Category: Visions of the Future

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.

On a daily basis, we are bombarded by news that requires action, but doesn’t drive us to act. Consuming colossal numbers about colossal issues, we become fixed points, unmoved by the baying demands on our empathy. Climate change, the ultimate colossal issue, perfectly captures the battle between know and do, think and feel. Our sluggish global response, a litany of non-committal grunts from our world leaders and bombastic counter-narratives, persists even as the evidence becomes incontrovertible and the real human suffering – from people on other shores, driven, increasingly to our own – becomes abundant.

But something is shifting, now, with a momentum that’s by-passing all the usual blocking points: breaking domestic habits; declaring itself in the manifestos of our most powerful businesses; redesigning the way we shop; declaring itself in entire UK towns. It’s even taken up residency in the Queen’s estate. That thing is the narrative being built against single-use plastics.

It goes like this: plastics are choking our oceans, destroying our sea life and poisoning the food chain on a catastrophic scale – and it can and must be reversed, by us, now.

Plastic isn’t a new story. Recycling has now reached the status of mass social etiquette, regulated by reliable waste collection and friendly colour-coded bins. We recycle committedly, if inconsistently – ‘mixed recycling’ remains our Everest – and participation rises slowly, year on year. But this low-level anxiety has taken years to accrue in our consciousness, more sediment than sweeping change. And though it’s now mainstream, the real impact is still hard to quantify.

Why has it been such a hard sell? If behaviour change needs motivation, means and the momentum of visible progress to sustain itself, recycling is making it easy for us. It’s not hard to recycle when the means to do so exist on every street corner and in our homes. We’re not being asked to change anything fundamental about the way we sell and consume. But if it’s not asking much, perhaps it’s not giving much either: neither offering us anything concrete in terms of emotional motivation (we know recycling is good, but when do we feel it’s good?) nor momentum: the seas are still clogged, the landfills still grow… councils are broke, recycling costs… and isn’t it all shipped to China anyway on vast, oil-guzzling trawlers?

Compare this to the plastic-free movement. Suddenly, people are going out of their way to embrace inconvenience. They are rejecting assumption and reinventing how they live. In just four months, public declarations of war on wasteful norms – from average consumers to senior politicians to business leaders – have already affected fundamental change in the way we produce and consume. Targeted campaigns – on plastic straws, on plastic bags, on plastic bottles – are carving focused, attainable action into the heart of the movement and bringing a new, purposeful character to the cause.

And yet, once again, plastics-free is not a new narrative. But something has happened to make it powerful enough to change mindsets and behaviour, rapidly and on a mass scale. So where was the tipping point?

Sensationalist headlines across the major papers left little room for ambiguity. ‘In one of the most powerfully emotive TV sequences to ever have been broadcast, Sir David Attenborough made the case to end plastic pollution in Sunday night’s Big Blue episode of Blue Planet II.’ ‘The scourge of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans must be tackled, Sir David Attenborough said as he launched the second series of Blue Planet II’. ‘David Attenborough urges action on plastics after filming Blue Planet II.’ ‘Michael Gove “haunted” by plastic pollution seen in Blue Planet II. ‘Blue Planet 2 behind BBC’s new promise to ditch single-use plastics’. ‘People are giving up plastic for Lent and it’s all because of “Blue Planet II”’.

It’s hard to imagine a more celebrated, unifying, or iconic series, fronted by our most national of treasures. But in an age of targeted, network-based influence, it feels unlikely that this tipping point could be something so mass, so mainstream, so familiar in format.

But look closer, and we see a collision of narrative techniques that exemplifies the way that storytelling is used by the world’s most effective social change leaders.

We all know that empathy is a powerful emotional driver, motivating us to act in extraordinary ways for those we feel connected to. Its limitation is its inability to operate on a mass scale; but by connecting us to an individual experience, storytelling bypasses the apathy of mass statistics and rational information, funnelling our emotional energy into a series of narrow storylines. Harnessed correctly, this singular focus can affect mass change. No surprise then, against a backdrop of sweeping environmental damage, that it was two distinctly human narratives that unleashed an outpouring of empathy from viewers: a pelican unwittingly feeding her chick plastic; and a mourning pilot whale, refusing to let go of her stillborn calf, poisoned by toxic build-up.

Coupled with Attenborough’s powerful closing address – a soft-spoken rebuke which, in three lines, challenges us as individuals, bonds us together in our shared humanity, and calls us to action in the face of immediate danger on a global scale – Blue Planet II suddenly has the narrative prerequisites of history’s most effective social movements, capable of transcending its form to galvanise a moment of rare, collective possibility.

And the impact of this trigger has been profound. We have taken to the internet in droves. We have reached out and found others who feel the same. And as our motivation builds, we discover new means: innovators offering plastic-free products, easy tips for a plastic-free life – means we never cared to discover until now. We realise that action can be targeted or wholesale, the choice is ours, but we have the power to choose it. And the momentum feels real: we share our stories, the difference we’re making, and we know that we can make a difference too. Every action reinforces the values that unite us and the belief that drives us on. And then it starts to become real: declarations are made, policy is passed, the conversation is permanently changed.

If we take anything from the anti-plastics movement it should be this: storytelling is the most powerful tool we have to change even the most engrained behaviour. The leader who learns this lesson today will be the leader of tomorrow.

If we’re lucky, it might even be Attenborough.

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.