To Promote Far-Out Plans, Enlist Imagination

Fictional framing blends reality with fantasy to help investors see possibilities — and buy into them

Based on the research of Luis Martins

Picture yourself in a manufactured colony that orbits between Earth and the moon. It might sound like science fiction, but it’s part of a 2019 presentation made by Jeff Bezos, founder of the space technology company Blue Origin, to an audience of journalists, space industry executives, and policymakers.

Such ventures are part of a growing cadre of radically novel business ideas that invite stakeholders to imagine market categories that have never existed, such as species de-extinction and extended human lifespans. 

To obtain support for such concepts, founders need to go beyond standard pitches, according to new research by Luis Martins, professor of management and Zlotnik Family Chair in Entrepreneurship at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin.

What is required is what he calls fictional framing. It’s a narrative strategy that constructs a future world blending the real and imaginary, such as factories on a massive, self-contained habitat floating in space. Though telling a story, it makes something drastically radical seem possible.

To help build such projects, entrepreneurs need to enlist partners, investors, regulators, employees, and the public. But, Martins says, “The cognitive distance between today’s world and the proposed one leaves stakeholders with nothing familiar to measure the idea against.”

With Violina Rindova of the University of California, Irvine, and Meenal Banga, a McCombs doctoral student, Martins drew on literary theory and the psychology of fiction to build a model of how to close that distance.

Picturing What’s Possible

Fictional framing is distinct from conventional entrepreneurial framing, which seeks to create familiarity and fit with existing understandings, Martins says. Instead of asking people to consider whether a concept is probable, it gets them thinking about what might be possible.

Possibilistic thinking doesn’t ask how likely something is to happen. It asks how much it would matter if it were to happen. It then invites people to collaborate in making it real.

“It’s about, ‘Help me think about what it could be,’” he says. “How might this world look? What could we do in this possible world?’”

To turn passive audiences into active co-creators, his model of fictional framing builds on three things our minds do naturally when reading or watching fiction.

Immersion and transportation. Fiction transports an audience to another world and immerses them in it by mixing known elements with imagined ones. Bezos, for example, paints some of his imagined space colonies as “shirt-sleeve environments. This is Maui on its best day, all year long.”

By doing so, he helps stakeholders disengage from the status quo, Martins says. He leads them to entertain possibilities rather than dismiss them

Mental simulation. Fiction stimulates a listener to construct a mental experience of being in the situation described. Bezos equips his imagined colonies with recognizable elements, such as high-speed transport, agricultural areas, and cities.

He then adds fictional ones, such as zero-gravity recreation zones where “you can go flying with your own wings.” By starting with the familiar, he provides a background mental scaffolding to help listeners imagine weightless flight, Martins says.

Filling gaps. Fiction keeps a narrative deliberately incomplete, so listeners can fill in the gaps from their own experience and imagination — a process known as situational model building.

Bezos suggests his orbiting colonies might have a variety of architectures, some drastically different from terrestrial cities. By doing so, he invites stakeholders to create personal interpretations of his vision, Martins says. They imagine how they might operate within it — converting them into participants.

Framing Futures on Earth

Fictional framing is not limited to tech titans, Martins says. It can be used for any major idea that doesn’t fit neatly into existing paradigms — such as eliminating poverty in a metropolitan area.

“People who live in that area and are anchored in the status quo might have a hard time imagining how that would be possible,” Martins says. “Fictional framing can make an idea that feels cognitively distant more actionable.”

In a world of technological innovations and global challenges, more entrepreneurs will propose radically novel projects with far-reaching consequences, Martins says. Fictional framing can help.

“Fictional framing provides an important strategic tool for innovation,” he says. “It can help magnify the difference our students and alumni make in the world. It can help them take on audacious, transformational changes and turbocharge our tagline: ‘What starts here changes the world.’”

“Co-explorers of the Imaginary: How Fictional Framing Legitimates Radical Novelty by Connecting Entrepreneurial Imagination to Stakeholder Possibilistic Thinking” is published in Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal.

Story by Sally Parker