What if..?

Speculative Fiction is about imagining, in this app’s case, in exactly 100-word stories. Speculative fictions look a little into the future as a way of exploring current questions around technology, culture, society and power. Sometimes dystopian, occasionally utopian and, when they are at their best, oscillating between the two, they provoke the viewer into seeing and thinking differently – opening new imagination spaces through stories. But you don’t need a film crew and Black Mirror budgets to create speculative fictions nor benefit from the power of imagining and writing them. You just need this app.

Just do it:

1. Every day, open the Speculation Studio app

2. Read today’s news story (or any other story you find)

3. Scroll to the text box and write a 100 word story. Start with What if..? Note, you won’t see a Save button, because you can’t. The point is the writing…

4. Sit back and think about what you discovered.

Process Product

Speculating is a verb. The power of speculation is in the imagining, the thinking. The story may be great or not-so-great. The point is that the very process of taking 15 mins and 100 words to think differently is valuable. Speculating through fiction is a power full process regardless of the quality of the story it produces. It is the journey the ‘author’ goes on as she writes her story that provides the value. As she follows her characters (human and unhuman) she exercises her imagination and creativity, but she also prototypes possible futures and thinks critically about those futures. Her story may change her reader but it inevitably has changed her. Regular speculation practice is good for you and good for your business.

Daydreaming

We don’t daydream enough. It’s another one of those childish things we put aside or are made to leave behind. It’s seen as escaping from reality rather than looking at reality in a new way. It’s wasting time we are told rather than investing time. It’s process with no product. It’s Ferris Bueller and Walter Mitty: likeable, diverting but hardly productive. Speculative fiction is part daydream, part science fiction and I argue, vital for a business focused on the here and now. The practice of speculative fiction is a discipline of imagination, creativity, prototyping and critical thinking that business people need now more than ever.

Creativity

Every time the Speculator works in her Studio and follows the story where it leads, she is of course being creative but it is important to widen out our understanding of that term. The devil on her shoulder is busy whispering: “You’re not a creative writer! That’s not a creative story!” Maybe not. But she is being creative in a wider and more important sense. As she follows her characters through the What If..? world she has set in motion she is imagining new possibilities, discovering new things about the future but also about the now. She is creating a new way of seeing. She is refreshing her imagination and vision. She is creating a new her. The creativity lies in imagining the scenario, the relationships, the speculative realities. The creativity comes in the process of imagining and seeing what that does to her way of approaching other, present realities.

Prototyping

Every speculation is an exercise in prototyping. Again the emphasis here is on the verb not the noun, the ing not the thing. As the current vogue for design thinking sprints has emphasised, the power of prototyping comes in the process the team goes through, the learnings for the business come in no small part from the iterative design thinking. Writing her What If..? fiction, our Speculator is iteratively prototyping, making unfinished but profoundly important mock-ups of the future. Some of them might become more fully formed or emerge as a product, service or business element but the real work has been done in the making, the speculating. Every decision she makes about where to take her character next; every choice of scenario and encounter explores a new reality and uncovers a new set of issues. Just like mocking up a new app with a paper prototype, playing with words, trying out different narratives tells her more and more.

Critical imagining

Those discoveries about the business, its place in the world, the wider context or society and culture are often critical and challenging. That is because we don’t often prototype and imagine. When we do, we see issues. Creativity and critical thinking are flip sides of the same coin. Critical doesn’t have to mean negative. While many speculative fictions skirt around the edges of dystopia, the thinking that emerges from writing them doesn’t always have to be dark or attacking a technology or a trend. An optimistic exploration, a story celebrating a possible future can still stimulate critical thinking as the Speculator discovers what that future is, what the nature of that celebration is and why it feels optimistic. Such self reflection and deep consideration is the sort of critical thinking that we have so little time for and businesses so sorely need at the moment.

There’s a lot more on all this in my book: What if..? Speculative Fiction and Imagining Business. Available in print and eBook on Amazon or below, if you don’t mind reading on your app.