Using Fiction to Find Your Strategy

by Mathieu Aguesse and Benoit Decreton

June 14, 2022

HBR Staff/Henrik Sorensen/Herba Mykhailo/Getty Images

Summary. By force of habit, most executives tune down their imagination when
strategizing. This is counterproductive, the authors argue. Instead, they offer an
alternative: Design fiction. A design technique that immerses executives and
employees deeply in various possible...more
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Trying to predict what the future will look like is doomed to fail. Yet this is
what most executives do when they strategize. They — we — do this because we have
been trained and educated to use trends and statistics to predict what is likely to
happen and prepare accordingly. As a result, companies struggle to react to changes
in their environments when they should be shaping them proactively. This is an
issue for executives around the globe whose strategizing, anchored in the past,
misses out on important opportunities to envision, and design, possible futures.

Over the past seven years in working with about 50 executive teams around the
world, we’ve been experimenting with an alternative approach to strategy: design
fiction. Design fiction is a technique that immerses executives and employees
deeply in various possible futures, and uses artifacts such as short movies,
fictitious newspaper articles, and imaginary commercials to generate transformation
roadmaps. Rooted in the future but helping to act in the present, design fiction
results in concrete actions taken to adjust companies’ visions, strategies, and
activities to create a better future.

Unlike many strategic foresight tools, design fiction does not attempt to identify
what is more likely to happen. Nor does it limit strategy conversations to the C-
suite; in fact a core component is the participation of a wide range of
stakeholders. Consequently, the teams that we’ve seen deploy design fiction are
able to formulate and shape desirable futures that other tools do not enable people
to see.

How We Use It
The first step of putting design fiction into practice involves crafting scenarios
of possible futures. For example, in a project with a major car insurance company,
we analyzed information from urban mobility trends, autopilot flight modes, Luc
Besson’s notorious movie The Fifth Element, and interviews with early electric car
adopters to develop scenarios of possible futures. These atypical data sources help
spotlight less obvious aspects that would otherwise remain unnoticed in the
strategizing process. In this example, from talking to an airline pilot we
understood how the risks will be shifting in an autonomous driving ecosystem.
Bumper shocks and losing control of the vehicle will not happen anymore, but new
risks such as system hacking and break down of vital sensors will arise.

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Beyond a return to “normal.”
Akin to strategic foresight tools, we do analyze current trends and weak signals,
but importantly, we also leverage the best design tools by building on analogous
situations, science fiction inspiration, interviews with extreme users and other
stakeholders. Typically, we also interview employees to understand which possible
developments have (not) been considered by the company. We ask questions such as
“What has been the biggest failure you’ve seen in the company?” and “What could
kill the company?”

From this data we craft a mix of scenarios which depict different versions of the
future. For example, by talking to employees of a major fragrance brand, we
identified the limiting belief that the company’s sales would forever be driven by
the end of the year season, as it has always been since the creation of the brand
more than a century ago. Using this information, we crafted a “Christmas is over”
scenario in which sales seasons were spread out over the year.

Next, we run immersive workshops in which we discuss three or four of these

scenarios with employees from all areas and levels of the company. The
participation of a wide group of individuals helps expand strategizing to certain
stakeholders, such as frontline employees, who can contribute different and
necessary perspectives as well as identify opportunities to seize. In small groups,
we help them reflect on the role that their companies could play in these scenarios
of possible futures and how to provoke the conditions for a more desirable future.
Design fictions emerge from these discussions. They describe new missions and
visions for companies and how to get there. In the project we conducted with the
car insurance company, this part of the design fiction process triggered a change
in the mission of the company from insuring cars against damages to enabling
individual journeys with all mobility means. Workshops with the fragrance brand
around the “Christmas is over” scenario generated a new mission that was more
inclusive by focusing on events such as Black History Month and Pride Day. While
discussing how to get there, the company also realized that its targeting strategy
would be much more accurate as a result.

Finally, we use the design fictions to design shareable artifacts (e.g., short
movies, fictitious newspaper articles) which can be considered as a prototype of
the companies’ future. From these artifacts, a roadmap of strategic transformation
is created. For instance, a design fiction project with a large construction
company ended up shifting their innovation strategy after they invented a future in
which 3D printing made building construction carbon-emission free. The
transformation roadmap included areas of 3D printing to focus on and investments
needed to shape this desirable future.

Inventing the Future

Design 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.
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MA
Mathieu Aguesse is an entrepreneur, founder, and CEO of Schoolab US, an innovation
studio working with major corporations, startups, and universities across the
world. He has been developing unique innovation and design frameworks, such as
“design fiction,” which he sees as the new essential framework for the leaders of
the future. He teaches design for impact at UC Berkeley and successfully launched
the first open innovation class dedicated to solving plastic pollution, Deplastify
the Planet.
BD
Benoit Decreton is an Assistant Professor of Strategy at Nova SBE. He also teaches
open innovation at École Polytechnique. His research focuses on innovation, problem
solving and entrepreneurship in multinational corporations. He has done in-depth
field research in Silicon Valley, analyzing innovation outposts of multinational
corporations.