Adapting to the future - using science-fiction movie plots

IN the 2017 movie Downsizing, people are shrunk to a height of about 15cm in order to reduce over-population and global warming. Such drastic scenarios envisioned in science-fiction movies can actually form part of an organisation's toolkit in adapting to the future.

The reason why organisations are every so often caught unprepared by crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic is not just because they did not prepare for contingencies.

More profoundly, it is because they have difficulty thinking about how crises of the future may look like. Luckily, "unthinkable, yet plausible" are distinct traits of science fiction, making this genre a source of entertainment, and also a useful instrument for organisational planning.