Explain about the future

Facts are overrated, stories always wins
In my experience, whenever someone talk about a sustainable future, the likelihood of them bringing up a long list of to-dos is pretty likely. They say things like ”here’s where we need to be in according to the Paris Accord 2050” or ”here’s what needed to be done to achieve our national goals of zero emission cities by 2030” and ”we need to lower our emissions from 11 tons GHG per capita in 2010 to below 1 tonnes of in 2050". As relevant as all that might sound to any of us who are somehow involved in the transition to a sustainable tomorrow, it doesn’t ring true to a random person on the street.
That’s because facts are overrated. As journalist and a researcher I long believed that presenting facts and figures and curves and studies and charts and graphs would make people take the appropriate action, indicated in all that. But instead they asked what all that would mean for them. And my response would be to show them another PowerPoint slide, another graph, another fact on the expected impacts of society.
But one day I realised that they weren’t asking what it would mean to them, but really how it would make them feel. Instead of talking about the ability to fulfil human needs and desires when describing a vision for a sustainable future, I found myself talking about national obligations and the technical transformations required for our society to reach our goals in line with the Paris accord.
So, when we talk about how other people’s understanding of the world is limited by cognitive bias and filter bubbles, we tend to forget that we cannot escape the big bubble that is our own life. As a journalist, I was in my own bubble, presenting facts and conditions for our future. My audience wanted stories about what it would feel like.

By being emotionally true, a story of the future will feel less uncertain and frightening.

They were afraid that they wouldn’t be able to feel as free if they wouldn’t be able to have a car. They feared they would not be able to express love by offering their kids hamburgers and junk food like parents always have done. They felt uneasy about the fact that they wouldn’t be able to treat themselves to a new jacket to look better on a day when they felt sad.
Hear me out here: I’m not saying facts are not necessary nor that we should avoid building our stories on solid science — Viable Cities is after all backed by a whole host of well renowned universities—I’m just making the point that stories don’t need facts to be effective, but that facts always need stories to make any sense. Using facts will only get you so far to get people to understand what you want, but storytelling can take you further than you ever expected. Even the OECD is laying out the elements they think is needed for a new narrative on economic growth.
Regardless of what one thinks of Donald Trump’s political ideas, one has to appreciate that what got him elected wasn’t a cohesive presentation of facts but an effective way of using storytelling. The stories he told about a vision of a better America weren’t based on facts, but to a large number of voters they still felt true. And feelings always trump facts.
Again, I’m only trying to make the case for how effective storytelling can be by telling you that, contrary to what you’d expect, you don’t ned a plan to get into the White House. All you need is a story. At Viable Cities, we are bound to tell stories based on science and that’s the way it should be.