From fiction to non-fiction
In this episode, we explore how to turn an imagined story of change into something more real
So here’s the idea: imagine a change in the same way that we would for a fictional story. There’s the setting; the characters; the drivers; the success-criteria whose achievement or not determine if it’s a comedy and tragedy, a would-be utopia or some type of dystopia - you know, all those kinds of things.
Given that, then let’s apply that idea to the changes we face - in overall terms, an urgent need to reach towards a more sustainable world. Make it a fiction; make it a story.
And once we have that story, what would we need to do to take that story, and make it real? How might we move it from fiction to non-fiction? That’s the practical challenge here…
Let’s start with the underlying issues here, the backstory for our story of change. One of the best summaries I’ve seen recently was in this post by Richard Claydon, over on LinkedIn, a couple of weeks or so ago:
It is becoming increasingly clear that the ways of thinking, learning, leading and doing that has brought humanity to this point in history will not take us to a sustainable future. The challenges we face, from obesity to climate change, to mental health and loneliness epidemics, AI and new ways of working all require us to be increasingly response-able and change-able.
Many of us feel like the so-called Red Queen in the Alice in Wonderland stories … running faster and faster to stay in the same place. We are busier than ever, many are more tired than ever … and yet the need for learning and adaptive capacity is also greater than ever.
How do we become skilled at continuous adaptation? Response-able agents in the complex systems we are part of?
To make this possible, accessible, understandable, we’re going to need a story. Yet the reality we’re facing is messy, tangled, littered with the past, deeply nuanced, insanely complex in almost every possible way. Nothing is black-and-white, no simplistic ‘good versus evil’: in fact, although there’s plenty of villainous behaviour around these days, often to the extreme, for the most part there are no real villains as such - instead, just the same old sad, pathetic paediarchs, covert-crybabies who’ve never grown up beyond two years old, still stuck in the ‘terrible twos’ for their entire lives and inflicting all of their childish rage on everyone else. “Not with a bang but with a whimper”, really…
The story we want here would need to show a shift from the crybabies’ world of possession and ‘control’ and wastefulness and childish lies and short-term ‘mine! mine! mine!’, and instead point towards a more adult world beyond money, beyond ‘rights’, a world of mutual caring, of mutual honesty, of mutual service and mutual response-ability, and with a longer-term measured not in mere months but more in millennia.
To make it a story, we’ll need a setting and characters and plot and all those other themes that I mentioned earlier, at the start of this post. Yes, it’ll be fiction: that’s the whole point. But for this purpose, we’ll also need enough realism in there, enough real-world hooks, to give us a means to start shifting it from fiction to non-fiction, to something more like a to-do list, a manual, layered, structured, eventually step-by-step. So how do we do that?
Let’s take a look at how we might do this, using the structure and ideas in my 2011 novel ‘Yabbies’:
(You can order the paperback from your local friendly bookstore with the ISBN 978-1-906681-32-6, or else get the digital edition from Leanpub at https://leanpub.com/tg-yabbies .)
I’ve looked at some of this before with Yabbies, in the post ‘All change please!’, a bit more than a year ago; but let’s take it a bit deeper here.
For the book, we have a genre: it’s basically ‘hard science-fiction’, an imagined alternative-future, but based mostly on solid physics and the like. (A few parts maybe not, but that’s a detail we don’t need here: the point is that overall it’s meant to be credible, or at least feasible as a description of an achievable real-world future.)
We have a setting: in this case, a sort-of-fictional Australia, in a future world in which that country has made huge social, economic, political and technological changes, while the rest of the world is still trying to cling on to the old ways of working. The time-period stretches from around 15-20 years ago, to around 30-40 years in the future.
We have two main-characters as our guides for the story. The first is Don Mercer, a law-professor who we first meet as a young law-student at the very start of the story, and then meet occasionally throughout his life to the very end; he gives us a connection to the longer-term view, spread over decades. Our second main-character is Steve Hallam, a young British lad who moves to Australia at the end of the time-period, and explores with us the strangeness of that place and time; he gives a shorter-term view, over a period of a bit less than a year.
We have an inciting-incident, the trigger for change: in this case, three global-scale disasters that hit at the same time, leading to a worldwide period of disruption later described as ‘the Troubles’. (Again, you’ll have to read the book to see the detail, but the point is that they’re each based on known real-world events, which makes the whole thing credible enough to make the core story seem sound.)
And we have a core-premise, that sets the drivers and the logic for the whole story: in this case, the simple point that if we want a more sustainable world, we need a system of law that would support it. The key principles are described for us in the formal-abstract for Don’s student-thesis, which starts the story in both senses, as the marker for the beginning of the time-period of the story, and as the very first chapter in the book:
Current Australian law is based on the Westminster system, which is of relatively recent origin by comparison with the legal systems pertaining prior to European immigration. A problematic characteristic of Westminster statute-law is its volatility, requiring constant maintenance by the legislature to keep pace with changes in society. By contrast, many tribal or ‘traditional’ systems of law have remained stable for long periods, in some cases for millennia. A variety of traditional legal systems from around the world, and from different periods of history, are assessed in order to identify principles and characteristics that would assist stability and sustainability. A hypothetical system of law is presented that integrates these principles into a framework for use under current societal conditions.
Next, for this purpose, I did take some care to anchor everything in the real. One part of this is that the whole text is littered with historical references, to anchor the story in place and time. One example in the story is that, during the crucial period of disruption, the police are believed to be too corrupt to trust; so the story has various characters bringing up references to real historical events that support that belief.
In the same part of the of the story, during that moment of total disruption, the guy in charge of the emergency-response uses a little-known law to force a switch the whole country to switch to a post-possessionist economics, by taking possession of all property in the entire country, and paying nothing for it. Sounds crazy, right? Surely there’s no legal way do that, is there? But actually, yeah, it’s not fiction at all: it’s a real law that really does exist and has been on the statute-books in Australia for several decades by now, and really does allocate powers that can be that extreme. (Hence why one character in the story rightly describes that real law as ‘a dictator’s dream’….)
So yeah, all of the hooks are in there in that story, to support a transition from fiction to non-fiction - to help move towards making the ideas real, literally ‘real-ising’ them.
But given all of that, what do we do next? How do we make it real?
Well, it turns out that most of it would be a fairly straightforward exercise in what futurists and strategists describe as ‘future-backwards’.
The usual approach to any large-scale would be to start from where we are, and plan forward from there. But the catch is that if we do that, we’re likely to veer a long way off target at any number of places in the process, ending up somewhere completely different to where we’d set out to be. Not A Good Idea…
Instead, in ‘future-backwards’, we do it the other way round: we start the planning from the desired end-point, and work our way backwards towards where we are right now. We identify all the intermediate mark-points that we need to reach along the way, that would confirm at each of those points that we’re still on-track towards where we want to be. And from that, we can then plan out much smaller forward-going steps for change, giving something concrete and achievable to aim for during each step along the way. That also helps us to adapt to changes that happen during the overall process, and to correct for and reduce any tendency to wander off-track.
We can do this; we can do this, we can create a better, more sustainable, more enjoyable world. Yes, we do first need a solid understanding of the challenges we face: that’s not in question. Yet beyond that, what we need most is a story of what that new world would be, would look like and feel like in a very human sense; and from there, a clear path from fiction to non-fiction, to make it all real.