A four-stage process
How each portrait moves from lived experience to futures.
Each portrait in this collection is the product of a structured analytical methodology. FGSA was developed to do something policy research rarely attempts: to move between a single person's lived experience and the systems, assumptions, and decisions that shaped it, then ask what comes next if nothing changes, or if it does.
The methodology unfolds through four stages and draws throughout on Causal Layered Analysis (CLA), a well-established foresight approach developed by Sohail Inayatullah. CLA examines issues across four layers: surface problems, systemic drivers, dominant worldviews, and deeper cultural narratives. FGSA adapts this into Narrative Causal Layered Analysis (N-CLA), which uses lived experience and personal narratives as the entry point for layered interpretation.
Stage one
Narrative Analysis
Today’s ecosystem, through their eyes
FGSA begins with the human frame. Empathy-driven interviews treat lived experience as a legitimate and essential source of policy knowledge, not a supplement to it.
Participants engage through in-depth conversations and written reflections that create space for sense-making and consideration of long-term futures. Interviews are semi-structured and dialogic, allowing participants to guide emphasis and interpretation.
Narrative analysis then distils each story into recurring themes, not as anecdotes, but as signals of underlying system dynamics. These themes form the foundation for every subsequent stage.
Themes that surface at this stage
→Gaps between policy intent and how it is actually experienced
→Inequities distributed across life stages or geographies
→Pressures created by the design of systems themselves
→Potential leverage points for transformation
Stage two
Systems Framing
What the current landscape looks like
Once focal themes emerge from the narrative, FGSA situates them within their policy and institutional context, examining relevant legislation, regulatory frameworks, institutional arrangements, and governance responsibilities.
The aim is to clarify how the system currently operates and which structural elements most directly shape the challenge surfaced in the narrative. Mapping this landscape identifies the actors, incentives, and institutional settings that stabilise current conditions and define the boundaries within which change can occur.
This is where N-CLA begins connecting visible policy outcomes with deeper systemic drivers and cultural assumptions, preparing the ground for policy evaluation.
Stage three
Policy Evaluation
The deeper story beneath the surface issue
This stage evaluates how current policies perform through the lens of intergenerational fairness, using the Future Generations Policy Framework’s Intergenerational Fairness dimensions. Drawing on insights from narrative analysis and systems framing, it examines how policies affect people across the life course, how benefits and burdens are distributed, and how present decisions influence future opportunity.
N-CLA continues to inform interpretation here. Understanding the worldviews and cultural narratives embedded in policy helps explain why certain choices persist and where meaningful shifts might become possible.
The five dimensions
Life stage equity
How different age groups are affected across the life course
Distribution across and within generations
How benefits and burdens are shared across time, geography, and social group
Future opportunities and path dependency
How present decisions shape future adaptability
Proportionate and justified trade-offs
Whether short-term sacrifices are balanced by clear long-term benefits
Precautionary approach
Whether policies anticipate long-term risks and act early under uncertainty
Stage four
Futures Exploration
What today’s decisions are making possible
Only after lived experience, systems framing, and policy evaluation are complete does FGSA turn explicitly to futures. This sequencing is deliberate. Futures grounded in lived reality and layered analysis are more useful, more honest, and harder to dismiss than abstract projections.
Each portrait presents two speculative futures, developed using foresight tools and grounded in present-day system dynamics.
Speculative Future 1
If the current trajectory holds
What becomes likely, and what is lost, if present policy settings remain unchanged over coming decades.
Speculative Future 2
If we act differently
What becomes possible when systems are deliberately reshaped with long-term wellbeing in mind.
Downloads
Download the methodology and framework.
The full FGSA methodology documentation and the Future Generations Policy Framework are free to download, share, and use. If you apply or build on this work, we’d like to hear about it.
Questions about the methodology or the collection? Get in touch at hello@foundationsfortomorrow.com.au
Ready to read the portraits?
Fifteen Australians. Fifteen policy areas. One question: what are we leaving behind?