On our PNI Institute call on September 12, 2018, we talked about the use of PNI for innovation.

Before each of these calls, I’ve been trying to (a) write a blog post about the topic and (b) find some things (ideas, frameworks, papers, etc) we can talk about during the calls. For this call I brought an idea for a new PNI exercise and an opportunity for PNI to help people think about the future.

First, we talked about a nascent PNI exercise that uses “local folk tales” to explore the future. (I wrote about this in the blog post “Tell a story that must never happen.”) In the exercise, people fill in this space with stories:

We were fortunate in this discussion because one of our members, Harold van Garderen, had tried out the exercise with several people just a few days before the call. He told us what happened, and we talked about ways to improve the exercise and grow it into something that could be of value to people.

After that, we talked about a scattered body of research that has to do with “intertemporal choice” and how it might connect with PNI. One article in particular captured my attention when it mentioned that people should “vividly imagine” their future selves. Telling stories is one of the ways in which people vividly imagine things, so it seems a natural fit for PNI. We tossed around some ideas about how PNI might address this need.

Tune in to listen to the call.