Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

Strategy is a story about the future that you’re willing to fund.

Even when an organization claims it’s being “data-driven,” even when it hires a trusted consultancy to help it plan its strategy. Even when everyone around the table nods in agreement.

Strategy is still acting on an imagined (anticipated, hoped-for, expected, feared) world.

1/ who the customer will be

2/ what they’ll want

3/ what they’ll fear

4/ what they’ll celebrate

5/ what they’ll normalize.

That story is rarely named explicitly. It’s shared in emails, PowerPoint presentations. It lives in roadmaps, in brand voice, in product principles, in the kind of people you hire, and the kinds of teams one sees on the org chart.

Implicit in this is that strategy is also in the negative space, like in the futures you simply refuse to consider.

Design Fiction is one of the few tools around that can make those futures felt and grounded to the lived-in world.

Not because it predicts. Rather, because it stages plausible worlds by making them tangible.

Worlds with texture, emotion, incentives, values, friction, unintended consequences, weird delights, and cultural shifts.

It gives us a way to “feel into” futures long before we can measure them. And once a future can be held, it can be felt; once it can be felt, it can be discussed, contested, re-authored, applied, and executed.

But what about scenarios, you ask? What about trend analysis, or roadmapping, or customer journey mapping, or SWOT analysis?

What’s it with you and your Design Fiction artifacts?

This might be familiar if you work on a strategy teams — you find yourself talking in circles not because your disagree on goals, but because you and your colleagues each are carrying different “future pictures” in your heads.

Scenario work is the rational, (sometimes) ordered and disciplined way to surface those pictures and turn them into a few shared, plausible worlds.

You know — maps, grids, PostIt™ notes, diagramatic representations of horizons of various indices. Etcetera.

How can we augment the “rationality” of this with somethig that allows a particular kind of emotional resonance? Something that makes a future felt, and become sensible — real enough to react to?

(Look, I get it. People are skeptical of “fiction” in business contexts. It sounds fluffy, ungrounded, unscientific. But hear me out.. I’m not saying we should dispense with the rigor of all the structure and analytics — I’m saying let’s augment it with something that makes a future feel real enough to touch stakeholders in a way that activates their imagination, not just their analytical mind.)

This is where Design Fiction comes in to augment the practice of strategy.

Design Fiction goes one step further with the rational analysis.

Design Fiction creates artifacts from inside one of those worlds.

The artifact becomes a kind of evidentiary object. You can point at it. You can pass it around. You can imagine the implications of strategic analysis in a way that you never really see or feel when you look at a white board, or a table in a policy paper or strategy document.

With the artifact you and your team can move from abstract debate to concrete decisions: what we’d build, what we’d stop, what we’d staff, what we’d message.

This seminar treats Design Fiction as a strategic practice for people working across marketing, branding, design, product, and leadership. Really anyone responsible for direction, meaning, and the story of “what comes next.” We’ll explore how this form of speculative prototyping can help you with the things that matter most:

/ Name the default future you’re already building

/ Create multiple plausible futures without drowning in possibilities

/ Use story as a tool for alignment—not persuasion theater

/ Build a vision that is specific enough to guide action but open enough to survive change

/ Turn “future thinking” from a workshop moment into a working habit

This is not a lecture about science fiction history, or about speculative fiction.

It’s an applied seminar about using speculative prototyping as strategy: a way to expand the space of options, clarify tradeoffs, and generate stronger, more resilient decisions, especially when markets, technologies, and cultural norms are moving faster than your normal, ordinary, everyday quarterly planning cycles.

Come ready to think, wonder, argue (in a good way), and leave with sharper instruments than “trend decks” and “best guesses.”

Let’s discuss!

Join me on Wednesday, February 4th, 2026 at 10:00 AM PST / 1:00 PM EST for this episode of General Seminar.