Narratives and Stories
Why we need them
An aside first. Since June last year, I have been (or not) co-editing a journal, we have sold two properties with and packed up one property, moved goods into storage, cancelled accounts, still packing up the other one, organised a new place to live until our new property is ready in 2025, been to Bangkok for APFN and brought back a ‘humdinger’ (Aussie slang) of a cold, then got another cold after I travelled interstate for the first property which turned into a triple humdinger as bronchitis and then bronchial inflammation. I am well on the road to recovery, as is my brain which was mush for while. I’ve only started to think logically again and quelled my anxiety to purring mode recently so I’m back to writing. I say this not to make you sorry for me, but to explain why my second book has been taking a sabbatical and why I have not done anything related to futures for those months.
All this ‘life’ work will, of course, free up my life and time for travel - not to mention finally being debt free - and to write again. I do think it was one of the most stressful periods of my life though. But I am back! The lesson: never sell two properties in two states at once.
My trigger for this post is some quotes I found in another reading of Narrative Foresight by Ivana Milojevica and Sohail Inayatullah, link below.
The first quote was:
In terms of context, narrative foresight straddles the boundary between the empirical, interpretive, critical, and action learning modes of futures studies …
and then a second was:
Narrative foresight focuses not on the veracity of the future – is a future true or false - but on discovering and creating new stories (more below about stories) that better meet needs and desires. The purpose of narrative foresight is thus to facilitate desired (preferred/wished for) futures.
You know, my brain is always full of topics about futures and foresight although my worldview pushes me towards some and not others. But they all linger - like narrative - which has now surfaced in my consciousness again.
The term ‘shape the narrative’ is common now and much work is done in this area, in and beyond futures studies. The term is overused now I think, and has lost the questions that should go with it which would would allow us to not only shape the present narrative but expand and deepen that narrative - hence narrative foresight.
Narrative foresight draws attention to the stories we are telling about our futures in the present, seeking an integrative approach that finds ‘new’ stories in the present. It helps us take the narratives we create in our futures process seriously. We might argue that stories in a futures sense are little more than scenarios, but scenarios have evolved to focus on what actions can be taken to achieve the futures portrayed in the scenarios, rather than the narrative that is, or should be created in the process.
Now I did spend a lot of time in my practice saying that the scenario world image was not the future, that our narrative (the scenario story) and the actions that emerge from those narratives that matter most. But the process usually quickly moved to actions, skipping the narrative. That could have been because of my inept facilitation, but in hindsight, I realise now that strategic foresight in organisations is usually based on a formula now.
Of course, it is easier to focus on the ‘real’ - actions - but we need to remember that reality is in the eye of the beholder, and shaped by our worldviews. So, I see organisational/strategic foresight as now mainly having a worldview bounded by positivism, while futures stories are more constructivist in nature. Of course, futures processes don’t have worldviews, but they do have individual worldviews which construct a collective worldview which participants are, or should be, trying to develop in those processes. Defining that collective worldview before thinking about actions, unfortunately, has all but disappeared from most futures processes. A return to Pierre Wack’s work on scenarios for people who use strategic foresight processes wouldn’t go astray.
I recently discovered the work of Joan Diden, an author I’d not heard about before. I wish I had. In Evelyn McDonnell’s book about her, The World According to Joan Didon (2023)*, she quotes “the famous first line from her book” The White Album (page 1): “We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Further on McDonnell points out that stories can allow us “to limit and distort reality” (page 2):
We live entirely, especially if we are writers. by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience … It takes an act of will to live in the world … I mean really trying to see it, look at it, trying to make connections. and that’s not easy, it takes work, You have to keep stripping yourself down, examining everything you see, getting rid of whatever is blinding you … Throw yourself into to convulsion of the world.
I must admit that as soon as I read this quote I thought about futures thinking and work, and how the now formulaic strategic foresight is used. In many contexts we have frozen our phantasmagorias and closed down how we view the world today and imagine our futures. We don’t really know ourselves or the world we observe. We need to really see the world for what it is - a miasma of realities that we see through our constrained lenses. But this takes that act of will and the stripping yourself down to see what is blinding new. This approach is explored in futures work with other names - but who do we make it mainstream and reframe strategic foresight for a start.
Our job in futures work (my view) is the explore that phantasmagoria deeply and expand those constrained lenses. Why? To open up, to crack open, how we approach our future thinking and work. To be able to never dismiss a reality unless you have challenged your worldview and assumptions. To always be ready to listen carefully to other people’s opinions. And to discover those new stories in the present.
*Reference: McDonnell, E. The World According to Joan Didion, 4th Estate: London, 2023.
Thank you for sharing, always appreciate your writings and insights. I had a version of this paper from Milojevic and Inyatullah awhile back from ELSEVIER that was only 12 pages in length....
"Narrative foresight focuses on the stories individuals, organizations, states and civilizations
tell themselves about the future. Narrative foresight moves futures thinking from a focus on
new technologies and generally to the question of what’s next, to an exploration of the
worldviews and myths that underlie possible, probable and preferred futures. It is focused
on transforming the current story– metaphor or myth– held to one that supports the
desired future."
Keep looking after yourself, Maree… sending you strength and hugs