Article
Skye Doherty*, Joanne Anderton, Helen Marshall
School of Communication and Arts, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Brisbane, Australia
Abstract
Creative approaches to secure water supplies in an increasingly water-scarce world often struggle to overcome the deep caution characteristic of the water sector. However, those involved in water futures recognise the need for alternate approaches. The Creative Methods for Water Security project developed four techniques to support engagement with the social futures of water in Australia. This article details interviews with water experts and draws on Story Thinking as a framework for envisioning water security. We outline a workshop that tested four novel methods. The work contributes to the growing inventory of tools to support participatory responses to global challenges.
Keywords
Creativity, Methods, Participation, Storytelling, Water Security
Introduction
A future in which less, more polluted water is shared among a greater number of people is imminent. The United Nations estimates that by 2050 water scarcity will be endemic with higher demand, reduced rainfall, and accelerating pollution impacting regions where water is currently abundant (Connor & Miletto, 2023). The agency’s goal of clean water and sanitation for all by 2030 is looking unlikely, with insufficient progress to meet targets and progress reversing in some regions (FAO & UN Water, 2024). In an increasingly water-scarce world, poverty, sickness, hunger, inequality, migration and conflict could become more common (D’Arras, 2022). Avoiding such futures is a priority for governments and publics, but the tensions between the often conflicting priorities of these groups mean balancing economic development, human need and environmental health is increasingly fraught (Head, 2010).
Despite the challenges, the water sector is considered risk-averse and slow to adopt new approaches and emerging technologies (Kydyrbekova et al., 2022; O’Callaghan et al., 2021). This is in part due to the high costs and extended time horizons required (Daniel et al., 2023). For a long time, water management has relied on engineering, risk assessment and modelling based on historical patterns to make predictions about future needs and to inform policy and capital investment. Dams and irrigation have been key tools in managing water use to meet the needs of people, industry and agriculture, supported by water bureaucracies that privileged technology over nature (Molle & Mollinga, 2009). Although new and emerging technologies such as big data and artificial intelligence promise to optimise water use (Huber, 2023) there is a view that established approaches “fail to incorporate the deep uncertainties about climate change and the institutional change needed to cope with them” (Gober, 2018, p. 5). Meanwhile, a recent ecological turn in water management has highlighted the need to move beyond technical solutions toward accounting for social and environmental concerns, and adapting to complex systems (Head, 2022; Houtgraaf, 2023; Wyborn et al., 2023).
Across futures-oriented disciplines such as foresight, design and social change communication, there is a view that creativity and imagination have a role in developing innovative responses to complex challenges (Doherty et al., 2024; Finn & Wylie, 2021; Ketonen-Oksi & Vigren, 2024; Liveley et al., 2021). In this article we discuss a project that explored opportunities for collaborative and imaginative research methodologies to respond to the challenge of water sustainability. The Creative Methods for Water Security project developed a set of techniques to support futures-focused work. In what follows, we detail what we learned about the Australian water context through a review of literature and interviews with nine water experts, including utility managers, policy experts and researchers. We discuss Story Thinking (Marshall et al., 2025) as a framework for thinking creatively about the issue of water security, then detail four novel activities we developed that relate to characterisation, testing values, pushing timescales, and developing aesthetics for future worlds. They were introduced and trialled by a group of 10 professionals and researchers at an online workshop in late 2024.
Our research revealed a risk adverse and technocratic sector that favoured an engineering response, which was not always effective when social and political tensions flared. Participants reported the challenges of envisioning over long time horizons, adequately accommodating community perspectives in short-term consultancy projects, and acknowledging the hard choices and potential trade-offs that are likely when there is less water to go around. Although sensors and data were increasingly displacing dams and pipes as key tools for managing water, a top-down approach made it difficult to incorporate local knowledges. These responses highlighted opportunities to deploy more inclusive and imaginative approaches that could engage stakeholders in thinking constructively about the social futures of water security.
The project contributes to a growing inventory of methods to support generative, participatory and futures-focused responses to global crises (Kelleher, 2012; Ramírez & Ravetz, 2011; Rinaldi, 2023). While the value of creative approaches is increasingly recognised across disciplines, there remains a significant implementation gap, especially in sectors traditionally focused on quantitative evidence and technical solutions. This study addresses this gap by applying a methodology drawing on science fiction and fantasy writing techniques to water security challenges. Our research specifically explores: (1) How narrative-based methodologies can help water professionals address future water security challenges; (2) What specific limitations in current approaches might be addressed through creative methods; and (3) What practical considerations should guide the implementation of these approaches within existing governance structures.
Australia’s Water Context
Water management in Australia involves the often-conflicting demands of agriculture, household supply, environmental need and traditional rights. It is managed by multiple agencies at national, state and local levels and involves governments, public organisations and corporate entities. The country’s major cities rely on water from diverse sources, including surface and ground water catchments and reservoirs. Available water is governed by entitlements on issue (or water licences), the buying and selling of which makes up the Australian Water Market. Surface-level and groundwater trading occurs within strict guidelines within the system, with the amount allocated in a given year determined by rainfall, storage volumes and carryover from the previous year—all factors that are highly variable (BOM, 2023).
The Australian water sector, along with the country’s water security, is threatened by climate change. Academic literature and our participants say the major and consistent implication from climate forecast models is that “regardless of what happens with rainfall precipitation, inflows into rivers is certainly forecast to drop substantially” (participant 4). The city of Melbourne is likely to be particularly impacted, with some catchments already seeing a decline in water availability by 15 to 20 per cent, a trend exacerbated by a rapidly growing population (Lang et al., 2022, p. 4). In Sydney, “the combined effects of a growing population and future periods of drought” is expected to put increasing strain on dams (Khan, 2023) and although desalination plants can help meet demand, they take months to switch back on after periods of disuse. Meanwhile, Perth’s groundwater replenishment scheme is using purified recycled water to refill the aquifers on which the city draws much of its water (Khan, 2023), and in Queensland the Western Corridor Recycled Water Scheme has been built but not fully used. Large-scale infrastructure has been Australia’s typical response to meeting the water needs of growing populations in urban centres (Kitoko et al., 2022); however, it is becoming evident that the country can no longer rely on one form of water supply. Ultimately, “We know that the supply demand lines are due to cross later this decade at some point. Given our population growth and the demand from industry for water services in particular that’s growing to the point where it will exceed that demand or exceed what we can supply” (participant 5).
A need for creativity
Managing water is complex and laden with diverse values and beliefs “about economic efficiency, social equity, and environmental protection, the need to provide for future generations, aesthetic and spiritual concerns, the role of government in civil society, and the human right to water” (Gober, 2018, p. 92). One common dichotomy is that water governance “embodies the tension between competing views of water as a common good and commodity” (p. 94), but in practice things are not so clear-cut and concerns about environmental protections and Indigenous water rights also play a part. This presents an opportunity for imaginative approaches.
The people we spoke to identified a need for the water sector to be “more creative, more flexible, and more participatory” (participant 1), as “a lot of water management comes from engineering and hydrology” (participant 4). This leads to “a heavy bias toward quantitative methods” (participant 5) as well as “evidence-based decision making or evidence-based practice” (participant 1). Indeed, the use of “best available science” in the sector is “written into some of the legislation” and any agency that steps away from that would be “exposing themselves to a whole range of criticism” and “fairly strong critique” (participant 4). One consequence is the heavy reliance on data, the “belief that if we just do the analysis, we’ll get to the single truth and then we just need to act” (participant 2). The Australian water sector is based on knowledge and understanding of past water cycles (Steffen et al., 2018, p. 10) as well as imported strategies that do not include the “traditional ways of engaging with nature and stewarding its resources” (Kitoko et al., 2022, pp. 164–165). While there are certainly benefits to the modelling that emerges from such data, it can also be “a trap in the sense of we think we know what’s going to happen. We have a model that tells us, and therefore we know the truth” (participant 2). Design codes and standards often are not updated to reflect the new reality of increasing temperatures, precipitation rates, or the likelihood of natural disasters (Wallis-Lage & Erdal, 2022, p. 54), and “as the climate continues to change rapidly, these historic patterns are becoming increasingly unrepresentative and water related infrastructure is at a growing risk of failure” (Steffen et al., 2018, p. 10).
Another issue is “rigidity, conservatism […] particularly when it [comes]to anything innovative, anything adaptive […] or transformational” because “if you have to develop something based on evidence of it having worked, you can’t do something new” (participant 1). This challenge is not unique to Australia. Globally, the level of innovation in water management is considered low, compared with other industries, something attributed to “exceedingly complex-designed systems with long design lives” (Kydyrbekova et al., 2022, p. 147). Water infrastructure is expensive and involves long time frames. As a result, the sector is cautious. Transformations of policy and technology are inherently disruptive and one way of looking at this process is as a continual cycle of creative destruction (Head, 2022, p. 126). However, there is little opportunity for disruption in a sector as heavily regulated as water utility (O’Callaghan et al., 2021, p. 7) and in which “an inherent fear of failure in combination with the vast risk and complexity of the issues can drive an inability to make a decision” (Wallis-Lage & Erdal, 2022, p. 54).
Existing creative approaches
Despite broad conservatism across the sector, public organisations are increasingly adopting foresight techniques to grapple with wicked problems. Recent reports from governments in Australia (Hartigan & Horobin, 2024) and New Zealand (Inayatullah & Milojević, 2021), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2022) and Nesta, the UK social innovation charity (Ramos et al., 2019) point to the growing take up of futures thinking in public policy. In the context of water security, the use of futures approaches has not been confined to Futures Studies. Indeed, futures methods have found purchase in the fields of Water Research, Sustainability, Environmental Studies, among others. Causal layer analysis (Absar, 2013; Barber, 2007; Kelleher, 2012), imaginary future generations (Hara et al., 2023; Kuroda et al., 2021), participation (De Vos et al., 2024; Dufva et al., 2015; Floyd et al., 2014; Roque et al., 2022) and backcasting (Mitchell & White, 2003) are among methods used across the literature. However, in this project, three approaches resonated with themes from our interviews: scenarios, Decision Making Under Uncertainty, and Resilience Thinking.
Scenarios
The Gulbenkian Think Tank on Water and the Future of Humanity makes the case for scenarios because “if we cannot ‘see’ the future, or possible futures, how can we adequately plan or prepare for them?” (Braga et al., 2014, p. 185). Similarly, Dator argues scenarios enable people and organisations to “examine and clarify their images of the future—their ideas, fears, hopes, beliefs, concerns about the future—so that they might improve the quality of their decisions which impact it” (Dator, 2019, p. 11). Our participants echoed these views: scenarios “widen their [an organisation or government agency]perception about what’s possible” (participant 5). They can also encompass internal and external driving factors as well as the state of the resulting system, representing it as either static or dynamic (March et al., 2012). When the state or path is presented as an internally consistent and coherent narrative, it becomes a storyline. Scenarios can be developed in conjunction with, or emerge from, other Futures techniques, such as the Futures Triangle (Inayatullah, 2023). Not all scenarios are presented as a coherent narrative or storyline, but doing so can be fruitful as “we use stories as a way of thinking about complex systems” as “stories inherently turn on tension, trade-offs, unintended consequences” (participant 2). At the same time, however, it’s important to keep in mind that we often do so with a “particularly Western narrative”, which is fuelled by crisis and conflict (participant 2).
Barber’s (2007) Global Currency Map demonstrates how creative futures methods can reveal the worldviews shaping water management. Using Causal Layered Analysis, he positioned Australia within the ‘consumption driven’ zone—characterised by high GDP and historically abundant freshwater access—and identified a critical limitation: Western societies habitually “turn to science and technology (but not to its own behaviours) to ‘fix’ the problem” (Barber, 2007, p. 67). His analysis framed the emerging global challenge as a choice between “life versus lifestyle” and informed subsequent water planning scholarship on Indigenous water values (Barber & Jackson, 2015; Jackson & Barber, 2013). Later work by Absar (2013) demonstrated the how an Islamic worldview might offer alternative perspective on water management. Our research confirms the persistence of the technocratic engineering approach Barber identified, while revealing new complications such as AI data centres competing for water resources. Where Barber and Absar used CLA to analytically surface existing worldviews, our participatory narrative-based approach uses creative writing techniques to generatively construct scenarios, characters, and language that can help stakeholders imagine and negotiate alternative water futures.
Decision Making Under Uncertainty
Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU) is a decision-making process that embraces flexibility and collaboration and calls for “new modelling strategies, a new role for science in water planning, public engagement, knowledge mobilization, and learning to live with uncertainty” (Gober, 2018, p. 121). Inherent in DMUU is the need to “move toward public consensus and incorporate a range of viewpoints in futures thinking” (p.122). There are three elements necessary for this transformative approach to succeed: 1) make decisions more proactive than reactive; 2) emphasise decisions that produce co-benefits; 3) change the focus of scientific and public discussion from climate change to the societal structures needed to manage climate uncertainty (Gober, 2018, p. 47). These elements require changes to the way in which we talk about these challenges, not just what we say. DMUU requires a shift in thinking around the end-goal, “a change in the policy question from what is most likely to happen in the future to what are the ramifications of actions that can be taken now, given that we cannot predict the future” (p.124).
Resilience Thinking
Resilience Thinking (RT) is an alternative to conventional “command and control” paradigms and can inform efforts to reform water policies in directions required for sustainable development (Marshall & Lobry De Bruyn, 2021). Conventional environmental management assumes the dynamics of all systems to be managed are mechanistic, with unchanging parts and relationships between parts, and that the behaviour of the system will be predictable and stable. Not only is the “assumption of social and environmental systems behaving mechanistically” flawed, “it is increasingly inaccurate in this era to characterise human and environmental systems as independent of each other rather than coevolving” (p. 67). Marshall and De Bruyn argue that because people and nature are intertwined, water management should focus on social-ecological systems (SES) and the capacity to of the system to absorb disturbances. In short, the less resilient a system is, the smaller the disturbance required to destabilise it. However, RT scholarship also recognises that power relations embedded in existing governance arrangements restricts the scope for deliberate transformation towards adaptive environmental management. Conventional approaches are built on command-and-control systems, which are becoming increasingly less fit for purpose.
Barriers to greater creativity
There is a growing consensus that “we should not look for solutions in the past but be more imaginative in achieving the outputs that our infrastructure systems require” (Kydyrbekova et al., 2022, p. 153), and that doing so will require “spaces that facilitate and encourage discussion and collaboration” (Kitoko et al., 2022, p. 179). However, public sector organisations need to be seen as rational, stable and accountable, with little tolerance for uncertainty, flexibility and risk taking that creative approaches require (Brinkman et al., 2023). In Australia, institutional “fear that even a small thing that you do can actually mess up the whole thing and […] you don’t want another uncertainty at this point” (participant 9) stymies risk taking while institutional and regulatory, planning, and design challenges (Wallis-Lage & Erdal, 2022, p. 54) hinder the implementation of resilience and innovation. Meanwhile, budget constraints (participants 1, 5, 9) mean every decision and investment must be justified publicly (participant 1). Often, it feels safer to use methods that have been used before—those grounded in data rather than speculation (Wallis-Lage & Erdal, 2022).
There is also a belief that the public sector lacks creativity, or the structures to encourage it. Creativity is integral to organisational innovation, but different from innovation: “Creativity refers to the primary idea generation stage, whilst innovation also includes the later idea implementation stage” (Houtgraaf, 2023, p. 1612). It is also a process that “is inspiration-driven and employs abductive reasoning to come up with solutions for public issues […] it requires sufficient tolerance for uncertainty, capacity for risk-taking, receptiveness to new ideas, and flexibility to learn and adapt” (p. 243-244). This conflicts with “a rational-instrumental logic underpinned design in public organizations” that use “inductive reasoning to offer theoretical explanations for issues, and deductive reasoning to anticipate outcomes of solutions” (Brinkman et al., 2023, p. 243). As a result, public organisations are usually geared toward these practices, and structured around bureaucratic principles such as specialisation, chain of command, formalisation, and centralised authority.
This doesn’t mean that public sector workers are not creative, rather that the nature of their work privileges pragmatism (Houtgraaf, 2023). Our research indicated the public sector can foster a climate that encourages innovation by enabling communication of new ideas and rewarding or at least recognising risk-taking and creativity (Fleischer & Wanckel, 2024, pp. 218–219), and by encouraging recruitment from the humanities and other “fuzzy area backgrounds” into long-term strategic policy development (participant 9). Indigenous perspectives offed another route: “The Australian Indigenous culture is an incredibly future focused culture that’s been here for 60,000 plus, that thinks in, depending on where you are on Country, cycles of seven generations or more” (participant 6). Foregrounding First Nations’ viewpoints and experiences, bringing some of those methods together will be instrumental to any attempt to instill resilience and adaptability to our water systems, and even “do justice to the multiplicities of the way that we think about future as a concept” (participant 6).
Story Thinking for Water Security
The Australian water sector is characterised by technocratic culture, risk aversion, and bias toward quantitative approaches, creating both opportunities and barriers for creative problem solving. While the industry has adopted approaches such as scenarios and Resilience Thinking, these methods often struggle to overcome the sector’s inherent caution and need for evidence-based decision making. The creative techniques that enable science fiction and fantasy writers to imagine alternative worlds, diverse characters, and unexpected scenarios provide an alternative foundation for innovative problem-solving. This is an area receiving increasing attention in Futures literature (Finn & Wylie, 2021; Liveley et al., 2021; Milojević & Inayatullah, 2015; Zaidi, 2019). Our approach draws upon a framework called Story Thinking (Marshall et al., 2023), which identifies four key domains drawn from creative writing expertise. The ‘Inhabit’ domain draws upon worldbuilding techniques for crafting immersive future environments. The ‘Empathise’ domain makes use of characterisation methods to understand diverse stakeholder perspectives. The ‘Envision’ domain harnesses plotting strategies for mapping potential cause-and-effect scenarios. Lastly, the ‘Engage’ domain addresses how stylistic elements can help forge a common language that bridges disciplinary divides. Crucially, in bringing these domains together, Story Thinking workshops are not intended to predict outcomes but to build shared understandings of how futures unfold in localised contexts.
Current study: Water security workshop
The Creative Methods for Water Security project aimed to test the applications of creative research frameworks like Story Thinking to issues faced by the water sector. Our approach was designed to address gaps identified in our literature review of the water sector: the need for more participatory methods, techniques that balance quantitative and qualitative insights, and approaches that embrace rather than avoid uncertainty. The 90-minute workshop was held online in November 2024 and brought together 10 participants including representatives of Sydney Water and Melbourne Water alongside consultants in the water sector and researchers from universities across Australia. They were selected by invitation as those with knowledge of futures methods, creative approaches to research and/or knowledge of the water sector and they were not renumerated for their participation.
The workshop focused on two scenarios that reflect contemporary water security challenges
Failure of Paradise Dam: This scenario explored the consequences of an infrastructure failure requiring expensive rebuilding of a dam intended to last 100 years but damaged after just 20. The case highlighted tensions between various stakeholders, including farmers facing seven to 10 years without water allocations, in a region dependent on irrigation for agriculture.
AI vs water: This scenario examined the growing conflict between water-intensive AI data centres and other water users. While AI offers potential for improved water monitoring and management, the technology itself requires substantial water resources for cooling and energy generation, exemplified by cases like Google’s proposed data centre requiring 7.6 million litres of water daily in drought-prone Uruguay.
During the workshop, we trialled four creative exercises (Table 1) that we designed to build a shared understanding of present problems and future possibilities and address some gaps in contemporary futures methodologies as applied to the water sector. The workshop was divided into two groups, each assigned one of these real-world scenarios in which to explore the methods, with time for discussion and reflection following the completion of the exercises. Below, we present findings from the ‘AI vs Water’ scenario group, which produced a particularly rich set of responses through multiple character perspectives, to demonstrate the kinds of outcomes these techniques might produce. However, our analysis of the activities and discussions of applications will draw on the conversations that took place across both scenario groups.
Table 1: Overview of exercises
| Exercise | Story Thinking Domain | Purpose | Key Approach |
| Mark My Words | Empathise | Build character profiles to reveal diverse stakeholder perspectives | Participants created fictional personas based on real stakeholder quotes, developing backstories and personal traits to understand different viewpoints on water issues. |
| Trade-offs | Envision | Explore power dynamics and values-based decision making | Characters were placed in consultation scenarios to explore what each values most, their perceived power, and conditions that might facilitate or hinder negotiation on water futures. |
| The Long View | Inhabit | Examine long-term consequences in different time frames | Participants projected how scenarios might unfold at 50, 100, and 1,000-year intervals, revealing how initial decisions create cascading effects and challenging linear thinking about progress. |
| An Aesthetic Turn | Engage | Develop shared language to concretise future scenarios | Drawing from their imagined futures, participants created specialized terminology to make abstract scenarios more concrete and develop shared reference points for discussion. |
Mark My Words: building empathy through character development
This exercise drew on character development techniques from creative writing, with a particular focus on understanding backstories and personal traits (Corbett, 2013; Wood, 2008). Participants were given deidentified, provocative quotes selected during the research on the scenarios and asked to imagine the individuals behind them, developing backstories and personal traits. By provocative, we mean that they were character-oriented; they represented particular worldviews that could be surfaced easily by a general audience. In doing so, this exercise asked participants to explore the perspectives of people who might hold different beliefs from them, ideally interrogating assumptions and helping to humanise those positions.
For the scenario group in question, from provocative quotes such as “We’re going to grow on water. The water market is one that grows at a double-digit compounded annual growth rate” and “No es sequia, es saqueo!” (It’s not drought, it’s pillage!), four distinct characters emerged: Mary-Anne (a local business owner and independent election candidate), Ted (a local politician—“conservative but with a green heart”), Johan (an independent small-holder farmer), and Alex (a local teacher). Each character was developed through personal narratives that revealed how deeply water resources are intertwined with individual and community identities. For example, for Ted, success meant providing economic benefit while also keeping the land intact whereas for Johan it meant having a healthy farm to pass onto his children.
Trade-offs: revealing power dynamics and values
Participants then explored how these characters might engage in consultations about water futures. This activity aligns with the ‘Envision’ domain, examining how conflict between stakeholders reveals differing values and assumptions. A recurring observation in our literature review was that certain stakeholders can easily become accustomed to viewing water through a narrow values lens (for example, as a commodity) whereas other stakeholders may have very different understandings of water, different ways of valuing it, and these can drive decision making. As Gober argues, “There are no perfect solutions for complex problems, only strategies to manage uncertainty, complexity, and political conflict” (Gober, 2018, p. 196). This exercise drew out these participant understandings and uncovered complex power dynamics surrounding water resources. For example, comments acknowledged how the way a character presented themselves could have a major impact on perceptions of trustworthiness: eg. “Firm handshake. Callous palms. Knife on belt.” Other observations indicated how characters might understand their power to be local while also realising “local power rests with position on big issues.” In some cases, identity might be highly valued while in others the power to make decisions might be more important. These varied insights highlighted how stakeholders might have complex understandings of the relational nature of their own power and how they might view water through different value lenses—as a commodity, a right, a legacy, or a shared resource.
The Long View: imagining futures across time scales
This exercise challenged participants to envision how their character’s successful negotiations might play out over extended time frames (50, 100, and 1,000 years), revealing unexpected trajectories and consequences, particularly using exceptionally long timeframes, which deliberately shifted the focus away from prediction and toward creative interrogation and exploration. Our literature review revealed that when asked to envision a future, many participants struggle to break free from current realities—even projecting merely 10 years ahead tends to simply recreate the present (Zaidi, 2019). To counteract this, we framed the conversation around key themes like technology transitions, helping participants gradually build a vision of tomorrow, with scaffolding to give structure to their imaginings.
This speculative futures exercise revealed stark contrasts in how different stakeholders envisioned water management outcomes. In Ted’s 50-year scenario, his initial water allocation strategy backfired dramatically, creating a world dominated by the descendants of tech moguls where “water is not really shared” and local farmers face severe marginalisation. This outcome poignantly contrasts with Johan’s vision, where local landholders formed a collective power structure that successfully negotiated with data centres, requiring them to justify their water usage to the community and establishing “inter-region water-powerbrokers” to ensure equitable distribution—representing a rare example of community resilience against corporate interests.
The 100-year projections unveiled more systemic vulnerabilities across all scenarios. Mary-Anne’s negotiated settlement resulted in critical infrastructure vulnerable to international cyber-attacks, with “the storage facility hacked and overridden by a Chinese source,” rendering water systems completely inoperable. Meanwhile, Alex’s scenario portrayed the human cost of climate disruption through a visceral depiction of a community enduring 20-year droughts, where only wealthy families maintained private water reserves while others adapted to severe rationing—“they don’t wash clothes very often, wash themselves once a week, flush the toilet only a few times a day”—leading to rising rates of skin disease and other health conditions that disproportionately affected poorer families.
The 1,000-year horizon revealed the most dramatic divergence in imagined futures. Mary-Anne’s trajectory ended in complete societal collapse, with communities “decimated more than 600 years prior due to extreme climatic conditions that made the earth uninhabitable.” This apocalyptic vision stands in stark contrast to the utopian scenario featuring Jessie Marie where humanity had “settled space in the true sense of the word” with colonies on water-rich planets like Europa, effectively solving water scarcity through interplanetary transport. Between these extremes, another nuanced scenario depicted centuries of colonial occupation, cultural exchange, environmental damage and restoration—a complex cyclical history where “some people had lives filled with struggle, others had lives of ease,” suggesting the persistence of both human adaptation and social inequality across millennia.
An Aesthetic Turn: creating a common language
The final exercise, aligning with the ‘Engage’ domain, asked participants to create new terminology for their future worlds, using examples of existing words from science fiction such as “belters” from The Expanse by James S. A. Corey which refers to the inhabitants who live in the asteroid belt and on the moons of the outer planets. As noted in the Australian Government Futures Primer, scenarios can help develop a shared language that builds connection and aids extrapolation (Hartigan & Horobin, 2024). This exercise was designed to push this further, recognising that metaphors and specific, evocative language—a key strategy for worldbuilding—can help realise a scenario and make it more accessible to audiences, aiding extrapolation and creating new possibilities.
This was one of the most successful exercises. Participants created rich speculative vocabularies that made concrete their future scenarios. Ted’s future featured an “aquaphone”—a secret communication network through pipe systems. Mary-Anne’s future gave rise to terms that captured the growing complexity and opacity of societal systems including “containment catastrophe” (situations where control is illusory) and “bleak houses” (uninsurable homes destroyed by weather events). The world following Alex’s initial efforts produced linguistic markers of profound environmental change, epitomized by terms such as “swelters” describing extended periods of intense, humid heat, “Drytowns” for abandoned settlements that could no longer sustain life due to water scarcity, and the “tiempo de saqueo” (“time of pillage”), a retrospective term for our current era of resource extraction and environmental degradation. Alternately, Johan’s negotiated future gave rise to a vocabulary of collective action and bureaucratic management, including “united fields” (farmer collectives) and “taps” (water allocation authorities) and “barges” (hardened negotiators hired specifically for their intimidating presence during inter-regional water disputes). These linguistic innovations transformed abstract futures into more tangible, immersive scenarios, revealing social dynamics and power structures embedded in language itself, while creating shared reference points for further discussion.
Reflections on the exercises
The strengths
The creative foresight approach demonstrated anticipated strengths in fostering empathy, breaking cognitive barriers, and enabling innovative thinking through its unique exercise design. The initial character-building exercises helped participants create detailed character profiles, making it significantly “easier to understand where stakeholders and key figures might be coming from,” as one participant noted. This approach transformed abstract thinking into a more concrete, personal experience, bridging gaps between different viewpoints and experiences.
A clear strength emerged in the exercises’ ability to expand imaginative horizons—necessary for leadership in water futures (Floyd et al., 2014). ‘The Long View’ was especially transformative. One participant observed its unique power to break out of a “business as usual” mentality, demonstrating how pushing beyond immediate temporal boundaries can destabilize ingrained thinking patterns. The progression from 50 to 1,000 years was powerful, as it forced participants to “tip over” the edge of conventional future projections, creating space for more radical and creative imagining.
Language emerged as a critical tool of transformation within this approach. ‘An Aesthetic Turn’ revealed the profound potential of linguistic imagination. Participants discovered that carefully crafted language could “make the future feel more real” and “make the distant feel possible”. This linguistic approach did more than just describe potential futures—it created a more immersive mental space, allowing participants to inhabit alternative perspectives more deeply. The method’s inherent creativity was further enhanced by its deliberately rapid pace, which participants surprisingly identified as a strength: the speed prevented overthinking, instead “stimulating creativity” by forcing quick, intuitive responses.
The approach also offered an explicit challenge to linear thinking—a tendency participants acknowledged as a common trap when extrapolating from present to future. The method introduced multiple strategies for disrupting predictable projections. Participants suggested incorporating “wildcards” or provocative “what if” questions specifically designed to break linear narratives. Data could also “complexify the situation by demonstrating the sheer number of systems at play,” preventing simplistic, one-dimensional future scenarios.
One participant highlighted the need to “change the pathway of a character and their future—essentially breaking, or at least muddying, the straight line”. This approach recognised that true future exploration requires a multisystem perspective that goes beyond simple cause-and-effect thinking. By introducing elements of uncertainty, multiple perspectives, and systemic complexity, the method created a framework for more nuanced understanding. The goal was not to predict a single future, but to generate “plausibility” through a more intricate, interconnected approach to imagining potential trajectories. This method transformed future exploration from a linear prediction exercise into a rich, dynamic exploration of possibility—challenging participants to embrace complexity and uncertainty as fundamental to meaningful foresight.
The challenges
A challenge emerged in exercise transitions, particularly between character development and future scenario building. One participant suggested “more scaffolding, or a stepping stone between the years” to clarify what characters achieved before projecting forward. As another participant observed, “imagining 50 years into the future was harder than 100 or even 1,000 years, due to the closer connections to the present day”. This challenge revealed a critical insight: proximity to the current moment can constrain imaginative thinking, making near-term futures more challenging to conceptualise than more distant, less familiar scenarios.
Participants struggled to create nuanced characters without falling into stereotypical representations. Some found it “difficult to build their character without relying on caricature and stereotype, particularly if their character was in another country”. The tendency was to “overlay the experiences of communities local to them or relevant to their work”, which raised critical questions about empathy and representation. This challenge prompted a provocative reflection on potential alternative approaches, such as creating characters based on other local community members—a method that could potentially “raise conflict but also had the potential to generate empathy”.
The approach’s departure from traditional analytical methods presented the most complex challenge. Participants noted that the storytelling-based creative methods engaged with “less quantitative scenarios than they were used to,” generating multiple creative “rabbit holes” while simultaneously making it difficult to determine which path might be productive. As one participant suggested, “quantitative boundaries could help to narrow down the rabbit hole”. The method’s open-ended nature generated excitement and uncertainty. Participants recognised the need to “create scenarios that do both”—combining creative storytelling with data-driven analysis(Milojević & Inayatullah, 2015). This challenge extended to broader questions of methodology, with one participant suggesting the use of “speculative design prompts” to provide structure and “release creative energy by giving permission to play”.
Strategies for implementation
The discussion above indicates that translating creative methodologies into practical tools for the water sector requires thoughtful implementation strategies that address institutional culture, existing processes, and diverse stakeholder needs. Our observations suggest three key approaches.
Data: grounding creative exploration
The integration of data with creative explorations emerged as a critical consideration. While the water sector is particularly data-rich, effective water governance must also “embrace values and feelings” alongside analysis (Gober, 2018, p. 196). Well-presented data can enhance creative exploration by illustrating interconnections that might otherwise be overlooked, while providing necessary boundaries to keep scenarios anchored in plausibility. Narrative Foresight (Milojević & Inayatullah, 2015) also acknowledges the value of linking data and experience. For organisations accustomed to traditional decision-making frameworks, structured data can serve as a familiar entry point before transitioning to more creative activities, addressing the tendency for water utilities to be “notoriously slow at adopting new technologies and concepts” (O’Callaghan et al., 2021, p. 1).
Details: balancing speed and depth
Our workshop revealed an important tension between rapid ideation and deeper exploration. The relatively quick tempo of exercises (approximately 15 minutes each) helped overcome initial hesitation and promoted spontaneous idea generation—particularly valuable for participants unfamiliar with creative methods. However, this speed sometimes came at the expense of nuance, especially when developing characters from unfamiliar backgrounds. This suggests a need for flexible timing based on specific workshop objectives: faster pacing when generating initial ideas or introducing methods, and more deliberate exploration when examining complex cultural dynamics or developing nuanced scenarios. This flexibility is particularly important when addressing what Shawl and Ward (2005) call “marked difference” in character development, where stereotypes can easily emerge without careful consideration.
Integration: building coherent experiences
The exercises we developed offer multiple implementation pathways—they can be “stacked” sequentially to build a comprehensive narrative exploration, or individual exercises can be strategically incorporated into traditional foresight methodologies. The sequential progression from character development to value exploration to future speculation creates what Brown and Imarisha (2015) describe as a space for “birthing visionary stories” (p. 3), while also addressing the challenge participants identified regarding transitions between exercises. This approach reduces cognitive load while building deeper engagement with potential water futures.
The language-focused ‘Aesthetic Turn’ exercise proved particularly valuable for transforming abstract scenarios into concrete, memorable experiences, addressing what Whitehouse et al. (2021) identify as the need for “shared languages” in collaborative problem-solving (p. 12). By creating shared reference points—characters with detailed motivations, futures with specific terminology—these exercises help diverse stakeholders develop common ground for discussing complex water security challenges while breaking free from linear extrapolation into more creative and systemic thinking.
Conclusion
This study has demonstrated how futures methodologies drawn from science fiction and fantasy writing can contribute to addressing water security challenges in a sector characterised by technocratic approaches and risk aversion. The Story Thinking framework offers a creative way to explore water futures through character development, values assessment, long-term scenario building, and the creation of shared language. Our workshop findings suggest these methods can complement technical and scientific approaches by introducing diverse perspectives, challenging linear thinking, and creating potential futures that engage both reason and emotion.
While building on narrative foresight approaches, our study demonstrates how systematically operationalising creative writing techniques can address limitations in water security planning. The framework differs from traditional scenario planning by embedding specific creative writing methodologies within each domain, creating structured pathways for empathy-building, values exploration, and immersive future experience.
The water sector faces increasingly complex challenges as climate change alters historical patterns, population grows, and competing demands intensify. By integrating creative methods with data-driven approaches, water utilities and policy makers can develop more robust, adaptive, and inclusive strategies. Our research highlights three key implementation strategies: grounding creative exploration in relevant data; balancing rapid ideation with deeper analysis; and building coherent, integrated experiences that establish shared reference points across diverse stakeholders. While these methods present challenges—particularly around managing transitions between exercises, avoiding stereotypical representations, and integrating with quantitative approaches—they offer valuable tools for imagining alternative futures and incorporating diverse perspectives.
Future research should explore further how creative methods might be institutionalised or better supported within water governance frameworks, perhaps through dedicated innovation labs or collaborative partnerships between utilities, researchers, and communities. Particularly promising is the potential to incorporate First Nations perspectives, which offer inherently future-focused worldviews developed over tens of thousands of years. The future of water security will depend not only on our infrastructure and technologies but on our collective capacity to imagine alternative possibilities, negotiate complex value trade-offs, and create shared visions of preferable futures. Creative activities like those we have discussed offer one pathway toward developing this essential capacity.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to our participants and the reviewers for their time, insights and suggestions. This research was funded via a Partnerships Grant from The University of Queensland Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.
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