The next episode for narrative foresight

Narratives serve as powerful tools in futures studies, as they enable people to engage with different types of futures through identification, emotional connection, and immersion. To establish this, we contribute to narrative foresight by introducing the narratives-with-branches methodology which is a systematic approach for translating participatory ideas into possible futures. To be more specific, we discuss four narratives concerning futures of hybrid work, each constructed around paradoxes and tipping points that open space for thinking of possible future trajectories. The narratives were developed and refined through a multi-stage process involving expert consultation, stakeholder engagement, and a participatory workshop we mainly focus on. In the narratives-with-branches methodology, workshop-generated ideas are interpreted as inputs, formulated into episodes, and clustered into episode themes. We classify these themes as repeating, ephemeral, or obscure, corresponding to plausible, possible, and radical futures respectively. While we focus on the use of the methodology only in one case, we discuss how the methodology provides a conceptual machinery for branching narratives in structured but flexible ways. We discuss how collective intelligence in the form of a workshop discussion can branch baseline narratives toward preferred futures and how the methodology can be seen which branches are plausible, possible, or radical. The methodology offers futures researchers and practitioners a scalable framework, due to its structured yet flexible nature, to practice participatory foresight to harness collective intelligence. We conclude by reflecting on the distinctive capacity of narratives to bring together often missed individual level psychology with systemic changes.