Author: Jack Moran

June, 2015, Älmhult, Sweden: Another day, another deluge of stories about a world in desperate need of aid. Whether you open a newspaper or your Facebook newsfeed, the crises, the calls for assistance, seem unending.

You’ve had visions of their present: hunger, displacement, the fragmented feelings of fear and frustration, the whine of a drone in their sky.

You’ve seen the figures: over 65 million refugees, one of the worst humanitarian crises since the end of World War Two. For 2.6 million of them, that displacement has been ongoing for over five years.

Governments have tried, desperately, to mitigate the crisis: policy is produced, diplomacy descends, and the calls for help, for home, continue.

The world seems paralysed by the scale of the disruption. But what, you think, if help were simpler? What if some assistance, some relief, could be provided in the form of something as small, as inconsequential, as an Allen key?

Your company might be short on diplomats, you think – but you’re not short of Allen keys. Your company might be short of policymakers, but you don’t lack inventiveness, innovation, initiative. Let’s put them together.

January, 2017, Baghdad: Another day, another deluge. Iraqi weather can be challenging at the best of times, for the most fortunate of people – but, for the displaced, the difficulties are difficult to contemplate, to negotiate.

In the summer, humidity and heat makes a tent unbearable. When the winter and spring come, they bring with them torrents of rain. Water, a foot high. Unclean, each deluge brings the risk of disease, of diarrhoea.

It’s not just the elements that cause such trouble. In a place where desperation and devastation are so common, the prospect of being protected by nothing more than tent walls left you fearful each night.

Today, however, the risk and the rain are unlikely to trouble you, at least for the time being. Four short hours ago, you were facing the prospect of another night in the tents, with their fragility and flimsiness.

Four short hours ago, you were offered an Allen key, and you and your family opened two boxes containing the IKEA Better Shelter: a lifeline, and a security. Solar panels that offer light for four hours, making the darkness less daunting. A stab-proof steel frame, allowing you to sleep more easily. USB ports for mobile phone charging, allowing you to access family, help, information.

You stand up, key in hand, and hold it up to the light. Around you, sixteen Better Shelters stand, secure, stable, strong. Not quite a community – but the closest thing you’ve had to it since you were displaced.

January, 2017, London: Another day, another deluge: five thousand kilometres away, January in London is proving as wet and windswept as ever. However, the rain’s not troubling you: you’re receiving the Beazley Design of the Year Award, with your company lauded for the work you’ve done to bring shelter, privacy, safety, and order to those who need those things most.

Your work, you hope, will inspire other companies to turn a product into protection; to recognise points where the private can fill gaps the public can’t; to adopt an active role in tackling need and negligence; to find those moments where your work becomes a social enterprise.

IKEA’s Better Shelter is one of the finest examples of corporate social responsibility made manifest. It combines altruism and innovation; it unites new technology with sensitivity to the needs of those using that technology; it finds a niche for itself where public policy is inefficient, or delayed. A Better Shelter costs double what another emergency tent might do, but the benefits – security, insulation, stability, three years’ use – make it a vastly-superior source of shelter. And, requiring nothing more complicated than an Allen Key, anyone can put it together.

From Facebook’s attempt to provide internet to some of the world’s most remote inhabited places using drones, to Google’s decision to become one of the world’s leading corporate purchasers of renewable energy, to IKEA’s belief in the power of something as small as the Allen Key, every company has a solution to offer – and a story to tell.

We are The Storytellers. We exist to move more people to do great things through the power and influence of storytelling.

What story will move you and the people around you to do great things in 2018?  Share your story with us.

Friday, May 17^th, 2019, Mountain View. It’s nearing midday in California, and a sweltering noonday sun is searing down on those in San Francisco and Mountain View alike.

You’re in your office, glad to be inside. You’ve spent the morning speaking to your colleague, Michaela, a talented young marketing executive, about your upcoming press conference. The future is here, you’ll say, introducing the public release of your first commercially-available driverless car. Sit back, and enjoy the ride. It’s about time.

This release, you’ll say, signifies another step towards swapping human labour for human leisure. Convenience, comfort, cheapness – we’re offering them all to you. After years of careful coding, of battles with legislators, of managing both public excitement and public anxiety, your vision of the future – finally – is here.

Saturday, May 18^th, 2019, San Francisco. It’s nearing midday in California, and a sweltering noonday sun is searing down on those in San Francisco and Mountain View alike.

You’re in your car, glad to be inside. Your family are there too – your partner, and two children. No way were they going to let you take your first ride into the future without them. No way were you going to let them miss your first ride into the future. After all, when you were their age, this was science fiction, expressed only in the speculations of futuristic films and idle prophetic chatter.

You’re watching, both excited, and a little restless, as you slide smoothly down sunswept streets. It’s strange, after decades of having to indicate, to brake, to see, to be in the front seat of a car and have to do nothing but watch and wait to arrive. Yes, your driver’s instinct is leaving you a little restless – but above that restlessness is exhilaration as you calculate of the number of free hours you’ll now have, hours previously lost to road-watching.

You still road-watch a little, though: it’s habit. You feel sympathy, then shock, as you see a child to your left run, stop, point to the ice-cream van across the road, break away from their friend, begin to dash, unseeing, across the road.

You know there isn’t time to brake: you’re too close, and moving too fast. You know you couldn’t brake if you wanted to: convenience, comfort, cheapness – but choice? Not included.

You know you could swerve away, but there is a lorry hurtling down the road across from you. You swerve, and your family’s life is on the line. You know you couldn’t swerve if you wanted to: convenience, comfort, cheapness – but choice? Not included.

Visions of your future – rapidly – are here.

Monday, May 14^th, 2018: It’s nearing midday in California, and a sweltering noonday sun is searing down on those in San Francisco and Mountain View alike.

You’re in your office, glad to be inside. Sipping ice-cold water, you take a deep breath. Today, you’re going to try and bring your vision of the future one step closer, by proving to the critics – governments fearful of losing popular support, the public fearful of the unknown, academics who see technology coming before ethical considerations – that, in the worst possible scenarios, the autonomous vehicles you’ve spent nearly a decade working on will make the right choice. A choice that will leave you able to sleep at night. After all: choice? Always included – and the moment to choose is now.

Since 2009, Google has been testing self-driving cars: a project that promises to transform the way we travel, and the way we live. In November 2017, after approximately three million miles of testing, Google’s driverless cars arm, Waymo, announced it was going to experiment with truly autonomous vehicles – ones without a safety driver on board.

In March 2018, a driverless Uber car struck a pedestrian while in autonomous mode – the first fatal crash involving a self-driving car and pedestrian in the US.

By 2020, Google hope to release a self-driving car available to the general public: a vision of the future with profound economic and ethical implications.

Automated cars will almost certainly make us safer. One death is perceived as an aberration, especially when placed alongside the 40,100 traffic deaths in the US alone last year.

Fewer deaths, fewer lapses, fewer tears – but also greater unrest when one does occur, perhaps. Human error is ethically uncomplicated in its inevitability, its lack of foresight. The detached determinism of an autonomous agent? Less so.

The streets of Tempe, Arizona won’t be the only ones that create moments where choice isn’t in the moment, moments where an algorithm will determine who lives, and who dies. This year, we try and envisage that future. This year, there is still choice.

We are The Storytellers. We exist to move more people to do great things through the power and influence of storytelling.

What story will move you and the people around you to do great things in 2018? Share your story with us.