Why Your Team's Strategy & Futures Design Process Isn't Working (And what to do about it)

White text over a blue, black, yellow, and magenta oil-art background, reads "redesigning systems without rewriting our stories doesn't work."

Have you ever given up on a future dream or desired strategy because you couldn’t find a way to make it seem possible enough in the NOW to even get started?

Have you ever gotten stuck in the “problem scope” phase of a design-thinking process with yourself or your team?

Have you ever watched as people curl and deflate, offering increasingly narrowed thinking as the problem begins to loom large, leading to disengagement and “brainstorm block”?

Sometimes, starting a life, work, or systems design process from the problem can make solutions feel too far away to imagine or reach, let alone implement.

That’s where Narrative Futures Design comes in to life design and organizational behavior.

Narrative Futures tools allow us to do backwards design, working from “inside a future” in which the problem is already solved.

They allow us to tap into and center the creativity, brilliance, and needs of the group, especially those most impacted by the problems we're seeking to solve.

They allow us to redesign the stories that undergird our systems, as well as the systems themselves.

They allow us to vision a future, and design a present that's connected to it. .

Now, especially, we need these skills in our communities (and our companies!) more than ever.

Yet so many of us are burnt out, exhausted, feeling hopeless, or just trying to pay the bills. It can be painful, even downright re-harming or inaccessible if you and your communities have experienced a lot of oppression now and in the past, to try to inhabit the space of vision and possibility.

And yet activists, community-builders, change-makers have worked with determination, rigor, and community care to keep these skills alive for centuries, and into the future. And you can too.

Community helps. Creative container helps. Starting small helps.

Some great practitioners and writers to check out who do visionary-to-community support design-to-do-it-now are Disability Justice leaders Mia Mingus and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. They’ve been doing, facilitating, and leading this kind of community-based, access-centered, we-make-the-world-we need, visionary-pragmatic work for a long time, and have incredible books, writings, blog posts, graphics, and more to help you learn more.

If you want to learn some more tools and practices that you (and your team, company, collective, or co-op) can use to get the benefits of Narrative Futures Design, you're also welcome to check out my particular take: the Narrative Futures Design video course. On sale in a few days here at www.racheleconomy.com/classes

Imagine the future. Make a map to present. Design the next world now.