Best Use of Thought Leadership
To break through corporate inertia and redefine sustainability, EY designed Four Futures – an innovative, immersive sustainability experience designed to transport senior business leaders 30 years into the future to evoke emotion and drive action on climate change.
The climate crisis is as much a crisis of culture and imagination as it is of science and policy. Despite increased sustainability discourse, progress remains slow. There is a disproportionate focus on reporting instead of action, while urgency and opportunity are not conveyed in a way that engages decision-makers. We wanted to take a different approach by creating an emotionally engaging experience that compels decision-makers to take action. By leveraging immersive storytelling, EY Four Futures seeks to break through corporate inertia and redefine sustainability – not as a compliance exercise, but as a strategic imperative.
EY Four Futures is an immersive sustainability experience designed to transport senior business leaders 30 years into the future – enabling them to explore four radically different futures shaped by the decisions they make today. Combining powerful storytelling, emotional engagement and science-backed climate data, it bridges the gap between our bold report-based thought leadership on the ‘new economy’ and the urgent real-world challenges our clients face.
We set out to:
- Engage the head, heart and hands
Often framed as a technical challenge, sustainability often fails to engage leaders on a personal level.
- Address shrinking corporate ambition
Many companies are pulling back from ambitious net zero, nature and social targets. We wanted to remind businesses that the physical/social impacts will be extremely disruptive to business models and operations over time.
- Engage those with the agency to drive change
Senior executives often view sustainability as a secondary concern and so we worked to bring cross-functional senior leaders into the conversation.
- Shift from emotion to action
The emotional impact of the sessions had to translate into tangible business actions, while providing the space for participants to process the weight of our central provocation: that there are ‘no non-radical futures’.
Four Futures works like this: Participants are invited into a small, dark room. They read four alternate 2055 futures on portrait screens around them. Their introduction is interrupted by a voice from one of the portrait screens: “Hello?” A second voice is heard from a different screen, but these voices are lost to static. “Is anybody out there?” “I’m calling from the future” “I really hope this reaches someone”. The room is then plunged into darkness, as a ‘transmission’ from 2055 begins to speak. One by one, we hear four stories told by Artificial Intelligence (AI) avatars of people from the next generation. The transmission ends with a poignant call to action for the business leaders of today.
The whole experience is extremely emotive. It uses immersive storytelling to break through corporate inertia and redefine sustainability as a strategic imperative (not as a compliance exercise) – compelling decision-makers to take action. Crucially though, EY Four Futures is far more than just an immersive experience: with over 500 UK business leaders having now participated in a session, it is proving a catalyst for long-term transformation in the UK economy.
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