Future Needs to be Shown, Not Told

As a professional futurist for well over 25 years, it has been a continuing source of frustration that excellent futures work -- scenarios, forecasts, and so on -- are so often ignored or not understood. I've seen well documented, insightful reports about the future shelved. I've had clients tell me that they are really interested in the trends we turned up, but no one in corporate wants to hear it so could we just not include them.

Perhaps even worse is what the popular media does with futures work that catches their eye. I cringe regularly at the pop futures stories that show up too frequently, breathlessly reporting on some new "trend" that turns out to be a brief fad or hyping some technology that is still a long way from being technically feasible, let alone commercially viable.

And then there are the smug reporters who just can't resist asking how anyone can rely on futurists. After all, where are the flying cars that we were told would be in our garages by Year X? (By the way, actually working flying cars have been around since the 1930s. They have just not been commercially viable so far and there are significant questions about whether they ever will be.)

The problem is, most reporters don't have a clue about what futures studies is and how it works. I feel confident in making this statement because I have a degree in journalism and worked as a newspaper reporter, magazine writer, and investigative journalist for a couple of decades. I also have a graduate degree in futures studies, so I think I have a pretty good perspective from both angles.

Professional futurists need to take charge when communicating about the future, not leave it in the hands of others. I know and have worked with some terrific futurists over the past quarter century. A few are great storytellers, but I have to say the vast majority are not particularly good when it comes to creating visual narratives.

Text, numbers, some charts and graphs, and maybe a couple of pictures are standard stuff for a report or set of scenarios or briefs or other futures work product. The problem is, they've been standard stuff for half a century.

We are seeing a massive shift away from text-laden books. Communication has moved online, first to the desktop and now to mobile devices. One of the key audiences for stories about the future is going to be living in the future many professional futurists talk about, but they aren't engaged in those discussion. Young people are abandoning books, and they are also abandoning long digital texts. Getting their attention means using pictures.

Visual storytelling can be a particularly powerful way to tell stories. Mobile devices are ideal for delivering transmedia stories -- stories that use two or more forms of media. 

Current computer technology makes it possible to create animations, motion graphics, and films on your desktop. Software that is free or within the budget of most artists has gotten incredibly sophisticated. While the technology sitting on your desktop may not let you match the computer graphics of Disney's new release of The Lion King, it will certainly help you grab an audience's attention.

It's time that futures professionals move away from printed reports and PowerPoint presentations stuffed full of data. Too often visions of the future are told, not shown.

You can say that sea levels will rise three feet or six feet or nine feet over the next 80 years, but that is too abstract for most people to understand in any meaningful way. However, if you show them a picture and tell them a story about how their neighborhood is going to be affected by sea level rise, the odds are high that they will understand precisely what it all means.

Today's technology is powerful enough that compelling visual narratives can be created using standard office technology. Climate refugees are already "a thing" and conflict is expected as climate change makes life more difficult across large areas of the planet. The image at the top of this article, while not the standard content produced by professional futurists, is an example what can be done with Photoshop and inexpensive computer graphics software.

Okay, not everyone who talks or writes about the future will be able to find their way around a computer graphics application. But what is needed are futures project teams with a solid core of professional futurists who are also adept at telling stories visually.

To communicate more effectively about the future, we need to draw our audiences pictures, not because they are stupid but rather, because that is how they absorb information. It's time to start telling...or rather, showing...compelling stories about the future to a generation that is eager to change it.