Storycasting: Making Plausible Futures Compelling Through Speculative Fiction

This book is a guide to Storycasting for futures and forecasting practitioners. A portmanteau of ‘storytelling’ and ‘Threatcasting,’ Storycasting is a supplementary application of the Threatcasting model, which develops meaningful and human-centric qualitative data that can be presented in thought-provoking narratives that illicit responses and stimulate interest in the outcomes. This book proposes that in distilling the work product of strategic futures planning, threat assessments, and long-term thinking into bulletized reports, organizations significantly diminish the interest as well as insight that can be gleaned from such efforts. In order to recapture the attention of senior leaders and decision makers, the Storycasting model covered in this book presents a way of converting the plausible into the compelling. After guiding readers through the theoretical and practical aspects of Storycasting, the book includes a case study novella, news reporting, and industry publications to demonstrate the potential of the methodology. Through this, the author creates a reality-based and human-centered scenario rooted in a possible future in which a proposed policy is realized, including anticipated add-on effects, reactionary push-back, and supplemental action that can be anticipated through speculative fiction using the Threatcasting methodology. The book closes with an analysis of the narrative output and advises readers on optimizing their own stories to best relate important projections to their organizations, clients, policymakers, and other stakeholders.

Christopher Owens is a program analyst. He was on active duty in the US Coast Guard for 22 years before returning to academia to earn a master’s degree in international development studies. His research leverages a sociologist’s pragmatic curiosity to geopolitics and global trends. After years of writing vignettes and strategic foresight scenarios developed from real-world trends in a professional capacity, he began developing longer-form speculative fiction such as short stories and a novel, “ Doublin’ ”, published in 2025. He co-authored “The Future of Cyber Enabled Financial Crime: New Crimes, New Criminals, and Economic Warfare” and “Microtargeting Unmasked: Safeguarding Law Enforcement, the Military, and the Nation in the Era of Personalized Threats.” Other unpublished non-fiction topics include culture-smart aid programs, gender issues in international development, and organizational self-assessment frameworks.