Very soon, most business leaders will need new skills to manage collaborative human-machine teams. More so than today, measurements for great leadership are going to be one's levels of communication, creativity, and problem-solving. Those with futures thinking and world-building capabilities are well positioned to research many possible outcomes, design branching narrative roadmaps, and deliver detailed project blueprints for fast-tracked success.
But very few business leaders even think about story strategy and forecasting techniques, let alone at the same time. To address these skills gaps in management roles, my futurist world-building frameworks are designed to help people achieve phenomenal results in a hybrid digital workplace. My systems don’t work for everyone, but for those who think more about the future than the past and have a knack for storytelling, the futurist world-building approach helps create powerful leadership assets that are outcome-driven, easily explainable, and highly reusable.
In fact, if you don’t see yourself as the kind of leader that could be guided by futures thinking or world-building to achieve your goals when managing human-machine teams, I doubt going through the process of mastering these skills will bring you much benefit. While the approach brings incredible value to leaders with a strong interest in or curiosity about these fields, I understand that there will never be a single leadership style or approach that suits all leaders and all teams.
If you do see yourself as a leader who communicates through story, builds out ambitious long-term visions of the future, and seeks valuable resources and guidance to translate your ideas into actionable blueprints your entire team can understand, a futurist world-building style might be exactly what you need to gravitate towards. As artificial intelligence exponentially replaces roles in the workplace, leaving fractured teams in its wake, the business world will require its most capable leaders to step forward and reunite their human team members with the hyper-capable technological agents they are surrounded by. The leaders will need to upgrade their communication, creativity, and problem-solving capacities. They will also require frameworks to design new blueprints, which is where I come in.
For the past ten years, I have worked as a film screenwriter, fiction author, non-fiction ghostwriter, and corporate reporting copywriter. I started my career crafting narrative blueprints for film crews with a wide range of skills, ensuring my words were interpretable by and actionable for each member of the team. Most recently, I’ve practiced writing and compiling comprehensive reports that tell the story of single company over the past 12 months, integrating the organisation’s financial performance with its social and environmental impact, strategy, governance, business model, and more. The reports I write are blueprints of a different kind; they supply information to stakeholders with varied interests and goals to assist each one of them in making informed decisions regarding the company.
The blueprints I produce and deliver as a screenwriter and report copywriter have something in common – neither would be possible to create as efficiently without frameworks that guide my process towards a successful outcome. My goal in creating futurist world-building material is to add to the toolkits of business leaders. Sometimes, when solving a problem, you won’t need to pick up the spanner. But when you do, you’ll not only have one on hand, but you’ll also know the best ways to use it, and you’ll have the skills to train and lead a team as you oversee the completion of your goal.