Litany
The surface news. The headline, the slogan, the plain statement of the problem. Most decisions live here, which is why so many of them feel shallow.
Causal Layered Analysis
What sits underneath a difficult decision.
Most AI answers stay at the surface of a question. Causal Layered Analysis is a futures-studies method for working past that surface into the systems, worldviews, and deeper stories that actually drive the choice. Manwe uses it in every serious run.
The four layers
A decision has more than one floor.
System
The structure underneath the headline: incentives, laws, markets, technology, supply chains. The machinery that makes the litany look the way it does.
Worldview
The assumptions and beliefs that make the system feel natural or inevitable. What you take for granted. What the room has quietly agreed not to question.
Myth
The deep story underneath everything else. The recurring drama, the invisible script, the roles we play without realising we chose them.
Why it matters
Skipping the floors makes decisions fragile.
A decision made only at the litany level, the surface, is a decision that treats the symptom. It can feel fast, clear, and complete, and then quietly fail because the system, the worldview, or the myth underneath was never inspected.
Working down the layers is slower. It is also the difference between an answer that sounds right and a decision that holds up when reality argues back.
How Manwe uses it
Advisors go under the surface before the record is written.
Toward the end of a serious run, Manwe stops asking advisors for conclusions and asks them to inspect their own assumptions. Each advisor names what they took for granted and how it shaped the advice they gave earlier.
Then, independently, they surface the deeper story they see running underneath the question: the recurring drama, the invisible role, the plot the room has been performing without naming. A synthesis layer turns those into a single "Deeper Story" that sits alongside the practical record.
This is also where the engine's Future Paths work begins. The deeper story feeds into how Manwe projects divergent futures you can walk through.
Lineage
Where CLA comes from.
Causal Layered Analysis was introduced by Prof. Sohail Inayatullah, UNESCO Chair in Future Studies at IIUM Malaysia, in his 1998 paper Causal layered analysis: Poststructuralism as method (Futures). It has since been used in government, corporate, and academic workshops for more than two decades, and featured alongside other methods in his 2008 paper Six Pillars: futures thinking for transforming. His institutional site at metafuture.org collects his ongoing work.
Manwe's CLA implementation was tested against the professor's digital twin on metafuture.org and judged to be genuine CLA methodology. The professor himself has seen the work and replied briefly:
Brilliant stuff here. Just love it. You are on to something. Congrats.
Try it
Run a real decision and read the Deeper Story.
Every serious Manwe run includes a CLA pass and a Deeper Story synthesis. The Mac beta is a direct download.