James Risberg

Organizational Future Narrative

This is a set of questions a team can use to examine their business and operating environment through a narrative lens: in our work together we'll use these questions to guide our process, but feel free to take them up yourself as a workshop with your team. If you do, I'd love to hear about your experience!

What is the current story?

• What are the current narratives and paradigms that define the world in your area of focus and business?

• Who are the relevant actors?

• How do they interact?

• How has the story so far paved the way for what comes next?

• What's due for change?

What is the new story?

• What does the new world look like?

• Who are the relevant actors? What are their motivations, goals, and approaches?

• What are their origin stories? Why did they emerge?

• What new ways of doing or being do they embrace or enable?

How do we get there?

• What shifts in thought, practice, or approach are needed to map from the old story to the new?

• What is the missing chapter?

• How will these new players come into power?

• What made them inevitable?

• How does the past become the future?

• How does the past inform the future?

How do you fit in?

• What is your relationship with the other relevant actors?

• What significance do you find in the story being told?

• What philosophies, values, skills, knowledge, or other superpowers do others need to develop to survive in the new story?

• What philosophies, values, skills, knowledge, or other superpowers do you have that make you a vital character in this new chapter?