Science Fiction is not just a genre of storytelling; it is a powerful tool for strategic thinking and innovation. By imagining possible futures, we can better understand the present and make informed decisions about the future.
Design Fiction — a cousin of the more prose-based form of imagining we’re calling Science Fiction — is a strategic tool. With it, we create artifacts that are like material cultural allusions/implications meant to provoke thoughtful reflections that can inspire innovation and strategy.
✶ Context: Science Fiction as a Strategic Tool
Science Fiction has never been about predicting the future.
It’s about imagining into it.
It’s about stepping beyond the “up-and-to-the-right” graphs of progress and imagining different kinds of worlds. Not better. Not worse. Just different — and therefore useful, provocative, strategic.
This worksheet is your invitation to reframe what it means to strategize. Not through forecasts or KPIs, but through “operationalized imagination”.
✶ Core Concept
Science Fiction is not escape. It’s rehearsal.
Just as design is more than styling, science fiction is more than entertainment.
It’s a method.
A thinking device.
A prototyping tool.
The future arrives via ideas, not inevitabilities. Fiction lets us model those ideas in context — social, material, emotional — before they materialize. Strategy, then, is fiction with consequences.
Some Discussion Questions
✶ Building Artifacts from Future Fictions
What would be the ‘diegetic prototype’for your strategic planning? What might that be?
Suppose it was more like a MacGuffin than a product. What would it be? What would it look like? How would it be used?
✶ Strategy as Constructed Reality
Imagine that every strategy is a fictional narrative we convince ourselves to act on.
What kinds of responsibilities do strategists have in shaping believable — but also far-reaching, audacious and ambitious — fictions? How do you balance the need for vision and the need for practical, actionable steps?
✶ Deliberate Fiction in Strategy
What would happen if we treated strategic planning sessions more like writers’ rooms or worldbuilding studios? Would our visions for the future be more compelling?
✶ Imagination as a Strategic Asset
How would imagination as a ‘KPI’ be measured? How would you determine the efficacy of imagination in strategy contexts? In commercial contexts?
✶ The Ethics of Strategic Fiction
If strategy is fiction, when does it become irresponsible storytelling — wishful thinking, hype, or self-delusion? How do we stay grounded while imagining?
✶ Fictional Competition and Fictional Futures
What kinds of imagined competitors or future scenarios should we create to stress-test our strategies today?
✶ Expanding Strategic Horizons Through Fiction
What assumptions are so baked into our current strategy that we need fictional counter-worlds just to notice them?
✶ The Narrative Power of Strategy
How important is it that a strategy not only be realistic, but also emotionally resonant and narratively satisfying?
✶ Provocations
Use these to loosen the grip of the present and help you slide into a nearby possible.
What if the job of strategy was not to be right — but to be vivid?
What are the fictions your organization already believes? Who wrote them?
Design Fiction doesn’t show us “the future.” It shows us a future — enough to get the conversation started.
What conversations need to be started??
✶ Exercise: Design Fiction as Strategy
What if we swapped ‘strategic plan’ with ‘design fiction artifact’? What would your deliverables look like then?
Imagine a fictional artifact that represents your strategic vision for the future.
This could be a product, service, or experience that embodies your strategic goals and aspirations.
✶ References
Below are some additional readings followed by some PDF references gathered for understanding Science Fiction as a strategic tool:
✶ Additional reading
Musings on how science fiction, speculative art, and speculation generally within the realm of entertainment helps us imagine, critique, and reframe our present and future.
Tech billionaires misinterpret sci-fi, often co-opting its aesthetics while ignoring its deeper critiques of power, ego, and dystopia. But consider Octavia Butler and Iain M. Banks..and literary/sci-fi genres like solarpunk and hopepunk, as contemporary examples of science fiction’s potential to provoke thoughtful, and provide expansive imaginings of possible futures.
An argument that sci-fi literacy is more essential than ever — and not to escape but as a vital tool for practicing more active, vivid imagination.
We’ve Never Needed Sci-Fi MoreThe Manual of Design Fiction is a guide to using design fiction as a tool for innovation and creativity. It provides practical exercises, case studies, and theoretical insights into how design fiction can be used to explore the future of work, technology, and society.
The Manual of Design FictionIt’s Time To Imagine Harder is a call to action for designers, artists, and thinkers to embrace the power of imagination in shaping the future. It emphasizes the importance of integrating speculation and imagination in establishing strategic visions in entrepreneurship and innovation.
It’s Time To Imagine HarderTo unleash their imagination, companies can take inspiration from science fiction. To imagine their futures, companies need to evolve their mental models. Our imagination can be constrained by entrenched mental models – simplified representations of reality our brain creates because the world is too complex to be fully encompassed.
6 steps for using science fiction to envisage your company’s future
Stories to Imagine Alternate Futures is a an essay in the book ‘Practices of Futurecasting’ that argues for the role of speculation in strategic design, as a way to create meaningful and rich visions of the future. It emphasizes the importance of using narrative as a tool for imagining and creating alternate futures, particularly in the context of design fiction and speculative design.
Stories to Imagine Alternate FuturesOMATA Annual Report 2024 set forth strategy and vision for my company OMATA when it was authored in 2020. The speculation was to project into the future of the company using the financial model that projected four years ahead. (To be clear: this was authored in 2020 imagining into the company’s future, altering the usual ‘look backwards’) conceit of the traditional annual report. The point was to model forwards, but not with an Excel spreadsheet or overly simple PowerPoint deck. Instead, the report was designed as a speculative artifact that could be used to explore the future of the company and its products and ultimately to help prospective investors understand in a felt fashion the potential for future growth and innovation. This led to the successful sale of the company in 2022.
OMATA 2024 Annual ReportIn the dynamic world of branding and advertising, design fiction is emerging as a revolutionary tool. This innovative and still nascent approach, blending elements of fiction and design, invites brands to envision and discuss potential futures through speculative narratives and prototypes. Unlike traditional advertising methods design fiction does not predict the future; instead, it harnesses our imagination to explore and understand the possible social, commercial, and cultural impacts ahead. This methodology is particularly interesting when brands apply this approach to sustainability and social impact to go beyond conventional advertising limits and devise strategies aligned with their broader brand aspirations.
How Design Fiction Will Shape the Future of the Advertising IndustryDesign fiction has helped dozens of multinational companies to strategize differently. And while creating fictional futures may sound a little quirky, we know that it works. For example, a recent design fiction project conducted with a major oil and gas company helped identify how to shape a future in which people living in remote areas were less socially isolated. The company decided to repurpose gas stations into places galvanizing community through services such as car sharing hubs, medical centers, delivery platforms, and ghost kitchens. Although company executives had engaged in various strategizing and foresight exercises in the past, only design fiction enabled them to envision this possible version of the future.
It’s not always easy. Using design fiction successfully requires executives to be creative and open to all possibilities. Yet as much as design fiction helps bring back imagination in the strategizing process, executives can be resistant to it. By force of habit, most executives tune down their imagination when strategizing and it is challenging for them to do otherwise. To work past that, we remind them that they are the ones in charge, that they are the ones with the power to shape a more desirable future, and that they have the responsibility to do so. After all, you can’t predict the future, you can only invent it.
Using Fiction to Find Your StrategyAdjacent to the ‘strategy as fiction’ question, Fredric Jameson’s “Archaeologies of the Future” is a significant contribution to considering the role of science fiction in contemporary contexts. It asks, ‘what is the relationship between utopia and science fiction, in the global consciousness?’
In an age of globalization characterized by the dizzying technologies of the First World, and the social disintegration of the Third, is the concept of utopia still meaningful? Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson’s most substantial work since Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, investigates the development of this form since Thomas More, and interrogates the functions of utopian thinking in a post-Communist age. The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness … alien life and alien worlds … and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more. Jameson’s essential essays, including “The Desire Called Utopia,” conclude with an examination of the opposing positions on utopia and an assessment of its political value today.
Archaeologies of the FutureStrategy is best understood as a form of fiction—a story told to one’s adversary with the aim of shaping their perception of future possibilities. Great strategy is great storytelling. Strategists must embrace narrative not as fluff, but as a foundational tool for shaping outcomes through deep human cognition.
Strategy as Fiction✶ PDF References
1. Worldbuilding as Strategic Practice (Leah Zaidi)
Insight: Worldbuilding, borrowed from science fiction, can help organizations prototype not just products but entire systems — cultural, political, technological ecosystems — to stress-test strategies against plausible futures.
Discussion question
How might a company ‘user-test’ not just a product, but an entire speculative world it hopes to operate in?
2. Shaping Strategies Amid Disruption (Hagel, Seely Brown, Davison)
Insight: Strategy today must be proactive: shaping entire markets and ecosystems rather than defending static positions. It’s about setting positive visions that others can rally around.
Discussion question
In what ways does your organization (or could it) act more like a ‘world-shaper’ rather than a market reactor?
3. Design Fiction for Strategic Innovation (Fast Company)
Discussion question
What assumptions underpin your current strategy that might no longer be valid in an exponentially shifting environment?
4. Strategic Use of Design Fiction in Tech Innovation (Calleo, Casoni, Celaschi)
Discussion question
How could you use speculative prototypes internally to anticipate ‘unexpected’ futures before they arrive?
5. Strategic vs. Critical Design Fiction (Thessa Jensen & Peter Vistisen) Insight: There’s a growing case for strategic design fiction — proposing plausible, actionable futures — not just critiquing dystopian ones.
Discussion question
Should your strategy exercises focus more on finding plausible opportunities for innovation, or critically surfacing risks and blind spots?
6. Diegetic Prototypes (David Kirby) Insight: Fictional technologies in film (‘diegetic prototypes’) shape public perceptions and make future technologies seem inevitable, normal, and desirable.
Discussion question
How can your strategic communications create ‘diegetic prototypes’ that make bold new futures seem inevitable and necessary?
“If strategy is about imagining futures that don’t yet exist, what separates a good strategic vision from pure fantasy?”
“When thinking about future scenarios, how do we decide what is ‘plausible enough’ to act on? Should we sometimes act even on seemingly implausible futures?”
“If prediction is no longer a reliable basis for strategy in an unpredictable world, what should take its place?”
“Imagine your organization received a product catalog from 2035. What kinds of products or services would surprise you? What wouldn’t?”
“Could your organization prototype a future vision the same way it prototypes a product? What would that prototype look like?”
“In a world of disruption, is imagination a more important executive skill than analysis?”
“What if your competitors weren’t real companies, but fictional organizations from the future? How would that change your strategy today?”
“If your current strategic plan were set inside a fictional world (like a sci-fi movie or novel), what genre would it be — utopia, dystopia, cyberpunk, post-apocalypse?”