Policy brief on Narrative Foresight for stakeholder engagements

A new policy brief titled “Why and How to Use Narratives for Stakeholder Engagements” by Sirkka Heinonen, Riku Viitamäki, and Veli Virmajoki, Finland Futures Research Centre, has been issued within the T-winning Spaces 2035 project supported by The Millennium Project.

This policy brief presents a set of four radical narratives embedded in the future world of digital and green transformation. These narratives of futures hybrid workers reflect a new paradigm of work as it emerges based on our research findings. The authors highlight the role, importance and potential of narratives and the narrative foresight niche of futures studies. They pay special attention to the “why and how” of communicating narratives to stakeholders, narratives that are meant to inspire imagination and open vistas to possible futures of worklife.

The authors suggest testing and assessing narratives as reflected to a stakeholder’s own activities, paying attention to possible timelines as well. In addition, elaboration of narratives through the process of branching them into episodes is proposed as a useful way of using and deepening the narratives. Finally, a few more recommendations are provided for benefitting from the use of narrative foresight in strategy and innovation processes, as well as from hybrid work potential in society at large.

This Policy Brief demonstrates how narratives of hybrid work can be used to illustrate and inspire futures imagination. Narratives can be evaluated by their impacts for companies – and elaborated in stakeholder engagements. This can happen, for example, by adding new episodes to the narratives and by identifying novel business ideas or calls for action.

The context for constructing the narratives and elaborating them is within the T-winning Spaces 2035 project ‘Winning spatial solutions for future work, enabling the double twin transition of digital/green and virtual/physical transforming our societies by 2035’, a three-year project funded by the EUNext Generation and Research Council of Finland, coordinated by Aalto University in partnership with University of Turku and University of Tampere. The Millennium Project was a collaborating network in this project with several interactions.

Sirkka Heinonen, Riku Viitamäki & Veli Virmajoki (2026) Why and How to Use Narratives for Stakeholder Engagements? T-winning Spaces 2035, Finland Futures Research Centre, University of Turku (.pdf)