Lineage and research
Zone of Attention Scanning was developed by Rowena Morrow, a futures practitioner and founder of Prospective Services in Melbourne, Australia. It stands on a documented lineage of futures thinking, systems practice, ecological reasoning, cybernetics, phenomenology, contemplative ethics, and critical scholarship that refuses false neutrality and instrumental certainty.
The positioning
It inherits from these traditions a commitment to ethical attention, relational responsibility, and perceptual integrity under complexity. It does not claim ownership of these lineages, nor does it resolve their tensions. Instead, it holds them in productive relationship.
Each tradition is treated the same way in the practice's Lineage Paper: what it contributes, what the practice draws most directly from it, and where the practice marks its own boundary. The practice claims to stand inside these traditions while refusing specific things each has been used for.
The eight traditions
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Futures and foresight
From Fred Polak and Kenneth Boulding: societies are guided by their images of the future. From Sohail Inayatullah: Causal Layered Analysis, which structures the scan's DROP movement. From Richard Slaughter's critical futures line: foresight as a civilisational capacity concerned with wisdom rather than control. The boundary: against predictive logic and trend aggregation as a proxy for insight.
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Sensemaking and systems thinking
From Karl Weick: perception is active and partial. From Gregory Bateson: pattern sensitivity over causal certainty. From Peter Checkland: plural perspectives without relativism. The synthesis the practice's two-stage structure rests on: confusing perception with decision degrades both.
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Ecological and living systems thought
Drawing on Donella Meadows and C.S. Holling: attention as a living flow that can be depleted, distorted or regenerated; ecology as organising logic, not metaphor. The boundary: against extractive approaches to sensing that seek advantage without regard for consequence.
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Cybernetics and organisational sensing
From Stafford Beer: organisational failure frequently arises not from lack of intelligence but from the collapse or capture of sensing functions. The boundary: against cybernetics as justification for technocratic authority.
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Ethics, power and situated knowledge
From Donna Haraway: all seeing comes from somewhere, and claims to objectivity often conceal power rather than eliminate it. From decolonial scholarship, an ethical posture: attention obligates care, not all futures are desirable, and restraint is often a moral act.
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Phenomenology and embodied cognition
From Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the enactive tradition of Varela, Thompson and Rosch: sensemaking begins before analysis and often before language, and what an organisation can notice is shaped by the embodied condition of the people doing the sensing.
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Contemplative traditions
From Simone Weil's attention as an active discipline of restraint: noticing without immediately grasping, judging or instrumentalising what arises. Where one attends, how long one stays, and what one turns away from are moral choices.
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AI, automation and epistemic risk
Drawing on Cathy O'Neil, Frank Pasquale, and Emily Bender and colleagues: AI is an attentional amplifier, not an epistemic authority. The boundary: against any configuration in which AI collapses uncertainty prematurely or substitutes for ethical judgement: a refusal to trade attentional discipline for computational convenience, explicitly not a rejection of AI.
The published papers
The practice is documented in two papers: a White Paper setting out the practice itself (the case for it, the six zones of attention, the two-stage structure, and its stated limits) and a Lineage Paper setting out the traditions above in full, with its bibliography. Both are available in full on the papers page.
Zone of Attention Scanning is not a method for predicting the future. It is a practice of learning how to see: carefully, collectively, and with consequence.