Visualizing The Future

Trying to predict what the future will look like is doomed to fail. Yet this is what most executives do when they strategize. They — we — do this because we have been trained and educated to use trends and statistics to predict what is likely to happen and prepare accordingly. As a result, companies struggle to react to changes in their environments when they should be shaping them proactively.

This is an issue for executives around the globe whose strategizing, anchored in the past, misses out on important opportunities to envision, and design, possible futures.

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Design Fiction

Unlike many strategic foresight tools, design fiction does not attempt to identify what is more likely to happen. Nor does it limit strategy conversations to the C-suite; in fact a core component is the participati...

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Inventing The Future

Design fiction has helped dozens of multinational companies to strategize differently. And while creating fictional futures may sound a little quirky, we know that it works. For example, a recent design-fiction project conducted with a major oil and gas company helped identify how to shape a futu...

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Creating Scenarios From Pop Culture

The first step of putting design fiction into practice involves crafting scenarios of possible futures.

For example, in a project with a major car insurance company, we analyzed information from urban mobility trends, autopilot flight modes, Luc Besson’s notorious movie The Fifth Eleme...

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No Place For Imagination

By force of habit, most executives tune down their imagination when strategizing. This is counterproductive, and there is an alternative: Design fiction.

A design technique that immerses executives and employees deeply in various possible futures, it uses artifacts such as short movies, fi...

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