A little while ago, I wrote about the problems that arise when futures work becomes theatre. When I tell people that a great deal of my work in futures (and elsewhere) is about storytelling, many often assume that there must be some theatrical aspect to this. But they’re wrong.
Alongside my futures, science communication, and sustainability work, I happen to be a professional oral storyteller, a performance artist who creates one-woman shows. Although I perform when I’m on stage, for audiences seeking entertainment, when it comes to facilitation, storytelling is not about performance.
Storytelling within facilitation is about making meaning together. To do this successfully, we need to facilitate storytelling within groups. Done well, facilitated storytelling can help to do three things.
First, it can shift conversations from opinions to lived experience.
Second, it can help to build psychological safety.
And third, it can allow multiple futures to coexist in the room, giving people permission to explore them and discuss them, without dismissing them.
In my experience, when storytelling is facilitated in futures work, it also changes who gets to speak with authority. Why?
Stories don’t require credentials. They are often based on lived experience and imagination to connect what we know with what might be. They deal with individual perspectives and values. They may have sensory features that can’t be measured, Emotions may come into play. That means that the storyteller is the authority when it comes to their story.
It sounds like I’ve taken a tangent into power dynamics (and I have), and this is relevant because, in futures work, people often feel they need expertise to participate. They tell me, “I’m not a futurist.” Story and storytelling lowers the barrier. Because everyone has stories, and everyone can tell stories, and everyone can create new stories. This capacity for story-making and story-listening is something peculiar to humans, and it’s one of our superpowers.
And that being the case, anyone who can share a story can participate fully in futures initiatives. Which means everyone can.
The science behind storytelling
Without wanting to going into this in too much depth (I teach storytelling for scientists and climate communicators, so this is part of my wider practice), it may be useful to know that there is large and growing body of research that literally change how we listen (for some of the neuroscience behind this, see Paul Zak and Uri Hasson – both accessible to non-scientists). Good stories have been shown to increase empathy, create emotional resonance and connection, help us remember, and encourage us to care.
And when listeners of a story are “transported” into a story (think about the last time you watched a good movie of book: if you found yourself feeling what the main character was feeling, or if you’ve identified with character so much that you go on the journey with them, then you’ve experienced transportation), they don’t just understand it, they experience it. And that experience shapes how they think about what is possible.
The role of stories and storytelling in futures work
If you want to think of futures and foresight work as simply looking at trends and responding to them, perhaps you could argue that stories aren’t needed. And yet, I’d argue that futures are not built by data alone. They are built by the assumptions we make about the present and futures, and the stories are our articulation of those assumptions. In the work that I do with citizen groups, futures are also built by the stories we tell about who we are, what matters, and what we believe is possible.
If we want more hopeful, sustainable futures, futures work needs to create spaces where people can tell “truer” stories about the present, make visible inherited narratives that no longer serve us, and experiment with new ones that serve them and their circles better.
Facilitating futures, then, is partly about becoming a better listener of people’s stories. And partly about helping people find the words for what they already know, but haven’t yet said out loud. In my experience, that’s often where futures work begins to make sense to people in groups.