The Future Needs Better Storytellers: Designing with Imagination in Mind

Narrative as a tool for transformation

It’s the year 2040.
And no one calls themselves a “changemaker” anymore.

Because change isn’t a specialty now — it’s a shared societal rhythm. Everyone, from teachers to tech developers to urban farmers, plays a role in shaping futures not just reactively, but deliberately. Even our calendars have shifted, the fiscal year now includes a Season of Reflection — a built-in pause for collective sense-making, rest, and redesign.

In corporate settings, where once quarterly KPI reports ruled the pulse of progress, community dashboards now display metrics like relational health, ecosystem reciprocity, and narrative coherence. Children grow up learning how to track the stories they tell themselves about the world and how to rewrite them with care. Decision-making in public institutions is co-led by artists, elders, and scientists. And in cafés, you overhear conversations about regeneration not as a trend, but as an ethic of everyday life.

We didn’t arrive here by scaling faster. We arrived by zooming out, slowing down, and remembering what it means to be alive, together. The tipping point wasn’t a grand policy shift or the invention of a new app — it was the quiet rise of a different question:

What kind of futures are we rehearsing every day, and are they worthy of us?

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Becoming Literate in Possibility

If you pause for a moment and look closely at how societies change, you’ll notice something interesting: change rarely begins with policy. It begins with imagination.

UNESCO has been exploring this through the lens of futures literacy, which they define as “the capacity to imagine and prepare for possible futures.” But this isn’t about forecasting or predicting what will happen. It’s about cultivating the ability to sense, question, and reshape what could happen — and to do so with intention, care, and curiosity.

In many ways, futures literacy is imagination turned strategic. And storytelling is one of its most powerful tools.

Because stories don’t just describe the world. They prime it. They create grooves in our cultural memory. They give shape to longing, and sometimes, permission to believe that something else is possible.

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Stories as Infrastructure

We live inside inherited narratives about growth, success, productivity, power — and often forget that these are not truths. They are agreements. Sometimes outdated ones.

When I work with organisations, communities, or cultural changemakers, we begin by asking:

What stories are shaping your choices right now? And who benefits from them?

The real work begins not with a pitch deck, but with a pause. With gathering around questions like:

• What are you rehearsing in your daily rhythms and for what kind of future?

• What assumptions are embedded in your strategies?

• What kinds of futures feel sayable, fundable, or imaginable in your context?

From there, we begin to open space for new narratives — ones that are not reactive but regenerative. Not based on extraction, but on relationship. This is where storytelling becomes a generative tool.

Designing with Imagination in Mind

In my work, I use a constellation of methods rooted in futures thinking and narrative design. These are not theoretical frameworks — they are embodied, participatory, and often joyful. Some of them include:

• Visioning Exercises: These guided sessions invite people to imagine not just a future that looks good on paper, but one that feels alive — the texture of the air, the kinds of relationships we nurture, the rituals that ground us. It's not about forecasting; it's about anchoring possibility in the sensory and emotional.

• Speculative Storytelling: Borrowing from Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurisms, and design fiction, this practice invites communities to tell stories from the future as if they were real. What if your neighbourhood newsletter was written by trees? What if your city ran on collective joy rather than GDP?

• Re-imagining Collective Narratives: Rather than accepting the stories we’ve inherited about progress, success, or what’s “realistic”, this approach asks: what if we rewrote them? Together, we surface the dominant narratives shaping our systems and then play with alternatives that are more life-giving, inclusive, and just.

Each of these practices strengthens the collective “imagination muscle.” Not to escape reality, but to reshape it.

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From Systemic Decay to Systemic Renewal

In her book Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown writes, “We are in an imagination battle.” And she’s right. If we want systems that prioritise well-being over extraction, collaboration over competition, interbeing over isolation — then we need stories that show us how.

This doesn’t mean utopias. It means living prototypes. Futures that are both idealistic and imperfect. Aspirational, yet anchored.

A regenerative economic model rooted in care work. A neighbourhood where kids design their own playgrounds. A political system that treats time as circular, not linear.

These are not pipe dreams. They are invitations.

And every invitation begins with a story.

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Imagination is Infrastructure

At its heart, this work is not just about creativity — it’s about capacity. It’s about making imagination a shared, collective muscle again. One that is practiced not only by artists or designers, but by teachers, policymakers, engineers, parents.

In workshops, I often use the phrase:

Don’t just ask, what’s likely? ask, what’s worth longing for?

Because longing is a form of intelligence too. And in a time where most futures feel pre-scripted or commodified, longing may be our most radical tool.

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Toward a More Care-Full Future

Futures literacy through story is not a luxury skill. It’s an act of resilience. A tool for reorientation. And perhaps, most importantly, a strategy of hope.

As we face complex, interlocking crises, we don’t just need smarter policies or better tech. We need new cultural myths. We need communities that dare to imagine forward — not in spite of uncertainty, but in partnership with it.

Because the future is not something we predict.

It’s something we story into being.

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Want to go deeper?
If this article stirred something in you — an idea, a question, a quiet knowing — you’re not alone. I write to connect with others who are also sensing the need for new stories, new metaphors, and more life-giving ways of seeing.

If that’s you, I’d love for you to subscribe, share this with someone who’d appreciate it, or simply reach out. Let’s stay in conversation.

Let’s co-author the future. One story at a time.