EnBW Sustainability Dialogue
How can climate risks be communicated in a way that is both understandable and impactful? At the EnBW Sustainability Dialogue 2025, I had the opportunity to co-facilitate a workshop as part of the coool team – focusing precisely on that question. Together with executives, experts, and other stakeholders, we applied the “Futures Wheel” method to systematically explore the long-term consequences of extreme climate events for critical infrastructure – step by step, implication by implication.
The second part of the workshop made things especially vivid: participants turned their impact chains into fictional “future news” headlines from the year 2070 – a way to communicate potential scenarios in an engaging and emotional format. Some examples included: “Stuttgart’s power grid on the brink – laundry only allowed between 12 and 2 pm” and “Unions enforce work ban starting at 6 a.m.” These headlines clearly demonstrated how deeply climate impacts can affect everyday life – and how important it is to think and act ahead.
The workshop was part of a broader dialogue program launched by EnBW in collaboration with the Coool Agency, designed to rethink pressing future challenges around climate adaptation and infrastructure. The goal wasn’t just to inform – but to build real future literacy through a format that combined analytical depth with creative expression. The mix of systemic method and narrative output led to numerous aha moments. The future news didn’t just capture insights – they opened up conversations, with printed versions even handed out at dinner. And that’s exactly the point: making potential developments visible before they happen – and using them to derive actionable decisions today.
