Stories matter in how we think about the future

In this SG50 year, no shortage of ink has been spilled in articulating the different futures that Singapore might face. The ongoing Future of Us exhibition presents exciting snapshots of how we might live, work, play and move in the future. As we look ahead to SG100, or at least 2016, it would behove us to step back and think about how we think about the future.

Why do we think about the future? Well, the short answer is that we cannot help it. We are a species that is temporally aware: we remember, we see patterns, we make plans, and we imagine things yet to be. Sometimes such imaginings inspire, other times they frighten.

Perhaps then-Minister for Foreign Affairs S Rajaratnam said it best in a 1979 speech: “We are not only living in a world of accelerating change but also of changes which are global in scope and which permeate almost all aspects of human activity ... (and) only a future-oriented society can cope with the problems of the 21st century.”

Futures thinking has always been a part of Singapore’s DNA. In today’s complex world, it becomes even more salient, as seen by the number of futures departments that now exist in various ministries and agencies, as well as in the corporate world and even the social sector.

But what is futures thinking, and what is it that futures practitioners do? Futurists do not make predictions. Rather, they try to uncover the hidden assumptions we hold about the world, and to tell plausible stories about the future.

The fact is, “prediction” isn’t necessarily a dirty word. Predictions are possible and useful in a stable world, where things change incrementally. However, in a complex and volatile world, predictions, which typically extrapolate from the present, are not only unhelpful, but outright dangerous.

As Singapore develops, we find our work focusing equally on what can happen as much as on what we want to happen. The Our Singapore Conversation initiative marked a fundamental shift in the evolution of futures work.

In the early years, futures work grappled with technical problems: Housing, employment, economic growth, defence and so. The name of the game then was to see “something” ahead — whether it was an emerging technology trend, nascent social trend or economic opportunity — in order to solve those problems.

However, beyond a level of development, aspirations become an integral part of any discussion about the future, as Our Singapore Conversation showed.

Futures work is now having to engage more with aspirations, values and notions of collective and individual identity. In other words, it is about stories, and how we tell them. Not only are we a time-conscious species, we are also a story-telling one. And lest we forget, “scenario” is simply another word for “story”.

Stories have been used across cultures and times to galvanise people. We tell aspirational stories to inspire ourselves to greater heights, as well as cautionary tales to warn ourselves against unwise actions. Stories have also been used to justify the status quo, as well as to foment change.

In modern and tech-savvy Singapore, we privilege the rational and the tangible, and are distrustful of the intuitive. But as behavioural psychologists such as Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky point out, people are driven not only by reason and evidence, but also by emotions, biases, ideologies, aesthetics and so forth.

Our visions of the future reflect both the evidence we analyse and the stories that we tell. Unfortunately, Singaporeans have typically done better at analysis than at storytelling.

Stories matter, and no less a personage than founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew has emphasised their importance. It is worth remembering what he said in 1965: “You have got to believe in something. You are not just building houses in order that people procreate and fill these houses up because there is no point in that. You do these things because in the end you create a happy and healthy nation, a society in which man finds fulfilment and you have got to have an ideological basis ... Nations have gone through tremendous privations and hardships in order to achieve specific goals which have inspired and fired their imagination.”

It is worth remembering that Mr Lee was also a storyteller par excellence.

In matters to do with the aspirational and the normative, there can be no authority. Thus, scenarios for the future that are produced by policymaking elites, with no or token consultation with the broader public, will not gain any traction. The scenarios will have to come from all of us as storytellers.

To be sure, there are many things we can do to be better stakeholders in our future, to be better storytellers: A more holistic education, a keener and more critical sense of history, developing a greater sense of empathy, by embracing diversity rather than merely tolerating it, and quite simply by being more informed about policy issues so that the level of public discourse is raised.

For a start, though, we need to acknowledge that in the global city that is Singapore, there will be stories that may end up being irreconcilable. We need to maintain our sense of solidarity even when we can’t agree on the story.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr Adrian W J Kuah is Senior Research Fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.