# 2 Working with stories of the future

At the end of Session 3, in Activity 8, you produced a story (or stories) of the future and identified some key themes for further exploration. These themes help to set the direction of travel for the next phase of your inquiry – the innovating and designing phase. It’s worth reiterating here that, while you may have an idea of your intended destination, the journey there is unlikely to be uncontested and linear. A helpful metaphor may be that of a sports team coach with a game plan.

Figure 2 Game planning

While the intended ‘destination’ is a win for the team, the gameplan itself will be responsive to the action that unfolds on the field of play, changing and adapting depending on the actions and decisions of others. In the same way, ‘practices are … emergent in the sense that the ways they change are not fully specifiable in advance’ (Boud and Hager, 2012, p. 23). Any design plan for an imagined future must allow room for further improvisation, changes of direction and emerging new possibilities.

A helpful starting point is the themes that you identified in the stories of the future that you developed at the end of the last session. Each of these themes represents a design element in this next phase of your appreciative inquiry, and we will begin to explore how we can move from these themes into planning for our inquiry in the next section, starting with identifying some provocative propositions to drive our inquiry forward.

OpenLearn - An appreciative approach to inquiry
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