In futures and foresight, we often talk about scenarios, or multiple plausible futures, that offer structured uncertainty and a way to think beyond prediction. Scenarios are powerful. I use them often. And if memory serves, they are probably the most popular futures and foresight method that exists. But scenarios alone are not enough. In this final reflection of 2023, I’d like to explore this a bit.
So what do scenarios do well? I think they do a few things. First, they help us stretch our thinking beyond the most likely future. They can also help to surface assumptions and blind spots, and create spaces where we can explore risk, opportunity, and strategic choice. They create cognitive distance, challenge pre-conceived ideas, and make the unfamiliar discussable. There’s no doubt about it: this is essential work.
And yet, I’ve watched many beautifully constructed scenarios fail to move people at all. Why? Because they are understood, but not felt. People agree with them but they don’t choose to own them.
Which is where stories come in.
Stories operate at a different level. Where scenarios map systems, stories locate people inside them. Stories help to answer some of my favourite futures facilitation questions, like, “What would it feel like to live here?”, “Who thrives, and who struggles, in this future?”, and “What do I gain, fear, or have to let go of?”
Stories reduce psychological distance, something that I explore in my PhD research. They create emotional proximity. They invite empathy, identification, and care. And care matters, because people rarely act on futures they don’t feel connected to.
There is a tendency for different facilitators to lean into either stories or scenarios, but there’s a risk in this approach. When futures work relies only on scenarios, it can become abstract, technocratic, or emotionally distant. But when it relies only on stories, it risks becoming anecdotal, ungrounded, too emotional, or overly optimistic.
Good futures work holds both. I like to think about the relationship between the two like this: scenarios widen the field of possibility whilst stories deepen engagement within it.
Scenarios help us say, “These are plausible.” Stories help us ask, “Which do we want to work toward, and why? What’s motivating us?”
With that in mind, futures facilitation is all about moving deliberately between the two.
We start with scenarios to destabilise certainty. Then we use stories to re-humanise the implications. And finally, we return to scenarios to connect feeling back to decision-making.
Using scenarios with stories turns “a future” into “our future”. This matters because futures work isn’t just about insight. It’s allso about choice and agency. And stories can help people see themselves as agents instead of spectators, imagine different roles they could play in a possible futures, and sense what kind of future feels worth investing in.
For me, this means that stories are the bridge that moves scenarios to action.