Today, the Arc of Outrage series turns to the forgotten stakeholder in energy infrastructure projects: the future. Evoking the future offers your best bridge to solutions with today’s skeptical communities.
What you’ll get in this solo episode of Energy Thinks
Your next infrastructure project has a stakeholder who will never attend a public hearing: the future.
I have argued that the future has the right of way—and that choosing not to build carries costs of its own. In this episode, I take on a difficult, practical question: How do you represent the future in your engagement with communities without simply invoking it as just another argument for your project?
This practical decision—how to invoke the future—matters because the right answer represents the best hope you have to dampen the Arc of Outrage and get to yes with communities. Listen to the episode to learn how.
Both of these things are true:
Communities are demanding agency over what gets built around them.
The community members in the room today are not necessarily thinking about what future generations require of them.
Four questions to ask yourself before you bring a project to a community
Who represents the future? What would make this a community its children will want to come home to?
What does a good future include? You are not entitled to a place in a community’s future simply because your project produces something the country needs.
When should the future conversation happen? What matters here? What future does this community already imagine? Could this project contribute to it—or what would have to change for it to do so?
How do you discuss the cost of not building without making a threat? If the community’s future looks better without this project, this project is not adequately compelling.
Bonus content for this episode
My latest book: The Myth and The Moment
More from my recent Arc of Outrage series:
Recent podcasts:
“Persuasion Won’t Shorten the Arc of Outrage” with Lee Beck
“Boardwalk’s Scott Hallam on Lessons from a Past Arc of Outrage”
Watch on YouTube or listen on Substack.
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Heart the forgotten stakeholder below!
To the future,
Tisha
