Envisioning Your Career as a Future Story

Natalie Shell, whose considers her life’s work “a dialogue project [in which] conversations and stories are key themes,” writes about “future vision,” which she compares to strategic planning:

You will still see that most people spend a lot of time and money paying for a strategic plan. A plan that plots out a set of things that addresses the current state of thinking and projects that and the past forward. … if we are looking at a strategy of what we want to grow towards, what we want to become, then perhaps it is wise to have inkling of what we are trying to grow towards? … pick a future point, a vision of where what (and why) you want to be/become. Then imagine/put yourself there. Now work backwards in time and space at the steps you have to take…. What is a future outcome I would like to be part of?” instead of asking “what is the problem I would like to solve” or “what is the change I want to make”, “what do I want to change in the world” , present and past-centred questions, perhaps we need to reflect more what, who and how we want to be? What is the future vision we are growing/climbing towards? … Choose a point in the future, focus on it, look at what steps/rungs you have to take to get there from there to where you are, describe that vision, share it in story…and become it!

Again, career can certainly play a major role in “the future outcome I would like to be part of.”

Shell also notes similarities between her process and Dave Snowden’s The Future Backwards technique, of which he writes:

You create stories going forwards in time to cover possibilities. Now if you have strong opinions about what should happen, then it is easy to influence the evolution of a scenario that will support your proposed actions. Its also easy to describe how the past led to the present in such a way as to vindicate your view of history. We found that by getting people to construct history in reverse that they explored more possibilities and were more open to novel discovery.

Greater detail about The Future Backwards in this download.

Finally, in the blog Future of Health IT: Trends and Scenarios, Dale Hunscher describes Future Scenario Planning as it applies to healthcare, quoting from his own white paper:

Scenario planning is the art of storytelling applied to the future instead of the past or present. In this way it is not unlike science fiction — it’s about “remembering the future.”

Hunscher notes 6 steps to the Future Scenario Planning method:

Framing the question
Researching the facts
Identifying local forces
Finding the driving forces
Developing the matrix

How could you apply these to planning your career?

Lots more on the technique in this section of his blog.

3 Comments

Dave Snowden on July 1, 2008 4:26 AM

There is a fairly big difference with Future Backwards. That technique attempts to avoid any question of an ideal future state and associated ideas that you could achieve such a position. That assumes linearity. FB aims to identify the stories about the past of an organisation (or individual) that determine the way they perceive the world, and to create multiple future state fragmented turning points from which a fail-safe series of steps towards an uncertain future can be commenced, but not determined.

I have a healthy dislike of idealistic solutions, and a believe that starting journeys and staying flexible is a more successful strategy and FB was built around that.

Virginia Pamplin on July 2, 2008 10:20 PM

I believe you just blogged one (a present moment story, that is)!

Kathy on July 2, 2008 10:28 PM

Thanks, Virginia,

I think you’re right!