Fiction as foresight: using narrative to explore the future of knowledge management [Forum special series, Arts & culture in KM part 23]

This article is part of a special series of summaries of keynotes and presentations from the KM Triversary Forum 2025, and also part 23 of a series exploring arts and culture in knowledge management. 

Organizations often use visioning exercises to imagine their future before developing strategies to achieve it. Fiction can serve a similar purpose, but with more emotional bandwidth. Where strategic visioning sketches what might happen, fiction asks how it would feel to live there. It makes the future tangible by showing what happens when institutional ideals meet human realities.

Fiction does not design perfect futures; it reveals how people engage with imperfect ones. In knowledge management terms, this means testing how individuals interpret, resist, or reshape the systems meant to structure their work. A story can surface the tensions between personal knowledge habits and organizational order, the same friction we see between the messiness of lived language and the neat taxonomies we try to impose on it.

From story as memory to story as foresight

My interest in narrative as a form of knowledge work began at NASA, where storytelling was central to the agency’s “lessons learned” culture. Real cases, often told by the engineers or project managers themselves, made complex technical and organizational knowledge memorable and transferable. Those narratives were not fiction, but they worked the same way good fiction does: they connected facts to emotion, context, and consequence.

Over time, I became curious about how similar methods could face forward rather than backward, using story not only to remember what happened but to explore what might happen. The Knowledge Cartographer is a novel that grew out of that shift from story as memory to story as foresight. While my intent was purely to write a speculative novel, my professional background as a KM practitioner and educator couldn’t be entirely suppressed. I used fictional roundtables to extend the practice of collective sense-making into an imagined future. Instead of engineers reconstructing a past mission, thinkers and practitioners from different disciplines debated how knowledge itself might evolve. In both settings, the goal was the same: to surface tacit assumptions, test ideas through dialogue, and make complex systems more humanly intelligible.

Experimenting with generative AI

The fictional roundtables were created through an iterative, AI-assisted writing process. I used Generative AI not as a content generator to produce finished text, but as a conversational partner to simulate diverse perspectives. Each roundtable participant’s “voice” was defined through close human study of their published work and interviews, then tested through short, AI-generated exchanges. I treated these sessions as structured thought experiments, ways to explore how real-world thinkers might respond to the novel’s ideas about knowledge, memory, and autonomy. The process was intentionally experimental: part foresight exercise, part narrative design, and part dialogue with an intelligent mirror (ChatGPT). What emerged were transcripts that felt plausible yet clearly fictional, designed to provoke reflection rather than impersonate reality.

Working through the roundtables taught me as much about dialogue as about foresight. Experimenting with different formats such as a conference panel, a workshop, or a podcast transcript showed how structure itself shapes conversation. Each form invited a distinct kind of exchange; some encouraged concise argument, others more reflective storytelling. What I learned was less about any single output and more about how framing influences the knowledge that emerges. The value lay not in the text produced, but in the reflective space the exercise created.

For that reason, I do not share the raw transcripts of the fictional roundtables. They were never intended as publishable dialogues, but as scaffolding for thought. The voices, while inspired by real people, are synthetic composites; releasing them would blur the line between respectful simulation and misrepresentation. What remains valuable and shareable are the insights about method: how generative tools can support exploratory reasoning without pretending to be authentic interlocutors.

In that sense, the roundtables became an exercise in knowledge stewardship, curating not just ideas but the boundaries of their use, and learning how to experiment with emerging tools without surrendering discernment.

The fictional roundtables

Each roundtable imagined how contemporary thinkers might respond after reading The Knowledge Cartographer. I did not give the AI the full manuscript.  In any case, I only had a first draft at the time.  My background notes on the plot, the characters’ backstories, and most importantly, the themes, were more important since they signaled my intent perhaps more effectively than the full first draft.  The fictional conversations took place in present-day settings—conference panels, foresight labs, online forums—designed to create a reflective distance without leaving reality altogether.

To learn more about the individual fictional roundtables, visit the Substack related to the novel and the series of posts dedicated to the fictional roundtables (series beginning with “The Non-Fiction Roots of The Knowledge Cartographer.”

At the time, I did not set out with a formal method. I was having fun being “creative.” The process unfolded intuitively, guided more by curiosity than by design. Only afterward did I recognize that I had been conducting a kind of narrative experiment, testing how fiction could serve as a boundary object between foresight, ethics, and knowledge management. Looking back, I can now describe the process as a form of retrospective method-making: learning by doing first, then codifying the insight so it can be shared and critiqued.

Lessons for KM practice

For knowledge management practitioners, the experiment highlights how narrative methods can make abstract systems tangible. Fictionalized dialogue can help teams test ideas, reveal hidden assumptions, and humanize complex strategies before they harden into policy. The goal is not to replace analysis with storytelling, but to add texture, to see how proposed knowledge systems might actually be experienced by the people who use them. Even small narrative exercises, such as imagining how future users or stakeholders might respond to a new process, can surface emotional and ethical dimensions that data alone will not show. In that sense, fiction becomes a low-risk laboratory for understanding how knowledge feels in practice, not just how it functions in theory.

Looking ahead

Speculative fiction simply widens the horizon. It lets us follow the thread of today’s knowledge practices into the future and watch what unravels or endures. By stepping a few decades ahead, we can see familiar questions about trust, learning, and autonomy play out under different pressures. The aim is perspective more than prediction. Fiction gives us room to imagine how knowledge might be lived, not just managed, in worlds that feel both distant and uncomfortably near.

Biography:

Barbara Fillip is a writer, educator, and consultant with over 25 years in knowledge management (KM). She is exploring how speculative fiction and narrative foresight can expand how KM practitioners imagine the future of personal and societal knowledge stewardship. Her current project, The Knowledge Cartographer, envisions the years 2025–2065 through the intertwined lenses of cognitive science, neuroethics, and futures studies—blending rigorous research with storytelling to provoke reflection on memory, care, and human–AI partnerships. At its heart is a centenarian protagonist confronting the arc of her personal knowledge and the challenge of passing it on. Alongside the novel, Barbara is developing experimental companion materials, including a Fictional Roundtable Series, to invite diverse voices into a shared exploration of long-term KM challenges. She brings a commitment to making complex, emerging trends tangible and emotionally resonant, inspiring fresh approaches to knowledge stewardship in an era of rapid technological and ecological change.

Presentation resources: PowerPoint slides and video recording (coming soon).

Header image source: Author provided.

AI statement: This talk and the related creative work behind The Knowledge Cartographer were developed through a human-first collaboration with generative AI tools. The tools (ChatGPT and Gemini) assisted in synthesizing research and exploring narrative possibilities. Human judgment, authorship, and ethical review guided every stage.