Asymmetrical thinking teaches us that the seeds of the future are contained in the present. We just have to train ourselves to see them and have the imagination to believe that they will grow into forces and trends fully capable of reshaping our world.

Storytelling, as much as any other activity, is subject to asymmetric disruption and growth. The small‐scale, low‐status content of the past inevitably rises to prominence in the future.

Before becoming court entertainment for English royalty, Shakespeare's plays were seen as sensational, corrupting content fit only for the lowest status members of society. As a form, novels began their cultural life as a guilty pleasure, printed by the chapter in the back pages of newspapers. In the 1940s and 1950s, comic books had a status little higher than pornography in the U.S. media landscape, and were attacked as a corrupting influence on the children who read them. Yet in the second decade of the twenty‐first century, Marvel's Avengers franchise, based on classic comic book characters, has produced some of the highest‐grossing films of all time and has been purchased by the ultimate mainstream global media company, Walt Disney.

If we look at today's media landscape, there are a number of trends and innovations which, though seen as edge cases today, will likely grow or rise in status in the future, becoming as respected and ubiquitous as any form that came before.

First on the list is content marketing. Despite its pervasiveness, branded content is still fenced off into a category all its own, kept separate from either journalism or mainstream entertainment. In the future, I believe the borders that separate branded from unbranded content will become less relevant in some cases or will be simply ignored or invisible in others. Branded content never need replace the breaking news and opinion sections of respected outlets like the New York Times or the daily news programming on the major networks, but it is primed to become equal in status with specialty magazines like Wired or Fast Company, or lifestyle publications like Women's Health or Outside. There's also nothing preventing major brands from sponsoring high‐end programming in the infotainment space—shows like 2014's Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson, or the BBC's blockbuster nature documentary Planet Earth.

Next up is storytelling assisted by artificial intelligence. AI is already an $8 billion market, set to grow to $47 billion by 2020. It is transforming retail, health care, heavy industry, scientific research, and conservation. And it is beginning to transform storytelling as well. Some creative agencies in the United States and Japan are starting to execute on creative briefs generated by AI, which have processed reams of customer and demographic data, determining precisely which messages will help a product or idea resonate the most with an intended group. This process is a novelty at the moment, but will no doubt become standard practice in the future. We'll always need human creatives, but there's no reason they should shy away from collaborating with nonhuman minds.

Personalization is another trend set to transform the way stories are told. The more data we choose to share about ourselves, the more the systems we rely on are primed to identify and even anticipate our needs. The holy grail of storytelling for any master brand is an extended story that evolves and deepens every time a customer interacts with a brand, in just such a way that the customer is surprised, delighted, and satisfied.

Until now, brands have had to rely on a single guiding narrative to design customer interactions around, and then hope for the best. In the era of radical personalization, consumers might have something like their own master narrative, offered in atomized form across their devices and interactions, refined across the span of their entire life. This, combined with trends in augmented reality, gamification, and so‐called blended reality, in which digital information is overlaid into a consumer's real‐world visual and tactile environment, could combine into the first truly immersive forms of storytelling. Personalization in this context could produce content that creates a dynamic, deepening relationship between a consumer and a brand, where both change over time.

These new forms of storytelling will not stay put in our lives, consigned only to feed us information. They will inevitably help us do other things as well. I've already spoken about the ability of stories to transform the companies that tell them. In the future, any consultancy or innovation practice will be incomplete unless it has a capacity to tell stories, about itself, its clients, and the world. And just as highly customized, insightful stories are helping organizations make decisions, there is no reason the same might not be true of our personal stories, made richer and more complete by access to our own reservoir of personal data. We humans have always told stories about our lives to help us make sense of what to do next, and in the future our technology will give us tools to make those stories even better. In addition to our journals, our memories, and our friends, we will also have our data and new ways to understand it.

What I've given here is a sketch of future storytelling suggested by new technology emerging as of this writing. But even by the time this book is in print, there will be other forms, more powerful and stranger than what I've laid out here. There always will be. When it comes to the inventiveness of the human imagination, the continuous emergence of the new is the only constant.

One of the few hard and fast rules of media history is that no form has risen to newfound dominance at the expense of all the past ones. New media always coexists with its predecessors. Just as there are still groups of people skilled at making stone tools, there are groups skilled in the art of oral storytelling and epic poetry, memorized and recited or sung live. These forms are no longer part of our daily lives, but they have not died out nor are they likely to. And we still have books, newspapers, plays, movies, comics, video games, and all the other forms of storytelling that human culture has developed over the ages. Our appetite for new stories always grows, never diminishes.

What this means for brands and storytellers is that there will always be new formats to explore and old ones to master. Your ability to tell stories and the interest of your customers and the public in consuming them are inexhaustible.

To some, this constant change is cause for anxiety. But to me and to anyone reading this book (I hope), it is unequivocally good news. As I said in the opening pages, we will always need more storytellers than we currently have.

If you've been helped or inspired by what you've read here, and especially if you've been moved to tell your own story based on what you've read, I'd love to hear more.