Telling the Future

 

“The future matters.” — Jens Beckert

Storytelling is a bet on the future, says management consultant Jacques Chlopczyk. The stories we tell ourselves today define the world we will experience tomorrow. Many startups have already mastered this form of storytelling brilliantly. They are so young that they often have little more than an idea—and the way they tell the story of that idea.

In doing so, they rely on the pssst … formula:

• passion … Every startup has a founding team that stands behind its idea with enthusiasm.

• story … Every story needs a good reason to be told, a hero, a conflict, empathy, emotion, and value worth passing on. These are also the ingredients in the recipe for an outstanding startup story: a business idea that turns the customer into the hero, offers a solution to a problem that resonates not only rationally but emotionally, and is compelling enough to be retold.

• structure … Every business plan gives a company and its development structure. Through different rounds of financing, the company seeks to conquer the market step by step, generate attention and awareness, and build lasting customer relationships. A great startup story is not a random collection of ideas but a carefully crafted script with a beginning, a middle, and the promise of a happy ending.

• sensory appeal … A promising business story offers not only facts but something for the heart as well. It touches its audience through emotion and empathy and, ideally, is told so convincingly that it sparks a movie in the mind.

• technology … The beginning of the twenty-first century will go down in economic history as a second founding era. What industrialization achieved at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century appears to be repeating itself more than one hundred years later thanks to computer technology, artificial intelligence, and robotics. It goes without saying, therefore, that technology plays a decisive role in almost every startup story.

Collective Pessimism Defeats Individual Optimism

Yet as rosy as startup stories paint the world of tomorrow, the public by no means sees the future in such positive terms. Quite the opposite. Criticism of technology, skepticism toward innovation, and fear of tomorrow dominate the narrative. Although many people have a very positive outlook on their own personal future, their expectations for society as a whole are remarkably pessimistic.

Journalist and political scientist Sebastian Herrmann described this contradiction between “individual optimism” and “collective pessimism”:

“Psychologists have just published a study revealing the two souls that reside within us: exaggerated individual optimism coupled with exaggerated collective pessimism. What feeds these opposing tendencies? It is the stories we tell about ourselves and those we tell about the state of the world.”

When people are asked to tell stories from their personal biographies, they usually begin with positive events: great love, marriage, the birth of a child, professional success, or athletic achievements of which they are proud. Only in a longer conversation do negative experiences also emerge. Then setbacks, illnesses, and personal tragedies become part of the narrative. And yet many of these personal stories still end positively, because even negative events are often assigned a positive meaning in retrospect. In our individual memories, more positive experiences tend to remain than negative ones.

Video tip: In her TED Talk, neuroscientist Tali Sharot explains in an entertaining and informative way why we view personal events in our lives with disproportionate optimism. Tali Sharot: The Optimism Bias

Collective memories, however, are entirely different. The history of many nations is told through setbacks, catastrophes, and crises. When psychologists ask people to identify the defining moments in their nation’s history, wars, rebellions, and uprisings are usually the events they mention.

It seems that we train our collective memory through negative events and therefore develop an unhealthy imbalance between our personal well-being and our collective perception. While we view our private lives with excessive optimism, we judge our collective environment with excessive pessimism. And Sebastian Herrmann holds stories responsible:

“Those who view the past primarily in a negative light also see a dark future ahead. Applied to entire societies, this could mean that if collective memory consists primarily of wars and catastrophes, visions of the future will inevitably become equally bleak.”

More specifically, the journalist argues:

“To cultivate positive visions of humanity’s collective future and release stories of confidence into the world, greater room should be given in our memories and discussions to humanity’s achievements, accomplishments, and moments of happiness.”

With this appeal, Sebastian Herrmann and the Swede Hans Rosling metaphorically shake hands. Throughout his life, health researcher Rosling fought against our tendency to see the world too darkly and too simplistically and then build our narratives accordingly. Again and again, he packaged data and facts, evidence and context, into positive stories about the state of the world in order to inspire a change in thinking—particularly among political and business decision-makers.

Book tip: As the final legacy of this effort, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Hans Rosling’s son and daughter-in-law and co-founders of the Gapminder Foundation, published the book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. Hans Rosling passed away before its publication. It represents his final attempt to influence the way we tell stories about this world.

Telling the Story Forward

Where Sebastian Herrmann and Hans Rosling leave off, Jens Beckert begins. For the sociologist and director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, the search for stories about the future does not look backward into the past—it looks forward.

Beckert transforms the historians’ motto—“history matters”—into “future matters” and predicts that the stories we tell about the future will also determine it. In his book Imagined Futures, Beckert takes a critical look at the dynamics of capitalism. At the center of his analysis are the fictional expectations of participants in capital markets and the narratives about what the future will bring.

According to Beckert, these fictional expectations are visions of the future, yet social actors treat them as though they were already reality. As a result, they exert enormous influence on the present and shape behavior in the here and now. Many go even further, Beckert argues, doing everything they can through their decisions to make these future imaginings and narratives come true.

Is Science Fiction Our Future?

Ideas and stories about the future are therefore crucial in shaping present behavior and influencing how the future will actually unfold. Against this backdrop, the dystopias we know from countless works of science fiction should both disturb and alarm us.

In its storytelling project Future Visions, Microsoft illustrated vividly how computer scientists, engineers, and experts from many other disciplines have been positively inspired by science fiction novels and films. Yet the overall picture of the future that emerges from stories and films such as Metropolis (1927), 1984 (1949), The Terminator (1984), The Three-Body Problem (2006), or Blade Runner (1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017) remains a deeply unsettling one.

If this is the future, do we really want to experience it? Do we want to work, research, and innovate today in order to create such a world tomorrow?

“The ability to dream up and spread these solutions lives or dies on the ability to tell great stories that inspire people to think differently. Nothing is more urgent than that right now.” — Jonah Sachs

So the question for you is: Which story do you want to tell? What’s your story?

This text is adapted from What’s Your Story? Leadership Storytelling for Executives, Project Leaders, and Everyone Who Wants to Make a Difference by Petra Sammer, published by O’Reilly.

Petra Sammer’s latest book is available on Amazon: BETWEEN THE LINES – How Smart Brands Use Story to Win Markets and Build Trust. BETWEEN THE LINES is a guide to storytelling for marketing and PR professionals. Available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0ax3rLfy

Read more about this topic on my blog, AMAZING STORIES.

This text was written by a human; AI tools were used for spelling and grammar checks. Photo by Max Böhme on Unsplash.