think-causal-layered-analysis
Causal Layered Analysis
Most contested issues are argued at the surface and the system level - the headline numbers and the policy fixes - long after that argument has stopped being productive, because the real disagreement lives in clashing worldviews and an unexamined story underneath. Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) reads an issue at four vertical depths and then rebuilds it. It descends through the litany (the official, visible, unquestioned account), the system (the structural and short-term causes the litany rests on), the worldview (the deeper ideological and paradigmatic assumptions, and whose worldview is privileged), and the myth/metaphor (the unconscious, emotive, civilizational story underneath, carried in a guiding metaphor). The durable move is not the descent alone. It is to treat the issue as a text with competing readings rather than one true cause, and then to move back up and reconstruct - rewrite the deep metaphor into a new one and propagate a transformed worldview, system, and litany that follow from it. The output is a four-layer matrix that holds the current "used future" reading of each layer beside a reconstructed preferred-future reading of each layer, anchored by a deliberately changed deep metaphor. Its purpose, in the originator's words, "is not in predicting the future but in creating transformative spaces for the creation of alternative futures."
When to Use
- An issue is stuck because the framing is stuck: the litany and the system explanation have been argued to exhaustion and the disagreement is really about clashing worldviews and the unexamined story underneath.
- The goal is to open up genuinely different futures, not to optimize the current one.
- The question is contested, value-laden, long-horizon, civilizational, or cultural - the kind of issue where a deep metaphor ("growth is health," "the market knows best," "users are a passive funnel") is doing more work than any number in the litany.
- You suspect the official account is privileging one worldview and hiding others, and you want to surface whose framing this is and what it conceals.