Attempting to predict and prepare for the future can be an arduous and alarming task for any entrepreneur or business. It may seem as though the risks are more prevalent than the opportunities, and it’s easy to get hung up on what could go wrong. It’s also difficult to break out of existing paradigms and imagine how things could be different.

One antidote to this self-defeating thinking style is to engage the power of science fiction. Sci-fi is an incredible way to free up the imagination and construct alternative futures. At Singularity University (SU), my colleagues and I use a science fiction visioning exercise to get our clients to start thinking exponentially. Specifically, we have our program attendees create their own sci-fi — in the form of comic books.

We begin by asking our clients to consider a current problem they’re working on, and we use sci-fi to project that problem into the future to see if they’re thinking about it in a big enough way. We construct a narrative of how the organization might change in the future. We consider how exponential technologies and trends will impact the future of the organization, and how they could possibly reposition themselves to create an ideal outcome that speaks to their mission and purpose.

It works remarkably well, so I advise you to try it for yourself.

Harnessing the power of story

Inviting people to create sci-fi narratives allows them to break out of the thought patterns that are holding them back. One of the big challenges of thinking about the future is that nobody really knows what it will look like. Using sci-fi tools, we can visualize possible futures and then decide which one is aligned with their organization’s visions, strategies, and goals.

Constructing a narrative around a company’s future vision isn’t just an imaginative exercise; it has real implications for the way that organization communicates its values. This is the narrative that draws new talent into the company and draws innovation out of current team members. Story is an effective way to do that because our brains are wired for story. We can communicate highly complex ideas through story and narrative, making them memorable and compelling.

To do this, we use what we call a “future-back” approach: we imagine possible futures fifteen years out and then work backwards to now, to figure out the next steps we need to start executing on today to make our desired future a reality. As Alan Kay says, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Even if we don’t know exactly what is going to happen, once we start to visualize and create what that future might be like, we take the first step in making our visions come true.

After conducting dozens of sci-fi sessions, we’ve settled on a four-part framework that guides people to access and share ideas and insights that would otherwise be unexpressed. Let’s walk through that framework

Step #1: Construct predictions with sci-fi narratives

We start with a deep dive into exponential technologies to understand what current capabilities are being developed. Then we imagine possible futures: what might the world be like in fifteen years? How do we write the stories of characters who would live in that future? What are the business models, products, and services that make their lives possible in that future?

Sci-fi sessions don’t just connect us with a fantastical future. We want to know what real people will experience in the future. In one comic book, readers meet Tulsi, a woman working to rebuild a Central American city severely damaged by an earthquake.

Another story followed Drule, a robot dog that served as a nanny for a single mother in a story set in 2030. We saw a character named Rhoda overcome Alzheimer’s disease through brain implants, and at 101 years old, we found her traveling the world as a journalist, keeping strong and active with the aid of a powerful exo-suit that also held her cargo — including a portable home.

It’s important to think about the character development of a human living in this futuristic world. What real, human problems do they face? What are the stories of how they might overcome some of those challenges in the future?

As we tap into these challenges through fiction, we can begin to trace these narratives back to their real-world applications.

Step #2: Connect to Global Grand Challenges

An essential part of the work we do at SU is to address what we call Grand Global Challenges (GGCs). These GGCs describe major tests of humanity in areas such as food, water, shelter, and health.

As we facilitate the sci-fi exercises, we try to fold in impact to align with our Grand Global Challenges. We craft a problem statement and then look at it from a series of five questions:

What is the problem?

Who is facing the problem?

Where is the problem?

When does this problem begin?

Why is the problem happening?

We fill in the answers with all of the assumptions about this problem. We consider the ramifications it will have in the future, through the lens of the impact it has on our character’s lives — and by proxy, on our futures.

Step #3: The STEEP framework

The third step of crafting sci-fi narratives is to apply the STEEP framework, imagining the future from the following perspectives:

Society

Technology

Environment

Economy

Politics

What will each of these factors look like in fifteen years? Imagine how each of these areas will be impacted by technological advancements. Will Mars be colonized? Will telemedicine be common? Do we think major climate change will happen? Will climate change be reversed?

How are these factors interrelated? What will be the most defining characteristics of the world in fifteen years? These questions focus on the world at large, not just one specific business.

If you’re going to try this activity, you can write down your predictions and thoughts on your own, but an even better option is to discuss your ideas with others to gain multiple perspectives. When we do this exercise in our sessions, we have participants talk through their ideas in groups, and their conversations allow individuals to think about future implications in a deeper way than they could alone.

Step #4: Build a narrative

Finally, we turn our focus back to the individual characters we’ve developed. Considering their future world and the challenges they face, we consider: what are their human needs, fears, and pain points? Who are their friends and family? What are their lives like?

We write a story around that character, following the Pixar formula of storytelling:

Begin the story on a typical day of the character’s life. What are they doing?

Something happens to create a conflict. What is it?

What are the consequences of this conflict? Describe how it escalates.

Finally, a new event enables a resolution. How is the problem solved?

Write your own sci-fi narrative

Hopefully, the way I’ve described this exercise doesn’t sound hard and stressful. It sounds fun. It’s an opportunity to free up your imagination and come up with ideas that you would probably never think of if you were sitting in a dour brainstorming session about the future of your business.

If you see the potential of this approach, I invite you to take action: write your own future narrative, using the Pixar formula if you find it helpful. Give yourself permission to come up with crazy ideas. Free your mind, because it’s difficult to think about the future in our current constraints of reality. Bring together other people in your organization and do this together.

Remember: you’re an agent of change to create this future, and it’s up to you to imagine the future that you would like to see — and create the solutions you want to be part of. Constructing sci-fi narratives is a fascinating and fruitful way to do that.

Did you know we have an online conference about product design coming up? SPRINT will cover how designers and product owners can stay ahead of the curve in these unprecedented times.

4 founders explain the biggest hurdles to flattening the climate curve in 2021

While a lot of our career, personal, and travel plans have been put on hold this year, there’s one thing we as a society cannot afford to put on hold: the fight against climate change.

Rather than scaling back the progress we’ve made, many are seeing this moment as an opportunity to create a new normal in which sustainability and circularity are integrated into our businesses and daily lives.

With this in mind, Techleal recruited some of the brightest minds in Dutch sustainability tech to join the Rise Programme for up and coming scaleups. The theme for batch two this year was: flattening the climate curve.

We caught up with four of the Programme’s cohorts to find out what they see as the biggest hurdles to tackling climate change within their industry.

Making sustainable transportation an option for the masses

Transportation is responsible for 30% of the EU’s total CO2 emissions. And cars are the biggest polluters, accounting for 60.7% of CO2 coming from road transportation.

With the explosion of new electric cars on the market, consumers are being courted with new transportation alternatives and government-backed incentives. But electric car registrations have still only increased incrementally across the EU from just 2% in 2018 to 3.5% in 2019 . So what’s holding people back?

While there is a large and growing consumer base who are ready to make the switch, as Lex Hoefsloot, CEO of Lightyear, explained, “If you look at the research into why more people aren’t buying electric cars they come down to: cost, charging, and range. And that’s been the same for the last ten or fifteen years.”

So-called ‘range anxiety’— or the fear that an electric car could simply run out of electricity at the most inopportune time (like on a dark, creepy horror movie type road at night) — has been one of the biggest concerns voiced by consumers.

Connected with this are questions about charging infrastructure. There are gas stations set up everywhere, but how many charging points are actually out there for electric cars? What if I want to go on a road trip? Will I have to hitchhike halfway through?

Lightyear is looking to solve both range and charging for consumers who are still on the fence about making the switch to electric.

“Rather than targeting people already interested in buying an electric car, we want to focus on other people. People who live in apartments and can’t charge at home. Or people who want to drive long distances every day,” Hoefsloot said.

And just how do they plan to do this?

While studying engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology, Hoefsloot and a team of students were tasked with building and racing a solar car in one year at an annual competition in Australia. After winning the competition with their solar-powered four-seater, Hoefsloot realized that the next step was to bring the concept to the masses. Thus Lightyear was born in 2016.

“We felt, if it’s possible to go from zero to a car built from scratch within a year, and win as well, then the sky’s the limit.”

Set to go into production in 2021, Lightyear One will be one of the first long-range solar electric cars. It has a battery with up to 700km of range plus five square meters of solar panels that add on 12km of range for every hour the car is in the sun.

They also made the Lightyear One more energy efficient. A normal electric car uses about 200-watt hours per kilometer, while their model uses about 100-watt hours per kilometer. So, for every bit of energy you have, you can go twice the distance.

As Hoefsloot explained, “Even in The Netherlands – a horribly rainy country – it can charge about 7,000 km per year, which is more than half of what people drive on average in the Netherlands. So in practice, you would only need to charge once every few weeks, rather than every few days.”

The third problem they want to solve for consumers in the future is cost. The Lightyear One will be the company’s first low volume car, but the plan is to later go on to build a high volume model that will be more affordable for a larger audience.

“A lot of people still don’t have the money to buy an electric car. We shouldn’t judge people for not making the switch because there are simply not enough options on the market yet. That’s why the push coming from the EU with its new incentives for alternative energy vehicles is so important.”

But, for now, Lightyear’s biggest challenge is assembling a winning team that can make their ambitions a reality. They now have a number of vacancies they want to fill on their website. Hoefsloot encouraged anyone who believes they can help the team achieve their ambitions to reach out.

“Frans Timmermans, Vice President of the EU, once said , ‘t he biggest misconception is that if you do nothing, everything will stay the same .’ Sometimes, in the Netherlands, I have the feeling that we hold ourselves back. We’re a small country. We’re not the US. And sometimes we start to think: ‘Can we do this? Maybe we should start with a smaller mission?’ But I would encourage anyone who has an idea to just start with it and make it happen,” Hoefsloot said.

Shaping an emission-free energy system

It’s not just our wheels that could use a green energy boost. Moving from the current, fossil fuel-based electricity system, to an all-renewable energy system, is crucial to stopping climate change but also more complex than just installing a lot more solar panels and wind turbines.

Simon Bushell, CEO of Sympower, believes that “One of the key things we need to do is empower traditional industries to actively contribute to the energy transition. A fully sustainable and interconnected energy system would bring us a big step forward in powering the net-zero future.”

But, as Bushell explains, it’s not that easy.

What hinders the widespread adoption of renewable energy is that it’s harder to control than fossil fuels.

Bushell and his team at Sympower realized that the energy transition would require new demand response technology and solutions. That’s why the company focuses on providing flexibility by regulating demand instead of supply.

Sympower has grown rapidly due to a very enthusiastic client base which has helped it spread the word organically. The company is now operating in Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Israel, with plans to expand to three new countries in 2021.

“What we do is something people don’t often know about, so it’s been really cool to see how enthusiastic our clients are to really help enable a fully-renewable energy grid in their country,” said Bushell.

However, there are still hurdles that Sympower has to overcome to reach a wider audience. Bushell told TNW:

When asked about what the world needs to do now to flatten the climate curve, Bushell told TNW: “I think there’s no silver bullet in the energy transition. If anyone tells you what they do is the one key thing, I would be very skeptical. A combination of solutions is what is actually needed. I do believe that we provide an essential service – the energy transition can’t succeed without flexibility.”

Giving waste a second life

Until recently, a lot of the focus on tackling the climate curve has been centered on improving energy efficiency. It’s only in recent years that waste and the end life of a product or materials have come under closer scrutiny.

In a TED Talk, Excess Materials Exchange founder, Maayke Aimee Damen, highlighted that, while improving energy efficiency is important, this only accounts for 55% of greenhouse gas emissions. Guess where the other 45% come from: the actual materials/product we produce (including waste).

According to a report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, if we just focused on designing out waste, keeping materials in use, and regenerating farmland in five key areas (steel, plastic, aluminum, cement, and food) we could eliminate 9.3 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions. To put this into perspective, this would be the equivalent of cutting the emissions of every vehicle down to zero.

While this sounds like an amazing opportunity to cut emissions, the truth is, many companies don’t really know where to start. As Damen explained,

In 2017, Damen and her co-founder, Christian van Maaren, created Excess Materials Exchange (EME), a self-described ‘dating site’ for excess materials. The team starts out by helping companies to structure the materials and products they have available by providing each one with a ‘Resource Passport’ containing insights into the composition, origin, toxicity, or deconstructability of the item.

This then allows EME to track and trace these materials throughout the supply chain and match them with other reuse opportunities, either inside or outside of the organization.

For example, they were able to help one of their customers, Dutch railway company ProRail, match excess rail tracks in one city to other worksites in need of materials across the country.

This also leads to some unlikely matches. For example, the Netherlands is famous for its tulips, but what happens with leftover flowers after the growing season ends? While in some cases growers have even paid to have someone get rid of the excess flower waste, EME instead has helped connect growers to pigment makers who can reuse them. Clearly, opposites do attract.

And Damen has seen that having a system in place is helping make the business case for recycling much easier:

With a lot of enthusiasm and support coming from their current clients, Damen told TNW that the company’s main goal for 2021 is to attract the investment needed to scale up their operations.

One piece of advice she would give to companies who really want to begin making a difference is to have clear KPIs in place.

“The biggest hurdle we see is that the urgency is quite low. People find it hard to relate to something that’s not tangible. It’s on companies right now to reduce their emissions or to start exchanging materials, but they don’t necessarily have a strategy or KPIs to steer them in the right direction. This makes it very hard for individuals within companies who want change to succeed because, if they succeed, there’s no KPI they’re going to be rewarded on and, if they fail, they have a problem. So the incentive scheme isn’t tailored towards taking action in the majority of organizations,” Damen told TNW.

Making international travel faster and greener

Perhaps one of the more difficult sacrifices we’ll have to make to lower our carbon footprint will be our wanderlust. While there are more and more options to cut emissions from our daily commute, for international travel we’re still reliant on flights to get us where we need to go.

While commercial aviation is only responsible for 3.5% of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions, it’s also growing faster than any other transport sector has increased by 130% over the past two decades. Although electric trains are becoming more popular, a train journey from Amsterdam to Paris or Frankfurt still takes around three to four hours.

But Hardt Hyperloop is making some exciting new advancements that could cut a three-hour intercity trip down to just 30 minutes. The company’s vision is to replace short-haul air travel across Europe with a 10,000km network of tubes that can zip people and cargo across borders. Not only is the hyperloop system expected to take less time, it’s also powered by renewable energy.

The energy-efficient tech behind the system is perhaps the most interesting part. Each hyperloop vehicle is pushed through the tube system using a combination of electromagnetic suspension and electric propulsion. This technology, along with the low-pressure environment created within the tubes, helps to propel the vehicles forward at high speeds.

While it may be a while before we can all jet-set across Europe by tube, Hardt plans to open the first European Hyperloop Center in 2022 where engineers, researchers, and governments can collaborate together to make this futuristic-sounding vision a reality.

From innovative technology to collecting the right data to government-backed regulations and incentives, there’s still a lot to be done. But one thing we did hear from all of this year’s cohorts was that the most important ingredient is there: the will and motivation to change. As Bushell of Sympower said:

Scrum didn’t work for my startup — so I designed an alternative project management method

This article was originally published by Built In .

Nowadays there are more opinions on how to develop software than there are firms actually doing the development. Some people call programming a science. Others call it engineering, a craft, or even art. Just as coding’s 70-year history has produced hundreds (if not thousands) of languages, it’s also spawned countless processes and frameworks purporting to have the best model for guiding a team to build software.

In recent times, no framework has seen broader adoption and more hype than the scrum implementation of agile. Agile — at its core — is very simple: a focus on collaboration, functionality, and flexibility over formality, documentation, and extensive planning. But just like software development overall, there are more variations on agile than you can shake a stick at. Scrum, one such variant, has proven very popular.

Since co-founding 4Degrees three years ago, I have spent a lot of time with my team working out what software development process would work best for us. Agile overall makes a lot of sense: It ensures that we’re talking to customers, collaborating internally, and staying nimble; it’s a good match for our core values. Scrum, on the other hand, really didn’t match our needs very well. While scrum may be perfect for many organizations, we found that it didn’t suit us — and likely isn’t a good fit for most other startups either.

Roles

In scrum, there are three distinct roles: the product owner (who decides what features should be prioritized), the technical team (who actually builds the product), and the scrum master (who coordinates the process). Right from the get-go, this division of labor didn’t make sense at 4Degrees. In the early days, we didn’t even have that many people on the team, much less all devoted to a specific type of functionality development. My co-founder, Ablorde, and I decided early on that we would share the role of product owner in the organization. But I was also doing most of the actual programming. If we were to have a scrum master, that probably would have fallen to me as well. Clearly it didn’t make sense for me to be all three of the distinct scrum roles.

We decided to set up our team a bit differently than the scrum structure. Ablorde and I still share product owner responsibilities, though our ultimate goal is to bring in a head of product (similar but slightly different from scrum’s product owner, which is often tied to the business in some other official capacity). We envision the head of product and the other people in the “product” organization as playing the role of both product owner and scrum master: coordinating across engineering, design, sales, marketing, and everyone else to figure out what features should be prioritized and then bringing the team together to execute.

Speed

Oftentimes, scrum is thought of as a very fast-paced framework for software development. And indeed, when shifting from a waterfall process with six-month-long development cycles, then deploying every two weeks feels like lightspeed. Not so in the startup world. When you’re just getting started, you might be a completely different company in two weeks. Planning to update your production application only twice a month is a recipe for disaster and unhappy customers. At 4Degrees, we deploy much more frequently: typically two to five times per day. That allows us to get out important updates quickly and divide work into more atomic units with fewer dependencies. Accordingly, we do not use any formal “definition of done” — tasks are “complete” when they’re live in production and at least modestly tested.

Accordingly, we don’t structure our product development cycle into “sprints,” one of the most fundamental components of scrum. The idea is to have the full team focus on one problem for a set period of time (most often two weeks). That just didn’t work for us; we couldn’t take two weeks to put out new functionality, and many times, it just doesn’t make sense to have the whole team focused on one set of tasks. Our back-end engineer may be doing some data science experimentation at the same time as our designer is conducting user interviews for some potential new functionality slated for weeks down the road.

Instead of sprints, we structure our development cycles into one-week and one-quarter increments. Every Monday morning, we check in to hear the latest on what customers are saying and prioritize/discuss the tasks that the team will be working on for the week. The meeting helps everyone stay up to speed on what’s happening, but it’s not the end-all-be-all: Tasks and priorities often shift over the course of the week as we continue to talk to customers and iterate on the code we’ve deployed.

In addition to our weekly cadence, we take a step back once a quarter to think about our platform a little more strategically. We analyze our customer insights and brainstorm major initiatives that may improve the project. That effort results in a roadmap of new functionality for the quarter. That roadmap is often more aspirational than realistic: Changing information and capacity over the quarter mean that oftentimes half of the roadmap won’t be completed on time. But that’s OK, it still provides us a path to follow to make sure the platform is headed in the right direction.

Tasks

The structural differences between our process and scrum manifest in a very different approach to how work is organized. Scrum prescribes epics, stories, and tasks to ensure that the customer perspective is translated into functionality. Stories (“As a user, I need…”) have become an infamous hallmark of scrum, and even agile more broadly.

At 4Degrees, all technical work is simply recorded as tasks: line items in our Airtable database. Customer centricity is the first of our five corporate values and is deeply integrated into our process. As such, we haven’t seen any need for artificially wording tasks as if they’ve come straight out of the mouth of a specific user.

Rather than relying on team consensus for bringing tasks into a sprint, we use a centrally determined priority and point value. Specifically, whenever a new task is added, I will assign that task a priority and point value. Higher priority tasks are sorted to the top of the task tracker and provide a slight bump to the “raw” point value of a task. Point targets are set and measured at the individual level rather than the team level. We’ve found that this works better because our team is so small and relatively divided in its responsibilities. We have a front-end engineer, a back-end engineer, a mobile engineer, and a designer; each of these team members has relatively little ability — much less desire — to guess the points that a task should be worth to someone else on the team.

Do what works

Due to scrum’s popularity, many practitioners have forgotten that the agile manifesto says “individuals and interactions over processes and tools” and “responding to change over following a plan.” While scrum works for many organizations, it has been force-fed to all startups, even when it’s far from ideal.

The most important concept to take from agile is being quick and responsive to things that don’t work. For many startups, the overly structured and relatively slow nature of scrum just doesn’t make sense. Instead, they’ll be better served by taking a faster, more iterative approach to experimenting and figuring out a software development process that is best suited to their specific needs.