“The future is already here - it’s just not evenly distributed.” William Gibson
A student in one of our storytelling cohorts, a Director of Product Management at a B2B company, shared the following anecdote with the class. Let’s call her Maya Chen.
They told me to bring a business case, but I brought a story.
“Show us the numbers,” the CFO said.
“There aren’t any yet. We’re inventing them,” I replied.
There was silence - the kind that makes you question whether you’ve just ended your own project.
I could have reached for another spreadsheet, another market-sizing slide, another benchmark dressed up as certainty. But the truth is, there was no data to prove that our AI initiative would work. All we had was conviction and a faint outline of what the world could look like if we got it right.
So I did what product people are not trained to do. I stopped proving. And started showing.
I painted two futures.
In the first, our competitors had already integrated AI copilots into their customer workflows. Their teams were faster, their clients happier, their margins healthier. We, meanwhile, were still running pilots and presentations, wondering when the “right moment” to start would arrive.
In the second future, we had acted early. We’d made a few bold calls, stumbled, learned, and course-corrected. Six months later, our turnaround time had halved. Our clients began expecting our standard from everyone else. We had quietly redefined what “best-in-class” meant.
Then I paused and said, “Which of these futures do we want to read about a year from now?”
No one spoke for a while. Then the COO leaned forward and said, “Let’s start scoping.”
What Maya instinctively did here is what we call Forked-Future Storytelling - a technique leaders use when logic can’t reach far enough and imagination must take over.
Instead of arguing with spreadsheets, you create a story that makes risk visible and possibility tangible.
Here’s how it works:
Begin with a shared truth. Everyone must agree the world is shifting; otherwise, there’s no reason to move.
Draw the fork. Make the contrast unmistakable—the cost of inaction versus the payoff of courage.
Give each future emotional texture. Fear lives in one path, energy in the other. Let people feel the difference.
Anchor in the present. The choice sits in this meeting, this quarter, this budget cycle. That immediacy is the story’s pulse.
Forked-Future storytelling is not manipulation. It’s a way of turning uncertainty into alignment. It acknowledges that before numbers can speak, someone must imagine what those numbers might someday mean.
Try This Week
Think of a decision your team keeps circling around - something stuck in endless debate.
Write two short paragraphs: one describing what happens if you act, one if you don’t.
Read them aloud. Which version feels more alive, more magnetic, more necessary? That’s the story waiting to be told
A Thought to Leave You With
The storyteller’s job - your job - is to distribute the future faster. To help others see what doesn’t exist yet, long before the proof arrives.
Because sometimes the boldest thing you can do in a meeting full of data is to give people a glimpse of the world they secretly hope to build.