Origin: Lat. campus relaxāre anomalĭa, gr. ἀνωμαλία, lat. methŏdus, gr. μέθοδος
A four-stage method that: 1) requires an imaginative view of the futures into which a decision must unfold. 2) requires the identification of the critical uncertainties and their ranges of possibility. 3) eliminates the anomalies caused by conflicting possibilities. 4) strings the surviving configurations together to form timelines. The idea is to create "filing space" for all plausible possibilities. FAR aims to provide a backdrop of internally consistent futures as contexts for policy formulation and decision-making. FAR is cyclic in that the scenarios developed in Step 4, along with appreciations gained, will provide all needed inputs to Step 1 of a subsequent cycle. This convergence towards a satisfactory solution is called Relaxation in engineering.
