of system and story: how narrative-based futuring expands the planner’s toolkit

I get asked quite often about the point of narrative futuring methods. “We have a plan, we’ve looked at the trends, we’ve built some scenarios; why would we need stories?”

A few days back, I found a real gift of a quote that gives us a good place to start with an answer to that question. The quote in question is from Alexis Kennedy, the narrative designer from Weather Factory, one of my favourite indie game-dev operations. While discussing the early stages of developing their next release, Kennedy provided this very succinct definition of the two formal extremes between which any game might be situated:

“System and story: a good system is stuff that happens predictably and a good story is stuff that doesn’t happen predictably. I don’t mean that a good story needs to be a twist every scene, but if you know everything that will happen, it’s dull. Similarly a system will throw you surprises every so often, but it’s designed so that once you understand it, you can appreciate it and use it to predict the results of your actions.”

Two points to make here. First, the story/system dyad is a spectrum rather than a dichotomy: a game (or a work of futuring) will almost always partake of both modes, even if it is considerably more toward one pole than the other.

Second, the surprise of story is a desired outcome in games development, but—and this should go without saying!—it is usually much less so in the context of planning and foresight! However, that’s the very best reason for including story in the planning process: the more you admit the possibility of surprise while you build your plan, the more you reduce the likelihood of surprise after the plan has been made.

Let’s dig into those definitions a bit more. Systems are predictable, despite their generation of surprises, because a well-considered system will have included within its parameters a certain scope for surprise. This is the working space of trends analysis and predictive/extrapolative scenarios, where you’re not solving for surprise so much as continuity: you’re trying to identify the rails you’d like to roll along. Story, by contrast, is based on the unexpected and the obstructive: story is surprise, the discontinuity of the line, the avalanche or angry moose that might derail your journey.

Kurt Vonnegut spent a great deal of time thinking about the shape of stories, and he had a bit of writing advice which I’m very fond of:

“Your character has to want something, even if it’s just a glass of water.”

That line was something of a gift to a science fiction writer who found himself doing a PhD in infrastructure futures in a department full of experts in water treatment and distribution! And it’s a gift that keeps giving, because it lets us illustrate the distinction we’re exploring here.

A trends/systems approach to planning is analogous to the “predict and provide” model of infrastructure planning. You look at trends in, say, population growth, urban/rural migration, and per-capita water demand per day, and that gives you an idea of how much capacity you might need in a given location in the next twenty years or so—which in turn lets you decide how many new reservoirs or treatment plant or pumps or pipes you need to install, and how much you’re going to need to increase the rates.

Now, systems-oriented planning is important stuff---to advocate for story approaches to planning is to advocate for the supplementing of system approaches, not for their replacement! (That said, I would argue that the prevailing bias toward the system approach could stand a good deal of corrective storywork, and I doubt I’m the only one.)

A story-based approach to planning is a way to get into discontinuities of trends, obstructions of outcomes: in other words, your Vonnegutean character will find that their glass of water is not so easy to acquire as they’d like. “Thirsty person gets glass of water” is not a story; hell, it’s not even an anecdote! But “thirsty person turns tap and nothing happens”—now that’s a story, or at least the start of one. Scaled out to the infrastructural level, the obstacles—the disruptions of trends and/or system parameters—are big, chewy issues: sustained drought due to climate change, perhaps, or maybe some sort of sabotage that damages the system.

Put another way, story brings in externalities, and puts the system (thirsty person) in conflict with its context (broken water pipes). Traditions of planning rooted in a business background tend to do a pretty lousy job of including externalities like this, because to homo economicus these are costs, and therefore anathema. (The irony here is that homo economicus is very happy to include externalities on the ledger when they appear as profits, as they do when water may be abstracted without any need for compensation or environmental maintenance.)

Now, at the risk of (re)stating the obvious: the thing with discontinuities is that, by definition, they are not predictable or quantifiable. The discontinuous is that which falls outside the model of the system, that which cannot be accounted for. The risk approach to planning represents an attempt to quantify the unquantifiable; this is how insurance works. But the limits of such an approach become clear when the systemic context gets wild and complex. We’re already starting to see situations where insurers are unwilling to cover certain risks, because they’re either literally incalculable, or they’re so high that the model starts throwing negative numbers in the final cell of the spreadsheet.

To point out that people being flooded out of their Florida beachfront mini-mansions is a story is not to trivialise that issue. On the contrary, it is to point out that it’s a very serious problem, precisely because it’s out of scope for the system as currently constituted. (If we wanted to be specific, we could even say that flooded Floridian homes are a very particular sort of story, namely the tragedy—the classical genre of story in which the unhappy ending is obvious right from the top of the tale.)

So what is the merit of a story-based approach to infrastructural issues, and to planning more broadly?

To reiterate, a story-based approach is not going to tell you how much capacity you need to build out; questions of quality and externality will not give you answers of quantity and internality. But it will, if done properly, show you the limits of the system/model approach—quite literally so, in fact. The story’s capacity (indeed, affinity) for surprises gives you a way to explore the breakdown of the border of the system, and the effects of what Iain M Banks so memorably dubbed “outside context problems”.

(Despite his reputation as some sort of socialist, Banks’s novels of the Culture can be seen as a series of explorations of the limits and failure-states of well-intentioned liberal interventionism; indeed, this is exactly what makes them such great books, and so definitive of their era. Looking at current events, however, we are obliged to conclude that they were never read as such, at least not by those who might most have benefitted from the reading. Selah.)

The utility of story to planners bears a similar relation to that of nemesis to hubris: it’s a reminder that planning has limits, and those limits are the (often arbitrary, but also unavoidable) definitions of the borders of the system that is being planned for.

Story is a stress-test of your systemic mapping; it’s a red-team exercise against not only your plan, but also the assumptions upon which that plan is built. Story is a warning—not that there’s no point in planning, but that you must plan for the plan’s failure, and never stop planning.

Curious about how the story/system spectrum might be manifesting in your own plans, and how you might stress-test them a little bit? Sounds like you need a creative critical foresight practitioner! So why not drop one a line, and set up a chat to explore how they might help?