The Stories We Tell About The Future

People in schools love telling stories.

We tell stories about our graduates and the wonderful things they’re doing today. About veteran faculty who were there when we started, but are no longer there. About a funny thing a student said, or the frustration evoked by today’s special schedule.

We especially love stories about “the old [NAME OF OUR SCHOOL],” which is often presented as a purer, better, and truer version of the school we inhabit today.

They are usually stories about our past or our present.

This isn’t surprising. We have a tactile, emotional connection to the past and present. We’ve lived it; our understanding of it is visceral. As I write this article, I’m sitting in a coworking space that evokes the office I worked in a decade ago. I feel myself transported to the moods and sensations associated with that chapter of my life.

We rarely have those powerful sensory experiences of the future. And one consequence, as Jane McGonigal points out in Imaginable, is that we find ourselves unprepared and anxious when entirely imaginable circumstances –– like a pandemic –– emerge.

Many stories schools tell about the future are about internal progress and transformation; they are about becoming the school you wish you were in today's world, rather than becoming the school you hope to be in a future world that’s different. In other words, they imagine the school as progressing within a largely static context.

Consider The Jetsons, a show that pretended to be about 2062, but is more reflective of the social expectations, family structures, work dynamics, and future hopes of a subset of people who dictated network programming in 1962. Does anyone really think The Jetsons will help us navigate the world 49 years from now?

To prepare their schools for the future, leadership teams need to tell more generative stories about the futures we will inhabit, who we will be in that future, and how we will get there.

Stories help us make the future more imaginable, more tactile, and more navigable. Who among us hasn’t had an emotional reaction to a plot twist in a movie or the satisfying resolution of a novel? Stories give us an emotional connection to situations we haven’t yet experienced.

Ultimately, this year’s newsletter theme – the power of storytelling – is connected to last year’s newsletter theme, “what’s the future?” Futurist thinking offers a set of habits, tools, and mindsets to help leaders tell more robust, generative stories about the future.

It’s rare for schools to really flesh out what it might be like for its graduates to live in an era shaped by accelerating technology, climate crisis, evolving demographics, fragmenting societies, micro-globalisation, or an urbanizing world – to borrow from six global drivers identified by The Future Laboratory.

But viewing the future through the lens of story unlocks several possibilities:

• It allows us to create an emotionally resonant narrative of the work that connects with our community, rallying support for the tradeoffs a positive future requires us to make today.

• It allows us to be more imaginative, so that we experience less anxiety and more readiness when a very strange and very real future comes into view.

• It reclaims our agency by framing our school as the protagonist set against a larger context. What choices will you make? How will you be transformed in the process?

• If framed dynamically, we hope you can imagine a multiverse of possible endings –– akin to a Choose-Your-Own Adventure story, with many possible endings, some of which are preferable to others. This reinforces the agency we all have to make things better.

That’s the power of storytelling.

To help us in this work, L+D is launching What’s The Future: The Event on November 8 and 9 in Silicon Valley.

Teams from a dozen or more schools will experience futurist thinking in depth. It’s the first time we’ve offered an in-person experience dedicated solely to this work. And, if you can act quickly, you have a chance to join us.

Preparing for the future is best done by teams.

Teams tell better stories together. Think of the power of oral literature, with adventures, characters, and images built over time by many voices.

Many of us have had the experience of engaging in transformational PD, only to go back to our schools and have trouble communicating our new enthusiasm or insights. That’s why we’ve established a team pricing model for this event, meaning that you pay the same price – $3500 – for up to five people. The future of your school will be collaboratively written, and this is a chance to begin writing it together.

Preparing for the future is practical.

We understand the world in terms of stories. They are not extra – they are required.

After 2020, most schools realize how quickly assumptions can be upended. What schools have not always realized is how to get ready for these shocks before they happen. Think of futurist thinking as a fire drill for leadership teams: when we prepare for what’s possible, we react faster and more effectively.

Preparing for the future is a smart entry point for strategic work.

Schools looking ahead to a cycle of strategic planning would be especially well served by attending. Too many schools develop a strategic plan that imagines the world will always be 2023. Our experience is that doing deep futurist thinking prior to strategic planning lays the groundwork for a more generative plan.

We have been gratified to see so many teams register for What’s The Future: The Event, and there’s only room for four or five more (maybe fewer by the time you read this.)

We hope you’ll grab one of those last spots. See you in San Jose next month!