In a world of inevitable regret, those governing risk must build practices that withstand
the vicissitudes of actual events by demonstrating that reasonable efforts had
been and will continue to be taken despite those harms. However, what is reasonable
depends on one’s worldview, and so not giving different worldviews appropriate consideration
leads to deficits in the quality of risk governance. This project developed
foresight methods for eliciting, discovering, representing, and modeling scenarios which
capture the counterfactual forests created by disparate worldviews. These methods employ
structural differences between objective and subjective relations toward physical
events to delineate the actual points of contention, while maintaining neutrality by remaining
strictly grounded in the input of the stakeholders themselves. These methods
respect how people frame causal information psychologically, avoiding biases known to
affect political judgment. Overall, these methods serve as a reminder that how we ask
designs how we think.
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