Why We Tell Future Stories
More recently, audacious scientific and technological innovation, instant global communication, expanded travel, increased international trade, intensified competition, shifting social roles, cultural mixing, biological transformation, and environmental shifts have made rapid change a pervasive phenomenon of life.
The world has come to believe that although the future is still unpredictable, it is in many ways in our hands. Rather than seeing ourselves as helpless pawns in the hands of fate, our societies perceive themselves as driven by human agency.4 Whereas the future used to be, like the weather, something you discussed but couldn't do anything about, now we dream about it, worry over it, save for it, invest in it, plan for it, game it, and, in the process to a certain degree, make it happen. Goal setting and strategic planning have become institutionalized as a central function of the management of organizations.5
Leadership is now seen as explicitly connected with the future. As Kouzes and Posner say, leaders “share the characteristic of being forward-looking, of being concerned not just about today's problems, but also about tomorrow's possibilities. They're able to envision the future, to gaze across the horizon of time and imagine the greater opportunities to come. They see something out ahead, vague as it might appear from a distance, and they imagine that extraordinary feats are possible and that the ordinary could be transformed into something noble.” They go on to say, “All enterprises or projects, big or small, begin in the mind's eye; they begin with imagination and with the belief that what's merely an image can one day be made real.”6
The Rarity of Compelling Future Stories
The telling of stories about the future has thus come to be seen as a central task of leadership. Indeed, according to Noel Tichy in The Leadership Engine, “Winning leaders create and use future stories to help people break away from the familiar present and venture boldly ahead to create a better future. They not only describe the future in terms that are personal and compelling, but they help others understand why and what they must do to get there. Without being able to do that, would-be leaders never get the sustained effort required to move toward their goal.”7
Nevertheless, although future storytelling is said to be a key task of leadership, the compelling future stories that leaders are supposed to tell are harder to find than one might expect. Certainly there are many examples of compelling stories that leaders tell, but they are generally stories about the past.8
And where the stories are about the future, they usually aren't compelling. Look at this example of an allegedly successful mission statement quoted in Steven Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Successful People:
Our mission is to empower people and organizations to significantly increase their performance capability in order to achieve worthwhile purposes through understanding and living principle-centered leadership.9
This statement was drafted by a company's management team at a retreat high up in the mountains, surrounded by the magnificence of nature. According to Covey, the ambiance of the retreat was empathetic, courageous, synergistic, creative, exciting, even exhilarating. Perhaps to the participants, the mission statement they drafted may recall that ambiance, but to those who weren't there, the mission statement is a blur. Just imagine the reaction of staffers of that company who weren't at the high-altitude, high-energy mountain gathering as they read this statement. Whatever it was the management team was getting high on, it hasn't been communicated in the draft that emerged from the gathering.
It's not that Covey gives a particularly bad example of a mission statement. In fact, it's a fairly typical instance of the genre. Mission statements or strategic plans are rarely if ever compelling documents. And it's not through want of effort. Arguably more ineffective time is spent in strategic planning exercises than in any other area of corporate activities.10
Or look at the most celebrated example of future storytelling in business history—the use of scenarios in the early 1970s to alert Shell to the implications of a steep rise in the price of oil. Pierre Wack and his planning team developed a set of future scenarios that included the possibility of an oil price hike. After presenting them to Shell's managing directors in September 1972, Wack was given a mission of presenting them to Shell managers and governments around the world. The result? Many Shell managers walked out of the presentation angry. “Just give me a number,” many of them said. Since the scenarios offered no single number to plug into their calculations, they chose the business-as-usual number, which required what Wack called “three miracles” for its realization: major new oil finds, change of heart in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, and no unexpected events to affect oil production capabilities. And governments disregarded Wack's scenario of an oil price hike as unrealistic.
Despite the mythology that has grown up around Wack's scenarios, little changed in Shell before the crisis in September 1973. Even after the crisis had happened and the price of oil had soared, Shell's operating managers were still slow to change their behavior. They could see what had already happened in terms of the rise in the price of oil. Intellectually they could understand the forces at play, which meant that the trends would continue. But still they stuck to old habits. Admittedly Shell ended up acting more agilely than the other oil companies, largely as a result of Wack's scenarios, which enabled some of Shell's managers to recognize events for what they were. But even so, the process was agonizingly slow, and it took some parts of the organization, such as maritime shipping, years before they got it. Presenting the scenarios to managers was, according to Wack, like “water on a stone.” To affect behavior in a useful way, Wack saw that the task was not to argue with the managers or lay out the facts: he had to change the way people viewed the world.11
So what's going on here? On one hand, it's said that the role of a true leader is to tell compelling stories about the future. On the other hand, the genre offers precious few examples. Why is this?
The Inherent Difficulty in Telling Future Stories
The reality is that telling a compelling story about the future is very difficult. No matter how thoughtfully you look ahead, the future is uncertain and inherently unknowable. Any story that appears to give it certainty and predictability will automatically be suspect. Even a future story that appears believable when first told is likely to become unbelievable quite rapidly, as events unfold that show the future will not take place as envisaged in the story. The more detail the story includes, the greater the likelihood there is of error—and hence loss of credibility.
The inherent unpredictability of the future is reinforced by a set of three related psychological phenomena that make people unwilling to believe in any future story, particularly one that implies they will have to change. First is anchoring—as humans, we naturally remain anchored to our past. We are also programmed to have an aversion to loss: people are typically more concerned about the risk of loss than they are excited by the prospect of gain. And a similar bias, the endowment effect, gives us a strong desire to hang on to what we own; the very fact of owning something makes it seem more valuable.12
So it's not just that the likelihood that the imagined story will occur is low. The truth is that people usually don't want to believe a future story that involves significant disruption. So what's a leader to do?
How to Tell a Compelling Future Story
By definition, future stories aren't true stories. Since the future hasn't happened yet, it's impossible to say anything totally reliable about it, particularly where human beings are involved. The first step in augmenting the credibility of a future story is to explore whether the length of the causal chain between the situation today and the imagined future can be reduced. The longer the chain of causation, the greater the chance is that one or more of the links will break, as some unexpected development throws all predictions into chaos. For example, Lou Gerstner as head of IBM was most persuasive when he was telling stories about the near future. Here he is in June 1
995 talking about the third phase of network-centric computing that will follow the first phase of mainframes and the second phase of PCs:
Now, what does it take to be successful in that third phase? Well, it takes the industry delivering some very important products. First of all, the products must operate across a very heterogeneous set of hardware and software platforms that today don't work together.
If you're going to have this fully collaborative computing, you must have software that can operate on multiple platforms. And that means it must be open, fully compliant with broad industry standards, and supportive of the full industry range of products.
The second thing it must be is it must be a marriage of the strengths of the desktop—phase two, which is ease of use, ease of application, with the strengths of phase one, which are the reliability, the security, and the robustness of large-scale systems. And so this new model requires a marriage of the strengths of the first two phases.
And the final thing the industry must produce is, these products must work across very small local networks all the way up to cross-border, multi-national global networks including publicly switched networks like telephone company networks.
Gerstner's future story was a persuasive and, as it turned out, a fairly accurate picture of what was about to happen in the world of computers. One reason for its accuracy was that his story was set in the immediate future and in fact was already starting to happen in some places.
A business model is a story that is set in the present or very near future. It helps the sponsors or managers think through how the business will work when it is launched—or understand the dynamic of a business that is already launched.
Of course, if you're telling a story about the long-term future, there's no choice—you have to set your story far in the future. And in that case, you usually need to tell multiple stories—scenarios—to encourage thinking about the various ways in which the future may unfold.
A Shortcut to the Future
Since the issue of a future story's plausibility is related to the length of the causal chain between now and some future state, you can sidestep the issue by telling a springboard story.
As discussed in Chapter Three, the springboard story is a story about the past—something that's already happened. So the story is easy to tell. There's no need to invent anything.
However, the springboard story elicits a future story in the minds of the listeners, who start to imagine what the future could be like if they implemented the relevant change idea embodied in the story in their own contexts. Consequently it's the listeners who do the hard work of inventing the future. Even while the speaker is talking, the audience is soundlessly generating future stories tailor-made to their own situations, and hence grounded in reality. What's more, as the future unfolds, the listeners continuously update the stories they have generated so as to fit the new reality. The springboard story itself doesn't need updating because it doesn't change: it has already happened. As a result, you avoid the yawning gap between the future as envisaged and the future as it unfolds.
Moreover, because the springboard story's listeners invent the future for themselves, they are much more likely to find that future alluring than if some stranger had dreamed it up for them. The springboard story thus sidesteps the problem of telling a compelling future story. Nevertheless, if you need to create a future story, you can take some steps that will improve its prospects of acceptance.
For the Future to Resonate, Make It Evocative
A couple of visions are often quoted as successful examples of compelling future stories, such as Winston Churchill's “We shall fight on the beaches,” and Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I have a dream.” The fact that they are quoted so often makes one wonder: Why always the same examples? Why not others? The reason becomes evident once you look at these examples in more detail.
First, here's Winston Churchill on June 4, 1940, at the end of a long speech shortly after a large part of the British army had been evacuated from Dunkirk:13
I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do.
That is the resolve of His Majesty's Government—every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength. Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail.
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
The first thing to note is that the speech was effective. Churchill's audience in the House of Commons was initially stunned, and then erupted into a lengthy ovation. The speech was repeated on the radio, and came to symbolize the British attitude to the war.
Second, although the picture that Churchill sketches is an evocative one of the British people resisting the Nazis to the death, fighting them by land, by sea, by air, and so on, Churchill is not telling a story in any conventional sense. Rather, he is painting a set of romantic scenes in the future, which are not linked together in time and space in any coherent way.
Third, the observation that Churchill's speech isn't a detailed story isn't meant as a criticism of the speech. On the contrary, part of the strength of the speech lies in its very lack of specificity. If Churchill had spelled out in detail how the British people were going to fight, he would have been in considerable difficulty, because it was impossible to say in June 1940 how the war would unfold. If he had given any detail, it would have been quickly disproved. So Churchill took the wiser course and refrained from giving any detail. Instead he painted a set of evocative word pictures of the future.14
Similarly, Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I have a dream” speech, delivered on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963, is notable for its lack of specificity and for the evocativeness of its poetic language:
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.
Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at a table of b
rotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.
The Leader's Guide to Storytelling Page 26