Stories About the Future
Unconventional thinking is distracting, if not outright threatening. It’s hard to argue with rational decisions, and forecasts based on past events. But what happens when conventional wisdom falls short or is taken by surprise, and suddenly past experience can’t explain the present? What does it take to break our gaze from the official future and consider other possible outcomes to the certainties we take for granted? What jarring changes might we be able to anticipate, and what would that mean for a well-prepared, agile organization?
Why use stories? A simple story has a profound ability to disarm even the most entrenched rationalist’s resistance to unconventional thinking by invoking the “willing suspension of disbelief.” Stories are fun. They create a space to investigate relationships and prototype responses to future events. Stories are where our hopes and fears become believable. They are a vector for transmitting ideas, good advice, precautions and opportunities throughout the swarm. They are how we make information meaningful and reason with uncertainty — without which there can be no possibility for creativity.
On the surface, a scenario is (hopefully) a good story. But as a strategic device, it is a playground for exploring the driving forces and causal structures that shape the future; a sketchpad for inventing and testing mental models, and revealing what we don’t know that we don’t know. The further we gaze into the future, the less certain we are of how things might play out. This structural uncertainty can be countered by considering multiple plausible futures that cover a range of most-probable circumstances.
Sketch it out!
Logic axes demonstrating social cohesion as a function of resource security and population density.
The slide deck at the top is just one of several possible Haitian futures researched and composed during the spring of 2010. I am sharing this particular scenario one year and a week since the disaster occurred — several months have passed in the story. Did I predict the future? Absolutely not. But a few critical events did actually happen, especially surrounding the election in early December. Many different perspectives and possibilities emerged from my peers’ stories as well. The goal was not to predict the future, but rather to rehearse for it; to be better-prepared for what opportunities or challenges may be waiting to take the field by surprise, and to make better decisions about the future by asking ourselves today “what should we do when this actually happens?”
Bob, David and Ken, doing what they do well.
