Category: Visions of the Future

Diagnostic: navigating to the new normal, are you ready?

Posted on by Marcus Hayes

Businesses now, more than ever, require a collective resilience and clear strategy to navigate through one of the most unprecedented times of crisis in history since World War II. As is often the case, times of extreme challenge define businesses’ future success. 

So how ready are your leaders for the journey the business needs to go on through and beyond this pandemic?

The Storytellers’ health-check profile is intended to be a thought-provoking tool for business leaders during our current global pandemic. We are constantly talking to executives across different industries as they shape the story they are using to engage and connect their people. We’ve pulled together insights from their agenda, together with research from other organisations, to identify what leaders need to be focusing on now to enable their organisations to both survive the next 12 months and thrive beyond it.

Our health-check profile provides a succinct and clear insight into some of the common pitfalls of organisations which fail through adversity as well as defining what great can look like, and what organisations ‘getting it right’ stand to gain. The results are simply an indication for potential risk and opportunity areas to consider; they shouldn’t be used to inform organisational decisions without additional data points and consultation.

Your story: a framework for progress and action

Posted on by Robert Tennant

Over the last few months, our team has been working hard to support Executive teams all over the world. These leaders are facing the momentous challenge of adapting to the immediate and ever-evolving situation. As this adaptation happens and organisations move from short-term crisis management to longer term planning, they are starting to consider how they must now transform to be ready to play their part in the “new normal”.

It’s very clear that Covid-19 will have profound and lasting economic, social and cultural impacts. We’re living in a moment in which businesses need to react quickly, act with empathy and fulfil their purpose in a way that helps society navigate a deeply troubling time. Doing so will also prepare organisations for re-emerging into a very different landscape.

The new stories of change

We’ve certainly heard an abundance of stories from our virtual interactions – acts of compassion, moments of innovation, the sudden removal of barriers and cultural walls. We’ve heard from leaders, amazed at how their people have united to achieve things that would have taken months or even years, in a matter of weeks.

For our clients who are in the process of co-creating a narrative to navigate through these changes, there are some significant realisations. There is now an increasing understanding that this situation is catalysing trends and drivers of change. Many of these trends were already significant drivers of change before Covid-19. The convergence of these trends means businesses will face the task of transformation, evolution, even redefinition, on a quite remarkable scale.

Seizing the opportunity

These transformations will, as ever, tend to focus on certain key areas of challenge or opportunity. Those that are truly meaningful will reconsider the very business model and nature of the business that has been successful to date. What will that business model look like in the face of this level of change?

Those leaders who are now starting to be proactive in preparing their people and organisations for profound, continuous change will emerge ready to tackle the enormous challenges ahead and then seize the opportunities that present themselves.

Leading a movement of change

One of the true tests of leadership in the coming months will be: who are the leaders who can successfully create a movement of change? Who are the leaders who will inspire people to look beyond current limits and define new opportunities? Who are the leaders who will generate unity and collective action in the face of challenge? Momentous change is on its way. These leaders won’t design the organisations of the future – but the teams of people who they inspire to believe and take action absolutely will. Focus on the story your organisation needs to write over the coming months and then turn it into a framework for progress and action.

HRD Summit 2020 – ‘Harnessing Human Creativity’

Posted on by Alastair Hagger

It’s 2020. The corporate landscape is more volatile than ever. At The Storytellers, we see this as an exhilarating challenge. Live in the now, look to the future, and ask yourself: is your organisation ready to be the hero of its own story?

On February 4th– 5th, the annual HRD Summit plays host to the most senior HR and business leaders on the globe. And we will be there. This year, at the ICC in Birmingham, 150 speakers – including our Co-Founder and Director, Alison Esse – will discuss the theme of ‘Harnessing Human Creativity’. 

Here’s the Summit’s ‘call to action’:

“The pace of change is more rapid than ever. Economically, politically, socially; as the world changes, it’s the organisations that can transform right along with it that will find success. Organisations are being required to rethink it all or risk being left behind, from their basic business models to their core identities. What is their purpose? Who do they want to be?”

What is your business’ purpose? Who do you want to be? Alison will be giving a masterclass at 12.30pm on the 4th of February titled ‘Resetting Your Organisation’s Narrative to Inspire Change’. At The Storytellers, we harness the power of storytelling to move people to accelerate change and transform business performance. How do we do this, and how can it help you harness the creative potential within your organisation?

Alison will be discussing:

  • How storytelling brings meaning and purpose to work,
  • Why people resist change (and what to do about it),
  • How leaders can use storytelling techniques to inspire change, and
  • How to construct an emotionally compelling strategic narrative.

We make meaning through stories. As Alison will show, an organisation can utilise the universal power of storytelling to identify and articulate its struggles and endeavours, create a hero’s ‘call to action’, and help its people to contribute to something bigger than themselves. All great stories – from Aristotle to Ad Astra – use this narrative framework to develop and foster a deep and satisfying emotional connection. Why? Because when people feel empowered and inspired by storytelling, they want to become the hero of their own narrative. They feel they can change.

In a business context, storytelling helps us to recognise and celebrate what we have achieved, understand what is possible, and engage us all in the role we need to play. Great storytellers are thus great leaders – because they inspire us with what we can achieve together. By creating the motivation, means and momentum essential to shifting behaviour, we’ve helped leaders at over 170 major organisations move their people to accelerate change and transform business performance – through the power and influence of storytelling. 

Want to know more? Attend Alison’s masterclass on the 4th of February and drop by for a chat at stand 27 in the ICC. We’d love to tell you more about how we can help you use the power of storytelling to navigate more effectively through the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity that characterises the business landscape today.

Here’s our ‘hero’s call to action’: See you in Birmingham! 

Visions of the Future: #TakeYourSeat

Posted on by Jack Moran

November 8th, 2013: Take your seat. The world is dying.

The world is dying, and you’ve been given a front-row seat – a privileged spectator spot. Others take their seat in front of televisions and computer screens, where storms are rendered via satellite, and climate change is experienced via tweets rather than typhoons.

Take your seat: passivity, spectacle, experiential and ethical distance.

Not for you. For you, to take a seat is not to observe the tumult from afar but to live it: the uprooting of community, a city ripped asunder in moments, submerged and swept away in the space of an afternoon.

It is to live waves as weighty as windmills and wind wild as whirlpools. It is to live loss as immediate as the breath you barely kept. It is to be crushed by the blows of a planetary ecosystem crumbling under intolerable strain, to feel climate change as not a noun but the most violent and vehement of verbs.

When chairs are strewn across streets like seaweed on seashores – empty chairs and empty tables – how to take a seat?

How to take a seat when yours no longer exists?

December 3rd, 2018: Take your seat. The world is dying.

The world is dying, and the distance between those who experience and those who execute – between those who spectate and those who strategise – can no longer be perpetuated.

It’s not as though the climate clarion calls haven’t been intensifying for not just months but decades. It’s not as though the increasing incidence of extreme weather events – insatiably destructive wildfires, hurricanes that direct destruction towards families, cities and livelihoods, flash floods and snowstorms and drought, the tick-tock of minute but relentless temperature increase – haven’t offered sufficient justification for a watershed moment.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference – snugly situated in Poland’s Katowice, where it would be easy to forget that climate change will not be experienced as half-degree global temperature rises but as lived loss – hopes to be that watershed moment.

But how to turn the silent spectator’s tragedy into the catalyst for change? How to ensure that those that theorise are joined at the table by those that feel – when the latter group is comprised by millions, each as deserving of a voice as the next?

How to ensure that those millions are perceived not as a sigh-inducing statistic but as a chorus of individual voices, each with a human story that demands immediate progress?

You give each of them a chair at the table, using the possibilities that digital technologies offer for democratic engagement with society’s leaders.

You create a space where politician and Executive are held to account by citizen, and the voiceless become the vocal.

You create the catalyst by which we translate abstraction into action, safeguarding the future of our planet.

You ask each of them to #TakeYourSeat.

Climate change had been on the agenda of those that lead since well before Super Typhoon Haiyan hit the small city of Tacloban, The Philippines, on November 8th, 2013, killing 6,300 and shattering the lives of those that survived. One of those was Joanna Sustento, whose family was lost to the storm.

Sustento is the perfect example of those who are reduced to deindividualizing noun (‘people’, ‘those affected’, ‘millions’) in high-level talks about counteracting climate change, yet those who are most susceptible to its imminent effects.

Ever since that day, Sustento has spent her life agitating for action, attempting to hold those most responsible for our warming planet to account. However, the world no longer has the leeway, or the luxury, to wait for more Sustentos to live climate tragedy before they are heard.

This year, the UN took note, and created a symbolic space that those seeking to salvage our planet could occupy, irrespective of location or status: the People’s Seat. Using the virtual communal areas created by social media and digital technology, it invited all those wanting to join the conversation to #TakeYourSeat.

In doing so, it ensured that the act of taking a seat was reconfigured as active participation rather than passive observation, and that active participation was a possibility offered to the many, not the few.

Climate change has regularly been spoken of as our greatest, and existential challenge. Daunting though the prospect of tackling that challenge is, we believe that the ‘incalculably diffusive’ effects that can arise from mass participation are imperative if we are to succeed – if we are to prevent global temperature from rising 1.5% above pre-industrial levels.

We perceive the People’s Seat as an initial ripple that we hope might facilitate tidal waves – tsunamis – of climate action: waves restore breath to a choking planet, and make manifest a world in which all of us can take a seat at tables where the stakes, and the potential costs, are rather lower.

 

Visions of the Future: Driving Diversity, Inspiring Innovation

Posted on by Jack Moran

November 6th, 2018: A day for, and of, history, perhaps. A day of historic firsts for the United States government: a moment at which its Congress began to look, in however ostensibly imperceptible ways, a little more like the country it claims to represent.

A day when Sharice Davids and Deb Haaland became the first Native American women to be elected to Congress; a day in which Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar joined them as America’s first female Muslim representatives; a day in which Jared Polis became America’s first openly homosexual male governor in Colorado; a day when, at the age of 29, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez becomes perhaps the most prominent millennial in American politics as the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Representatives.

A day, then, when diversity of gender wasn’t enough for the American electorate, and they opted – in some corners of the country, if nothing else – to try and ensure that the country’s decision-makers weren’t just a little more diverse in their gender, but also in their age, religion, sexuality, and class.

Imagine these midterm moments not as fodder for pub quizzes and episodes of Pointless– the catalyst for momentary scratching of heads and groans – but as watershed moments – moments at which the American people, collectively, chose to start washing away the social detritus left by past inequities.

Imagine these midterm moments as not, in fact, moments – but part of movements. Moments when we remove the glass ceilings and build elevators in their place, requiring not so much violent smashes as vibrant steps to conquer.

Imagine that those glass ceilings weren’t just removed in the political sphere – that ‘diversity’ wasn’t just restricted to those few individuals fortunate enough to have the right electorate and the right face at the right time. Imagine if our businesses and parliaments took similar leads, and replaced barriers with opportunities; uniformity with diversity.

What happens?

November 6th, 2022: Less history, perhaps, on this day. Fewer firsts. Fewer headlines. But imagine that below the surface – behind the headlines and away from the spotlight – diversity had become a norm, not an exception.

Imagine, then, a world where companies weren’t forgoing crucial growth opportunities because they weren’t misunderstanding or missing new markets.

Imagine a world where the UK economy was boosted by £24 billion each year or more – an extra one percent or so of its current GDP.

Imagine a Parliament, or a House of Representatives, or a boardroom that was more diverse and inclusive – intellectually as well as interpersonally – where new ideas were more likely to take shape, be heard, and be implemented.

Imagine those new ideas forming the cornerstone of transformational innovation, then, with individuals from disparate backgrounds and experiences bringing new modes of thinking and new ways of interacting to your organisation.

Imagine missing fewer opportunities, making fewer strategic mistakes – giving your company the competitive edge, or giving our society the optimal conditions, it needs to succeed in a world driven by the capacity to innovate effectively.

What if it all starts by smashing a ceiling and building an elevator?

What if it all starts with a gay governor or a millennial Congresswoman?

 

 

Currently, the uppermost echelons of our society don’t look particularly diverse. For all the noise garnered by the success of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, fewer than one in four US House Representatives are female. Fewer than one in three members of the UK parliament are.

In the corporate world, where ossified (and ossifying) modes of operation and prejudices still prevail, the rooms where it happens look even more homogeneous: only 9.7 percent of Executives at FTSE 100 companies are female, and only 6 percent of top management positions are held by BAME individuals.

The price of this lack of diversity isn’t just ethical – there is good evidence that it is also economic. Research repeatedly suggests that companies that have greater gender diversity in the boardroom receive greater innovation revenue. Other research reports that companies with 2-D diversity out-innovate and out-perform others, are 45 percent more likely to report a growth in market share over the previous year, and 70 percent more likely to report that the firm captured a new market.

However, with a majority of companies – 78 percent – reporting that they do not possess diverse leadership, and the figures in the political sphere broadly similar, it could hardly be clearer that most organizations are still ill-placed to derive the economic and social benefits of diversity.

Innovation occurs in environments where new ideas can be raised, heard, and enacted with as little friction as possible – and research also suggests that diverse workplaces are more likely to create those conditions. For example, in environments where leadership is homogeneous,women are 20% less likely than straight white men to win endorsement for their ideas; people of colour are 24 percent less likely; and LGBTs are 21 percent less likely.

This isn’t just a loss for the individuals who see their capacity for innovation trammelled. It’s also a loss for companies, voters, and society – who all benefit from outstanding innovation.

Imagine turning this loss into an opportunity, and opportunity into outcome. Imagine replacing exclusivity with inclusivity, and stagnation with innovation.

We think that’s a vision of the future worth creating.

 

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

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

Visions of the Future: Lost in Translation

Posted on by Jack Moran

“And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. […] And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” Genesis, 11:1-7

 

October, 1942: Lost in translation – a common phrase, covering a range of situations in which we are subject to the burden of Babel: the moments where differences of language create, and render nearly-insuperable, gaps in human experience and understanding.

What, then, is lost in translation? Meaning, certainly. Understanding – of course. But what more might be lost when a common language cannot be accessed?

What about lives?

You are in Guadalcanal at the height of World War II: a hellscape where death at the hands of an enemy solider isn’t the only threat facing you. Around you, you see dozens of your military companions – perhaps even hundreds – develop headaches, fevers, nausea, outbreaks of sweating – and many are dying.

You know that your adversaries are facing the same challenges – the same misery and malady – and managed to attempt to engage in conversation with a local villager under the cover of darkness: an attempt to gather intelligence, to learn anything that might help save you and your companions.

Your companion wants to help – wants to explain the solutions that are making your American adversaries more successful in combating the disease facing them. But you lack a common language – and how to explain quinine or atabrine with only rudimentary English between you? How to outline the causes and cures of a complicated illness when arranging a meeting took all the linguistic capacity you possessed?

A wave of the hand. A shake of the head.

Lost in translation. Nothing to be done.

 

October, 2019: Found in translation? You are seeking to communicate, to a skeptical Senegalese French-speaker thousands of miles away from you, that the next delivery of mosquito nets from your charity cannot be used for fishing – that they are an essential defense in the fight against malaria.

Without nets, their rate of infection will soar. As the rate of infection soars, so will the rate of death. Clear, concise communication is imperative: all must be understood, accurately and speedily.

But what if nothing was lost in translation? What if the smartphone in your hand was all you needed to transverse linguistic and cultural gaps, to impress upon your recipients the gaps?

You speak into your smartphone in clear English, having activated voice-recognition technology that will identify each word as it is articulated, creating a near-perfect transcription of your insight and advice.

As you are speaking, an app is, in real-time, translating that transcription into fluent French, using thousands of hours of speech data to power the world’s most accurate translation algorithms.

Yet now, even more is possible. Driven by more AI-enabled algorithms, your smartphone will ensure that any gaps in meaning or tone are navigated by interspersing, among the French, a language that all can understand: emoji. Do not ❌ use your nets 🥅 for fishing! 🐟 They’re there to save you and your family 👪 from malaria 🤢– don’t waste them.

The response comes back in the form of two images: two images that express as much as succinctly as a dozen words – that require no shared English or French – The response comes back in the form of two images: two images that assure you that nothing has been lost in translation.

👍🏿🙏

We understand. Thank you.

 

 

Breaking Babel’s Burden

In 1887, L.L. Zamenhof published the first guide to Esperanto – the constructed international auxiliary language that he hoped would “enable the learner to make direct use of his knowledge with people of any nationality.” Just over 120 years later, Esperanto has a mere 2 million native speakers: a fraction of the earth’s population.

In 1999, Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita created the first emoji – 176 12-by-12 pixel images designed to convey basic information in a more succinct, speedy manner. Under 20 years later, over 5 billion emojis are used on Facebook Messenger daily: a pictorial language that has transcended generations, class, and nationalities in a way that Zamenhof could scarcely have imagined for Esperanto.

In 2017, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation proposed an emoji mosquito as a way to better describe mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria and Zika. Recognizing the universality of the mosquito as a symbol of disease and death, they offer a glimpse into the possible future of emoji: a way of creating shared meaning when there are moments that our words can’t reach.

For as long as humanity has existed, the burden of Babel has proved a barrier to human flourishing: communicative gaps decrease efficiency, foster misunderstanding, and prevent the creation of interpersonal relationships.

The digital age, however, offers numerous possibilities to break down Babel’s burden. Emoji are facilitating cross-cultural communication, leading them to be spoken of by Wiredas “a lingua franca for the digital age”. Voice recognition technology, combined with accessible, AI-powered translation software, could offer real-time linguistic bridges, with emoji supplementing translated speech in ways that offered crucial insight into tone and emotion.

Creating these linguistic bridges could inspire a new age of human communication: an age where differences of language are overcome in seconds, and where cool, impersonal translation software is augmented and humanized by a return to pictorial communication: the often-derided, but barrier-breaking emoji.

Less misunderstanding and miscommunication. Better business efficiency. The forging of new links between individuals across the world. Maybe even saved lives.

There’s a vision of the future for you.

 

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

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

Visions of the Future: Food of the Future

Posted on by Jack Moran

September 26th, 2018: What are you cooking today?

Well – here’s a recipe for you.

Take:

  • 9.1 billion people, the world’s projected population by 2050;
  • 25% of farmland worldwide: the proportion that’s now highly degraded, subject to soil erosion, water degradation, and biodiversity loss;
  • 8% of farmland worldwide: the proportion that’s now moderately degraded;
  • The year 2023: the year that the population in China, India, and Africa will constitute over half the world’s population;
  • 63kg of meat per year – as of 2016, the average meat consumption per capita per annum in China.

Heat by 2.6 degrees Celsius: the upper-bound estimate, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, of how much the earth might warm by 2050: the year that Oxfam estimate that the world will no longer be able to produce enough food to feed itself.

This recipe doesn’t come with a picture, but, to conjure up a vision of the future presented by this slow-cooking combination, imagine 379 Big Macs.

Then try and imagine 379 billion Big Macs (more burgers, incidentally, than McDonalds has cooked up in its entire existence).

Then try to imagine – if you can – a world that’s short of 379 billion Big Macs. Each year.

That’s the vision of the future outlined by Ms. Sara Menker, founder and Chief Executive of Gro Intelligence. When will our collective meal be ready? Cooking time for this unique recipe: uncertain, but take out and try any time between 2023 and 2050.

There’s a recipe for you.

September 26th, 2020: What are you cooking today?

Here’s another recipe for you (innovative business partner required):

  • Take the world’s favourite foods – anything you like;
  • Pass favourite foods through 3D scanner, pressure sensor, and MRI scanner. Record texture, density, moisture content, visual data, and flavour in database;
  • Repeat for all favourite foods until your database contains all one could possibly want to feed the world;
  • Save database to a USB stick (yes: this vision of the future features fast food, too);
  • Insert USB into USB port on specialist 3D pixel food printer;
  • Select chosen meal;
  • Download chosen meal – and enjoy!

Imagine cooking from a computer. Imagine food that requires minimal – if any – farmland. Imagine a kitchen that requires not a gas-guzzling oven, but just your laptop and a 3D printer. Imagine a vision of the future where you can send your dinner via email, your breakfast from your smartphone – from folder to fork in minutes. Imagine a vision of the future where feeding the world doesn’t cost the world.

There’s a recipe for you.

If we want to combat climate change and ensure a sustainable future for the world, altering agricultural practice is imperative. Currently, 75% of our food can be sourced back to only 12 plants and 5 animal species, while global calorific demand continues to increase relentlessly with population increase.

Unsurprisingly, this will cease to be sustainable unless new nutritional sources are discovered or found. That doing so is increasingly imperative has been amply documented, with a range of reports – from Gro Intelligence to Oxfam – offering grave estimates of the risk posed by imminent food insecurity: 2023? 2030? 2050?

However, panic is premature. The power of human ingenuity is being devoted – with alacrity – to the task, with the Open Meals project one example of the attempt to combine new technology and ingenious innovation in ways that safeguard a prosperous future for humanity.

Futuristic and cutting-edge though this vision is, those behind Open Meals envisage a world where a meal can be downloaded and printed as easily as a PDF from a USB, combining big data, food analysis, and 3D printing technology to try and ensure that – no matter how much land we lose – the world stays fed, full – and, we hope – cool.

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

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

Visions of the Future: Artificial Intelligence

Posted on by Jack Moran

6thDecember, 2017: What can you do in twenty-four hours? Navigate your car, eyes fatigue-filled and mind preoccupied, through the London traffic; send a dozen important emails; make your way, anticipation augmenting, down to the room where it happens – the room where you and your team are about to test, again, the intellectual limits of Life 3.0.

What can you do in twenty-four hours? More – so much more – than was ever thought possible. You gaze at the figures and formulae and results on your screen, seeing a glimpse of a future that isn’t quite here but may have just jumped one large step closer to reality – a world in which ignorance becomes intelligence in moments, and accelerates all the way to superintelligence before your best analysts can process the results.

When humans are born – tabula rasa, or close to – we have the capacity to learn. Life 2.0. Imagine a newborn baby, in its first twenty-four hours. What can it do in 24 hours? Learn to breathe, recognise its mother, adjust its eyes to an unfamiliar world.

Imagine a newborn baby, armed with the capacity to learn to play three board games in 24 hours.

Imagine one that could beat a world champion, a grandmaster – in 24 hours.

Imagine that this capacity for learning isn’t limited to game-playing.

Imagine what that artificial hand could do if it touched your business, your economy – your world.

So what now? What comes next?

6th December, 2027: What can you do in 24 hours? With a cognitive system whose capacity for creative synthesis is matched only by its capacity for destruction – when the unparalleled pattern recognition that can recognise and execute Alekhine’s gun in a fraction of a second could also recognise and execute the innocent in the same shooting snippet of time.

What can you do in 24 hours? When the seas of AI rise relentless and roughshod over every human intellectual domain, when it takes you a day to do what your computer colleague can do in hours or minutes, and the profit and efficiency imperative makes you and your education and experience redundant?

But what else could you do in 24 hours, when competence is replaced by creativity as the central focus of human economic affairs? When the policy frameworks, conceived and perfected through months of careful, expert-driven deliberation, ensure that the unprecedented explosion in human prosperity is distributed in a way that enhances, rather than jeopardises, our capacity for self-determination? When human economic endeavour could double every fortnight? When we win the wisdom race, and ensure that AI is an asset, not a threat?

So what now? Humanity’s at 11:58. What will we do in twenty-four hours?

Life 3.0 is coming. Artificial Intelligence researchers may not quite know when, but the prospect of AI has moved, imperceptibly but inexorably, from science fiction to science theory. The implications for every aspect of human life – the way we work, the way we interact, the way we define human value – are profound. With each development – such as Google’s AlphaZero acquiring superhuman-level proficiency in chess, and shogi, and Go, in under 24 hours – that paradigm shift moves a little closer.

As Yuval Harari writes in ‘Homo Deus’, and as Max Tegmark articulates in this TEDTalk, nobody can slam the brakes, and nobody knows where all the pieces are. Nobody knows quite how much unemployment we risk, how much prosperity is possible, how much danger might arise – but we know that these questions can’t be avoided.

We, like Nick Bostrom, believe that, if we get the answers to these questions right, the potential exists for outcomes that positively transform our lives beyond all recognition. But there is the potential for risk – risk that we can’t control if we don’t predict, assess, strategize, so that, when the detonation occurs, it is controlled.

The process has begun, with 23 principles – a kind of AI Accord – agreed and signed off by over 1,000 experts and industry leaders. This collaboration can serve as the blueprint, and the catalyst, for a vision of the future unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

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

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

Visions of the Future: Cannabis Legalisation

Posted on by Jack Moran

12th July, 2018: Consider: you, heart throbbing, fingers clenched tightly over keys and cold cash, cautiously glancing around a lamplit alley. Silhouetted in a corner is one ominous hooded figure: an unlikely saviour, and a resource of last resort. How to save a life?

You’ll naturally be racked with doubt, fear, anxiety. It’s not just the question of remembering the paralyzed powerlessness you feel every time the convulsions begin. You’re also racked by the fears that come with this type of purchase: the potential for violence, for fraud – or, worse, for a product so impure that it causes more harm than good.

One can buy anything on the black market – but at what cost?

When cures are criminal, this is the price of seeking to alleviate pain, to prevent a seizure, to offer respite and relief to an ailing son or daughter. When cures are criminal, this is the price of seeking to save a life.

12th July, 2019: Consider: you, fingers curled lightly over a small bottle in a brightly-lit room, smiling down at an anxious, aching child.

After weeks of legislative wrangle, you’re going to be one of the first doctors in the United Kingdom to legally administer medicinal cannabis. After weeks of watching them stagnate, knowing that succour was beyond the boundaries or the law, you’re on the verge of  – in however small a way – bringing a vision of a better medical future one step closer.

You’ve testified in Parliament; you’ve appeared on radio and television; you’ve liaised with business and legislators to make the economic, medical and pragmatic cases for regulated cannabis consumption. You’ve helped smooth out the relevant Bills, arguing for and against amendments, calming the natural anxieties that come with change.

Convincing the sceptical was never easy. Yet the prominent, evocative narratives provided by needlessly suffering individuals helped provide the momentum and motivation needed to catalyse change. All that remained was the means – the collaboration, insight, and theoreticians required to turn a vision into reality – to make cannabis oil as acceptable a medical solution as chemotherapy.

That’s how to save a life.

In the United Kingdom, over 255 tonnes of cannabis are sold each year, with 3 million people purchasing approximately £2.6 billion worth of the nation’s most popular illegal drug.

Most will be seeking the relief provided by a psychotropic high. However, for some – those afflicted by epilepsy, or chronic pain, or Tourette Syndrome – the consideration isn’t hedonism but health.

Recent high-profile cases – Billy Caldwell, Sophia Gibson – of suffering children that could be helped by access to legal medicinal cannabis have catapulted the question of regulating and legalising currently illegal drugs back into the public consciousness – especially for medicinal purposes.

Proponents of legalization argue that stretched policing resources and government funding would be better directed at more harmful criminal behaviour, while also citing the potential economic benefits of a taxed, regulated cannabis industry.

Detractors fear attempts to liberalise drug legislation, doubt that a black market could ever be eradicated, and point to the moral implications of increased drug consumption.

Of course, any vision of the future should include an emphasis on moral progress as well as economic progress. The granting of emergency licenses to Billy Caldwell, Sophia Gibson, and the mother of epileptic Alfie Dingley are the first steps in that attempt: an experiment that sets a precedent.

Yet these licenses were granted after lengthy wrangles with the UK Home Office: they’re temporary, bespoke, contingent solutions. A coherent vision of the future demands legislative change, with Britain lagging behind Germany, the Netherlands, and over 30 US states.

We believe that this change is possible, and imminent. With organisations and individuals with the strategic insight and expertise to add means to momentum and motivation, we can bring that future closer – now.

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.