By Anders Sörman-Nilsson, futurist and founder of Thinque. Futurist-in-residence to the Brisbane Broncos, Ord Minnett and Barker College.
The short version: Every corporate strategy describes a world that does not exist yet, which makes it speculative fiction with capital attached. Science fiction has a documented record of shaping real events, from an H.G. Wells novel that led a physicist to the nuclear chain reaction, to the 1983 TV film that moved Ronald Reagan towards arms control, to the futurists who wrote the 2054 "bible" for Minority Report. A futurist-in-residence does the same two jobs for an organisation: make the threat vivid enough that leaders act, and make the destination coherent enough that teams can build towards it.
On 10 October 1983, Ronald Reagan watched The Day After at Camp David, six weeks before ABC broadcast it. The film shows Lawrence, Kansas, destroyed in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. That night Reagan wrote in his diary that it was powerfully done, very effective, and had left him "greatly depressed." His biographer Edmund Morris later noted it was the only such admission he could find in Reagan's papers.
When it aired on 20 November 1983, around 100 million Americans watched. Schools sent letters home. ABC staffed counselling hotlines. The film was shown in more than forty countries, including the Soviet Union.
In December 1987 Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty. The film's director, Nicholas Meyer, says a telegram arrived from the President afterwards: "Don't think your movie didn't have any part of this, because it did."
Historians rightly point to Gorbachev's arrival and the Soviet economy as the larger forces, and Reagan had been uneasy about nuclear weapons since at least 1980. But here is the part that matters for anyone who runs an organisation. Reagan had been briefed on nuclear war for years. He had the numbers, the maps, the casualty estimates. None of it did what two hours of Kansas sci fi devastation did. The film didn't tell him anything new. It made him feel something he already knew.
Notice what the film didn't have. No spaceships. No invented technology. Meyer had come straight off directing Star Trek II, so he knew how to build a future, and chose not to. The scenario landed because nothing in it could be filed away as science fiction.
The traffic runs the other way too, and it runs earlier.
In 1913, H.G. Wells wrote The World Set Free, a novel about a weapon built from radioactive material, small enough to be dropped from an aircraft and capable of erasing a city. He called it an atomic bomb, and he gave his fictional physicist the year 1933 for the breakthrough.
A Hungarian physicist named Leó Szilárd read the book in 1932. On 12 September 1933, crossing Southampton Row in London after reading Ernest Rutherford's dismissal of atomic energy, he conceived the nuclear chain reaction. He patented it the following year. Wells had written the idea into a physicist's head two decades before the physics caught up.
Fiction opened the nuclear age. Fiction helped close a chapter of it.
While stories were shaping scientists, scientists were being hired to shape the stories.
In 1929, Fritz Lang made Frau im Mond and hired the rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth as technical advisor. Lang wanted the physics right, and got a multi-stage rocket and a launch sequence that Apollo would echo forty years later. He also wanted tension, so he invented a device for the launch: title cards counting backwards from ten. That is where the countdown comes from. A silent film. NASA has used it ever since. A seventeen-year-old Wernher von Braun saw the film, and the first V-2 to fly successfully from Peenemünde had its logo painted on the base.
Seventy years later, Steven Spielberg convened a three-day think tank of futurists, technologists, architects and doctors to build the world of 2054 for Minority Report. They produced an 80-page document the crew called the 2054 bible. John Underkoffler, the MIT Media Lab alum who designed the gestural interface, treated the work as real R&D and later founded Oblong Industries to build it. Syd Mead, who drew the Los Angeles of Blade Runner and had designed for Ford, Sony and Philips, coined his own screen credit for the work: visual futurist.
Nobody in Spielberg's room was asked to be right. They were asked to be coherent. Coherence is what let engineers build.
Futurists write the fiction. The fiction writes the engineers. The engineers write the world. Here are some sci fi stories and snippets we have recently been sharing from global stages...
Open your strategy and read it the way a stranger would. It describes a world that does not exist yet. It is populated by technology you don't own, staffed by people with skills nobody has hired for, and it serves customers who behave in ways you've inferred rather than observed.
That is speculative fiction. The only difference between a transformation program and a screenplay is that the organisation has put a date on it and committed capital against it.
Which makes the quality of the fiction the whole game. Bad science fiction is wishful and internally inconsistent, and it quietly refuses to follow its own second-order consequences. Good science fiction holds together under pressure, and it makes people move.
Most organisations have a risk register nobody feels and a 2030 plan nobody can build from. The threats are spreadsheets. The destination is a slide with a north star on it. The Day After made a future vivid enough that a president steered away from it. Minority Report made a future coherent enough that engineers steered towards it. A leadership team needs both. Almost none have either.
Those two jobs. Not predictions. Writing the scenario vividly enough that the board acts on it, and the blueprint coherently enough that the teams can build to it. Over twelve months or more, that usually means a quarterly Future Signals report written for the organisation's sector, board and executive sessions, and being on call when something breaks or something new lands on the agenda.
Three organisations currently have me in that futurist-in-residence role.
I've worked with the Brisbane Broncos since 2025, thinking with the club about what the game, the fans and the business look like a decade out. That season they came from ten down at half-time in the grand final to beat Melbourne 26-22 and win their first premiership in nineteen years. People keep asking whether I had anything to do with it. Only the Rugby gods know. But I've rarely been happier to be in a room.
Ord Minnett is an iconic wealth manager with a very particular decade in front of them. Australia's biggest ever transfer of wealth between generations is arriving at the same time as AI, electrification, robotics, and geo-politics is changing what people are investing in. In their Ords Quarterly, we've been talking about AI's future in Australia, that technology is geology, and how many data centres the country needs to build, and the copper, silver and steel that has to come out of the ground before a single LLM prompt can happen.
Barker College has been around since 1890 and their whole promise to families is two words: Inspiring Tomorrow. That's a big thing to say to a parent. Last month I stood in front of the Barker community at the Barker Institute where I am the futurist-in-residence and we talked about what flourishing really looks like for a kid who'll be starting their career in the 2040s. As a dad of two boys, that one wasn't abstract for me. I am deeply invested in a better future.
A football club, a wealth manager and a school. Every conversation ends up at the same two questions...
If you can't answer the first with confidence, your strategy is fiction that hasn't been through a second draft. If you can't answer the second, it's fiction that hasn't met its antagonist yet. Both are fixable. Both are the work.
If you'd like to work on changing the future together, there are two ways this usually happens.
The first is a keynote. Forty-five-60 minutes, one room, and my job is to give your people the jolt Reagan got from two hours of watching Kansas sci fi. Email me today about availability.
The second is a residency, which is the slower and, honestly, the even more impactful and sustainable version of the work. We spend twelve months or more together. Each quarter I write you a Future Signals report about what's coming for your sector specifically. I sit down with your board or your executive team. And in between, when something breaks or something new lands on the agenda, you can call me.
I should be honest about how these work, because it's a bit different to booking a speaker. The Broncos, Ords and Barker are a small group and I'd like to keep it that way. I only take on a few new residencies a year, and once I'm working with an organisation I won't work with their direct competitors, so in practice there's one seat per sector. That's a big part of the value for them, and it means I can't really run this through a booking form.
So it's by application. If you think your organisation should be in that group, just reach out and tell me two things: what's the ten-year question you're actually wrestling with, and which sector you'd be taking the seat in. I read every application myself. If it looks like a fit we'll get on a call, and if it doesn't I'll tell you so and probably point you towards someone or something that will help.
Nobody gets to be right about the future. Everybody gets to be coherent about it, and that part is a choice.
A futurist-in-residence is a strategic foresight specialist retained by an organisation over an extended period, typically twelve months or more, rather than for a single keynote or workshop. The role combines scenario planning, trend and signal analysis, board and executive advisory, and thought leadership content produced for the organisation's own audiences.
A keynote is a single event designed to shift how a room thinks in under an hour. A residency is a standing relationship. The futurist produces recurring outputs such as quarterly signal reports and executive briefings, is on call as conditions change, and typically works with only one organisation per sector so the insight stays proprietary.
Reagan's own diary records that the film left him "greatly depressed," and director Nicholas Meyer has said Reagan sent him a telegram after the 1987 INF Treaty crediting the film with a part in it. Historians generally see Gorbachev's reforms and Soviet economic decline as the larger causes, and note Reagan's earlier unease about nuclear war. The fair reading is that the film contributed to a shift that other forces made possible.
In 1999 Steven Spielberg convened a three-day think tank including Stewart Brand, Douglas Coupland, Jaron Lanier and MIT Media Lab researcher John Underkoffler to extrapolate the world of 2054 from existing technology. Their 80-page "2054 bible" informed the film's production design, including the gestural interface Underkoffler later commercialised through Oblong Industries.
Because a strategy describes a future state that does not yet exist, built on assumptions about technology, people and customer behaviour that have not yet been observed. That is the definition of speculative fiction. The deadline and the capital commitment are what distinguish it from a screenplay, which is why the internal coherence of the scenario matters so much.
Anders currently holds futurist-in-residence roles with the Brisbane Broncos (since 2025), Ord Minnett and Barker College. The work includes quarterly Future Signals reports, board and executive sessions, client and adviser presentations, and thought leadership content produced for each organisation's audiences.
Anders Sörman-Nilsson is a Swedish-Australian futurist, keynote speaker and the founder of Thinque, a Sydney-based strategic foresight consultancy. He is the author of Digilogue, Seamless and Aftershock, Adobe's AI brand ambassador, and futurist-in-residence to the Brisbane Broncos, Ord Minnett and Barker College. His client roster includes Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, McKinsey, LEGO, Dyson, Westpac and Woolworths. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, BBC, Monocle and the Australian Financial Review. He is a Global Speaking Fellow, a TEDGlobal member and a WEF Young Global Leaders nominee, and lives off-grid at Great Mackerel Beach in Sydney's Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. He writes the weekly Decoding Tomorrow newsletter.