The Space of Narrative Uncertainty
Navigating the Void: When Global Narratives Collapse and Leadership Must Fill the Vacuum
The headfirst leap that the US has taken into a global trade war represents – among other things – a real rift in the narrative fabric of the official future at large. Most of the analysis and punditry has understandably focused on the near-term economic fallout and the potential political implications, but I think it’s worth exploring the space of narrative uncertainty and chaos as well.
A conceptual vocab reminder for context: The concept of the “Official Future” comes to us from the work of Peter Schwarz, who argued that every human community operates with a set of shared (but typically seldom stated) assumptions about what the future will be like. The Official Future consists of assumptions and expectations, implicit beliefs, and – of course – the stories that a community tells about itself and the world in which it exists. For a country or an alliance or an entire economic order, the Official Future might consist of assumptions and stories about the value and nature of economic cooperation, the viability of long-term growth targets, the durability of agreements (and governments), the existence or importance of shared values, etc.
And as a reader of the radical Briefing, you know that we take it as axiomatic that our expectations and assumptions about the future powerfully shape how we show up, act, think, and lead in the present. So the question arises: What happens when we see a large-scale shredding of shared assumptions about the future – about how global systems work and to what ends and whose benefit?
Well… we’re perhaps about to find out. (And note that we’re perhaps also about to see a parallel shredding of related assumptions about the future of work / workforce in the new era of agentic AI…)
One thing that’s already happening – and will likely shape the way things play out over the longer term: There’s been plenty of jockeying for narrative control in the uncertain, liminal space that’s opened up since the Trump inauguration and dramatically widened in the last week. The US right wing – from Trump outward – has been cycling through and struggling to sustain stories of policy coherence and a somehow improved economic future to be found somewhere on the other side of present turmoil. Meanwhile and rather miraculously, the left (and center-left/-right opposed to melting down the global economic order) is STILL trying to figure out a viable counter narrative that doesn’t sound like a defense of a status quo that appeared to be roundly rejected in 2024.
The upshot here isn’t just that narratives matter. It’s that narratives matter even MORE in times of uncertainty – when we creatures of meaning are struggling just to make sense of a deeply ambiguous situation where the old assumptions no longer seem to offer a stable foundation for building the future.
The stakes couldn’t be much higher. And I’d argue that this need for new narratives in a context of uncertainty and disruptive change is going to be felt at all levels of human organization.
If you’re leading – or hoping to influence – a government, you absolutely need to be thinking about (or re-thinking) the story you’re telling about the future. If you’re leading a university or an NGO or a company, you need to be doing the same. And you need to recognize that if you’re not out there actively shaping the narrative as you want it to be understood by your stakeholders, you’re not only missing a critical opportunity to shape the future. You’re also leaving that uncertain narrative space up for grabs, and there exists a real chance that the story that fills that space won’t understand your actions and work on the terms you’d prefer and may not be aligned with the future you favor.
@Jeffrey