Design fiction is the practice of creating tangible and evocative prototypes from possible near futures, to help discover and represent the consequences of decision making. — The Manual of Design Fiction (View Highlight)
However, a good part of the work with design fiction (including ours) involves imagining commercial products from the future, their usage, the user experiences and the cultural phenomena developing around them. In this article, I argue that prototypes can take the shape of an organization to explore the implications and consequences of global changes. (View Highlight)
In an uncertain future marked by climate change and technological transformations, how might the nature of an organization evolve? Whether that organization is an enterprise, part of the administration, an NGO or other, what might be its future values, policies, employees’ skills and ways of operating? Those are the questions that leaders of organizations must explore simultaneously. Surprisingly, there is limited foresight work on these questions to feed their thinking. (View Highlight)
In France, Plurality University Network intends to fill that gap. Led by Daniel Kaplan, the Emerging Enterprise project brings together representatives from businesses operating in France, as well as one trade union (CFDT), and researchers. Together, they developed ten “archetypes” of corporate organizations of the future. Their methodology blended classic foresight elements with the use of imagination and the participation of (mostly science fiction) writers who helped tell the stories of companies of the year 2050. Some organizational structures are quite different from today’s corporations, others more recognizable yet significantly transformed. For instance, A Guild provides a certain category of professionals with a stable or even lifelong job and the conditions for their continued development, while placing them with organizations that need their skills. Or, an Entrepocene (a portmanteau that combines entreprise in French with anthropocene) does not set out to change the world, but endeavors not to make it worse. (View Highlight)
But, practically, how do these archetypes translate into the life of an organization? How do they change an organization’s structure, processes, or culture? Akin to prototyping in the design and engineering fields, organizational prototyping aims at exploring new ways of working, management structures, and team configurations to learn what could work best in their specific context. Besides getting people inspired and on board with the notion of change, the objective is to create a tangible representation that shows what change could look like inside an organization. This is what design fiction prototypes are good at. They reveal the ways futures could come to life and show what ‘might come soon’ be like in the form of material objects — the tangible artifacts from the future. (View Highlight)
In 2020, Julian Bleecker, co-founder of OMATA was going through a founding round for his start-up. Pioneer in the field of design fiction, Julian did not want the usual investor Pitch Deck. Instead he chose to publish a fictional Annual Report of his company. Set in the future, this design fiction prototype shared not only Julian’s vision but how he had planned to execute it. In “Why Did I Write An ‘Annual Report’ From The Future?” he describes the document that contained three categories including Team and Workshop. It covered in detail the profile of people who would belong to the organization, where and how they would work. Instead of pitching forward into the future, Julian showed how an entrepreneur can report back from the future as if it has happened: (View Highlight)
“The biggest benefit to this was it refined my own sense of what it was I wanted to achieve, the purpose and values that would be imbued in the OMATA brand and products, and the kind of team and customers I imagine would be part of that future”. — Julian Bleecker, OMATA (View Highlight)
The Annual Report works well for a small group to test their assumptions and explore unexpected evolutions for their organization. (View Highlight)
For the Swiss Federal Office for Defense Procurement, the aims of prototyping RESINT are to:
• Stimulate the imagination about accessing the know-how of Swiss people abroad made available by emerging technologies in order to support the country’s defense.
• Clarify whether this scenario should be explored further and, if so, how.
• Map and define the role of the various players (armed forces, Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, etc.) if a more detailed exploration is implemented. (View Highlight)
“Design Fiction becomes the means of translating early warning indicators into something physical and immediately relatable that people can react to. It helps punch through people’s field of manufactured normalcy and demonstrate why something matters.”
— Noah Raford, former Futurist-in-Chief and Chief of Global Affairs at Dubai Future Foundation (View Highlight)
The examples of organizational prototyping described in this article show how making a scenario become reality offers leaders and stakeholders a “safe space” to experience potential profound changes in an organization. The prototypes do not solve any specific problem, but open up the field of possibilities including multiple viewpoints. They simulate, as closely as possible, a reality accessible to organizations. (View Highlight)
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